Pacing Ourselves

    “The Hindu definition of hell is 'more, faster'." Iain McGilchrist

 

    Our feeling of always being in a hurry to get somewhere, do something, "be someone," is based on an underlying common sense of emptiness, "not enough", "not good enough". Even the most accomplished among us tend to suffer from chronic low self-esteem. 

    Frantic striving would make some sense IF inflating our ego could solve this imaginary problem, BUT IT DOESN'T help at all. The more our ego gets puffed up, the crazier & more destructive our behavior - as we're all witnessing.

    The solution is NOT found in grasping for & accumulating more & more, faster & faster, BUT by growing up as authentic, spiritually mature human beings.

 

 

     “... the essential practices of patience and slowing down to the speed of the soul.”  

    Francis Weller “In the Absence of the Ordinary. Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.” 2025. 

    Whenever we notice we're rushing, no matter how worthy or even noble our task, we're trampling on & damaging ourselves, others, animals & things in our haste! EVERYONE and EVERYTHING is Divine and is to be loved & nurtured, NOT trampled.

 
    "Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart. ... Once we abandon the belief that there is a more spiritually-useful moment than the one we are in, we have embraced our life and infused it with the energy for awakening." We CAN "recover the sacred in the most remote areas of life, in the midst of difficulty and dissatisfaction, loneliness & despair. The reality of problems is challenged and investigated, and life begins to thrive free of circumstances & conditions. The heart takes over and is resurrected from the conditioned habits of mind.” Rodney Smith 


    During his Near-Death Experience Johathan Ashford learned profound spiritual lessons. This one is particularly valuable:
    “I realized on the other side that none of my previous accomplishments mattered. It wasn’t worth a single grain of sand. None of it; not all the money, the jobs, the titles, the successes, the wins, nothing. It was worthless. Absolutely worthless. And it’s scary to see how much time and effort we put into those things because you could say it keeps us from recognizing what we are. We get distracted by what we think we want. 
    And coming out of that life review, I recognize that there really is only one thing that matters. It’s a singular free-will choice that everybody in existence has - that I choose to be loving in this moment. I’m not worried about tomorrow. I’m not worried about next week. 
    Just right now, in this moment, I choose to be loving, and I recognize that or I don’t – I forget. And the times I forget, I choose to love myself for forgetting. So in essence, I’m sitting in love which is the most valuable thing here. It’s literally your entire existence without you knowing. It’s literally your entire existence. 
    It’s kind of like the Divine sense of humour that it has. I will put you into an existence where you forget what it’s about and hope you remember. I’ll give you little clues and breadcrumbs along the way, but if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it.”  
    Jonathan Ashford Shares Wisdom from his Three-Hour Visit on the Other Side 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKivFH1-lys

    "Try to be mindful, & let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come & go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." Ajahn Chah

 

Anesthesia and Amnesia - Our Primary ‘Sins’

Anesthesia
     We go numb to try to cope with the fact that we have not been granted what we need to thrive. The levels of addiction in our society are off the charts, and I’m not just talking about alcohol and drugs; I’m talking about shopping, working, sex. Addictions are an attempt to cope with intolerable states. The meager lives we are asked to live, in which we are often reduced to ‘earning a living,’ are themselves intolerable. We are meant to have a more sensuous, imaginative, and creative existence. As children we are enchanted with the world, yet as adults we end up, as poet Mary Oliver said, ‘breathing just a little, and calling it a life.’ That’s the anesthesia.

Amnesia  
     We are living in what writer and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls the Great Forgetting. Many of us have forgotten that we’re a part of an ecosystem, a watershed. We’ve forgotten that we’re kin to all the other animals. We’ve forgotten that we need each other. We have forgotten what I call the ‘commons of the soul.’
     For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities ‘primary satisfactions.’ We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. 
     In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more. But once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else. Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions. We can find them through our friendships, by spending time in nature, by risking being vulnerable with someone we trust."

     It's SO easy to intellectually and or spiritually bypass our real task of growing up via deep meditation / contemplation / self-reflection. Cynicism and or desperately adhering to some dogma - despite feeling completely wrong - remain sadly common secondary satisfactions. Regardless of age, we're all drawn towards zoning out - like curling up with thumb in mouth & our favorite blankie. But ONLY what's true, real and deeply meaningful can satisfy.

     "I don’t use soul in a religious sense but rather the way psychologists Carl Jung and James Hillman and the Romantic poets like Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake use it: to speak of the experience of depth in our lives. Soul invites the marginal, the excluded, and the unwelcome pieces of ourselves into our attention. Soul is often found at the edges, both in the culture and in our lives. Soul takes us down into the places of our shared humanity, such as sorrow and longing, suffering and death. Soul requires that we be authentic, revealing what lies behind the image we try to show the world, including our flaws and peculiarities. Soul doesn’t care at all about perfection or getting it right. It cares about participation. Soul is revealed in dreams and images, in our most intimate conversations, and in our desire to live a life of meaning and purpose."

       “The Geography Of Sorrow - Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losses.” The Sun Interview: by Tim McKee, October 2015. https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow