Curiosity, Acceptance & Nurturing

"May I develop complete acceptance and openness
to all situations, and emotions, and to all people.
May I experience everything nakedly, completely
without mental reservations and blockages.
May I never withdraw from life or centralize onto myself.
May my heart be laid bare & open to the fire of all that is."
Reginald A. Ray

 

    Our acceptance & openness needs to INCLUDE the MANY daily random accidents, screw-ups & irritants like stubbing our toe, dropping, spilling & breaking things, losing keys / wallets / phones, burning & ruining meals, crazy random digital errors, loooong 'holds' on the phone, near impossibility contacting health-care providers, trades people & most companies ... We REGULARLY encounter a LOT of situations that very easily annoy, frustrate, irritate & anger us, even if / after we feel we've successfully 'dealt with' (fully processed) the real biggies in our life ie past major traumas.

    But our acceptance & openness ALSO needs to INCLUDE ongoing inescapable major traumas like chronic pain, prolonged disability, incurable illness & death of loved ones, friends and our self! These can & do cause "shipwrecks" - at least one of which is pretty much guaranteed if you live beyond 60. Do see : https://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.com/2013/07/361-beyond-stress-management-resilience.html

    Aversion to all that we fear / dislike / can't control is common & understandable, but is at best only a short-term band-aid. Clinging & chasing after things we like, think we need or must have is also common & understandable, but easily becomes obsessive eg addictions, and there are many "entrepreneurs" to feed our hunger to escape (see the 2023 miniseries "Painkiller" on Netflix). But it's a meaningless delusion to see our identity just a meat-machine that avoids undesirables & chases after desirables. "The one who dies with the most toys wins" is desperately simple-minded.

     Our ONLY WORTHWHILE OPTION is repeatedly remembering our true nature and repeatedly embodying it by BEING a NURTURING PRESENCE to others & the environment no matter how annoying, great or persistent the challenge. This is simply being natural, true to whom / what we are - like birds flying in the air and fish swimming in water. 

    We see great nurturing when parents really know their children and spend quality time with them by providing all that they require to optimally express their natural talents and mature into healthy, balanced, self-sufficient, caring, intelligent, pro-social adults. 

    Nurturing has NOTHING TO DO WITH stuffing them full of candies & fast food; indulging them with as much screen time as they want; throwing money at them to blow shopping online or at the mall; buying them all sorts of toys & clothes - there is no quality time here - just spoiling and creating helpless, hopeless, miserable perpetual infants. The worst fear of wealthy parents is their kids "growing up to be assholes." This fear easily becomes a reality if parents don't have the wisdom & energy to spend quality time with their kids.

    EVERY stage of life has its own challenges. During our youth, we try so hard to learn and become competent & competitive to get by in this fast-moving world. During our middle years, we try so hard to establish a career, a home life, have & raise kids, pay our bills, maybe even live a little, put a bit of money away for retirement ... During our later years, we're dumbfounded that life went by so fast; if we're fortunate enough, we can help raise grandchildren; again, if we're fortunate enough, we have the inclination to devote our time & energies on NURTURING our own & loved ones' spiritual maturation / evolution of consciousness, rather than wasting our time wallowing about our progressively declining physical & mental health.

    “… for each & every one of us, we have circumstances in our lives that are chaotic, out of our control, outside of the box of what we think of as practice. And that is actually your deepest practice.
    The Buddha talked about this precious human birth. It’s precious for all of us, it has the most exquisite balance of dukkha (challenging situations) & easefulness. We’re not so overwhelmed by suffering that we’re lost and drowning, or we’re not so lost in the pleasure, either. It’s got this balance that keeps us needing to find a deeper happiness and having the resources to look.
    This birth the Buddha talked about as the precious human birth is rare and it’s precious. And it’s precious for all of us, even those of us who don’t have the conditions in our lives to go on many or any retreats.
    There’s something about practicing with the chaos of life, & the realities of our difficult, complicated relationships & situations that we’re faced with in day-to-day life that can move us very deeply and force us to feel things we might not otherwise feel. It also helps us see that it’s good to be alive and in the world and feel it and really land in this human experience fully and recognize it as a shared thing.” Cara Lai https://www.dharma.org/cara-lai-dharma-talk/

     Four wise teachers & authors immediately come to mind when I think of inspiring survivors of major trauma. I've quoted them all in my quickly searchable blogs:

    Amoda Maa : “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.

    Isira : "Buddha on the Dance Floor." ‎ Living Awareness, 2014.

    Gabor Matte : “The Myth of Normal. Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.” Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

    James Finley : “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

 

    James Finley on the alchemy of transforming the lead of trauma into spiritual gold:
    “(After graduating from high school, I escaped from a lifetime of psychological & physical abuse by my alcoholic father by entering a monastery. But there) I was sexually abused by one of the monks – a priest, my confessor, who Merton thought very highly of - everyone thought very highly of this person. And I had a breakdown. I became extremely dissociative, paranoid.
    I worked (looking after the pigs at the monastery). … The boar walked out on the ice, and it fell through the ice of this little lake in the woods, and drowned. I felt as I was walking around, I felt I was unraveling, and that sanity was like thin ice over icy-cold black water, and it was cracking, and if I fell through, because of my trauma history, I might never find my way back again. So I left (the monastery). I didn’t tell the abbot what happened. I didn’t tell Thomas Merton what happened. I didn’t tell John Hughes, who was a psychiatrist. I just left.
    So here’s a lesson. How can we learn to be healed from all that hinders us from experiencing the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on & on in the bitter-sweet alchemy of our lives? The alchemy is just not how phases of happiness can unexpectedly become precipitously sad – it was frightening. Nor is it something so sad that can suddenly break wide open with liberation, like an unexpected gift, or love, or presence, or a child. It isn’t just the rhythm of darkness and light, or birth and death, or the rhythms of your life, the rhythms of my life. Rather, the alchemist of old were trying to turn lead into gold. And lead into gold is how do we turn the unrelenting, unforeseeableness of life, how can we learn to experience the steady strong currents of divinity that flow on and on and on so unexplainably, that brought me and brought all of you up to this very moment that I’m talking right now? How has this come to pass? And how can I learn to find my way to this groundedness that’s always there? And finding my way to it, how can I abide in it? And how can I learn to share it with others?

 
    So I’d like to end with a story. … This hermit heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it, it was a mother and a father with their little girl. And the parents apologized for intruding on his solitude, but said to the hermit, ‘As you can plainly see, an evil wizard has turned our daughter into a donkey. And we would like you to pray over her, so we can have our daughter back.’
    The hermit said, ‘I see. Come in, come in, come in.’ And he had them sit off to the side, and he asked the little girl if she was hungry and would like something to eat. She said she would like that. And so he was talking to her while he prepared a meal for both of them, and they sat down. And he asked her about herself – about things about her life and so on. 

    And as the parents were watching how lovingly he spoke to the little girl, and how attentive he was to her, they suddenly realized the evil wizard did not cast a spell on their daughter, turning their daughter into a donkey, the evil wizard cast a spell on them to believe that their daughter was a donkey. 

    And so when they left, they were so relieved and grateful, having their daughter back, and the little girl was so relieved because it’s very hard to be a little girl when your parents think you’re a donkey, especially if because you’re a child, and to avoid the confusion, you start believing it yourself. There’s like a shame-based, traumatized place within yourself, that you don’t know what to do about it. 

    The deep healing that that little girl and her parents experienced in this story bears witness to the deep healing that I hope we are exploring together here today.”
    James Finley "Becoming a Healing Presence in a Traumatized World" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu97TxU7mW4&t=6s

 

 

Another glorious morning shines down on us ...

Who / What Am I Really?

    Most of us are anxious, frightened & confused about life, aging, sickness & death, so much so, that we try (without success) to not think about or discuss these "depressing matters." Yet it is actually our aversion that keeps us trapped in the thoughts & associated emotions we're trying to avoid.
    We hyper-rational, control-obsessed individuals declare that death is "unacceptable!" Our society has conditioned us to consider ourselves bigger, better, smarter, better looking, and certainly independent of everyone else. How dare life slip out of MY CONTROL with all this aging, sickness & death crap! That's for "losers" - NOT "me"!
    BUT most of us have failed to learn that arguing with reality is THE cause of needless suffering. Only by "leaning into" the very things that scare us, and learning as much as possible about these, by truly becoming intimate with & directly experiencing these challenges physically & emotionally, can we come to a radically different perspective.
    This sounds alarmingly ridiculous to most of us, I know, yet it's true. And you'll only know how true it is AFTER you've given up arguing with & denying reality, have completely accepted the harshest of life's challenges, and awakened to lovingly embracing ALL of life's "10,000 joys AND 10,000 sorrows." Then and only then, can you possibly get how everything is perfect as it is.

    “So, what is it that animates this chunk of meat (our body), that makes it vital? The teacher would call it ‘the vital principle’ or life-force. It is in the absence of this that the body is inert.
    If there is such a thing as life-force, does it evaporate when the body dies? No. This ‘vital principle’ is present in the very movement of the cosmos: evidently, it is universal and eternal.
    So, the teacher would ask: what, then, can we consider real; a piece of flesh which decays and returns to the earth, or the force which is eternally present?
    Without the presence of this universal force, the body does not ‘see and hear.’ We cannot rightly say, then, that the body ‘sees and hears.’
    That which is seeing and hearing right now is not the body – it is the vital Principle. ‘You’ are that.

    When it is indubitably recognized that your nature & the nature of the absolute are fundamentally the same, indivisible nature, this is the ‘recognition of one’s true identity’: the realization that any and all identity is eclipsed by an actuality which renders separative distinctions ultimately meaningless.
    Such a realization, or non-dual perspective or awareness, cannot help but have a profound effect on one’s consideration of ‘personal individuality’. One cannot recognize that truth, of all pervasive indivisibility, and continue to maintain the fiction of separate personification – of the ‘me’ that was born and the ‘I’ which dies.
    This fruit of realization – that the absolute essence of all being does not ‘come’ from some place nor ‘go’ anywhere – quenches our deepest, final fear, the fear of extinction. Then the liberated may, indeed, ‘take no thought for the morrow.’”
    Robert Wolfe. “Living Nonduality. Enlightenment Teachings of Self-Realization.” Karina Library, 2014. 

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this 47min Robert Wolfe video: 

 

Intimacy with Reality

     Artists, perhaps especially poets, are thought to be more sensitive to & thus more critically aware of present-moment reality. The average person may have 'thicker skin' than artists, is less affected by, less keenly interested in, less able or willing to deeply feel what's going on, and therefore floats along with the momentum of the times 'comfortably numb.' 
     Though most of us are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with how the world is becoming, we're so addicted to comfort and so averse to unpleasantness, that we allow life's harsh realities to fester & grow increasingly out of control.
     Artists, like prophets of old, are supposed to wake us up out of our sleep, mass hypnosis, autopilot, ... Artists, by way of poems, paintings, movies, etc bypass our superficial self-centered mind's filters, and communicate directly with our hearts & bodies. 

"With That Moon Language"

Hafiz

Admit something: 

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me." 

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise 

someone would call the cops. 

Still, though, think about this, this great pull 

in us to connect. 

Why not become the one who lives with a 

full moon in each eye that is 

 always saying, 

with that sweet moon language, 

what every other eye in 

this world is 

dying to 

hear? 

"Love Poems from God."
Daniel Ladinsky ed., Penguin Compass. 2002

“Before loss there was love.
After loss, love.

Before grief there was love.
After grief, love.

Our essence is never in danger.

When all else falls away,
Our essence can shine.

So, what does love invite of us now?”

Jem Bendell

from his video “Grieve Play Love”

Control, Chaos and our Hemispheres

     Clinicians love to cure - definitively fix - the sick, the broken. And many of us, at least when we feel broken, want to be fixed-up once & for all! We all dearly love 'agency,' the sense of control, the ability to reach out, grab & hold onto what we want, and push away what we don't want.
     At some level, we realize that this idea of perfect control over our life & environment is wishful thinking, based on an a childishly unrealistic, simplistic, mechanistic, reductionist model. Life's complexity extends well beyond our comprehension, never mind control.
    However, we dread the idea of being overwhelmed by chaos - being helplessly out of control as our world crumbles around us. So to create some sense of agency, we tend to restrict our attention to manipulating whatever we can. But with this narrowed focus, many of us forget about or even become averse to the big picture that includes the most meaningful dimensions of life that cannot be controlled or even be put into words!
    Our current Western society tends to overuse the perspective of our left hemispheres, and at best ignores, at worse ridicules & actively suppresses the perspective of our right hemispheres.
    This lack of balance causes serious conflicts: rigid partisanship (political, religious, ecological, ethnic, racial, gender, economic, and even academic / educational: 'hard' sciences vs 'soft' sciences & arts) instead of harmonious tolerance, balance & collaboration. It seriously impacts the education of even our health-care professionals: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2012/02/control-and-liminality.html
     Extreme positions eg towards control, often produce unintended, undesired results eg chaos.

     Iain McGilchrist spent 20 years researching & documenting the neurological basis & Western cultural rationale for a healthy balance between the two hemispheres, perhaps summarized in Reinhold Niebuhr's 'serenity prayer':
          Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
          courage to change the things I can;
          and wisdom to know the difference.

     “Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focused, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

     Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans & many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilizing the world, the other better at understanding it.
     Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal.
     Because of the way we prioritise the left hemisphere’s take on the world, we have ceased to appreciate the meaning of continuity & flow, instead prioritising discrete chunks of experience we call things. This has serious consequences for how we see our selves as human beings and our relationship with the wider world. … the world in which we live in the West is shaped by a set of beliefs about reality which we know from experience, and feel intuitively, to be almost certainly false. Though the consequences of this are widely deplored, we seem strangely powerless to resist it. We are as if in a trance, whistling a happy tune as we sleepwalk towards the abyss."
     Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019. (An exceptionally worthwhile read IMHO)

     “It’s just not compatible with the left hemisphere’s view that there could be anything wrong with itself. It has a polished, perfectionist view of what it’s doing. It’s therefore very unwilling to accept the contrary argument. As a society I would say, I believe we exemplify this mentality in our world. 
     In a nice piece of research ... they sent questionnaires to over two thousand executives to see how much they knew about their own industries. Managers in the advertising industry were 90% confident they were correct, but were actually wrong 61% of the time; people in IT 95% confident they were correct, only 20% were right; 99% of them overestimated their success. This is the world we’re now living in. 
     Now how did we get trapped in this worldview of the left hemisphere, which is that of the static, the fixed, the certain, the isolated, in competition with others, a detached, unempathic, unflowing world, which has only one value – that of utility? As opposed to a world in which things are seen as seamlessly interconnected, flowing, never certain, constantly changing, but with which we have a relationship of care. 
     How did we get into this trap? I think there are briefly a few reasons: one is that it gives us power, it makes us powerful, and that is hugely seductive. This is the hemisphere about getting. The left hemisphere controls the right hand with which we grasp; it controls the bits of language (not all of language) the bits with which we define things and pin them down, and say we’ve grasped them – so it’s the grasping part us. That makes us powerful but it’s version of the world is also extremely simple. It’s that it’s made out of bits which can be understood, and then we’ve got there. And all the bits that don’t fit with that are sheared off from the model. And so it’s possible at the end of the day to go, ‘I’ve explained everything,’ because actually you’ve only explained the things you’ve allowed into your model. Another thing is that it’s what I call ‘the Berlusconi of the brain,’ because it’s the one that controls the media. It’s the one that actually does the talking and constructs the arguments, so it’s a piece of cake for it to make its points, whereas it’s quite difficult for the right hemisphere to express things that are subtle, often contradictory and implicit. And I think the fourth reason, at the moment, why we are trapped in this is because we’ve evolved a world out there which reflects the left hemisphere’s world inside. So all around us we have the rigid, lifeless, fixed, represented world which is that of the left hemisphere.”
       Iain McGilchrist @ Schumacher College: Things Are Not What They Seem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXiHStLfjP0
 
      “… we know intuitively that there is a dimension of ourselves and of nature which eludes us because it is too close, too general, and too all-embracing to be singled out as a particular object. This dimension is the ground of all the astonishing forms and experiences of which we are aware. Because we are aware, it cannot be unconscious, although we are not conscious of it – as an external thing. Thus we can give it a name but cannot make any definitive statement about it … 
     Our only way of apprehending it is by watching the processes and patterns of nature, and by the meditative discipline of allowing our minds to become quiet, so as to have vivid awareness of ‘what is’ without verbal comment.

     … seen as a whole, the universe is a harmony or symbiosis of patterns which cannot exist without each other. However, when it is looked at section by section we find conflict.
                       ‘for the world is a shen vessel 
                        and cannot be forced.’
     ‘Shen’ presents problems for the translator... I take it to mean that innate intelligence (or li) of each organism in particular, and of the universe as a whole, which is beyond the reach of calculation."
       Alan Watts. “Tao. The Watercourse Way.” Pantheon Books, 1975.

'Shen'

Relationship, Relationship, Relationship

     "All shall be well,
      and all shall be well,
      and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) English Christian mystic

      “So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance and everything is perfect, complete, whole.”
        Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998. 

     How do we feel on reading such statements by saints, mystics & other serious meditators / contemplatives? Where do we land on this spectrum?: 

vehemently disagree
confused & lost
intrigued
intellectually agree
emotionally agree
completely agree (intellectually, emotionally & physically)

     The closer we are to vehement disagreement, the more aversion we have towards some aspects of our life & our selves AND the more craving we experience towards other aspects of our life & our selves. Powerful aversion to all (people, things & situations) that threatens our survival, health, happiness, wealth, status, etc, and craving & clinging to all that guarantees our survival, health, happiness, wealth, status, etc seems absolutely obvious, healthy & reasonable to most of us.
     YET, at the same time, we all know at least subconsciously, that our ability to control constant change, aging, sickness & death is an illusion. So most of us, for most if not all our lives, live "merely on the surface of things." We half-pretend (delusion) we can keep our "self" from changing, aging, getting sick & dying, AND at some level, we experience life as hard, cruel & meaningless.

     But an interesting change occurs when we stop pouring so much energy into aversion, craving & delusion. We start to experience intimacy with who we really are, everything around us, with all of life. This often happens after we suddenly realize that we only have a very short time to live (trauma-associated growth); following other major traumas ('shipwrecks'); during aboriginal sweat lodge ceremonies, vision quests, & other spiritual practices; insights, 'heart openings' & other mystical experiences during serious meditation practice. 
     Many of us have experienced more trauma than we may consciously realize. Psychotherapy would greatly help to free us from a prison of PTSD-like reactivity. Relying on spirituality alone when psychotherapy is necessary ('spiritual bypassing') prolongs needless suffering and obstructs spiritual growth.
     "On the surface of things," life does suck. But when we "penetrate into the substance," when we become intimate with reality, everything changes.

      "You learn about a thing ... by opening yourself wholeheartedly to it. You learn about a thing by loving it." Barbara McClintock - Nobel prize-winning geneticist

     "Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough." George Washington Carver  

     "When we give our hearts to whatever we do, to whatever we experience, or to what is happening around us, without personal agendas or preferences taking over ... the space of awareness, is exactly the same."
       Amaro Bikkhu "Small Boat, Great Mountain." 2003   www.amaravati.org/downloads/pdf/SmallBoat.pdf 

     "All IS well,
      and all IS well,
      and all manner of things ARE well." Julian of Norwich (modified)

Not Everyone is Ready to See Clearly

     “mindfulness concerns freeing oneself from misperceptions, thinking patterns, and self-imposed limitations that impede creativity, clear seeing, and optimal mental and physical health. ... every individual has the intrinsic capacity to be mindful, and with intention and practice, mindfulness can garner strength and stability. In this sense, the greatest potential of mindfulness may emerge when one consciously decides to pursue mindfulness not as just a ‘tool’ in the proverbial toolbox, but as a way of seeing oneself and the world, or a conscious way of being and interacting.” 
       Jeffrey Greeson, Eric L. Garland, David Black. “Mindfulness - A Transtherapeutic Approach for Transdiagnostic Mental Processes.” in Amanda Ie, Christelle T. Ngnoumen, Ellen J. Langer, eds.
 “The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness
.” John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

     “Even though we intellectually acknowledge the vulnerability of our body and our mortality, we find ourselves in denial, fear, and rejection of this truth. Even as we nod our heads in agreement with the reality of impermanence and the instability of conditions we cannot control, it is deeply challenging for us to live in the light of what we know. A world of distress is born of the ongoing argument we have with the unarguable. This argument is what we are invited to understand, deeply and profoundly. An awakened heart and an awakened life are lived in the light of what we know. Learning to release our arguments with the unarguable is the greatest act of compassion we can offer to ourselves and to the world.”
        Christina Feldman. “Boundless Heart. The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity.” Shambhala, 2017.

Acceptance and Discretionary Suffering

     The core of meditation practice IMHO is carefully investigating the difference between unavoidable vs discretionary suffering: investigating how we can minimize our tendency to unwittingly cause LOTS of unnecessary problems for ourself & those around us.
     A reasonable starting point is Reinhold Niebuhr's "serenity prayer":
          Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
          courage to change the things I can;
          and wisdom to know the difference. 

     Let's look at the rather large & often frustrating "things I cannot change" category. Many people suffering with chronic pain, as well as a variety of mental health issues including addictions, can potentially benefit greatly from the following teaching:

     “Accepting and releasing into just what is, is the homeopathy of Zen. Being willing to settle into just this experience – this is the teaching of saying yes to our life, not giving in to thoughts of another life. We learn that our resistance strengthens whatever we want to avoid.
     Trying on the attitude of yes is the not-knowing mind, whereas the conditioned mind creates conditions. This is too much (or not enough). No way am I going to stay in this situation. The not-knowing mind is willing to know and feel whatever is happening.
     Recently I was thinking about a difficult situation in my life, trying to find a way to make it acceptable. For days I would think about it, invite my mind to reimagine it in a less painful way. After weeks of trying, I realized, I’m helpless. I can’t solve this by myself: I just have to be it. That realization was an enormous relief. Like Ram Dass saying, I’m going to be on this train forever, I settled into my own circumstances: There isn’t anything I can do about this situation. There is no way to escape it. I must live with it and let it become digested and transformed internally on its own. Thinking I had to solve the problem became the problem.”
        Katherine Thanas. “The Truth of This Life. Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is.” Shambhala, 2018.

Everyday Mind's Blindness

     Most of us (sort of) realize that we don't "stop to smell the roses" enough. But who has time for such luxuries? After all, doesn't "everyday mind" insist that we're either a hunter or rabbit, and that it's always rabbit-hunting season?
     No wonder we miss out on so much - a huge chunk of life that doesn't involve survival / mating. Many people, events & things don't even enter our consciousness.

     “… organisms don’t pay much attention to … (things that are) not important in Darwinian terms (spreading genes). … 
     My older brother, after reaching the phase of middle age when women no longer paid much attention to him, said, ‘It isn’t that they think I’m bad looking. They just don’t realize I exist.’ Exactly! As a heterosexual woman walks down a city block, there are tons of things she could focus on, so the first job of her perceptual apparatus is to filter out things that, with the most cursory, even unconscious appraisal, are seen to not merit extended, conscious appraisal. Sadly, that category of things includes my brother …”
     Robert Wright. "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment." Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Watershed Wood Designs   watershedwooddesigns.ca

Minding the Mind

     WHILE feeling safe & loved, WE ENGAGE in exploration, play, & cooperation.
     WHILE feeling frightened & unwanted, managing feelings of fear & abandonment TAKES OVER. 
       Underlined words from: Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

       How rarely we feel completely safe & loved! Perhaps even more sad is being so used to feeling frightened & unwanted, that we assume this to be "normal".

     Safe & loved feels like: 
• while hugging someone you love & who loves you; 
• while looking after a 2-year-old grandchild; 
• while holding a puppy's face in your hands & staring into each other's eyes; 
• while doing work that you find very meaningful & rewarding eg preparing a delicious, healthy meal for loved ones; 
• while "struck speechless" by the beauty of nature;  
• while quietly reading a book that you love; etc.

      Frightened & unwanted feels like: 
• "craving" - lacking, unloved, lonely, alone, small, vulnerable, afraid, anxious, longing, empty, hungry, thirsty, impotent, needy, wishing "if only I could have / do / be X, THEN I would be happy"; 
• "aversion" - angry, bitter, hating, intolerant, judgmental, disgusted, cynical, rigid, violent, wishing "if only I could avoid / prevent / eliminate X, THEN I would be happy"; 
• "delusion & confusion" - not being able to see things as they are, but only from the heavily biased perspective of our own troubled mind-heart. We feel disoriented, confused, troubled, bored, forgetful, hopeless, nihilistic, sick-and-tired of our repetitive thoughts / self-talk, moods & how our mind works, wishing for clarity, to wake up from what feels like a nightmare. 

     It's critically important for our own & others' quality of life, and even safety & survival, that we detect as early as possible, when we feel frightened & unwanted or any of it's many manifestations. 
     If this "life-or-death" alarm bell is a false alarm or gross exaggeration - and in modern times it almost always is - then we can, and I humbly suggest that we must, intentionally train ourselves to quickly shift back into feeling safe & loved with its associated wise, kind, conscious behavior.

     Of course we all tend to think that most others certainly behave from this primitive survival-based (frightened & unwanted) level of consciousness, we ourselves are, if not consistently, then mostly reside in the evolved wisdom-based (safe & loved) level of consciousness & behavior. 
     So how do these statements sound?: “No one to be, nothing to do, nowhere to go” and: "Whatever appears in the mind, just say ‘This isn’t my business. It’s impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self.’" 
     If these sound strange, if not irritatingly "against the grain" of all that we know, then we are usually in survival mode, and WHILE we are, survival mode is at least distorting if not completely controlling all our thoughts, emotions & behavior. We've all had varying amounts of trauma in our lives, but few of us think we've had enough to cause PTSD. But what if ALL of us suffer from some degree of PTSD?

    Mindfulness training involves learning practices with which we intentionally, consciously, continuously, notice as soon as we're in this primitive survival-based (frightened & unwanted) level of consciousness, accept it as our natural biological heritage, then effortlessly shift back into our natural evolved wisdom-based (safe & loved) level.

Katie Hoffman      "TU"      www.katiehoffman.com

On the Path towards Wisdom

     Tejaniya encourages us to “keep practicing continuously ... Eventually wisdom will outweigh the defilements***, and you will begin to gather momentum. The practice will then become interesting; new avenues will open to you. Then you will begin to see and be part of a simpler and less complicated reality …”

      *** Defilements: “ ‘unwholesome qualities that can defile or taint the mind’ – negative qualities of mind that have the potential to make us suffer and cause trouble in our lives. Defilements in meditation practice (refer to) greed, hatred or aversion, and delusion. There are many subcategories of these three defilements …”

     We're "hard-wired" for our minds to slip into defilements: we have a fully functional brain stem that reacts automatically to even the mildest dislikes; the mildest preferences; and the many, many in-between "neutrals"; with immediate visceral feelings of, respectively: hatred, aversion, anger; or  greed, clinging, attachment; or boredom, delusion or confusion. In cave-dwelling times, this crude survival-mating focused level of consciousness helped us survive. But now, in our closely-interconnected, interdependent, collaborative world, this primitive level of consciousness causes a great deal of harm, and little if any benefit. See: https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/why-buddhism-is-true/
     

     It's also very helpful to understand how trauma ramps up the power & persistence of this fear-based level of consciousness. “If you feel safe and loved, your brain (is) specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it (is) specialized in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.” Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015. Fortunately, we have neuroplasticity & the ability to learn healthier ways of thinking and behaving.

     Secular philosophical & psychological wisdom studies, and all of the world's wisdom traditions advise us to intentionally mature from primitive egocentricity, towards the much more appropriate & evolved allo- & ecocentricity. 

     "Four central features of wisdom (are recognized) in both European & Asian philosophy: self-knowledge, detachment, integration, and self-transcendence. …
     (These) four features can be conceptualized as developmental stages:
     Self-knowledge is awareness of what constitutes one’s sense of self in the context of roles, relationships, and beliefs.
     Detachment refers to awareness of the transience of external aspects of one’s sense of self.
     Integration means overcoming the separation among different ‘inner selves,’ that is, accepting and integrating all facets of one’s self.
     Finally, self-transcendence refers to independence of the self of external definitions and dissolution of mental boundaries between self and others. … ‘self-transcendence is equivalent to wisdom and implies the dissolution of (self-based) obstacles to empathy, understanding, and integrity’.”
       Staudinger UM, Gluck J. "Psychological wisdom research: commonalities and differences in a growing field." Annu Rev Psychol 2011; 62: 215-41. 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles  www.buddhadoodles.com