Food and Drink for the Soul

    "Beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive."      John O'Donohue

 

    "Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace & elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. 

    ... the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person. And it’s amazing, you know? Here am I, sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces, and that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that’s the mystery of poetry, is poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth. 

 

    ... there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. 

    I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness. 

    … my old friend Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German mystic … said, ‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor any created thing can touch.’ And I really thought that was amazing. And what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

    above from John O'Donohue's WONDERFUL interview by Krista Tippet: 

    Audio: https://onbeing.org/starting-points/new-to-on-being-start-here/ (also bottom of this page)

    Transcript: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/#transcript

    From a wonderful young, living mystic's interview:
    “I don’t think I believe in evil spirits. I think that the words we’re using are making this binary in a way, or categorical. I believe in energy forces. We all speak of this rise of collective consciousness, but with it, we (((inevitably))) can see (((its shadow))) an incredible influx of hatred, anger & violence manifested at the same time. When you look at the state of things nowadays, it’s fairly clear that the collapse is here. We’re not on the brink of it. It's happening. (((BUT RIGHT NOW, revitalization - the OTHER SIDE of the 'collapse' COIN IS ALSO HAPPENING!!! MORE & MORE of us are AWAKENING to our True Nature, which is loving instead of lost in fear.)))
    The collapse is happening for one very simple reason. This is just the expression of ignorance. And when I mean ignorance, I don’t mean intellectual or philosophical ignorance. I mean to not know who we truly are. I mean to believe in an illusion; to believe in the idea of the self, that leads to the idea of separation – that I am this, and therefore I’m not that. I am me and I’m against you because you and me, we have different beliefs, and so we’re enemies; to the condensation of the self, the belief of the illusion of the separate self is what is causing all of this. 
    When you believe in a self, you believe in a country, you believe in an idea, you believe in a social status, you believe in a certain amount of power, in money, in a job that makes you better or not better than anybody. So it’s the story of the self that people believe in and they believe that to be the truth of who they are. And they believe that this is the reality they live and experience, and this belief of separation has caused an incredible amount of fear and suffering. 
    We’re just using words, and language is going to fail us inevitably, because language (((being inherently dualistic)))) separates. Tall only exists because short exists. Narrow only exists because wide exists, or black and white. We create oppositions through words, because we categorize, we label, because we have to. That’s what we found to understand and experience reality. 
    And so we say fear, but fear is just the same way that darkness doesn’t exist. Darkness is a word that means nothing. Darkness is just the absence of light. There’s light and there’s no light. Show me darkness. No. You can just show me the sun disappearing, ebbing and flowing and setting below the surface of the horizon. There’s light and there’s no light. And for the no light part, we created a word, and we called it darkness. 
    And so it’s the same with fear. Fear is just no love. There’s love and there’s no love. And the no love we turned it into fear. But love is what we’re made of. That’s the fabric of who we are. It’s pure love, because pure love is consciousness. And so there’s love and there’s the absence of it. In the absence of it, we made into a word. And that word – fear – has governed much of our understanding, behavioural patterns, and experiences of reality.”
     above from the INSPIRING (1hr 47min) Interview with House of Dragons Actor Emeline Lambert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOTefUSwj4w .
    MORE & MORE WONDERFUL PEOPLE like Emeline above, and untold numbers of less well-known people, like many of the readers of these blogs, are bringing MORE & MORE REVITALIZING LIGHT & HOPE into the dark corners of our world. 

 

Beannacht / Blessing
John O’Donohue

For Josie, my mother

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

 

Hope, Courage, Patience, Perseverance

    "I believe that there’s an intelligence, a spiritual power that I don’t understand. I call it God because I don’t know what else to call this great spiritual power. It gives me strength. 
    I’ve also had amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human. Your humanness goes away, and you’re part of that natural world. It’s the most amazing and wonderful and beautiful feeling .....
    Traditional faith will have you believe in a loving God, and when I look at what’s happening on the planet, I think if there is a God like that, is he playing with us? Are we living in some great experiment? How can you believe in a loving God when you see the horrors that are perpetrated against nature, against animals, against each other? I sometimes think it is like an experiment which has culminated in this strange, confused creature that is human beings, and we seem to be lost. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? I don’t know what the meaning of life is. 
    The meaning of my life is to give people hope because without hope you give up."  
    Jane Goodall PhD 1934-2025 

    There's a lot to unpack in Jane Goodall's heart-felt words. So what does she mean by "amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human"? 
    I understand that momentarily forgetting you're human refers to going beyond or deeper than your surface identity of name, address, history, likes / dislikes, virtues / neuroses etc, and opening up to / remembering our primal intimate Oneness & Source.      

    Goodall clearly contrasts what many of us see as human civilization blindly rushing towards self-destruction, with her sense that there is still hope, because human beings are also capable of experiencing, nurturing & sharing awe, wonder, & beauty. 

    Iain McGilchrist has been clearly explaining how human society's current tendency is "left-hemisphere-dominant" - seeing the world in a very pragmatic, abstract, detached, transactional manner: seeing only lumber when looking at a great forest, seeing only mining opportunities when looking at a majestic mountain, seeing only harvesting of fish, oil & natural gas when looking at the great oceans - focused only what they can quickly grab for short-term gain for themselves. Some, much like the tobacco industry a few decades ago, flatly deny that this way of seeing is "perpetrating horrors against nature, against animals, against each other." Many CEOs, populist politicians / dictators, billionaires, etc CAN BE clever, AND YET display no evidence at all of wisdom. 

    From a neuroscience perspective, McGilchrist would say that we are able to see things in balanced way when the left-hemisphere's exclusive emphasis on grabbing, controlling & surviving is not running the whole show. One way to facilitate this balanced, healthy, holistic perspective is being alone (and at peace) in nature. Then we more easily appreciate the right-hemisphere's way of seeing the world: appreciating our intimate inter-connectedness with everyone & everything, love, beauty, truth, the arts, mystery, spirituality, meaning, metaphor, humor, paradox, etc - AS WELL AS - the practical, limited role of the left-hemisphere. To have a clearer understanding of these two, ideally complementary ways of seeing and being in the world, I highly recommend one of McGilchrist's excellent interviews, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqz0MO9mX0

    To paraphrase Einstein, our (left-hemisphere dominant) way of seeing / level consciousness that got us into this dire mess CANNOT possibly lift us out of it, into a better future. Our exclusive left-hemisphere ways: estranged, adversarial relationship with our own hearts, each other & Nature is what's so painfully unnatural & unsustainable. 
    Chronic fear, anxiety & anger has for too long, been drowning out our patience, wisdom & kindness. We desperately need to cultivate a FAR wiser balance.

    So can we gain some freedom from chronic fear & anxiety - when "being well-adjusted to a toxic situation is no measure of health"? 
    Well, we know that our executive function is easily shut down when we're stressed - ie stress tends to impair good judgment. 
    We also know that many are able to operate under high-stress life-or-death situations with amazing calm & competence: fire-fighters, police officers, paramedics, surgeons, psychiatrists, air traffic controllers, pilots, military personnel, martial artists, etc. 

    Common knowledge would incorrectly tell us that our level of stress is directly proportional to the degree to which we lack total control of our present situation. 
    Actually, our level of stress is mostly based on catastrophizing ie anxiously, vividly imagining the worst possible future outcome, which very rarely if ever materializes and / or being stuck re-living the past.
    The secret of the "grace under pressure" exemplified by fire-fighters etc is staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. Clearly, knowledge, training & practice in knowing what to do in challenging present situations is a basic necessity ALONG WITH knowing how to remain present, focused & grounded ie Mindful.

    Mindfulness training IS PRACTICING staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. It's best started under stress-free conditions eg being peacefully alone in nature, or in your own home away from distractions. Start by sitting, standing or lying down and remaining still, for a set period of time eg just 5 minutes at first, with eyes closed, and just quietly observe what goes on, mainly inside of you. 

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."  Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

     With patience, a bit of courage, and a lot of perseverance, a sustained regular practice will result in you being able to remain surprisingly calm, grounded & wisely responsive (rather than impulsively reactive in a way that everyone will later regret) to even the most serious challenges. You will also learn humility & empathy for yourself & others, because you will remain perfectly imperfect. Interestingly & a bit annoyingly, after decades of practice, you too might find major challenges surprisingly easy to accept, while small, meaningless events might still provoke you briefly. 

    So this is a life-long practice, with continual growth in wisdom, and less & less sabotaging interference by neuroses & traumas. Your quality of life, and the quality of life of those around you, will definitely progressively improve well beyond your current understanding.

“We are not isolated individuals. 

We are cells in the body of humanity, and what we do to one another we do to ourselves. 

The new story is one of interdependence, shared purpose, and sacred relationship with all Life.” 
Nancy B. Roof PhD 1929-2025

 

Another World is Possible www.kosmosjournal.org

Oneness, Peace, Contentment, Happiness

    Everyone at some level is aware that right now, no matter how well we're doing, by whatever measure - loved & respected by family & friends, smart, well-educated, successful, healthy, attractive, financially-secure - our life as we know it & that of our loved ones, can radically change in an instant. Our fragility is partially because for many, happiness depends entirely on how well we can control our environment. But, again at some level we know that we have put our environment & ourselves into crisis. So our anxiety & stress appears to be because we cannot reliably control the basic, universal facts of life: constant change, aging, sickness & death.
    Much of this is based on the simplistic materialist model of reality - a left-hemisphere-dominant perspective - which imagines life AS IF life was nothing more than accidentally-assembled machinery, meaninglessly churning away, then inevitably breaking down, end of story. As a result, a frightening proportion of humanity are electing brutal primitive leaders who are obviously deaf, dumb & blind to essential human values of love, compassion, honesty, truth, empathy, compassion, nurturing each other. http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/09/balance.html

    BUT WHAT IF our anxiety and pervasive sense of 'lack' or 'something missing' were caused not as much by our inability to adequately control life / fear of death, but MOSTLY by the gnawing disconnect between how most of us perceive the world ("relative reality" "consensual reality") and our innate intuitive memory of "Ultimate Reality" which cannot be seen, nor adequately described. And because Ultimate Reality is far more complex than the reductionist model, many are not able to or not ready to deal with it.
    Nevertheless, throughout history, from all traditions, from every corner of the globe, shamans, mystics, saints, philosophers, poets & other deeply spiritual seekers of Truth have continued to point us toward Ultimate Reality in the only possible way - by directly experiencing it.

     In this tradition, Rupert Spira offers very clear, concise pointers to help us directly experience Ultimate Reality in his excellent 40-minute video (at the bottom of this page). His excellent talk (from the video) about how our Essential Nature is Happiness, is partially transcribed here : 

    “Could it be that the entire, what we call the universe, is an appearance within Awareness or Consciousness? After all, that is what our experience tells us.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations of an infinite field of Consciousness, through the agency of which Consciousness knows itself as the world? Just as when we fall asleep at night we dream, we imagine an entire world within our own minds, and yet, we view that world from the perspective of a separate subject of experience within that world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like dreams, in the mind of Infinite Consciousness? Or to use religious language, each of our minds are like dreams in the mind of God, through which infinite consciousness or God’s infinite being seems to divide itself into two parts: a subject that knows and an object that is known, just as we do at night when we dream.
    Our own mind divides itself into two parts: a dreamed world and a separate dreamed character, from whose point of view that world is known. In other words, the dreamed character – the character in the dream – is the agency through which our mind knows itself as the dreamed world.
    Could it be that each of our minds are like localizations through which Infinite Consciousness knows itself as the world? After all, that is in line with our experience. Is there anyone here who is currently experiencing anything other than the knowing or consciousness of your experience?

    … if we investigate like honest scientists, relying only on the evidence of experience, this knowing or consciousness is all that is ever experienced. And it is possible to explain the whole of reality on the basis of consciousness alone, without recourse to an abstract world made of matter, which nobody has ever, or could ever come in contact with.
    What are the implications of this possibility? It implies that whatever or whoever seems to be outside of ourselves, in other words all others, all objects and the world, although they may be outside of our limited, finite minds, they are not outside of the infinite field of consciousness, out of which our finite minds are made. In other words, the implications of this possibility is that everyone & everything is a modulation of a single infinite indivisible whole, seemingly separate from ourselves, seemingly made out of something other than ourselves, but in reality, an integral part of the same infinite, indivisible whole.
    In other words, although experience seems to comprise a multiplicity & diversity of objects & selves, if we look through that appearance, trusting only the evidence of experience, we find no separate objects, people, entities, selves or things. We find only our Self, not our personal (small) self – a collection of thoughts and feelings, but our Self, that true and only Self of infinite, indivisible, self-aware Being – referred to as God in the religious traditions; referred to as Consciousness in gatherings such as this; and referred to as “I” in common parlance. 

    I’m not speaking of some extraordinary experience to which only a few enlightened sages have access. Everybody knows the experience to which I am referring. The common name for it is love. When you feel you love someone, or are in love, do you not feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that you are one with that apparent other? (Oneness, Unitive Experience, Unitive Consciousness) Is that not precisely what the experience of love is – the dissolution of the sense of separation between yourself & the other. In other words, love is not a relationship. It is the collapse of relationship. It is the absence of self & other. In other words, it is the recognition of our shared being. It is the recognition of Reality.
    Why is it that everybody loves the experience of love above all else? It is because each of us, all apparently finite minds long, above all else, to be divested of their seeming separation. All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, it’s limitations.
    The experience of beauty is exactly the same experience but in relation to an object rather than to a person or an animal. When you feel the experience of beauty whilst walking in a landscape or listening to a piece of music, do you not feel to a greater or lesser extent that you merge with the music or the landscape? Is there anyone here who has not had that experience? Is there anyone here who on listening to a piece of music or walking in the landscape has not felt themselves dissolve into the music or the landscape, who has not felt the sense of separation between themselves and the object dissolve? Isn’t that why we love to walk in Nature or to listen to music?
    All the separate self truly longs for is to be divested of its sense of separation, to be relieved of the apparent limitations that seem to confine us to a cluster of thoughts, images, feelings, sensations & perceptions, and returns us, as it were, to our Origin, our Source, or our Essence. 

    In the non-dual traditions there are these two essential pathways.
First of all the inward-facing pathway through which we investigate what we call “I,” which culminates in the recognition that the “I” that we essentially are, the Awareness that we essentially are, is without limits & is inherently peaceful.
    And then there is the outward-facing pathway in which our entire experience is realigned with this new understanding in which we not only understand but feel that everyone & everything is a modulation of our own essential infinite self-aware Being.”
    Rupert Spira, “Your Nature is Happiness” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQSbc42Uc4 - below

Reality - Beautiful and True

“The truth is a difficult concept to define...
We live in an era where it's becoming more and more difficult to 

determine the facts and what's fake.”
Gary Schwartz

 

     Most, perhaps all of us, are born with a deep intuitive knowing of reality that is indescribably beautiful, inconceivably vast, and is therefore impossible to put into words. 

 

    But society conditions us to agree on a greatly-simplified model of reality that most of us can understand, describe, work with & manipulate - "consensus reality." Gradually, most of us forget reality and start to assume that our simplified working model (consensus reality ie our "common sense" understanding) is not just a dumbed-down model, but actually real. 

   The other major distorting influence on most of us is that of trauma. The combined affect of consensus reality & trauma is so potent, that as Anais Nin observed, we can't see things as they are. We only see things as we are - ie what's left behind after trauma & forgetting our true nature.  "... we live in the distortion ... " Thomas Hübl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4Ktsi3KX2I

    The greater our distorting influences, the more vehemently we defend the accuracy of our perception AND the more rigidly we resist opening our mind-heart!

                 “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.” Carl Jung

 

    Learning about mystics, saints and the increasing numbers of people who are serious about Truth, intrigues us by resonating with that deepest intuition we still retain about reality. It can't be directly expressed in words, but only pointed towards poetically, by way of metaphors, stories, music, etc.

“Half of any person
is confused and bewildered
and way off The Path.

Half!

The other half
is dancing
in some Invisible Joy.”
Rumi

 

    As to which half of our self we choose to inhabit has most to do with which of two, very different ways of being we trust more: fear - or - love. Me alone against the world - or - pulling together for our collective well-being. As long as we remain convinced that life & the world are basically hostile to ourselves & our loved ones, we remain fearful, tight, aggressive & alone. This sad, hurt, angry mood is common, especially in old age, when we finally realize that craving for material possessions will never satisfy our deepest hunger for realizing what's true - reality.

    Many of us would deeply benefit from BOTH psychotherapy AND a deep spiritual path. It's easier to wallow in simmering discontent, ending life in bitter cynicism - "ordinary unhappiness."

    BUT if we let go of craving, and open-up & lovingly nurture those around us, we are re-born to be who we've always been.

 

    “Walking the path toward the complete ending of clinging & suffering is the noblest thing a person can do. It opens the fist of the mind, and allows a person to walk in the world with gift-bestowing hands.” Gil Fronsdal

 

 

by Mollycules www.BuddhaDoodles.com

 

 

On Becoming The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be

     Below is a transcript from imho an excellent, valuable interview containing important points that our anemic culture knows or cares little about YET is vitally important to every one of us:

1) Most people enjoy light, upbeat music (stories, movies, plays, books, etc), and tend to criticize music outside of that comfort-zone as depressing, "too deep for me," or confusing. Most of us are acclimatized to our stunningly shallow, consumer society. Immediately following 9/11, Americans were encouraged by their president to "go shopping" to show the world what they're made of! While many went shopping with patriotic fervor; history will find such blissful ignorance impossible to comprehend.

2) We see discomfort as a violation of our basic human rights, and respond to deep suffering with strong aversion, anger, & try every possible escape: an endless array of distractions, suppression, alcohol, drugs - prescribed & otherwise, possibly ending in depression, bitterness & cynicism. Yet hardships & pain are not meaningless punishments. Like everything else in life, they're to learn from, to help us evolve. Most people simply can't handle this last point, so they choose to rail against this reality. Arguing with reality is choosing to suffer needlessly. The infinitely wiser alternative is to relax our ego & body, and humbly learn all the deep lessons being offered. There's absolutely no comparison between these two approaches, yet most of us will absolutely exhaust the first, before trying the second out of shear desperation & utter fatigue.

3) Even psychosocial-spiritually-evolved human beings can & do have all sorts of hardships, including prolonged severe physical pain eg Buddha, Jesus, and in current times, Adyashanti, Jordan Peterson, etc. This can be a shockingly unpleasant surprise, at a time when we may have (prematurely) assumed that we've already 'processed' enough pain, suffering & even heavy "dark nights of the soul." But, as long as we're alive, learning - at times from very hard lessons - continues.

4) We mistakenly assume that happiness comes only after we're finished climbing up the mountain, but as long as we live, we can and need to grow. With age, growth clearly becomes increasingly internal ie integrating our values more & more completely into our lived experience ie intention, speech & other behaviors. The quality of happiness we experience also changes, becoming progressively more subtle, deep, independent of external circumstances & independent of others' opinions. Happiness feels more & more like home, equanimity, peace, silence & stillness (not the brief 'sugar-high' of winning a lottery).

     Steven Bartlett asked Jordan B. Peterson, ‘How are you doing?’ Peterson responded,
     “Brilliantly and terribly. You know, when you listen to a profound piece of music, one that sort of spans the whole emotional experience, it’s not happy. Happy is elevator music. Probably, you shouldn’t listen to that at all. And you think, ‘Why?’ Well, it’s harmless, treacly, sweet, simple, lacks depth, it’s shallow – that’s a problem. It doesn’t have that deep sense of awe & horror, I would say, that’s characteristic of the best of all music.
     You know, you listen to some so-called 'simple music' – Hank Williams is a good example. You know the blues cowboy from the 1950s, who died of alcoholism when he was 27, and whose voice sounds like an 80-year-old man. Simple melody, you know, but there’s nothing simple in the song and in the voice. It’s deep. You know it’s like black blues in the States from the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by that tradition. There’s this admission of a deep suffering at the same time as you get the beautiful transcendence of the music. And that’s meaning, you know, that’s awe-ful in the most fundamental sense but, you need an antidote to suffering, and it has to be deep. And deep moves you tectonically and it’s not a trivial thing. But that’s better than happiness. And maybe, if you’re lucky, while pursuing that and while you’re immersed in it, you get to be happy. And you should fall on your knees and be grateful that when it happens. You know it’s a gift. It really is a gift. And it comes upon you unexpectedly – your happiness, you know. But you aim to climb uphill to the highest peak you can possibly envision. And that’s better than happiness.

      Wherever I go in the world, people come up to me and, I wouldn’t say they’re happy to see me. They’re often in tears, and they often have a pretty rough story to relate – they were suicidal, or nihilistic, or homicidal, or trapped, desperate. And they tell me that, real fast. And then they say, ‘I’ve overcome that to a large degree, and thank you for that. And then you think, well that’s really something, to have that happen over & over. In some ways you might think, well how can anything better possibly happen to you, than to have people come up to you all over the world, strangers, and open themselves up to you like that, like they’re old friends, so quickly? But at the same time, it’s an awful thing, because you see even in the revelation of their triumph, the initial depth of their despair. So I wouldn’t change that. But it’s not nothing. It’s certainly not just happiness. It’s better than happiness, but it’s almost unbearable."

Q: "Why do you do what you do?"
     “To see what will happen. Some programs you cannot predict. You cannot predict how they’re going to end. You have to run them. Well, I believe that truth will save the world. I believe that. So you speak truthfully, and you watch what happens. And you take your consequences. And maybe you hope and have some faith that, in the final analysis, things will work out in your favor, but perhaps they will and perhaps they won’t. But that’s faith, eh? That’s faith. Faith isn’t believing in things that you regard as ridiculous, sacrificing your intellect. It’s a decision. Will truth, beauty & love save the world? Well, you can find out."
     Jordan Peterson: How To Become The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be | E113 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uLDin9A9pc EXCELLENT INTERVIEW well worth investing 1hr 6min of time

Spacious Possibilities Overflowing

     During his first week-long meditation retreat in the 1970s, Guy Armstrong experienced: 
     “so much space in the mind, that anything that isn’t working right, I can eventually figure out a way to be free of it. I just gained that confidence from that very first retreat. 
     The amount of openness that was in the mind had the capacity to settle or understand whatever unhappiness was there. There was nothing in my whole experience that was fixed and had to continue the way it was, which meant that my unhappiness wasn’t fixed. Whatever got built up there could also be taken down. 
     It’s like the first time you move into a new apartment, everything’s empty, and then you bring in the furniture piece by piece. Whatever furniture we brought in, can also be taken out. Well I think largely, whatever conditioning we’ve grown up with, it all came in piece by piece. And whatever has been done and planted there, can also be removed. It’s through the capacity for spaciousness and emptiness that we come to know that.

      ... we’re all familiar with the 5 senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling & touching. But the Buddha talked about a 6th sense, which is the mind. And the objects of the mind are basically our thoughts & our feelings. So in Buddhist meditation, thoughts & feelings are taken up as just another sense object, just like sight, smell, taste, sound & touch are. 
     And the wonderful thing about the quality of mindfulness is that it has this ability to pay attention to those mental experiences in exactly the same way as we can pay attention to physical experiences, like sound etc. 
     When I came to meditation, I was so wrapped up in the world of thinking that I didn’t think it was possible to step out of it. But mindfulness is outside of the thought process, and can observe thoughts, just like it can observe a sound or a breath. So it gives an incredible power when the workings of the mind themselves can be observed just like other sense phenomena. 
     So the implication for meditators is we spend a lot of our time thinking about our life as happening with these concepts of the past: What’s happening to my career? Family? How did I get into the situation? Where does all this sadness come from? But what’s radical about mindfulness practice is it’s only about the present moment, and seeing well what’s creating the suffering or the peace or ease, right now?

     Emptiness is kind of an off-putting word. When you think that you’re going to draw people to meditation practice by talking about emptiness – I don’t think so. I think a lot of people have ideas of not just ego death, but also coming into something that is vacant, a loss of meaning, connected with some kind of despair. 
     But that isn’t the way that it feels when you actually start to sense what it is pointing to. What is pointed to is an absence of fixedness. It’s empty of anything that’s fixed or solid. 
     And what that opens us to is number one, a great sense of space, openness, freedom – freedom to move around, and also, as you get more into the moment, and out of the stories about the past & future, it opens to the great beauty of what we’re witnessing. Obviously, when we first come into practice, there often is a lot of emotional conditioning to open to and come to understand and work through, but it opens us to the beauty of the wonderful qualities of heart & mind, of loving-kindness, of compassion, the wisdom that’s possible, balance of mind, equilibrium, not to mention the beauty of nature and the physical world.”

Metta Hour with Sharon Salzberg

Ep. 90 – Guy Armstrong 
https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/metta-hour-podcast-episode-90-guy-armstrong/

Meaningful Connection

     When we're under a lot of stress, we tend to feel isolated, alienated, all alone, like nobody cares about us, me against the world. Most people are drawn to mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) courses to better manage their stress and become more resilient in the face of life's many and unpredictable challenges.
     "Resilience is our inherent capacity to see beauty, find connection, commune with something larger than ourselves, and create – even in or after horrendous experiences." Staci Haines
     Stress tends to close us down - we back away from our own authenticity, others & the environment. Resilience allows us to open up, and connect with our own authenticity, with others & the environment.

     "In trauma-sensitive mindfulness practice, resilience involves imagining a place, activity, or memory that connects us to a sense of well-being … This can be cultivated by introducing a brief intervention during mindfulness practice or by practicing a separate guided meditation. Once people feel they can stabilize their attention on the resilient stimuli – the feeling of being somewhat safe, or a positive memory – we can then guide them to feel physical sensations that correspond with the resilient object of attention.”  David A. Treleaven. “Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing.” W.W. Norton & Co, 2018.

     It's profoundly calming (self-soothing, self-regulating) to vividly remember the physical sensations during a time when we felt deeply connected to ourself, another person, an animal, the environment, or even an activity. Safety, trust & love dominate in connection (& evaporate under stress). 
     Savor the interaction in the (11mins) video below, between Susan and Maddy the bear. The quality of their connection is viscerally obvious.