Between & Beyond Words

     “ ‘Teach a child the name of a bird,’ writes Jesuit author Anthony DeMello, ‘and she’ll never see that bird again.’
     DeMello means that language, by labeling phenomena, exacts two injuries. First, it obscures uniqueness: the mystery of this bird, this night’s moon. And second, it also fractures the unified field of mystics and physicists. … 
     So we wonder: How to create a family culture with abundant spaces beyond words? How, in such spaces, can we learn from Clea (18-month-old daughter) how to be part of nature’s web, both as individuals and together? … 

     In her book Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, family counselor Naomi Aldort encourages parents to refrain from reacting when our kids push our buttons. Buddhist teacher Jonathan Foust has a wonderful acronym for it: WAIT (Why Am I Talking?). 
     I use it a lot. When I’m about to either put a label on a mystery or try to make a situation right, I WAIT. I sink into the sky, a breeze … and also into my inner weather. Something interesting usually happens: The moment aligns. Life doesn’t need my brain.
     After a year of using Aldort’s practice, I realized part of why it’s effective. Instead of anthropocentrically narrowing reality, WAITing allows us to be biocentric: Clea and me both. It allows me to tune in to how attuned she is to surrounding sensory stimulus. She’s noticing a hawk overhead, wings stiff as kites. She’s stopping to pick daisies for Mom. She’s here, now: a plume of smoke, the coarse lick of our kitten Boot’s tongue, a crescent moon. Clea’s in a place of peace. It’s not the nervous, more-is-better place that fuels overconsumption and creates the divide between ourselves and the rest of nature. Clea is nature. Or, rather, she has yet to find out she’s not.”

       William Powers. “Child of Nature.” Lion’s Roar, March 2016.

 

Photo: David A. Lovas

Finding Freedom from Self-talk's Tyranny

     "How do we avoid becoming lost in our own thoughts, projections, beliefs, and opinions? How do we begin to find our way out of this whole matrix of suffering?
     To begin with, we have to make a simple, yet very powerful observation: All thoughts - good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts - occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you'll see that a thought simply occurs on its own - it arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we're taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet."

       Adyashanti. "Falling into Grace. Insights on the End of Suffering." Sounds True, Boulder, CO, 2011. p9

     Thoughts ... Clouds in the Sky: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/06/clouds-thoughts-emotions-are.html

Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, Canada

Stillness in an Ocean of Noise

May I suggest listening to Koun Franz's dharma talk

"Resolve and Motivation" given January 6, 2014:

http://yourlisten.com/Koun/motivation-and-resolve

 

Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings and

     Silent (not noisy) night,
     Holy (not distracted) night ...

     “…how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our own thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range. Perhaps we fear that with silence we might hear the cries of our own suffering and the suffering in the world.”
        Halifax J. “Fruitful darkness. Reconnecting with the body of the earth.” HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 1993.

Direct Intimacy with Daily Life

     "Suddenly I was experiencing the vitality and immediacy of life itself - in the flowers, the people, the clamor of traffic - without the walls of resistance that human beings are heir to.
     What is this resistance? Why do we again and again resist our feelings of joy or happiness or love? We don't do it intentionally, but our conditioning, our habits of mind, and our culture all seem to work to build up the walls between what we naturally feel and what we allow ourselves to feel. Ironically, it is often the times when we are forced to feel intensely - times of grief, or physical pain - that catapult us into feeling joy. That is why we often hear people say they are grateful for the losses or difficulties they have encountered. They are grateful because the shock forced them into an intimacy with life that had been hidden from them. Intimacy seems hidden, but it is actually available to us all the time: in the world we inhabit with people, in the natural world, in our work, and in all our relationships. Once we are willing to be directly intimate with our life as it arises, joy emerges our of the simplest of life experiences."

       Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara "Simple Joy. Becoming Intimate with all of Life's Circumstances." Tricycle, Spring 2014 

William McIntosh   http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtsacprof/

Stone Walls Invariably Crumble

     The transtheoretical model of change (http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/11/436-readiness-for-change-is-pivotal.html) reflects our natural evolutionary, personal & species-wide, transition from rigidity towards ever-increasing psychological flexibility.
     Rigidity is an understandable, yet primitive, fearful avoidance of change. Change that we feel is beyond our current ability to handle & survive. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=rigidity
     Psychological flexibility, on the other hand, is about bravely opening up to clearly examine & skillfully engage with what's facing us, right now. See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/search?q=Psychological+flexibility
     Need for change may be obvious to everyone except the person who is rigidly avoiding change. The rigid individual is unable to fundamentally (qualitatively) transform to a new self-concept / worldview. At best, this individual may think in terms of minor (quantitative) adjustments to reduce stress.

     Difficulties, friction, noise, liminality are various ways of experiencing a boundary - a "line in the sand" between our current self-concept / worldview and the one for which we're ready, or almost ready.  
     Boundaries are imaginary - not solid walls, nor necessarily sources of suffering. A great deal of energy is trapped by trying to maintain old boundaries, which when released, makes this energy available for loving & living.

The Danforth by P. Michael Lovas