Time to go LIVE?

     To what extent do YOU sleepwalk through life - your thoughts, speech & actions fully pre-programmed by your genetic & environmental conditioning? How predictable are you? Are you barely surviving on "story of me" re-runs?

          “To live is the rarest thing in the world. 
            Most people exist, that is all.”                         Oscar Wilde

     As one who’s spent far too much time & energy on (wallowing in) miseries from my childhood, I’ve come to wonder if such activity (or more accurately, lack of activity) is primarily an avoidant luxury when we have nothing truly important & urgent to deal with. 
     An incurable disease diagnosis with a month left to live seems to snap about 40% of people out of their “neurotic selfing habit” and right smack into the best quality of life they’ve ever known. And they’re profoundly grateful for the diagnosis! See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/search?q=post+traumatic+growth

     An excellent, wonderfully well-written book IMHO is: Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017. A few relevant quotes from it:
          “Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. All the o-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.”
          “Annie Dillard … reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.”

     And finally, a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: 
          “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”

Danger Signals

     Immediately from one or a few obvious cause(s), or more gradually from unknown numbers of straws on the camel's back, we're regularly bombarded by many, many danger signals.
     'Danger' sounds acute, even life-threatening. But as social creatures, we sense danger even when someone we consider important, isn't as friendly towards us as usual. So the innumerable variables in life, coupled with our 'negativity bias' conspire to more or less constantly keep us on edge! And the greater our history of trauma, the more exaggerated the alarm bells & our responses. One can sustain major trauma without ever having experienced combat or sexual abuse.
      “By far the most important predictor of how well (people) coped with life’s inevitable disappointments was the level of security established with their primary caregiver during the first two years of life.”
     Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015. 

     So we can see that we should be gentle & understanding with our own & others' odd behavior. We're all, to some degree, scared, needy kids who just want to be safe, secure, loved & happy. Our behavior hints at how patient (to desperate) we are to get there, as well as how healthy (to dysfunctional) our idea of "there" happens to be. All of us are always doing our best, no matter how that may appear to others - and even to ourselves when we look back (with dismay & gratitude for the great tolerance we received) later!
     But identifying with our level of dysfunction is unsatisfactory - intentional wallowing simply won't do. We must tirelessly dig ourselves out of this hole. We can learn to quickly & easily recognize the felt sense of false (ego) danger. There's a distinct difference between danger to our ego vs actual life. We must learn to identify this difference, because our quality of life definitely depends on skillfully managing these two vastly different dangers.

 The Space Between by Alice Mason   https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AliceMasonArtist?ref=l2-shopheader-name

Levels of Being in This World

     "We access the mind of calm abiding through recognition. What do we recognize? Awareness: the ever-present knowing quality of mind, from which we are never separated for an instant. Even though normally we do not recognize awareness, we can no more live without it than we can live without breathing. ... Discovering our own awareness allows us to access the natural steadiness and clarity of the mind, which exist independent of conditions and circumstances, and independent of our emotions and moods."  
       Mingyur Rinpoche


      “normally, for probably all human beings in all cultures, the default state is an ego state. In neurobiology, we know that the default state of most people, where they’re not doing something or actively thinking about something, is a running commentary about themselves and their own life and what’s going on. Trungpa Rinpoche called it ‘subconscious gossip.’ That is like a one-foot layer of debris on top of the ocean of our state of being, and most of us think that who we are is just this incessant thinking and ruminating and grinding away at our issues, obsessions and so on. We have no awareness at all of who we really are in the full sense."
       Reginald A. Ray  http://www.soundstrue.com/store/weeklywisdom/?page=single&category=IATE&episode=6324


 

Phases of the Moonsnail by Kath Kornelsen Rutherford www.fogforestgallery.ca

The Blues - As Good As It Gets? Really??

     It can take a painfully long, long time - and some of us never really get it: it's not about being rescued, saved, or completed by anyone or anything out there.
     Each one of us, individually, needs to fully discover, directly experience who / what we actually are. However with our common personal-verbal level of consciousness, we can only grossly underestimate: http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Two-Levels-of-Consciousness/c17jj/56f14e0c0cf266a292561f27
     The blues - even the wonderful Mary Gauthier's (below) - seems to be about the seemingly endless futile struggle to find happiness, wholeness, perfection, outside of ourselves. No wonder so much of the blues is about all sorts of doomed, broken escape routes - booze, drugs, gambling etc. 
     We need to see clearly, accept & have compassion for this deluded aspect of our shared human life. But we need to grow bored, sick & tired of wallowing, and break through to the other side of this ...

     See: http://jglovas.wix.com/awarenessnow#!Seriously/c17jj/56fe7a7d0cf2b279cdbb25e1

Enlightenment?

     "... enlightenment is an attainable goal, once our fanciful notions of it are stripped away, and we have learned to use meditation as a method for examining reality rather than an opportunity to wallow in 'self-absorbed mind-noise'."

       Ingram DM. "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book." Aeon Books, London, 2008. 

Allowing Elephants to Pass Through

     Blockage or stagnation of energy (qi) is the fundamental cause of illness according to Chinese & Japanese traditional medicine. Energy which is normally "fluid", becomes pathologically "reified" & stuck.
     Western psychology & psychiatry has similar metaphors of "being stuck" re mental illness: wallowing, catastrophization, circular thinking etc.
     A common dysfunctional & ineffective way of (not) dealing with difficult issues is pretending that they don't exist - avoidance. It may be a major problem that's quite obvious to everyone except those who refuse to see, accept & skillfully let go of "the elephant in the room."

     In meditation, we learn to become increasingly porous.
 
    "When you sit,
     you leave the front door open,
     you leave the back door open,
     and you don't serve tea."                   Shunryu Suzuki 

      Zen talk by Koun Franz: "Beyond Words – December 19, 2013": http://zennovascotia.com/dharma-talks/

Where Am I Now? Now? Now? Now?

     At one time, parents were advised to always ask themselves "Do I know where my children are right now?" It's also important to be aware of where my attention is at any moment in time!
     Usually, it makes most sense to be consciously aware of what's going on in the present moment around us and within our mind-body. In this mindful way, we're most likely to behave appropriately - in the best long-term interests of all concerned.
     Mindlessness of various sorts (absent mindedness, distracted, multitasking, catastrophizing, wallowing etc) is generally the shadow side of mindfulness, resulting in much wasted time, loss of productivity, passivity, errors, accidents etc.
     At specific times & places, where mindfulness is not essential, eg relaxing weekend at home, "mind wandering" can contribute to: "self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation & evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events & experiences, simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self & others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning, & reflective compassion." 
     Yes, mind wandering has potential short- & long-term personal value, under the appropriate circumstances. But the fact that people spend "up to 50% of their waking hours" at it means that much of the time it has negative consequences, and may be a form of avoidance. Open-hearted engagement, in real time, with whatever is at hand, seems to be optimal. Escape into our heads, or increasingly into our smart phones, is avoidance of what's real & what needs to be addressed. If one is intentionally relaxing in a familiar environment, then one can intentionally, productively engage in mind wandering without negative consequences.

       Scott Barry Kaufman "Mind Wandering: A New Personal Intelligence Perspective." Scientific American September 25, 2013. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/09/25/mind-wandering-a-new-personal-intelligence-perspective/

Daydreamer by Leah Welch   http://fineartamerica.com

Walk an Intelligent Path

            When walking through hell,
            KEEP WALKING

      These are excellent instructions, as long as one does not walk in circles. Wallowing is terribly common and comforting - in a sick way.
     One needs to follow a path that leads to the end of suffering - the Buddha's ONLY message.

Dale Chihuly   http://www.chihulygardenandglass.com/

Just This Moment - as it Actually Is - OR - Perseverative Cognition

     “… it takes a bit of meditative presence to be with what is – just as it is – without being distracted by all the evaluations and comments that habitually arise about our situation. We suffer more from our stories than from the actual situation as it is.”         Toni Packer 

     “My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes – most of which have never happened.”        Mark Twain


Perseverative Cognition: Brosschot JF, Verkuil B, Thayer JF. Conscious and unconscious perseverative cognition: is a large part of prolonged physiological activity due to unconscious stress? J Psychosom Res. 2010; 69(4): 407-16.
Psychology of Stress: http://www.guidetopsychology.com/stress.htm

Montreal, Canada