Month: August 2010

Mini-Movies and other strategies

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We have a tendency to do anything to avoid our life as it actually is –  its unsatisfactory nature, its lack of clarity, the way it can give rise to anxiety. Our fear-driven instinct is to get away, to escape. One way we do this is by imagining a different future, a better place, a life with a better script. This is how Rich Hanson describes it , in his excellent book, Buddha’s Brain:

The brain produces simulations…even when they have nothing to do with staying alive. Watch yourself daydreaming  or go back over a relationship problem, and you’ll see the clips playing – little packets of simulated experiences, usually just seconds long. If you observe them closely, you’ll spot several troubling things:

  • By its very nature the simulation pulls you out of the present moment. There you are, following a presentation at work, running an errand or meditating, and suddenly your mind is a thousand miles away, caught up in a mini-movie. But its only in the present moment that we find real happiness, love or wisdom.
  • In the simulator,  pleasures seem pretty great, whether you are considering a second cupcake or imagining the response you will get to a report at work. But what do you actually feel when you enact the mini-movie in real life? Is it as pleasant as promised up there on screen? Usually not.
  • Clips in the simulator contain lots of beliefs…. In reality,  are the explicit and implicit beliefs in your simulations true? Sometimes yes, but often no. Mini-moives keep us stuck, by their simplistic view of the past and their defining out-of-existence possibilities for the future, such as new ways to reach out to others or dream big dreams.

In sum, the simulator takes you out of the present moment and sets you chasing after carrots that aren’t really so great.

Rich Handon, Ph.D, Buddha’s Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom, p., 44.

The Sun Never Says

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Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe Me.”

Look what happens
With a love like that,

It lights the
Whole Sky.

Hafiz

Things we are not aware of

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When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual … does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict.

C.G. Jung

A lot of the time, we are not fully conscious of everything that is going on within us; our unlived life, or the parts that have been formed by the unlived lives of others,  is out of sight but exercising influence over our choices. We can see this sometimes when we look back at decisions made or life choices and wonder why we ended up in a certain place. Or when we see repeating patterns in our relationships. Jung suggests that if we do not attend to what is going on inside us, things or people appear in our outer lives in accord with that inner dynamic, and the outer choices we make reflect this inner drama. He suggests that the more we ignore the inner issues, the more we act them out in the world  around us. If we do not do this work, we risk remaining on the surface of life, rather than than incorporating our opposites into healthy choices.

If it ain’t broke….

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Some similar ideas to the post yesterday, taken from the excellent blog Medicine to live By!

It strikes me that for many of us, our “self-work” becomes a full time job and overtakes some of the rest of the naturalness of life.  I know because I have long been a “professional evolver,” one who is in constant analysis of myself and what this or that situation in life has taught me.  It’s taught me a lot, but when I get too stuck in “how to heal and perfect my own nature,” I become a white bread and mayonaise, boring, stiff version of my colorful, goofy, tender, insecure self–the one who’s a real human being.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself, far too often, responding to myself or to someone else in my life with these pre-digested strategies for wellness when the best medicine might be simply to go out and live fully and robustly, noticing the many dimensions of life and filtering a little less of ourselves.   Seeking the “proper experiences,” whether the best meditation training, the most inspiring yoga class, is not the right prescription for happiness if we’ve failed to use it to give us flexibility in life.

Malynn Utzinger, “The Tyranny of Self Help” www.doctormalynn.com

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

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Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives, tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,  feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy to let you in, Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left – fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul? Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw, nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the present hour, to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth, to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red, hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters, caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds. A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next is coming with its own heave and grace. Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things, upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises, and I would bow down to think about it.

That was then, which hasn’t ended yet. Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light, I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.

I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.

Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

Spiritual Bypassing

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Following yesterday’s reflection on the need to assimilate the feminine and masculine dimensions within ourselves, another post on integrating the different aspects of our lives. John Welwood has written some excellent books on the links between relationships, psychology and spiritual growth. He draws attention to the need to ground our selves in the vulnerability of our human condition, not run away from it.  He reminds us that we exist on different dimensions, including the key one of close relationships with other people, and notes the difficulties we can have in bringing our full awareness to that area.   A key concern of his is understanding how we relate to love. One term he uses is “spiritual bypassing”, which happens when we use the spiritual life to run away from our actual life, or from human, psychological work which needs to be done.

While many teachers are extremely warm, loving, and personal in their own way, they often do not have much to say about the specifically personal side of human life.  Coming out of a philosophy based on traditional Asian societies, they may have a hard time recognizing or assessing the personal, developmental challenges facing Western students. They often do not understand the pervasive self-hatred, shame, and guilt, as well as the alienation and lack of confidence in these students. Still less do they detect the tendency toward spiritual bypassing— using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional “unfinished business,” to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks, all in the name of enlightenment. And so they often teach self-transcendence to students who first of all need to find some ground to stand on.

In this way, spirituality becomes just another way of rejecting one’s experience. When people use spiritual practice to try to compensate for low self-esteem, social alienation, or emotional problems, they corrupt the true nature of spiritual practice. Instead of loosening the manipulative ego that tries to control its experience, they are further strengthening it.