This is not the age of information.
This is not the age of information.
Forget the news,
and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time of loaves
and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread
for a thousand.
David Whyte, Loaves and Fishes from The House of Belonging
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
C.S. Lewis, The Fours Loves
This reflex to solve, rescue and fix, removes us from the tenderness at hand. For often, intimacy arises not from any attempt to take the pain away, but from living through together; not from a working out, but from a being with. Trust and closeness deepen from holding and being with, both emotionally and physically.
I’m learning, pain by pain and tension by tension, that after all my strategies, the strength of love lies in receiving and not negotiating; in accepting each other and not problem solving each other; in listening and affirming each other, not trying to change or fix those we love.
Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
Summer often allows an opportunity for catching up on reading so I will give some suggestions for books in the next week or two.
Over the past few years we have seen mindfulness practice being applied to specific areas where people may have difficulties, such as anxiety or depression, or indeed when people struggle with issues such as shyness in public or procrastination. It is nice to see that we are also beginning to find reflections on the even more fundamental issue of the sense of self, or our basic sense of unworthiness, themes which I have covered frequently in some of the posts in this blog.
One book which covers these themes, and which I can recommend wholeheartedly, is entitled Living with your Heart Wide Open, written by two of the most experienced mindfulness teachers in the U.S., Steve Flowers and Bob Stahl. A nice title, but, in fact, the subtitle reveals more about the material covered, in a very accessible fashion, in the chapters: “How Mindfulness and Compassion can free you from unworthiness, inadequacy and shame“.
As this subtitle suggests, the book is concerned with the basic underlying narrative tone which pervades our life, dealing with different aspects in each chapter and applying mindfulness exercises to the themes covered. In other words, it helps us become more aware of the manner in which we talk to ourselves. It looks at the origins of this self-talk in the way our life history has shaped us, but focuses mainly on how it hinders us in our daily lives and leads to ongoing suffering. Although many of the exercises in the book are familiar, using them in a systematic way linked to themes means that this book leads readers – with great kindness – to reflect on the ingrained thought patterns that keep them trapped in self-judgement, or criticism, to potential greater freedom:
This book offers a mindful path to breaking free from these habitual thought patterns. Through meditation and inquiry, you can discover where this negative self-talk came from and why you are so judgmental towards yourself. Addressing this lack of self-compassion is essential. In a sense our very existence is threatened by an endemic of self-loathing. War essentially begins inside the individual, stemming from a sense of alienation and separation from the interconnectedness of life. Making peace within is one of the noblest endeavors you can pursue – for yourself, for others and for the world (p.5).
One advantage of this book is that it presents recent psychological research on the Narrative Self, Attachment, Shame and Self-Esteem in a very straightforward manner, which will be of great benefit to readers coming to this material for the first time. It does not go into too much depth as it always keeps in mind that the purpose of the book is to help the reader in a practical manner in areas that are potentially life-changing. I particularly liked chapter five which deals with Self-Compassion, the subject of a number of studies and books at the moment. The authors show how cultivating self-compassion is necessary in this modern age, with its excessive emphasis on continual self-improvement, and then lead into two practices to allow the reader develop it better in their daily lives. These reflections and meditations are rich enough to keep returning to them again and again, allowing a gentle healing of some of the deeper parts of our psyche.
As you continue to practice self-compassion, you may notice more and more things about the self you’ve created with all of your old stories. Perhaps you tried to be especially good to counterbalance the problems in your family. Perhaps you learned to be generous of yourself as a way of earning the value you felt you lacked. Self-compassion lets you be with all the hurt, loneliness and fear that the narrative-based self has concealed. In the open heart of self-compassion, the wounded child within you will begin to heal (p. 105).
To sum up, a book that could be a very lovely companion on our journey this Summer and after, as we move towards greater acceptance of our our selves and our history, allowing us to see through our stories and live in the present more richly.
Research, mainly in the area of neuroscience, is increasingly showing that meditation changes how the brain functions. What I find interesting is how this harmonizes with the work of psychologists who look at the importance of early relationships or those who write about the unconscious. One of the most stimulating writers in this latter area is the modern psychoanalytical author, Christopher Bollas. Jon Kabat Zinn likes to say that meditation allows us to step out of “doing-mode” into “being-mode”. This strengthens our capacity to rest with experience rather than always conceptualizing it. As Ajahn Sumedho said in a recent post, we simply recognize, without going into the need to analyse. Bollas’ quote here may suggest a link. Maybe getting in touch with silence may allow us reconnect with our earliest experiences which were processed without the use of language and thought. We may even say that sitting in silence and holding whatever arises may possibly, slowly, heal these early experiences, if they were somehow lacking. His words also allow us see how our emotions contain a deep truth which may be outside of conscious thought, truths which may be “known” without being “thought”.
Some moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive experience. They are registered through an experience in being, rather than mind, because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of life before words existed….the aesthetic moment constitutes part of the unthought known. The aesthetic moment is an existential recollection of the time when communication took place primarily through this illusion of deep rapport of subject and object. Being with, as a form of dialogue, enabled the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought. The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic.
Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object
No one else can ever provide the connection that finally puts the soul at ease. We find that connection when the window of the heart opens, allowing us to bask in the warmth and openness that is our deepest nature. When we look to others for this ground, we wind up trying to control and manipulate them into being there for us in a way that allows us to settle into ourselves. yet this very focus on trying to get something from them prevents us from resting in our own ground, leaving us outwardly dependent and inwardly disconnected.
John Welwood
Mindfulbalance 