#605 Perspectives Evolving

     How we feel, how we are, and how we perceive is one indivisible unit. 
     With mindfulness, we learn to monitor how we feel, and recognize this as a constantly changing energy, flowing through. When we lightly hold anything in spacious awareness, we are no longer stuck in it or identified with it - it is no longer who we are, and it no longer, or at least less strongly, distorts our perception of reality. We are spacious awareness, not the ever-changing energies passing by.
     Self-concern (egocentricity) seems to be a step on the path to developing a healthy sense of self. Then concern for one's immediate family's welfare, then one's ethnicity, religion, country, etc. are only expansions on this same egocentric theme. Ideally, by one's 60s, one is progressively letting go of egocentricity / tribalism, and is developing a wise, grandparent-like nurturing attitude toward all of humanity, nature, the cosmos.
     Having a grandchild helps promote this allocentric / ecocentric shift. A grandchild brings joy that helps keep open the heart-mind, that can hold everything in spacious awareness.

McFrost69   www.dpreview.com

#470 Accepting & Respecting our Bodies

     "Most of the time, our bodies react to the environment without generating thoughts. Feelings are just faster than thoughts to inform us about changes in the environment. Even emotions, which are feelings filtered by memory or interpreted, are often mere afterthoughts. It is very difficult to change habits with using thought only and practically impossible to talk ourselves out of a depression or phobia. Not surprising to me: the best predictor for therapeutic success is not how brilliant the cognitive interventions are, but if a client likes his or her therapist. We are primitive, social animals, albeit with a lot of potential."

       Andrea F. Polard, Psy.D. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unified-theory-happiness/201301/your-brain-is-liver

Focusing   www.dpreview.com

 

#355 Physically Connecting with Life

     "The most powerful thing I've learned in practice is to tune in to how I actually feel. Our tendency is to either bury or act on feeling but not to actually feel feeling - and I don't mean a particular feeling but the felt sense that is underneath all feeling: our beating heart, our humanity, our basic goodness. The most important thing is to connect with that, and then everything else is just our life. ... our path is not a project, it's life. It's so powerful to realize that practice is fundamentally choiceless. It's just about being a human being, about being able to connect with our humanity on a more complete level."   Judith Simmer-Brown

Gretel in contemplation

#331 Thoughts, Energies, Actions - Choices, Choices, Choices

     A sponge is porous, all of the stuff in the water passes through a sponge immersed in the water. Likewise, each of us is immersed in the thoughts and energies of our current global culture. It ALL passes through each of us, whether we realize it or not, want it or not. Humans are completely interconnected at ALL LEVELS (thoughts, emotions, energies, communications, financially, ecologically etc).
     A massive problem is the fact that our human family is so diverse in terms of psychosocialspiritual development - from stone-age blood feuds to the Dalai Lama's message AND embodiment of forgiveness of current persecutors. We are in the age of BOTH the basest of child-soldier massacres AND Nelson Mandela's soaring example of what a human being can and MUST evolve to. 
     ALL levels of thoughts and energies pass through each of us - hideous & inspired - WE CHOOSE which ones to cultivate, which ones to enact in our lives, in this our one and only world. WE ALONE CREATE OUR REALITY, moment-by-moment. We must take great care about what we choose to occupy our minds, and what activities to feed with energy.

     “Wisdom traditions, the paths followed by our patients and our own experiences suggest that a sense of integrity comes through establishing healing connections. That’s not quite it. It wasn’t that the wave needed to establish connections. It was connected — part of a greater whole. Its challenge was to recognize the connectedness that was already there.”     Mount BM. The existential moment. Palliat Support Care 2003; 1(1): 93-6.

     Movement on the quality of life “continuum toward an experience of integrity and wholeness may be thought of as healing, and toward suffering and anguish as wounding.”
     Mount BM et al. Healing connections: on moving from suffering to a sense of well-being. J Pain Symptom Manage 2007; 33(4): 372-88. 

     “The key to self-development … is the experience of … a state of relaxed concentration in which the individual neither freezes out of fear nor clings due to desire. … the free flow of vital energy within the body and between the body and the universe.”     Sayama MK. “Samadhi. Self-development in Zen, swordsmanship, and psychotherapy.” State University of New York Press. 1986.

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