#713 Acceptance of Circumstances - Outer & Inner

     “the painful aspects of life, the really hard times … That’s the stuff you work with. … It may seem like the outer circumstances are the problem, but the challenge is actually what they bring up in you – the inner experiences of anguish or sorrow or suffering that they provoke or trigger in you.
     I don’t feel self-loathing and those kinds of intense emotions anymore, but I sure remember what they feel like. I know that the single most important thing for people today is the extent to which they feel really bad about themselves. I have a passion for finding a way of talking about this that can help people make friends with themselves. That requires a deep acceptance of yourself and learning how to accept things inside you that are considered unacceptable.
     Usually we spend our whole lives trying to avoid feeling that ‘there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.’ The view I’m coming from is that we’re actually complete and whole, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with us. In fact, we are fundamentally good, and we can connect with that goodness. We can move closer to accepting and honoring all parts of ourselves, while knowing that almost everybody shares those bad feelings about themselves. This is just what it’s like to be human.”                          Pema Chodron

        “Connect with the Best of Yourself – An Evening with Pema Chodron and k.d. lang.” Shambhala Sun, September 2015 

#704 Choppy Waves AND Profound Stillness Beneath

www.elephantjournal.com

#702 The Best Defense is ... What?

     The idea that the best defense is a strong offense might explain some peoples' apparent unprovoked aggressiveness. They seem to be yelling: "Don't mess with me, I'm bad!" Maybe fear cowers behind facades of aggressive posturing. And don't we all, to a lesser degree, at least think, and perhaps speak with some hostility?
     So why is there so much defensiveness? Would there be any if we had all received perfect unconditional love from day one? Perhaps behavior is conditioned by all - remembered & forgotten - past experiences. So maybe nothing is completely unprovoked - the present situation may just be stirring up an old wound.
     For me, the most impressive individual is authentic, open and decent. Such (rare) people have dropped their offensive-defensiveness ball & chain. They're able to simply connect directly - one human being to another. I suspect they began with self-observation & self-acceptance, which then spread to acceptance of others. Awareness & acceptance nurtures unconditional love, authenticity & peace.

#695 Accepting Ourselves, Accepting Others, and Then ...

     We keep trying so desperately to be accepted, valued and loved. We're acutely aware, at some level, of our many imperfections. And we fear our very survival hinges on eliminating, hiding, or overcompensating for our "defectiveness".
     After a while, we start realizing that nobody is perfect; and that unconditional love is painfully rare. Imperfection is tolerable, but life without unconditional love is brutal. What can we do about it? We know that we can't make others do anything. 
     But we can learn to accept ourselves as we are, then it's relatively easy to accept others as they are, and then, perhaps, we ourselves can become the source of unconditional love - the absolutely most precious, nurturing aspect of life. Perfection within imperfection?

     “When you came into this world, you cried and everyone else smiled. You should so live your life that when you leave, everyone else will cry, but you will be smiling.”                         Paramahansa Yogananda
        Dana Sawyer “Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions. The Authorized Biography of a 21st Century Spiritual Giant.” Fons Vitae, Louisville, KY, 2014.

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS

#676 Brokenness & Unconditional Love

     People seek help from psychotherapists when they feel broken and want to feel whole. 
     Ideally, psychotherapists themselves first undergo psychotherapy. Doing so, psychotherapists are better able to hold both their own brokenness and their own wholeness. Before we can accept others, we must learn self-acceptance.
     Psychotherapists ideally hold clients in "unconditional positive regard" and "meditative equipoise." These terms suggest great spaciousness, porousness, awareness, acceptance, unshakable love, understanding, peace, stillness, silence, wisdom. These therapists' qualities ideally remain stable, despite the variability & severity of problems and personalities of their clients.
     Obsessing about our needs, our brokenness, how we didn't receive unconditional love as children, is an endless wallowing in misery. It's also backwards. To heal, an inversion must occur.
     Unconditional love does appear to be the very core of human life. But our wholeness, authenticity, true happiness - all appear to be proportional to the degree to which we embody, we are the source of, unconditional love. Indeed, when a person feels utterly miserable, the best thing she can do for herself, is to help others in similar or worse situations.
     Traumas do hurt, traumas do crack our armor, and mercifully, the cracks do light our darkness. But our authenticity is in shining - being unconditional love.

Springtime at Luxembourg Gardens, Paris

#641 Learning to Intentionally Engage with what's Meaningful & Challenging

     • "How do we prepare students to cultivate their own inner resources of spirit and moral courage? 
     • How do we enable them to engage moral and social dilemmas with clarity about their own values . . . ? 
     • And, how, without proselytizing, do we foster students’ own development of character, conscience, and examined values?
 
     Contemplative exercises expand students’ learning from the conceptual faculty of mind to the contemplative (non-conceptual) dimension. In other words, (we can) learn to step back from mental-emotional-behavioral phenomena and 'watch' them unfold, as if from the observer standpoint. The goal is to observe one’s inner and outer activity without judgment. According to scientific research from the last twenty years, it is precisely this contemplative 'observer' faculty that has the power to bring about lifelong learning and shifts in consciousness.

     Contemplative pedagogy (eg Mindfulness) is not about a goal, an outcome, or even effort. It is about being alive to the lifelong path of self-evolution – thereby becoming a beneficial presence in the world, to all beings. Isn’t that what any effective pedagogy aims to do?"

       Fran Grace. "Learning as a Path, Not a Goal: Contemplative Pedagogy – Its Principles and Practices." Teaching Theology and Religion 2011; 14 (2): 99-124.

#606 Spacious Awareness

     For most of us, our default level of consciousness is one in which "I" and "mine" are the axis around which the universe turns. In other words, we're normally egocentric, self-absorbed, at times self-obsessed, and thus by necessity, we're stuck in an adversarial relationship with everyone and everything else. It's critical to clearly see this. Self-awareness is humbling, so we compulsively seek distraction - today's "opium of the people".

      “Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.”          Daniel Goleman "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships"      www.goodreads.com

     Mindfulness practices help us see clearly and accept our far-from-perfect conditioned selves. The upside is that we also become aware of a qualitatively higher level of consciousness. At this level of awareness, we experience spaciousness, clarity, generosity, freedom, stillness, silence, loving-kindness, joy - the polar opposites of claustrophobically agonizing about "me & mine". Spacious awareness is always at hand - in fact we're it - whenever our "noisy ego" doesn't drown it out. While screaming, a baby cannot appreciate that his loving parents are right there trying to soothe it.
     As we progressively shift from being egocentric to allo- and ecocentric, appropriate self-care & self-compassion remain. We're AS important - not more, not less - as other human beings. Normal, healthy maturation is transcending an unhealthy, exaggerated degree of self-concern ie self-obsession, and opening our heart-minds to embrace & nurture all that we encounter, right here, right now.

Jonathan Shapiro   www.dpreview.com

#599 Alive with Potential

     The boundary between wallowing / self-indulgence / complacency / self-acceptance / idealism / spiritual practice / enlightenment tends to be dynamic, moving, evolving. When open to it, we get a felt sense of outgrowing younger needs & ways of being, which loose their appeal as our requirements evolve to become progressively more sophisticated, mature human beings.

     The motivation to keep growing, evolving varies between individuals & within the same person at different phases of life, from nonexistent to urgent priority.

     One can’t successfully evolve too fast (eg "spiritual bypassing") since such “striving” binds us to “ordinary mind”. Rushing to acquire a goal ties us down to the same primitive (brain stem) level of consciousness that cause problems in the first place.
     Nor can we successfully stagnate in complacency – besides the dullness factor, our biological clock is ticking away. 

     Awareness of our mind-heart-body tells us what we need to physically process right now. Awareness of actual awareness tells us that, right now, we are clarity, peace, silence, stillness, joy.

     We have the mysteriously incredible gift of life … can we share our blessings with so many who suffer?

 

Angela Classen   www.angelaclassen.com

#517 First Self-acceptance Then Self-knowledge

     What we find unacceptable in others, we naturally find unacceptable in ourselves. Rejecting others is relatively easy. When it comes to aspects of ourselves that we judge unacceptable, it's easier for us to suppress these, becoming consciously unaware or "blind" to our own "faults".
     When we deeply deny our own unacceptable aspects, we see or "project" these imperfections onto others and in them we find these all the more reprehensible. We judge others very harshly for having ( our ) qualities that disgust us. An extreme example is narcissistic personality disorder (below). The sickest example is scapegoating - ethnic, religious & other forms of "cleansing".
     Obviously, healthy maturation involves progressively greater degrees of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and empathy for self & others as we slowly become truly civilized & gradually earn our title: homo sapiens sapiens.

     “Narcissistic personality disorder is named after Narcissus, the youth from Greek and Roman mythology who falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. While the term narcissistic is commonly used to describe people who believe they are better than everybody else, in psychiatric terms, it refers to patients who unconsciously believe they are defective & deeply flawed. In order to mask their self-hatred, they develop a veneer of false confidence and superiority over others. Often, this takes the form of being highly critical and setting up impossibly high standards for people in their lives. But this only serves to alienate others, leading to rejection, loneliness, and sometimes suicidal depression.”
     Carlat D. Unhinged. The trouble with psychiatry – A doctor’s revelations about a profession in crisis. Free Press, NY, 2010. 

#502 Self-improvement?

     Don't we all want to become better in some way? We may have recurrent daydreams of performing various actions better, looking better, becoming more likeable, more valued & appreciated, and thus feeling much better about ourselves. Essentially, we'd like to start from scratch & create a whole new "ideal" person.
     Letting go of self-judgment, and adopting self-acceptance & gentle kindness toward ourselves - as we are - is infinitely more beneficial AND practical than making ourselves feel sickeningly inadequate by constantly comparing ourselves to (our & society's) ideal, unreachable standards. This does NOT mean we succumb to the other extreme - failing to actively care for ourselves, others & the environment. There is a sane, practical middle way between obsessive perfectionism & giving up.
     Most importantly, we might be surprised to find that the quality of life we seek has little to do with our ideas of self-improvement, and almost everything to do with the state of being or level of consciousness which naturally manifests gentle, kind awareness.

Watatsumi Temple, Japan - by Xu Xiaolin - http://travel.nationalgeographic.com

#395 Why Do We Resist Mindfulness?

     I read about meditation practices for 30 years before I ever started to actually meditate. Even then, I remained strongly inclined towards action, or at least trying to figure things out by thinking. The fact is, most of us have a lifetime of practice doing & thinking, and virtually no experience - hence no confidence in - dropping everything to sit still. So, "if it ain't broke", we stick with the momentum of our lives - keeping busy, physically & mentally.
     But the older we get, the more clearly we see the many ways in which "it IS broke", and the more often we realize that "keeping busy" is often an ineffective habitual nervous twitch. We gradually realize that even old dogs have to learn new tricks. Meditation is very effective for most things for which "keeping busy" is useless - that's why so many people around the world, and increasingly in Europe, Australia and North America meditate regularly.
     Obviously, most of us will be clumsy at it initially. But like any other skill, with training we progressively gain competence. Deciding "I'm no good at this", then quitting is a very common, very unfortunate pattern. What overweight person, on starting an aerobic exercise program, ever declared "Yes, I'm damned good at this!"? - None! Persistence and steady practice is how we gain competence at anything worthwhile. 
     Attention NORMALLY drifts all over the place. Gently, repeatedly, with endless patience, we keep bringing attention back to our focus of attention - THAT's a huge part of the practice. What we primarily develop is NOT a blank slate mind, but rather gentleness, acceptance, humility & great patience - this is transformational. ... But we all start impatient and a bit arrogant!

Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens, Wolfville, Nova Scotia

#393 Awareness, Acceptance & Dwelling in Two Apparently Distinct Realities

     As a natural consequence of ongoing mindfulness practice, we gradually become increasingly clearly aware of what's going on - both within and outside of ourselves. This is often described as "waking up" as if from a dream, or becoming conscious after being on "autopilot".
     Another natural consequence of our ongoing practice, we gradually stop believing the brain stem's judgment of all that we perceive as either "good" or "bad" (black-or-white thinking), and are thus more & more able to replace primitive egocentric (brain stem) reactivity with wiser allocentric perspective & behavior (prefrontal cortex).
     Interestingly and importantly, our brain stem remains in place & functional, so we remain aware of our own ongoing immediate egocentric judgments. However, meditation practice progressively rewires our brain, changing it structurally & functionally. So the brain stem's messages are perceived less & less as commands for immediate action, and are increasingly perceived as dubious options with a long track record of leading to suffering. And because of our direct experiential knowledge, we fully understand - and have compassion for - both ourselves & others when we more or less automatically obey brain stem reflexes.
     As our prefrontal cortex becomes increasingly dominant, we increasingly recognize not only our own, but other people's inherent clarity, wholeness & wisdom. We recognize & nurture this amazing natural human capacity in ourselves and others. This is the ultimate height & depth of human activity.