#652 Life's Difficulties AS Initiation

     “Life will initiate you. It will, in all it’s ways. It will make you face praise & blame, gain & loss, pleasure & pain, and joy & sorrow - it’s what it’s woven of. But to take it as an initiation, means to not avert your gaze, to not close your heart to the sorrows of the world, but to say ‘Yes, this has been given to me, and I will take this – the war that’s been given, the death, the injustice that’s the measure I’ve been given – and make something that is beautiful, some understanding or dignity out it.'
     As the Sufis say ‘Overcome any bitterness because you are not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain or the sorrows of the world in her heart, you are each endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain, you are called upon to meet it in compassion & joy, instead of self-pity.’ "

        Kornfield J. "Awakening is Real. A Guide to the Deeper Dimensions of the Inner Journey." Sounds True (audio) www.soundstrue.com

WisdomAtWork.com

#651 Generosity

     It takes an amazing degree of generosity to accept each and every thing that happens to us in our lifetime.
     And when we have indeed embraced all of it, with a clear, open, loving heart-mind, then we have indeed lived life well, and evolved fully ...

#650 Effective Management for Existential Distress ??

     A life of generosity, ethical living & ideally, a longstanding deep meditation practice, seems to be one of the ideal ways to access & embody profoundly meaningful, transformative insight & evolve or mature spiritually. Such maturity generally includes facing death with calm composure (equanimity).

     However, for many in our secular society, who spend their lives focused mostly on material concerns, the possibility remains open for having profound transformative spiritual experiences, even at the end of life, via medically-supervised psychedelic drugs, in palliative care settings.

     "under the influence of the (psilocybin), 'individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.'
     ... cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months.
     Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion.
     “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress. Xanax isn’t the answer. So how can we not explore this, if it can recalibrate how we die?”
     “When administered under supportive conditions,” the paper concluded, “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” Participants ranked these experiences as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds of the participants rated the psilocybin session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; a third ranked it at the top. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly.
     Furthermore, the “completeness” of the mystical experience closely tracked the improvements reported in personal well-being, life satisfaction, and “positive behavior change” measured two months and then fourteen months after the session.
     A follow-up study ... found that the psilocybin experience also had a positive and lasting effect on the personality of most participants. This is a striking result, since the conventional wisdom in psychology holds that personality is usually fixed by age thirty and thereafter is unlikely to substantially change. But more than a year after their psilocybin sessions volunteers who had had the most complete mystical experiences showed significant increases in their “openness,” one of the five domains that psychologists look at in assessing personality traits. (The others are conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and tolerance of others’ viewpoints, is a good predictor of creativity.
     “I don’t want to use the word ‘mind-blowing,’ ” Griffiths told me, “but, as a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible.”
     ... William James ... suggested that we judge the mystical experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by its fruits: does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?"
       Michael Pollan "The Trip Treatment." Annals of Medicine, The New Yorker Magazine, Feb 9, 2015
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment 

     Listen to Mary Hines' March 12, 2015 interview: "Psychologist Anthony Bossis: Can psychedelic drugs help ease the fear of death?"  http://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry

Lilly J Warren   www.dpreview.com

 

#649 A Sudden Hunger, and then ...

     We often feel a tad over-extended; just outside our comfort zone; just short of coping - in a word, stressed. Nothing major needs to trigger this: our sleeve gets snagged, yanking us back when we're trying to "get ahead"; an inexplicable pain appears; even a brief period with nothing going on, so we're "bored". And sometimes it's not at all clear why we feel "off" or "out of sorts".
     Basically, when we sense that nothing's stoking our fire, we get scared! Will our fire go out? Yes, but please, not now! We start to see that our sense of self (ego) is like an idol that crumbles unless continuously propped-up with positive strokes. We foolishly depend on the solidity of this imaginary idol to feel relatively up, unafraid, oriented, peaceful.
     And how do we typically respond when the idol fails to be catered to by other people and circumstances? A visceral hunger arises - as if our energy were suddenly critically depleted. Annoyance / irritability / anger (born out of fear if we really look closely) may suddenly arise to energize us to bulldoze past life's speed bumps. Then we "get busy", with anything - any distraction will do - the most potent being addictions: junk food, caffeine, prescription meds, busy-work, smartphones, cigarettes, mindless fun, etc!

     Since life does NOT revolve around me (or you), it's actually normal for our individual egos to get random shares of positive, neutral & negative strokes. Though it's not at all personal, we often react as if it were.
     So for practical purposes ie sanity & quality of life, we need to work on letting go of such self-centeredness. If life does not in fact revolve around me, then I should learn to fully accept that, and not take anything personally. Sometimes the sun shines, sometimes the weather's ugly, & sometimes the climate is bland. There's nothing whatsoever personal, when we're getting soaked by rain, beautifully suntanned, or fried by a lightning bolt! 
     A wise meditation teacher once advised: "Only have no preferences!" Of course we usually do have preferences, but what if we hold these very lightly, in a huge container, and seamlessly accept the fact that things mostly turn out differently than we'd like, or even expect! Can we simply be curious, rather than desperately hope that "luck" is "on our side"? Whether we're "lucky" OR "unlucky" this time, does it say anything at all about next time? So perhaps we're not "special" regardless?

     The journey from egocentricity toward allocentricity is the ancient, well-travelled hero's journey towards wisdom and mature happiness.

#648 Just This, Right Now

"You must live in the present,

launch yourself on every wave,
find your eternity in each moment."

Henry David Thoreau


"I awoke only to find
that the rest of the world was still asleep."

Leonardo da Vinci

 

WisdomAtWork.com

#647 Mindfulness

      "The most direct way to understand our life situation, who we are and how our mind and body operate, is to observe with a mind that simply notices all events equally. This attitude of non-judgmental, direct observation allows all events to occur in a natural way.
     By keeping the attention in the present moment, we can see more and more clearly the true characteristics of our mind and body process."                                                                     Jack Kornfield                         www.wisdomatwork.com

Bess

#646 The Mindfulness Movement in America: Opportunities and Challenges

“Mindfulness is pure awareness.

First, do no harm. How do you know if you’re doing harm or not? Through awareness.” 

Jon Kabat-Zinn PhD

Listen to Jon Kabat-Zinn's inspiring interview at this weekend's Wisdom 2.0 conference: 

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/2635433/events/3845334?origin=stream_live&mixpanel_id=13c72687a227fb-01aeae93db92f7-436f2b42

 

from Jon Kabat-Zinn's 2/28/2015 presentation at Wisdom 2.0