Addendum: Mindfulness (H)

Mindfulness isn’t about distance from emotion, but space around it. The feeling is as intense, but it is not the only thing in the field because the field has b roadened. This space around felt emotion allows us to choose, to respond; when weave lost in an emotion, rather than present in it, humans tend to react.

On Home (H)

picnic to the earth

here let’s jump rope together here
here let’s eat balls of rice together
here let me love you
your eyes reflect the blueness of the sky
your back will be stained a wormwood green
here let’s learn the constellations together
from here let’s dream of every distan thing
here let’s gather low-tide shells,
from the sea of sky at dawn
let’s bring back little starfish
at breakfast we will toss them out
let the night be drawn away
here I’ll keep saying, “I am back”
while you repeat, “Welcome home”
here let’s come again and again
here let’s drink hot tea
here let’s sit together for a while
let’s be blown by the cooling breeze

–Shuntaro Tanikawa

Re: Dreams/ Journal (H)

1.

A couple nights before I started my current lab rotation, I dreamt I was at lab meeting. I was attentive, but I didn’t understand the material. After the meeting, Andy, the PI, pulled me aside.

“You couldn’t follow that, could you?” he asks.

“No.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I didn’t want to interrupt. Everyone else already knows the stuff; I can just look it up.”

“You have to speak up when you don’t know something,” he tells me, annoyed, harsh. “You can’t be flustered by not knowing things. How are you going to give lab meeting or job talks if you get flustered when you don’t know things?”

2.

The next night I fall asleep listening to Tara Brach talk about meditation and trauma. I dream that I am watching a video of a woman talking about mindfulness, about the important of staying present. “After all,” she says, a chesire grin coming over her face, “all you have to miss is your life.”

3.

A week later, I dream I’m walking outside. Green, lush. I come across tall wooden stairs, the kind made of slabs of wood with space in between them, the kind I was terrified I’d slip through when I was younger and so small. A large tree hanging over it. Ripe oranges. All sensory; no thoughts. I walk up the steps to a dwelling with a series of bedrooms accessible from outside, a kitchen, a library room. I know that one of the rooms is mine, and I go in, and I sit on the floor, and I cry so hard. I cry for a for a long time. Not relief. An emotional state I don’t have a word for, for once. One of the other women there glances in, and then lets me be. When I’m done, I join the others in the kitchen.

4.

I dream I’m in the tub, listening to the sound of the water and my breath. Sunshine streams in from the window, bright and warm across my closed eyes. I meditate, anchoring on the sounds, relaxing in the heat and calm.

Dreams (H)

From Pab:

It’s always the same core, but it takes different shapes.  In my twenties it went thusly:

“I’m someplace hot and green and full of old cultures.  Blended civilization and primal energies, foreign tongues that have somehow fended off the brutality of life with smile lines and easy laughter.

It’s alien, but I’m at home in that; between my cameras and the National Geographic sponsorship I’m comfortable that I’m doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing.  These journeys always change me – there will be things made of brass and bone to be shared when I come ‘home,’ stories to tell, but the real magic is in being lost; becoming a part of everywhere by belonging nowhere.

Oh, and the pictures are good too.”

That dream got eaten by disease and Capitalism after my first trip abroad.  I’ve had time to chew on it myself.

–

I want to move to America.

You know, that place they told us about in school, where the government is just an organizing tool for the general population?  Where freedom and creativity and love of diversity are areas where everyone excels?  Where “capitalism” is just an excuse generous people made up so that they could help each other out without seeming creepy?  I want to move there and live happily ever after.

–

Plausible:  Get some Contact Improv, add some Parkour.  Video.  Add music.  Participate in the read-write culture that TV nearly killed and the Internet is bringing back.  This is the easy one.

–

The most frustrating experience I have reared it’s head right before those guys tried to bash my head in.  Here’s the thing:  we’re creating our experience.  Every moment, every breath.  Every thought expressed and action taken, or not, is a choice shaping every moment to come.  This has been understood for thousands of years, and yet somehow  … somehow when you try to explain that violence is a nasty, self-perpetuating problem to a couple of thugs who want your wallet in an alley, it doesn’t work.  At least, not with words.

It’s a constant problem – Everyone on this rock has consciousness – on some level we all get this.  But apparently we suck at it.

On Poetry (H)

Poetry is the erotic in language. It can serve as a keeper of a sense memory or a moment of realization. It can be a paean. It is neither logical or illogical inherently; the point is it communicates that which is deeply felt, and the receiver, if open and able to interface with the poem, will feel deeply hirself. Poetry can create encounter across space and time.

Addendum 3: Working with the Mind (H)

I seem to have temporarily misplaced my ability to communicate articulately, but I want to get this thought out.

One of the radical shifts I’ve made in the last few years is in how I talk to myself. My head is a much kinder place to be. I’ve written about some of those shifts here–using metta meditation, trying to talk to myself the way I’d talk to a friend (who says you have to love yourself first?), shifting to a language of discernment rather than judgment, mindfulness, reforming my ideas around human nature so as to let go of shame around pain, integrating my friendships into my sense of self–and it’s ongoing work.

That said, I feel like I’m moving on to the next step. I spent part of New Year’s Eve reading Marshall B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. The book is mostly about how to communicate with people empathically. A lot of the techinques are legit, practically speaking. I have beef with some of the theory, which ends of being morally relativistivic in a way that doesn’t sit well with me.

Whatever the failings of the book, one of the strategies it suggested for NVC with yourself is to think about the goal or intention of everything you do, especially the tasks which irritate you–or anything you think of as a “task”. He says that thinking about something as something we “have” to do builds resentment because being commanded (even by ourselves) violates our need for autonomy. The suggestion is to think about the goal, and if the goal isn’t life-nurturing, ditch the task. If it is, talk to yourself in terms of choice instead of what you have to do, connecting the activity to the larger goal or value which motivates it. Acting out of the wish to support life, to nuture yourself and others, cuts the irritation and/or resentment associated with the tasks, and enables you to do them with more energy. As Shigeki put it’s about “deconvoluting the practice from the purpose”. You build your power by exercising will and acting on your deepest wishes.

My addition to his theory is that thinking this way supports integrity, in the sense of wholeness: instead of a million annoying tasks that feel like distractions from your goals, that are split off from what you value, you start to feel most (maybe even all, when you become skilled enough at it) of what you do as part of your deepest goals and values.

I’ve been working with this as one of my resolutions of sorts. This is pedestrian, but as I said to Shigeki–well, I do walk places. One thing I’ve been working with the past few days is going to the gym. Usually this is something I do because I “have to” for health, and acting out of that is draining, even though I usually get it done decently. The last few days though, I went thinking a few times during the workout, “I’m choosing to take care of myself.” The vibe was different–running felt easier, and the whole thing was a lot less mentally fatiguing.

A couple years ago, the moment of realization was: I’m not willing to abandon myself anymore. The realization I keep having these past few months is: I’m not willing to fight with myself, or do things with myself that are out of force. Force and love are irreconcilable. And the same action performed out of self-love, rather than force–and not necessarily love in a sentimental sense but in a concrete, Fromm-ian sense–has a different impact.

On Marriage (H)

From M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled:

…I draw the analogy between marriage and a base camp for mountain climbing. If one wants to climb mountains, one must have a good base camp, a place where there are shelters and provisions, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ventures forth again to seek another summit. Successful mountain climbers know they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well-stocked.