What Are We Doing With Vital Energy?

     “He was an old man, wore old man’s clothes, a flannel shirt and old man’s trousers, slippers and a hat, and had an old man’s gait, yet there was nothing old man-ish about him, such as there was with my grandfather or my father’s uncle, Alf; on the contrary, when he suddenly opened up to us and wanted to show us things, it was in a kind of artless childlike way, infinitely friendly, but also infinitely vulnerable, the way a boy without friends might behave when someone showed some interest in him, one might imagine, unthinkable in the case of my grandfather or Alf, it must have been at least sixty years since they had opened up to anyone like that, if indeed they ever had. But no, Haugue hadn’t really opened himself to us, it was more as if it had been his natural self which his rejection had been protecting when we arrived. I saw something I didn’t want to see because the person showing us was unaware of how it looked. He was more than eighty years old, but nothing in him had died or calcified, which actually makes life far too painful to live, that’s what I think now. At the time it just made me feel uneasy.”
       Karl Ove Knausgaard. “A Death in the Family. My Struggle: Book 1.” Vintage Books, London, 2014.


     We bury so much difficult-to-understand, liminal energy in our bodies, causing us to harden, stiffen, & die well before we're buried. This feared & banished energy is the very stuff of life, growth, learning, evolution. What wasted opportunity!

 

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS, Canada

Knowledge, Power, Control & ... Meaning

     "As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make judgments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty ... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning."

       Karl Ove Knausgaard "A Death in the Family - My Struggle: Book 1" Vintage Books, London, 2014, p11-12.

missinghumanmanual.com

What is Healing?

     “Before ALS, I could see my plans opening into limitless vistas, now I am cured of planning. ... In my fourth summer of ALS, I am healed by music and vulnerability.

     Healing comes in many guises. We’re healed by just the touch of a friend. We’re healed by the hug of a child.
     And healing does not imply that your life is suddenly going to lose all of the struggle, all of the challenge. What it does instead, is it strengthens us for what is next.
     But to be open to healing, means to be vulnerable. And I think if you look at me, I’m what you would call ‘a vulnerable adult’. The cat doesn’t even listen to me here. I have no real sense of control any more. 
     And so the choice could be to resent this, to be frustrated by it – and there are times when I am, I promise. But I think the greater choice, is the fact that once you embrace your vulnerability, you’re open to such beauty. And in the end, isn’t this one of the things that truly makes us human? The ability to make, to perceive, to live in beauty?
     For me, I’m a musician, I’ll always have the soul of a musician. And because of that, music heals me. If I'm finding myself anxious, or find myself in a space where I know I better get a hold of this, I find that listening to music is one of my best strategies. And so, music is a healing activity. But if you talk to Matthew Sanford, for him, visual art just opens up that same sense of healing. I know so many people who are artists in their own right. And they’re really not themselves until they’re in that artistic mode, either listening, perceiving, or actually making the art.
     I feel that I’m just lucky that I have that gift, because in many ways, it’s helped me to understand how to do this, and do it in the most humane way possible. And that is healing.”            Bruce Kramer

Bruce Kramer's EXCEPTIONAL interview by Krista Tippett      http://onbeing.org/program/feature/in-the-room-with-bruce-kramer/7424  


     "We tend to equate healing with curing, with fixing. There is no fixing for life. We're all headed to the same place. I'm just going faster.
      But there is healing that I have. If I can find myself in a space that I feel quiet and secure and loved, isn't that a healed space?"           Bruce Kramer

http://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2013/08/29/music-with-minnesotans-bruce-kramer 

      Completely letting go: http://www.johnlovas.com/2015/03/the-problem-of-evil-zen-perspective.html 

Bruce Kramer

Magical Thinking and Maturation

     "Magical thinking is the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the correlation posited is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. Magical thinking may lead people to believe that their thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. It is a type of causal reasoning or causal falacy that looks for meaningful relationships of grouped phenomena (coincidence) between acts and events." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

     No matter how reasonable, rational, scientific etc we perceive ourselves to be, we all so desperately need some sense of control over our scary, brief, unpredictable life, that we all pretend, to varying degrees (some of us with violent desperation) that magic is real. A beautifully written memoir describing this phenomenon is Joan Didion's 2007 book The Year of Magical Thinking.
     'Magical', for me, is not a pejorative. Whenever we can't face life as it presents, we "change our reality" - how we perceive, understand and therefore respond to life, as we want to know it. There are many, many examples of this, from "failing to hear" a bit of bad news, to tenaciously clinging to a bed-time-story-like worldview.

     But as we mature, and to the extent that we're able to mature, by letting go of layers of pretense, armor, & filtered glasses between ourselves and reality, we face life directly, as intentionally evolving sentient beings. 

     Quality of Live: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/03/quality-of-life.html
     Awareness Heals: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2015/03/653-awareness-leads-to-spaciousness.html
     Our Journey: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/02/286-human-journey-from-simple-facts-to.html

WisdomAtWork.com

Eyes & Hearts Crusted Over

     We only become aware of the hard layers of armor over our eyes & heart AFTER some of it has been shed. Before that, it was simply how the world was seen, felt, experienced. This causes so much cynicism, hostility, anger, bitterness and other types of hell. 
     Each of us is absolutely certain of our own perceptions, self-concepts, worldviews. Yet, we see everything as WE are - we're mainly seeing our own rusting armor.

     The more we let go of our own baggage (armor, cross, neuroses, "shit"), the more lovable everyone - including ourselves, and everything becomes. Reality doesn't bite after all!

 

Recognizing & Transcending Fear

     “Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
      I would like to see you living
      In better conditions.”                                             Hafiz

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_a_baldwin.html#KQKea0dwqHKufJQi.99

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/james_a_baldwin.html#KQKea0dwqHKufJQi.99

      "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

      “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”                                                                                                                                                James A. Baldwin

     Listen to American meditation teacher Jack Kornfield being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. They spoke at length about practice & mindful living:
http://www.oprah.com/own-super-soul-sunday/Full-Episode-Oprah-and-Jack-Kornfield-on-Mindful-Living-Video

Steve McCurry   http://stevemccurry.com/

Cracks in the Armour - a Great Gift!

     “I just went through a series of heart attacks, and the greatest gift that’s come out of that for me is a deeper appreciation of vulnerability, which is usually seen as weakness. But I’m experiencing it as a kind of porousness, of feeling less defended, less armored. If we can impart to younger people the gift of that vulnerability, it may help them to embrace aging.”           Frank Ostaseski

      To successfully negotiate transitions requires full open-hearted conscious engagement – mind, heart and body – so that all aspects of the learner can be transformed. According to models of normal human development, the learner becomes one step more mature, which results in a greater ability to comprehend and deal with complexity. One’s “self-concept” is a fluid, evolving process. One first develops an ego, then slowly we let go of egocentricity, gradually becoming hypoegoic, allocentric and ecocentric. Mystics and saints in various traditions strive to shed their ego altogether.

      “We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode.”           John Cleese

JMW Turner (1775–1851)   The Burning of the Houses of Parliament