Love

“Let us fall in love again
And scatter gold dust all over the world.
Let us become a new spring
And feel the breezes drift in the heaven’s scent.
Let us dress the earth in green.
And like the sap of a young tree,
Let the grace from within sustain us.
Let us carve gems out of our stony hearts
And let them light our path of Love.
The glance of love is crystal clear
And we are blessed by its light.” 

Rumi

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“The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well.
As a matter of fact,
I know of no better topic
for us to discuss
Until we all die!"

Hafiz

 

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“In this choiceless, never ending flow of life
There is an infinite array of choices.
One alone brings happiness -
To love what is.” 

Dorothy Hunt

 

 

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“Love is the whole thing.
We are only pieces.” 

 

Rumi

 

 

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"There is silence everywhere,
you just have to listen for it.
I am surrounded by love,
I just have to stop looking for it.
Trust opens both,
If I let it." 

 

Joan Benner

 

 

 

P. Michael Lovas photograph

 

Taking Care of Ourselves More Wisely

"Sometimes I go about with pity for myself
and all the while Great Winds
are carrying me across the sky."             Ojibeway wisdom

     "Be still... drop in deeper... listen.... sense into these 'Great Winds' that carry you...."                                    WisdomAtWork.com

     It's normal & healthy to look after ourselves. But don't we at times flip-flop between self-neglect & overindulgence? 
     Consider the ideal grandparent. Doesn't she wisely nurture her beloved grandchild? Nurturing means providing whatever's needed to maximize the probability that a person, animal, plant or project will flourish, thrive. 
     Wise nurturing has at least three components: unconditional love, experience & patience.
     Experience requires not just time, but also quiet, patient, honest self-reflection - intentionally, humbly learning from our mistakes, as well as things that went well; always guided by the open question, 'What will nurture us, others & our environment in the long-run?'
     Unconditional love is very rare! It must come, first & foremost, from ourselves! We must generate this precious, vital nurturing energy through self-acceptance, self-compassion - recognizing ourselves as being human beings, instead of mythical superheros. Unconditional love is the one & only source of the essential energy that unleashes & fuels our full human potential.
     All this requires patience, for we need to listen deeply to re-connect with our authenticity. Authenticity is easily drowned out by noisy distractions and the roller-coaster artificial highs & lows of our adrenaline-junky lives. Wisdom waits patiently as we slowly realize that we're fed up with noise, and that we're much, much more than thrill-seeking children. 
     Wisdom awaits - AND - life is short.

"Let Go of Words, Concepts & Internal Dialogue" - Some Reasons Why

     Most of us are unconsciously completely identified with our internal dialogue (self-talk) - our ideas, opinions, preferences, likes, dislikes, must have, must avoids, prejudices, etc. This is very common and problematic from the perspective of both Western psychology ('cognitive fusion') and the world's Wisdom traditions.

     Eckhart Tolle's take on this:
     “In romantic love, you want the other person. In true love, you want the other person’s good’ (you wish the other person well). And so other languages have different words for love to distinguish between the emotional wanting and something deeper: agape, metta, and so on. The Dalai Lama says ‘My religion is kindness.’ So words like agape, metta & kindness point to something, point to something within you – an essence from where you perceive & interact with the outside world in a very different way from the usual mentalized, conceptualized perception of reality around you, including other human beings. 
     The usual way to relate for people who have not awakened to that deeper level that I often call ‘essence,’ or your ‘essence identity,’ the usual way is to relate to other human beings through mental concepts or judgments. They become the veil that comes in between you and your perception of reality. And awakening is to become free of the compulsion to judge continuously, to interpret continuously, to label and name continuously, what’s around you and whoever you are with. 
     And when that compulsion to label everything mentally, the conceptualized reality, when that subsides, and that subsides when presence arises, then you sense something in whatever you perceive, that is a kind of recognition, whether it’s a human being, any other being - a tree or an animal, you recognize something in the other that before, when you were naming & labeling you couldn’t. 
     When we're naming & labeling, the other was always ‘the other,’ and nature was also conceptualized - especially human beings become conceptualized as ‘the other.’ In the egoic state, the ego actually emphasizes the otherness of others, by continuously criticizing, judging, having opinions, and mistaking every viewpoint for the truth. So there can be no love there, although the egoic entity sometimes talks about love. 
     Jesus said ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’, which means recognize your neighbor – the other, as yourself. And that recognition is sensing, when you look at another human being in the spaciousness of just this, sometimes called the formless dimension. What you’re looking at is form. What you’re looking at is the physical body, and also what you are perceiving is the mental form, the psychological form of that person. 
     You go beyond form, what you sense in the other, through your own presence, is the presence of the other – that which cannot be seen. It’s the essence of everything. 
     When your dog dies, all you’re left with is the fur, the bones and internal organs – the essence of that being is no longer there. But when you look at a live dog, you can sense the essence of beingness – the beingness in the other. Sometimes it’s easier with animals than with humans, because with humans you have a lot of mental identifications. So you sense the beingness, because you sense your own beingness. You could call that ‘perceiving from the heart’ – perceiving from beingness. And then you sense the beingness of the other. And that recognition is the recognition of oneness. And that’s love. Love is sensing that you share consciousness. What you love in the other, ultimately, is the consciousness. 
     It’s nice to touch the fur of a dog, or to touch another human being, but ultimately, what you love in the other is something that you cannot perceive, that is beyond the senses, you cannot mentalize. So to perceive through that space of love, is to be free of the compulsion to mentalize, to conceptualize. 
     And in practical terms it looks like this. I’m looking at Ram Das, with conceptualization, I have some image – oh, he is the famous guru, he wrote that book, or whatever concepts I have; without any concepts, there’s just suddenly a meeting, in stillness, because that’s really what it is, when you look at something without naming it, you look through the stillness. 
     And I invite you to look at the totality of your environment, not through any naming, but through the alert space of stillness."

      "A Dialogue with Ram Dass & Eckhart Tolle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPmgTJGPzlg

May You Live with Ease

     "To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders." Lao Tzu

      For many of us, our minds are far from being still. One example:
     “Though it was a divine trip, I remember often being impatient and jittery, perhaps from culture shock, perhaps from not knowing how to live without grinding and studying. This sense of not feeling comfortable in my skin plagued me during my early adulthood. From the outside I was doing splendidly: I had married the woman I loved, I had gained admission into medical school and was performing well in every way, but deep inside, I was never at ease, never confident, and never grasping the source of my anxiety. I had some unclear sense that I had been scarred deeply by my early childhood and felt that I didn’t belong, that I was not as worthy or deserving as others. How I would love to repeat that trip now with the serenity of my current self!”
        Irvin D. Yalom. “Becoming Myself. A Psychiatrist’s Memoir.” Basic Books, 2017.

     “While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption. 
     Research … has revealed that trauma produces actual physiologic changes, including recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilent to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character – they are caused by actual changes in the brain.
     This vast increase in our knowledge about the basic process that underlie trauma has also opened up new possibilities to palliate or even reverse the damage. We can now develop methods and experiences that utilize the brain’s own natural neuroplasticity to help survivors feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives."
     Bessel Van Der Kolk. “The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” Penguin Books, 2015.

      “Be curious, not judgmental.” Walt Whitman
 

Christi Belcourt - "Quiet Moment of Gratitude" - christibelcourt.com

Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side?

     “ ‘Someday,’ she said, sighing, poised with a cup of tea in one hand and cigarette in the other, parakeet fluttering in the air behind her head, ‘I may move somewhere far away from here.’ But something in her face in that sallow light made me think that it was almost certain she wouldn’t.”
       Michael Paterniti “The Telling Room. A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese.” The Dial Press, NY, 2013

     My daughter-in-law recounted a Tibetan teaching about having a wise relationship with moments of what we perceive as happiness. Consider a precious dove landing, briefly, on your open hand. And the moment when the dove starts flying away ... truly loving it, letting it go - complete freedom ...

     Preciousness & brevity; 
     Vitality & openness; 
     Freedom & spacious generous openness of the heart-mind.

     The periphery appears to remain disturbed. Keep returning to the center, which appears to remain still, silent, open, undisturbed, at peace. Yet life is residing in both at once - in the totality. As they say in Tai Chi, we join heaven and earth.

     Parts are relatively easy to "get", 
     the totality more challenging, 
     and yet ...
 

Citadel Hill, Halifax, NS

We're Much More Alike than Different

     We're very (overly?) aware of our own burdens & struggles as health-care professionals. It's really helpful to periodically gain some appreciation about how others live.

     "Meditation, as a space of clarity and equanimity, eludes me. But I recently read a book by the Soto Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri in which he talks about the struggles of meditation, and it helped. His instruction is, quite simply, 'Just shut up and sit.' This message resonates with me. So now, even when my mind is full of monkeys and a plethora of uncontrollable thoughts, I just shut up and sit. I can do that."
       Patrick Brady, inmate of the California State Prison, written while in solitary confinement. 
       Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Spring 2014.

Franco Balducci's 2007 "Traveller of Peace", San Gimignano, Tuscany, Italy

Uncomfortable Being Still?

     We need to feel that we're getting somewhere, onto bigger & better things, greener pastures, onward & upward, ... Conversely, we fear going nowhere, getting nowhere fast, being stuck, ... Many of us, when we find that we have nothing to do, nothing planned - free unstructured time, instead of savoring this rare luxury, feel anxious, lost!
     So there's a common compulsion to keep busy, be productive, remain active, ... There's great emphasis on movement itself, not direction, nor how or even if movement relates to any particular plan.

     “Do not confuse motion and progress.
      A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress."          Alfred A. Montapert

     We've come to associate a type of person who's restless, irritable, cynical, sarcastic, "doesn't suffer fools well", as a "man of action", a doer, capable, competent, someone who can get things done. On the other hand, someone who is quiet, reflective, still, peaceful, a deep thinker, tends to be seen these days as quite the opposite. And yet, the restless fellow is more suited to a widget assembly line, whereas the reflective person is better suited for leadership positions, or at the very least advising leaders.
     To accurately assess what's going on right now, one must first be able to accept what's going on ie be comfortable enough in the present moment, in one's own skin, in stillness, in quietness - to gather sufficient, accurate data. Only then can one reasonably decide what to do, in which direction to proceed regarding long-term goals. Having "ants in your pants" and a cynical attitude is a distinct handicap. Reasonable long-range planning and restlessness are mutually exclusive.
     "Doing" needs to be balanced with "being" - very different modes. The former is adequate for carrying out relatively simple physically tasks. The latter is essential where executive function is required: mature ethical judgment, long-term planning, etc (prefrontal cortex) - AND is the portal to real quality of life.
     See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/10/417-appreciating-even-prioritizing.html
     and: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/10/self-concepts-sense-of-momentum-or.html

alex326   www.dpreview.com

Self-Knowledge, Depth, and Healing Abilities

     “Thomas Merton warns us that ‘he who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give to others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.’ And for Merton, the Cistercian monk, deepening one’s own self-understanding requires a disciplined practice of meditation or contemplative prayer, made possible only by regular doses of holy quiet.”

       Simmons P. "Learning to fall. The blessings of an imperfect life." Bantam Books, NY, 2000.

Shaman Traveler to Other Worlds for Blessings by Norval Morisseau