At some point in time ...

    At some point in time, we finally realize that 'the story of me' is deadly boring, we wake up from the trance, face reality and start living. The present moment, according to Eckhart Tolle, is the way out of the ego.

     “[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.” Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

     “… as every therapist knows, the ego does not want an end to its ‘problems’ because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to my sad story, I can tell it to myself in my head, over and over, and feel sorry for myself, and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God. It gives definition to my self-image, makes me into someone, and that is all that matters to the ego.” Eckhart Tolle

     “How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.” Joseph Campbell

     "The ego likes to be entertained and reaffirmed constantly. When it is made to be quiet, and not do anything interesting, it objects quite vehemently and tries to circumvent the situation by finding something to support it, such a talking, reading, daydreaming, anything to keep it going. Unless we renounce these tendencies, meditation cannot succeed.” Ayya Khema

      “Midlife is the time to let go of an overdominant ego and to contemplate the deeper significance of human existence.” C.G. Jung

      “Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.” Carlos Castaneda
 
 

 

Grief as a Solitary Burden

     “Expressing grief has always been a challenge. The main difference between our society and societies in the past is how private we are with it today. Through most of human history grief has been communal. 
     The Pueblo people of the Southwest, for example, have ‘crying songs’ to help move grief along. The Mohawk traditions have the ‘condolence ritual,’ where they tend to the bereaved with an elegant series of gestures, such as wiping tears from the eyes with the soft skin of a fawn. The healers in those traditions know it is not good to carry grief in the body for a long time. 
     But now we’re asked — and sometimes forced — to carry grief as a solitary burden. And the psyche knows we are not capable of handling grief in isolation. So it holds back from going into that territory until the conditions are right — which they rarely are. The message is ‘Get over it. Get back to work.’ 
     Again and again in my practice clients come to me with a depression that is more of an oppression: a result of so many years of sorrow that have not been touched with kindness or compassion or community. You’re left with an untenable situation: to try to walk alone with this sack of grief on your back without knowing where to take it. 
     In traditional cultures people were often given at least a year to digest a major loss. In ancient Scandinavia it was common to spend a prolonged period ‘living in the ashes.’ Not much was expected of you while you did the essential work of transforming sorrow into something of value to the community. The Jewish tradition observes a year of mourning filled with observances and rituals to help the grieving stay connected to their sorrow and not let it drift away. Most people today might get a week of bereavement leave, at best, and then everything should be fine. 
     In this culture we display a compulsive avoidance of difficult matters and an obsession with distraction. Because we cannot acknowledge our grief, we’re forced to stay on the surface of life. Poet Kahlil Gibran said, ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’ 
     We experience little genuine joy in part because we avoid the depths. We are an ascension culture. We love rising, and we fear going down. Consequently we find ways to deny the reality of this rich but difficult territory, and we are thinned psychically. We live in what I call a ‘flat-line culture,’ where the band is narrow in terms of what we let ourselves fully feel. We may cry at a wedding or when we watch a movie, but the full-throated expression of emotion is off-limits.”
     “The Geography Of Sorrow - Francis Weller On Navigating Our Losses.” The Sun Interview: by Tim McKee, October 2015. https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/478/the-geography-of-sorrow

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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
 

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Who is Suffering?

     “… our illness is not a replication of something countless others have had before us, nor an accident of fate unrelated to ourselves but is in fact the opposite: a message from our deepest selves. And it is a message that is by and large not being heard. 
     Thus, beyond diagnosis, illness can be a call to rediscover our original alignment, to re-establish our essential wholeness; and chronic illness or pain is a particularly insistent caller. This realization saves a lot of energy! If, instead of encountering illness in ourselves as a call to arms in a psychic war against bits and pieces of our bodies and minds, we attempt to understand our symptoms in the light of the whole of our being, suddenly the question is no longer the primarily academic one of finding a label for a particular pattern of discomforts but rather one of a feeling investigation into our judgments and fears and the way they restrict our life energies. Instead of asking, What disease do I have? the question becomes, Why do I restrict energy in the particular way that I do? In other words, just who is it that is hurting?”


     “All emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form.” Eckhart Tolle


       Michael Greenwood. “The Unbroken Field. The Power of Intention in Healing.” Paradox publishers, 2004.

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Two Levels of Consciousness

     We’ve all experienced – and vividly remember – occasions when we were fully present, totally engaged in any of a wide variety of situations: while relaxing, caring for or loving a person or activity, including work. Such experiences stick with us because they stand out as qualitatively different from everyday life. 
     During such “wisdom” experiences, we’re intimate with whomever or whatever we vividly share the present moment. Self-talk fades away - our noisy, anxious self-concern having subsided. We become unconditional friendliness, kindness, peace, gentleness, patience, acceptance, equanimity, perseverance, stillness, silence & timelessness.

     How do wonderful “wisdom” experiences come to an abrupt end? Doesn’t “self talk” predictably burst onto the scene insisting that we “don’t have time” and must get back to focusing on our fears, worries & anxieties? So our noisy ego, anxious self-concern, our stressed-out “everyday mind” quickly & easily drowns out the peace & wonder of our innate wisdom. 
     Everyday mind so dominates, that we (mistakenly & to our detriment) assume that this primitive, fear-based, survivalist level of consciousness or operating system is literally who (& all that) we are. And it’s distressingly easy for most of us to remain trapped – by default – in this distorted, unrealistic, unhelpful, unhealthy state of mind. 

     “My mind is like a bad neighborhood, I try not to go there alone.” Annie Lamott
 
     Psychotherapists describe everyday mind as a real mess: 
     “an innumerable swarm of disconnected impulses, thoughts, reactions, opinions, and sensations, which are triggered into activity by causes of which he is totally unaware.”
     “a disconnected, helpless collection of impulses and reactions, a being of disharmonized mind, feeling, and instinct." 
       John Welwood ed. “Awakening the Heart. East / West Approaches to Psychotherapy and the Healing Relationship.” Shambhala, 1983.

      Wisdom is a completely natural, inherent, accessible part of our consciousness, intelligence, or operating system. Yet sadly, we're barely aware of it, don’t know how to intentionally access it, and don’t really trust it! And since most of us feel at least somewhat stressed most of the time, our stressed-out everyday mind becomes our default identity.

     "What we experience is our state of mind projected outward." Gerald G. Jampolsky MD

     “Wellbeing is not found by calming the mind, changing our thoughts, or adjusting our attitudes, but by actually shifting into a level of mind that is already calm and alert.”
       Loch Kelly. “Shift into Freedom. The Science and Practice of Open-hearted Awareness.” Sounds True, 2015. 

PTSD in Patients AND Caregivers

     "Dr. Gary Rodin, head of supportive care at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, says the trauma of going to the hospital for a life-threatening illness isn't so different from someone who has seen military combat or been the subject of a physical assault.
     Jordan's case (mother of a 6yo boy who had extensive, painful maxillo-facial surgery) also exemplifies how PTSD can affect the patient's loved ones just as much as the patient, he said — especially parents, spouses and partners.
     "She doesn't have the illness, but one of the people she cares most about — probably in the world — does," he explained. "Some of the highest rates in PTSD are in mothers of children who have a serious or life-threatening illness."
     Rodin says hospital PTSD is far more common than many people realize. He's seen it develop in up to 25 per cent of patients who have cancer and other life-threatening conditions.
     "What's not recognized is that one of the most common traumas human beings face is a serious medical illness," he told Goldman. "So especially at the time of diagnosis, or a complication, or when there's screening, all these things may trigger enormous anxiety."
     Rodin and his team at Princess Margaret Hospital developed a program called Emotion and Symptom-focused Engagement (EASE) provides emotional support and anxiety management for people who are suffering from hospital-related PTSD.
     "We know this kind of proactive intervention reduces PTSD symptoms ... and also reduces all kinds of other distress," he said.
     Rodin says a short course of treatment can do wonders when PTSD is recognized early.”
       “PTSD in the Hospital: Why the Emotional Scars of Serious Illnesses Linger Long after Treatment.” CBC’s White Coat Black Arts: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/ptsd-in-the-hospital-why-the-emotional-scars-of-serious-illnesses-linger-long-after-treatment-1.4590370

Confusion, Sleepiness to Avoid our own Depth?

      "Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you." Marianne Williamson

      What if even the most highly educated & accomplished among us habitually "play small"? Below was written by a well-known, highly-respected, highly-educated psychiatrist & educator, Roger Walsh MD, PhD:
 
     “One general principle that soon emerged was that my defenses, biases, and lack of experience limited my capacity to appreciate information or people of greater wisdom than I myself possessed. Moreover, it seemed that not only was I passively incapable of hearing it, but was also at times actively defended against it.
     On one such occasion, I went to a public lecture given by Ram Dass … with approximately three thousand other people. During the course of the evening, he started to outline a multilevel model of consciousness and described the component states in ascending order from the ordinary to the more transcendent. My reactions and those of the audience provided unexpected insights into the nature of our usual state of consciousness and its relationship to apparently more developed states. 
     As he ran through the first two levels, they seemed very reasonable and readily understandable, the third was a little less usual, and the description to the fourth immediately evoked an experience in which I heard his words with perfect clarity, was struck by their import, and immediately afterwards could not remember a word he said. My next memory was of being awakened by the snores of the person next to me, and looking round the hall I saw that approximately one quarter of the audience had very suddenly fallen asleep. 
     … I had undergone massive repression or denial resulting in a literal and extremely rapid loss of consciousness, as presumably had a significant number of those people who had fallen asleep at the time I did. In order to repress something, we have to at least partially recognize it and assess it as dangerous. Yet if the descriptions of the higher states of consciousness were recognized and repressed, it could only mean that they were already known and that this knowledge was denied (entry into conscious) awareness through active defenses. 
     This and related experiences led me to a total reevaluation of the relationship between ordinary and ‘higher’ states. Formerly I had assumed that deeper wisdom was attained through the acquisition of new knowledge and understanding. However, now I was forced to consider the possibility that we already possess the requisite knowledge, that our usual state represents an actively and defensively contracted state, and that higher states are attainable, not by the acquisition of something new, but by the release of current defenses and the resultant expression of already existing capacities.” Roger Walsh MD PhD

        John Welwood ed. “Awakening the Heart. East / West Approaches to Psychotherapy and the Healing Relationship.” Shambhala, 1983.
 

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