Month: March 2017

“Relationship” is such a tricky word.    I think it takes on unique shades of meaning every time it is used.   I have many relationships, and each one of them has its own identity.   This has been incredibly confusing and even disruptive when I’ve talked with someone about a possible relationship.   There hardly ever is time or opportunity for a definition of terms.  I try not to use the word.

In our culture, the default meaning of a relationship is a “couple”.  The presumption is that people in a relationship have agreed on some kind of joining and see themselves, even vaguely, as a couple with all kinds of implied expectations.   There may even be unspoken rules.    For me, that meaning is so far off the mark that it is alarming.    Actually, I’m rather critical of that presumption.

Often, the notion of sexual connection elbows its way into the meaning given to a relationship.    For me, that has not typically been part of a relationship, even close one.     Sometimes my relationships have been sexual, and sometimes there has been no sexual engagement.    That has depended on the terms of the specific relationship.

Just by being seen as a kind of coupling, a relationship is frequently mistakenly seen as being protected by a wall of definition and exclusivity. The emotional energy of individuals in a relationship is expected to stay inside the relationship and  be directed at one another.   I see this as neither helpful or healthy.

Of course, by implication people in a relationship are expected to be immersed in love with one another, and no one else.   This is a pretty narrow view of life and I think ultimately undermines the real love between those in a relationship.

I see myself in many relationships.    I think every one of them is a loving relationship, but in many different ways.   If I am in relationship, I am in love almost by definition.   I once thought that meant one individual at a time, but I abandoned that idea.   I’ve allowed myself to have an open heart, and feel I’ve become a much more loving person in all my relationships.  That includes the emotional energy that tags along.

I regret that “relationship” has taken on such a narrow meaning, but I really haven’t come up with a better word.   The closest I have come is “companionship.”   I am connected with my companions in so many different ways, none of them as a couple or as exclusive.  Yet I love all my companions, in evolving ways.    I try not to have assumptions.  Hopefully we talk enough to devel0pe a common but changing understanding of what that means.

I am convinced that I am changing the wiring of my brain.   The more I experience mindfulness, the easier it becomes.    I think I am making new pathways in the neurons of my brain.    This is allowing me to see and experience the world differently.

When I was born, my wiring was rather simple, and I learned how to see the world through experience.   As time went on, pathways in the neurons were established, and my sense of time and space were developed.   My sensory data was stored in a pattern that came from experience, over and over again.   My wiring got more extensive and complex, as well as fixed.

By engaging in mindfulness,  I am taking charge of the operations of my mind.   I am living less and less in those stored images that make up my fantasy world.   These are the familiar brain patterns that are suppose to help me make sense of the world.   Some of that is changing.  The illusions around me have less and less significance, as I am able to look through them at the reality lurking behind the illusions my brain has created.    I look less and less at the sensory images as reality.

But first I have to reclaim control over my sensory images, pay careful attention to them as I  back away.    I need to develop an awareness that allows me to step back and watch my senses, not live in my senses.   What I see and touch is not reality but an image of reality ,  developed and refined over years of practice.   I am putting my mind back in charge, which is what happens in mindfulness or meditation.   But first I have to watch my senses and pay attention to them, which is different from living in them.

All this new experience is rewiring my brain, laying out new pathways among all those neurons.  I am beginning to know a little of what it is like to develop this new habit of mindfulness.   My new wiring is taking over more and more.    I clearly am seeing people and things in a new way, and it comes easier with time and practice.

It is my deepest desire to stir in all my world a sense of its own loveliness.    I’ve learned that it is my particularly human ability that I am able to bestow love on all reality and remind everything I meet that it is lovely and loved.   While I may be in the role of lover, I am in the same moment the messenger that all things are worthy of love.  It is an unconditional love that simply recognizes the loveliness of all things.

First I have had to learn to recognize and accept my own loveliness.   I am grateful for all those who have convinced me and helped me become aware of an inheritance that is all mine.   My life has been filled with people who told me of my loveliness until I am now convinced that it is true and appropriate.  I am so much less inclined to grasp for the recognition I so ardently sought.   I do not falsely feel unworthy.

I am now more inclined to accept my innate loveliness, indulge in it, be aware of it in a relaxed manner.   I smile at myself more, allow mistakes, expect  only that I be me and take joy in that.   I am more able to awaken a sense of their loveliness in my companions, and most people I meet.   I can gaze at them with awareness and a smile that stirs a little of the feeling of what it means to be a lovely human.

I am able to walk through my garden or my woods and convince my plants that they are lovely.   I will soon tell my garden flowers daily how lovely they are.   I will touch them and lovingly feel the firmness of their stems, the softness of their leaves, the yielding fragility of their blooms.   I will remind them daily how lovely they are just by being flowers.

I want to take the message and affirmation of loveliness to all my friends and companions.   They are lovely, they are lovable.   It is a gift I give by loving them, by giving them my full attention, my full presence.    By immersing myself in their loveliness, I too am the beneficiary.   I indulge in their loveliness and feel the joy.

I am developing a revised notion of what it means for someone to been of  my beloveds.   Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, I am beginning to make a helpful distinction between present and absent, real and imagined, them and me. I’m slowly shredding the mythology my culture has taught me about relationships, coupling and marriage.

By my own experience, and the guidance of Gilbert, I’m realizing what an unfocused distraction a beloved can be when they are absent.  I conjure up images, I have unspoken conversations, experience imagined interactions.   None of it is real, but my body and feelings respond as though the fantasy is actually happening and I am part of it.   My mind and emotions are held captive, all by an imagined exchange.  I am so distracted I miss out on what I am actually doing.   This is not a good or helpful thing to do.

I would rather learn to be wholly present and attentive when I am with a beloved.   I want to apply this to anyone whom I love.    When they are present, I want them to be totally in my mind.   When they are not present, I want them to be out of my mind.    I don’t want a fantasy to be the source of my delight or my agony.

I do not want to give any of my beloveds the power to direct my attention and energy when they are absent.    I want my beloveds to become a focus of my attention when they are here.    This is a gift I want for myself.    It is a gift I offer to anyone I love.

Sometimes, like today, it is unsettling to realize how dependent I am on my body.   In a very real way, my body is who I am.  It seems to be my only connection to my world. At the same time I have an awareness that seems to be able to watch my body, maybe not even be co-extensive with my body.    Yet they seem inseparably joined as one.

My body has been my gateway to mindfulness.   My body is where awareness begins.   That beginning could be a touch felt, a glance seen, a sound heard.   By being attentive to what my body senses, I am able to quiet my mind and find that joyful ease that rises from a quiet, attentive mind / body.   Mind and body mirror one another.    My presence is changed when they work together in this way.

I sometimes think of how I will be affected if my body becomes so impaired that it no longer supports an alert mind.   I think of a time when the neurons in my brain no longer function as they currently do.   Will I some day slip into the fog of dementia or alzheimers?   I wonder if I will have an awareness that persists in spite of my impaired body.

Being dependent on this body of mine has been a grand adventure so far.   I want to continue that adventure as long as I can.  I want to keep alive in me that spark of life that has been passed down to me from the first living cell.   It is a spark on which so much seems to depend.

I still put a lot of effort into timing my life.   My mind is active in putting time as an overlay, another aspect of just about everything I do or that appears to happen around me.   There are the occasions when I can experience, momentarily, the realm of no-time, timelessness, just the now.    But even those experiences have a beginning and an end, a before and an after.

This business of time is a huge mystery for me.   I seem to have a very developed skill of removing myself out of time by paying attention to imagined events.    I can go back and replay the past, recreate the past, create a fantasy of the past.    I am very capable of reaching into the future and imagining what could happen, planning what might happen, solving problems yet to arrive.

So there is an ability I have of stepping into the past or future.   In fact, I have all the internal reaction as though I really am there, experiencing what might have happened or what might be in the future.   It is much harder to put aside the past or the future and pay attention to what I am experiencing right now.

It almost seems that it is my mind that is doing the timing, that time might be an artifact of my own awareness.   Is time an illusion like so many other things I have thought were real?   Do events have a beginning and an end or is that something I have learned to impose in order to take the mystery and uncertainty out of my experience.

Slowly, I am learning to loosen my grip on the distinction between the past and the now.   Is this the gift or the loss that comes with age?   I am losing my sense of past time.    As my “past” becomes my present, I am better able to accept and smile at the many embarrassing things I have done.   I am much more tolerant of my mistakes.   Today, I am aware that all those I have loved are no longer lost but are present, and I love them now.

I’m not sure how to deal with the future, except that there is a calmness that arises when I think of the future being now.    Everything is OK, I can deal with it, surprises are exciting.   Grasping is meaningless because everything simply is, there is nothing I can do to change it or control it.

Timing my life is very much a useful tool.    But I think it may be an artifact whose usefulness is over-rated and may some day become obsolete for me.   Until then, I am looking for little ways of exploring life timelessly .

 

Those of us who enjoy privileges, do so at the expense of others.   Otherwise we wouldn’t be privileged.

Whether we pay attention or not, we are complicit in the suffering of the under-privileged.

For me it has been quite simple and clear.   As I get older, I have a choice.   Shall I hang onto old ideas, beliefs and concepts or put them aside in favor of a less cluttered grasp of my world.   I’m trying to stay to my choice of the latter, a choice that requires daily, even hourly renewal it seems.

I’ve not been struck by a lightning bold of inspiration that drove me to this choice.   It has been brewing for many years, but I’ve never quite been ready to actually sample it.

I’m discovering a kind of discernment that may require years of storage in a dark basement before it time arrives.   I’m actually getting more mellow, less anxious and more comfortable with uncertainty.

I’m enjoying a world that surrounds me with more clarity than it has before.   It is easier for me to see people just as they are.   No pre-conceived notions.   The world looks like a different place the more I am able to give up my old expectations and beliefs.

There is no need for special interpretation or revelation.   Things just simply are the way they are.   There is mystery still because there are many things I don’t quite understand.   The more I am able to look through the illusions created by my imagination, the more I experience my world with clarity.

I want to put fears and grasping aside and try to live my days with an open mind.

 

It all began when I was rummaging through a box of old photos, looking for images of my family and ancestors.  In those treasured photos of people I once knew or hardly knew, I saw images of my younger self.  Almost in a glance, I saw all those years of my former self.   It seemed like many lives rolled into one.   Some felt so familiar I could reach in and touch them.   Others so strange I hardly could find myself in them.

The memories of having “been there” were nevertheless so strong.   I sat on the couch, and it was a piercing vantage point from which to review  where I’ve come from, where I have been, who I have been.

So who am I now and who am I becoming?   The caterpillar has entered the chrysalis and the transformation has begun, but the outcome is so shadowy.   Some things I can decide, perhaps even determine.    So much is outside my control and will be shaped by events yet to come.

I know that I do not intend to hand my changes over to someone else, as I have done so much in the past.   I have often allowed, even invited someone else to be a significant part of my formation.   Their way became my way.   I soon figured out  that one of us had to be in control, and I acquiesced.

I want to find my own way, even though I do not have a clear idea of what that involves.    I know that I want to experience my presence and the presence of  others in a more aware manner.   I know that I do not want to  continue to use my imagination to shape my relationship with the world.   I am willing to continue to change, but not reshape reality to conform to some kind of image, whether friendly or not.  I may even want to be surprised.

I want to have open eyes this time as I emerge from my changes.   It is a beautiful world, and I want to see it, neither change it nor be changed by it.  I intend to be prepared to love what I see.

 

I think that I once kind of knew what it meant to be normal.   All I had to do was look around and see what human beings were like, and that became my measure of what is normal.   Now I’m not so sure.  In fact, I’m not at all sure what it means to be normal.

I recently heard from a friend that what I was experiencing through my growing mindfulness was not as normal for humans as I had claimed.   I’ve thought a lot about what she told me.   I think I’ve lowered my expectations for my fellow humans in the process.

The joy I’m experiencing in so many moments of the day may not be normal.   I think that I’m OK with that.   I don’t think my abnormal practice by which the searing blade of joy is whetted to a sharp edge is very common.   Cultivating awareness and the joy it brings is not a soothing balm for me.   Awareness comes from persistent effort and diligent grinding to remove the entanglements I have clung to.  It is work.

The illusions I have unknowingly surrounded myself with have to be unbelieved.   I have to keep shutting my eyes and deliberately step through my familiar illusions. Only then do I find that my eyes had actually been closed for a very long time, and I am struck with a brilliance I never knew stirred behind the fantasies.     My two dimensional world leaps at me in 3-D.

Perhaps pursuing joy is not for the faint of heart.   It largely comes to those who decide to let go of assurances and consolation and step through the mirror.  For me it means not getting caught up in the fantasy and drama of the news.   Last week, I listened to the news for only two days before I realized I was being drawn into the illusory world the news creates.   I am challenged by my wanting to be aware of what is happening without being  distracted and drawn into the fantasies.

For me, it also means not getting drawn into my imagination.   I am so easily caught up in the imaginary world of memories and plans.   It is not until I give up that world of images that I find joy in what is happening right now.

The path that I am exploring may not be normal, but I think it is what I want   I also hope to have companions along the way.   I know it means giving up the stability of permanence, but I am not prepared to give up having a place I can call “home”.   It means I will wander thru mystery and give up the indulgences of certainty.   It means that while I will have no “committed” companion to salve my loneliness,  I hope I will walk with others.

It may mean departing from normal and leaving the assurances and illusion of normality behind.