Brain Food and the Waking up of Unavowed Dreams

BRAIN FOOD
This is to go on notice that these essays require thinking, and hence might be considered brain food. Some might like this. Most won't. If it's not short and fluffy and entertaining, hopefully with a tad of sexual provocation, then it's on to something else.

So be it.

One of the amazing fall outs of spending my last nine days going back into a training, this time in a separate and to my mind, radically evolved, version of the Feldenkrais work*, was the waking up of unavowed dreams, wishes that were lingering in me that I had no idea were there. Feldenkrais said that this was the deepest purpose of his work: for people to achieve their vowed and unavowed dreams.

(*The evolutionary offshoot is the Anat Baniel Method, by the way, and the training is still open. If you want to transform your life, I'd advise signing up. And tell them I inspired you.)

I woke up last night and did the usual, and then I wanted and hungered for something more. This hunger was for intricate and complicated and beautiful classical music. I had some Bach on my iPod and that started to slake the thirst, the hunger that I didn't know was there, but iPod is a reduction of the CD sound and somehow I have a craving for depth of complicated and beautiful music, which will have all the more brilliance and nuance and complexity if I can find really good earphones and listen to a CD rendition.

And then the music is Bach and so the singing is in German and I have a craving to fulfill the beginnings of learning German in college and getting so excited and then not following through.

Along with this, a craving to finish a learning in physics, since Anat recommended a book by Richard Feynman, who was a professor at the college, Caltech, where I went to for the first two years.

The book, Five Easy Pieces, is excerpts about physics from Feynman's text for freshman and sophomores at Caltech, called, simply enough, the Feynman Lecture's in Physics. I got a B, but I didn't really encompass and understand this in depth back when I was nineteen. Another unavowed dream that I'd forgotten: time to buy or borrow the Feynman Lectures.

(January 29, 2007)

Practicing

PRACTICING
Sometimes, you’ve set out to do something, and it’s getting so late, you are tired and don’t want to do it.

Thus for me, tonight I don’t want to do my one blogero a day and yet it was one of my new year’s resolutions, as was doing the work of Byron Katie ( coming to Sonoma on Feb. 6), so here’s the short posting and also the work.

The thought: it’s too hard to write this late.

One: Is it true that it’s too hard to write this late.
Answer: The good old standby: I don’t know.

Two: Can I absolutely know that it’s too hard to write this late.
Answer: No, I can’t.

Three: How do I react when I believe that it’s too hard to write this late.
Answer: I get even more tired. I feel weak. I feel persecuted by my own previous enthusiasm.

Four: Who would I be without the belief that: it’s too hard to write this late.
Answer: I’d just be a tired man as a keyboard, having some fun, learning once more that reality is what it is and my suffering comes mostly from my ideas and thoughts and beliefs about reality.

So: what’s the turn around to it’s too hard to write this late.
Answer: It’s not too hard.
My thinking is too hard this late.
Life is good this late.

Night, now.

Holy Trinity: Now, Nature and Love

NOW, NATURE AND LOVE
Let’s say that it’s our job as human beings to live a full and rich and good life. And to invent and discover our own religion, as it were, or perhaps, more accurately: our own spiritual path. Over the years I have discovered a holy trinity for my spiritual path, and the holy three are, as the title suggests: Now, Nature and Love.

Now is how we are all born and how we spend our childhoods, some more some less. When a child is playing with a ball or a sock or a pan or a rock or a piece of water or a puddle of water or a leaf, that child is jus there, right there, in the moment with the water or rock or pan. They aren’t worried, am I playing with this pan / water / rock the right way? They aren’t competitive: no concern to be a better rockpanwater player than the next child. They are now, the world is good, life is being lived.

And then we get trained out of that, get worried about what others think get addicted to competition and outside approval.

For me, in college, the discovery of Gestalt therapy and Fritz Perls’ use of being present as the curative tool, and then the discovery of meditation some years later all brought me to a realization of the great happiness and ease of a life lived in the present.

Nature is both big and small. Big nature is being outdoors in the real air and on the real earth, growing real food in real soil, putting feet down on the soft sweetness of ground that hasn’t been covered by concrete, laying in a field looking up at a sky blue and clear and showing us how big we are, how big the world is, how bright and clear and magnificent. The ocean, the rain, the grass, the trees, all that wonderful stuff.

Along the way I discovered organic food, raising my own peas that tasted so good and real after all those frozen peas I’d eaten all my life, how fine and magnificent was the taste of a ripe tomato, grown in fresh soil fertilized by goat manure. I discovered Permaculture, a system of rebuilding and designing our world in harmony with nature.

And there is the smaller earth we carry around with us, our bodies, our bones the mountains, our blood the ocean, our lungs and breathing the air of life. To move this small earth, to walk, and jump and roll, to build a house, make a garden, make love, ride a bike, dance, skip, hop, ski, golf, play tennis, do yoga: all magnificent and part of the heaven of this life.

Along the way I have discovered the Feldenkrais Way and the Anat Baniel Method and yoga and the conscious meditation of the Gurdjieff work (sense both arms and both legs and be aware of light coming in eyes and ears, a meditation in the now, and in the nature of being in this small earth of our body.)


And then love. To get along with others, to enjoy others, to create joy for others and ourselves in mutual interaction. Sometimes through touch, sometimes pleasant and open conversation, sometimes structured listening and sharing, sometimes song.

Along the way I have discovered the Byron Katie work as the path back to love when it slips away. The path of admitting our hatred and annoyance and judgment and anger and then giving ourselves alternatives to that slavery to feeling bad and dislike, which will lead us back to love, not by trying to be loving, but by showing us how much better certain ways of feeling and thinking about the world work. How much better we feel without the story and stories that are blocking our love.

This is just a taste. All this book is about now, nature and love. Enjoy.

Human Learning, One of the Wonders of the Universe

Human Learning, One of the Wonders of the Universe.

A dog from Chicago has no trouble communicating with a dog from Japan. A newly born deer is ready to get up and run within hours if not minutes. These animals, much as they love them, have an easier time of being who they are meant to be, and they miss out on what’s central to the human experiment: learning.

They don’t need to learn to crawl, to sit up, to walk: it comes with the package. The don’t need to learn to talk: that doesn’t come with the package.

This is humanity.

We learn.

When we are young, this is our whole life, learning.

Then we go to school, and we keep learning, but a lot of crap we don’t need to learn: how to stifle our movement, how to be quiet, how to do what we are told, how to wait our turn, how to play the school game.

Along the way, we might learn to read, if the teacher doesn’t get in the way of our abilities of figure stuff out and doesn’t set us up to fail but disconnecting reading from the game that it is. But that’s another topic, the topic of how fun it is to teach kids to read and do math, about which one essay has already been written.
( Titled :
Math isn't hard, it's a chance to learn how to use our brains. )

For now though, for a short sweet piece: learning makes us human and we can learn wonderful new things, a musical instrument or a new language. And we can learn how to constrict our breathing and hold ourselves to have back pain, or the wreck our hips. We can learn to hate ourselves and feel bad about life.

There is lots to learn.

And what is the core of learning?

Noticing a difference that makes a difference.

That’s nice isn’t it?

Noticing a difference that makes a difference.

What have you learned today? Maybe this essay has been part of the wonder of life for you. I hope so.

Ciao.

Love your weeds, Connect to Nature

LOVING YOUR WEEDS
In Northern California, it is our wet season, and though colder than usual just now, in the garden, it’s the time of water and a few winter vegetables, like garlic and kale and chard and endive and onions and some cover crops, like fava beans and field peas and vetch and wheat and rye.

This is the time of year when the so-called “weeds” can thrive, the wild oat grass and the mallow and the dock. This is good.

Weeds are a miracle of life, and they do what plant life does: they take solar energy from the heavens and water and minerals from the earth and turn it into more plant, more green, more “weed,” more biomass. More Life. More oxygen.

To pull out weeds now is to destroy nature’s oxygen and life making purposes. It is to rob your garden of all that plant material that the sun and water and soil would be creating all winter and spring. Someday, and someday soon, an honest gardener will have to stop hauling “stuff” in to the garden, stuff that requires fuel to haul, be it manure or straw or compost. It’s getting time to starting thinking about honestly creating our own biomass to create our own compost.

This could take the form of growth compost radishes for the compost pile, like John Jeavons does. Or, it could take the form of growing all the weeds you possibly can in the winter and then when spring comes and it’s about a month before planting, push them all down, cover them with newspaper, and cover the newspaper with some soil or straw or compost, something to keep it from blowing away. The newspaper will turn all that biomass to soil, rich incredible compost, right there where you want to plant. No tugging out, lugging to the pile and then lugging back to the garden.

In Permaculture , a system of designing your land and garden to imitate nature, extra effort in creating tidiness is usually an affront to natural processes. In the case of weeds, in Permaculture, they are encouraged to grow and then either “sheet mulched,” as explained above, or else eaten by animals that are used within the system for feed or wool or milk. Then the animals are fed on the gains from the sun of the winter.

This is working with nature. This is easier on your work, healthier for the earth and gets us out of this habit of thinking of nature as the enemy, of all thinking of nature as something to fear or conquer or control.

As an aside, but an important one, this fear of and disconnection from nature has very much to do with people’s fear of walking and riding bikes places at night. Yes, yes, it is less safe, and a big part of that is, I think, a cover for a fear of the nighttime, which like fear of dirt, or fear of insects, or fear of weeds, is a disconnection from the non-linear and wild and natural parts of ourselves.

So. Let your weeds grow. Daydream about the seeds you saved last fall and summer. Dig some trenches for irrigation or some swales. What’s a swale? That’s another Permaculture way of cooperating with nature to catch the water in the wet time of year, and it’s another story.

And while you are letting your weeds grow, you might want to take advantage of some of the immense nutrition that you could treat yourself to with mallow and dock, this time of year, and chicory and dandelion coming along soon.

13 Possibilities: Inspired by a Joel Kramer talk

13 POSSIBILITIES VIA JOEL KRAMER
Joel Kramer, a thinker and yoga guy, came by Sonoma last night. He let himself wander all over the place under the title of Yoga and Self Transformation. This was a delightful discussion, bringing up many of the same issues that this ongoing series of essays has been exploring: What are we to do with our lives? How to help the mess that the Earth and her people are in? How can we become better and happier people?

Actually, I don’t know if Joel talked much about happiness, but the idea, the flavor was underneath.

Then I came home and glanced at a book Marlie had just got at a girlie swap gathering, mainly clothes were swapped around, but books and videos, too. The book is good, I’ll talk about it day after tomorrow in the taichiyoghealth blog, but the hint for today’s essay is that the author likes the natural rhythm of thirteen moons, and in each of the thirteen chapters gives a list of thirteen food ideas from around the world. Having been born on Friday the thirteenth, I too am quite fond of the number thirteen. I’ve an earlier essay, called Thirteen Ways to Have a Wonderful Relationship, from October 23 of 2005.

So today’s essay is going to be 13 thoughts/ possibilities inspired by Joel Kramer. In honor of his honoring of the meandering principle of water and good gardening and nature in general, these will meander. So, with that rather long, foreshadowing (partly to avoid getting to the “hard” part), here we go.

1) Yoga is about the mind as well as the body. The body is conditioned and had certain limitations which can be explored, and if explored kindly and without force and pain, these limitations can be learning pathways to not only more flexibility but more awareness of how to change. In the mind, gad oh gad, do we have conditioning. We have so many filters up about how we see the world, that, hey, guess what, we usually don’t see the world, but only prebaked unclear idea of the world. In yoga, we have lots of tradition, which is nice, as a stepstone, but not as another filter/demand structure.

2) This conditioned thinking, combined with the human ability to create and invent, has led the world into a sorry mess. We have old ways of thinking, as in “All those guys are bad, we’d better go kill them,” and this is combined with brand new sparkling zippy wappo weapons. (Note: this is my rather loosy goosy paraphrasing and taking off from Joel. He sets a much higher tone than this, so don’t judge him by me. I’ve added him and his lovely companion Diane to my links, so go to their website (JoelKramer-DianaAlstad.com) and buy their books or listen to their pod casts. AND: what I am saying is very, very much in his spirit of everything is up for grabs and the new clear and fresh way to see things, which is what all these essays have been about for the last couple of years.)

3) These weapons allow us to be disconnected and supremely inhumane in our killing. Back in the spears and clubs days, if you were wrecking and wounding someone, you knew it. From a plane two miles up or a missile launched from hundreds of miles away, the killing is quite antiseptic and clinical. (Joel didn’t talk about, but for me, one of the most amazing images from Fahrenheit 911 the movie, was the kids, and they were just kids, in the tanks, with their rock and roll music, blasting humans and buildings as if they were in some hot nightclub video game). Which is to say: our brains our way ahead of our hearts.

4) Humanity is at the edge. We could lose the game and extinguish the species. AND this is when evolution tends most likely to happen: when it has to happen. So we’ve got two things going: a race to the edge of the cliff, and a chance to use the knowledge that as a species we could perish, to figure out how to co-operate and learn and shift ourselves to a better level of being.

5) This shift has a lot to do with getting out of our narrowness of identification, of our little group, or tribe or country. We have to learn how to identify our deeply selfish interest in identifying with the Big Picture.

6) Many of the conditioned ideas about opposites aren’t so worthwhile, if you get honest. For example, the cooperative vs. competitive thing. A bunch of people get together to raise a neighbor’s barn. All cooperative and cozy and no competition. Except, the competition with whatever trees had to be chopped for the barn, habitat destroyed to make way for the barn, and so on.

7) Joel had some fun comments about the competitiveness in yoga, and how we try to be good and not be competitive and can’t help ourselves, because we look over here and over there. He stated, and this I’ve brought up for from the Gurdjieff work, our brains are meant to compare. That’s what they do. So we can’t help it.

8) What I’ll add to that, and this is all me, is that the Feldenkrais work is often far more useful than many other systems, because it makes hugely explicit use of this comparing as a basis for learning. The comparing starts at the beginning of a group lesson, when you lie of the floor and compare your left leg to your right, and the left side of your ribs to the right, and so on. And then, throughout the lessons, most of the time with eyes closed, since on the floor you aren’t going to fall over, you are comparing: what is the difference if you turn your head to the right while turning your shoulders to the left and if you turn your head to the right while turning your shoulders to the right, or what is the difference to the right shoulder if you push up through the left foot and side of the pelvis, and so on and on and on. In the Feldenkrais work, learning is defined as discovering a difference that makes a difference. Brains compare because that’s how they learn; and this comparing thing gets shanghaied by our judgmental part. (Joel had a fun thing about the phrase: Don’t Judge, being a judgment.)

9) In real yoga, the goal is to learn about yourself and your conditioning. In relationships, we are in minefields of conditioning, and often stymied by myths that require us to pretend to be “gooder” than we really are. The yoga of relationships helps begin to lift us out of the sort of self absorption of yoga, the privileged permission to spend this time getting me, me, me in better shape, with better energy and freer and sexier body. (Again, this is me coming along, making fun of the Look Better Naked idea of yoga, which is explicitly part of the Bikram advertising.) Anyway, Joel did bring up how yoga was a privileged luxury, and part of the deal was how to go from this to, well, Saving the World.

10) Over the ages, we get caught up in the idea of evil. And what is the idea of evil? It is that there is a continuum of violence and when you go beyond a certain point you are evil. Joel was going somewhere with this, but I don’t know where. All I’ll say, is that it’s clear from history, that people love to deal with what they call evil by the Final Solution: Wiping it out. Be it modern agriculture as war with insects, or dumb bell politicians dealing with Fundamental Moslems, the primitive tendency is to clear the slate of the Bad Guys.

11) Children these days are being deprived of a connection to nature, and there are huge pressures on parents that make it hard to raise their children decently in the onslaught of all the crappy food and media and the rush of modern life. Which is part of the World is a Mess theme, and also part of this theme: real community seems to be almost gone. If it takes a village to raise a child, where are our villages. Both in our families and in our world, we need ways of real relationship that are not only satisfying for our lives, but will.... Save the World.

12) In the face of all this mess, the best inner place to be is one of optimism. Factually, “realistically,” this might not make any sense. But internally, to thrive and be effective and to enjoy our life on this crazy planet, to be optimistic is the only realistic option.

13) Too much avoidance of the real world, and real problems and real opportunities and real needs has been the hidey hole of a life after life, heaven, the next life, some sort of immortality gizmo going on. If we come back from that unknowable possibility, to the world as it is, there are chances all over the place to make a difference. The fun is in finding them.

(If you read this Joel and Diana, I hope you enjoy this, and please straighten me out on what I missed. Anyway: it was a fun ride.)

Waking in the Night

ON WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
This isn’t about “waking up” in the hotsie totsie Enlightenment way. That would be nice, but for now, I’d like to explore a little this habit of mine of waking after a few hours sleep. Usually four hours or so, and then I’m in the nice warm bed, and I’m not particularly sleepy and I don’t feel like getting up.

This used to bother me. I wanted something to “do,” to entertain myself until I fell back to sleep and I happen to live with someone who is not fond of lights in the middle of the night, so that means “No” to the obvious way of enjoying some warm and cozy hours in bed: reading.

No reading. Ohmygod: What to do?

Well, to tell you the truth, that is one reason I became a Feldenkrais Practitioner. There are so many varieties of slow and gentle and enjoyable movement combinations that I was sure I’d find a bunch that would be useful to the warm and cozy hours of the night.

And they were. And they are.

I mentioned this to my trainer, Dennis Leri, how I enjoyed the movements when I woke at night, and he talked of some anthropologist who realized that no one had studied peoples’ sleep patterns much and decided to do so. This anthropologist discovered that in most cultures, especially those without the lure of the electric light to keep us up to all hours, waking in the middle of the night was the norm.

And people stoked the fire,
or checked on the children and the animals,
or composed songs and poems,
or had visions,
or went out to watch the stars,
or meditated,
or prayed,
or made love,
or had time for those quiet conversations you can’t get around to in a busy day full of work and children and interruptions.

Well, the same partner who doesn’t like lights, isn’t into this “norm” of waking mid way through the night, so I’m on my own.

I have found these hours extremely enjoyable. And then there is this one surefire way that I can ruin them for myself: to worry about getting back to sleep, and thus to get into “trying” to get back to sleep, a hellish state of being, and one guaranteed to prevent me or anyone from sleeping.

A second, and slightly lesser way to ruin the peaceful night time warm cozy hours, is this: to obsess with something I “should” or “need to” get done the next day. This can be a bit of a drag, but if I slow, and allow this quiet dark time to be one in which I can visualize and give thought experiments to different options, ah, that’s nice.

And finally, besides Feldenkrais and thought experiments, there’s the sweetest alternative of all: doing "nothing." (See earlire essay on the doing part of "doing nothing.")

So, in this "nothing," I'm involved in: Following my breathing. Sensing myself, seeing if I can sense down to the cell level. Enjoying being exactly where and how and who I am.

This is sweet and ironically, so peaceful, that it often brings a sleep that I no longer care about.

Happiness and Inner Quiet

Yoga in the living room

HAPPINESS AND QUIET
This is all it takes to be happy: stop being unhappy.

The trick is, this isn’t a matter of “trying” to be happy. This is a matter of turning off the juice that is lighting up the unhappiness.

Now, the essay on Byron Katie shows a simple and direct route toward turning off this juice.

Here is another route and, as in the Katie work, it is both “simple” and profound all at once.

This is it: feel the pain as sensation and separate out the words about and around the pain, and stop paying attention to them.

Some examples. Someone does something that makes you really angry. Okay, fine, you are angry. Sense where in yourself that anger resonates. Discover where in your body you feel tightness, or a muscular readiness to strike out, or a changing of your breathing. Sense each and every particular of this conglomeration you call “anger.”

And then drop all the accompanying words about how bad, stupid, selfish, awful, f….ed up, and so on that so and so is.

Just sense the anger, and skip all the words. In a way, this is exactly question four of the Byron Katie Work: who would you be without the story? Except that this is not even an answer, this is just a pure sensation of yourself in the moment, with whatever feeling you are feeling minus the usual words that keep your misery fueled for hour after hour (or, year after year – don’t we all know someone, if not ourselves, who has nursed a grudge for decades?).


Another example. One day, I was working in the community garden and someone told me that a friend of ours, one we knew had been struggling for quite a while, was dead. The immediate effect was as if a small blow to my heart area and a sort of pressing in our myself from all sides. As I sensed this and walked in the garden, looking at the flowers and feeling this pain, I felt, wordlessly sad, and at the same time, immensely happy to be alive and to be sensing this “pain.”

Then, the words kicked in. I should be visited. I should have written and sent a poem. I should have….. And then I felt awful.

And why not? All these shoulds are impossible to do once the time had past. The here and now sensations in me where real, but the “should have…” story was completely unreal.

In reality I could be both sad and happy and full of life at the same time. Out of reality, it was just more of the everyday unhappiness that we can get anytime we blast ourselves with a bunch of words of shame or blame or guilt.

So that’s it: sense whatever you are feeling and leave the words out of it and experience what that is like. If I tell you what will happen, I will be denying what this is all about: sensing our own reality, for ourselves, in each and every moment.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss Joy

for the last two essays.)

Happiness and The Work

HAPPINESS AND THE WORK
The importance of happiness.

This seems obvious, doesn’t it? That it’s important to be happy?

And then, when we aren’t happy, we have all our reasons that we cling to like a magnetic poison: it is so and so’s fault. If only this had happened. If only they hadn’t done that. If only….

Which is to say, we are so sure that our happiness (and unhappiness) is the fault to something, someone, somehow outside of ourselves.

Then along comes the woman who goes by the name of Byron Katie , holding out this possibility: our suffering has one cause and one cause only: our relationship to our thoughts. And she doesn’t expect us to believe or accept her interpretation. There is no prescription in what she calls, the Work, to “let go” of your thoughts, to “let go” of your beliefs.

(Katie is coming to Sonoma on February 6 c/o our own wonderful...Readers' Books...)

She opens up options, and that leads to freedom. (Interestingly enough, this is what Feldenkrais work does, too.).

Her first gift, is the gift of setting us back into honesty. We don’t have to pretend to be “above” all the petty nonsense with which we drive ourselves crazy. Her first injunction is : Judge Your Neighbors.

Her second is: Write it down.

So, off we go, writing down the stuff we dislike and hate and are annoyed with in others: Dad shouldn’t have judged me. Mom should be nicer. Son should be more….. Daughter shouldn’t….. This person should have …..

And actually, you work through one person at a time, so you make a whole laundry list of all the things Dad or Mom or daughter or son or ex-mate should and shouldn’t do or have done. You judge. You write it down, writing being a way of slowing down the chatter and the obsessive swirl of thoughts. ( Interestingly enough, Feldenkrais works with slowing down, there of moving; again: go slower if you want more awareness.)

So Judge Your Neighbor, Write it Down, and then what? Ask Four Questions and Turn it Around.

Aha. The famous four questions. Which are: (see as well: thework.com.)

1) Is it true?

2) Can I absolutely know it’s true?

3) How do I react when I believe that thought?

4) Who would I be without that thought?

Seems simple enough, and yet, these are questions to bring us to and even amused and sometimes horrified self awareness. Let’s take an example, someone has a ex-spouse and the spouse is saying nasty things about them.

So the thought could be X should stop saying nasty things.

Question One asks: 1. Is it true that X should stop saying nasty things? Now, social convention and good manners and positive psychology and Oprah would all say Yes indeed, but we are talking reality here, as in: who is in charge of X? If we are in charge of X (i.e., are the God we imagine/wish to be), then fine, we can turn of X’s bad mouth. But that mighty force Reality says, X is X and at this point in time X is into the nasty thing saying.

Oh, well. The reality is X is saying nasty things. So that’s it. The reality truth, not the be good truth, not the world as we want it truth, is that X should do what X is doing.

Second question, if we can’t get behind that way of seeing things, we can ask: 2. Is it absolutely true that X should stop saying nasty things? Absolutely, as in: we understand the higher meaning of the Universe, and we know that it is in the Higher interest of the Universe and our life, and we absolutely know this, that X should be behaving better.

This is pretty hard to say yes, to.

Okay, enough of that.

Now the consequence question: the third question: 3.How do I react when I attach to the thought that X should stop saying nasty things?

Well, we react with anger and sadness and distraction and worry and ….You know the list. And also: we glare at X, or say bad things about X, or refuse to speak to X, or yell at X. These, too, are part of the consequences of my attachment to the thought.

So, here’s were the self realization comes in: this trouble is coming from our attachment to our thoughts about X’s behavior. Not from X's behavior. Our thoughts are cauasing all that pain, and this isn't theory: bad feeling by bad feeling, judgment written down by judgment written down we ask number 3 and come up with the consequences FOR OURSELVES OF OUR ATTACHMENT TO THE THOUGHT.

Hmm.

And then question four: Who would I be without the thought that X should stop saying nasty things?

And this is not saying: drop it. This is not saying: let it go. This is not saying: thought is bad and we must rise above it, or stiffle it, or go to silence/ peace and Realization.

No.

This is saying: imagine for a second or two, or more, what and how we would feel and be if we just looked at or visualized X, but without any thoughts in my head that X should stop saying nasty thing? Just saw them as a blank slate as it were. This is a way of trying out the world without my thought, without my attachment to our thought.

(This is about giving our brains options, which, interestingly enough, is core to how the Feldenkrais Way gets such dramatically better results than all the systems telling you the "right way" to do things.)

So, we see how and who we are with the thought, which is question three. And we can see and test out who and what we’d be without the thought, this is question four.

So, that’s three fourths of the four part deal:

Judge your neighbor.
Write it down.
Ask four questions.
Turn it around.

The turn around is just to take the sentence: X should stop saying nasty things about me and "turn it around" in two ways:

One: I should stop saying nasty things about X.
(This is saying to me: can I practice my own medicine?)

Two: I should stop saying nasty things about me.
(This is why I feel bad when X says nasty things about me. When I believe these things since I'm saying the same thing to myself, it's going to "hurt" when X says them.)

So, that’s the Work: Judge. Write. Ask. Turn around.

Sounds simple, or too easy, and it’s not. It’s work, and it requires time and paper and intelligence and going inside to our real heart intelligence, to real honesty.

And the pay off is this: we can be free from our suffering, one thought at a time.



(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss Joy
for the last two essays.)

Happy and Amazing New Year to us all. Yes.

NEW YEAR
Hurray. The New Year is here. Marlie and I went to bed early. She has a free yoga class on New Years Day morning, that is widely appreciated, and wanted her healing and happy sleep, and anyway, we both like to get to sleep early.

Now it’s 1:48 AM, and the New Year. Big deal? No. But another fun way to remember the possibilities of life.

My New Years Resolutions:

1) To go to sleep and to wake up in a state of gratitude and love and awareness.

2) To put something up each day on one of my blogsites, every day that I have access to a computer and the Internet.

3) To play a little each day with either the guitar or the piano.

4) To continue my habit of walking or riding a bicycle to all events and activities and shopping less than four or five miles away.

5) To be happy and do the Work of Byron Katie any time I’m not.

Wow. That is a lot. Dare I put that into writing. Yes. Can I do this?
Yes.

Can I do this with joy?

Yes.

Happy New Year, one and all.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Tai Chi Yoga Health Weight Loss Joy

for the last two essays.)