EVERYTHING/NOW

Everything that I am looking for is here....the potential...a sensation on my skin...in this moment....there is nothing after this....just the edge of now, now, now... facing into the wide open-mouthed stare of the future...

Making Ok...what Is..

Acceptance is fraudulent. It means accepting something that is not acceptable. Trying to make what is not Ok, Ok!. These are our newly found New Age skills. How to manipulate reality by "accepting", "surrendering". How to slip past the guard at the gate - only to find that they are our guards and our gate and that we are going to forever be a prisoner of our own subterfuge.

I find it impossible to surrender to anything that I have not resisted FULLY. I sometimes feel so punched in the gut by my resistance, that I can only muster up a gesture or image of myself bowing down to it...laying my forehead at it's feet. Anything less has been a game of side-stepping...constructing my surrender in my mind and making all the right gestures and noises to convince myself and the other that I have indeed done this most spiritually elevated thing....surrendered. Surrender cannot happen in the mind....it is not a thought... it is an action. It is an action of interfacing FULLY with your resistance... to the point where surrender happens in spite of yourself. It is the total dissolution of your position in relation to something. It is not giving up, it is not being a doormat, it is not resignation, it is not giving into another's power or control, it is a cesation of resistance by submitting oneself to one's resistance not by submitting to the other or the situation.

We can only access and experience our resistance through our bodily sensations....If we manage to stay in the strangehold...with our clenched jaw or fists, our tight-lips, with our armour-plated abdomen....our pounding heart beat, our constrained breath,our squeezed brain,our impending tantrum, our bursting tears... for long enough... we may get a glimpse of thef ease and refinement of action that follows...

This is the art of somatic meditation...

The other is in you.....

I have to keep on reminding myself why I started this blog. It definitely was not an attempt to entertain hence the no-frills approach...It is a temptation to want to entertain. This is afterall the age of infinite possibilities, of infinite distractions. The simple art of being is in danger of becoming passe. We feel it is not enough to just be present. We have to be occupied, entertained, thrilled constantly. We need to have something thrilling to say. We are on show.

The most precious thing for me has always been to be in the presence or company of someone who is just there with me. Some of the best times of my life are just standing in the kitchen having a morning cup of coffee with my partner... I love being with him in the most fundamental sense. It never actually matters what we are doing when we are present with each other. Being together and feeling the melange of textures as sensations deep inside me. For these things I am insatiable. I only feel unfulfilled or disgruntled when this presence is highjacked...which often it is...Then the real work begins. To remember to just stay present with the feeling inside me of feeling abandoned in the moment or abandoning myself in the moment by becoming preoccupied with my thoughts of being abandoned...thereby abandoning my partner. You can never really feel totally abandoned if you stay present with yourself and whatever you are exepriencing...even if it is the disconnect from the other. You can only abandon yourself! When I am able to do this somehow the connection gets re-established. The art of being together is another endangered experience. Most of the problems that exist between the couples that I consult with are mostly about all the things that interfere with being present with each other. If we are not paying attention. Our stories about ourselves, our woes, our illnesses, our stresses, our dramas are all in the way of being present with the other. Deep down inside all of us we are strategising for centre stage. Compelled to colonise the attention with "me". "me", "me". Or we so often get caught up in what's happening on the outside, in the activity, in the need for excitement. This is how we miss the other, how we miss being together. Extraneous means of external origin: foreign to; not belonging. Belonging can only be experienced from the inside. The love you feel for the other, the love the other feels for you...the other can only be experienced in you. Otherwise we are in love with and making love to, living with, going out with, a thought, a construct, an ideal.

SANITY

- I am constantly discovering that any sentence that starts with I should is a lie...or in fact any idea I have about anything is nothing short of a lie. Discovering that INSANTIY is fighting with anything and everything in contradiction to what I consider to be SANE. Everything that I think should or should not be happening. The moment I engage with what I consider to be INSANE, I become INSANE. Trying to convince another of my point of view is INSANE; trying to convince the other that I am right and they are wrong is INSANE; trying to adjust another's behaviour to fit with my sense of reality is INSANE; trying to adjust my behaviour to fit with another's sense of SANITY is INSANE. Staying embodied and present with the feeling I have that the other is wrong and I am right, or that I am SANE and the other is not, is an invitation to SANITY - an opportunity to experience myself, to face what I have still not faced; to do the work that I have still not done; to free myself from the seeming tyranny or imposition of the other..... INSANITY means senseless.....when we are disconnected completely from our senses we are INSANE. Feeling what we feel as a sensation not as a thought brings us into direct contact with reality in ourselves... no thing between ourselves and reality. To experience our conflict with the other in oneself...not easy!....but if we do, we empty and the position we have changes and the situation changes.....and we find a moment of peace and stillness within ourselves...a moment of emptiness....a moment to reframe reality....

Your Presence.......

David Whyte the poet talks about the ability to hold a conversation with what comes to find us. This really requires Presence, because a lot of the time we are ducking what is coming at us....pushing it aside as though it is not really happening and focusing on whatever distracts us. This Presence is the attention we give to what we are experiencing....what is in front of us....what we feel about what is in front of us. Giving attention even to the feeling to flee or take refurge from what is jumping up and down in front of us creates the capacity to interface with everything that presents itself to us. This willingness to stay Present with ourselves no matter what gives us the capacity to go beyond the bland background noise of our lives into something more authentic and surprising....more ourselves...more generous and more courageous.......

sanity and madness

I have always been deeply suspicious about what is called normal. The obvious thing about normal is that there is nothing normal about it. Normal! Normal is often the expression of the false self..Obedience is one of the problems of the world and often not the solution... where we do and say what we think we should instead of what is actually true for us. Spirituality is often an attempt to make us respectable conformists....it can also be a way of experiencing and even enjoying our conflicts...even if it means suffering more without beng self-destructive.

Perhaps we are so fundamentally mad that to pretend that we are not amounts to another form of madness....

Not to be in denial of our madness prevents us from having to act it out ...and is in itself a kind of sanity

attend to the unconscious with "evenly suspended attention"

Sometimes there is nothing to say because it feels like there is simply nothing going on...This seeming nothingness is a very fertile ground, I have come to experience. Where seeds have been sown and are waiting to sprout....

To attend to the unconscious stirrings within oneself with evenly suspended attention before taking action....

The way to evenly suspend one's attention is through meditation.

I want to bring into special prominence what I have come to understand as meditation - not medication. Not the feel good warm fuzzy thing that we do to escape or soften reality....

....rather the willingness to sit with whatever it is we are experiencing whether it be soft or hard, comforting or discomforting.... to sit with it and allow it..giving it full permission to just be there... simply noting what is going on without doing anything with it...

and then slowly expanding awareness to include anything else that may be happening simultaneously....without losing awareness of one thing in favour of another....

....this paying attention is not only a kind of love.... this evenly suspended attention IS love....

It is called "choiceless awareness"....not choosing one thing over another....and allowing what emerges from that bed of neutral attention to express itself unfettered by compulsion....