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....

here's to you in gratitude

I am not one of those people who tries to negate the negative by coating it in a layer of gratitude.... I haven't quite resorted to thanking my bed for letting me sleep in it...but I have learned to give the negativity a wide enough frame so that I can see everything else that is going on....There is ample space for it all....and no reason to shut all the good stuff out because you wake up with the feeling of life sitting on your head after ten rounds in the ring...If I don't expand the frame, the whole day is held hostage to my negativity and cynicism. If the frame of awareness is large enough...the negativity is dwarfed by spaciousness, small mercies and Grace. Here's a toast to those elegant proportions of my life....

belonging

.....David Whyte the poet speaks about us as being creatures of belonging...that we may only come to this belonging after long periods of exile and loneliness... That
loneliness seems to be the call to come into oneself...to stare into one's own face of rejection and fear of abandonment, depression.

The only way I survived through years and years of suicidal depression was to see my depression as something with its own life, being necessary and worthy of my attention and respect...to see it as a portal rather than something insurmountable...
It became my way, my spritual practice... not something I felt I needed to discard.. a mistake.

It has required an unrelenting attention... a practice of staying very physically present in this interface with my heavy hopelessness and a lack of enthusiasm for life at times.

There has always been an indescribable Grace in this willingness to stay present.

As if the Grace and the paying attention to what I am experiencing is the silent prayer of one part of myself to the other...

In this place I never felt totally alone... always coming to a reassuring sense of belonging...

The edge

The edge is where our heart is constantly caught off guard...In that vulnerability there are all sorts of possibilities. Opening to what is really there. Instead of the lie, the story we have made up...instead of the usual insulation that prevents us from having a straight conversation... a barefaced honest interaction. This means giving ourselves up in every moment.... giving up our position...risking the emptiness that annhilates all identity that is built on bewilderment and self-preservation...dying to ourselves every day...creating and recreating...

"The holy contours of life"

The cumulation of the quality of awareness we bring to each moment defines our future...defines the quality of where we will end up and what we will be wearing
when we get there. Embodied awareness can contain ANYTHING and EVERYTHING....the worst internal scream; the most helplessly insane urge; as long as we stay present
with it and don't try to get away from it or hand it over to someone else. It's got to cook inside before it can be served. Believing in the holy contours of life....that it is all a very precise ploy just to get us to constantly pay attention.

capricious deity

On the astrological reading of a suggestion that when making intense supplication the timing and answer may be delayed....not to despair....His reply is guaranteed, but in the way He chooses not the way you choose and the moment he desires, not the moment you desire....my friend's response was perhaps he resisted intense supplication because he did not want to be at the whim of a capricious deity...

We are capricious creatures it would seem.....capricious in love, in what we say and don't mean, intend to do and dont...it seems that the very fabric of life is capricious ... the Buddhists call it Impermanence....

And perhaps that deity that we supplicate to and implore is none other than a grandiose externalisation of ourselves....

Today I implore that deity to grant me the patience to wait for the answer.....

The Sufis speak about the joy that disappointment
brings... and this little paradox is definitely accessible...

....only if you are not trying to renovate or elevate the
source of your dissapointment - feeling it fully without
joking, busying, packing, eating, drugging, meditating,
etc.... it away....

...it can feel like a disorderly and greedy hole in the middle
of your midrif that you want to get away from at all costs...

... when all it requires is your physically embodied, unconditional
presence and attention....

...there is a joy so palpable that follows this emptying out.....

....it's a quiet thing!

mmm.... i have seen the truth....
and it doesn't make sense.....

it's only at the edge that you can
have any fresh experience.....
otherwise you are a prisoner of the
same...
breathing the same old air,
again and again.....

my first post

i have decided to start a blog to present my ongoing passionate
pursuit of simplifying my life and anything that comes up on
the screen of my awareness...