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....