March 22nd, 2023

Is listening the master skill? I’m thinking it is.

In music it certainly is. How good you are depends on how well you listen – how well you listen to yourself and others. How much do you hear in music?

How about health? Listening to your body? Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Relationships? Listening is vitally important.

Finances, travel, spirituality… Listening is it.

Listening requires stillness. Putting down ambition.

What does the ear look like? Some kind of plant or animal or spatial entity? Perhaps the answer lies there.

Listening is the master skill, until I am shown otherwise.

March 21st, 2023

I’m bundled up and have got the heater on. I had a tough time with the cold shower this morning – I’m still finding it difficult to keep my head in the cold water for more than a few seconds – I get that nasty ice cream headache sensation for a while afterwards, making me brace myself against the wall.

Perhaps there is nothing worse than to remove yourself from life. To stop trying, to decide it’s not worth the energy. It can be somewhat inevitable after emotionally draining experiences, or when you experience burnout. But if it goes on a long period of time, it can spell disaster. I rejected life when I got burnt out, told myself that this world was a piece of shit and that the real world could be reached somehow. I didn’t want to participate in this life any more because I was hurt and exhausted. That’s where you need brothers and sisters to carry you along for a while. When you’re disconnected from your tribe, the worst things can happen.

As I see things now, there’s Life, and there’s being afraid of Life. The word God doesn’t do anything for me now. Religious ideas don’t appeal to me. There is simply Life, and it is ready to be embraced the moment we decide to stop fearing fear. Our bodies may quake and tremble, but we can cultivate the strength to tell ourselves and believe that “it’s okay”. Even if the body doesn’t survive, it’s still okay.

The relationship between higher self and inner child needs to be cultivated. If you’re simply living Life, then you don’t concern yourself with this – you are simply alive. But if you’ve gotten separated from Life, and need to be revived, or healed, then you need to establish this relationship. Perhaps there is a false self that lies between higher self and inner child. This false self has abandoned the inner child, however much the inner child still protests within. The false self is full of ideas and concepts to sort out the world, and is bound to thought. The higher self transcends thought, but uses thought as a plaything. When you identify with your thoughts, you’re disconnected from your higher self, and if you’re disconnected from your higher self, you can’t have a relationship with your inner child. The higher self speaks to the inner child, whereas the inner child simply feels. There may be two-way communication, but it’s not verbal in both directions.

It’s the new moon. Yesterday was the spring equinox. We’ll make a fire tonight.

I have a few notes written down. I’ll put them in quotes and ramble a bit after.

“What has value? What actually works?” These are my top two questions now. What is truly valuable? Is a pair of jeans you love more valuable than going out to dinner with a friend, for the same amount of money? Is a more expensive car more valuable than a trip to Bavaria? Is reading valuable, if you remember little of what you read? Is watching tv and movies valuable if you never think about what you saw? Is waking up in a mansion more valuable than waking up in an ordinary house? Is breakfat in a five-star restaurant more valuable than steak and eggs at home? Is reading the paper valuable? Is going for a run valuable? Is looking good valuable? Are mantras and prayer valuable? Are memories valuable? Is vision of the future valuable? Is a closet full of clothes you mostly never wear valuable?

Perhaps I’ll save the answer for another day. I don’t have ‘the answer’, but I’m not going to attempt to answer the question now.

And, what actually works? What actually helps, and moves us forward? What helps us progress and evolve, and move from suffering and contraction to joy and expansion? Perhaps the first question and the second are the same? That which is valuable is that which works to help us expand? Is that too easy? And how do we know if we are expanding or contracting?

One of my notes is “loving space”. That is what I see as valuable and that which works. Holding yourself in a loving space – a space where you can be you, and all of the pain and yuck is welcome. You can scratch, belch, fart, hiccup…whatever. It’s all welcome, in the loving space.

Alright, I’m going with loving space as the answer to both of these questions.

What else have I got? “Enlightenment vs. healing”. Perhaps one could see these terms as synonymous, and another not so. But words have power. I favor Life over God these days, and I favor healing over enlightenment. Healing, to me, implies letting go of ambition and resistance, and allowing what is to be. Enlightenment, to me, has the connotation of seeking, going after something. It is filled with images of the Far East, for me, and going through hell to get to heaven.

Last one: “learning is nourishment or unlearning”. I was considering the idea of the purpose of learning. If we remember little of what we consume, then why did we spend our time with it? This would be a good question, if all we were doing was adding more to our intellectual base. Most of learning has to do with repetition and getting things on a deeper level. Just as we don’t go to a buffet and say ‘I’ve eaten enough for the rest of my life’, we don’t hear something and consider ourselves done with it. We continue to seek nourishment, in the form of food and knowledge, and that is what most learning is: nourishment. It feeds us. Then there is unlearning, which is a form of learning. Unlearning can’t be learned – something has to fall away, and that falling away is almost always uncomfortable. These are the two forms of learning we need to heal: consistent nourishment, and unlearning. The third type of learning is practical learning: how to sew on a button or change your oil or play a dorian scale. The fourth type might be fun and expansive learning: seeking out new experiences, like a sporting event or traveling. I don’t have it all systematized. I need to make breakfast now.

March 11, 2023

I woke up noticing a big lump on my right middle finger knuckle. I observed both the fear in my body and thoughts, the scariest ones being concern about cancer. Right now, looking down at my fingers as I type, the knuckle joint looks kind of like the pointy head of a male gorilla.

I was prompted to think about acceptance as a result of this. I cannot count the number of prompts I’ve heard to accept over the years. But what does it actually mean? Really, what it means is to move towards sensations in your body. That’s it. Now why in the hell wasn’t that made clear twenty years ago? Did no one understand what it actually meant? You can’t accept anything other than sensations in your body – not at first. That’s where you start, and then, maybe, you can find yourself being okay with things as they are. Acceptance means to be fully with the feelings and emotions and sensations in the body – the totality of what you feel, without acting on the urge to move away, yet being with the urge to move away too. That’s acceptance. Acceptance on the level of thought is totally meaningless, because the thoughts are generated by the sensations, and then you may get into countering negative thoughts with positive thoughts, which is still just an attempt to avoid sensations. So, there it is – acceptance.

The opposite of acceptance is resistance, a word that I’ve heard equally as much as acceptance over the last couple decades. Considering what I wrote above, resistance simply means to avoid sensations. That’s it.

At this point in my life, I don’t understand what it means to lack body awareness, because it’s so second-nature for me. I don’t understand people who don’t know what they feel, and are generally disconnected from their bodies. I remember saying to someone in my early 20’s that often I didn’t know what I was feeling, so clearly at one point I was far more disconnected. I would be very curious, perhaps more curious than anything, to actually live in other bodies – to actually feel what others are feeling. If I could do that or be able to fly, it would be a tough decision, but I think I’d choose feeling over flying. Maybe it’s something we can learn to do. I thought about animal communication earlier today, and how your communication could improve if you could actually feel what it’s like to be an animal.

A few more words about acceptance and resistance. The importance of exercise and physical challenges makes more sense when we understand what acceptance and resistance really mean. When we get that remaining with sensation, embracing it fully, is what it’s about, then it would make sense that we could practice this by challenging ourselves physically. Thus, using any kind of physical activity, be it yoga, running, weight training, or cold exposure – anything that challenges you, can be valuable.

For each exercise we do, it creates a different challenge, thus the greater variety of challenges, the more we prepare ourselves to feel without resistance. I know, for example, that hanging from a pullup bar is very different from taking a cold shower. They both require the same discipline around mindset though. They both require you to not take your thinking so seriously, and also not take your impulses so seriously either. By breathing through them consciously and with control, you are willingly being with the discomfort.

Exercise has been valuable for me on two accounts then: one, it teaches me to be more okay with what I am feeling, and two, it simply makes me feel better. The cold shower is one of the best exercises because you can get so much benefit in such a short time, without using much energy and feeling super refreshed afterwards. When I take cold showers, I feel the danger impulses to get out – especially from my head and my hands. I’m learning to stay with this longer, and it’s helping me to detach from my thoughts more and more.

Alright, I need to go feed the birds and then feed myself.