Monday 30 March 2015

From Distraction to Opening to the Reality of Suffering


     “I think I’ve learned so many things from this experience (husband Bruce Kramer's ALS). I don’t think in 54 years I truly understood suffering, and once this happened to us, I was amazed at how I just didn’t pay attention to all the suffering going around. Before ALS, I had my perfect little life, I was really enjoying it – we were both enjoying it, very busy, and I just didn’t see that. And I would never want to go back to that blindness. And I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to give back in some small way the amazing love and devotion that we’ve been showered with throughout this experience. So I wouldn’t trade that in. … 
      I think maybe we see (suffering), but don’t feel it. I could see it and think ‘Oh, that’s so terrible,’ but I never felt it. 
      It’s terrifying to feel it. But once you’ve experienced it, it opens you up to so much other suffering, and to knowing that you do have the opportunity to help. … It’s really a different way to live.”          Ev Emerson

Bruce Kramer's EXCEPTIONAL interview by Krista Tippett      http://onbeing.org/program/feature/in-the-room-with-bruce-kramer/7424  


 
Pipla   www.dpreview.com

Sunday 29 March 2015

Death, Grief and Love

     "In Japan the idea of life and death is ... like there's a great ocean, which contains all life. Periodically, due to cause and effect, a wave emerges, which is an individual. You can interact with that person - touch them, love them, hate them. Eventually, due to cause and effect, the life energy of that individual disappears back into the ocean. But it doesn't die in the sense of being gone forever.

     Grief lasts as long as it lasts. There will always be a hole in your heart that's the shape of that life, which you knew  however briefly. ... that hole will never be filled in by anybody else. It will be with you your whole life, but it will soften and get filled in over time. It gets filled with love and happy memories, and with the prayer or hope that the life energy will go on - that it will reemerge in a beneficial place."

       Jan Chozen Bays, Roshi "For the Children We've Lost" Shambhala Sun, May 2015


Akos Stiller   www.stillerakos.com

Saturday 28 March 2015

What is Healing?


     “Before ALS, I could see my plans opening into limitless vistas, now I am cured of planning. ... In my fourth summer of ALS, I am healed by music and vulnerability.

     Healing comes in many guises. We’re healed by just the touch of a friend. We’re healed by the hug of a child.
     And healing does not imply that your life is suddenly going to lose all of the struggle, all of the challenge. What it does instead, is it strengthens us for what is next.
     But to be open to healing, means to be vulnerable. And I think if you look at me, I’m what you would call ‘a vulnerable adult’. The cat doesn’t even listen to me here. I have no real sense of control any more. 
     And so the choice could be to resent this, to be frustrated by it – and there are times when I am, I promise. But I think the greater choice, is the fact that once you embrace your vulnerability, you’re open to such beauty. And in the end, isn’t this one of the things that truly makes us human? The ability to make, to perceive, to live in beauty?
     For me, I’m a musician, I’ll always have the soul of a musician. And because of that, music heals me. If I'm finding myself anxious, or find myself in a space where I know I better get a hold of this, I find that listening to music is one of my best strategies. And so, music is a healing activity. But if you talk to Matthew Sanford, for him, visual art just opens up that same sense of healing. I know so many people who are artists in their own right. And they’re really not themselves until they’re in that artistic mode, either listening, perceiving, or actually making the art.
     I feel that I’m just lucky that I have that gift, because in many ways, it’s helped me to understand how to do this, and do it in the most humane way possible. And that is healing.”            Bruce Kramer

Bruce Kramer's EXCEPTIONAL interview by Krista Tippett      http://onbeing.org/program/feature/in-the-room-with-bruce-kramer/7424  


     "We tend to equate healing with curing, with fixing. There is no fixing for life. We're all headed to the same place. I'm just going faster.
      But there is healing that I have. If I can find myself in a space that I feel quiet and secure and loved, isn't that a healed space?"           Bruce Kramer

http://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2013/08/29/music-with-minnesotans-bruce-kramer 

      Completely letting go: http://www.johnlovas.com/2015/03/the-problem-of-evil-zen-perspective.html 

Bruce Kramer

Friday 27 March 2015

Embracing Illness - instead of "Fighting" & "Waging Wars"


     “As an educator I had learned the difference between opening to possibilities through questions, and closing creativity with answers. Then, as ALS*** became part of my experience, the question I started to be able to ask to turn that was, ‘How shall we grow into the demands of what is beyond us?’ – which is a different question from ‘How shall we fight this?’
 

     Human beings have the capacity to grow … as humans, we can become better. We can become more compassionate. We can become more understanding. No matter what it is that afflicts us, that affliction can become a part of us that makes us better people.

     I realize on one level this sounds incredibly idealistic. But the fact is, that as humans, we’re given ideals. We’re able to project that, and it makes us better. So I feel that in the end, by focusing in on what does it mean to be a teacher?, what does it mean to be an educator?, and what does it mean to have faith? - those things - suddenly, you’re not angry with ALS any more. You may be angry at the circumstances. I will admit to you, there are days when I melt down, I’ve had it, I don’t like having everything done for me.

     But the fact is that most of the time, I perceive great beauty, and great joy. And a lot of that comes from having ALS. I don’t think I could go back. I’ve said this to friends and they look at me like I’m nuts. What I’ve learned in the last four years – I just don’t think I could give that up. It’s too profound. It’s brought me much closer to my own spiritual center. It’s brought me much closer to my children, much closer to my spouse, my friends. We use the word ‘love’ a lot. We say ‘I love you’ a lot, because of ALS.”


Bruce Kramer's EXCEPTIONAL interview by Krista Tippett      http://onbeing.org/program/feature/in-the-room-with-bruce-kramer/7424  

     *** http://www.alsa.org/about-als/what-is-als.html


Wednesday 25 March 2015

Magical Thinking and Maturation

     "Magical thinking is the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the correlation posited is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. Magical thinking may lead people to believe that their thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. It is a type of causal reasoning or causal falacy that looks for meaningful relationships of grouped phenomena (coincidence) between acts and events." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

     No matter how reasonable, rational, scientific etc we perceive ourselves to be, we all so desperately need some sense of control over our scary, brief, unpredictable life, that we all pretend, to varying degrees (some of us with violent desperation) that magic is real. A beautifully written memoir describing this phenomenon is Joan Didion's 2007 book The Year of Magical Thinking.
     'Magical', for me, is not a pejorative. Whenever we can't face life as it presents, we "change our reality" - how we perceive, understand and therefore respond to life, as we want to know it. There are many, many examples of this, from "failing to hear" a bit of bad news, to tenaciously clinging to a bed-time-story-like worldview.

     But as we mature, and to the extent that we're able to mature, by letting go of layers of pretense, armor, & filtered glasses between ourselves and reality, we face life directly, as intentionally evolving sentient beings. 

     Quality of Live: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/03/quality-of-life.html
     Awareness Heals: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2015/03/653-awareness-leads-to-spaciousness.html
     Our Journey: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/02/286-human-journey-from-simple-facts-to.html



WisdomAtWork.com

Tuesday 24 March 2015

Psychotherapy & Buddhism


     “It is through the mindfulness practices that Buddhism most clearly complements psychotherapy. The shift from an appetite based, spatially conceived self preoccupied with a sense of what is lacking to a breath based, temporally conceived self capable of spontaneity and aliveness is, of course, one that psychotherapy has also come to envision.”

        Epstein M. "Thoughts Without a Thinker. Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective." BasicBooks, NY. 1995. 


Erez Marom   www.dpreview.com

Sunday 22 March 2015

Profound Quality of Life

               "Why are you unhappy?
               Because 99.9 per cent
               Of everything you think,
               And of everything you do,
               Is for yourself -
               And there isn't one."

               "We do not possess an 'ego'.
               We are possessed by the idea of one."

               Wei Wu Wei "Ask The Awakened"
               www.weiwuwei.8k.com/bits.html

Lynsey Addario, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Tuesday 17 March 2015

Buddhism & Mental Health



      "To call something a 'fundamental principle of Buddhism' is only correct if, first, it is a principle that aims at the quenching of dukkha (pain, misery, suffering) and, second, it has a logic that one can see for oneself without having to believe others."

       Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. “Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree - The Buddha's Teachings on Voidness.” Wisdom, 1994.


     “The Buddhist premise is that by reflecting, by contemplating, and by understanding the common human experience (of suffering), we can transcend all the mental delusions that create human suffering.”

       Ajahn Sumedho. “The Mind and the Way. Buddhist Reflections on Life.” Wisdom, 1995.



Akos Stiller   www.stillerakos.com

Monday 16 March 2015

Engagement - Feeling At Home

"Within each of us, in the ground of our being,
 powers reside for the healing of our world.
These powers do not arise from any ideology, access to the occult, or passion for social activism. They are inevitable powers.
 Because we are part of the web of life, we can draw on the strength -- and the pain -- of every creature. This interconnection constitutes our 'deep ecology': it is the source of our pain for the world as well
 as our love and appetite for life."

Joanna Macy


"Expand and deepen your mindfulness to attend more carefully to the deep ecology that weave your deepest being into the fabric of all creation.
Discover the roots of compassion your deep connectedness with all living beings.  
Allow yourself to live-&-work today in a way that affirms these natural wonders." 

Joel and Michelle Levey


WisdomAtWork.com

Steve Demeranville, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Sunday 15 March 2015

Time to Awaken our Heart & Mind


     "The epochal task today is to rekindle the divine spark in our heart and mind: to revitalize our recognition of who we are, and how we relate to each other, to the earth, and to the cosmos. We are not material beings in a material universe. We do have a material body, but we also have an immaterial consciousness in an information-penetrated universe. Our body is connected — 'entangled' — with all bodies from atoms to galaxies, and our consciousness is one with the cosmic consciousness that pervades the world. Our crises and instabilities arose because we have refused to recognize this timeless insight and pursued our selfish interests in the belief that we are separate beings in a strange, uncaring and potentially hostile universe.

     Evolving our consciousness is not something we do only for ourselves - it is something we also do for others ... for all others, and for the earth."



Torsten Muehlbacher, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

Thursday 12 March 2015

Letting Down the Walls that Separate

     "We are in a world that is rather terrifying. People close ranks and hide behind their factions. There is great insecurity. (And yet) it is possible for humans to live together as long as you let down the walls that separate you.
     Our world is evolving rapidly, and is at a crisis point today. Either we will move together towards a deeper unity of all people, in a spirit of openness, fraternity and mutual respect, or the divisions that exist will grow into terrible forces of fear and hate, encouraging wars, terrorism."

       Jean Vanier, the Canadian humanitarian who spent the last half century working with people with intellectual disabilities, winner of the $2.1-million 2015 Templeton Prize in honour of his work that led to the creation of L'Arche, a worldwide network of support communities. The Globe and Mail, March 12, 2015.

     Beyond Walls & Friction: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/12/well-beyond-walls-friction.html
     More about Opening: http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/02/opening-opening-forever-opening.html

Jason Speth, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com