Sweet Embrace

Returning to read reread read again both Making Your Way in a Wild New World and The Buddha's Brain.  Unseen but felt forces had distracted me from them.  Fine to read, but the value is in mastering the process.  Remember remember remember the primary lesson of Ai.

Path of Torment ~ FATIQUE

Interesting, thinking of fatigue as a path to Wordlessness via torment.  What's suggested isn't, to my surprise, resisting the fatigue, but quite the unexpected opposite - giving way to it, surrendering to presenting weariness.  Breathe into it.  Intriguing phrase.  

"Being able to feel Wordless fatigue makes you more capable of resting deeply into whatever time you've got, allowing you to stay more rested physically & much calmer emotionally."

NOT what I expected.  Going to have to reponder this one...

Paths of Torment

Eeek...  Dropping into Wordlessness through Paths of Torment sounds pretty Spanish Inquisitionish.  

Oh, wait - it talking about suffering we CAN'T avoid.  Okay, that sort of sounds better.  If I knew what it meant.

It means noticing the pain, whether physical or emotional, without creating barriers around it, not averting our eyes to avoid seeing it.  

Strangely, studies show that when we don't resist pain, it tends to hurt less.  It's our verbal constructs - our resisting thoughts - that exacerbates the injuries, heightens the pain, delays healing.

Seeking out pain is stupid.  Accepting what exists - feeling it even as we seek to heal it - is much smarter.  And using it to drop into Wordlessness is wise.

Letting Go

Letting go is the toughest thing I've ever undertaken.  Not easy to understand what it is I'm supposed to be doing, let alone do it.  

History & Fantasy

Startling reality – past & future only exist as stories in our mind.

Spot on!  Events happen.  Facts about them are unchanged, no matter how many years go past.  Dates – same.  People – same.  Action – same. 

Example:  My 11-year old brother died suddenly on Easter Monday, leaving a gap of 8 years between my next sibling & myself, the youngest.  That’s reality (in spite of my oft-dreamed dream of Ian strolling out of Ed Allen’s garage, as if nothing had happened, no years had passed).  

Ah, but everything else is not so clear.  

The stories each member of Ian's family, each one of his friends, his classmates, his teachers, other adults, other kids, spun around that relatively short statement of fact ~ ah, those differ & sometimes widely, sometimes so widely as to make one wonder if the stories connect to the same event.  

Certainly, everyone in Ian's family came up with our own stories around that life-changing death, each one of them gospel to each one of us. 

We all - every human being - come up with our personal histories, our own fantasies about the future.  Stories spin off of thoughts, new thoughts spin off of old stories, until the only thing they have in common - whether they're Personal History and/or Fantasy - is that they're fiction.

Falling Petals

It was eons ago that I first heard Stephen Covey say it's not the venom from a rattlesnake bite that dooms most people, but their response to it - running makes the poison spread that much faster in the bloodstream & throughout the body.  It's the thoughts we hold onto about what's happened in our lives that cause us the most suffering.    

How weird that the apparent Queen of Wordiness - ME - unleashed torrents of words trying to unlock the reality to grounded living, only to discover that words are mere puffery, a bunch of letters stitched together to get across an understanding of the indescribable.  

Fact:  as soon as we try to convey something, it is diminished, ever so slightly (and sometimes flagrantly) distorted.  It is the very nature of language.  What was it Mom used to say?  "The flowering moments of the mind lose half their petals in our speech."  

Forget when people intentionally use language to distract, distort.  Even the most well-intentioned person cannot convey with any degree of perfection the thoughts in his or her mind. One glance from John tells me more about his feelings for me than words could.  One kind act from him tells me volumes more than a litany of love on the most beautifully designed card, his tender actions a veritable bouquet of what he feels.

Step Away From Cozy

It's easy to enjoy hanging around familiar people, those few or many with whom we share common events, the ones who have the same memories set off by the same triggers.  They bring a special richness to our lives, even the ones with whom the memories might not be so bright, the experiences not so merry.  Their very familiarity, the comfort we find in having them in our background, lends a special depth to our lives.

Much the same is true, it feels, of our thoughts.  The ones we feel a certain comfort with, the ones that help give us our very sense of place, be they positive or negative.  WE, as individuals, are infinitely more a reflection of our thoughts than of our bodies.  Infinitely.  Especially the ones that we cozy up to, whether fair or foul.  Thought - rooted in words - is what we attach to experiences, giving them residence in our mind.  

The rub is that memory is, by its very nature, selective.  It's faulty.  I once showed my oldest brother a family picture I'd drawn at age 8 or 9.  I pointed out different things about it that were unexpected.  He asked me what I thought each meant, and each time I answered the same way, "I don't try to interpret what I meant, because the one thing I know for sure is that I would be wrong.  I just find it interesting."  That really bothered him.  If I found the different things interesting, then I should attach some specific meaning to them;  he found my refusal downright irksome.

Even then, 8 or 9 years ago, something deep down inside of me knew the pitfalls of thought & memory.  As cozy as they feel, they are almost invariably wrong, wildly off-kilter from the unknown, now (maybe always) unknowable reality.  

Was it several years ago that I read that the reason humans - particularly Americans - tend to assume things is because we like to feel that we know, even when we don't?  There abouts.  Hence, the lure of assumption, which gives at least the illusion of knowing.  

Assumptions are all about words v. sensing, about tagging manageable, limited & limiting labels to often unmanageable events, circumstances, situations.  Of all the human actions, fewer give us an unrealistic sense of cozy than assumption.

Which leads me to one of the scariest things a human can do - drop out of limiting thought & into simple sensation, just being.  Ponder it - since we could first listen, even before we could talk, most of us were trained to suspend our sensing and embrace words.  From our earliest  interactions, too many people are told that what they're sensing is false & that what words depict - however far it is from the reality they've felt & seen - is correct.  We so keenly ache for the cozy rather than the true.

None of which changes the core reality that one of the most important things we can do for ourselves & others is to step away from the cozy, the comfortable, the familiar stories, and just let ourselves experience, sense, feel whatever is at this moment.  Just let it be.