Sunday, June 29, 2014

TAKING THE WALK












                                      










         






                        Remember to be as kind to the person 

                              inside of you that is afraid 

                         as you might be to some real person 

                               that you love openly 

                                and with compassion.



              I send you big Sunday bunches of love,  Misty                                   June 29th, 2014







Saturday, June 21, 2014

NOT BITING THE HOOK

I am always touched deeply by Pema Choedron's view of the world, try this:




NOT BITING THE HOOK
In Tibetan there is a word that points to the root cause of aggression, the root cause also of craving. It points to a familiar experience that is at the root of all conflict, all cruelty, oppression, and greed.


This word is shenpa. The usual translation is “attachment,” but this doesn’t adequately express the full meaning. I think of shenpa as “getting hooked.” Another definition, used by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, is the “charge”—the charge behind our thoughts and words and actions, the charge behind “like” and “don’t like.” 




Here’s an everyday example: Someone criticizes you. She criticizes your work or your appearance or your child. In moments like that, what is it you feel? It has a familiar taste, a familiar smell. 




Once you begin to notice it, you feel like this experience has been happening forever. That sticky feeling is shenpa. And it comes along with a very seductive urge to do something. Somebody says a harsh word and immediately you can feel a shift. There’s a tightening that rapidly spirals into mentally blaming this person, or wanting revenge or blaming yourself. Then you speak or act. The charge behind the tightening, behind the urge, behind the story line or action is shenpa.





You can actually feel shenpa happening. It’s a sensation that you can easily recognize. Even a spot on your new sweater can take you there. Someone looks at us in a certain way, or we hear a certain song, or walk into a certain room and boom. We’re hooked. It’s a quality of experience that’s not easy to describe but that everyone knows well.





Now, if you catch shenpa early enough, it’s very workable. You can acknowledge that it’s happening and abide with the experience of being triggered, the experience of urge, the experience of wanting to move. It’s like experiencing the yearning to scratch an itch, and generally we find it irresistible.




Nevertheless, we can practice patience with that fidgety feeling and hold our seat.
(From Pema's book, Practicing Peace in Times of War)





For more of Pema Choedron please use these links:

http://pemachodronfoundation.org/store/buy-books/#peace

www.shambhala.com/heartadvice/


Have a lovely lovely Solstice Day!
Misty,  June 21, 2014


Friday, June 13, 2014

TRUE ELDER-NESS

Getting OLD…… hmmm.  Sometimes you encounter a sense that it is all hard: Creaking stiff limbs and failing health, loss of our more vital lives and identities, financial worries, and the parade of deaths of our friends and family.

I recently came upon some quotes that might lead us to alter that impression.  There are many reasons that the last third of our lives can be quite stellar.  If we are doing the work of growing our emotional and spiritual lives, there can be such reward during this period.


In our youth and mid lives we can explore the outer world and learn about ourselves by traveling and challenging our careers, our minds, our bodies and it is wonderfully fulfilling, life altering, satisfying, and defining.   This next part of our lives truly asks for a more internal journey. The tasks that can help us achieve this as outlined in “Analysis with the Aged”, in the book Jungian Analysis by Murray Stein are as follows:


1)      Face the realities of aging and you eventual death.  Our awareness of the limited time left to us allows for a deeper, more meaningful engagement with our world, activities and people.
2)    Take some time to remember your life, write a memoir, talk to people about your experiences, write in a journal, make letters to leave after your death.  These things all allow us to be seen, and this allows us to move forward and be more present.
3)    Do some evaluation of where our time and energies are spent.  Reset limits.  As we let go of old obligations and aspirations, we can use our attention and energy on what is now our real focus and what is actually achievable.



4)   Work through the parts of us needing to impress others.  Letting go of the exhausting job of creating a persona for others.  Becoming more visible as we are and being less bound by ego.

5)    Listening in a deeper way to what I have talked about as the “call”.  It is the still small voice.  Seeking wholeness, blending our understanding of our conscious and our unconscious presence, being receptive to our own mysteries and those of our world.



6)    See your own patterns, make efforts to step outside them, seek understand of your true path and your particular reason for living, and then step onto that path.


7)    Tap your creative energies.  Explore ways to express your experience of living.  Is who you have been in your life, i.e. the mask you have been wearing a good fit?  If not how can you express yourself differently and with more resonance to your late-in-life self.  Explore the arts, and begin to see your own life as a painting, a novel, a dance.  Allowing the living itself to becomes an art, not a business.  The unexpected can be the material of exploration.

I have gathered some quotes regarding Aging that I thought you might enjoy:



There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle.   Samuel Butler

We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.  Mary Lamberton Becker
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.  Kafka

The advice of the aged will not mislead you.  Welsh Proverb

For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.  Plato

Old age is ripeness.  American Proverb

It takes a long time to become young.  Pablo Picasso

It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth==and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up==that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Every age has it’s beautiful moments.  Albert Einstein

I enjoy my wrinkles and regard them as badges of distinction-I have worked hard to get them.  Maggie Kuhn

I could be well content/ To entertain the lag-end of my life/ With quiet hours.
William Shakespeare

There is a fountain of youth:  it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love.  When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.  Sophia Loren

It is wrong to think of old age as a downward slope.  One the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the advancing years, and that, too, with surprising strides.  Brainwork comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.  George Sand

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when he masks are dropped.  Arthur Schopenhauer

One should never count the years—one shold instead count one’s interests.  I have kept young trying never to lose my childhood sense of wonderment.  I am glad I still have a vivid curiosity about the world I live in.  Helen Keller

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult  chapters in the great art of living.  Henri Frederick Amiel

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or gistering wrong.  Charlotte Bronte

Life is half spent before one knows what is it.  French Proverb

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable precisely, the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad foundations.  George Santayana

For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned it is the season of the harvest.  The Talmud

Expressing your enthusiasms can add years of creative life to your time on earth.  Benard Baruch

One has only to grow old to become more tolerant.  I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.  T.S. Eliot

Life does not accommodate you.  It shatters you.  It is meant to, and it couldn’t do it better.  Every seeds destroys it’s container or else there would be no fruition.  Florida Scott-Maxwell


Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.   Maya Angelou 




Whatever your age, may you celebrate your OLDNESS today and be in it!  

                        Blessings to you all, Misty June 13, 2014 






















Tuesday, June 3, 2014

WHAT KIND OF KINDNESS?

Following is an eight minute commencement address given by George Saunders, one of America’s best novelists. I find it very meaningful and inspiring. I suspect you will also.

                               Some Thoughts on Kindness.

Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).
And I intend to respect that tradition.
Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.
So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.
But here’s something I do regret:
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
But still. It bothers me.

So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?
Here’s what I think:
Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).
Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.
So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?
Well, yes, good question.
Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.
So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.
Because kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything.
One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.
Congratulations, by the way.
When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .
And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.
So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.
Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.
Congratulations, Class of 2013.
I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.  





Have a kind day.  Misty  June 3, 2014