Humanyms

Gudding: Writing from Lovingkindness

Gabriel Gudding wrote a Rationale for Writing with Kind Mind. I’ll hand over my airtime to that.

the comments the discussion continued. He talked about the atmosphere of quarelling, the kneejerk criticism, or kneejerk kindness. What about conscious cultivation of an atmosphere encouraging exploration? People perform best where there is genuine warmth and kind humour. Some further things he said in the comments:

Gandhi was not a pacifist. He was a proponent of nonviolence. The difference is a pacifist refuses all struggle, whereas the advocate of nonviolence will engage in extraordinary struggle for justice — to one’s own death if necessary — while striving to retain a kind and compassionate attitude.
[...]

For some reason we have this notion that to cultivate a kind mind is to be a patsy, to be acquiescent, weak, and a push-over — and means that one must and should passively succumb to injustice. 

In fact, the opposite is true. A kind mind can better take the energy that is anger and turn it into clear, skillful action rather than mere rage and lashing out — which may or may not be effective.

One thing I’ve been fascinated to learn from the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at UW-Madison (run by Richard Davidson) is that the mindstates of courage and compassion are nearly identical: they have nearly identical brain-bloodflow patterns. Confidence, courage, discipline, straightforwardness are all attributes of a mind invested with kindness: the ability to face adversity increases greatly.

[...]The more one cultivates a kind mind, the clearer the distinction between being reactive and being responsive. 

So again no, i’m not talking about pretending conflicts don’t exist. I’m talking about cultivating an ability to better respond, rather than to react, to difficult situations.

Developing a mind capable of seeing that many of our cultural and intellectual habits harm us can be very difficult. One of the principle myths serving to stop this discerning mind is precisely the dream of creative freedom. It’s a very powerful delusion.

Sorrow and Useful Writing he says, “What I have found is that the way into a mindstate of joy means that I must learn to feel sorrow, deeply, in my body, so that it does not short-circuit into depression, anxiety, rage and blame.”

Quote: Asked by Angela Armitage in interview, “whose writing do you dislike?” Gudding answered, “The older I get, the less interested I become in disliking thing.”

Longitudinal Shifts: Ruminating

In the back of my head, there’s a rush and intention and waiting for something.

I’m preoccupied with words, but the most enjoyable moments often aren’t in or about the words. This feels like a paradox. Are words acting as the straight man foil for the comedy that is the main act in life? Or it’s a cooperation? I need both. I seem most upbeat while in motion physically, outdoors, so long as I’m warm, and with people. So then why is it so hard to drag myself out to that situation?

Part of the problem is being adaptable and pleased. Wherever I am I like being there and don’t want to move. I drag my heels until I’m in the next situation and then don’t want to leave it either.

For years it felt like my feet were nailed to the floor. Now only my reluctant heels drag. That’s one less stigmata source to worry about but that elusive flow is being elusive again.

I look back on what I’ve said here over the years. It’s funny, my omissions of words.

I recently realized that when I quit my job from burnout 4 years ago, after a dozen years working in ESL, I never mentioned here ending my term nor career.

I stand by my policy of never blogged about clients while I worked, for their privacy, but my blackout seems larger than need be. I muted a lot. Beyond need for privacy or tact. What informs my choice of blackout zones?

Did I mention here when hubby was laid off and started a new business?

Certainly, privacy is important. Not everything should be made made public. It adds an observer distortion. I like to work things out on my own terms at my own speed and bringing someone into the loop can interfere with natural development but there are trade-offs. A few people presumed I was an architect since I made so much mention of that. I tend to scramble signal for my own privacy but that can add some distortions.

My dad’s death really hit me in April, but all normal here. I didn’t mention to anyone except hubby unavoidably. And by choice, which was something of a breathe thru break thru.

The anniversary of dad’s death will be in a month. I’ll likely not mention that until the other side of historical calm. I’m sure there’s some logic to my logic but I’ll blurt more details to some random stranger as involuntary confessional priest than in my own journal. Of course, online is for forever-like and strangers are only likely to pop up again, say, as job interviewer.

Talking with some random stranger he said he worked in california and while high on the job thought randomly moving paper files into other folders would be hilarious. He was caught, fired, changed job-types and years later in another country went to an interview and looked in the eye of his former California boss.

You never know what will come to bite one in the butt. You can avoid being bitten or presume you’ll deal and it won’t go septic and do what you must.

At the same, I realize that by writing publicly as much as I do, it’s working. I write myself away from mental habits of harsh scrutiny, redirect myself from depressive spirals, retrain my brain and chemistry to not be evil to myself.

I do chip away at my own habit of distancing myself from myself, creating areas of my brain that are under such high security clearance that even I am not qualified to see them. I’ve spent the last decade declassifying files of memory. 40-Word Years Project has been part of that process, guided by the principle of not dwelling and obsessing but moving along and the principle of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Have I ever not been examining? Probably not, but the spotlight was spun outwards, intensely dissecting out there, then inwards with judgement and condemnation during analysis, which furthered the clamming up.

There’s a Chinese proverb, “everyone pushes a falling fence.” How much of a contributor have I been to the feedback cycles of being dismissed and jabbed at verbally and not consulted and when consulted, not heard because all my body language and tone of voice said, please don’t listen to me? I started playing with variables of that in earnest in ’98. Fun was singled out as key and scheduled in. :p

Thru the tools of some aspects of buddhism over the last 6 years or so, I could disconnect the train before trainwreck of apologizing for existing. That’s been a particularly sticky habit. A decade ago my sentences and postures were in-filled with sorrysorrysorry. (Still happens when I’m disoriented or tired.) But now, even compared to a year ago, I’m able to jump in unself-consciously and state my position or make one up on the fly and engage with people I know or don’t and let the outcomes fall where they may.

I don’t feel myself my brother’s keeper in the same way and don’t presume that I will only have deleterious effects on others while others can have only positive effects, example or lessons for me. In the humbleness competition of 20-years ago of Christianity, that trait was positively valued but now the preface of self-reproach just wastes time that could be spent productively. (Of course however diverse ways people apply an ideology is not the responsibility of the ideology.) But this habit of self-deprecation is clear as being ego-based, and a request to be propped up and some sort of game to need to rebuff praise. So much wasted energy. We don’t have to be dogs all lowering our tails and gaze to an alpha, or least not throwing so much energy into it. Otherwise it is living wisting after a delete or undo key instead of living what is. Not continuous recoil and pursuit. Adapting, engaging, being curious, affected but onwards. No ultimate upwards nor downwards is ensured.

I can see distance travelled. Luna Allison pointed out a video on positivity from Cognitive Media called Smile or Die which mentioned how mandatory positivity informed economic crash and is a form of cruelty. I’ve held my pendulum back from swinging. Or held back the bubble.

The bubble in the level has to float. Somehow, unconsciously, as my behavior seems to tell, I’ve worked under the assumption that the bubble can slip out of the level and I’ll slip the noose of humanity and become subhuman. I make allowances for others that I don’t give myself. Am kinder and more compassionate to others than myself. I need to step back more and be more circumspect and see myself in context more.

Yeah, them’s some of the thoughts of this morning.

And the quote is something I find interesting in itself as a concept, interesting lens for understanding the mental trade-offs Avison may have made to balance faith and intellectual rigor, but I still lean towards the energy expenditure of creating systems, exploring competing systems.

Quote: “I must embrace a system or be enslaved by the struggle to create one” ~ Amanda Jernigan on Margaret Avison on a 17-page feature in Arc, Summer 2010

A Quiet Word

People who regularly do meditation cultivate a different brain.

Meditators displayed a significantly larger volume of hippocampal tissue, as well as a similarly increased volume of tissue in the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus. All of these areas are recognized as playing a role in emotional regulation.

Some flyers about town advertize “easy and fun meditation” which strikes me as misleading. I get absurdly tight whenever I see that. It’s misleading to conceive of meditation as fluffy amusement. I don’t mean it is Terribly Serious and to sell as “easy” is sacrilege. But when you sit with yourself, especially if your habit is to run from thing to thing to thing, once you stop, you can be swept into all the emotional backlog that you set aside in the name of getting on with things. It is Jacob wrestling with an angel for the first few minutes which last subjective hours.

It is not letting the mind float. It is not chilling. Those are kinds of relaxation and useful changing gears but it is not the same practice or effect. It is useful to use one part of self to let other parts rotate into rest. For example, to exercise so cardio takes front seat. To do practical things (gardening, cleaning, light sports) so that your main attention is all on one things. This is helpful but it exercises a different part of self.

Meditation is to set aside imaginative runs, denials, and b-b-b-buts. It is to see self as that absurd fragile creature of potential for loss and gain. It is setting aside. It is observing without pursuing nor running from. As Batchelor says around minute 13 is to stay within meditation and not checking in with how meditation is going. That step away is an affect of meditation.

Quote: “By continually coming back to the breath we stop feeding our mental habits” -Martine Batchelor [via Tricycle, starting about 3 minutes in to 7 minutes in]

Mindfulness Link

The image is from the park near the geodesic dome:

The last post was a bit long so I’m clipping a bit to here. It comes from practicing Hinduism.

Meditation Links: Marchand on incense, walks, flowers as calming route:

“People are a little shy to use that, like they are manipulating themselves.

We tend to take our emotions so very seriously, like we can’t control that. It’s like a taboo about controlling emotions but as long as you don’t, you have no control you are not free.

People feel we should be freely expressing our emotions or freely having them. You know…if we are angry, we have the right to be angry… but we also have the right to not be stupid. What’s it going to bring you, this anger, only more unhappiness.”
How to Control Your Emotions Thru Your Senses by the 9 Rasas guy, Peter Marchand

Marchand also has talks on emotional patterns and a dozen others.

Emotions seem like a hoberman sphere that one can make to take as big or small of space as one prefers. It still exists but clutters more, clutters less, pulls up more or less attention. By pressing or pulling, making public or private, it does not cease existence, or come into existence but the effect changes. I suppose I could expand on what this means but any attempt unravels to a room full of cotton loom explosion so take from it what you will of what is useful…

Blog Link: XUP has it: Talk about it or not, does airing or bottling give more resolution/healing.

Quote: “I can’t prove it but I can say it.” – Stephen Colbert

Mind Watching: Patterns

The mind has its own propanganda. It’s like seeing peripheral signs of Christmas, displays going up, inquiries of wishes, sly gazes into sock drawers to see if some need replacing.

At what point do we tip and the white decorative lights on trees and traffic light red and green become Christmassy again? Each year I forget. The associations change the constants.

Sometimes random seem to cluster to patterns that stretch over long distances and gloss over much to connect little. It may be a match. It may not. It doesn’t take much for brain pattern filter to kick in – take the newspaper gambit of there’s been a crime. System is: Let’s dredge files of every similar crime for the last century and prime those again as a pattern, burying the complexities of particulars. It’s an orientation, a context-building, it’s a proposal for narrative not a wax-stamped proof of How Things Are. It’s a product of the way the human mind wants a narrative. And it’s contrived and creates a reality from disparate events pared down of all the rich detail of real cause.

Logical or emotional cobwebs are ok so long as we don’t try to hang too much from them or make too much of them. We can make allowance for the gap between seem, feel, and all the facets of is.

Emotional times naturally have a fast pendulum swing. Some people carry a propensity to some emotions with them the way a group entering a new room carry with them energy and volume from another physical space.

That’s all natural but keeping one’s head can keep the rollar coaster from being so nauseating. It’s not something that is optional. Self-aware, others-aware, context-aware is survival-level.

It’s a luxury to blithe and blizzard along wrapped up in whatever tumult comes next. That’s for people who have excess energy to burn.

Long-haul one needs to recognize patterns, one’s own thinking when clouded or clear, distinguish when people are expressing emotion more than content. There is no unveiling of underlying reality or nature when things feel particularly good or particularly bad, light washed or white-washed or mud-splotched. Everything is the complex nature and reality, the mix.

One Deep Breath‘s prompt this week is loneliness. Poewar’s is difficult subjects, with links to depression help. Some people around have a funk, a nosedive, a fatigue. Is it seasonal, pre-Christmas? We say November blahs (and February blahs, and July doldrums, and, and). Labels impose a pattern that detracts from this moment’s reality. Now isn’t bad, or good. Now is.

To backtrack a zigzag, Poewar links here include one from the blog author of Walking the Black Dog. (Fabulous name.) It might be hard for some to read. It doesn’t buck and bolt away from depression. It doesn’t cling to depression as something noble and beautiful in any Plathian-camp way. It’s an awareness of it being ok to be walking there. It doesn’t have to be glamorized, or demonized, hid from or clung to.

Link: Osho talks about attachment, how to watch attachment, aversion and indifference. Chodron’s interpretation is to not to try to change them but aware of them, conscious of unconscious and the torsion each adds to be aware of what catches you and catch it first.

Youtube Link: Morrissey being in interviewed by BBC, the interviewer opened by saying “it is good to meet you!” and Morrissey pulled back, paused, and said with measured reserve, “why?” as if to say to the interviewer, who are you and what are you about? At that point I said to myself, this is a guy I could like. Any sort of fawning and his radar clicked on. A lot of people would let that pass or assume it is just a neutral social patter or take it as a compliment. The interviewer made an acceptable answer and the interview buzzed on.

Article Link: Hookers need johns

Word-wise:

Oarish. I think it should be a word. 1. A means of regular forward and back motion to propel forward with great effort and low speed. 2. Like or in the manner or shape of oars. flat in the manner of oars such as letter openers, paddles for honey, wooden carvings of leaves, origami of amateurs, failed designs of paper airplanes.

Quote: “It is difficult to steer a parked car, so get moving.” – Henrietta Mears