I just posted something like this the other day. Tara Brach is always so good it made sense to post yet another on the same theme. Remember fear and anxiety are simply clinical terms for manifestations of fear. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
The practice of being with all that arises within. Fear here can be translated to "anxiety," which is the clinical term for fear which everyone at one time or another experiences with or without a diagnosis of some sort of anxiety "disorder." Psychiatry pathologizes much of the normal human experience and fear and/or anxiety often referred to in Buddhism as such. Normal. There are techniques to learn how to be with these normal feelings, whether they're very intense or not. -- And boy does protracted psych drug withdrawal open the floodgates of fear and terror and trauma, like nothing else. It’s not like anything natural that occurs before drug damage as those of us gravely impacted discover. But even with this sort of iatrogenic damage I’ve found that the best solution is to treat it like all the rest. I’ve decided that in the end, it’s the same thing as though on steroids. … [click on title to read and view more]
I've been studying The Gene Keys for a couple of years. I find the work a delightful contemporary mythological window into reality that truly does penetrate into the cells of the body if one contemplates the process that unfolds. -- "People don't need help. They need love." … [click on title for the rest of the post]
This is a very brief but wonderful meditation and emotional release. I highly recommend it. -- little excerpt (While) feeling so frustrated with all the trying and "efforting" that we put into things, I'd like us to go a little deeper and explore what the real underpinning is of all of that push to try to be in control of things. So in this moment can you allow yourself to just feel how much you just want to 'effort;, in fact it happens a lot, all day long... … [click on the title to read and view more]
Anderson Cooper went to this retreat having never meditated. I found the clip quite enjoyable and if you're new to meditation it might be quite informative too.
On a "mindfulness" retreat, Anderson Cooper puts down the microphone and learns to love silence, as well as life without a cell phone. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
This is just for fun. I do not recommend or know anything about the maker of this video. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
I want to practice what Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind’ — a vital corrective to the cynicism that comes when we let life’s hard realities darken our vision and diminish our imagination. It’s a way of looking at the world that makes fresh starts possible in everything: our personal lives, our work lives, even our political lives. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
(old post sharing again by sticking it to top of blog today) -- Spring has returned and I’m so happy to be able to start freely walking barefoot on the ground again. I’ve posted this a couple of times before and it seems a good practice to introduce to new readers now that weather will allow, so I’m posting it again. There is science behind my incredible and unstoppable need to walk barefoot upon the earth!! Every day that weather permits I do this. I walk barefoot on the earth. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
Our suffering is important in that it reveals the suffering of others. There is nothing unique about our suffering. Tonglen meditation is particularly good at transforming this understanding into something valuable. Tonglen is a method that allows for the development of compassion. Compassion is necessary both for the relief of our own suffering and so that we might serve others towards the end of their suffering too.
Trauma has relocated from an event to the nervous system itself, expanding the definition to include any event where our animal body is overwhelmed. This rethinking can be attributed to Somatic Experiencing (SE), a psychotherapeutic approach created by Peter Levine that conceptualizes trauma as occurring when survival responses (fight and flight) cannot be completed... … [click on title for the rest of the post]
