Becoming something…

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I feel like I’m trying to escape something, but I don’t know what it is.

Tonight, I hid under the coffee table. This is the dog’s space. He was very confused. Yet, at the very moment that I was trying to get away, I was trying to get closer to the ground.

Are we not just like the dog, trying to recognize one space as constant? This is our grounding. We have evolved as animals, but still need context. Unlike the dog, our being grounded isn’t as easily shattered, we can adjust to some variables but it can still just as easily disappear.

What can we do to stop running?

It may be about turning inward, instead of looking outward. I’ve pulled some interesting bits of information and insight from: Yoga Journal - Yoga Meditation - Teaching Grounded Meditation

These thoughts on meditation provide some great insight into our minds and facing our own moments of wanting to be down with the dog under the coffee table.

+The mind can be our greatest friend or our greatest enemy, the source of many of our problems or the solution to our problems.

+Stages of Meditation Meditation encompasses three distinct stages. The first is self-regulation, in which we teach our students to consciously alter their body-mind functioning and feelings. For example, teach your students breath awareness with the stated aim of inducing relaxation.

Having taught self-regulation, the second stage involves methods of self-exploration, which consist mainly of concentration combined with self-awareness. This allows us to become aware of parts of ourselves that were previously unconscious. Self-exploration techniques develop inner strength and stability.

Ultimately, self-exploration techniques open the door to the pursuit of self-liberation and spiritual growth, the linking of our awareness to higher consciousness. This third stage is called self-mastery, which leads to self-realization.

+…meditation teaches us that we cannot get rid of our problems, that life is inherently problematic and challenging…If we simply seek ecstasy, and hope to avoid sorrow and suffering, then we are actually seeking the loss of ourselves. The ultimate aim of meditation is to remain grounded in self-awareness under all conditions of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, gain and loss.

I hope these thoughts have been helpful. I have tried to start my mornings with some quick yoga exercises. Today, I didn’t. A lesson learned. You can actually find some simple exercises online to get your day started (youtube). You could even start with five minutes in the morning attempting to focus on nothing but your breath (Tantric Breath Exercise or Three Breathing Exercises). Breathing should bring a level of self-awareness, so making noise while breathing is encouraged. I promise you will notice a difference with your day. You can check out what I do each morning here.

“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Life sure does feel like a maze, does it not? Wandering looking for the right direction, knowing at any moment we might walk right into a wall. The worst part is that we are often doomed to back-track. At best, we find ourselves busting through the wall but only to find ourselves lost again, with little frame of reference. It is part pre-determined and part under your control.

There is no alternative to being yourself. I think mostly it has to do with your attitude along the way.

You have experienced parts of the maze behind you, but not all of it. Has it shaped you? A product of our experiences or not, we have got to start listening to the scale to which we define ourselves. The confusing reality is, often the walls are miles apart and filled with millions of people. Life isn’t long enough to assume you can deduce the way out through guess and check. The cheese might not be as close or as far as you think. Without tangible walls to give a sense of direction or a map to the maze ahead (or the one being built), why are we full of this concern. You can define ‘this’ how you like, but even if the concern is not to have one, what is it in context to?

We often look to our most local of mazes through which we see ourselves traveling, forgetting the immensity of the one we are actually in.

Leave your home, find your car (or the nearest bus stop), and think about how well you seem to navigate the most local of mazes. You are probably doing just fine along life’s maze. Stop looking for the walls, looking for the end, and fearing the retracing of steps. Otherwise, the cheese won’t have a smell anymore and your sense of direction will be localized to the smaller of life’s mazes. Because the local maze you might be stuck in, is the one inside your head.

“You emerge victoriously from the maze you’ve been traveling in.”

Don’t create context, walls to define yourself against. Self, defined, is limited to the scale of what you define it against. There is no alternative to being yourself, amidst walls you can’t see and contexts you can’t begin to define.

What a waste of time?

or was it?

Years seem to fly by these days and with each year coming the transition into the next also seems to have much more philosophical baggage with it. I’m holding onto a lot, happy about a lot, and getting over a bunch of things. The new year allows for a big sigh of relief and a chance to motion, with a toast, everything into “that was last year”. It honestly feels like one of the only moments each year where it’s relatively easy to live in the moment. A few drinks down and a count down away from closing a book and opening a new one at the same time.

What is next?
Are we sad it’s over or happy for what is next?

Maybe, most importantly, this is a time to reflect. Treasure the space you have to yourself or the friends that are surrounding you. Time can slow for a moment as bubbles from your bubbly tickle your nose. Nothing else can be a greater lesson in learning how to live from book to book, year to year, and day to day. It’s a great chance to understand how to find joy, or live in the tough reality of a lifetime of transitions.

Is someone not there or something missing?
Who IS there? What did you get out of this past year?

Stop comparing yourself to dreams and actually work towards them. If you are the type to set out some resolutions, let your one resolution be to have none.

Look at your hands.
Look at your eyes in the mirror.
Tell yourself, this is the new year and I have already accomplished what I’m setting out to do.

Lets take a moment to define “going with the flow.” First, this statement acknowledges that there is a flow and a direction to things. Also, it is important to note that if you just sit there and do nothing, the flow, like in a river, will take you somewhere. While that journey may be interesting, chances are it may not be what will make us the happiest. So I think “going with the flow” is effective as a mantra only if we swim with the flow and help guide it. Just make sure you aren’t trying to avoid or swim around the unavoidable. You might just need to fall over a few waterfalls, hit a few rocks, and swallow a few gulps of water on your way.

Use the momentum of life to engage yourself and invest in opportunities. And, for those seeking all the options in the world or holding onto too much, a valiant futile attempt to swim against the flow is just a waste of energy.

I spent most of last week in Seattle, which is why my posts were so sparse. I was there for both a conference on experiential education and some personal meddling. My significant-other, Gregg, had taken the initiative a few months earlier to begin co-coordinating our conferences. We had one methodology, decide on a city first then conference second. Which of course we mixed up priorities. Then this is where he and I are different. Conference search, for me, meant days online looking at all the options possible. Cities first, then maybe find time to see what conferences were there. Plus I had some ideal, that nagged me during the search, that this was an opportunity to find a conference that had topics that I was really into (I scraped our strategy basically to look for the most perfect option) I’m exhausted all over again just thinking about it, aren’t you? As my list grew, Gregg’s list got smaller and he really was only considering the city because he thought, if someone else is paying why be so concerned. You can start to see a trend.

It might begin to look like I’m heading down the road of dissing the “open-minded-free-spirited” bunch but I am in fact pinning the tail on a much larger donkey. This post is for all of us and all those times when we find that “going with the flow” is really a guise for being indecisive. This causes tension in most everyone because being completely narrow-minded or open-minded isn’t really ideal, yet our society rewards making the most perfect “right” decision but only after being open minded enough to consider every option. We are destined to fail, how can we be both at the same time?

Through my whole process of looking, looking, looking, I exemplified my tendency to wander. While I was looking, Gregg forced us to make some decisions on his ever shortening list. In the end, my tactic led nowhere. City first, conference second had us removing more options from his list. We were left with one, Seattle, which was on both of our lists since the beginning (a slap in the face). Plus the conference was applicable to both of our work positions. I grumbled at the decision.

Part three of all of this was the beginning phases of looking at graduate programs. I thought, wouldn’t it have been better to have chosen an area with more college options? Quite the opposite was true, at least for me. Since the Seattle area didn’t have the plethora of options of say Boston, I was able to satiate my desire to look at all of them. I ended up visiting all applicable programs offered in my broad areas of interest at each of of the institutions.

There is a growing lesson from this. I could over analyze this whole ordeal but I’ll keep the lesson simple. Settle more often. Settling for Seattle led me to find the first graduate program that seemed to take into account all my interests, plus the institution is highly rated. I discovered an article in Psychology Today while in the beautiful Seattle library, just as I was wrapping my own head around this conclusion. Click here and check it out!

Here are some tips they suggest:

How to Make Options Your Allies

You can outfox your evolved emotional makeup.

* God is not in the details: Practice making decisions quickly about small things and routine purchases. Limit the time you spend comparing specs. Build confidence in your “gut” by attending to it.
* Don’t dwell: Refuse to spend too much time regretting a decision or blaming yourself for a poor outcome. Instead learn from your mistakes and determine to do better.
* Keep your expectations realistic: Needing it all is guaranteed to make you unhappy.
* Risk a wrong decision: Fight emotional paralysis by seeing that even making the “wrong” choice is often better than making no choice at all; you still learn through trial and error. It is better to blunder your way through life than to avoid making decisions.
* Don’t look back: Engineer your decisions so that they are binding and irreversible: Force yourself to buy final sale items or draw up a contract with family or friends stating that you will not reverse course on a larger decision.

This whole topic relates right back to a previous entry about focusing your options, specifically regarding those close to you. It seems like although settling has a negative connotation we must settle and focus in order to actually have time to experience something. Play to your evolutionary strong points and keep it simple stupid.