Hi Jamie

Your posts are well written and articulate. It seems to me that within your writing are also your answers? “I enjoy writing” that could be a great place to explore?

Happiness, one of those words with so many associations, something we so badly want to grasp and cling to, where the grasping and clink transforms it into something else… usually not happiness.   The word certainly comes with a lot of baggage let alone when we add the word ‘BUT’.  I want to be happy, but….

I’ve often used that phrase in the past. I want to be happy… but… but I’m afraid to be… but I don’t think I deserve to… but life isn’t how it should be, could be, if only (ego, control)… but I don’t want to be disappointed when the moment of happiness passes….. Have you ever wondered about this one?  I want to be happy… but what if I’m happiest when I’m unhappy?

We are complex simple creatures.  Of course all these notions are stories, perhaps at some level illusions of our own creation. Stories we tell because at some time they are/were useful to us but perhaps now are habit. (A practice of meditation and contemplation can help detach from our habit of thought.)

The task, as you are engaged in, is to look past the stories and words to get to a place where you are (you are never not thier), and from that place find a way to say YES. Yes to yourself, your situation, your emotions, your thoughts, non of which are you. Those are just things you get to experience. The good and the bad, experiences with labels that don’t exist in a world that is non-dual and everything is connected.

If I may a comment on your statement: ” We don’t need to be kind and loving to toxic people, to people who abuse us and put us down. Instead, we need to set boundaries with them. Likewise, we don’t need to be kind to selfish, self-centered people, who only care about themselves. You can be kind and loving, but wisely, with boundaries.”

Just something I noticed  with your conclusion “You can be kind and loving, but wisely, with boundaries”.  Implies that creating healthy (wise) boundaries is a act of love and kindness for oneself and the other even those that have hurt us (the other is also ourselves) to which I agree and suggest a path  to become unstuck from your question? To set healthy boundaries with your thoughts, your past, your hopes… is a loving act you can gift yourself? ( Boundaries that don’t require labeling, if only’s , should of, could of… toxic, selfish…. One can set healthy boundaries without labeling)

Happiness I think, like Joy, isn’t something we create but a  something in a moment we get to sometimes experience and if we are wise express our gratitude for, breath in, breath out…

Happiness not something we want (desire) but create space for, no but’s… a extra place setting at the table if you will.

I hope you keep writing

“Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous” – Joseph Cmpbell

Hi William

My suspension is that like Joy, Passion isn’t something one seeks as if it can be grasped but a experience that one might be surprised by in the moment.

The metaphor of the crossroads suggests the duality of choice of either or and that one path would be better then the other. If only we could know which one. (leading to anxiety and fear)  Such measuring suggestive of the future moment when you will look back on the past and wonder if only or what might have been if I turned left instead of right, or maybe turned 180 or some other degree of a turn? It is in this moment that we imagine the future moment where we think back on the past moment where we pondered the notion of the crossroads through the eyes of a possible regret that we chose wrong.

The crossroads, I think implies a assumption that if we could just figure out all the angles and control them, bend them to our will (ego) as we imagine things could be ‘if only’ we make all the right choices… and then just maybe they will lead to this thing call passion. The crossroads were the past is always gone, the present never stays and the future never comes –   We are undone before we begin when what we are looking for is something we already have/are but do not see.

I like what Joseph Campbell had to say when you talked about Bliss (satcitananda) – “if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Something I have learned over time is that whatever choices you make, nothing you learn is waisted and will most likely lead you down paths you never imagined. Follow your heart, your ‘satcitananda’ with passion as best you can and enjoy the ride. You are the answer to your question.  Dance

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown.” Alan Watts

The first time I heard the notion of centering prayer it was in connection to the notion of contemplation leaving me to wonder what the difference was between Meditation, Contemplation, Prayer – Centering prayer.

I haven’t found clear answers however my thoughts are that the general difference between meditation and contemplation is that meditation is a emptying (decent) that can creates space for the state of contemplation which isn’t so much as about thinking and words but a non-dual listening – Which is similar to a state centering prayer leads to which is a prayer that we don’t make happen, No intention other then having eyes to see and ears to hear, no ego or beseeching...)  but a happening resting in and arising from stillness/silence.

My experience has been that centering prayer often transitioned to contemplation which transitioned to meditation then back to contemplation and centering.  The Common thread being a emptying and ungrounding which paradoxically lead to experience of being centered.

A Zen master might say nothing was attained. Not that the experience was not experienced only that the experience was is  always present… for those with eyes to see and ears to hear…  put another way we return home to see it for the first time, and that we work for that which no work is required,  nothing is attained because each of us have always had and are it.

But another way, Einstein noted that the same level of consciousness that notices a problem won’t be the same level of consciousness that solves it. The tenancy is to try to ascend our way out of the problem by thinking our way into a new level of consciousness, to use the mind to grasp the mind, the eye to see the eye. However new levels of consciousness can not arise from ascending but only from first descending of which meditation, contemplation and centering prayer are aids.

In the end language is problematic. I appreciate the space to wonder. 🙂

Needless to say our on again, off again history gives me hope that one day she will let me back into her life

Having been were you are I can’t help but wonder if at some level we invite the experience of being abused. Is that karma… as in our actions create results and we ought not be surprised when they do.

Zen Buddhism suggests that suffering arises when we want things to be other than how they are and that where there is hope, there is fear and where there is fear there is hope. Two sides of the same coin where the two can’t be separated from each other. Non duality has us imagine that by naming a pair of opposites a coin we have solved the problem of duality… only we can’t help ourselves from picking the coin up, flipping it into the air and calling heads OR tails and so we suffer. We hope to escape fear and wonder why fear keeps chasing us.

The Way suggests that freedom from fear is to become hopeless, which goes against almost every thing we have been taught. You got to have hope… right? OR maybe, what if, Liberated from hope and fear, we are free to discover clarity and energy in the present moment.

If we think about it our notion of hope almost always involves looking backwards to some unwanted past we wish to change or to some imagined future where where we can get Life to work out as we would have it be (read ego/control). Keeping us stuck flipping  coins, this time for sure, in only, maybe, what if, should of, could of.. so we suffer.

What would your contact with your friend look like without the baggage of the hope/fear coin?

In Zen the notion of hopelessness is not the same notion as despair.  That’s something we have been taught to believe, something I’ve bought into, only now I’m not so sure. Giving up the hope/fear coin is about learning to sit in, leaning into impermanence, groundlessness and uncertainty, which is actually the reality of everyone moment. Without the coin, being in that moment as is,  eyes open.

Without mistaking the notion of ‘hopelessness’ with not having intentions or goals,  Imagine yourself not feeling as if you must hope something… what a wonderful freeing feeling!

Imagine not living in this limbo of hope/fear and being honest with your friend. The history suggests your not going to be happy with the answer but at least you will know one why or the other. If you decide that that is not a risk your willing to take, fearing that you might lose what you have, then enjoy what you have as it is without the need for the hope/fear coin. You suffer either way however at least it would be a honest suffering.

Reading over the last I suspect I have been advising myself with regards to my own situation.. a exercise which I find oddly cathartic…. If I come off harsh I apologize.

I wasn’t offended.  I tend to ‘step in it’ with relationship topics 🙂

The way you expressed yourself in the last post was very elegant

Hi Jill

Healthy boundaries are important, establishing them difficult, especially as it comes to family.  So easy to trigger the “ghosts” of the past and doing so reacting to the past instead of the present moment and the relationship we really desire to have with those we love.  We all have a tendency to focus on the worst memories and overlooking the more positive ones.

The task of removing the past from being in the present requires creating a safe space for honest communication.  Here the art of detachment, meditation and contemplation can help, even then its not easy. The best advice on preparing to enter into such dialog I’ve come across was  a book by Kerry Patterson –  Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High.

That said there are times when Love requires that relationships end. (relationships never end even if people decide not to meet up again so the word ‘end’ may not be the correct word).

I intentionally use the words the “Love requires”, meaning that the decision to end a relationship is for the good and growth of all involved and and genuine concern of all involved.  In Crucial Conversations before dialog begins all parties involved must first ‘master thier stories’. I believe the same is required in determining if ones actions are coming from a place of love or from a the intention to punish and be right.

It seems most of the stories we tell ourselves, as they involve troubled relationships, tend to fall into two categories – victim and villain stories – which more likely then not trigger the ghosts and end dialog/relationship. I mention it only to suggest that if were telling victim and villain stories were probably not acting from a place of love but to punish, ourselves and others. And being right, we love to be right, nothing better then being righteously right. (no saying your doing that, that very much is a trap of which I am well versed.)

I’ll be candid even knowing the above I’ve failed more times then succeeding in healing troubled relationships and that for the good (growth) of all involved have had a relationships end or limited.  Surprisingly it has been in the pain of a ending relationships that I have learned and grown to do and be better. That growth sometimes lead to reconciliation but not always. That is the way of Life.

I wasn’t sure what you meant when you asked for support and I hope I have not crossed a line.  I am not suggesting you are not right in feeling what your feeling or that your decision to limit contact isn’t for the best for all involved. My hope for you is that by accessing to your inner truth and stillness you find peace with your decisions. In your stillness you will know.

I feel like a sad pathetic person and am not looking for comforting words but for some direction on how to go about fixing my life by fixing my day-to-day

I think you answered your own question with the suggestion of taking things day to day, perhaps focusing on steps you can accomplish day by day.

I personally don’t like the word fix in this context, not sure why…. (thinking out loud) much of our suffering comes from wishing things were other then they were, if only this, should of this… as if such thinking could change our past experiences and changing the past fix our future.  The source of our If only’s, and should of’s tend to be about ego and control , a desire or even demand that life be as we deem it should to be other then as it is. To fix things within that context would likely continue trying to control life as we would will it to be vice engage in life as it is in the moment where we actually have influence to change, inevitably leading to more suffering and stuckness.

We can’t fix the past or the future, we can however learn and learning better do better. A change in perspective that is more growth orientated then a ‘fixed’ a one. My feeling is that from such a perspective one is more likely be kinder to one self and avoid such labeling as pathetic. Such labeling being unhelpful in the day-to-day approach to change. More of a flow with life then trying push against it.

Not sure if thier was any advice in that, just thoughts. The following from Auden cam to mind as I was thinking out loud. To move forward we have to let our illusion die, which isn’t saying that we don’t feel what were feeling about our past and such. Only that we don’t hold on to them as if they are the reality of the present. Effectively creating the things we fear

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”  ― W H Auden

Good question Lost One Flow

Came across a book when I was much younger titled ‘Surprised by Joy’. I’ve always liked that title. It hasn’t been my experience that one can ‘find’ joy, seek it out as if it was a something that you could hold onto. My experience of it is that its a something that happens and surprises, the surprise part of the experience of joy.

This morning I was at a yoga class.  Everyone moving from flow to flow of the routine similar to the other mornings.   Anyway during the class I catch a glimpse  in the mirror of everyone bending and twisting, and could help but wonder of the absurdity of it… but then also a kind of beauty of everyone showing up, struggling through, sometimes if just a moment flowing through.  In that absurdity of the moment I was surprised by joy.

Each of us it turns out have questioned the sanity of getting up at that early hour, especially those days when we arn’t feeling our best and if asked what is the point couldn’t answer. But you show up, engage with the moment, with life as it is, in all its routine absurd struggle and sometimes surprised by the wonder of it and in the wonder joy?

Like a yoga class life will find you twisted up in routine of work and family obligations.. but maybe if one creates the space for it, will glance in the mirror and noting the absurdity of all our striving also see the beauty and be surprised by joy.

I wonder Lost1Flow if the answer to your question is in your avatar name – Create some space within and find the flow.