Affectionate Awareness

Sounds True is not only a great publisher but Tami Simon does these unbelievable great and meaty interviews with some of her authors and thinkers and writers.

The other week she interview Jon Kabat-Zinn, which you can listen to here or download from iTunes.

Here are some of my favorite passages....

I love this way of looking at "failure"

you can't imitate anybody else. You have to find your own way, and life being the teacher will show you every time you get caught, every time you get hung up, every time you get attached. All of the things that we most think might be failures are actually just lessons—just the way, I think, Thomas Edison said, after his thousandth try resulted in the light bulb, but [he had] 999 failures, he said, "Those weren't failures at all. I had 999 ways of knowing how not to make a light bulb." And so, in that sense, that again is a kind of generous way of looking at it.

Regarding brain research on the effects of meditation: 

 all this brain research that's coming out that's showing not only changes in the activity of the very important regions of the brain that have to do with learning, that have to do with memory, that have to do with executive function and decision-making and emotion regulation. [They're] not only finding changes in activation of various regions of the brain and the direction of what you might call great cognitive control or greater executive functioning and great emotional intelligence, but they are actually now seeing structural changes in many of these regions of both the neo-cortex and limbic system—the emotional domain of the brain.
So in eight weeks, in MBSR, they're seeing thickening in various regions of the hippocampus and certain regions of the insula and the neocortex, and then the thinning of the amygdala. If these results turn out to be true, it is really demonstrating (and the irony is that it's through meditation research) that the human brain is really an organ of experience and it responds to experience by changing its own structure. And its structure is the most complex structure in the known universe, and consists of over a hundred billion neurons, and neurons are only half the population of the human brain. [Those] hundred billion neurons [have] so many connections that, for our purposes, the number of synaptic connections is infinite.

And another, regarding "affectionate attention":

Mindfulness is—you know, the way I define it operationally, is "the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally." And the "non-judgmentally" is the real kicker, because we have judgments and ideas and opinion about just about everything. But that's where the affectionate attending comes in. It's not some kind of cold clinical perspective [where] we're taking on things as you would if you were just thinking about things. It's actually experiencing a sense of being in relationship to everything that is being experienced because the reality is all relational.
I mean, you can't touch without being touched, and by extension, all the senses are in some way relational. If you don't think that when you see that you're being seen by the world—well, you may not feel that way if you're living in New York City where everybody averts eye contact. But if you tried to spend the night in the rainforest in the Amazon, say, you'll have the feeling that you're being seen, not just that you're seeing. That you're being heard, that you're not just hearing. And you're being smelled and it's not just you smelling. And you could very well be being tasted, too, by small creatures, as well as potentially [be] lunch for big creatures.

A Contrary View to Lululemon Flap

Okay, well, this point is fair.  This blog post responds to Lululemon's Chip Wilson's decision to tip his hand as a fan of Any Rand.

Leslie Kaminoff suggests we actually read the novels -

I have read Atlas Shrugged five times, Fountainhead four times, and all of Ayn Rand’s non-fiction. As far as her more formal work on philosophy is concerned, I have had the privilege of personally studying with two of the top Objectivist scholars in the world.  I have been contemplating and applying Rand’s ideas in every area of my life and career for four decades, and I’m well aware of the hard work it’s taken to forge a consistent world view in which the principles of Yoga are compatible with those of Objectivism.  It wasn’t easy, but I did it, and I owe whatever success I’ve had in my life to the effort I put in.

He doesn't really explain how he forged that integral and consistent world view, though, and I wish he had.   Guess All Things Considered has found their Ayn Rand fan yogi (see link above)

David Nichtern's Mindfulness Meditation Instruction

David Nichtern is the one who introduced me to meditation in April 2002. The practice has helped me immeasurably. It's so simple yet so powerful. Here - in only six minutes - David provides his instructions on mindfulness meditation. Check it out, do it and enjoy!

Here is his web site to learn more: www.davidnichtern.com

A Song for the Weekend

Mesmerizing and a beautiful way to start the weekend...

Yoga Improves Student Performance

This warms my heart....grades up, suspensions down...

"Change In An Instant" The New Field of Energy Psychology

Insights from the Edge is a free podcast sponsored by the publisher SoundsTrue.  It’s one of my favorites and always interesting.  I always learn a lot.  

The one from the other day, the 29th, the anniversary of my mother’s death, is about energy psychology which is a new area of psychology, trying to help people live better and happier lives. 

Dr. Henry Grayson, the guest who is a psychologist and a physicist, defines energy psychology this way:

the field of energy psychology is just one that recognizes that everything is comprised of cell energies and that consciousness plays a role in it. And so the field of energy psychology recognizes both the dealing with the energy meridians that we're talking about; dealing with the field of energy that surrounds a body; dealing with the "non-local mind" that it has been called in physics—that our mind is not contained in the brain and the skull but in fact reaches out to countless others around us because it's all a part of "one mind," as physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it. Whether it's the subtle energies of the Eastern tradition of energy—not just meridians but the chakras. And so the broad field of energy psychology has people that work with various ones of these dimensions or all of them. Or just how consciousness seems to affect it without using any specific focus on any of those. That would be the broader field of energy psychology, I would say.

Here is the description of the podcast which you can listen to here or read or print out the transcript.  Or you can download from iTunes.   All free.  And I highly recommend.  

 Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Henry Grayson, a leading psychologist who has spent decades exploring the connections between psychology, physics, and the spiritual traditions of the world. Dr. Grayson founded and served as chairman emeritus at the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York. With Sounds True, he has created the nine-hour audio training course The New Physics of Love: The Power of Mind and Spirit in Relationships. In this episode, Tami speaks with Dr. Grayson about the role of thoughts in our relationships, how the non-local nature of the universe impacts our consciousness, and the possibility of “deleting undesirable and obsolete core beliefs in the twinkling of an eye.” (60 minutes) 

SoundsTrue has published a CD, which is a 9 hour course, called The New Physics of Love.  Dr Grayson also has a book called Mindful Loving.

In the podcast, Dr. Grayson describes a process he went through on himself to release the disturbance caused by a childhood trauma.  He said it takes about 45 minutes.  I’m not sure what you do for the unconscious traumas..., but here is his process: 

• Place the fingers on the forehead - to focus.  Through the centuries people often did that.  Even Rodin knew that in his portrayal of his statue the thinker.  We learn that it stimulates the frontal lobes of the brain, subtle energies, helps us focus.   Focus on the trauma, memory,  who was in that scene, the scene, how i felt, where i feel it in the body.  Breathe.   
• Place the fingers on the eyebrow I release all fear related to this trauma.  Take a deep breath and exhale.  
• Place the fingers on the outer edge of the eyebrow.  And i release all anger and rage related to trauma.  Take a deep breath or two or three.
• Place the Fingers underneath the eye I release all anxieties related to this trauma 
• Place the fingers on under the nose I release all embarassment related to this trauma
• Place the fingers on under the lip I release all shame and guilt related to this trauma.  And a deep breath.  
• Place the fingers on under the arm - I release all worry and excessive concern related to this trauma.  Deep breathing again.  
• Place the fingers on under the rib cage in front.  I release all hurt and sadness related to this trauma
• Place the fingers on over the heart - I release fear.  breath in love and exhale fear.  6,8 or 10 slow breaths.  
• Place the fingers on the collar bone (one either side).  Has to do with fear again.  I release all fear related to this trauma 

I would assess what came up, how much disturbance remained for me on a scale of one to ten.  Was a 10 when I started.  On the first round I got it down to a 6, second time it came down to a 3, third down to 0.

Then he addressed, for me a key question, the obvious question:  

TS: I think of all of the people who have physical challenges and who have wanted so much for there to be a healing. They have brought all of their intent, all of their openness and capacity into the situation and it hasn't changed for them. They've remained ill. And so when I hear your story about the fingers burning and your belief, I think, well … how do we understand all of the people who aren't healing?
HG: I think that's a wonderful question, Tami. It's one that inspired the book I just finished writing, actually.
What I discovered—I was giving a seminar in Boston a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago and I had the inspiration to start it off by saying, "How many people here want to have a totally happy and healthy life?" Of course everybody's hand went up. And of course my asking this question was inspired by what I experienced clinically and with myself in other dimensions but I thought I'd ask this larger audience. Everybody's hand went up and I said, "With your permission, I'd like to come around and do this muscle testing on everybody very quickly and to see if you believe you deserve to have a totally healthy and happy life or if it's safe for you to have a totally healthy and happy life." I thought that maybe 25-30 percent would have some of those.
The results blew my mind, literally. Everybody agreed to participate in it. And in this workshop there were probably 75 people who were there and I quickly went around and did this. Eighty-two percent of the people had both of those barriers as beliefs. They don't deserve it and it's not safe to have a totally healthy and happy life. The other 18 percent had one or the other. And these are only two of many barriers we could have.
I thought, "Well, let's check this out further. Is it just New Englanders?" I was doing a seminar in New York a few weeks later and got the same results. Raleigh, North Carolina? Same results. Chicago—same results. San Francisco, Austin, Texas, all across the country, I got the same results. Almost identical. There was just a point or two off. And these were only two, as I say, of many different barriers that could be beliefs or traumas or world views or secondary gains or whatever it might be. Most of those are not conscious to us. And all of these people in all of these audiences were mostly people who had done a lot of work in different kinds of self reflection—spiritually or psychologically—and still were not conscious of it.
We can't blame ourselves for it because that's what the ego mind always wants us to do: to blame ourselves for making ourselves sick or whatever. No, we can't blame ourselves. We've just had those downloads. We had those conclusions from childhood. It is part of the human condition that we carry that. You can't sail a boat if we've got anchors holding it back. And maybe the anchors aren't visible to us. We've taken sailing lessons. We've learned how to hoist the sails, how to set the rudder, how to set the sail. The wind is there but the boat's not moving. We've not been taught how to look for all of those anchors. It might be hidden, holding the boat back.
And I think the same thing is true for us, that when we don't get the results that we want there are other hidden anchors. If 90-95 percent of all of our behaviors are not conscious, it's very likely that we have a bunch there that are just not conscious to us. One reason I do the muscle testing is because it helps us access that quite quickly as to what they are and where they are and what it would take to cut loose those anchors.
So I think that that is a role that keeps a lot of things from working. And then the other thing is that sometimes we just have a need, for some reason, whether it's conscious or unconscious, but we have some strong gains for keeping or having the sickness. We haven't dealt with it otherwise. And if we've not dealt with it, whether it's in a relationship or in the body, or whatever it is, we're not ready to let it go. And so we have to be ready to do that. And that's why I like these other methods too because it helps open up that dimension. That's when I say that whether you want to have a healthy and happy relationship or whether you want to have a healthy and happy body or mind, or business success, or money, or whatever it might be, the same thing applies.