healing our understanding

I was listening to Tavis Smiley’s special radio segment called “The Medicalization of Race” (December 20, 2009). It’s a roundtable discussion about race in light of The Human Genome Project and contemporary cultural and scientific understandings. They were talking about how race is a culturally created designation.

I recall in my Cultural Anthropology studies how xenophobia is near to the root of making fearful generalizations of the other; hence, race an easy catch-all for the other colored humans. We’re all colored. In this way, the race designation isn’t entirely about color or physical differences, be they hair, body types, or genetic mutations, it’s about a fearful, culturally conditioned, dualistic, karmic identification with and against the concept of race. Race is a conceptual separation of humanity, based on egocentric karmic conditioning.

Our true nature is essential, free, healing and beyond the separatism and contradictory nature of egocentric karmic conditioned thinking and doing.

In my deep and lengthy investigation into reforming my path towards an authentic livelihood within culture, I realized something central and inspiring at the end of Tavis Smiley’s race panel discussion. It appears everyone needs healing of understanding. If we are openly honest about our co-existence with nature, humans are in a quandry as well another growth phase. The averting socio-environmental disasters and enabling a beneficial co-creative growth phase is dependent on re-under-standing (healing our understandings) as a function of disidentifying from egocentric karmic conditioning and re-co-creating our living practices in accordance of compassionate awareness, loving acceptance, and our indisputable universal true nature of oneness, change, and emptiness.

To be a little more specific about how this realization is important in my personal vocational path, I have needed to re-understand life in order to live it. The personal and cultural conditioning I’ve learned has brought about significant suffering in my identified life. I’ve also observed that there are many people who don’t perceive or feel like I do; which is further evidence of the grounding fact that identification with our constructed views is largely our existential understanding and worldly doing mode. However, the universal human commonality is the same: identification with our karmic conditioned enculturation and idiosyncratic coping mechanisms causes suffering for ourselves and others. While our contemporary social understanding may be that this is an unfortunate side of our limitation as human beings, this is not the truth. Healing our understanding is re-under-standing that views, beliefs, opinions, values, goals, purposes, and such complicated, conflicted and fragmented thinking is not our true nature; it is egocentric karmic conditioning, borrowed collective consciousness, and learned historical enculturation. Hence, healing our understanding is vital towards over-coming our stubborn egos, sheepish complacency, and oft hidden suffering.

I suppose one of the amazing previously uncherished strengths of my character is the ability and tendency to investigate my and others’ experience of life with the curiosity of it’s universality. In this sense, I am more like an adventurous mountain climber, independent avant-garde artist, or homestead permaculturist. Typically, I care much less about a fleeting view than the intuitive intention that causes it. I both experience and observe gut wrenching suffering and physical pain, unexpected crisis and the woe of lament, though I recognize a deeper aspect to this living. As such, I simply consider myself a bodhisattva because my path has been an investigation of suffering–it’s causes and cessation. Unwittingly and authentically, enmeshed in my experiences of suffering due overwhelmingly to the firm grip of egocentric karmic conditioning, original nature is known within me as the opening door of conscious awareness that is finding original harmony with being alive here and now amidst everything as it is.

In conclusion to this particular post, “healing our understanding” may be the authentic work that I may be capable of and suited in doing vocationally. This is about healing my understanding into original nature as much as helping other people heal their understanding and healing our collective human understanding too (a paradigmatic shift towards natural, original being). “How?” is the practical question I must also attend to, fortunately there are uncountable directions for manifesting this Wayward purpose. The arts are certainly a viable means for engaging re-under-standing, however, seriously cultivating authentic conscious awareness practice is inescapably at the core of personal actualizing and enlightening. Also, I enjoy how this phrase so caringly addresses the possible change from a limited egotistic view to a healthy aware conscious presence. The idea that understanding could be healed is truly heartwarming rather than judgmental and conditional. Like the body, our mind (as if there was ever any separation) may heal naturally too. Oneness is our original nature.

fearification

I might as well get a bit playful with the fear that has plagued my life. On the radio this morning, I heard a coach tells his team to work hard and don’t return off the field saying “I wish I had… .” I reflected on my own life and thought about how hard I work on overcoming my own personal issues, at authenticity in relationships, at my jobs, exploring beneficial new activities, and trying to be open to others in life. I usually feel very undervalued for this hard work. I don’t have a coach, guru, significant other, or parent that supports my work. I’ve discovered I need to do this work for my own self and in relation to being with others.

obeygiant.com

The wet cement of suffering I wade through in life is conditioning and the causes of such conditioning. Early coping mechanisms for dealing with perceived abuse, social dissonance, and high sensitivity are now very inadequate ways of living an adult life. It’s clear my childhood was fraught with fear which enforced intended behavioral patterns of listening, obeying, paying attention, and doing things as instructed. I was really taught how to follow and fear was the primary method of coercion for making me do what I was told. I’m playfully calling this fearification as I dive into how this has functioned in my life, because this word allows me to seriously view the use of fear–by using intended or actual verbal or physical punishment or reward–to make someone act in a preferred way through the lens of unconscious ignorance.

No aware, loving, compassionate, and true human would use fear to force an egotistically desired result! I know this now, yet I still stumble along far too much in the unconscious conditioned coping mechanisms I learned as an innocent little bubba. I am trying to let go, but no one every taught me nor showed me how to live this day-to-day life in calm, open, careful, and energetically masterful ways! The old coping mechanisms and habits are the actions I learned for dealing with a life of stress, condemnation, rules, criticism, limitation, and fear. I wonder who may have actually seen that me and my siblings weren’t just well-behaved, but fearfully coerced into doing so. God, all parents (not just my own!), adults, teachers, and all authorities were the enforcers that my parents unconsciously recruited in their memetic structure of raising the people they procreated. Sounds a bit odd, but even now it resonates with tons of twisted relative truth. My life is thusly stained with patterns of rebellion, fearful obeying, silent resignation, expressive outbursts of stifled energy, reading volumes of self-help and health resources, self-marginalization from society because I think I don’t fit in with others, and thinking I am strange and inappropriate. This is the one result of fearification, though it appears to be prevalent enough. I sure don’t have a statistic, but the abundant “problems” of our contemporary world suggest that people are highly identified with their own conditioned coping mechanisms.

So, how shall I move on from the conditioning? Conscious seeing of the conditioning with both compassion and the authentic aspiration for transformation to the other shore of naturalness and being. Meditation is clearly key practice. But what about the unknown and unexperienced living activity that exists beyond the abandoned unconscious habits, learned strategies of behavior, unrealistic thinking patterns, and typical routines? Often times I think that I can’t let go of my father or fiancee because then, I will have abandoned them in the pool of ignorance and conditioning. Isn’t it my purpose to help those whom I love? Or is this too a conditioned way of considering relationships, love, and conditioning?

Enough with the questions about the unknowable. Fantasy will only provide another story, not living presence in actual life. I don’t want to create another ignorant story, however masterfully devised. Here I am reminded of the Constructive Living tenets: know your purpose (how, by what means is true authentic purpose known? meditation?), accept your feelings (I’ve been practicing this for nearly 15 years), do what needs to be done (attentive action is our real relationship with everything), and Naikan reflection (how I have caused trouble for others, gratitude for everything). Constructive Living provides a way for us to practice living beyond the conditioned ways we’ve developed. This is just one way, yet it is a good one for supplying a structure to work with in transforming our lives from identified fearification to authentic conscious presence in our own lives.

I also want to mention that yesterday was Class 2 of Cheri Huber’s What You Practice Is What You Have email class. Her class is copywrited, so that is all I can mention about it. I’m following the rules.

attitude

How did I get this difficult attitude that is so harshly perfectionistic and critical of my own self? I know how, it was my defense mechanism in dealing with the harsh criticism and judgement that my father applied in his conditional parenting. I was smart, did quite well in school (and got some praise for that activity), and did what I was told to do (or else punishment). I’ve spent countless time relearning about my past and life such that I could arrive at and understand the answer to this question of how my ego conditioned self functions.

But the question for me nowadays is how do I move onward from the old habits that keep me in fearful avoidance of assumed and projected disapproval and punishment? Now that I am softer and more open to the subtleties of life, how do I flow with the energies and live fully, rather than resist, stress, depress, and struggle trying to make it through each torturous day of monotony?

I need an essential healthy attitude adjustment. I do not need a conditional repositioning of views and beliefs such that I can be what others may think is successful. That’s what I’ve been doing most of my life, trying to appease others’ expectations and act well, which drains me of all my good natural positive energy. I am watching this occur each evening I come home after working a job I just barely like (I consider myself lucky and am very grateful for this job at this time in my life, which isn’t an essentially good attitude). The FACT that my energy is so very drained each and every day is a massive warning.

Very deeply I actually, and even somewhat easily now, see the inherent essential goodness of all being. Of course, though, I like to call this The Great Emptiness of the Way, along with Zen Buddhists and Taoists. But each day, I get highly mired in the day-to-day muck of conditional existence. HAH! There! That is my attitude I must change if I am going to rest in deep presence and move from great emptiness in my life. I aspire to live this way more than anything else at all. I see this is my calling to live this way, though it’s manifestation and expression I do not know. I NEED to find the effortless effort of harmonizing with the Great Emptiness and Goodness of the Way things always and already are. My attitude (collection of beliefs, views, and thinking) needs to practically support harmony, not conditional living strategies that I learned in trying to appease parents, teachers, friends, etc.

TOWARDS THIS, I shall read a book I haven’t completely read yet. I will start the book over from the beginning. I acquired Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s first book, “Turning the Mind into an Ally” when I started meditating in 2003. As he is quoted on the back cover, “We can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it. This is a practice anyone can do.”

In my current practice of seeing myself as clearly as possible in order to move beyond the hard conditioned egotistic karmic aspect of my life, I am ready to embrace a thorough attitude adjustment that is harmonious with the Great Allowing Presence of the Way. Since I have experienced a great awakening in this vein at another time of my life (2005-6), I am already very aware that this can be the way in which I live my life. I am hungry for harmonious goodness and a warmly open attitude towards everything.

healing energy and presence

How do I choose to commit to a new vocational direction in life with all my ignorance and unassuredness in making a good and right decision? It sure is a risk, to change, to switch careers, to listen to a deeper sense of my being in choosing the work that I would appreciate doing each day. I suppose it is not as big of a risk as I took when I was younger and knew even less about myself and the world when I decided on my current work field. Seems true enough. Now I feel a bit more confident. Nice.

I want to become a “healer.” I think I have a lot to offer others, if they want my assistance in their movement in change. This is a reciprocal function as well. By helping others, I will be helping myself too. I need the support as much as you do, and this is nearly always true for us humans. I think that embarking on a vocational path of helping others heal, I too will continue to heal.

This is a large step of opening for me: from wounded to healer. But it is in deeply knowing the woundedness that I am rising with self knowledge into loving compassion. Awareness is the key for healing into being harmoniously present. A process of unconditioning and re-learning trust of our natural being is in staying true to the Way things are. How can deep irrevocable healing take place in any other way? We certainly cannot dupe ourselves into healing! That’s simply swapping out one illusion with another, and then, another after that. That’s conditioned existence, not living with and accepting emptiness.

Today, the day of the new moon, an irrevocable synergistic opportunity of possibility in harmonizing myself with the Way, I want to commit to my new path in being “healing energy and presence.” This is my consciously aware recognition that I have been headed in this direction for a long time and that I am very deeply interested in helping others who may ask me to assist them in healing changes.

I am currently particularly attracted to Rolfing, Feldenkrais, and Zentherapy. I am nearing the final (tenth) session with my friend who is a Rolfer. This is influencing me, as I learn the structural aspects of the body. I have received a small amount of Feldenkrais instruction which helps me to understand the function of the body. Zen practice also inflences me greatly in re-directing myself in the Way. I practice Qi Gong and Butoh too – healing movement modalities. I am also influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine in receipt of acupuncture, herbs and Taoist wisdom. In these ways, I have been moving into a general field of movement, awareness, mind/body practices, and healing. I do not know what else to say at this time other than list these wonderful influences and continue to be grateful for their presence in my life.

realistic apology

My ego conditioned mind self really liked you. I wanted to be with you for this lifetime, growing in intimacy and togetherness. I failed to decipher the difference between the ego-self and the very boundless soulful energetic Self. This led to a relapse into depression, getting caught up deeply in my own egotistic  issues and merging with the grandiose energy and awareness that cannot be claimed as ego nor harnessed for ego’s masked use. Actually, it/we can, but it’s not the same as freely flowing beyond suffering with the Way we are and everything is. We are not conditioned minds, yet that’s exactly how the mind thinks: linearly. We are bounded by our conditioned minds and bodily forms, though this itself is not the cause of suffering as our conditioned minds and aching bodies may try to trick us into believing. Our cause of suffering is wanting things to be other than it is due to the ignorance of our conditioned minds and restricted bodies. With awareness and paying attention in the normal functioning of both mind and body, awakening occurs naturally.

So, I am sorry I got so confused. It’s such an ordinary thing, because we are typically living ordinary lives in such conditioned reality. I want you. I want intimacy. I want deeper loving. I was(and still am) willing to practice with my conditioning and deficient body, but you weren’t(and still aren’t). I can’t continue using that fact against myself. I have apologized profusely for my ignorance and the troubles that I have caused. I am grateful beyond measure for all that I have experienced with you. Even though I was attached to “us” and “you,” I know, not in a conditioned way, that I love you. If I distorted this love, then I know my conditioned mind would be in control. NO.

This love experience will continue to grow within me like the roots of a tree, filling me up with awareness of life and the beauty of being. I am grounded in a profound understanding that awareness itself is the key that unlocks the conditioning of the mind and restrictions of the body. I pray for the strength to commit to this evolutionary path of awakening and to offer this to all who ask of me. I cannot force anyone to embrace awareness as I do, for this is a relative truth that harmonizes within my specific being with the energy of absolute universal existence.

seeing the resistance

I met the resistance in my father again today, just a few moments ago. He called to say that he doesn’t want to travel in the very cold temperatures tonight to drive me home from my second scheduled Rolfing Session. He supplied me with plenty of excuses, though I did my best to remain silent on the phone here at work. He said I should cancel my appointment. I then remarked that I want to go the Rolfing Session and I can find a way to get home somehow. He was immediately relieved and thanked me.

I can see I too have done this similar excuse-filled behavior with friends, girlfriends, and family. It’s very strange not only for me, but very much for the other individual who is asking something of me. We both are at odds because I make it known and stick to my excuses for NOT DOING what the other wants. Usually, this situation lingers like stinky cheese in the minds of those who I have disappointed. Sometimes the excuse is justified and reasonable, but even when it is, it is still an excuse NOT TO DO because I DO NOT WANT TO. It still stinks. How immature am I to want to do what I want over what others ask of me? For me, I can see it is typically selfish laziness that causes me to generate a mindstream of pseudo-reasonable excuses for inaction.

Seeing and experiencing the resistance within my father to do as I have asked of him, I realize the frustration that is caused as a result. The frustration arises from WANTING to NOT DO something and is passed on through excusing one’s self from what has been asked. This is essentially breaking one’s word, even if it is implied in the fact that we are friends and family of the one’s who ask something of us.

In this moment, I apologize to those I have frustrated due to my selfish laziness in wanting not to do what you have asked of me. In most situations, I could have left my selfish desire behind and answered your call for my assistance in your life. I see in this moment of experiencing my father’s pattern inaction where my pattern of inaction has originated, and, that I may consciously be able to circumvent the learned conditioned habit towards “being with” you.

peace & harmony

learning about purpose

Today is the first day of a distance learning class that I am taking: Living on Purpose via the ToDo Institute. This should help me grow in understanding MY purpose versus my usual perspective of eliminating personal viewpoints and goal-building. I guess I would say of myself that I have been reeking of zen in my thinking and talking about the Way, rather than living life in this moment without fabricated purpose. Oh, I do my best, but it seems much more like hypocrisy to me than equanimous fulfillment. Thus, I am on my way to continue learning about purpose.