I've been thinking this week about the difference between impulsivity and inspiration.
I believe that my impulsivity arises from a need to find stimulation to escape the dullness of a mind trapped by learned helplessness. According to Mingyur Rinpoche, "faint heartendness" is the #1 blocker of our true, buddah nature. He tells an interesting story in Joy of Living, about a woman who, early in his vocation as an international teacher, told him about her self-hatred. He didn't know what that meant. This speaks to the new theory of neuroscience that I'm learning, that all our emotions are culturally constructed. My own self-hatred is a prison constructed from my experience and my circumstances. When I sit with it I feel its core as a low arousal unpleasantness.
The "stims" that I've lived with all my life, my hand flapping, my grievance collecting, the jumping, the angry daydreams, these are all ways of trying to kickstart my muddy heart.
But I'm experimenting right now with a different way. I am following Rinpoche's instruction in seeing life as a dream, and thus feeling this faint heartedness and sense of powerlessness as that. Seeing it the same way I would if I were in a lucid dream and then allowing the mind to open up to all kinds of possibilities of power. I'm also spending more time in my meditation in that hypnagogic state, between dreams and wakefulness.
It certainly opened my mind up to changing one pattern. I imagined that my room was miraculously tidy, and every time I finished my meditation, I felt an overwhelming urge to clean.
I am sitting in this moment in the cleanest room I've had in years.
Narayan Helen Libenson speaks of "don't know" mind, and how practicing this attitude of knowing that we don't know liberates us from all the patterns and habits that we delude ourselves into believing are our identity.
Being comfortable with the feeling of not knowing is what allows life to remain fresh and inspired. It's a natural stimulation that comes from the natural way that life changes, rather than the constant chasing after sensations that comes from a life that has calcified into dull routine.
