New words, new feelings

I'm working on building the specific words for feelings that  I need to recreate to sustain the growth that I've made and want to build.

Repiphany: an insight that I've had before, but forgot

e.g. If I sit with that feeling of stuck-ness long enough it starts to give, and I start to feel a small motivation to change.  I've recognized this before, but it's not quite intuitive

Incrementum, the feeling after I've taken a small action towards positive change, and

Recrementum, the feeling I have after I've completed a micro habit that served me well in the past

eg. Just looking at that empty swept corner of the room gave me hope. 

Remomentum: the energy that starts to build from several instances of recrementum

eg. If I could commit to the 2 minute hotspot for a few days, I'm sure I'd build some remomentum. 

Being an energy leader

To be a thought leader, first you need to be an energy leader.  If, as Lisa Feldman Barrett theorizes, the brain is not for thinking, but for allostasis, then if we want to influence the other brains, we need energy. 

My first stage of energy building and maintenance is nurturing calm. I move  the needle from the unpleasant arousal that is the clay from which I make my depression and self-hatred, towards the pleasant stillness that is serenity and calm acceptance. The energy grows and rises and from that I can weave together curiosity, gratitude, enjoyment. And as it peaks, the excitement and ecstasy that crests until it becomes the base for deeper peace and equanimity.  

Even the unpleasant affects from which we make depression, grief, common misery, sadness, and anxiety can become the material for that more pleasant flourishing that sparks renewal. 

This morning's meditation sparked that kind of pins and needles feeling that I'm guessing might be the awakening of new neurotransmitters.  I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't know for sure. But I feel like I'm going through a period of transformation. 

The key is still tapping into and strengthening the flow of serotonin. 

The Way

Yesterday I re-read part of one of my favourite essays, Jonathan Franzen's Why Bother?  It's something of a manifesto about the writer's responsibility to protect the literary tradition of tragic realism.  It is not the writer's responsibility to weigh in on whether or not the world is doomed, simply to remind people that death, loss, poverty, destruction aren't going anywhere soon. We still have a lot of work to do.

So the writer spends a fair amount of time contemplating change.  Contemplating the difference between natural suffering and self-created suffering.  The writer spends most of her time in the first of the noble truths: there is suffering.

There's this other place, however, that is a little harder for the writer to stay in.  The belief that there is a way out of suffering. Maybe this  is where comic realism comes in.  Comic realism kicks us in the butt in a different way. It looks at our tragic lives and sees where we get stuck and helps us laugh at our vulnerabilities.

Last night I had a stroke of good fortune.  Aziz Ansari decided the Just For Laughs comedy festival would be a good place to try out some new material.  So he flew up from New York, and tweeted that in an hour he'd be at a children's theatre not too far from where I live.  I found out about this on FB, from a guy who I've had a bit of a thorny relationship with lately. I wanted to see the show, but I wasn't sure if it would be comfortable seeing it with him.

I risked it and it was great.  I saw a master comic from the middle of the third row. He was practically talking to me. It's interesting to see a comic in the draft stage of a routine. To see those moments of discomfort before he's got it seamless enough to charge $100 at Madison Square Garden.  To realize how much work goes into a good comedy routine. How it literally left him short at breath at one point because he wasn't in good enough shape for the physical comedy.

I need a lot of energy to do and be all the things I want to do and be. I can't muck around anymore getting stuck in these bad cycles. I need to learn how to manage my energy, so that I can turn it into the power that the world needs from me.

This next week coming up.  I set out on the way of accumulating that power.

Easter

Life is a precious gift. Really, every day we should be waking up as though we won the lottery, when we consider the tremendous odds of being born at all. And to add to this gift, the fortune to be aware of life's full potential. And to be able to activate that potential.

How is it that I spend so much more time feeling overwhelmed by life's challenges than I am overwhelmed by its plenty? Because my beliefs limit me.

Whatever I know at an abstract level, I am still in the habit of believing in this singular, solid self, this collection of sad and angry memories, this financially and still emotionally struggling self. I still find myself locked in to angry obsessive loops of energy.

But there's an emerging energy in recent months, the same, yet different from that pure energy I've felt in my chi kung practice.  It's a free flowing almost fractal like, snakey, wavey energy that is in my gut. The difference is subtle, but important. It's the ease with which I can now activate it.  I rest my bare attention on it, recognize it as both precious and impermanent and then I just watch it go.

In time it rises up. Up through my heart, my mouth and eventually out the top of my head.

This is the result of my lent decision to sleep earlier, rise earlier, listen only to Tergar material to get to sleep.

This is my Easter gift to myself.

If not a friend, then at least an interesting companion

It is five in the morning, the Sunday before Christmas.  The year is coming to a close. And I think I can safely say that I have grown.

I feel a different energy in me. Something more sustained and sustainable that I've ever had.  I sit quietly from time to time and just feel it, in my heart, in my gut, in my brain. Sometimes it's warm, sometimes it's magnetic, sometimes it is liquid and sometimes effervescent.

I hope to be in constant conversation with this energy all my life. Creativity I'm beginning to believe is a state of conversation.  Sometimes we go off and have this conversation with ourselves, taking great care to make sure that our contribution to the conversation of civilization is the best it can be.

Sometimes we just blurt it out. But what's important is that we show up, seeking to understand and be understood.

Today, I just want to rest in gratitude for this wonderful year.  Last year it ended with money.  This year with some stature.  An award and a great writing credit.

Next year, I have to score a book deal if I'm going to continue writing.

But that's just writing.  If I'm going to continue being happy, sustaining the mild happiness that is so essential to writing, I'm going to have to keep meditating.  I'm going to have to continue cultivating compassion.  I'm going to have to work on going to bed early in my tidy home.

Above all I'm going to have to continue believing that my happiness is of greater benefit to the world than my misery.

Here's What's Happening

The suffering is dissolving.  As the energy in me rebuilds, the deep entrenched habits of stress and suffering in me begin to dissolve naturally.  I feel it happening, the pain arising, sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes sexual, sometimes just a deep dullness.  It comes up and I watch it and then gradually it gets washed away and dissolved by this liquid magnetic energy that is filling me up mostly from the top down.  But sometimes from the bottom up.

I don't assume postures anymore.  I stand in wu wei, first position.  Usually after about five minutes my right arm begins to rise on its own.  Sometimes I feel my arm start to dissolve.  Sometimes I feel my head get looser on my neck.  My lower spine begins to stretch as I relax my knees and sit into the gravity.  Then at some point I start to feel a natural warmth in my gut, or at the back of my neck.

When I start to feel the warmth I remind myself to feel gratitude.  Of all the techniques there are to iterate the energy, the one I believe works the best is to get it spinning emotionally, because we do this to be happy. And happiness is both the goal and the fuel of unleashing this energy.  The gratitude keeps me focussed and lightly harnessed to the energy, especially when I feel my mind drifting off to ordinary awareness.  Love keeps me coming back far more naturally and effortlessly than will.

Today I had three experiences of suffering  that convinced me I'm on the right track.  And ickyness that I know is usually a resistance to pleasure.  Pure aversion, that once dissolved is usually a gateway to healthy joy.  A deep sadness that came out of nowhere that felt as though the energy had simply hit a part of my brain, in the same way a neurosurgeon might probe it during open heart surgery.  And then this deep pain in my neck and shoulders that made me realize that my alignment was being corrected by the more natural flow of energy down my spine.

I had two brand new experiences of pleasure.  For most of the stand I let my left arm hang limp.  But towards the end I felt a bracelet of energy, as though a hand was taking my arm around the wrist.  Gradually this bracelet pulled my arm up in a floating motion.  I felt such fluidity in my body that when the energy began to move my upper torso towards my right I felt like I might actually be able to twist all the way around.  In fact I almost did.  I stood there for I'm not sure how long, feeling the energy work its way around my spine. And then gradually I turned back.  After that I was able to just stand in pure quiet, pond like energy, as though most my body had dissolved.  There were still some remnants of suffering, and I was almost happy to have them there as markers.

This is always such a challenging place to be in, this peace.  Because there's no direction.

But there will be.  A different energy will eventually fill me.  It will fill the best parts of me, the parts of me that lead me to happiness, not to more pain.  And my good habits will have double the energy they had before. My talents will be more focussed and effective.  And the people around me happier.

To be filled and guided by this energy and power.  This is joy.

Leaning in, Sinking down

Last night I had one of the best stands I've had in a long time. I'd just finished the first day of a two day conference (Montreal WordCamp) and I was feeling that emptiness I sometimes feel when I've been around a group of people. Maybe I'm an introvert who feels drained around other humans. I don't know. Though I want human company, I often feel this profound feeling of depletion and despair afterwards.

Too often in the past I've dealt with this problem with distraction. I come home feeling empty. Then I fill the emptiness with food and television,which just makes the emptiness worse. And then I go into these social situations, that I want, from a feeling of vulnerability.

Last night was different. I've been working with thoughts and feelings in my meditation practice, and last night I decided to divide and conquer. I did some standing with my loneliness (made a little sharper by the fact that my son left for two weeks with his father.) I alternated this with a feeling of open awareness. I did some standing and sitting with smaller feelings, my aversion to cleaning the kitchen that I left a mess this morning, my frustration that my son had pulled out all the cable, internet connectors in an attempt to take his Playstation, etc.

I stayed with this feelings and felt the thinking feeling in my forehead, as I do more and more. Later in the evening I found the motivation to really stand for well over an hour.

I felt the warmth of this universal energy that is always available to me. I felt a voice telling me that I didn't need to choose this energy anymore. The choice had been made. I am this energy and I have chosen myself. The feedback loop is now a core part of me. No decision. It's just maintenance.

As I stood, the warmth began to sink and grow. But towards the end of the stand I began to notice different kind of energy. There was, not so much a numbness in my forehead, but an energy close to a neutral sense of being. Not the usual tension I feel there. Or the sense of relief when i've stopped living in that part of my brain. Just an energy, a presence.

Later I wondered if maybe this was what it felt when thought was in the service of awareness/attention, and not the other way around.

This morning as I was standing, I found myself getting distracted and pulled into the stream of thought. I reminded myself, as I've been doing the last week or so, to lean into this energy and then alternate it with open awareness.  But this time it occurred to me to lean in and then do what I'd always been doing in Tai Chi, sink down. Or rather position myself to allow the energy to sink of its own accord.

Lean in, sink down. I realized that this could be a very effective mantra for bringing my attention back to deeper core awareness.

When I sink, or position for sinking, I start to feel all the deeper parts of my brain, all the other lobes below and beyond this frontal cortex. I know my brain is getting deeper and stronger. And I know I'm becoming deeper and stronger as a result of this practice.

As I continue this, I will feel this strong desire to bring this connection to other people.

And then, as the end of a day or a conference, I'll feel less and less drained. More and more energized.

The loop, once blocked, is now open.

An Adventure in Standing Always

Yesterday I read an article by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker about her new treadmill desk. It sounded a bit eccentric.  But she directed me to an interesting researcher at the Mayo Clinic, James Levine, who believes that much of the obesity epidemic is rooted in what he calls "sitting disease."

We live in a society in which we are cued to sit all the time.  We sit to work, to travel, to eat.   As a writer, who has very few meetings, I'm especially sedentary in my life.  As more and more people telecommute, as we use e-mail rather than face to face meetings, we quite simply move as little as possible. We are inactive, and our complex brains have less and less connection with gravity.

This research has hit meet like a lightening bolt.  So much of my life has been about standing. But while I can get up every morning and maintain a standing practice, I actually do very little standing throughout my day.  This makes it hard to maintain the energy I need to do the things I want to do: run a 10K with Ben, write a book, get our life into a place of financial stability.

So I've made a decision.  In the way that Buddhists weave formal and informal practice throughout their lives, I will weave formal and informal standing.  Standing is my mindfulness. Standing grounds me, gives me inner strength, vitality, clarity.  When I am standing I feel differently about myself.  I feel motivated and connected to the world.  So I will now begin a practice of increasing the amount of informal standing I do throughout my day.

I tried it yesterday.  Managed to spend most of the day standing, with a few exceptions for some sitting meditation.  By the time I stopped, around 8:30 p.m. I was exhausted.  It was like I'd run a marathon.  It seems like a small adjustment in life, but it's something that could have a major impact on my life, and on the lives of more people, if standing were to become a more habitual practice.

I don't see myself getting a treadmill desk.  But I do see myself writing while standing, or the very least thinking while standing.  I see myself eating breakfast and reading the new york times while standing.  I see myself doing my morning writing while standing, and maybe, eventually all my writing while standing.  I see myself reading book while slowly walking around my apartment.

There's something about standing that biases us towards action.  And something about sitting in a chair that biases, or can bias us towards inaction and isolation.  A decision to stand, is a decision to act. I'm not sure yet where those actions are going to take me.

I'm excited to find out.