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July 2018

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The Parable of the Velveteen Rabbit

July 16, 2018

We are mistaken if we believe that our consciousness is fully awakened at the first moment  after birth.   Perhaps because we don’t know how to imagine any other living state, it may seem to us that birth is a decisive instant,  before which there is nothing and after which we are fully ourselves.  Contrary to that assumption, consciousness is an evolving condition of being.

One of my favorite childhood stories is The Velveteen Rabbit[1], a parable of  just how this evolution may occur.  The Velveteen Rabbit, once a beloved and shiny stuffed bunny,  was loved deeply by The Boy, who saw him as real.  All of the wear and tear from allowing himself to be vulnerable stripped the rabbit both of his sheen and his un-realness. When the boy finally “moves on” as children (and all people) can do sometimes, the Rabbit was heartbroken, feeling rejected and diminished.   Despondent, after crying his first real tear,  a beautiful fairy came to make him into a Real Rabbit, allowing him to hop, skip, and jump with other rabbits (who also had once been discarded).    The Velveteen Rabbit could never have enjoyed the beauty of being Real had he not been “broken open” by the experience of vulnerability.

To me, the moral of this story is that we become Real through the process of connection.    The story is a beautiful metaphor for how our flaws and apparent imperfections can be transformed when they are integrated and fully accepted.    We become more “Real” (authentic) when we are open and ‘vulnerable’  (able to be hurt),  when we allow ourselves to be deeply affected by someone.   But as the Skin Horse wisely tells the little rabbit in the story, sometimes becoming Real hurts. 

Becoming who we are is a journey in which we must come to terms with our tattered fur and threadbare paws. This is a life-long process of learning to be comfortable in our own skin.   We live fully only to the extent that we embody authenticity and aliveness.   This is how we become Who We Are.

                       [1] By Margery Williams

 

 

 

 

 

To Think Or Not To Think: That Is Not The Question

July 8, 2018

 

Inquiring Deeply Newsletter

July 2018

As is often said, the mind makes thoughts like water makes waves. So to think or not to think is not the question! The more appropriate question is how we relate to the process of thinking.

In my view, thinking in meditation is not merely the unwanted source of ruminative distraction it is often painted to be. To the contrary, there is transformative opportunity in paying attention to the content of the conversations that take place within our minds during meditation. The word “conversation” is useful in this context because it highlights the fact that thinking itself is a relational process. By paying close attention to inner dialogue, we can discover a great deal about our different “voices” or part-selves and can gain insight into the way we relate to ourselves.

Inner conversation is revealing. We may notice replays of actual conversations we have had with others, showing us what remains unfinished or where we have gotten emotionally snagged. Our minds may host soliloquies or arguments, even fantasize entire interactions with others. Inner conversation, like our communication with others, has many layers, interwoven with emotions and the bodily sense of our symbolized experience.

The themes represented in our mental narratives say a lot about how we “show up” in our interpersonal lives. We have an opportunity to get in touch with the stories we tell ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) about self and other. Our inner dialogues reveal our interpersonal assumptions, the interpretations and projections we tend to superimpose on others when we talk with them.

One important and often neglected dimension of the thinking mind in meditation is awareness of the mind’s relationship to itself. We can begin by noticing the judgments and thoughts that we have about thinking. There is often a bias to view thinking as a kind of stepchild in the inner family. We may implicitly feel shame about the amount of mental band-width devoted to “story-teller mind”.

Apart from the content of our mental narratives, there are also subtle aspects of our inner conversation that can be revealing. Do we feel ourselves to be Speaker? Listener? Neither? Both? Do we create sufficient space around what we say to ourselves to feel into the meaning of our inner conversation? Do we feel pushed around by our minds, driven crazy by our thinking? Do we rely on a kind of “thought police” to stifle our inner voices rather than to kindly investigate them? To the extent that we view our job in meditation as managing and controlling the thinking mind, we may unwittingly enact a power struggle which is a form of self-violence.

It is ultimately the climate of our relationship with ourselves that allows transformative change to come into being. Any thought which we must not think often represents a part of ourselves which has felt rejected, disappointed, frightened, ashamed, or otherwise hurt. Alternatively, when we make space in the mind for the process of thinking— when we can be present with thoughts and bring self-acceptance, compassion, and wisdom to investigating them— that creates the possibility for deep healing.

* For more on this topic, see Ch. 7,  “Reflections on Thinking”, in Schuman (2017) INQUIRING DEEPLY  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01N24V17T

Downloading Future, Please Wait

July 5, 2018

BEING HERE NOW

When I posted this picture without title or further explanation some time ago, I was astounded at how many people said “huh??”

The point of the post is not some intent to confuse or create a clever play on words. 

Rather, it is to invite you to contemplate two things:

(1) The computer mindset in which we all spend way too much of our time (downloading content); and

(2) The future-oriented frame of mind in which we all have the tendency to live our lives.

The problem with waiting for the future to finish downloading is the idea that we have Time.  People tend to live facing towards the Future with some sense that “It” will be arriving from that direction.   “Someday” we’ll get all our ducks in a row and then life will begin.

Waiting for “It” to arrive (whatever we take “it” to be) distracts us from the only moment in which we can ever be happy, which is Now. 

Life is not a dress rehearsal; it’s the actual event.