Matt Killingsworth, Track Your Happiness, and the Wandering Mind

Matt Killingsworth wondered if staying in the present was important to being happy, so created Track Your Happiness to gather data to try to answer that question. As it turns out, a wandering mind is more likely to be unhappy. Just another reason to meditate!

The One Thing Holding You Back

For a while, I have felt that something was missing from the Witness method that Bill Harris of Holosync mentions.  Just watch the emotions, but there never seemed to be a finishing point to that.  I listened to a Sounds True podcast with Raphael Cushnir, the author of "The One Thing Holding You Back", was intrigued, and found that my local library had the book.

Raphael Cushnir touches on the witness with "Yeah, But" excuse number six, mentioning that emotions need more than witnessing and that they need to be felt and given complete awareness.  This actually seems to match what I recently read in Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" and feels more like the shadow work I've heard mentioned in various places.

Raphael Cushnir talks about emotional connection and the 2 x 2 method for accomplishing that and gives tips, examples, and stories of working with it.  It is something I am going to experiment to see what happens, but it does feel right to me.  I would definitely recommend checking his book out.

Surrender and action

Recently I was wondering when I needed to surrender and let the universe take me where it will and when I needed to make a move. It seems like a very fine line. One can not move when it is needed and thus miss an opportunity or can move too much and sabotage what one is trying to accomplish.

It's still a riddle for me, but shortly after pondering this, the following idea came to me: It first starts with desiring something.  That action places me into a school, where the universe is the professor.  The universe gives the lessons and assignments to help accomplish this task - it could only be a few or many before achieving my desire.  It is then up to me to do those assignments.

Of course, it still brings up the question as to when being still may be the assignment.  It's not like there's always immediate feedback to know if you are heading in the right direction or not.

There is No Enemy

From Buddhist Geeks: Ken McLeod presents "There is No Enemy". He talks about "moving beyond ‘us vs. them,’ embracing the mystery of the human condition, and changing the world. Ken speaks about the futility of fighting our lives, explores what it means to make an something an enemy, and how to realize that there is no enemy."

I especially like his quote: "Obstacles in your path should not be regarded as obstacles. They are simply features of the landscape which have to be negotiated." It makes me think of the concept known as "the Witness" as well as "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle.

A Reflection on Life and Lucid Dreaming

In many cases, a dream tries to reflect reality. However, for whatever reason, there are usually elements in the dream that are out of place. The conscious mind can notice these out of place elements, but generally only if there is enough awareness to catch the tuggings of the conscious mind. Usually we are so buried in the dream that we don't notice those oddities, accepting them as they are, until after we wake up - if we even remember the dream at all.

If you have enough awareness to hear those tuggings of the conscious mind, your conscious mind can rise up to where you realize that you are in a dream. Thus begins a lucid dream, where you can just watch or start to take control of your dream. Sometimes the conscious mind can rise up too much to where you begin to wake up.

One analogy that has been used about life is that it is a dream. How our perception of life is actually a dream and that if we wake up, we can be enlightened, in the world but not of it, etc. And how does that waking up happen? Awareness. And how can awareness happen? Meditation.

In the waking world, I see that the ego, shadow self, or whatever you want to call it, acts just like that part of the brain that gives us dreams. Then there is the higher consciousness, or super consciousness, that tries to tell us that we are dreaming. How well we hear it depends on our level of awareness.

I recently had an experience that brought me much pain in the past. This time, however, I could see that it was the ego making noise, trying to protect me. Despite noticing this, it still produced stress, as I had no idea what to do about it. I could clear my mind, but not too much later it would come back. It's like not being knocked over by an ocean wave, but not too much later the next wave comes along.

How to describe what happened next is difficult. I guess I could say that I listened closer to what the ego was saying. It was saying something, though, that suggests that I made a conscious decision. It was then when I saw it for what it was, as I had not made that conscious decision at all and was (and still am) trying to figure things out enough to come to a decision.

Now I am at a point of realization that if I make a particular decision, the voice of that ego will come back. I'm not sure what I would do, but am trying to not let that influence my decision. But I do have it in the back of my mind, trying to figure out how to bring peace to that part of me, as no matter what decision I make, it is likely to come back sooner or later.

Spiritual Bypassing

Reality Sandwich has a snippet on Spiritual Bypassing, from the book Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters. It discusses the tendency of those that follow a spiritual path to ignore or repress those difficult emotions that we view as negative.

I see this essentially as the issue of denying our shadow self. It only makes witnessing and feeling these emotions (or even thoughts) that much more important.