ENGAGING FULLY WITH LIFE

In the following video Brene Brown offers wise counsel on allowing the level of vulnerability necessary to foster self compassion. This key to self love in turn allows one to fully experience the range of human emotions needed to reach beyond the numbness of mere survival; that dampened down state which prevents us from knowing what it means to thrive in the fullness of our own life.

Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability | Video on TED.com

Anita Moorjani's Near Death Experience clears in 4 days, grade 4B lympho...

A STROKE OF LOVE

In this video from Ted Talks, Neural Anatomist Jill Bolte-Taylor passionately,

vividly and lovingly describes the path which led to her becoming a brain scientist,

and the brain hemorrhage which caused her to experience the expansiveness of

enlightenment available to all of us.

EVOLVING THROUGH TAI CHI

TAI CHI AND ME

“Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible.

Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary, emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly, like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.”

Sogyal Rinpoche.

The above quotation comes from The Tibetan Art of Living and Dying and pertains to the practice of meditation. It also encapsulates my experience of Chi Kung and Tai Chi, practices that soften and melt on many levels.

The most primary experience of Tai Chi is movement at a physical level, and I dread to think how my physical progression would evolve over the next few years if I wasn’t stretching during warm up, and during the various practices I have learned to enjoy. Spending a week in The Orthopedic Hospital after a horse riding accident in which I fractured my pelvis convinced me of the necessity of exercise. The ward mainly contained elderly people who had sustained injury during falls and brought to my attention the number of people on the street who couldn’t walk without the use of a cane because their physical structure had seized up.

As we are mind/body creatures, our emotions are intimately connected to our physicality and one affects the other. As Chuang-Tzu states, “In all things The Way does not want to be obstructed, for if there is obstruction, there is choking; if the choking does not cease, there is disorder, and disorder harms the life of all creatures.”

Maintaining an awareness of myself as a being of energy vibrating as part of a field of energy, facilitates my understanding of the necessity of keeping that energy flowing. Where there is blockage in the system, suffering ensues. This suffering will occur on physical, emotional and intellectual levels. Meditation and movement, indeed meditation as movement within the forms of Tai Chi and Chi Kung, softens the damaging grasp of contraction engendered by a cultural milieu predicated on argument, fear and the illusion of isolation. Sensing one’s own energy while consciously connecting to the greater universal field of energy, allows for a softening of the experience of boundaries thereby increasing one’s sense of being All That Is.

Sogyal Rinpoche uses the metaphor of a vase. Once the vase breaks, one realizes the space one previously discerned as being inside the vase was, all along, the same space as that by which it was surrounded. The culturally conditioned mind creates the boundary which the practice dissolves, until one becomes, to quote Deepak Chopra, a “citizen of the field.” As citizens of the field, we realize our connection to our greater selves. Free from the versions of Reality we have constructed, we are liberated to live more loving, playful, creative and compassionate lives. We are all genies, imagining ourselves captive in a bottle, until we realize there is no bottle and we are free to work magic in our lives. (This is a work in progress for me!)

Over millennia, Taoists have developed disciplined, specific practices designed to channel energy through our various energetic systems, allowing us to actively interpenetrate various dimensions of existence, drawing energy from those dimensions into the ‘physical’ dimension of the Earth plane, through our various energy bodies and into the physical bodies we have fashioned for this lifetime. It is my sense that these disciplines are interplanetary and inter-dimensional, technological gifts we receive in order to help us to complete our task of awakening to the loving creative power we are.

Learning to create a flowing energy system allows us to feel more compassionate towards the Little Self we inhabit this lifetime. As citizens of warlike cultures we learn to integrate conflict, creating an internal battleground in which we chastise our inner Other whilst simultaneously perceiving this inner culprit in those around us. The technologies with which we have been gifted, when utilized, allow our Higher Selves and Highly Evolved Beings access to the dimension of our human consciousness so that we may be assisted in the work we were born to do.

While we are in the midst of suffering without means of amelioration we exist in a Me-centered universe in which our transcendental heart struggles to open. Once we avail of this life buoy, the practice, which provides us with the means to save ourselves, we can become more compassionate towards others drowning in the sea of illusion and soften our attitudes towards them. (I’m also thinking of a few specific people here whom I am struggling to like, whilst acknowledging how much I’ve learned from my dislike of their behaviour, mainly, to look out for the temptation to behave likewise myself and to refrain from doing so!)

Practicing Tai Chi and meditation (though admittedly not on a daily basis) for the past two years has enabled me to integrate so much of the learning of my previous decades, each ‘piece’ of which has been essential to my growth as a human and a spirit being. I also feel privileged to know the people I’ve met during this time, people who are consciously working on the development of their awareness and exhibit a higher caliber of behaviour towards themselves and others as a result.

“Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavour of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as if by a blanket of sunlight.”

This Golden Sun of the practice, the warm blanket of Divine Light experienced during meditation and further integrated through the disciplined, orchestrated movements of Chi Kung and Tai Chi is not only a true agent of positive change, but a solid base from which to reach out to facilitate a wider transformation, as it naturally translates into behaviour which benefits others.

Happy, sunny days

Ok Just in case I've contributed to y'all thinkin' it rains on our glorious Emerald Isle all the time, I'm chucking up a few recent photos of the summer we're having. Yes, along with the UK, Ireland is actually having a proper summer this year!!!

THE ALL POWERFUL WEATHERGOD

I'm feeling decidedly mean. I love dipping into the blogs I follow and keeping up with the lives and interests of their authors and feel suddenly miserable that I've been so lax in contributing to this great world of blogging of late. As I'm about to begin my summer hols soon I'll rectify that in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, I'm lazily offering some of anothers hard graft, to whit a poem by one of my favourite poets, Billy Collins. Last week and weekend the weather was splendid; hot, sunny - provoking lazy days in the garden and activity filled picnics on the gorgeous local beaches. For the past few days it's been raining and cool and all of us locals are bemoaning the change in climes - yes, the conversation at the hairdressers today revolved around the well founded Irish paranoia that we've had our summer already, and this could be it for the rest of the so-called summer, whilst we remain hopelessly optimistic that "things will pick up again"....and we'll be rescued from our fears once more!!! The rain once diverted Billy Collins thoughts into less sanguine channels before he allowed the possibility of a return to better weather to again claim his allegiance for this earthly realm....

Rooms

After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,

I walk through the rooms of the house

wondering which would be best to die in.

The study is an obvious choice

with its thick carpet and soothing paint,

its overstuffed chair preferable

to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.

And the kitchen has a certain appeal -

it seems he was boiling water for tea,

the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.

Then there is the dining room,

just the place to end up facedown

at one end of its long table in a half-written letter

or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,

upright against a headboard,

a book having slipped to the floor -

make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.

Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,

dead on the stone cold floor -

it's starting to sound like a ballad

sung by a man in a pub with a coal red face.

It's all the fault of the freezing rain

which is flicking against the windows,

but when it finally lets up

and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,

when the trees stand dripping in the light,

I will quit these dark, angular rooms

and drive along a country road

into the larger rooms of the world,

so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow-

a road that cuts through bare woods

and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet

these late November days.

And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves

there is hidden a nest of mice,

each one no bigger than a thumb,

a thumb with closed eyes,

a thumb with whiskers and a tail,

each one contemplating the sweetness of grass

and the startling brevity of life.

And he wrote that poem in November - this is June!!!

BABY BLACKBIRD BYE BYE

Little Joey’s gone. He was only in our lives for a few days, but had a huge impact. I initially called him Mussolini because of his face, cross looking when viewed head on, the sides of his blackbirds beak widening to give a dictatorial aspect, that, combined with his demanding cheeps earned him the moniker.

Caoimhe, who has a bird phobia, had found him around the side of the house, almost stepping on him, and had run, breathless into the house, calling “MUM! Muuuum!” Her sister, upon hearing her tone, had run out and when I arrived I was greeted by one baby blackbird and two upset daughters. A shoebox was lined with dried grass and moss, and I 'deftly' lifted the bird and deposited it in it’s new nest. I had observed the bird appeared to have a damaged wing and at least one damaged leg and was hesisitant as to whether we should be helping it at all. Having become aware of it, or course, and not knowing what else to do, I felt we had to ‘do something’. I learned through Googling, that taking on the care of a baby bird is a huge commitment – the box needs to be kept, ideally, at 85 deg F, the air around the bird needs a moisture content of 25 percent, it needs to be fed every two hours around the clock (at least, depending on it’s age) and, baby blackbirds need to be fed pureed dog food with a high water content as giving it water by syringe could drown it. Phew!

As my concerned daughters were too scared to go near Mussolini, I had to step in and become mother. Having breastfed two human infants didn’t prepare me for this task. I’m not a bird and found trying to keep this little mite alive very stressful. I worried about it getting enough food. As it’s legs were so damaged it couldn’t do what baby birds usually do when being fed (i.e. stand up and flap it’s wings – this info thanks to YouTube!) it would fall forwards on it’s beak when trying to feed. At first, I interpreted this as bird language for not wanting food. I eventually learned to wait until it got itself into a position where it could put it’s head back and ‘gape’, and developed a technique of putting the tip of a watercolour brush into it’s beak for it to gently take the food. Then the moistened brush side can be used to wipe excess food from the sides of the beak.

While I continued to feel stressed, I began to enjoy the sound of the blackbirds song in the house and to appreciate it’s contented little cheeps once fed. My concern for it’s condition never waned however, as with a damaged wing, and two damaged legs, how would it ever fend for itself. Esme began to feed it and to share the responsibility for caring for it, followed, miraculously, by Caoimhe, who initially was so sad to not be able to go near it to help it, but who, by day three, was participating in feeding Joey, having thus affectionately named ‘him’.

I wondered at the reason for this little birds appearance in our lives, as everything in the external world is a reflection of the internal. I thought about it’s injured wing and crippled legs, and how sad it is for a little creature to be unable to fulfill what it is born to do. The likelihood was this bird would never fly. I reflected on my own able body and skillsets, and vowed, once again, to fully spread my wings and fly.

On Monday morning, just as I was leaving for work with Joey where I intended to get the vet on The Animal Care course to take a look at him, I received a phonecall from Caoimhe at school asking me to collect her as she was experiencing breathing difficulties, again. She’d had some similar episodes the previous week so this time, I brought her straight to the doctor. After the examination the doctor recommended we go to the A+E at the hospital to rule out a pathological explanation. We came home and fed Joey, who, I noticed also seemed to have developed breathing difficulties. When we returned from the hospital five hours later, having received the all clear for Caoimhe, little Joey, wings spread, head thrown back, had died. This came both as a disappointment and a huge relief. He had been loved and looked after during his short life, helping us in return and now, Little Joey had left behind his damaged body, and his limitations, having reminded us to let go of ours, and flies free, at last.

Image courtesy of Nigel Chaney