Mind|Body|Spirit Academy

Here’s a little poem from Marianne Williamson’s Illuminata that I have liked for a long time, and am currently finding useful – yet again:

Dear God,
I surrender to You my striving.
I let go all need to effort or to struggle.
I relax deeply into things exactly as they are.
I accept life, that it might move through me with grace.
Amen.

Please don’t let the G-word turn you away. I know I had that issue for awhile, but I would have missed some valuable stuff along the way if I hadn’t broadened my idea of the word and subbed my own ideas. You can pray to whatever you believe in. The “God” referred to in the poem is based on the concept of God in A Course in Miracles, but it can be Jesus, Krishna, your higher self, the life force, love, spaciousness or whatever your personal conception is.

I think the important idea here is not who or what is prayed to, but about stopping the striving. There’s a sense of peace and freedom in taking a break from the efforting, if only for a second, so we can see what we’ve been pushing against.

Striving is not the same as working hard. It’s the striving “against’, and resistance to reality, to what is. What if you stopped, rested from your striving for a minute? For an hour? A day? Can you feel it? It’s peace.

I have been reading a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. It’s one of those spirituality books that you can open anywhere and read a little for some soul food. Like many of the best books I’ve ever read, I acquired it completely by accident.

I currently love this little book and carry it with me everywhere. The passage I keep reading lately is about death. I don’t know why, but it’s on my mind lately. I suppose at the ripe old age of 43 I’ve been somewhat introspective about where it’s all going…where I’ve been, mentally and physically, and what’s to come. I think about impermanence, and my fight to stave off the wrinkles, the gray hair, the inevitable un-hipness beginning to set in.

The starkness of the “D” word contrasted with the way I feel when I read the words recommended by Batchelor in this chapter is confusing. I hesitate to even write about such a topic here, for fear it will turn readers off. I find it an ironical, absolutely freeing, load-lightening, joy-inducing, improvement to my perspective when I read the words he says to comtemplate in meditation:

Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?

He says the aim of this meditation is to awaken a felt sense of what it means to live a life that will stop. When I share the quote with my husband, he agrees, and rattles off the Shawshank quote, “either get busy livin’, or get busy dyin'”. I suppose that captures part of it, but that’s not all that is evoked for me.

I don’t know if it’s just the way Batchelor poses the question, or where I am in my life or spiritual journey now, but what I get from the contemplation of the phrase is an unmistakable clarification of priorities. I immediately realize that no matter how difficult life may seem at times, what I want to be is joyful, open to every precious moment of it. All of it. I don’t want to waste a single second in self pity or smallness, guilt or regret. I want to experience every wonderful, horrible, awesome moment with all of my being. Because it’s the only thing that makes sense to me when I acknowledge the fact that it will end, and I know not how or when. I am amazed that something so utterly depressing on the surface can inspire so much joy.

It doesn’t mean I won’t get lost, or forget sometimes. But I remember more and more often over time. This is the value of spiritual practice, of our teachers in all of their forms. They can help remind us of what’s important and give us perspective when we most need it. Where do you get your instant perspective?

I have been gluten free by the conventional definition for over 8 years now, and still have allergy symptoms, and have started to have issues with numbness and tingling, as well as gall bladder pain for the past few years. My research indicates that it may be because I haven’t eliminated all of the gluten containing grains from my diet. I only eliminated the ones conventional medicine identified as problematic – barley, wheat and rye. This information is over 60 years old, and there is plenty of new evidence that not only are all gluten containing grains dangerous for those with gluten intolerance, but possibly even meat and milk from grain fed animals, as well.

Having survived the first trauma of dietary restriction (but not without much weeping and gnashing of teeth), you can imagine my excitement about the idea of enduring yet another round of elimination. I have started to remove all grains, but am not quite there yet. My lovely, thoughtful young niece made me gluten free brownies for a recent party, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I could not eat them. I am still having moments where I want to weep because it feels like there is nothing to eat, but not nearly as frequently as before.

Others are forging this trail ahead of me, like Wellness Mama, for instance, and I am grateful for all of the practical information they share, like beautiful pics of scrumptious, easy to make food, that keep me motivated.

I am also getting better at cooking, improvising, and the way I think about food. I try not to think about cooking as a burden, but as something I get to do. I think about how it wasn’t all that long ago that we did not have fast food, and cooking wasn’t that unusual. I think about what a great cook I have become since going gluten free and having to figure out how to make good food that I actually wanted to eat.

It’s still hard for me to believe sometimes that there’s this entire food group that I cannot eat, like it’s a weird dream I had a long time ago that I couldn’t eat wheat. It’s sometimes hard to believe that grains can be so unhealthy for us, and still the government and doctors and prominent health experts keep telling us to eat them.

What I cannot dispute is the evidence – the evidence that, at least for people like me who are gluten intolerant, my feeling well, and ultimately my health, depend upon avoiding grains. It’s becoming more common knowledge and the information is pretty easy to find if you just look. Then there’s the ultimate test – how do you feel when you stop eating a certain food? So far my body says, “it’s better without the grains”. No sniffles, less digestive discomfort, and my body just feels quieter, calmer somehow.

Engaging mindfully in this process of discovering what works for my body, learning how to cook and eat, and questioning my assumptions that deprivation and craving were inevitable have all helped. I don’t have to be miserable, I don’t need sympathy, and there really is plenty to eat if I take responsibility for my food. What I discovered is that there really is no victim here…just a girl who can’t eat seeds.

2/20/12 Update: I am two weeks without dairy and mostly without grain, and I feel fabulous. I have cheated a little, but am seeing such amazing results I will continue to work on it. I am unwilling to say I will permanently do without grain or dairy, but I will try to heal my gut using as much of the GAPS diet as I can stand before I try to add these things back. Please ask me if you want more info!

I’ve been away for awhile and I have so many things to tell you, but I guess I’ll just start here, right where I am, right now. The afterglow of the holidays is beginning to dim, and as I am sorely feeling the empty space where the jolliness and eggnog should be, I find myself looking for what’s next, taking inventory of all that is unfinished. Starting the new year with gusto is fine, but it’s also good to have a look at this restlessness, this continuous need to pursue, to be somewhere other than here. I know that the way to true freedom is to be with the discomfort in full acceptance in order to discover whatever gift it holds for me.

This has me thinking about what I know about the way the mind works, and how it is always looking for the next problem, can’t relax unless it’s “doing” something, like a dog with a bone. We no sooner finish one project than to have ten others surface, clamoring for attention. Why is this?

It’s totally innocent. Our brains know how to tune out the ordinary, the predictable, and filter for novel stimuli. It’s pure survival. The brain automatically tunes out common stimuli so we can attend to new things – this is called “attenuation”. If we couldn’t do this, we would spend all day trying to figure out what’s dangerous, how to dress ourselves, and what is edible or not, as though we had encountered these things for the first time. It allows us to tune out annoying noises, and the other distractions from our intended tasks. Imagine trying to go through every day as though it were the first time! It’s pretty easy to see the evolutionary benefit of attenuation, but there’s also a downside.

Errors can occur when our brains generalize in this way, thinking something is insignificant when it might not be true. We don’t notice the nuances, assuming we know other people and everything else we’ve previously experienced. This is the seat of prejudice, of stagnant relationships, and of errors in judgement. We tune out, avoid, become bored with, or don’t pay that much attention to anything we deem predictable.  Even the beautiful and the enjoyable can become commonplace, and we then begin to look for the next thing to give us the surprise, the joy, the rush of newness. We can find ourselves ignoring very important things, like:

• loved ones speaking to us
• the scenery along well-traveled routes
• taste of our food
• our possessions
• routines at work or home
• even miraculous things like sunsets and wildlife, if we see them often enough
• physical or emotional pain

Attending to these stimuli then, can require some effort. At first. Then it becomes easier all the time to develop the habit of fully attending to whatever we’re doing right now, as we discover the newness, the aliveness, of it. There’s a dynamism and a vitality to the moment when we are actually looking at it, and we become aware more and more of the time when our attention is going to some bright, shiny object in the past or future instead of being here in the glorious nowness of life.

Mindfulness practice is the way to come back to our experience, rather than dismissing it and automatically going for the far-off flash and ignoring the substance right under our noses. And “practice” is just that, practice which requires effort. I and many others can say from personal experience, though, that the payoff is undeniably worth the effort.

Knowing this tendency of our brains can help us to lovingly and compassionately bring ourselves back, over and over again, to the moment. We can be patient with our own impatience, knowing this fact of our humanness. This retraining of our brains through mindfulness practice promises the reward of lasting joy, happiness, and freedom. In the end we discover that the thing that we spend so much time chasing is actually right here!

This video is the best, most up to date information I have found so far on gluten sensitivity:

What is gluten sensitivity?

Have you ever noticed how much time we spend avoiding reality?

• We turn on the radio to banish the silence in the car
• We turn on the tv and stereo to cover up the silence in our homes
• We plug in air fresheners to cover up the smells in the house
• We talk to cover up the silence in conversation
• Every store has music or announcements to cover the silence
• We keep eating even though we are full
• We light the house and stay up even though we are tired
• We eat junk even though we know our bodies need real food
• We cover up the taste of our food with salt, sugar and chemicals
• We use scented detergents to wash ourselves and our clothes because somehow it isn’t conceivable to tolerate the smell of ourselves and our clothes
• We wear perfume and deodorant to cover up what we really smell like
• We drink, smoke and take drugs to make the moment better than it is
• We procrastinate and do something other than what we know we need to be doing right now
• We turn the lights off during sex to hide our perceived flaws
• We try to dress ourselves to hide what we really look like, to look “better”
• We put on makeup to hide what we really look like, to be more “beautiful”

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

In Buddhism and nondual spirituality it is said that desire is the cause of all suffering. At first it might seem to apply only to selfish or extreme pleasures, or be about coveting material possessions. What it really means is that the cause of all suffering is “the desire for this moment to be different than it is” or desiring for reality to be something other than it is.

What’s cool about this statement is that you can test it out for yourself. You probably even have memories you can use to test it. Remember the last really great thing you experienced and wished you could make last – a holiday, vacation, sunset, someone’s visit, the feeling after a new purchase? The intensity of that longing and everything we do to try to make a moment last could be characterized as suffering. Same for avoiding pain: pushing away something that we don’t want or like makes it seem much worse, last much longer, than it otherwise might have been. Have you noticed? See if you can check into this sometime.

Freedom, then, is in fully participating in the moment, no matter what it brings, rather than living for the good moments and trying to stretch them, and working like hell to improve the mediocre moments or fast forward through the undesirable ones.

The first step toward freedom is noticing this human tendency to push away pain and grasp at pleasure. I dare you to check it out. In fact, I double-dare you! How much time do you spend trying to alter reality?

Let everyone know what you discover…leave a comment below.

Check out this recently published article in Resurgence by Robert Holden, one of my favorite happiness authors.

Here’s an excerpt:

In my latest book, Be Happy, I have written: “Your definition of happiness will influence every significant decision in your life.” It is essential, therefore, that individuals and governments alike keep happiness on the agenda because, more than ever before, humanity needs a better understanding of happiness. We have learned so much, about atoms and galaxies and other things, but we still do not understand ourselves very well; we still go to war too often, and there is still too much suffering.

How happy are you on a scale of 1-10? It may not seem like an important question, but research shows it is not fluff, not just icing on the cake. It IS the cake! Do you know what makes you happy?

Just a quick reminder of the upcoming Adyashanti broadcast tomorrow. Audio and video streaming are both free. Last week’s was a really good one, and you can purchase it for download here.

The next one is Wednesday evening, November 9, 9pm EST. Just visit this page at the appointed time and click “watch live video stream”.

Since my recent post about the importance of self-compassion, I am hearing and reading more and more about such practices and how much they can help people feel better.

Ruth Buczynski’s post today has a simple description of what’s called “metta” meditation. It’s very easy to do, and the impact is described by many as immediate feeling of well-being, especially when feeling hurt by someone.

I’ve found this perspective and practice a valuable one. It’s a change from my normal habit of ruminating, scrutinizing and analyzing such situations, and it is a more compassionate stance toward myself which I find comforting and freeing. Even with my mindfulness practice, I wasn’t previously aware of just how stingy I was being with such kindness toward my own existence, and the psychological impact of beating myself up for my mistakes in the innocent attempt to use mindful observation.

Hope you might give this compassionate approach a try and tell others how it went.