Waking Up Falling Asleep Waking Up Falling Asleep

I was going to title this post: Mindfulness and Scatteredness, but a piece of a dream pushed it in a different direction.

Assembling the ingredients.

Ingredient #1: - a conversation with my Saturday morning friend, Ted. We were talking about how people find purpose in life, and then it shifted to one of his favorite topics - propaganda and how to help people to wake up to how they are being manipulated and then having done that, what to do about it.

He talked about doing a workshop or writing an op-ed piece. I suggested writing an essay in the style of Wendell Berry, one of his favorite authors. I talked about how if someone could organize 5 or 10 people who would all agree to write 3 articles for newspapers or give a workshop or two over the next two years, about how they have started to choose a life more based on values and relationship and quality of life rather than scurrying around and always trying to make a few bucks more to feed the consumerist addiction, that the potential impact for a community may be palpable. The stories would not be diatribes against the system but rather testimonies to a certain waking up and how the transitioning was taking place in their lives and what it looked like. (Let this ingredient sit in the background quietly percolating...)

Ingredient #2: Just before giftmas I took a questionairre which was part of a doctoral dissertation for the daughter of a friend of mine. I was happy to help out and the topic of mindfulness helped to increase my motivation to do it.

The survey took a total of about 15 minutes; as it turns out, a pleasant 15 minutes. The questions basically set the stage by asking if I, and the other participants practise any form of mindfulness meditation. Then it went on to ask a series of questions about daily experiences, mundane experiences, and the level of awareness and presence you experience during those times in a progression from never / sometimes / frequently / almost always type of progression.

For me it was like taking a test and finding out what your grade was right on the spot (although you didn't actually get a grade). The "test" was a reflection of how much the practise of mindfulness has generalized and migrated from periods of meditation to your day to day life.

Well an interesting thing happened. The experience of taking the survey "jolted me" in a very positive way. It "operationalized" mindfulness in very concrete terms and brought it to a position of immediacy in my day to day life - or at least in parts of it. Mind you I knew all of this before, and had experienced it times before, but this seemed more immediate. It was like it gave me ideas as to how to put it into effect more often.

The effect was to mobilize me to practising being present and alive, in my daily routines and actions and experiences. Being on vacation certainly made it more easy to be present, etc., but even after I returned to my office I found my ability to maintain it fairly easy. The experience of mindfulness is generally comfortable and as such it has a way of drawing you further into the practise. (Let this indredient quietly do its work of suffusing your environment over a period of a week or so.)

Ingredient #3: A dream fragment. I had a dream a few nights ago. In it several things happened and in one part there was a conversation going on between another man and myself. It was like we were both trying to size up each other, but I had the feeling that he knew something significant that I didn't know, and there was a recollection later that the conversation was around a person's purpose or "mission." There were a few other developments in the dream, and then it ended.

When I got up and started my day I had the good fortune to remember parts of the dream and also to know that there was something in this one which was trying to tell me something and I would do well to not too easily discard it. I set the intent of recalling more of the dream, and bits and pieces of it came back to me over the next several minutes.

The most interesting part was when I recalled that the other man said: "the real question is whether you can stay awake." And then I said to myself: "wow!"

I would have thought that a better question would have been: "once having awakened and then finding that you have fallen back to sleep again, how can you help yourself to wake up again?" But they are probably both equally important questions. (Let that ingredient act as a quickening agent.)

So here I am, on a roll. I've been thinking about "mission," caught on to an operationalization of mindfulness in day to day life, and have a question posed to me in a dream. As I like to say: "neat!"

What to do?

What came to me was to set in motion a practise which would address both questions, i.e., if I "fall asleep" (i.e., go on automatic pilot, go into trance, get caught in the web of mindlessness as manifested by all the addictions, and unthinking consumerism, multitasking, not paying attention, etc.), what can I do to "come to my senses," and if I am being mindful, attention, aware, awake, what can I get in the habit of doing to keep the pattern going. It's like a flywheel process; it takes a fair amount of energy / effort to getting it going, but the more it gains momentum, then the less effort is required to keep it going.

So I've been working with the following process which for lack of a better term I will call Mindfulness Minutes.

Here's the process in some detail and in an approximate sequence. But remember that this is simply an outline which can create an experience of mindfulness. Once you have practised it 5 or 10 or 150 or 1500 times it will become second nature and then you can invent and explore your own pathways and explorations to keep the flywheel of mindfulness going across time and across situations.

1. Set the intent to do it.
2. It may be helpful in the beginning to say: "this is a good time to take a break."
3. Clear a "space" so you can shift gears into being more aware and present. Typically the universal way of doing that is to bring your attention to your breath. Watch your breath; really become aware of it.
4. There is no effort to change anything about your breathing. It may want to spontaneously shift, and if so, bring mindful awareness to that, and let it happen - or not; either way be aware of the experience. Keep it fresh.
5. Whatever you become aware of bring your awareness to it. The second learned reflex during the mindfulness minutes is to not make any judgements about what you are aware of or experiencing. The strategy is one of watching and being aware without the need to label and differentiate. Even when you notice events being judged, evaluated, sliced and diced into favorite or unusual categories, "simply" let mindfulness be aware of the process without judging, labeling and differentiating.
6. You will probably become aware of events in your mind (images, thoughts, conversations) and your body (sensations, feelilngs) or in your environment. In every instance let yourself become aware of what is presently in, or coming into, your awareness. Let it be. Any effort to bring it forth or to push it away is not part of this exercise - except as, yet again, another opportunity to let mindfulness "be and do" its thing.
7. As you become aware of something, notice it, and let it go. It's like you are encouraging impermanance.
8. The "letting go" is without effort. The easiest way I have found to do this is to both bring attention to the event in experience and let the awareness bring you further into the experience and if you are not trying to hold on to it, it will naturally morph across time. Or, when you notice the sensation or the image, notice it and then on your exhale let your mindful attention go to the experience of exhaling.
9. Do this for a few minutes and then move back into whatever you had been doing or whatever the next thing is that you want to do.
10. Now that you have set the intent to do it, and have practised it, the next step is to set up some sort of feedback loop that reminds you at random times throughout the day to take that break. Whenever I walk in a particular corridor I take it as a cue to practise. I have done it when I walk through a door way, i.e., I take that as a reminder of the opportunity. I take a cue from a muscle in my neck; it it gets too tight, I use it as a reminder. The best is to come up with your own.

There is lots and lots more to this, but this is basic introduction that can get you started. Reading this may make it sound complicated, but it isn't. Just do it, or don't. If you do it, be aware not only of what you experience during the mindful minutes, but also what impact it has on you across time.

I would love to hear your comments about this.

Rushing In My Dreams - Balancing Act?

In my last post I talked about procrastination.

During the week or two before writing that I became aware of several dreams in which I was rushing. There was no particular place that I was rushing to. No particular task to accomplish. Not running from anything. Just rushing. Just the feeling of pressure that comes from rushing.

It may have been related to the fact that I was procrastinating with those reports and that led to a feeling of "having to get something done." Maybe that's it; in my daytime consciousness I was doing a fairly good job of pushing the task out of my mind - and then in my sleep / dream time world, it shows up as the concrete abstraction (how's that for juxtaposing two words) of just plain rushing - without any specific content.

But another thought also occurred to me. That was that with any change there is an inevitable backlash which tries to re-establish the original state of affairs.

In my situation, I started this process when the words "I will rush no more" became my mantra by applying them in an ongoing, daily, and gradually expanding manner. The "ongoing" was important because to not do that it would just become another incomplete experiment in living and I've had enough of them already. The "daily" was important because that has a more cumulative power and helps to maintain momentum. An analogy would be with exercise. It's better to do some exercise every day than to save it up for extended periods of exercise every few weeks or so. As we all know that is the surest way to increase injuries and then that will set the person back even further.

And the "gradually expanding" was important because that both makes it real and that also makes it much more interesting and "alive."

I also wanted it to be gradual to forestall the inevitable backlash. The bigger the initial change, the more abrupt it is, and the more radical it is the bigger will be the pushback. It is as if the force of habit of the original lifestyle suffused with rushing and mindlessness and consumerism has a life of its own, and if you push hard, it will push back hard. Isn't that one of the basic laws of physics - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not just physics. That's also life.

Another way of looking at this is that a person or a system tends to keep doing what it's doing unless it is acted on by an unbalanced force. (If all the forces are balanced, i.e., equally counteract each other, than the object / system will either remain stationary or will continue at it's same rate of speed and in the same direction it's headed.)

The strategy I adopted was to apply an unbalanced force combined with the principle that "the slow way is the fast way." You could call it a stealth approach the goal of which was to allow for change of very well ingrained habit clusters (lifestyle, society-style) by keeping the change beneath the radar so the pushback would be (almost) avoided.

To go back to the dreams now, I wondered if the mindless rushing in my dreams was a signal that "the old way" was "creeping" back in?

And then an interesting thing developed. When I made this connection, the dream sequence ceased ( - at least so far.) My further thought was that now the new system (I will rush no more) is well established and the pushback from the dreams (unfocused rushing) is a "threat" to the new and more prized system and therefore I / it wants to neutralize the potential resurgence of the old system.

Neat.

Of Dreams And Birds

(Prewords: Over the past 3 weeks I have written several drafts (variously titled: Gradual Change; Reversing Reversals; Depression as Ground Fog; Some Thoughts on Peace of Mind and Restlessness) for blog entries but have held back on posting them. The topics are in themselves worthy and may eventually be published. But it's like something was holding me back. I was waiting for something that was more spontaneous, something with a bit more "oomph" feeling to it. I think it was also related to not wanting to "have to" get another entry up.)

I've been very active in the nightime dream department in the past several weeks. It may be related to coming out of that stormy place I was in a few posts back and, in my mind now, it may be connected to a series of posts by Proxima (entries dated 3/23, 3/24, and 3/27/07) about dreams. I also had a person ask me about what I thought about dreams a few weeks back and that may have stirred the pot somewhat.

Bird Dream #1: (Three weeks ago) I'm driving along minding my own business and a big black bird flies into my car and perches directly on top of my head. I'm aware that there is not much room up there for the bird so I scrunch my head down into my shoulders to create more space for it. Initially there was some fear but then it was mostly just trying to create space for "the addition." It could have been a crow or a raven.

Bird Dream #2: (Last night) I'm walking up into a mountain range. I am then aware of a very large flock of birds swirling above me. They do their aerial dance gracefully. I am then in a more forested area and there, on a low lying branch, is a great snowy white owl. No movement; just perched there.

The dreams had things happening before and after the appearance of the birds, but those two birds is what stands out in my mind. Each one on its own would have pulled my attention, but the two of them, even though separated by approximately 3 weeks of external time, really caught my attention.

Hmmm...why birds? One while driving, and one while walking - an issue of movement? One jet black and the other pure white. One moved and the other is stationary. As they say, it just gets "curiouser and curiouser."

--

Some further context of what's going on in my life recently:

1. I've been thinking again about psychotherapy and healing. We tend to organize our lives around extensive habit-clusters. If those habit-clusters are working well for us then it is often best to leave well-enough alone. If, however, they are persistent and seem to work against our best interests, then it may be a good idea to find a strategy to shift away from them and towards a better and more wholesome habit-cluster "seed." The task then would be to put energy into that new "seed" and let that expand and develop through latency towards its own potentials.

That process has much to recommend it and it goes towards the idea of healing - the process of making whole again by dealing with the original imbalances either directly or through changing the down-the-road-consequences by offering workable alternatives. But there is a further sense of healing which in a sense takes us out of the drivers seat and opens us to input from outside. In that sense, there is an opening, a cultivation of the sense of receptivity coupled with a seeing what is as clearly as possible - without the filters. In that way, we are still in the drivers seat but there is a another source of input from "on top."

2. I have been reminded in the past several weeks of something I have been aware of previously, namely, that information is being "presented" to me often. By this, I mean that I'll be just doing my thing, whatever that is that day, and something will catch my awareness: I'll hear a quote, hear a story, see a picture, have a flash of partial insight, etc. Then later in the day I will be working with someone, or talking with someone, and they will say something which gives me an opportunity to relate the earlier experience.

It's like I'm presented with a key (the information) and it takes a while for the lock (the situation in the conversation which is a puzzler) which responds to the key to make its appearance. It's very curious, but sometimes it's as if it's an only-to-be-used-one-time key. When I see these connections, then it gives me more motivation to stay aware to what is being presented and to not press for any interpretation. At those times my only effort is to set the intent to be receptive and to see / hear clearly. This process feels "non-linear" and is just available "for the picking." It appears to me as a larger process and contains a certain wonder. It invites a "deepening" rather than a "doing" but they are both there.

3. After I was up this morning I scribbled the following 2 comments based on the dreams:

A. Accept that it's all inside - the positive and the negative - and then choose your directions and intents and expressions.

B. The way we organize our history is in the service of "the winner" ... (it's not just with world history) ... the ego - it's mostly fiction - one way (of many possibilities) - just what is happening - period.