Editorial notes: This poem was found in ‘Draft’ mode in the original blog and may be incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last updated on 19/09/2016 Arise, my heart. Don’t look down, no matter the pains that surround me. Shine, my heart. Cast the beacon of your feelings on all that arises within me. Your light has come, my heart. The sympathy you seek...
I am small and the world is great and beyond my comprehension right now. This at least I can say without doubt. But here is a dream. Once there was a fish in a fishbowl. There were pebbles on the ground, water all around, a toy castle, and a filtration system of some sort. Every so while food would fall from above the water, from where there was no water, a place of nothingness except pain of...
Editorial notes: This untitled post was found in ‘Draft’ mode in the original blog and may be incomplete. It is published here in its original state. It was last updated on 13/09/2016 Like a captain far from any familiar shore, gifted with a map without which he could only be utterly lost, yet dreading the fear that his past mistakes can only repeat so that he will lose even the ken...
The Buddhists teach that fear is like a slave at a festival who cannot enjoy the celebrations because of immanent obligations, while doubt is like one lost in the desert, wavering back and forth, going nowhere. Change can be frightening for many reasons. Change implies new challenges and facing new unknowns. Change can mean abandoning old challenges and old senses of self. Sometimes the need for...
He had been walking since before he could remember, and before that he had escaped. There had been dunes of fine white dust and shattered stones lining desiccated river beds. He had passed passages decorated by impossible fossils, decaying wooden signs and roughly hewn markers proving undeniable theses and directions, and a skeleton proving that he was not the first to go this way. He had known...
A few things have entered my awareness recently, and combined with my present struggles and goals to produce an inspiration. I’ve been introduced to the DBT skill radical acceptance. I’ve come across strategies for reparenting and for relearning responses. And have discovered that the creator of DBT herself persevered through psychiatric struggles. Radical acceptance At DBT I have...
This is a diary of a perfect, impossible day. One that epitomises, exemplifies, and trends towards my various goals, values, and desires for expressions. A Morning Wake up and whisper a personal mantra. Paint the constellations. This expresses my hope in transcendental significance, and drive to ascend ever higher, to get to the place to get to the place. Shower and shave and teeth, practising...
This is what I’ve worked out. This is the progress I’ve made. This the set-back I’ve experienced. This is my recommendation for the best way forward. It seems like Emotions form a substrate of the conscious entity, that is separate in the same way that the physical body is separate from the mind, but irreducibly connected in the same way that the physical body is. Just because...
I may lose myself and be lost in the tangles of associations and prompts and distractions and imaginations and judgements and intuitions of the mindless mind. Sati (bare attention, mindfulness) is an exercise in the moment, and a propensity developed with training. The arising and leaving and intending-towards sati increase and decrease with practice. The Pali texts describe sati as a hot pan...
A boy lost in the woods. The path is a dragon to be fled, cobblestones made of logical paradoxes to be solved. There is a sign pointing to freedom and wealth. There are warnings; a cacography of leaves and bare twigs, foretelling failures and eternal damnation. The spirits sing sweet songs, gossamer echoes of Ariadne’s thread. “Here is freedom, here is choice.” But the boy...
