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...
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 dessicated 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 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...
I have been on an epic journey. I have travelled a countless distance and endured unmeasurable inflictions. This is my story. It began with a breath I learned to sit with the breath and discovered great subtleties of silence. In time these places of bliss became distracted by moments of tension. I tugged on the thread. At the end of the tension was a discomfort, small and ambiguous. It was a...
I have faced the dragon. I have seen the ocean that drowns. I have seen the fires that consume. I have walked and been suffocated and been burnt. Beneath the waters and the flames I have seen the boulder that crushes. It is a wooden board with sharp corners and rough edges, and a solidity that won’t fail. It is a room that shrinks and shrinks until the prisoner is crouching and caught. It...
Weak and vulnerable. Rivers flowing behind the eyes, and in the chest a sea. And the sea is never full. An undulating surface. Depths and darkness and suffocating enclosure. A place that expands from the inside out, with walls that never move. Desperation and pity and collapsed possibilities. A flimsy coil of smoke rising from its own darkness, reaching and grasping. An abyss reflecting itself...