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...
Emotions are a central concept in Western psychology and its language for introspection. The definition of “emotion” is nebulous, incorporating and alluding to a range of phenomenon, and yet it is an extremely powerful category for defining and referring to the human experience. Buddhism has a deeply and long developed model for describing, identifying, and deconstructing mental...
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 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...
There will be no monuments to my battles. No records of my trials. No one will see the monsters I went out to meet. No one will remember their size or ferocity. Stepping into fear When I woke up the dragon was already there. I have woken up to so many mornings – days that end only to turn into another, growing into weeks, marking months – with a pain in my chest and a knowledge of...
The mind is a morass of sensations that fling themselves against the canvas, splattering their reception by laws of attraction and rejection. The observer may sit patiently, never being moved only moving, never seen only seeing, never the watcher and never the watched. Or the observer may be cast outside by the tremors and insistence of its subject matter. Forces of delight pull the observer...
A warmth that expands and demands and drives steam into the mind’s chambers. A hot wind carrying flakes of brittle rust, curling around the chest; abrasive. A tube carrying ease and motion, behind the heart between the lungs, strangled and pinched and squeezed. A driver of power, planning and scheduling confidence and assurance and recurring pride. Schemes and checkmates and victory parades...