Review – Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes July 25, 2012
Posted by Living Abundance in review.Tags: review
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I recently picked up the book Solitude: Seeking Wisdom In Extremes by Robert Kull. I had only heard of the book for the first time a week ago and suddenly I saw it in a bookstore and the library. I should thank my dharma buddy Paulette for recommending the book during sangha.
The book is a firsthand account of one man’s year-long experiment to see the biological, psychological and spiritual effects of solitude. The author set out to live for an entire year off the coast of Chile for an entire year in complete solitude, where he had no direct human contact.
The book is one part wilderness survival and one part psychospiritual development. The author actually was an experienced Buddhist meditation practitioner, and used meditation techniques daily as a way to develop a clear mind and control the psychological effects of having to survive alone in the wilderness. Another aspect of the author’s spirituality was a deep connection to wilderness and nature, including the elements (wind, rain, ocean, clouds, etc.) as well as the plants and animals he relied on for survival. A large part of the author’s time on the island was spent reading many books including meditation and Buddhism books.
The book was quite satisfying and very fascinating to see how the content changes over the course of the year. The entries are chronological, and the author made a journal entry every day.
I quite enjoyed the spiritual themes and questions that the author struggled with in his account. The questions were ones that I have sought answers myself, so I enjoyed reading another person’s explorations. Some of the themes included: aloneness/solitude versus social interaction, Big Mind versus little mind, activity as distraction versus inactivity and stillness, mystical experiences in the wilderness,
depression, anxiety, and dealing with physical pain. You might be as surprised as I was about the answers or resolutions that the author finds to some of these questions.
It was also great to hear another person put great emphasis on spirituality as an important aspect of human life.
Some great quotes from the book (there were many other great indirect quotes throughout the book from other authors and Buddhist teachers that I didn’t include here):
We have seriously confounded luxury with necessity in our culture, and can no longer differentiate between what we want in order to maintain a particular lifestyle (with its social relationships and sensual pleasures) and what we actually need for physical survival. We have confounded social identity with biological and spiritual being to the point of believing we will die if we lose our social standing, which is often based on the material wealth we have accumulated. This accelerating spiral of desires becoming necessities is driving our suicidal rush to destroy the Earth we depend on for our actual physical survival.
Are you remembering to remember and notice Life living in you?
A few comments to make about what I didn’t enjoy in the book were the long, often tedious accounts of wildlife and the weather, in part due to the author’s training in biology. Because each entry in the book is a daily journal entry, some of the descriptions became quite repetitive.
In all, I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in nature and wilderness survival and/or meditation and spirituality.
Happy Listening: Anyway by Martina McBride July 17, 2012
Posted by Living Abundance in happy listening.Tags: acceptance, impermanence, positivity
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Marina McBride – Anyway
You can spend your whole life buildin’
Somethin’ from nothin’
One storm can come and blow it all away
Build it anyway
You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not ever come your way
Dream it anyway
[chorus:]
God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good
When I pray it doesn’t always turn out like I think it should
But I do it anyway
I do it anyway
This world’s gone crazy
And it’s hard to believe
That tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway
You can love someone with all your heart
For all the right reasons
And in a moment they can choose to walk away
love ’em anyway
[chorus]
You can pour your soul out singing
A song you believe in
That tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang
Sing it anyway
Yeah, sing it anyway
I sing, I dream, I love
Anyway
Dealing with Uncertainty: What to Rely On? July 15, 2012
Posted by Living Abundance in Uncategorized.Tags: anxiety, career, depression, effort, present moment
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For the first time in my life I am searching for a “real job,” a permanent full-time job reflecting all of my education and training. Consequently, I am also face-to-face with uncertainty, as I really don’t know what the future brings with regards to my location, my job, my coworkers, my friends, my sangha, and my distance from family.
Here in this incredibly uncertain future is where my usual tendency to resort to projecting into the future and building myself up with planning is no longer applicable. I have to admit that I no longer am in complete control of my future. I can’t simply decide an answer to all of the above open questions.
I’m seeing quite clearly how this sense of not knowing is uncomfortable, it makes me uneasy. It is not a place I am used to. The blessing of my modern life is that I can have a great deal of control over my own personal situation.
My usual reaction to dealing with anxiety is to resort to routine in my daily life. I structure what I do, the tasks I complete, where I go, the people I spend time with, as a way to cushion myself against the unpredictability of human life. I take comfort in the familiarity of going through each day exactly as I can plan it, and as a result, I get stuck in grooves, repetitiveness, and habitual patterns.
Therefore, the curse of this modern life is that the control can create an illusion of certainty. It can always appear that I have things entirely planned out, arranged, put in place, but then something will come along and tip the boat, shake things up, take the rug out from under my feet.
I am seeing exactly the type of situation that this routine is explicitly trying to avoid:
I haven’t encountered this situation before/ recently.
I need to make a decision about what to do, the best way to proceed.
I only have a limited amount of information at this present time about what is the best decision.
Any decision I make has no guarantee that it will achieve my desired end result.
For me this circumstance of uncertainty and novelty is quite scary. For that reason, I’ve carefully and purposefully engineered it out of my life situation.
This type of job search is new and uncertain for me, as I’ve never before had to look for a “real job. I have no guarantee that in this whole process I am proceeding in the “right” way or making the best decisions.
Although I think that so far I have been doing better than I expected in dealing with the uncertainty of not having a job lined up, I do experience some low points. At times I feel hopeless, my mood becomes more depressed, and I lose my motivation:
I give up. I don’t care. I’m not doing this right now.
I’ve also been noticing some thoughts and feelings that I suspect may be due to what I label “internalized classism.” The thoughts and feelings go somewhat like:
I don’t belong here. I don’t fit. I’m not wanted. I have nothing to offer.
At other times in my life (applying to university and graduate school, applying for awards, working in an academic setting), I’ve had similar feelings where I’m not the right type of person (i.e., not the right social class) to be accepted here. I see how these thoughts have been a story that has been playing for much of my life, and is a result of deep conditioning.
What else do I rely on to tell myself that things are working out exactly the way they are supposed to?
A sense of hope and optimism for the future.
Faith in the process unfolding before my very eyes.
Faith that the world I perceive outside of me has a place for me.
Faith in myself and my abilities, skills, and personality.
Faith in other people who have helped me thus far, who have shaped who I am. In all of my past experiences that have shaped who I am, I carry their instructions, their example, and their teachings inside of me.
That sense of faith is actually a familiar place for me from when I was struggling to complete my degree. Often I felt so much like giving up, and I wanted to stop pushing myself to work to finish. I wanted desperately to stop using fear, anxiety, shame, and guilt as motivation to push myself to complete the work I found dissatisfying.
As much as I could at these times, I tried to motivate myself to complete my work by having faith that my talents and abilities would combine with an intrinsic human need to direct activity outside of oneself. Now I am trying to use a similar motivation on my job search. I am trying to have faith that there is a place I can align myself with to receive my talents and abilities.
Happy Listening: Beautiful Life by Doc Walker July 4, 2012
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Beautiful Life by Doc Walker
This old house, It’s covered in dust
This old house, has seen better days
This old car has turned from red into rust
This old car dreams of the old highway
This old river it still twist and turns
This old river used to run untamed
This old town well it’s heart still burns
This old town it still runs through my veins.
Chorus
It’s been a beautiful life
Oh I’ve been along for one hell of a ride
Even though I may be falling apart
Oh it’s been a beautiful life
These old shoes they’ve walked for miles and miles
These old shoes they’ve walked through life unafraid
This old guitar I got it when I was a child
This old guitar well it still has something to say
(chorus)
All of these eyes have seen laughter and tears
And these eyes have seen something new
This old heart it still has a few more years
This old heart will always love you
(chorus x2)
Such a beautiful life