Tag: Meditate

Roller Coaster

Put people in a dark room and show us the view from a moving roller coaster and we will bob and weave even though we have gone nowhere and done nothing.

Spend the evening watching the view, and you will get tired. And so many people are in the dark watching screens showing persuasive lies of mimesis.

Fatigue is induced. It is a feature not a bug.

We cannot turn it off. We cannot make it go away. And we cannot escape. It is the water we live in. It is our ecology. It is the culture that takes over the world. It is what we must work within; we have no choice.

Ok,
How do we work in it?

Kinko’s was once an important tool.

No message, no number of messages, can do in this maelstrom of messages what I once did with Kinko’s. And all the media are algorithms always favoring the most exciting, and tiring, that gets the most views.

The house always gets its percentage. To win in the game, to get your many views, means you lose as you feed the machine and fatigue your audience.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

The internet is not a better copy machine.

There is not a better message when you are pouring it into water.

I teach people ways of moving. I teach ways to reshape how they feel themselves move. How they come to feel themselves then reshapes how they move all the time. This is not information. It is not done with words.

How we get through too much information is not more information, even if we think our more is better information.

We need to teach people to be blind and deaf. And our tools to teach that are words and images and sounds.

The koan is the arm pointing at the moon; look at the moon not the arm.

The technique is not the content of expression but in the manner. Stop informing. Teach fish to lose their eyes.

Meditating to…

The prevailing rationalization is almost never empiric. It will serve purposes other than clear explanation. The coercion in a society promotes understandings that perpetuate the established. And these ideas persist and mislead for hundreds of years.

No words dislodge these misunderstandings. They shape our perceptions and get confirmed by how we unthinkingly see our experiences — however the mismatch.

Silent insight turning away from the conventional by turning away from ideas and words, deep listening without expectations, opens the opportunity to notice. And then we might begin to feel that an idea does not fit our experience, our world, does not fit us.

Rinse, repeat. There is no bottom; nothing is revealed. There is a little unburdening: a received rationalization shapes our expectations and perceptions a little less. There is no arrive; there is no gain. There is some useful loss.

This does not feel secure, does not feel comforting; thus it is not popular. We cannot tell someone how to see around. We can suggest that they sit silently and hope they become detached from explanations.

Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot

A few minutes meditating or a brief nap

A single minute of sleep onset is sufficient to boost the probability of insight by a factor of three compared to wake.

Source: Sleep onset is a creative sweet spot

The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing | PNAS

Source: The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing | PNAS

Research indicates that core dimensions of psychological well-being can be cultivated through intentional mental training. Despite growing research in this area and an increasing number of interventions designed to improve psychological well-being, the field lacks a unifying framework that clarifies the dimensions of human flourishing that can be cultivated. Here, we integrate evidence from well-being research, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and clinical psychology to highlight four core dimensions of well-being—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We discuss the importance of each dimension for psychological well-being, identify mechanisms that underlie their cultivation, and present evidence of their neural and psychological plasticity. This synthesis highlights key insights, as well as important gaps, in the scientific understanding of well-being and how it may be cultivated, thus highlighting future research directions.

There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought – Scientific American

… we believe subjectively that we are possessed of far greater certainty about our attitudes than we actually have.

… consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy.

Philosopher Peter Carruthers insists that conscious thought, judgment and volition are illusions. They arise from processes of which we are forever unaware

Source: There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought – Scientific American

Sitting still

The Still Point: Capturing the movement of the mind
Tricycle Fall 2004

Spokane Men’s Yoga Gathering — Flow, Pause, & Meditation — 2019-08-11

The next Spokane Men’s Yoga Gathering will be on Sunday 11th of August from 6 to 8pm.

We will work on flowing sequences of yoga to add to your regular yoga practice.

We will start with Ken’s vinyasa sequence that we have used for warm up.

  • Ken’s vinyasa sequence
    • pause on half fold and seated chair
  • Warrior 2 sequence
  • Surya Namaskara – once or twice
  • Plank, staff, up dog, half dog sequence – a middle of Surya Namaskar

In the middle of flow, we will each pause in positions that feel most beneficial.

In the middle of the gathering we will pause for meditation. How does yoga feel different after meditation?

On a day when you can do only five minutes, one of these sequences will benefit.