by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 21, 2016 | Blog
I have really enjoyed this so far. It has been
time-consuming but tremendously rewarding and fun. It has helped me focus on
things I need to work on, areas I am doing well and has brought a lot of
interesting feedback through comments, messages, emails and texts. I am going
to work harder to prioritize responding to this feedback, I apologize for doing
such a poor job so far.
It looks like the next few days are going to address
emotions, thanks to some feedback that was offered to me about yesterday’s
post. I really appreciate that people are reading this critically and trusting
me enough to offer honest criticism.
I think I have done a poor job articulating the role
emotions play in my life, and have inadvertently portrayed them as being bad or
something to be avoided. I can admit this isn’t far from the attitude I had for
quite a while. It was an attitude that served me well, and was probably
necessary for a time, but it had to change as I evolved as a person.
For most of my life, my emotions ran the show.
I tried keep this hidden, but they did. I was an emotional
wreck most of the time, and I think this made a lot of people uncomfortable
around me and made others feel they couldn’t trust me.
And, they were right.
You cannot trust a person whose emotions are out of control
because their barometer for how to behave is never steady.
One second they will do one thing, the next they will do
something else. It’s like making your decisions based on the direction of the
wind: it’s completely out of your control and can shift on you at any second.
This cost me over the years, and brought a lot of
humiliation and setbacks. It cost me in school, my dating life, my work life
and friendships. Predictably, things got worse and worse, and I treated more
and more people poorly. I watched long term, strong friendships fall apart, and
I watched as the consequences I was experiencing because of my choices grew
increasingly dire. I did not feel like I had any control over how any of this
was going either. My emotions were in charge.
When I was given an opportunity to do something different, I
think I ran the other direction pretty quickly and did not stop. I thought that
a detached awareness of everything around me was the way to live without all
the hassle. It did save me a lot of hassle, but it also kept me from having
meaningful relationships and trying all the things that make life worth living.
Tomorrow we’ll look at how that played out for me, and then
continue on to look at the necessity and importance of emotions. We’ll explore
things like passion, opinions, and what it means to be present emotionally,
without being overwhelmed or oppressed by them.
What are the things that can push you to a place of reacting
emotionally rather than rationally? Can you see ways this leaves you open to
manipulation or coercion?
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 20, 2016 | Blog
“Leave alone whatever rises in the mind. Do not seek to
change or alter anything. It is all perfect as it stands.” -Flight of the
Garuda
I’m going to cheat today.
I am speaking to a class of graduate students about
mindfulness and meditation tonight, so today seems like a good day to run
through a quick primer on this topic. It will help me get organized for this
evening, and it is pretty useful stuff too. No matter how often I go back to
basics I find there are things I have forgotten.
What exactly is mindfulness?
There are all sorts of definitions, I prefer to see it as a
nonjudgmental observation of what is most present in your awareness. This can
be anything:
Noticing where I bit my nail too close, observing the
sensation of discomfort.
Hearing the music coming from the television.
Noticing the anxiety about speaking tonight, where it sits
in my chest and stomach, observing the thoughts that emerge to explain it.
A note of frustration arises as I think about what I need to
do today, then a hint of self-judgment. Allowing myself to observe these things
instead of feeding them or rejecting them allows them to drift by without sticking.
The key is to allow yourself to notice without judgment.
To allow things to exist exactly as they are. To allow all
thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, noises and distractions to be exactly
as they are.
It’s not something we are necessarily wired to think about,
but why do we instinctively like or dislike some emotions?
There is no answer to this other than the fact that they are
unpleasant, but what really makes them so?
What happens when we can just allow everything to be there,
exactly as it is, without necessarily believing or investing in it?
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 19, 2016 | Blog
They say it now takes up to 2000 hours to record one hour of
uninterrupted nature sounds.
There is a good chance that this is the same “they” that
told us we eat 8 spiders every year, but it illustrates a point: we are in a
constant sound bath, and more and more it is made up of the artificial noises
born of our modern society.
Some bemoan this fact and say they long for the days before
cars and trucks and aeroplanes and hooligans with boomboxes on their shoulders.
Others would go farther, and wish for the days of hunter-gatherer, where the
sounds were limited to those of nature. Wind, birds, the desperate crush of
your bare feet on the grass as you fled the snarl of the wolf pack that was
going to eat you because we were stuck squarely in the middle of the food
chain. I say I would go back even further, back before we even had ears
to hear with. The peace and calm of a soundless, sightless existence at the
birth of life.
I win.
I actually really like sound, and I think it provides us
with an often missed opportunity for mindfulness.
Sound brings us many opportunities for judgment, so it also
brings us many opportunities to not judge. It is one of the best
laboratories to observe how something starts in the senses, triggers an
emotion, and then our thoughts jump in to start telling us a story about why we
do or do not like it, and what must be done.
Take the sound of a car with a kickass bass system at 4am.
It is just a dull, rhythmic thud, but a dull rhythmic thud that wakes us up.
This brings discomfort. It is just early enough to keep us exhausted, but not
early enough that we can go back to sleep and get good rest. We’ll probably be
a zombie today, and everything will suck. Oh man, this is going to pile up on
us all week, and then we’ll spend the weekend trying to catch up. There go all
the projects we had planned. What kind of douchebag has a system like that
anyway? Why does everyone else need to hear their music, especially when it
probably sucks? G Eazy or some shit like that. This is the problem with people
now – no one has any respect for anyone else, no one cares about anyone else,
everyone sucks. They are most likely driving drunk. No one with a system like
that in their trunk is out for a good reason at this time of night. We’re not
saying we hope it happens, but if they were to go to jail for life or die in a
car crash (just them of course, we’re not monsters), it would not be a tragedy.
We probably wouldn’t lose a cure for cancer, as Bill Hicks would say.
Now, notice that everything after the word “discomfort” is
part of a story told by the mind and nothing more. A dull thumping in the night
led us to all of that. All over sounds.
Today, let yourself hear sounds with acceptance.
Exercise non-choice, by leaving the radio off, keeping the
earbuds in your pocket, not watching television while you eat, and notice all
the sounds around you. Notice how there are sounds behind the sounds that are
most easily heard.
Notice how none of them are inherently bad, they just
trigger things inside of us and we create stories that make them bad.
The noise is neutral, see what it sounds like when we let it
stay that way.
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 18, 2016 | Blog
I am having trouble making things sound the way I want them
to this morning, I apologize ahead of time for awkward phrasings and uninspired
writing.
I slept until 7:54 this morning. I cannot remember the last
time I slept so late. I can acknowledge that I am sick now.
The fever is down this morning at least. The last two days
seem like a dream in a lot of ways. It’s all a little hazy.
This is a good opportunity to look at focus. I think I try
to do too much a lot of the time and end up accomplishing less than I would
like. Today is a great time to address this since I am in danger of trying to
hit the ground running and keeping myself from getting better.
I am going to do the things that are necessary today, and
stop with that. I am going to try to be smarter about how I do things going
forward. Work smarter, not harder I suppose.
As I’ve mentioned, I have two speaking engagements coming
up, but I also have two conferences I am applying to. Rather than doing a bunch
of new work on 4 new ideas, why not take what I already know and adapt it for
each purpose? I will actually end up with a better product that way, and it is
an opportunity to deepen my knowledge of something I work in all the time.
That’s it for me today. What are the things you need to be
focusing on? What is getting in the way of you doing this?
by Jamesscotthenson | Oct 17, 2016 | Blog
This time of year is always difficult.
I like the sun, I like the heat. I like how there is light
in the sky out here from 6am until 10pm a lot of the year. This is the time of
year when it starts getting dark early, the sun doesn’t rise until late, and
the cold starts to sneak in.
This is also the time of year I seem to be sick all the
time. I get sick a lot, but this time of year is even worse. Yesterday
definitely went south on me. I could tell I didn’t feel well, but went to the
office anyway. I figure I can feel terrible at home or feel terrible at work,
it doesn’t really matter.
This did not work. I saw one client, and then spent 40
minutes laying on the rug in my office.
It’s a really nice rug. Everyone loves it for meditation.
I went home and fell asleep for 4 hours. I think. I am not
sure what time I got home or when I went to bed. I do know what that guy on The
Walking Dead must have felt like when he woke up in that hospital room and
everything was all over the place though.
I still feel really rough.
The hard part about this for me is that I had things I
wanted to get done today. I want to rebuild my fence, I need to prepare for a
few speaking engagements, I really need to move into my new offices.
This is all out the window. There are few things that mess
me up more than Nyquil, and I’ve taken it twice in the last 18 hours. I feel
rundown, unmotivated and depressed. I can’t seem to break this fever, so I am
having a hard time concentrating and I am a little snippy.
Just a little.
I can make something out of this though. I am about the
watch Son of Batman with Max. I have some reading to catch up on. Tyler is here
this weekend so we can play cards or videogames. It could be much worse. This could
actually be fun, if I let it.
The key here is to focus on what is, instead of the way
things “should” be.
This is an opportunity to catch up on things I neglect when
I feel good and run all over the place. It’s a chance, as has been the theme of
this week, to hang out with the people I love. It’s all in how I look at it.
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