I had referenced a meditation by the Piazetzner rebbe in another post and wanted to just spell out the meditation as I learned it.
This is a quieting meditation. The goal is to quiet the chatter of the mind and let the stillness fill the space.
Sit quietly and pay attention to your thoughts. Every time you think of something, say to yourself: I'm thinking of [Whatever it is you are thinking]. Try to be specific. An example would be: I'm thinking of doing the dishes, I'm thinking of cracks on the dishes, I'm thinking about cooking food for dinner tomorrow, etc... Every time you name what you are thinking about, you are decreasing it's power over you and your thoughts and drawing the power back to yourself.
The analogy that always comes to mind is of my children who are always coming up to show me things. If I try to push them away, they get annoyed and talk louder, but if I acknowledge what they are saying and pay a moments attention to them, they go back to playing and don't bother me anymore. In this meditation, we are doing the same thing to our thoughts.
Once your mind is clear. Recite the Shema silently. As you say each word, visualize it and allow it to drop into the still water of your mind. I always visualized this as watching the words slowly fall into a still pool of water.
As the last word drops into the water, ask for a gift or ask a question. Then wait and see what comes.
It's quite a wonderful meditation and especially good for finding insight in stressful times.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Love or Fear - It's your choice
I talked to John the other night and he gave me some simple wisdom in response to my questions about how to choose the good inclination (יצר הטוב) over the bad one (יצר הרע).
He said it's really making a choice between fear and love. If you choose to live with love, then it will be easy to make the choices that nourish and support. If you choose to live with fear, then the choices will be ones of self-destruction.
So how, I asked, does one move from fear to love?
He answered that it's about learning to send love to your fears. Simple to say, hard to do. The example we talked about was dealing with old memories of times that were dominated by fear. We can't change who we were, but we can change our attachment to the memory.
In this particular memory, I had not realized how scared I was at the time it happened, but in retrospect, it was very clear to me that I was being controlled by my fear. I concentrated on the memory and then threw my arms around my young self to send love. As I did, the feeling of the memory changed. I think this is one I'm going to have to go back to a few times, but the fear was starting to change. And in doing so, I'm changing who I am now by changing my attachment to who I was.
I'm learning to send love to my fear, and in that way, give power to my self-nourishing inclination and remove it from my self-destructive one.
He said it's really making a choice between fear and love. If you choose to live with love, then it will be easy to make the choices that nourish and support. If you choose to live with fear, then the choices will be ones of self-destruction.
So how, I asked, does one move from fear to love?
He answered that it's about learning to send love to your fears. Simple to say, hard to do. The example we talked about was dealing with old memories of times that were dominated by fear. We can't change who we were, but we can change our attachment to the memory.
In this particular memory, I had not realized how scared I was at the time it happened, but in retrospect, it was very clear to me that I was being controlled by my fear. I concentrated on the memory and then threw my arms around my young self to send love. As I did, the feeling of the memory changed. I think this is one I'm going to have to go back to a few times, but the fear was starting to change. And in doing so, I'm changing who I am now by changing my attachment to who I was.
I'm learning to send love to my fear, and in that way, give power to my self-nourishing inclination and remove it from my self-destructive one.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
The warp and the Woof
warp and woofThe essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric: “The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the warp and woof of the American nation.”
warp and woof. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/warp and woof (accessed: April 01, 2009).
I had an interesting conversation with my friend Yael today and it got me thinking about the warp and the woof of Judaism. The background is that I have been thinking (again) about going to rabbinical school and coming to the conclusion (again) that it's probably not the best place for me. As a friend said a long time ago: "I think you wouldn't learn what you are looking for in Rabbinical school, and the teachers wouldn't know how to teach you." I guess there are not many places to go to school to learn to be a Rabbi-healer, so I've decided I need to figure out what I think a rabbi should know and then put together a plan for learning it.
There are two aspects of my Judaism that make it difficult for me to fit into a standard program. The first is the shamanic way I experience Judaism and texts, as I've written about on this blog. The second is that I tend to approach things from the heart. Jews, especially the Yeshivot here in Jerusalem, tend to hyperfocus on the Talmud. I tend to think of the Talmud as Jewish Koan study and the result is critical thinkers who excel at dissecting texts and arguments in a relatively cold way.
I tend to approach things from my heart which means that I'm more interested in how to connect with the text, if it has power, and how it interacts with my life and thoughts. Talmud study, as I've experienced it so far, is very intellectual by it's nature, so the difficulty is learning to understand the complexity of it without getting lost in the abstract nature of the arguments.
In thinking of what to study, I came up with a list of the major texts: Tanach, Mishnah, Talmud, Shulchan Aruch, Zohar, and Hassidut. I thought to pick a starting point then just start going through the texts. The warp.
Yael looked at it and remarked, well that about covers Judaism. She was right, I had a simple list in which each could be a lifetime's study. She suggested that I pick topics and then follow them across the texts, learning each text as it arose in the context of the issue. The woof.
They are basically two different approaches to the texts. One focuses on how to understand and learn the texts, the other focuses on how to explore issues through the texts. I think they are both valuable, and the question is how to balance them to maximize learning.
I think there are certain texts, like the Mishnah and the Tanach, that are foundational to the whole tradition and need to be read from start to finish. But the Talmud is probably best done by topic.
I need a method for learning texts that results in a compassionate, heart-centered person, rather than a hyper-focusing one. If people have thoughts on how to do that, please let me know.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Hungry rats 1, Overthinking Students 0
I found the following quote in Learning How to Think by Nocholas D. Kristof. The editorial is about how predictions by expert pundits were often wrong. It seems that the more famous you are, then the more likely you are to be wrong, and that expertise is not a good indicator for making accurate predictions. He wrote:
Of course, my overly analytical mind wants to know if it's important that it's a white rat in the study? Why not a gray rat? Or a brown one?
In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.I think this is a vote for viewing the world as it is, not as we want it to be. As I wrote in an earlier post, it's important to accurately describe what's going on while limiting, as much as possible, any diagnosis. If one can use neutral words to describe the sensations or experiences then one will be led to a more accurate account of the experience, which will then help one to be more in touch with one's soul.
Of course, my overly analytical mind wants to know if it's important that it's a white rat in the study? Why not a gray rat? Or a brown one?
Friday, March 20, 2009
How you describe yourself determines who you are
I used to be an auto mechanic and every once and a while a friend had a car question for me. This morning, I helped acquaint a friend with her new car. She had never owned a car before and was interested in what was under the hood.
We popped the hood and as I pointed out each of the mechanical systems. She asked questions and wanted to know what kind of maintenance each needed. Mostly she was worried about how often she will need to check her oil and top off her fluids.
At one point, I think it was when I was describing the cooling system, she said something to the effect of: "So if there's a problem there, I'll go in to my mechanic and tell him my radiator's broken and he needs to replace this part?" I stopped her right there. "Don't tell your mechanic what's wrong with the car," I said, "tell him what you are hearing or experiencing in the car, and let him determine what's wrong. You are not the expert, he is." It's something I've told patients before: don't arrive with a diagnosis, come in with a set of problems, tell your healer how you make sense of things and understand them, but always start with what you are feeling before you try to make sense of it.
What I realized today is that this is another way to get in touch with your soul. Who we think we are often prevents us from seeing who we really are, but if we get in the habit of accurately describing ourselves, we can avoid that pit-fall.
We popped the hood and as I pointed out each of the mechanical systems. She asked questions and wanted to know what kind of maintenance each needed. Mostly she was worried about how often she will need to check her oil and top off her fluids.
At one point, I think it was when I was describing the cooling system, she said something to the effect of: "So if there's a problem there, I'll go in to my mechanic and tell him my radiator's broken and he needs to replace this part?" I stopped her right there. "Don't tell your mechanic what's wrong with the car," I said, "tell him what you are hearing or experiencing in the car, and let him determine what's wrong. You are not the expert, he is." It's something I've told patients before: don't arrive with a diagnosis, come in with a set of problems, tell your healer how you make sense of things and understand them, but always start with what you are feeling before you try to make sense of it.
What I realized today is that this is another way to get in touch with your soul. Who we think we are often prevents us from seeing who we really are, but if we get in the habit of accurately describing ourselves, we can avoid that pit-fall.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Tommy Thompson part II
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending two seminars taught by Tommy Thompson. He teaches Alexander Technique and is a true healer. The first seminar was just for Alexander teachers and I wrote about in an earlier post. The second was for the general public, and I was one of the few who took both. His approach is relatively unique (I’m told) in the Alexander world, and I found a lot of wisdom in his approach and his style. What follows in this post are some of his teachings which particularly impressed me.
He taught that our responses to the world are often shaped by who we think we are as opposed to who we actually are. When one responds to something, one reaches for who one thinks one is, which may not be who one actually is. We need to be open to what is really going on, not what we think or expect to be happening. His model is the physical body, but this is very true for all of our interactions in the world. It’s very true, I would add, in shamanic or spiritual experience. We have “peak” spiritual experiences and then seek to repeat those experiences, often expecting the next shamanic experience to be the same as the last. But it never seems to work that way. Sometimes there are similarities, but usually the expectations prevent us from perceiving what’s actually happening and make it harder to have shamanic experiences.
Tommy talked about this as “Faulty sensory appreciation”. He explained it to mean that where you are is not where you think you are. Alexander technique is about retraining and activating ones proprioceptors so that our perception of where we are and how our body is acting matches what our body really is actually doing. (A proprioceptor is defined as a sensory receptor that receives stimuli from within the body, esp. one that responds to position and movement.)
He continued that we need to have the experience, not react to the experience we’re having. We can change the quality of our experience by saying to ourselves “This is me having the experience of…”. And in this way, we focus our attention on what we are doing instead of reacting to it. My understanding of this was that by verbalizing what we are doing, we distract the conscious mind much in the same was as the Piazetzner meditation works (I'll write about this in another post). His description was to “become part of the experiences you are already having.”
In discussing his Alexander work, he gave a lesson in how to teach in general. If you try to get a person to conform to what you expect, the person will get an idea of what to do, but it won’t be the awareness that they need. It won’t be the internal awareness that generates the change. We need to meet the person where they are and offer alternatives, not try to force the person to change in the manner in which I think is best.
If one acts on an expectation, one’s own or another persons, or what experience has taught you from unreliable sensory perception and diminished kinesthetic cues, then one is not relating to reality, one is relating to one’s expectations. An example is when you reach down to pick up a suitcase, expecting it to be heavy, only to realize it is empty. You need to divest yourself from being who you think you need to be and you can be yourself.
I would add that it's important to always know that our perceptions of the world are always changing. If we react to things according to our experience, we may be reacting in a way appropriate for who we used to be but not who we are now. And if we continue to react in the same ways, then we actually prevent ourselves from growing and lock ourselves into one way of being. The experience of "dying" is very common in shamanic experience, and it can be understood here as reaching a point where we need to spiritually die and be reborn in order to let go of our old way of relating to the world in order to move forward.
A less dramatic way to approach this problem in to experience our emotions and not react to them in our usual way. In parenting, I find that often it’s best if I am non-reactive to my child and let them work through their emotions without influence from my emotional reactions. My sense from Tommy was that he felt that we should approach ourselves in this way so that we experience ourselves without judgment which allows us to experience ourselves without the weight of our own expectations.
I was very impressed with Tommy’s teachings and with his approach to healing. So much so that I had a very interesting response. I wondering what would have happened had I met Tommy earlier in life, before I went to acupuncture school. Would I have then studied Alexander technique first? Or is it the experiences I’ve had as a result of going through acupuncture school that allowed me to recognize what we was teaching? My own approach to these thoughts is usually to have faith that I am supposed to be an acupuncturist and if I was supposed to be an Alexander teacher, I would have met Tommy before I started studying Chinese Medicine.
I also wondered if I should start to study Alexander technique with Tommy (if that becomes geographically feasible at some point)? I realized that I don't need to study an entirely new system to be able to use his teachings to find wisdom in what I do already.
I left their wondering if there is a way to do Alexander technique on the soul? Is there a way to activate the proprioceptors of the soul, making us more in tune with our soul and inner being. To know when we are in touch with our soul and to know when we are basing our actions on experiences rooted in faulty spiritual sensory perception. I think Tommy’s answer would be that as there is no difference between the body, mind, and soul, that when we do that on the body, then we are becoming more in tune with our souls. Though I’ll have to ask him.
He taught that our responses to the world are often shaped by who we think we are as opposed to who we actually are. When one responds to something, one reaches for who one thinks one is, which may not be who one actually is. We need to be open to what is really going on, not what we think or expect to be happening. His model is the physical body, but this is very true for all of our interactions in the world. It’s very true, I would add, in shamanic or spiritual experience. We have “peak” spiritual experiences and then seek to repeat those experiences, often expecting the next shamanic experience to be the same as the last. But it never seems to work that way. Sometimes there are similarities, but usually the expectations prevent us from perceiving what’s actually happening and make it harder to have shamanic experiences.
Tommy talked about this as “Faulty sensory appreciation”. He explained it to mean that where you are is not where you think you are. Alexander technique is about retraining and activating ones proprioceptors so that our perception of where we are and how our body is acting matches what our body really is actually doing. (A proprioceptor is defined as a sensory receptor that receives stimuli from within the body, esp. one that responds to position and movement.)
He continued that we need to have the experience, not react to the experience we’re having. We can change the quality of our experience by saying to ourselves “This is me having the experience of…”. And in this way, we focus our attention on what we are doing instead of reacting to it. My understanding of this was that by verbalizing what we are doing, we distract the conscious mind much in the same was as the Piazetzner meditation works (I'll write about this in another post). His description was to “become part of the experiences you are already having.”
In discussing his Alexander work, he gave a lesson in how to teach in general. If you try to get a person to conform to what you expect, the person will get an idea of what to do, but it won’t be the awareness that they need. It won’t be the internal awareness that generates the change. We need to meet the person where they are and offer alternatives, not try to force the person to change in the manner in which I think is best.
If one acts on an expectation, one’s own or another persons, or what experience has taught you from unreliable sensory perception and diminished kinesthetic cues, then one is not relating to reality, one is relating to one’s expectations. An example is when you reach down to pick up a suitcase, expecting it to be heavy, only to realize it is empty. You need to divest yourself from being who you think you need to be and you can be yourself.
I would add that it's important to always know that our perceptions of the world are always changing. If we react to things according to our experience, we may be reacting in a way appropriate for who we used to be but not who we are now. And if we continue to react in the same ways, then we actually prevent ourselves from growing and lock ourselves into one way of being. The experience of "dying" is very common in shamanic experience, and it can be understood here as reaching a point where we need to spiritually die and be reborn in order to let go of our old way of relating to the world in order to move forward.
A less dramatic way to approach this problem in to experience our emotions and not react to them in our usual way. In parenting, I find that often it’s best if I am non-reactive to my child and let them work through their emotions without influence from my emotional reactions. My sense from Tommy was that he felt that we should approach ourselves in this way so that we experience ourselves without judgment which allows us to experience ourselves without the weight of our own expectations.
I was very impressed with Tommy’s teachings and with his approach to healing. So much so that I had a very interesting response. I wondering what would have happened had I met Tommy earlier in life, before I went to acupuncture school. Would I have then studied Alexander technique first? Or is it the experiences I’ve had as a result of going through acupuncture school that allowed me to recognize what we was teaching? My own approach to these thoughts is usually to have faith that I am supposed to be an acupuncturist and if I was supposed to be an Alexander teacher, I would have met Tommy before I started studying Chinese Medicine.
I also wondered if I should start to study Alexander technique with Tommy (if that becomes geographically feasible at some point)? I realized that I don't need to study an entirely new system to be able to use his teachings to find wisdom in what I do already.
I left their wondering if there is a way to do Alexander technique on the soul? Is there a way to activate the proprioceptors of the soul, making us more in tune with our soul and inner being. To know when we are in touch with our soul and to know when we are basing our actions on experiences rooted in faulty spiritual sensory perception. I think Tommy’s answer would be that as there is no difference between the body, mind, and soul, that when we do that on the body, then we are becoming more in tune with our souls. Though I’ll have to ask him.
Energy mirrors
Something interesting happened today during a treatment. Often, I am able to feel, physically, what my patient is feeling. Today, as I felt it, I tried to work on it within myself. I could feel two things happening at once, my energy was shifting within myself and the energy was shifting within my client. There were times when I needed to nudge a little on one side or the other, but the two were changing together.
The sensation of feeling two things at the same time was also noteworthy. I’ve felt it before, though usually it’s when I’m trying to work on myself and using someone else as a mirror. I connect with the other person and then try to connect with myself through them. That allows me to see myself from another perspective and then work on myself. Today, I was using myself as a mirror for the other person to work on them through me.
The sensation of feeling two things at the same time was also noteworthy. I’ve felt it before, though usually it’s when I’m trying to work on myself and using someone else as a mirror. I connect with the other person and then try to connect with myself through them. That allows me to see myself from another perspective and then work on myself. Today, I was using myself as a mirror for the other person to work on them through me.
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