1. Be you in every moment
Who else would I be? The suggestion is that you should not be waiting for the perfect moment to do something, because at perfect moment will never come. Which is why I NEVER make New Year's resolutions, because if it is important enough to resolve that issue, then it should not be put off for a special moment; the special moment is when you decide to do it, ie right now.
To quote the nine hundred year old philosopher, "Do or do not, there is no try".
2. Let go the fear of feeling
This is explained through analogy of exploring a house, the house is yourself and the rooms are aspects of yourself. Exploring the house is exploring your identity, but the analogy is for something else and not letting go the fear of feeling.
To me the statement is about releasing the fear of experiencing life. Life is a series of feelings, emotional and experiences such as feeling the job you are doing. Releasing the fear is equivalent to setting your mind to a state where you can go and seek the experiences of life with out being guided by negative experiences of the past. Fear is the comes as a result of negative outcome, but also the possibility of negative outcomes. When you learn to ride a bike, you will fall, and accepting that fact allows you to go beyond the fall to appreciate the future of bike riding. If the fear of falling stops you, wou will never experience the freedom of riding a bike.
If you were hurt in a past relationship, do not let the possibility of being hurt in the future from experiencing another relationship. Small fears can be helpful, serving as a warning, but if it leads to inaction, then you doomed.
3. Identify with nothing
Unfortunately it is in our language, Indo-European Language is a identifying language. It takes things in the world and sets them in concrete ways inside people's minds. Other language groups do not do this in the same way. Native North American languages, at least the ones in the North are without a concept of ownership, so in cultures where there is no word for "mine" everything is free for everyone to use. In these cultures the languages have no tense and stories told are stories that happened in a time that is not clear, it could have happened yesterday or several generations ago.
But it is not thee languages and those cultures that we exist in. We exist in a culture with a language that names and identifys things; it limits things. As an ancient student of life once said, "Hill … it is a hasty word for something that has stood here since this part of the world was shaped."
Essentially, the idea behind identify with nothing is, do not chain yourself down with limited definitions, because everyone is more than the some of their experiences and can be anything as long as you believe that anything is possible. Or, once you believe that you are limited, those limitations become the best you can achieve.
4. Don't be so hard on yourself
A failure of myself. The problem with this goal is that it can potentially lead to negativity in the form of Identity. I had a friend who accepted himself totally and I was mad at him because he accepted all his limitations as fact. He never tested his conceptions of himself, he essentially limited himself by defining what he could not do and accepting it.
Last Tuesday for the bike ride we went down McDougall road. It has some very substantial hills. Heading back I had to walk part way up the first hill because I was out of breath and I could not risk the easiest gear because I was afraid that it would be stuck there. If I had accepted that limitation, I would have had to walk up all of the hills, but I did not. I challenged my perceptions that the hills were too steep and I rode up them. I nearly died, but I made it. Accept your limitations, but challenge them too.
5. Don't make personal growth the mean to "Get what you want"
Clearly this is one I have to work on. On the other hand, personal growth is important and it will help me get what I want. But I guess what they are saying here is that personal growth is its own reward and getting what you want is a secondary concern. I plod through life trying to improve my understanding of my situation, I have the occasional epiphany, but these epiphanies are the rewards of personal growth and not what they will get me. Just this week, Friday afternoon I realized something that I had been mulling over in my head for a long while. It was the epiphany that was my reward, I unlocked another aspect of my personality and even though I saw implications fanning out that would give me other more tangible rewards, it was the epiphany that was my true reward. You can ask me about that if you wish.
6. Be more interested in your reaction than what triggered it
The just seems to be that you should ignore the triggers of a particular behavior and instead focus on your reaction. A better way to say this is stop reacting to things beyond your control and focus on the things you do control, like your reactions to things. If there is a belligerent stressor at work, thinking about the stressor will do nothing to relieve the stress, but thinking on why it stresses you out may allow you to understand and thus relieve your stress.
Also you can understand the things that you can't change, and you can accept that you can't change them, but you can change how you choose to react to them.
7. Make friends with the Unknown
Essentially this line could be rendered as: Treat the unknown as an opportunity. You wake up, got to work, go home go to sleep, repeat. It becomes a routine and often it begins to aggravate us, but because it IS routine it becomes comfortable. The older you get the more comfortable it gets and the more important it is to be comfortable. Breaking the routine becomes scary, but it is necessary to break your routine if you are going to find a better routine that fits better with you. 90-95% of people are born in the same town as they lived and die, they might get a cottage and after years they move to the cottage, but that change is so gradual that it is not change. To get up and to quickly switch towns to a place you have never been, where you have no roots is super scary, but might be what you need to do to change things up for the better, so why be afraid?
New jobs, new careers, new friends, new relationships, new towns, new ideas. Each is scary but each has its rewards. But we are resistant to the word new. Do not be.
8. Don't over analyze.
Okay I admit this is my Achilles' Heel. I do it, women do it, but generally men do not. For the most part, men do this very well. It might because they think of nothing a lot more than women. And that is tough if you don't. I know why women don't think of nothing, well I have a guess. In a hunter gatherer society the women were the gendered roled as the gatherers. Gatherers and hunters have very different mind sets, the hunter is narrow and is head down concentrating on one task, but not so gatherers. Gatherers are groups that are facing every direction because they are more vulnerable, because they have children and my be encumbered. They are constantly communicating and they relay information about the surroundings and the task that they are performing. In other words they are thinking all the time.
Why do I thinks all the time, I am broken, I admit it and as per #4, I accept it, but I have learned that I can mitigate my brokenness through analysis and thinking. So I am a man, who by being a man takes things as they are presented verbally (you said it you must mean it), but I am constantly thinking about what your body language might mean and most frequently, why people did not move as predicted. In teachers college the often bunted around stat was that 95% of all communication is nonverbal. I count myself as luck if I can read 50% of it, I know that I am not very lucky. Briar chastises me every time, she knows I can't read body language but body language is so obvious that she finds it hard to believe that I can't see it. Stop she says, you are too intense, you are pushing her away from you. I want the opposite outcome but I can't read anyone so I fall back on analysis.
And I admit I can over think stuff and make it worse, but I fear that alternative is worse. When I am comfortable in my situation, I am accepting and relaxed, but still, my past proves that I have missed things when I am relaxed and comfortable.
9. Be in the body.
This is 8b. When you stop thinking you are open to the things around you and you accept them. Makes me think that the precepts of enlightenment were invented by a man, who could do these all naturally because they were a man.
Nature brings this state out in me though. Sitting in a canoe or sitting in my happy place I feel this. Not sure if I can at other times. I will have to experiment. This sounds like meditation. The kind that the Dali Lammas practices. Do what you are doing but do it with your entire mind.
10. Love freely
No free love, not that love was ever free. I worry that I love too freely. I worry that when I am not in love I fall in love to quickly and I am generally too trusting. But one advantage I can see to this is that I seem to exude trust to others. The trouble is when I am friends with someone and they are troubled. I love my friends and I need to help them when they are troubled. And maybe I should not love my friends too, because when my friends are newly single, my attraction intensifies and I fall in love with them. It could be argued that I don't fall in love, but feel free to express it.
I would say that the extension that is not mentioned here is that love freely naturally extends to things and actions. Love driving. Love reading. Love cars. Love books. Love bike riding. Love people. Love specific person.
I have come to several conclusions about love over the years due to my obsession with Love. Soul mates are everywhere, or rather they don't exist anywhere. Spend enough time with someone that shares a number of your interests, when you have mutual caring, you will form a connection people call soul mates. It can happen among friends and lovers. Love is this feeling that is used freely to mean one thing, but it is one word that describes an infinite different feelings. I tried a thousand, but it is a thousand different feelings in billions of different people that have ever lived. Love is infinitely complex and different every time. The grail of love is love that you share with one who loves you. But not the act of love, which is not love, but a chemical reaction caused by sex. Love is respect and caring and a desire, not carnal desire, to put the other ahead of your desires. When this kind of love is mutual …
11. Look at a picture of the Earth
When I look at the Earth I feel love. The feeling that people feel when they look at the Earth is a realization that petty concerns are in consequential, that life is precious. And it is, but the picture of the earth is so ubiquitous these days that the meaning has been lost. It was reinvigorated by Carl Sagan when he wrote his poem about the image that Voyage took of our planet from a billion miles away, called The Pale Blue Dot. Everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever loved was born on that pale blue dot. There was another picture taken next to Saturn, of that Pale Blue Dot, possibly more contrasting of a different idea, that all of what we know is on the Earth, but we know very little at all of everything in the Universe.
I look at the transformer outside my window attached to the telephone pole and light standard framed by the deep blue sky. Beauty after a fashion.
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