A yogini at large

April, 2026

BLOG 158

ROUND 2

“Ironically, psychopathology is one of the signs of the larger imagination of the psyche, or soul. If we had no soul, that is, had no organ of meaning, our adaptations would be our reality. But the soul protests and registers its protest through our body, our troubling dreams, our affective invasions, such as depression or our addictive, anesthetizing self-treatment.“

(James Hollis Living an Examined Life)

The above passage reminds me that I am on an evolutionary or soul journey. And that some of the ways my body, emotions or mind “act out” are not to be suppressed or ignored, or even modified to better keep me in line, but rather to be taken as the soul’s protest against not living up to my potential. That is, the potential to be a fully evolved, enlightened human being.

James Hollis suggests that the “soul” is synonymous with our “organ of meaning”. Moreover, the “adaptations” he writes about are most likely an individual’s attempts to tick all the boxes, to survive in the world and in one’s own eyes, according to a script that has been dictated, largely by external influences — institutions, authority figures, media, etc. and only tweaked by the individual’s particular circumstances. In other words, most of us have “drunk the Kool Aid” from a very young age.

I find it reassuring and motivating to consider the part of me that asks questions, studies, chants and reflects on life events to be aligned with my soul, the aspect that has never been content with pat answers, or satisfied with the status quo. But I’d be guilty of hypocrisy if I said it didn’t matter to me whether I was liked and accepted, appreciated, even admired and respected by the people around me. We are, after all, social animals, and fear of rejection by our particular tribe is a dominant factor directing our lives.

Like a protective parent, a part of me monitors what I think or feel, do or say to ensure my behavior aligns with that of the “tribe”, or, as Hillevi Ruumet puts it, the social matrix into which I was born. To see my discomfort with or suspicions re: the status quo as protests of my soul brings up some interesting questions.

Hollis frames his questions as follows:

“While most of modern psychiatry and psychotherapy prefer to work around these protests and thereby drive the internal conflict deeper, the psychodynamic understanding of symptoms, dreams, and behavioral patterns is rather to ask: Why have you come? What is it you are protesting? What is the desire of the soul (as opposed to the desires of my environment, my complexes, my history)? These questions do not bury the issue, try to bypass it, or medicate it into numbness, but rather approach the soul with dignity and ask, as we might of any stranger who knocks unbidden at our door, “Why have you come? What do you want? How might we converse?”

And these, my friends, are the six million dollar questions. Actually, the first of many. Should we choose to ask them, we usher in what Hollis calls the second half of the journey:

“The second half of life is not a chronological moment but a psychological moment that some people, however old, however accomplished, however self-satisfied in life, never reach. The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason — death of partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever — are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments.”

I suspect the second half of my life began in my mid-thirties, first with the loss of a loved one, the serious illness of a child, followed by the loss of our income, our home, and a break from the security and certainty of life as I’d known it. Looking back I can see a grand design in all that happened. Two major moves and the acquaintance of a spiritual seeker set me on a different trajectory. One I am still trying to honour with what T.S. Eliot calls just enough “light to secure the next foothold”. The light cast by Hollis and a host of teachers who have gone this way before me.

Now how to get off this heavy jag with some levity. How about I promise to go lighter next week? Tomorrow is Monday, and this is all I’ve got.

April 19, 2026

APPLES AND ORANGES

“We are living in a material world,
And I am a material girl…”

(Cindy Lauper)

After three months of establishing a satisfying routine in Hawaii, I resisted returning to West Vancouver for fear of having nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to meet. The opposite ended up happening. Since landing on Tuesday I’ve been swept up in a flurry of activity — physical workouts, medical appointments, year-end grandkids events, an unanticipated funeral (as I suppose most are!) that, combined, have left me reeling. So, on a solitary Sunday morning, I sit, regrouping and reflecting on my first week back in B.C.

For starters, I note how unnecessary my anticipatory anxiety has been. Rather than fearing having nothing to do, the reality is I have planned almost more than I can handle. But I’m starting to register the difference between keeping busy for business’ sake, (aka apples) and doing things that add value in some way (aka oranges). I also register how averse I am to doing nothing, to waiting for the bread to rise, which is what it takes to await inspiration or cultivate the imagination. I hear my mother’s admonition that “an idle mind is the devil’s playground”. Fear seeps into idle moments and stirs a fierce desire to escape its grim litany by any means.

In rereading James Hollis’s Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the second Half of the Journey, I resonated with this simple message: “Life’s two biggest threats we carry within: fear and lethargy…Fear says, “The world is too big for you, too much. You are not up to it. Find a way to slip-slide away again today”…While “Lethargy says, “Hey, chill out. You’ve had a hard day. Turn on the telly, surf the internet, have some chocolate. Tomorrow’s another day.”

These are the same kind of messages that have sabotaged my good intentions re: blogging. When a friend asked me to collaborate on a study group focusing on the second half of the journey, I was inspired to resume blogging as an adjunct to our studies, as a way to expand on the themes Hollis is discussing, while at the same time restoring something that has given me a sense of value, of purpose and meaning, namely leading an examined life. Blogging served to focus my thoughts and studies on the big (and many small) incidents and issues that arose in my life. It helped me get my head around confusing or contradictory information, and prioritize what actually pertained to me, as well as discern what I could reasonably hope to achieve.

I’ve learned that my inner “material girl” (closely related to my maniacal inner roommate) can distract me with the equivalent of the telly, internet and chocolate, letting this too-big world pass me by, or, by contrast, enlist my inner spiritual seeker to take an active role, doing what I can, with what I have, where I am. And contribute to the collective well-being of the people/world around me.

After a nine month hiatus, to resume blogging has been, for me, an enormous test of will. A combination of fear that I’ll have nothing worthwhile to share, combined with the seductive power of lethargy was almost overwhelming. I find I am not alone, as Hollis writes:

“While it is natural to expend energy on managing our fears, the magnitude of this effort on a daily basis cannot be overemphasized.

“On the other hand, lethargy takes so many seductive forms. We can simply avoid tasks, stay away from what is difficult for us, find ways to numb our days through the thousand soporifics and analgesics the world provides…”

Welcome to my life…

P.S. Please pass the remote and the peanut butter cups.

Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026

THE FIVE YEAR PLAN

“We all enter situations where something irks us, and for a couple of days we may have all sorts of mental conversation about it. If you can put these insignificant things aside without being disturbed in your peace, your sense of harmony and your sleep, you will have taken a great step toward conquering yourself. Many of the things which bother us are very insignificant. We give them a big importance from our sense of perfection, but most of the time our idea of perfection is insignificant. It really doesn’t matter.”

(Swami Sivananda Radha: Time to be Holy, Ch. 34)

 What I needed, as I sat down to record this blog, was an antidote to the kind of toxic emotions that come up unbidden when something upsets my inner equilibrium. Something was done that got me triggered, and, once triggered, I have a hard time, as they say, getting the horses back in the barn. One comment, one gesture, and suddenly the whole herd is off and running: old injuries, fresh outrage, the familiar inner script about being misunderstood or disrespected.

Sensing a need to dissipate that uncomfortable energy, I went straight to the pool. For the next half hour or so I tried to release whatever energy was pumping through my body, and prompting all kinds of snappy comebacks — things that I wanted say or do that might convey how deeply offended I’d been. Stroke after stroke, I could feel the arguments composing themselves in my head, all the clever ways I could put the other person in their place, let them know just how inappropriately they had behaved.

As I continued swimming, I suddenly had the epiphany: what might happen if I fast forwarded to five years from now? Would any of this matter in the least? This thought cast a whole new light on the present. It was as if the sun had come out. It probably did — we’ve had a cloudy day — but nonetheless, I was struck by the idea that if I could just transport myself to a future time when this petty little irritation was long forgotten, then I could save myself the time and energy that went into wanting to express my indignation or my hurt feelings or whatever emotions were prompted in the moment. Just that single shift — five years out — and the whole drama shrank to size.

Since then — and this strikes me as miraculous — I have not given it another thought. The mental replay stopped. The speech I was rehearsing simply evaporated. And the best part? I have no lingering energy around it. No simmering, no tightening in the chest, no imaginary re-litigation of the scene while I’m supposed to be doing something else. Empty space where the grudge was starting to build.

I believe that this shift is credit due to the teachers and the teachings that taught me to at least count to 10, taught me to take ownership of my thoughts and feelings, my reactions, and be responsible for the trail that I leave. These tools come from years of studying Eastern psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, Western psychology, all kinds of resources that people have shared throughout the ages. Because guess what? ALL of us  have moments that severely challenge our best intentions. Times when we want to believe or feel or do or say things that are absolutely NOT our ideal behavior. The point of all the years of spiritual study and practice is not that we never get triggered; it is that we learn, little by little, how to steer ourselves back toward the enlightened, compassionate and understanding people we have the capacity to be.

So this is my offering today: the five-year plan. Think about anything that might have you triggered at this moment, or has been a recent trigger — and ask yourself, five years from now, is it really going to matter?

PS If that doesn’t work, try remembering what you were thinking, feeling, doing or saying five years ago. Not much there, huh? So we know the five year plan works. We just have to play it forward! 

Sent from my iPhone

April 6, 2026

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR…

“There is actually no more dangerous solitude than the man who is lost in a crowd, who does not know he is alone, and who does not function as a person in community either. He does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has taken all other responsibilities off his shoulders. Yet he is by no means free of care. He is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts, and all the pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean.”

(Thomas Merton: New Seeds of Contemplation)

As I sit to write, and this only after several minutes of mindful breathing, I see slate-gray storm clouds piling up to the east. They evoke the same sense of urgency — in this instance to cover our outdoor furniture — as my roiling thoughts evoke in my mind. And, in my imagination, I see a mouse, threatened by the shadow of a cat, dashing to and fro in a desperate attempt to escape a macabre fate.

My first instinct is to phone a friend and vent, find some way to dissipate the nervous energy. With great effort I sit with it and observe mind and body. My hands flutter around and my heart rate speeds up.

My respiration becomes shallow. Fight, flight, or freeze hormones course through my body. My mouth is dry, my gut is currently in spasm, and I feel in desperate need of a nap.

I went for a swim instead.

In short, I spent an hour or two, if not more, at the mercy of my amygdala, or reptilian brain, flashing DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!

Leading the relatively quiet life of a retired homemaker, yoga teacher, wannabe athlete, I have successfully avoided most forms of stress in what one son calls my “room of ignorance,” a vacation home on a tropical island a couple of thousand miles from my real life. So when a brilliant AI professional set me up with a program to jump-start my blogging, I found myself wanting to flee from the responsibility of putting my money where my mouth is — literally.

I can now dictate my ideas to a computer (though I didn’t this time) and presto chango, the program gives me back a first draft in my own voice, only better. Using a half dozen AI agencies, it matches my spoken words to the closest examples in all of my earlier work, so that I not only have an extra pair of hands — vis-à-vis not having to do all the writing — but also an extra pair of eyes that happen to be smarter than mine.

The prospect of this brave new era in my blogging life put me into full-on panic mode  Whereas, so far as I know, the computer is emotionally inanimate, I apparently have several psychological hurdles to surmount before I can get on with the program.

To be perfectly honest, one of the main reasons I quit was the pervasive inner voice that said, “Who actually “gets” this? Who wants or needs this? In fact, who even reads this?”

One can only argue with the inner judge and critic for so long, until finally all motivation — not to mention inspiration — is gone.

Luckily for me, a late afternoon swim helped calm my emotions and dissipate the nervous physical energy, until a small inner voice piped up with: I need this. That’s all it’s ever been about, really — a way to extend the spiritual conversation beyond the confines of my monkey mind. Like a message in a bottle, I floated out weekly messages in hopes that they reached sympathetic souls. I wanted to offer an alternative to “the pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean”.

The antidote, according to Merton, is this:

“To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others, is absolutely necessary if one is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.”

While life on a tropical island may seem like the isolation-from-reality that Merton describes, it actually gives me the time and space to observe human nature, including my own, up close and personal. Taking time to read and reflect, to journal and study, helps me see the consequences of my words and actions and make changes accordingly. Even if this means seeing how far my inner saboteur will go to keep me safe in a room of ignorance. 

P.S. Can you imagine what would happen to my nerves if I won a lottery?

June 30, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB

“Wisdom begins when you realize you don’t know what you think you know.” (Socrates)

The other morning my quiet time was disturbed by a minor ruckus in the nearby Jatropa tree. What I first took to be a particularly clumsy mating dance turned out to be two fledgling sparrows trying to get a foothold on the tree’s spindly limbs. That accomplished, they settled their puffed-up feathers for a few minutes before launching on a wobbly course to the rooftop opposite, and thence out of sight. A few minutes later I spotted a third fledgling hopping around nervously on an adjacent roof beam, seemingly working up the courage to dash to the same tree. Which it did, momentarily. And, after similarly gathering its composure, suddenly darted off in the direction of its feathered friends.

This little scenario got me thinking of the stops and starts on the spiritual journey — how one flounders around, hopping from one tract or thesis or teacher to another, searching for a spiritual home. It has lately been easier to track my own spiritual trajectory by rereading passages from the memoir I wrote a few years ago, and that a friend recently returned to me. After skimming over a few chapters, my first observation was: “If I had to write this again, I wouldn’t.” Then, rather than be embarrassed for having committed to print what was really just a passing phase in a lifelong process, I gave myself kudos for admitting that I no longer know what I thought I knew!

The thing that best sums up where I see myself today, some four decades after starting my spiritual journey, is a comment David Brooks makes in his “Moral Bucket List”. He describes an end goal on the road to character as having “achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things.” In terms of my own philosophy, I’ve learned that tolerance, acceptance, compassion and understanding go a long way to keeping me balanced and happy.

I’ve learned to trust my inner compass. To place greater value on time spent with friends and family than on personal goals and achievements. (Though I’m inordinately proud of having biked in this year’s Lavaman relay…) Meaningful dialogue means a great deal to me. But I’m also better at enjoying my own company.

More importantly, I’m not so in thrall to my big important story. I’ve just begun to understand what Socrates meant by: “Wisdom begins when you realize you don’t know what you think you know.” Unbeknownst to my ego, I’ve made a shift from wanting to teach what I know to wanting to learn what I don’t know. Ruumet calls this the “apotheosis of the ego.” It is a time when so much of what mattered to me when I was younger — particularly how I was perceived by other people — no longer motivates me. I no longer daydream about being a famous artist and/or influential writer. Instead, what now motivates me is to start my day in a mood of keen attentiveness and profound gratitude.

Most days begin with a journal entry, jotting down whatever thoughts or feelings come to mind as I’m waking — sometimes I’ll also analyse a dream — all in an attempt to start my day with maximum clarity. Then I chant the mantra that was given to me in 1993 by Swami Sivananda Radha Saraswati, to dissipate any residual emotional energy. Not many people I knew in the early ‘80s were “into” the things that intrigued me; Kundalini and Dream yoga, Vedanta philosophy, Buddhist psychology, and other esoteric teachings. The latter disciplines and practices better prepared me for the time we lost most of our possessions, money and sense of security in the economic downturn of the early ‘80s. After losing most of our possessions and money (including the family business) in that downturn, I realized that the truly important things, my marriage and family, were still standing.

This was brought home even more clearly when, at eighteen months of age, our youngest child contracted meningitis and was hospitalized for close to a month. Such a health scare brought my priorities into sharp focus, and now, four decades later (and despite having felt out of step with my surroundings for much of that time), I’m reaping the benefits of having committed to a spiritual path for the better part of my adult life. As twenty-one of my nearest and dearest gather to celebrate my 75th birthday, I look around with wonder, and immense gratitude for all the experiences we’ve shared, all the hills and valleys we’ve surmounted, all the ways I’ve learned to live more consciously in the context of family and community.

Socrates also said: “The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” I did not win the Nobel prize. My face never graced the cover of Time Magazine. My paintings didn’t break records at Christie’s. I was never featured in O magazine, nor hosted my own TV show. And I never had huge crowds paying blind homage to me.

Thank goodness for small mercies.

And Happy Birthday to me!

June 23, 2025

GOING WITH THE FLOW…OR NOT

“There really isn’t anything or anyone absolutely bad or negative, and nobody benefits from your effort to understand that, except you. It helps to remember that each one of us is not an island, and that we have our seasons, and our ups and downs. Life is not just a straight line. It’s a wave. Sometimes you are on top of the wave, sometimes you have to go to the bottom, and then you have to make sure you have enough momentum to come up again on the other side.” (Swami Sivananda Radha Time to be Holy Timeless Books 2010)

The other morning I experienced a graphic example of the vicissitudes of leading an examined life. Or any life. My swim partner and I set out to swim part way across what I’m calling Jericho Bay, a small scallop of shoreline off English Bay where Jericho Beach is located, and where, on most any day, a handful of intrepid open water devotees (and me, who is a relatively fair weather swimmer) can be identified by the color, shape and size of our “swim buddies”, inflatable sausage-shaped tubes that come in bright colors and stand out against the dull blue-gray of the water.

This particular morning we crossed the entire bay with ease and were pretty chuffed with our performance. Until we turned around. Not having guessed that the current had played a great role in our progress, we found ourselves practically swimming on the spot. With a water temperature of about seventeen degrees (Celsius) one’s strength can get zapped pretty easily. At least psychologically. Thankful that we’d stayed fairly close to the shoreline and could put our feet down if necessary, or indeed climb out onto the beach, we gamely persisted until close enough to scramble up the sand, grab our towels and scurry back to the showers. Not gonna lie, I’m extremely grateful to have access to a hot tub and steam shower (please don’t judge me) to raise my core temperature, and while doing so, contemplate first world problems with whomever happens to show up in the hot tub.

Spiritual life is very much like the push/pull of the currents along Jericho Beach. When everything in my life is flowing smoothly, it’s easy to attribute this ease of well-being to my own efforts, my degree of enlightenment. When the tides and currents of life’s events seem to turn against me, maintaining any degree of equanimity is not so easy. At times like these I at least have my spiritual practices to fall back on, and what Swami Radha calls my spiritual bank account to draw from.

Not surprisingly, cold water swimming is also part of this spiritual bank account, teaching me how to literally and figuratively keep my cool when my inner maniac is screaming at me to cut and run. The research tells us that there are several voluntary and involuntary reactions that can be triggered by uncomfortably low water temperatures. The urge to dunk-and-dash-for-shore is a pretty universal (and highly compelling) reaction. Simply being able to resist this urge for a few minutes or longer builds resilience that can be recruited in other situations from which our gut reaction is to escape. Post haste.

To be able to stay with any unpleasant sensation or awkward situation is a powerful tool for controlling our emotions, our fight or flight mechanisms. It gives us the “staying power” that enables us to choose what we are going to do versus being run around by our less-evolved personality aspects.

Pema Chödrön says as much in her guide to meditation. In Six Kinds of Loneliness she describes it thus:

“Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being.”

It is this fresh, unbiased state of being that I associate with true enlightenment. Nothing more esoteric or complicated than that. It’s not a one-and-done laurel leaf crown, or an unlimited get-out-of-jail-free pass. It’s a state that we maintain through daily practice and study that remind us we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Or, as I wrote in last week’s blog, it’s about re-minding myself, time after time, that I’m not the fish, I’m the pond.

June 16, 2025

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

“The Illuminator ideal begins with a different understanding of human nature. People are social animals. People need recognition from others if they are to thrive. People long for someone to look into their eyes with loving acceptance. Therefore, morality is mostly about the small, daily acts of building connection—the gaze that says “I respect you,” the question that says “I’m curious about you,” the conversation that says, “We’re in this together.” In the Illuminator model, character building is not something you can do alone. Morality is a social practice.”

(David Brooks How to Know a Person)

As I write this entry I am mildly distracted by the comings and goings of marine traffic in the adjacent English Bay. In particular, I see a tugboat pulling two barges, one behind the other, with the last one sporting some complicated crane-like equipment. Who knows where they’re going or where they’ve been, but it’s a sure bet they’re headed where they’re very much in need. I have a fondness for these feisty little marine workhorses from having read Timmy the Tug books to our children when they were little. Quintessentially West Coast, “they tow and push barges, assist large ships in navigating coastal waters and harbors, and supply various industries with materials and goods. They are essential for moving resources and connecting communities in a region heavily reliant on water transportation”. (AI Overview)

The tugboat might make a good symbol for Brooks’s Illuminator model. Tugs serve to weave connections between, and fulfill the needs of, an otherwise scattered coastal community. They make it viable to live a relatively modern, productive life in otherwise remote locations. A friend of ours operates a successful destination restaurant that can only be reached by boat. We take the ferry there in the mid afternoon, enjoy an early dinner, get back on a ferry shortly after 8:00 p.m. and are home and in bed by 10 or 11. But I digress.

That people have “humanized” tugboats by giving them names and personalities makes it less of a leap to see Brooks’s Illuminator in a similar analogy. The Illuminator brings empathy, encouragement and acknowledgment to people who, for whatever reason, are feeling disconnected from and alienated by the relentless demands of our productivity-oriented society. One that sees us more and more isolated in our dependence on technology, with only our cell phones, computers and laptops for company.

More significantly for me, the Illuminator sets a different example than what I believed to be the prevailing, if not the only model of a spiritually developing or evolving seeker. Brooks describes this preexisting model in terms of the renunciate or pilgrim who “retires” from society to focus on self-transcendence and, ultimately, divine union (whatever that may be):

“This moral tradition, like all moral traditions, begins with a model of human nature. We humans are divided creatures. We have these primitive, powerful forces within us—passions such as lust, rage, fear, greed, and ambition. But people also possess reason, which they can use to control, tame, and regulate those passions. The essential moral act in this model of character formation is self-mastery. It is exercising willpower so that you are the master of your passions and not their slave. Developing your character is like going to the gym—working through exercise and habit to strengthen a set of universal virtues: honesty, courage, determination, and humility. In this model, character building is something you can do on your own.”

By contrast, Brooks proposes: “In the Illuminator model, character building is not something you can do alone. Morality is a social practice.”

Though this distinction may mean nothing to you, it has come as quite the epiphany to one such as me, who has been steeped in the earlier model of character-building — as self-transcendance or mastery — since discovering the eastern teachings of Kundalini yoga and Vedanta philosophy three-plus decades ago. From Henry James’s: “Know thyself and it will set you free” to St. John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul”, character development and therefore evolution of consciousness has centered on an individual’s solitary struggles to tame their lower nature, dominate the primitive, powerful forces that limit one’s ability to truly see, care for and be an asset to the greater community.

The Illuminator’s task, as I understand it, is to take the unique skills and abilities one has acquired throughout their life journey, their aptitude for meeting not only their individual aspirations and needs, but for fulfilling their potential as self-realized human beings, and then channeling these qualities into helping, guiding, steering, supporting and companioning their fellow human beings:

“Being an Illuminator is an ideal, and one that most of us will fall short of a lot of the time. But if we try our best to illuminate people with a glowing gaze that is tender, generous, and receptive, we’ll at least be on the right track. We will see beyond the cliché character types we often lazily impose on people: the doting grandmother, the tough coach, the hard-charging businessperson. We will be on our way toward improving how we show up in the world.”

If I didn’t have raging allergies to smoke and hay fever I’m sure I’d show up in the world a whole lot perkier…

June 9, 2025

THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM

“At bedtime the eight year old told me his teacher said think of your mind like a pond full of fish and each fish is a feeling. Try to be the pond, not the fish.”

(Meghan K. Stack @Megankstack)

The title of this blog popped into my head as I pondered the strange behavior I’ve been witnessing recently, both globally and locally. Who put that lunatic in charge of our great southern neighbors? This blog is not a political column so please erase that last comment from your brain. I might do it for you by editing it out. But for now I’m just giving my thoughts free rein. And my thoughts take me to a comment David Brooks makes in his chapter on Illumination:

“You may find the whole idea of God ridiculous, but I ask you to believe in the concept of a soul. You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity. If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them. You will be aware that at the deepest level we are all equals. We’re not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls. If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you’ll probably wind up treating them well.”

It appeals to me to use Megan Stack’s imagery of the fishpond as a starting place for seeing the people I meet as precious souls, versus the kind of judgments my inner fish toss off about these same folk. And, since charity begins at home, I’m developing a more tolerant attitude towards the personality aspects that swim in my mind, pretty well all the time. This can be particularly challenging when one or more of these aspects play on my emotions — my fears, my needs for safety and security, acceptance and inclusivity — that make this inner fishpond an inhospitable place to swim.

In fact, much of how spiritual practice has served me over the years has been as a sanctuary, or asylum, from the more debilitating thoughts and feelings that, if unexamined, can drive me to knee-jerk actions or speech that I later regret. My journal is the first line of defense against such impulsiveness. Which is how the topic of this blog first came up. I’d been reading political commentator Heather Cox Richardson’s daily “Letters from an American” and wanting to crawl under a figurative rock. I wondered how the world could possibly recover from the insanity such a man and his supporters could unleash. And dreading where all of this insanity is leading.

But can he/they do any more damage than an uncultivated imagination that sees insult or injury behind every tree? Or worse, sinks into the mud of boredom, futility or self-pity? Once I register these pond-polluting feelings in my journal, I switch to mantra chanting or balanced breathing as the count-to-ten pause I need to restore my equanimity. For reinforcement or guidance I turn to any number of inspirational readings that offer a radically different POV. I find Pema Chödrön is particularly helpful in restoring my objectivity. In When Things Fall Apart she writes:

“To think that we can finally get it all together is unrealistic. To seek for some lasting security is futile. To undo our very ancient and very stuck habitual patterns of mind requires that we begin to turnaround some of our most basic assumptions. Believing in a solid, separate self, continuing to seek pleasure and avoid pain, thinking that someone ‘out there’ is to blame for our pain – one has to get totally fed up with these ways of thinking. One has to give up hope that this way of thinking will bring us satisfaction. Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.”

Her antidote is meditation. Stepping away from all the agitating mental/emotional stimulation of our very important story lines and just sitting with whatever is happening internally. Instead of “jumping up and running” she advocates:

“With cool loneliness we do not expect security from our own internal chatter. That’s why we are instructed in meditation to label it “thinking.” It has no objective reality. It is transparent and ungraspable. We’re encouraged to just touch that chatter and let it go, not make much ado about nothing”…

Having experimented with “cool loneliness”, I’ve come to realize the futility of trying to contort myself, or my surroundings, into an ideal of how things should, could, would or ought to be. Accepting a certain amount of insanity within and around me allows space for everything to unfold according to its own destiny. Such acceptance settles the pond of my mind into a reflective space that is more profoundly at peace with “what is”. And I may one day see the precious soul in the persons who agitate me most greatly.

Chocolate peanut butter cups help with this. Also Stanley Cup hockey. Go Oilers!

June 2, 2025

NEEDS MUST

“We are often blind to how much we are changing. The psychologist Daniel Gilbert has a famous saying about this: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they are finished.” We are also often blind to the fact that a change in life circumstance often requires a renovation of our entire consciousness. As Carl Jung put it: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” (David Brooks How to Know a Person)

The above quote was to be the theme for this week. What follows is the first thing I wrote this morning:

I’m in panic mode about having to both write my blog and entertain company this evening. Not “having to”, wanting to. I register a marked change in my confidence to entertain. Even though I bought all this food, I worried that I wouldn’t have time to cook it. Or that I wouldn’t have enough, after all, to serve to company. Or why I reneged on my original idea and asked the others to bring things. Well I’ll do my light invocation — let go and let God.”

So it was that I headed out to drive my grandson to school; my head spinning with things to do, and a body jangling with high nervous agitation. To add to the confusion I opted for an unfamiliar pool, where I missed the memo about circle swimming (vs going side by side) and swam into the swimmer with whom I was meant to be sharing the lane. He was not impressed. Curtly cited the rules and huffily carried on his way. This almost drove me out of the pool after only completing a fraction of my swim. It took great fortitude to JUST PLOW ON. Throughout the swim I endured an incessant dialogue between my maniacal roommate and the calm, capable person I wish to embody.

By the time I’d finished my laps I was still trying to problem-solve a problem that was mostly in my head. Ironically, everything was in hand but for the “me” who was caught in a vortex of panic, which drove me to the grocery store, where I doubled down on the amount of food I’d planned to serve, and came home laden with more groceries than I knew what do do with, and more ambitious plans than I had time to execute. And this doesn’t include the things I asked the others to bring when I woke in that state of high anxiety.

Can you tell I haven’t entertained in a while?

Somewhat belatedly, Brooks’s message hits home: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning…” If yesterday’s shopping spree at the farmer’s market represented life’s morning, by the time I registered what I’d bitten off it was —figuratively speaking — very late in the day! The irony is that my cleaning lady just came to my aid, and while I scramble to order my thoughts in this blog, a Mexican chicken casserole is materializing in the kitchen. With marginal help from me.

Let go and let God, indeed.

My point is that, so long as I am ruled by an old personality aspect that thinks I’m no longer “up to” whatever I feel inspired to do, I will compound the actual effort required to finish it with the stress of self-doubt and second-guessing.

Brooks expands on his theme with:

“Periods of transition between tasks can be rough. When you’re locked in a task, you’re embedded in a certain mindset. When that mindset stops working for you, you have to let it crumble inside you. “All growth is costly,” Kegan writes. “It involves leaving behind an old way of being in the world.”

The “old way” that I want to leave behind is the conditioned ego that thinks it’s all up to me, that I am a solitary entity who is independent from the world around me. Being able to surrender this overarching sense of responsibility allows other people to help me. Together we create a sense of collaboration and community. Together we shoulder the burdens of defeat, the joys of achievement, and the work of learning to live through transitions with grace and grit.

Or collectively vow never to entertain again…🤔

May 27, 2025

THE AFTER PARTY

“It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?” (David Brooks The Moral Bucket List)

While I explored other topics for this blog, I found I couldn’t concentrate for having just attended a celebration of life for the kind of friend whose eulogy virtues shone more brightly than his résumé virtues. At least at first glance. Which is not to say he was a saint. I wish he’d been there to hear the choice comments made by longtime friends who turned what could’ve been a somber occasion into a roast as much as a wake. Our first hint was a sign at the highway turnoff to his rural driveway, where big blue balloons adorned a sign indicating “Mark’s After Party”.

Along with a broader picture of the person we’d only known in a particular context, my takeaway was a profound appreciation for what Brooks calls the eulogy virtues. Here, clearly, was a person whose priorities were well and truly in order: family first, friends —especially those in need — second, strangers-who-became-friends, third, then everyone and everything else. Maybe lastly, for good or ill, himself.

Swami Radha puts great emphasis on the kind of selflessness that characterizes our friend, though he would never see himself from such a yogic perspective:

“THE GOAL OF YOGA is to achieve true union with the Light – knowing that the Light is within, and acting on that knowing. My Guru, Swami Sivananda, used to say that selfless service was the way to achieve this. “Selfless service will make you divine,” he would often say. He would tell people to concentrate on that instead of intellectualizing about concepts like liberation, the Absolute, or atman. The Bhagavad Gita says the same thing too, over and over – selfless service is the way to the Divine.”

While the Eastern teachings extol the virtue of humility and selflessness, I’m pretty sure that’s not the message most of us got in the West. Here, the emphasis has been on “résumé success, with the eulogy virtues being a byproduct at best. Brooks’ makes this observation:

“But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.”

For me, the goal of selflessness is less lofty, and could even be considered self-serving. It is the experience of freeing myself, however temporarily, from my maniacal roommate, the ego or devil on my shoulder who demands I be and do more that looks like the “desired” model of success than what my actual self represents. Attending my friend’s celebration, I was encouraged to see how my values aligned with those of the recently deceased, and what that had meant to other people. It gave me a sense of how satisfying it must have felt for him to suspend self-interest in the service of family and friends, and even strangers in need who became part of his extended family. Speech after speech revealed what a stellar human being he had been, showing how capable he was, despite some seemingly “unenlightened” qualities, of loving and being loved.

Surely that is successful enough for anyone.