Musings on PEACE, in Honor of International Peace Day

It’s International Peace Day on Monday, Sept. 21st, and since I posted on peace last year at this time, I thought I would do so again. You can check out Peace Day related events around the world, read about the Peace Alliance’s efforts to establish a U.S. Dept of Peace, or read about the founder of Peace One Day’s efforts to establish a world-wide cease-fire on this day.

Of course on this blog I write more about inner peace than global peace, but probably anyone reading this doesn’t need to be convinced that the two are related. I have been musing about what true inner peace means lately, and came upon this quote in a book I recently read by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron:

“The peace that we are looking for is not peace that crumbles as soon as there is difficulty or chaos. Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace, or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth, it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.” (emphasis mine, from Taking the Leap by Pema Chodron)

I think this idea, that peace is “an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened” is what is really resonating with me this year. It’s partly because the national dialogue here in the U.S. lately seems even more vitriolic than a year ago – and I really didn’t think that was possible. Peace of any sort seems very, very far away. And it’s clear that everyone is speaking – spewing often – from a place of feeling threatened. Defensiveness leaves absolutely no room for any kind of dialogue or progress.

Obviously this is something we all already know from our personal relationships. In a disagreement, once our buttons have been pushed, once the conversation has become about defending or protecting some aspect of ourselves that we don’t want to lose or are afraid will get hurt, it’s all downhill. It becomes more about getting the next good zinger in than trying to reach common ground.

And I think the same is true for the experience of inner peace. When I think of my most peaceful moments, I definitely think of time alone, spent in a favorite spot, meditating, reading, or communing with nature. And I think we all need those moments, the space in our lives to experience that. But I’ve observed – in myself and others – that it’s also very easy to become so attached to that kind of peace, that we become irritated when anything disturbs or challenges it. And that irritation is a form of contracting, of defending, not of opening and expanding.

It’s tempting to try and control every aspect of our lives so that our peace is never disturbed. But of course, unless you live alone in a cave, that’s also completely impossible (and maybe not even then.) Learning to accept what arises, to open  to it, instead of fighting it off, is the only real path to peace. This was a big lesson for me when I became a parent, as I had been meditating daily, and undisturbed, for many years. Learning to accept whatever happened when I sat down – the possibility that my meditation would end before I planned, because of the needs of one of my children – taught me (and is still teaching me) about opening on another level.

It’s also shifted my perception of peace, and spiritual practice, and this is why the quote above struck me just right. As Pema says, “peace isn’t an experience free of challenges.” Who would want that, really? Challenge is part of how we grow, how we achieve, how we discover ourselves, how we go deeper. I was talking to a young friend recently who by her own definition has had a really blessed life, everything has come easily to her, with few challenges. But last year she got her heart broken for the first time. And that has totally opened her up in a new way, because she felt true pain for the first time. And through her pain, her capacity for compassion deepened. It was all intellectual compassion before, now it’s based on empathy.

Recognizing this has so many implications, for our own pursuit of inner peace, for parenting, for politics, you name it. If we can open to disagreement, challenges, even pain (without seeking it out, of course – that’s a different kind of problem), instead of shutting down in the face of it, instead of becoming threatened and going on the defensive, these things are transformed from hindrances to peace into stepping-stones to it. They are no longer things we need to fight off, in our minds or the world, in order to experience peace – they are themselves what we need to accept and understand, what we need to go through, on our way there.

This gives me some hope even, about the current U.S. social dialogue. Perhaps everything is coming to the surface, getting aired out, instead of getting repressed or pushed down, on the way to moving through it. Only time will tell. Certainly it’s interesting to think about the 1950’s, which are often held up as some kind of national hey-day, with economic prosperity and elevated morality for all, when in fact, much of the country could not ride in the front of a bus or drink from a water fountain of their choosing based on race, and the overall poverty rate was even higher than today. The 1950’s were a heyday for very few, but there was seemingly less conflict. That’s certainly not peace, that’s repression. So maybe now, at the very least, the repression phase is ending, and as tumultuous as things are now, we will move through this to a new kind of understanding. I choose to remain optimistic.

So those are my thoughts on peace, inner and outer. What are yours?

Using Death as an Adviser

Just getting back into the blogging world after spending last week in the midwest visiting my family, and something happened on our way there that triggered some thoughts for this post…

About 45 minutes into our flight, the flight attendants all rushed towards one part of the plane, and then the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board. There was, and it became clear that an elderly man was having problems – the doctor asked for a stethoscope and defibrillator, and several men on the plane moved the semi-conscious man to a place where he could lie down. Soon after, the pilot told us we would be making an emergency landing for medical reasons.

The man left the plane with help at the stop, and we continued our trip. I don’t know what happened to him, although he was conscious at the time. What was amazing was the complete shift in mood that occurred on the plane when everyone realized what was going on. In the airport I had been quite dismayed at the thoughtless and ‘me-first’ attitude of everyone we seemed to come in contact with. We had to arrive at 5am – no one’s favorite time – but the airport was already very busy, and LAX is an old airport with not enough room for modern baggage and security lines. With three preschoolers plus luggage we weren’t the fastest of travelers, and there were audible groans and frequent eye-rolling whenever anyone got stuck behind us in a passageway or line. Several times someone just pushed right past us – or over us, I should say, as the kids were almost knocked over more than once by a traveler in a rush. I tried to let it go, but I couldn’t help feeling very despondent over the more self-absorbed aspects of human nature.

All that changed instantly when the pilot asked for a doctor on the plane. We learned later that over a hundred passengers missed their connecting flights as a result, and most of them knew as soon as we were delayed that they were going to arrive much later than planned, or possibly not even get to their destination that day. But there was not a whimper of complaint or single groan at the pilot’s announcement. Everyone realized the potential seriousness of the situation. Someone’s husband, or father, or brother, or grandfather, or friend, was seriously ill, maybe even mortally so. And in light of that, any other concern or complaint was simply petty.

I thought then about how death and facing mortality throws everything into perspective, showing us clearly what matters, and even more importantly, what doesn’t. It’s a theme that comes up over and over in both personal development and spiritual teachings, and I think there is great power in facing our inevitable death head-on. Not in a morbid way, just in an honest one.

The title of this post comes from a teaching of Don Juan, in the Carlos Castaneda books. Don Juan urges Carlos to use his own death – which Don Juan describes as a menacing shadow always perched just behind him – as an ‘adviser’. He is always trying to get Carlos to let go of his ‘pettiness’, and live his life in a larger context, and teaches that maintaining a constant awareness of death is a powerful method for doing so. Of course, being Don Juan, his approach is quite extreme and his way of helping Carlos to become more aware of the reality of his own death is to scare him at night in the desert to the point where he actually believes he’s going to die. Not a gentle approach for sure, but an effective one, as anyone who has had an actual near-death experience can testify.

Eckhart Tolle, in his preface to The Power of Now, described his own near-death experience of sorts, although it wasn’t triggered by any actual physical danger. During an intense depression at thirty years of age, he came to a point where he felt he couldn’t live with himself any longer. But in the midst of that feeling, he suddenly wondered “But am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ’self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with. Maybe, only one of them is real.” As he puts it, the ’strangeness’ of this thought started him on a trajectory that triggered a profound spiritual experience. His subsequent attempts to understand and explain that experience completely transformed him, and his life.

When I first read The Power of Now, this experience reminded me of the genesis of Ramana Maharshi’s spiritual quest. At sixteen, he was suddenly struck with an intense feeling that he was going to die. He was not in any mortal danger at the time, just alone in his room. But instead of seeking out others for comfort or distraction, as most sixteen year-olds would probably do, he just laid down and investigated this feeling. He asked himself, ‘who is it that is going to die?’ and gradually moved through the different layers of his sense of selfhood – his body, his emotions, his thoughts, his sense of ‘I’ – until he was plunged into a deep realization of something beyond or beneath this. Soon after, he left home, traveling to the area where he would spend the rest of his life meditating and eventually teaching.The question ‘who am I?’ became the root of ‘inquiry’ in his lineage.

According to legend, an awareness of mortality was also one of the triggers for the Buddha’s flight from home and spiritual quest. His father had created a fabricated kingdom for the young prince Siddhartha to live in, shielding him from all contact with illness, death, or pain of any kind, in an attempt to prevent his spiritual inclinations – which were predicted by a seer at his birth – from surfacing. But Siddhartha eventually became curious about life outside the kingdom, and on a trip outside the gates, was confronted with a funeral in progress, and learned of mortality for the first time. Transience or impermanence  is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, and confronting death is a powerful theme in many traditions. Some Tibetan Buddhist traditions include practices performed in funeral grounds or while contemplating a decomposing body, to emphasize the impermanence of the physical world.

Although because of the belief in an afterlife traditional Christianity approaches death differently, and doesn’t have any death contemplations such as this that I know of, in the last few years I’ve been reading quite a bit about various Catholic mystics, especially medieval ones, and have been struck by how many of them experienced profound spiritual transformations during life-threatening illnesses. Their descriptions – of white light, endless love, an expansiveness and union beyond their own personal identity – correspond to the experiences of those above, although their ultimate interpretations of what those experiences represent is different. The commonality of both near-death and meditative experiences across cultures has always fascinated me, and speaks to the universality of mystic realization.

So an awareness of our own death – a real awareness at a deep, visceral level, without plunging into morbidity – enables profound transformation. It helps us let go of our self-absorption, our pettiness, and focus on what really matters. It shifts our perspective and helps us to ‘not sweat the small stuff’. It humbles us, and awakens us to our smallness in the grand scheme of things – which ultimately is a relief, freeing us from our imagined restrictions. And spiritually it can help us touch the deepest part of ourselves and reality, whatever we interpret that to be.

So have you faced your own death? Do you contemplate mortality, or do you shy away from thoughts of it, as many of us are conditioned to do? Do you fear death?

Spiritual Experience vs. Realization (or What’s The Point, Anyway?)

I have been musing lately about the relationship between spiritual experiences and spiritual realization. I said in a prior post on chakras that I don’t think dramatic spiritual experiences necessarily lead to personal insight or wisdom. I said this because I am a lover of meditation, but I know firsthand that you can have wonderful meditative experiences – moments of stillness, joy, love, or even dissolution – but not change much off your meditation cushion. I know it’s not spiritually PC to say so, but you can meditate and still be ignorant, arrogant, uptight, mean, or insecure.

In fact, attachment to meditative states can actually become a hindrance to spiritual growth – many Buddhist and yogic texts warn against becoming addicted to spiritual highs or blisses. This is especially true within the traditions that teach chakra and kundalini meditation, which is what I mostly practice and teach, because these high-energy techniques can result in dramatic shifts in awareness. And if you’re meditating just for those, you might as well be bungee-jumping. I mean, experience is fine, you could even make a case that diverse experience is what life is all about, but collecting experiences is not happiness, or peace, or enlightenment.

So what exactly is the point of meditation then? Or of spiritual practices and techniques at all? Or, for that matter, of this vast expanse of techniques and traditions (heavily marketed these days I might add) that we call ’spirituality’?

Gangaji was asked this question once at an event I attended, and simply said, ‘to be kind.’ The Dalai Lama has said something similar. A classic Buddhist answer is simply ‘to be happy’. Some, such as Eckhart Tolle, might say that spiritual growth has become necessary for humanity to survive – that evolving beyond ego-based living has become an imperative. Another teacher I once had said spiritual seeking was just a personal preference or proclivity – much like Mozart’s pull to music or Shakespeare’s to words. Some of us are just drawn to the other side.

Others would argue that all of life is a spiritual journey, that everything we learn is part of the process, and that distinguishing something called ’spirituality’ is pointless and divisive. In principle I agree with this, but it’s also true that spiritual paths – methods and advice for experiencing the mystic or divine aspects of ourselves and the world – have emerged within virtually every culture. So there is something different going on here – a desire to consciously seek light and direct knowledge emerges at some point for many humans.

Spiritual practices, and particularly meditation when it’s practiced in a spiritual context (which of course it isn’t always), are tools for opening the doorway to light and direct knowledge. And this direct knowledge, or direct experience, of spirit/awareness/presence/the other side/God/Goddess/divinity/the sacred dimensions – or whatever term you prefer – is the mark of a mystic in any tradition, as I see it. Of course meditation isn’t required for that – people often have spiritual experiences outside meditation. Anytime our usual perceptions or fixed identity drops away, and our awareness opens up or expands, we’ve touched this. And many different things can trigger such moments. Meditation is simply a structured way of opening up, of releasing, into this – rather than leaving it to chance, you could say.

But from what I’ve seen, on its own even the best meditation practice isn’t enough to change someone, to evolve them, to make them kinder or wiser. For that to happen, meditative experiences have to be processed, and they have to be integrated into a larger context of spiritual practice.

This makes sense if you think about it, because we have all sorts of experiences in life and don’t necessarily learn anything from them, unless we put some effort into processing them. For example, our psychological hang-ups might pull us back to the same types of dysfunctional relationships over and over, and it takes conscious work to break the cycle. Unraveling and releasing these kinds of patterns is a big part of what modern personal development, and ancient spiritual practice, is all about. Whether you call it karma or conditioning or the ego or just being stupid, by default we are driven by mostly unconscious mental and emotional patterns. We have to dredge that stuff up into the light of day to work through it and let it go.

Part of the reason I’ve always liked Buddhism is that it emphasizes a holistic spiritual path, it is really a way of life, and meditation is just one part of it. The Noble Eightfold Path, a foundation teaching that is accepted in some form by most branches of Buddhism, outlines eight aspects of practice, and meditation is one aspect (or maybe two, depending on how you interpret them.) I think the best teachers within any tradition emphasize this holism. I was amazed when I first read St. Theresa of Avila’s books (the queen of dramatic spiritual experiences), as she outlines a very similar integrated spiritual path. And it is found in the writings of mystics within every tradition, I think.

When this integration isn’t present, spiritual practice just breeds arrogance, or confusion. I’ve seen a lot of this in spiritual communities I’ve been a part of over the years, and I’ve suffered through phases of it myself. Although I may be inviting trouble by saying so, I think it’s a particular problem with born-again Christianity: There’s a sense that this one dramatic experience saves you, and changes you forever. There’s little support for the idea that you need to process this experience to understand what it represents, or that you need to work to stay true to it, and be on guard for your ego’s attempts at distortion.

So, that’s my take on meditation and spirituality, from 10,000 feet: Meditation in any form (and there are many types) helps open our perceptual boundaries, and awakens us to realms of awareness – and spirit – that are hard to find amidst the busyness of our daily lives and minds. And sometimes the resulting experiences are dramatic, sometimes they are more subtle. Either way, on their own these experiences mean little. It’s what we do with them that matters. What do they show us about ourselves, and who or what we thought we were?  How do they shift our ideas about ourselves in relation to others and the world? What do they teach us about the nature of reality and our role in shaping it?

Just my two cents, what’s yours?

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Why Adam Lambert Didn’t Win Americal Idol (or, the problem with religion)

If you are surprised I am writing about American Idol on this blog, let me just say – not more than I am.

But I simply can’t get past my view – and anger – that Adam lost because he is gay, and because Kris Allen is an evangelical Christian that did missionary work. I just can’t get past the idea that this is a referendum in the ongoing religion-fueled culture wars of the U.S.A.

I have been trying to tell myself otherwise all night and morning. I have been saying, ‘But Kris seems like a great guy, and he is really talented’, and ‘It doesn’t matter – Adam’s success is already assured, he will go on to a long and illustrious career’. Or ‘Kris’s song choices were more mainstream, hardcore rockers like Adam never win’, and finally, ‘Geez, Lisa, it’s just a TV show – get over it!!!’

I’m sure I will (get over it, that is.) Probably by tomorrow, when I’ll do the Blog Sharing/Link Love post I had planned for this week. But not before I vent a little today (Ok, you’ve received your vent warning, so if you keep reading and end up mad, it’s not my fault.)

From my perspective, it is completely naive to think religion or Adam being gay had nothing to do with this upset. For weeks, media outlets have been running articles along the lines of MSNBC’s Is America Ready for a Gay Americal Idol? The LA Times  ran a front-page article on how these two represent this country’s cultural and religious divide. In the interviews leading up to the finale, the contestants were consistently asked ‘do you think religion will play a result in the vote?’ (to which they both – good friends – said, ‘I hope not.’) But since Adam has never publicly expressed any religious views, it’s hard to escape the fact that ‘religion’ in these questions was really shorthand for ‘religious views on homosexuality.’ On a darker note, the blogosphere has been alight with vitriol from supporters of both contestants, most of it aimed at their beliefs and personal lives.

It’s the vitriol on both sides that really gets me. And THIS is the problem with religion. The New Testament is 100% about love. That is almost all Jesus talked about. Sure, there are some other statements about the social and political situations of that time. But when asked which commandment is the most important, Jesus makes himself pretty clear, “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” and then “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love, love, love. Buddha rarely used the word ‘love’. He focused more on connectivity, on the essential oneness of us all. But the essence was the same. And of course Jesus and Buddha were just two of the more famous messengers – there have been many more, within virtually every religion, and many outside of them all. They each found this love, this truth, for themselves, and then they said ‘here is how I did it, here is one way to find this out for yourself.’

Somehow, over time, after a messenger is long gone from this earth, the message always gets mucked up. Someone comes along that wants to use it for political purposes, or just has an axe to grind, and the ‘one way’ changes to ‘only way’, and the focus on ‘love’ shifts to ‘righteousness.’ And one great teacher’s realization gets morphed – in my view disfigured – into a religion.

Don’t think this has only happened with Christianity. I have been on many Buddhist forums over the years, and have often been shocked with the views on what makes a ‘true Buddhist.’ I have read that you can’t be Buddhist and 1) eat meat, 2) drink wine, 3) be pro-choice, 4) be a Republican. Since 3 and 4 rarely go together, you can see it would be tough to meet everyone’s standard for ‘Buddhist.’ I have also run into strong opinions about meditation, about what is ‘real meditation’ and what is not, and what I should or should not be teaching regarding the chakras. This is in the Los Angeles progressive new-age community, so self-righteousness is not something reserved only for the Bible Belt.

And this is why I don’t define myself as anything anymore. And why, even though I hold deeply spiritual beliefs, I was interested in the mostly atheist views of Raising Freethinkers. Because even though I am a ‘believer’, I sometimes think maybe the world could use a few centuries of atheism, or at least secular humanism, to clear itself out and start afresh on the spiritual front. (As an aside, after giving my intro spiel at a meditation class last Fall, one woman raised her hand and said, ‘Ok, let me get this straight. Your credentials for teaching this class are that you are an ex-Episcopalian, ex-Atheist, ex-Buddhist making things up as she goes along.’ To which I could only respond, ‘yes’.)

OK, I think I’m done. I feel much better. I will return to my usual ‘all religions share common themes’ and ‘all religions are different paths to the same truths’ next week. For today, I mourn for us all. I mourn for Adam because he deserved to win. I mourn for the teachers past and present who have tried to show us how to love one another, and whose messages have continually been lost. I mourn for the world my children will inherit, which I am profoundly worried about.

Namaste-

New Blogroll, Positive Reinforcement, and The Self

Just a few misc. notes and articles this weekend. For those of you in a reader, I wanted to let you know I’ve updated my blogroll a bit. I have been a mad blog seeker and reader lately (and feel free to send me suggestions for more), but these 15 blogs are the ones I’ve been reading regularly. I’ll try to feature great posts from other blogs I like, or have recently found, in future Blog Shares posts. I’ve sorted my blogroll list into three categories, since this blog itself ranges across the spectrum of these three categories. Some of these blogs could easily fit in all three categories, so this wasn’t always so straighforward, but in general:

Mamas with Soul - Moms with big hearts that blog at least in part about parenting, and particularly on mindfulness and spiritual themes. (Or with what I consider a soulful quality. This is all quite subjective of course!)

Seekers and Teachers – Blogs that focus on spiritual themes, teachings and the process of seeking itself.

Mind/Body/Spirit – Blogs that focus on alternative health, or personal development from an integrated mind/body/spirit perspective.

I encourage you to check out the blogroll of each of these blogs, because they each have their own excellent community developed.

Also in the sidebar I always feature my latest two articles on the BellaOnline Buddhism site. I mention this because this week’s article is a list of Buddhist Movies, all of which are available on both Netflix and Amazon. So if you are a movie fan at all interested in Buddhism, you may like these (and some may also be available for at least partial viewing online, but I didn’t have time to research that.)

I also wanted to share a couple of interesting articles that came my way via StumbleUpon (the only social networking besides Twitter that I do). For me, these two articles really represent how two themes of this blog – parenting and the spiritual growth process – come together. The first is from Alfie Kohn, entitled Five Reasons to Stop Saying ‘Good Job’. I saw the author speak on the same subject last year, and I think this article really sums up his views on the problems with positive reinforcement quite nicely, and includes some suggestions for other ways to respond to our children.

Personally, I do not think it is entirely possible or desirable to parent entirely without positive reinforcement. (For example, I admit to resorting to bribery while recently potty training my youngest daughter, who, unlike her twin brother, was not at all interested. Her bribe of choice? Purple balloons. Shame on me. I am happy to say that she now uses the toilet without the promise of purple balloons and doesn’t seem at all harmed by the process.) But, I do see a lot of value in attempting to minimize positive reinforcement, which can quickly become a crutch. Doing so allows children to discover the joy of various activities just for themselves instead of for praise, and helps them to look at the results of their actions regarding others, rather than ‘being nice’ solely out of a desire for approval or fear of punishment.

To me this is also a very important pattern for many of us to break out of in our spiritual search. In general, organized religion emphasizes toeing a certain ‘moral line’ of good behavior, with a promise of reward, or fear of punishment. Many people who consider themselves ’spiritual but not religious’ (myself among them), come to reject organized religion for exactly that reason. But it’s a hard ego pattern to break, and many of us carry the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ self-judgment into our spiritual journey. We constantly judge ourselves against some external projection of what it means to be ’spiritual’, whether that projection is mindfulness, equanimity, compassion, joy, or something else. In the process we end up creating yet another projection that we can never live up to, and orient our spiritual process around whether or not we are or are not living up to our own standards.

I think truly probing the depths of our being, and discovering the joy of existence, involves dropping this process of projecting and judging altogether. Maybe you have patterns of anger, and lash out at people sometimes. So what. Say you’re sorry and move on. In my experience, anger will dissolve over time. The bigger question is, are you feeling more moments of joy? Are you learning more about yourself? Are you appreciating moments in your life? If so, then don’t measure yourself by any other standard. Some of us are more volatile energetically than others, so the process of growth is bumpier. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t moving closer to the ultimate truth of our being. (And equanimity is over-rated.)

Along those lines, I really love Zen, and the Vedanta/Advaita traditions of India. One of the sites I recently added to my blogroll is http://www.luthar.com, which contains many articles written by a lovely man and teacher that I have been corresponding to via StumbleUpon. These articles really get to the heart of the Vedanta/Advaita tradition, and particularly the teachings of Ramana Maharshi (Gangagi’s teacher’s teacher.) His latest is called The Heart of God: The Nature of Self-Realization. This tradition is really about experiencing your deepest source directly, and this is often referred to as ‘The Self’. This can be confusing to readers of Buddhist literature, where ‘The Ego’ seems like a bad thing, the force blocking us from spiritual truth, love, and joy. But The Self in this tradition is not ego. Instead, it’s as if we are each waves in the ocean of existence, and ego or self (with a little ’s’), is the individual wave, while recognizing ourselves as part of the ocean of existence is Self with a big ‘S’.

So for me, the themes of moving beyond positive reinforcement in parenting, and moving beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in spirituality, really merge at this level. In both endeavors, give up the categories, the individual waves, and just find the ocean…

Namaste-

Four Paths to Freedom – Which Is Your Root Path?

For the next post in my mystic spirituality series (which I have to warn you I may meander through with lots of tangents, because I am after all a Pisces and just can’t help myself) I wanted to cover the four types of spiritual paths, which correspond to four types of mystic experiences. I don’t usually like categorizing much, but I find this particular classification system useful for:

1) understanding the religious and spiritual traditions of the world

2) understanding the different routes to ’spiritual’ experiences, and

3) understanding your own spiritual proclivities

These four categories are based on ancient Hindu texts such as the Vedas and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, but I first came across them in the biography of Vivekananda, one of the formost disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, and the first Indian ‘Swami’ to travel to Europe and the U.S. (he did this before Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship.)

In Vivekananda’s writings, he labels each path as a different type of yoga, or path to ‘union’ (which is what the word yoga means.) The root of any experience that we label as ’spiritual’ or ‘mystic’ is a dissolution of boundaries, and therefore rooted in a sense of union with forces or a power larger than ourselves. Of course dividing life into ’spiritual’ and ‘non-spiritual’ moments presents big problems, but for the sake of this post, let’s just not get worked up about that – I think we can all acknowledge that we have certain moments or experiences of opening that help define our spiritual lives. Personally I prefer the word ‘freedom’ to ‘union’ – as in, freedom from the forces that usually keep us tied down or separated. So I call this Four Paths to Freedom, but you can call it whatever you want!

Think about what you gravitate to the most as you read this. What has preceded your defining moments? What dissolves you? Which of these traditions have you gravitated to the most? Each path is traditionally associated with certain risks, which I have listed, so think also about whether you have ever been (or currently are) caught in any of these traps? Let me know in the comments!

Paths of Inquiry (Jnani Yoga)

These paths revolve around direct inquiry into the nature of reality, mind, personal identity, and God/source. While these start as intellectual exercises, the practices are meant to move you beyond intellect, dissolving subject and object and all the dualities of mind that cause us to believe we are separate from God/source/each other.

Motto: To Know (or even better, To Know the Knower)

Seeking: Truth

Tradition Examples: Zen (all of Buddhism to some extent, but Zen in particular), Taoism, Vedanta, Hasidic Kabbalah (in terms of Talmudic study), Eckhart Tolle, Jungian-based symbolic psyche systems, the Enneagram

Risks of these paths: Getting trapped in the mind. Analysis paralysis. Mistaking intellectual understanding for wisdom, or self-awareness for realization.

Antidote: Surrender. Your intellect is your tool on this path, not who you are. It can bring you to the brink, and then you have to let go.

Paths of Devotion (Bhakti Yoga)

These paths revolve around devotion to an external representation of God, source, or love. Usually, this is devotion to a teacher, deity or other person meant to represent the liberated state. While initially these generate feelings of love for the object of worship, the idea is to collapse into the love itself, recognizing yourself as a pure expression of love, not an individual feeling love.

Motto: To Love (or even better, To Become Love)

Seeking: Connection

Tradition Examples: Christianity (through devotion to Christ), Tantric/Vajrayana Buddhism (through mandala, deity, or guru identification), Sufism, ritualized Hinduism (deity devotion), Guru yoga

Risks of these paths: Getting trapped in external devotion. Never recognizing the same source inside yourself. Getting addicted to the ‘feelings’ of love or bliss that devotion can trigger, without taking the next step into becoming love. Sentimentality. Self-righteousness – when emotion becomes the sole psychological driver.

Antidote: Discrimination – as in the mental ability to take a knife to your ego, discriminate between the various forces at work there, and surgically dissect your emotional addictions (which can be considered a kind of jnani yoga – inquiry and devotion work together.) If you stay trapped in worship for the emotional ‘high’, your ‘object’ of worship has to remain external to yourself. Give up temporarily feeling good to be free.

Paths of Service (Karma Yoga)

These paths revolve around service to others, as a means to overcoming the ego’s self-interest. The goal is to live in selflessness, through service to others, in order to overcome all egoic attachments and thought patterns. Dissolution occurs through recognizing everyone (and yourself) as expressions of the same source. Service to others is service to self  – there is no separation.

Motto: To Serve (or even better, To Serve as Source)

Seeking: Selflessness

Tradition Examples: Christianity (think Mother Teresa), Judaism (in the principle of tikkun, or making the world ‘whole’ through compassionate action), Bodhisattva practice in Mahayana Buddhism (which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, but some lineages stress service in action more than others, and fit better here), karma yoga monasteries like that established by Vivekananda himself (one of Gandhi’s inspirations)

Risks of these paths: Attachment to outcome – judging results instead of focusing on your inner relationship to service. Also, martyrdom or ’service ego’ – attachment to others viewing you as a ‘good person’, which masks underlying insecurities. And finally, compassion fatigue – a shutting down due to sacrificing your own needs beyond a level that is sustainable long term.

Antidote: Solitude. Meditation. Pulling inward instead of going outward for a time, to reconnect to your source and recognize your true drives.

Paths of the Unseen (raja yoga)

Raja actually means ‘king’, and these paths are so called because they combine aspects of all the other paths, plus add in occult and energy studies. The idea is to study the unseen forces in our world – the patterns of energy and laws of existence that determine what we experience and how the world evolves. Or put another way, the laws of creation. Dissolution comes through the recognition that we ourselves create the world, as opposed to the focus being on an external ‘creator’. Any act of creation – from the creative arts to healing (which is a kind of re-creation) to magic and manifestation – can be a practice on this path.

Motto: To Create (or To Become Creation)

Seeking: Power  – as in the power to Create/Manifest

Tradition Examples: Tantric/Vajrayana Buddhism, mystic Kabbalah, kundalini yoga, siddha yogic paths, Religious Science/New Thought Christianity, energy healing traditions practiced as part of a spiritual path, Evolutionary astrology, any occult or energy-based tradition (magick, divination, healing, even martial arts) that is practiced as part of a spiritual journey

Risks of these paths: Arrogance. Attachment to using power as an individual, to fulfill your own ego desires, instead of as a means for experiencing yourself as a conduit for creation. Also, disassociation – too much time in the ‘unseen’ can leave you emotionally disconnected from ‘real life’.

Antidote: Compassion, and service (the raja and karma paths can work to balance each other just as the bhakti and jnani can.) Focusing on your connection to others is the best way to keep yourself connected and balanced.

Many people label only devotional or occult paths as ‘mystic’, but as I said in my Are You a Mystic? post, I use it much more broadly. As for my own tendencies, in my life I have most definitely focused the most on the Paths of the Unseen, with a strong draw to Paths of Inquiry too. But interestingly, the main focus of my last few years – parenting – is a combination of the other two Paths, Devotion and Service. So I’ve been pulled to explore other aspects of myself – and spirituality – through that.

So what’s your tendency? What paths (formally or informally) have you been drawn to? What do you most seek – Truth, Connection, Selflessness or the Power to Create? What traps have you encountered? I’m interested to know…

And if you like, please:

February in Review

Last month I did a month-in-review post for the first time, idea and format courtesy of Mon at Holistic Mama, and the feedback was good, so here we go again…

Summary

Both the kids and I are more balanced this month, partly because I wrote less (hence fewer posts here), and because my mother and stepfather are visiting the area for 7 weeks, and can help out. The kids LOVE all the extra attention – a good reminder that mindful attention is all they ever really need. This month felt like a transition – I’m not entirely sure to what yet though.

Fun

The twins are potty-trained!! Right now this feels like the biggest accomplishment of my life. Nothing like trying to catch two 2-year olds ‘in the act’ to develop mindfulness.

Making valentines with the kids. I have NO artistic abilities whatsoever, but as a mother have discovered that I love arts and crafts, so doing it with my kids this age sets me free. Does look like they will soon surpass me in skill however.

Getting lots of comments on my ‘Are You a Mystic?’ post. I don’t seem to inspire comments much, although a respectable number of you do read this  (unless DH is paying wordpress and feedburner to inflate my stats??) So I was happy to finally get comments, and hope to inspire more with a new series on mysticism for women this month.

Being interviewed by Amy Jewell of www.cirkla.com on BlogTalkRadio. On my hand before the interview I wrote: 1) Don’t talk too fast, 2) Don’t say ‘um’, and 3) Don’t giggle. Listen and let me know how you think I did. Thx.

Starting up my meditation classes again. Always amazed how much teaching propels my own meditations forward.

Hiking in my favorite place with DH (see picture below.)

Challenging
Rain. The month started out with LOTS of rain, which normally I love, but this got old. I know, those of you busy shoveling your driveway don’t want to hear my whining. But eight years in sunny southern CA have made me a wimp.

The dentist. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to visit the dentist for the first time in five years, since we do actually have dental insurance. This resulted in not one, not two, but three deep cleanings.  All I can say is – FLOSS!!!

The economy hit closer to home. The midwest town where my family is from has been hit very hard, and two cousins were laid off this month, one after 23 years working for the same company, and the other with four kids and an already perilous mortgage. Others we know have survived recent lay-offs and/or taken paycuts. It is interesting to feel the feelings of anxiety this brings up, as well as compassion, and questions as to how to help.

Thoughtful

I have continued to explore the weird world that is Twitter. On the upside, I have found several Buddhist and spiritual articles from tweets that I liked. On the downside, Twitter is basically hell for an intuitive person. It’s full of people desperate to get your attention in 140 characters, and because of the high volume, this occurs at a frantic pace. It is like a giant out-of-control  human psyche made visible. Very strange. And addictive, of course. And then there is the mystery of the sudden influx of followers I got this past week. Am I listed someplace? Adding to the mystery is that many defined themselves as Christian Conservatives??? Really not sure what to make of all this.

An insight/thought

I have noticed that at the start of my meditations I am spending more time working through two prominent layers of distraction. The first I call ‘internet mind’, which is a busyness related to additional time online (including Twitter), and  which is very frenetic. The second is a pervasive subtext of anxiety, increasing with the world’s focus on the economy. Cutting through these two layers so that they don’t subtly  ’attach’ to and magnify my own thoughts is tricky business.

Website/blog Find

Liked this interview with three women spiritual/yoga teachers I really respect – Lama Tsultrium Allione, Shiva Rea, and Sarah Powers

Words

“If you can fix a problem in a single subtle structure, the solution will be shared throughout the entirety of the body–subtle and physical.” A little geeky I know, but I get geeky when it comes to chakras and energy body stuff. This is from The Subtle Body, which I loved reviewing this month.

Note to Self

Must stick to vow to limit daily online time, and to honor an ‘internet sabbath’ – at least 24 consecutive hours offline once each week.

Favourite Tip/Idea from web

Also liked this article from Karen Miller, author of Momma Zen, called Parents, Leave Your Home. She is always good at highlighting the ways we perpetually wish things were other than they are.

Slice of home

This isn’t a slice of home, but a slice of the home in my heart (sorry for the uncharacteristic sappiness.) With my mom and stepfather here to watch the kids, DH and I were able to hike in one of our favorite places, for the first time in five years. We started at the bottom, down by that river you can barely see! Based on how my legs feel, it will be another five years before we try this again.

Meditation – Intent, Intuition and the Stillpoint In Between

Looking back, I realized I haven’t written a straight post about meditation for some time, so here goes. This is kind of a companion to my Types of Meditation post. In that post, I briefly described different forms of meditation from the perspective of their benefits. In this one, I will instead talk about forms of meditation from the perspective of which aspect of mind they emphasize. I think it is useful to look at this distinction, particularly for people that have been meditating for awhile, because I believe in the value of mixing things up a bit – experimenting with different techniques to prevent your mind from becoming attached to one approach.

The two main aspects of mind are active and passive (what else?) When we are directing our mind in a concentrated fashion – reading a book, or trying to sort out a problem – we are consciously engaging in the active aspect of mind. When we are sitting back and observing (our mind or something external) or absorbing (listening to music and the like) we are consciously engaged in the passive, or receiving, aspect of mind. I put ‘consciously’ into both descriptions, because much of the time we are engaged in unconscious mental activity – just letting our mind wander about, and that might also be active or passive in nature. But the one thing all meditation techniques have in common is that in all of them we are trying to relate to our mind consciously.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of different meditation techniques. Some utilize active aspects of mind, and some utilize passive aspects of mind. Either way, the technique is just a means of shifting our awareness away from our usual thoughts and emotions. So while the techniques might seem drastically different, they are all meant to be doorways into other levels of awareness and insight. It is like the yin/yang symbol – the black/active/yang side and the white/passive/yin side initially seem like opposites, but they are dependent on each other, in the sense that they each help define the other. We can’t understand one without the other, and we can’t realize the wholeness they represent together until we see them both. In the same way, an understanding of both active and passive aspects of mind, and both types of meditation, enables us to see beyond them.

So what are active aspect of mind meditations? I would classify most visualization meditations in this category, particularly guru and deity visualizations. In many Tantric forms of meditation (found within Hindu-based kundalini yoga lineages and Tibetan Buddhist lineages), a visualization of  a teacher, Buddha, or deity is used in order to actually merge your own mind with the states represented by that being. This kind of meditation is also found in Christianity – read some of St. Theresa of Avila’s descriptions of her ‘contemplations of Christ’ and it’s clear she is visualizing him in  devotional fashion. Visualizations of places, mandalas, and other things along those lines are also active, because the goal is very similar to deity-visualizations – to merge your mind with the vibration of that place or creation.

Affirmations and other intent-focused meditations are also active in nature. You are actively trying to direct the vibrational level of your awareness – it is like launching an arrow in the direction you want to go through your own active effort. In fact, all of the various suggestions out there for using the law of attraction are means for effectively harnessing the active aspect of mind. Ditto for compassion and metta meditations, where you visualize those you care about and expand out from there. In these you are connecting your mind and being towards love by consciously directing it. I would say the same is true for chakra meditation, because you are trying to merge your mind with the energies of one or more chakras (amongst other things.)

Passive, or receiving (the term I prefer), forms of meditation are those that are observation or intuition based. So traditional breath meditations, and meditations where you attempt to observe your own mind, letting its activity float by like ‘clouds in the sky’, fall into this category. Chanting meditations as well, because they normally involve instruction to ’settle’ into the sound. The myriad of meditations associated with developing intuitive skills are also receiving techniques. Many of these involve ‘emptying out’, ‘opening up’ and other techniques that involve letting go of control rather than directing it as in active meditations.

Now, all this active and passive talk is really just one way of talking about meditation, because in every meditation we use a little of both. For example, when your mind wanders in a breath meditation, you do actively pull it back. And when you feel a merging occurring in a visualization meditation, you let go into the experience. So meditation is always a balancing act between control and surrender, acting and receiving.

But the overall techniques do tend to fall into one or the other category. And the type of meditation you engage in influences what parts of yourself you will discover, what parts of you will develop, and what doorways of awareness you will walk through. I think problems can arise when someone becomes attached to only one meditation technique or approach to mind. What tends to happen is that someone gravitates towards those techniques that feel the most comfortable to them, and over time, they go to the ’same place’ in their meditations every day. That’s probably fine if you are just looking for a particular daily ‘fix’ – if, for example, you mostly engage in meditation in order to calm down, and have found one place you ‘go to’ that relaxes you each time. But if you are engaged in meditation for personal or spiritual growth, it becomes a problem. Because growth and comfort rarely go together.

I say this knowing full well that many spiritual traditions emphasize only one form of meditation, and encourage a practitioner to stick with it for life. I also recognize the value of this advice – too many people, especially here in the West, take a ’shop til you drop’ approach to spirituality, jumping from technique to technique, and thus never sticking long enough with one to discover what it has to offer. I also believe that it is important to have one core technique. BUT, I think there is great value in occasionally exploring techniques that are very different, at least in part as a test for yourself as to whether you have become attached to one form or aspect of mind. If you have a regular practice, you could do this once a week, or every few months for several weeks.

Regardless of what technique(s) you choose, remember that yin/yang symbol. That symbol is also about balance. You could say that exactly in the middle of the symbol – and your meditation practice – there is a stillpoint of perfect balance, where the mind is neither active nor passive. That stillpoint is a doorway into eternity. Or God/enlightenment/nirvana/the tao/brahma/Allah/source – whatever words you wish to use. So whether your chosen technique is active or passive in nature, or you mix it up, it is always meant to be a pathway towards that middle, still, point – the point that exists beyond them both.

For more meditation posts, check out the Meditation page.

Gangaji – Thanks for the tuning

I wasn’t planning to post again this week, but I went to a public event of Gangaji’s last night, whom I had not seen in several years, and feel compelled to share some of what transpired. If you are not familiar with Gangaji, you can check out the profile I wrote of her for the Heroes of Healing project, or her own website.

For the cynics among you, I feel compelled to say that I am not a ’student’ of Gangaji’s (she doesn’t really structure her programs that way anyway), and in fact haven’t seen her in five years. At one time I did attend many of her public events and a five-day retreat with her, but there were many people at these and she wouldn’t know me from Adam. This is all to say that I have no vested interest in marketing Gangaji, and am not a Gangaji ‘groupie’, if there is such a thing.

But at this point in my own spiritual path and teaching, she is by-far the best living example of ‘truth’ and ’silent awareness’ (words she likes to use) that I have found (and frankly, I have seen most of the big-name spiritual teachers out there.) Simply being in her presence provides a ‘tuning’, because the purity of her state of awareness throws any resistance in my own awareness into sharp relief. Much like a piano-tuner tunes a piano by striking his tuning fork and then hitting a piano key to compare, Gangaji provides a pure example for me to assess my own awareness by. She is my tuning fork (sorry I couldn’t come up with a more poetic metaphor.)

She is also excellent at what she does. And what she does is invite people to sit with her on stage to share experiences or ask her a question. Through her own questions and transmission, she then takes them deeper and deeper into their own being. The transformations that often take place are beautiful to watch. And while it is easy to sit in the audience and pass judgment on each person that goes up, the real value is in seeing yourself in each person, or rather, seeing your own habits of mind reflected in them. Then every transformation is your own too.

So here are some of my favorite lines from the night, all things Gangaji said to individuals on stage, and what they meant to me:

- While the first person was on stage with her, practically gushing devotion and joy, which made many people uncomfortable, Gangaji said to the audience, “As an experiment” (one of her favorite phrases), “try dropping the narrative going on in your own head, the ‘what does this have to do with me’, or ‘what is she talking about’…just as an experiment try dropping all that…not because it is the right thing to do, or a good thing, or a holy thing, but just as an experiment for yourself.“…This is the essence of spiritual practices for me – they are experiments and tools to help us realize ourselves. It isn’t about ‘beliefs’ and ’shoulds’, which too often only clutter (and confuse) the mind.

- “You have to be able to receive in order to give.” We often equate spirituality with giving – with compassion and service. But to be able to give, we have to be open to receiving. We can’t give love unless we are open to receiving it. We can’t transmit peace unless we are open to receiving it. And truly receiving is much harder than we often realize, because it means allowing ourselves to be vulnerable – vulnerable to potential pain, or difficulty, or whatever may come.

- “So are you going to add to that suffering or do something different? You always have a choice.” This was to a woman who described how sensitive she had become to suffering recently (after 15 years of spiritual ’self-absorption’ by her own account). She described watching a movie on torture in Afghanistan and not being able to sleep for a week. As Gangaji said, that is not what opening your heart is about – it is not about taking the suffering into your own mind and body so that you become miserable too. Guilt can often lead us to take that path, and patterns of emotional indulgence. But we can, as Gangaji put it, ‘open ourselves to the pain of the world, not deny it, and yet allow it to go through us, without taking us down with it.’ If we do that, there is a chance we can do something about it, at least in our own awareness, and hopefully even beyond that.

- The woman she was speaking to then said, “There is this story in India of a saint, and of how when his cow bled, he would bleed too, out of compassion”. Gangaji replied (in my favorite line of the night), “I wish I had met that saint…he might still be with us!”

- A woman came up who was experiencing a great spiritual shift in her life, but she doubted its validity because her external life was a mess. As she said, she was expecting some sort of alignment between her inner and outer life. “Not necessarily”, said Gangaji, “this isn’t about perfecting your life, or perfecting yourself, or perfecting the world. And thank goodness, or we’d all be waiting forever. This is about finding that presence, that you are feeling right now, all the time, regardless of what else is going on.” I think this exchange is particularly helpful considering how popular teachings related to the law of attraction have become in the last few years. While I believe these teachings have tremendous value for healing, and attaining goals, and all that, none of that has anything to do with discovering who we really are. That peace, that presence, is always with us, regardless of the state of our external lives.

- “Now, what are you going to do with all that power?” Gangaji said this almost under her breath, as one woman stopped on the front of the stage before sitting down, to gaze out at everyone in the crowd. While Gangaji had asked several individuals to gaze like this while sitting with her, what this woman did was different  – she thought she was connecting with the audience, but on an energy level she was thriving on the focus. This is not a judgment, just an observation, and it was a potent example of the power of our ego, and its insatiable drive for attention. All of us spend a lot of time and focus collecting power of different types, almost out of habit, and Gangaji’s question is a great one – now, what are we going to do with it?

- One young woman started her exchange with the statement, “I am just at the beginning of being spiritual’, to which Gangaji replied, “STOP. Stop right there! Stay at the beginning! Don’t go any further. The beginning is where it is all at. The problems start as soon as you think you know something, or have something, or had something you have to get back.”

- “Who says you have to be calm and happy to be at peace?” You could substitute almost anything we think we need for the words ‘calm and happy’ – healthy, wealthy, in love, married, divorced, parents, childless, working, not working, travelling, in a cave…you name it. We all start our spiritual journey with projections and ideas about how it is going to improve us or our lives. We all want things, whether material, situational, or experiential. And there are lots of teaching out there to help us get them. But, what does that have to do with being at peace? If your peace is conditional, what good is it? Just find peace now, be peace now, and forget the rest.

For another Gangaji inspired post, try Form and Emptiness, Spirituality and Politics.

Neuroplasticity and How to Keep a New Year’s Resolution

I have written in the past about neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to restructure in response to new stimuli, experience, and even thoughts. Neuroplasticity in its most obvious form is easily seen in the brains of individuals with unusual physical abilities or apparent disabilities. For example, the area of the brain associated with the processing of fast visual stimuli is exceptionally well-developed in professional baseball players, who must track pitches at 90 miles an hour or more. The area of the brain associated with processing physical sensation through touch is much more developed in blind individuals, due to their reading of braille.

Neuroplasticity is especially interesting to me in the context of spiritual practice, particularly meditation. Research indicates that regular compassion meditation increases our brain’s ability and likelihood to respond compassionately to situations even when we are not meditating. Similar findings indicate the same is true for self-observation and mindfulness – that the more we engage in formal practices designed to practice these skills, the more our brain strengthens in the associated areas. (For more on this research, check out this article I recently wrote for BellaOnline, Does Buddhism Change Your Brain?)

I think neuroplasticity also has fascinating implications for parenting. To me, it means that triggering certain states and emotions in my children makes them more likely to shift into those states themselves on their own. For example, getting them to laugh regularly may help develop the areas of their brains associated with humor and laughter, making them more likely to be able to let go and laugh on their own when confronted with stress or difficulties in their future (scientists have linked a healthy sense of humor with succesful stress management for years.) Neuroplasticity also demonstrates something all us parents know in our hearts but sometimes forget – that example and experience teach much more effectively than words. Helping our children experience compassion is much more likely to develop a brain and psyche capable of kindness than constantly telling them to ‘be nice.’

For us adults, knowledge of neuroplasticity offers powerful information about how we can change – a topic especially relevant at this time of year when many of us make that annual referendum on personal change, our New Year’s Resolution list. Based on my reading of the current scientific knowledge of neuroplasticity, and on teachings about personal transformation from the spiritual traditions I have studied, here is my recommendations for making a New Year’s Resolution list you can actually stick with:

1) Prioritize and pick one (yes, one) thing about yourself or your life that you would really like to change. Make a commitment to focus exclusively on this resolution for 6-8 weeks. This is the amount of time research indicates it takes for most of us to develop a new habit. In other words, this is the amount of time required to begin to create changes in our brain – the kind of change that will enable permanent transformation. You can move on to other items on your list later in the year.

2) Now, think about what underlying mental or emotional patterns contribute to your current state related to this resolution. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, what emotional or mental triggers cause you to overeat or skip exercising? If you are trying to be less impatient with your children, contemplate what specific situations and factors cause you to lose it? The idea here is to pinpoint the existing thoughts (and by extension neural patterns) that currently reinforce the behavior you are trying to change.

3) Next, develop specific affirmations or practices that counteract these triggers, and make sure they are in positive, rather than negative, language. For example, if you realize that you tend to overeat whenever you feel criticized at work, focus on statements related to building your self-esteem, such as ‘I am competant and confidant in what I do.’ If you always lose your patience when your children create a mess, say ‘I am flexible and calm in the face of chaos.’ While this might seem extremely hokey, the insight of the latest neuroplasticity research is that we can create new neural patterns in our brains through the thoughts we think. So focus on creating and enforcing thoughts that support your resolution – over and over (it is all about practice.)

4) Next, focus on strategy and routine. Develop a very specific step-by-step plan for how you will accomplish or ‘practice’ your goal. If you want to lose weight, what diet are you planning to follow? What will your exact menu be for each of the six weeks? When, where, and with whom will you eat? When will you purchase the foods you need? If you are trying to develop your patience in the face of chaose, create test situations for yourself each day – for example, buy your kids a ton of art supplies and sit down with them to make an art project (guaranteed to create a mess), and practice (again that word) a different response.

5) Think in the long-term. Remember that you are trying to change your brain, and that takes time (at least 6 weeks.) You will undoubtedly fail along the way, as your existing thought patterns surface. No matter, just plug along with your plan on all fronts. Just like practicing batting in baseball (or any other kind of traditional practice) the number of times you fail is not that relevant, it is the number of times you succeed that begins to create new neural patterns. So focus on maximizing your successes, and don’t get caught up in counting your mistakes.

For more on neuroplasticity, check out Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. Or, for more posts along these lines, check out the spiritual practice section of the Meditation page.