What deals have you negotiated within yourself? What if it’s time to honour them? Leaning out over the abyss, I strain to find form beneath the morning mist. There’s a chill in this mountaintop air; my teacup is chattering in its saucer. Continue reading
Tag Archives: meditation
My most shameful permission
You know you’re in trouble when you’re following Muammar Gaddafi’s lead! The documentary told how a young on-the-move Gaddafi broke cultural tradition by not going back home to contribute when his family could really have benefited. “Oh,” I remember saying to myself, “his independence from paradigm norms and rules freed him to create his own world.” And it’s kinda scary how easily a piece of random information can dig itself into your own story. Continue reading
Challenging the glamour of our rituals
I discovered the dark glamour of drugs, death, and sex in an Ontario grade 5 classroom. The heroin addicted, HIV positive prostitute was only 7 years older than the little blonde girl white knuckling Reader’s Digest during afternoon reading time. Every sentence was a step deeper into a darkness I knew only through other people’s nightmares. Continue reading
Making a change? Finding your authentic self
In the long low darkness of the void, while your brain chemistry adjusts to change, there is one last sacrifice to make. After setting aside your rituals, your be-all-end-all attentions and beliefs, you must now claim one final permission in order to connect with your authentic self: time. Continue reading
Making a change? Connecting with your universal self – Part 2
Click here to catch up on Part 1… So, after tasting universal love I had two options: retreat into bliss and keep surfing my supernova, or use this new platform as permission to seek out compatible abundances to honour my temporal self. This is a crazy world, and keeping our bodies, our little frictions in the flow, alert and alive can be a tedious business. But did I really want to sacrifice my humanity to white, black, or orange robes and hide in ritual? Continue reading
Making a change? Connecting with your universal self – Part 1
Why alter the attentions of our little friction in the universe? Why change? Love. Not for family, friends, not for any ideal, country or even love of self; because the self is a violent sneeze, a brief yet explosive misting of mucus soon lost to time. Eloquent, I know. True change courts a love beyond our humanity, known only when we offer ourselves wholly to the unorderable bliss of the universe. Bring that love home, and your human connections can finally become what they need to be – your reality and guide to purpose. Continue reading
Making a change? The mindfulness key
STOP whatever you’re doing and SMELL where you are… take a long, slow, lazy sniff of this moment and watch its molecular landscape paint itself across your brain. Now draw a few shorter more urgent breaths and pay close attention to new layers and nuances that add texture, peaks and valleys to this internal mapping. Continue reading
Making a change? Why risk the void?
Short answer… So you can tell the truth. Not some sort of accountability to your friends and family bullshit, but permission to express and experience your genetic truth at a cellular level. This is clean energy flow. This is bliss. This is what Oprah’s driving at, what we’re all reaching for, but we’re missing the point by expanding its definition into our human social systems. Continue reading
Why a craving is our most intimate human experience
I can barely form this sentence – I want! – my mind has no patience for language – I need! All words have been conscripted in service of a craving and my executive functions are shutting down. Just as frostbitten fingers are first to have their blood siphoned away, this cold Calgary morning has redirected all my neurotransmitters to the same goal – survival. Continue reading
Sense Scrolling – 3 minute blank canvas mindfulness meditation
Our brains process reality through a filter of attentions and associations (eg. chair, building, tree, etc.). These filters, developed over time through culture, coding, and experience, can limit our freedom to explore and evolve our internal/external lives. Sense scrolling is a insight mindfulness meditation designed to loosen immediate associations, heighten senses, and give our filters the flexibility to deepen/change the way we experience our world. This insight mindfulness meditation can be performed in under 3 minutes, anywhere you can be still with your eyes closed.
Step 1 – Smell: Close your eyes (for steps 1 – 4) and focus on your breathing. Take 5 deep nose breaths and concentrate on the smell and temperature of the air. Your entire world is limited to that smell. Define it’s layers and overall character.
Step 2 – Taste: Focus only on taste. Explore your mouth with your tongue and define the current balance of salty/sweet/sour/bitter. This taste is your world – hopefully a minty one. (note: this step, combined with step 4, can also be performed during any meal to focus and enhance the experience)
Step 3 – Hearing: Your world is only the surrounding air vibrations. Try to differentiate all distinct areas of sound and pinpoint their locations, moving clockwise from back left to center front to back right. Separate the layers of sound from low frequency to higher pitched vibrations. You’ll be shocked by your acuity!
Step 4 – Touch: Your body becomes your world. Is there any air flowing across your skin? What is it’s temperature? What is your temperature? Pick 2 or 3 parts of your body and focus on them one at a time. What are the internal/external sensations. Are your toes touching the end of your shoe? Are strands of hair blowing across your face? Are you putting more of your weight on one knee?
Step 5 – Sight: Starting with only a dark empty world, open one eye. Concentrate on colour contrasts (yellow leaves against a blue sky), shapes (single leaf), highlight/shadow, and repeating patterns (building windows). Now open the other eye to experience the wonder of full depth of field. Look for motion patterns and perspective distances. Now add your other senses. This is your world – and it’s magical!
Note: Over time, besides giving you greater freedom of perspective and attentions, sense scrolling mindfulness meditation will actively heighten your senses and give you the ability to focus acutely on any of the five in almost any situation. You’ll be able to walk familiar route as a soundscape, smellscape, coulourscape, rather than just a landscape. Trying a new food will become a fully engaging adventure. And sex… well, let’s not even go there~wink.
Blank Canvas Living 