Find Your Sacred Place, Continued

More to chew on from the discussion between Moyers and Campbell:

Moyers: This sacred place does for you what the plains did for the hunter.

Campbell: For them the whole world was a sacred place. But our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation, that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it's corny music that nobody else respects. Or get the book you like to read. In your sacred place you get the "thou" feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived. 

That's it, but wanted to share this with you. I'm reading fiction almost every night (right now, it's "Master and Commander" by Patrick O'Brian) and I'm loving the feeling of just disappearing into the story. Music, books, art, silence, whatever it is... Campbell is onto something, so find your bliss station, and spend some time there!

Find Your Sacred Place

I've been toying a lot lately with the idea of committing to a consistent meditation practice. I know I need one: a place of stillness and peace where I practice awareness and breath and just sitting and *being* for a few minutes every day. I do have a regular yoga practice, but while complementary and integrated, they are not one in the same.

I've been returning to Joseph Campbell again lately, as he is the one voice who, for me, can cut through all the clutter and noise and remind me how to return to what is highest, truest and timeless. I found this exchange in "The Power of Myth" the other day, and it has given me new motivation to find my sacred spot in the day where I can meditate and fill my cup.

Bill Moyers: You write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a sacred place? 

Joseph Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something will eventually happen. 

Doesn't that sound exciting?

Here's to each of us finding our sacred place, and experiencing "what you are and what you might be."

Peace,
Tiffany

p.s. What ideas do you have for where or when your sacred place might be? How will you commit to being there each day? Since I'm serious about finding this, I'll post an update on how I've made this happen in my life.

Why We Need to Keep Asking Why

One of the most powerful practices you can enact is to simply ask “Why?” instead of giving into your most automatic impulses, thoughts and actions.

• When someone says something hurtful to you, ask yourself why they feel the need to hurt.

• When someone cuts you off in traffic, ask why they aren’t paying attention or why they are full of urgency or anger.

• When someone dresses in a way you find goofy or scandalous or slovenly, ask why.

• Then, ask why you are reacting as you are, or why you feel the need to examine others so closely. Know thyself first, right?

The thing is, we know so little, but we assume so, so much. We fill in the spaces of all we don’t know with our opinions, our emotions, our thoughts and our beliefs. We fill in the spaces with our family histories, our socioeconomic background, our race, our education, our religion. We fill in the spaces with our culture, our parents, our stories and our philosophies. We fill in the spaces with our egos.

 

Your curiosity is perhaps your greatest teacher, your best guide.

Your curiosity opens you up, accesses your observant awareness, closes down your impulsive, judging thoughts. Your curiosity is a path to your heart and your highest self.

My son hasn’t started asking “Why?” about the whole world yet (though he’s begun with “What’s that?” about many, many things!), but we all know the story about the child who drives his parents bonkers with asking “Why?”

When does that end? When do we stop asking why? Why do we stop asking why?

I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because we get frustrated once we realize that there are so many things we don’t know the answers to. Maybe we like living in a world of certainty more than we like having our minds and hearts challenged. To be sure, it’s exhausting to spend a lot of time in uncertainty. We don’t have answers, and we like answers, so we invent them, even if we must do so unconsciously.

I like answers. They are so satisfying. But they are not what the world and the people in it are here for. The world and people do not exist to give you answers.

We have so many answers in this world. Science and our faculties of reason and intellect have given us the path to almost as many answers as we want. Somehow, we have to reacquaint ourselves with mystery, and subsequent to that reacquaintance, we must find comfort in, or at least acceptance of, mystery.

This is one reason I love reading mythology or reading about it. Mythology is not, as is commonly explained, a way to explain a world before there was science. Mythology points directly at Mystery. Does its level best to deliver you into its midst, inasmuch as words and stories and art can deliver the ineffable.

Hmmm. How’d we get from judging less to talking about the Mystery? Are they related?

I think so. Because if we keep asking “Why?”, beginning with the most basic things – our bodies, our relationships, our world, our universe – we stay open enough to eventually arrive at the doorstep of Mystery. And there, knocking on Mystery’s door, but not really expecting an answer, content to gaze at the intricate carving of the door, the way the moon bathes the door in a bright and silver light, content to experience the profound peace that comes with accepting that the door has no key, no lock, no handle, we achieve a union with ourselves, with others, with Source, and that is the very definition of bliss as we can know it in this human lifetime.

One of the things I know now as a parent that I didn’t know before is that a newborn baby is an expression of the Mystery. Totally otherworldly, completely spellbinding. Open and beautiful and as close a window to the Mystery as we’ll ever get here on earth. Little by little, humanity overtakes them, and that is not to be mourned. But for a few brief weeks, these little sleeping, gurgling creatures are more like sprites or fairies or some other mysterious, magical being. Their peace (when not crying, of course!) is enough to move anyone curious enough to watch them to tears.

Many wiser than me have said that our spiritual journey here on earth is a process of reclaiming what we already know and have experienced – that we are one with Source, that our natural state is to be completely open and at peace and infinitely loving.

I agree, and advise that one tool we need on this journey is our curiosity. Of course, asking why can be a dangerous proposition: It can lead us to answers, and if we stop seeking, we get stuck, thinking we’ve found all we need to know. We stagnate there. We may be alive, but vitality stops. That’s why we must never stop asking why, why we must always make room for curiosity.

Peace,

Tiffany

In what areas of your life have you stopped asking why? How could you engage your curiosity to revitalize those areas? Please share any thoughts in the comments.

How to Have a Flash of Insight

I had this post basically prepared before the thing I don't yet want to write about happened, so I figured I'd publish it now and give you something to ponder while I'm on hiatus. Hope you enjoy it.

After reading over my last post and contemplating Ariane's great comment, I realize I was only half-right about the need for an introspective process as you work toward finding your bliss. Introspection alone will only get you about halfway to where you need to be. To break through the ruts and habits of what you think you know, you need the sudden flash of insight, and getting there cannot be done by your rational, intellectual mind.

I'm a big fan of the show House, wherein a brilliant diagnostician (whose character is based on Sherlock Holmes) solves baffling medical cases. But if you know the show, despite House being an ardent believer in reason, intellect and logic above all else, those tools rarely (if ever) solve the mystery. Usually he's talking to his best friend Wilson, or goofing around with some prank when he discovers the missing piece of the puzzle that allows him to finally make the correct diagnosis and save his patient's life.

Of course, it's a great irony -- in this man devoted to logic and intellect -- that it would be his subconscious that does the really heavy lifting. This is one of his character's tragic flaws--one that prevents him from having healthy relationships. In privileging reason above all else, he denigrates the subconscious and all its associates (insight, emotion, spirituality, etc.), never making the connection that this is his most vital asset as both a diagnostician and a human being.

So what I'm saying is: Don't be like House.

I know that introspection and analysis alone can't get you to bliss because it is true in art and it has been true in my own life. Of course, like House, I often forget this, and the more intractable a problem becomes, the more stubbornly I set my rational mind to solve it. This rarely, if ever, works.

I'm kind of laughing at myself, because as big a fan I am of mythology's power and Joseph Campbell, you'd think I would remember this truth and apply it in my own life. But, if you are smart, and your brain has gotten you good places before (good grades, into a good school, accolades at work, etc.) you can easily be deluded into thinking it has ALL the answers.

What most people (myself included) often forget is that your brain can also get you into as many bad places as it can good ones. This isn't a given, but people can rationalize the worst behavior in the world, truly deluding themselves into thinking that what they are doing is clearly justified.

As Steve Ross says in "Happy Yoga", thinking is addictive. And, like any addiction, when thinking reaches this compulsive level, it's not good for you.

All of my most significant epiphanies, my most life-changing realizations, have happened when I have given my brain time off--when I'm dreaming, daydreaming, meditating, creating art or engaging with art or just playing in the true sense of the word--allowing for spontaneity and creativity and surprise and not indulging a rational process.

Lately I've been feeling burned out. Trying to keep up with a very alert, active and engaged 17 month old all day, a house in a constant march toward disarray (the forces of entropy are much stronger in a house containing a toddler!) and a part-time freelance career--not to mention relationships, friendships, administrative tasks, cooking/eating and my own health and creative life--well, I've just been feeling tapped out.

Usually, when my baby naps or goes down for the night, I get on the computer and catch up on work, email and other tasks, getting sucked into the news or Facebook or other useless distractions. This week, I just couldn't. I used the time to read a book, daydream, even just sit and breathe deeply and notice how I felt. Last night, while watching the movie "The Fighter," I solved a mystery that I've been trying to solve basically my entire life. Suffice it to say, it's about my family of origin and the dynamics of it, but suddenly, all the pieces clicked and a lifetime of non-understanding melted away. It was truly a sudden flash of insight.

So without further ado, this is how I think you can allow both your brain and your subconscious to help you have important insights of your own.

• Write down all the things that you think you need to do. Get the to-do list out of your mind and onto paper or a smartphone or someplace you can access readily. If you feel like your mind doesn't have to remember the daily tasks (grocery shopping, paying bills, laundry) and the bigger tasks (birthdays, taxes, deadlines for work or school, etc.) you will free your brain of that clutter.

• Do your daily work efficiently. Whether this is for a job, or school or work in the home, try your best not to get distracted by time sucks like Facebook or annoying, unproductive phone calls or surfing news sites. The only exception is when you find a site that you really get something out of. For me, that's Arts & Letters Daily. It's a site that fuels my imagination and my intellect with articles that are mostly the equivalent of a gourmet meal. In other words, cut out the junk. By doing this, you are more productive and can set aside greater chunks of time for the next step.

• Unplug your rational, productive, practical mind. How to do this? First, take a deep, full breath, all the way down to your belly button. OK. Now, there are many paths that help you unplug. Yoga works well for me, but so does visiting a museum or gallery, or reading a novel or watching a really good movie. (Again, popcorn movies are fine here and there, but they don't feed your subconscious in the same way movies with convincing characters and authentic narrative do. You're letting your subconscious chew on art, which leads it to play in the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes, which helps it to make connections to your own life.) Or, go for a walk, jog or bike ride. (Without your iPod!) Lie down on a blanket and watch the clouds go by. Play games or do puzzles, but without attachment and intention. Just to see what happens. Become a detached observer. And whatever you do, remember to breathe deeply and fully. Sometimes, the answer is to sleep. Not just to have dreams, though those can be great aids to the flash of insight (or can be the insight themselves), but also, you simply can't relax and maintain alert awareness when you're exhausted and feeling unwell.

• Be patient. Like anything we can't control, the subconscious will deliver your flash of insight when it's damn good and ready. You can't force it, or rush it. If anything, you can only create the conditions that are favorable to having insights. So, if you catch yourself thinking, "OK, I went to yoga this morning, and then I took a walk, and then I watched the clouds for thirty minutes, so why haven't I figured anything out?", then you are back to compulsively thinking again. Breathe, let those thoughts go, and try again. The beauty of meditative work and play is that the more you practice it, the more natural it becomes, and the more often you simply find yourself with a clear, aware presence, rather than a compulsive monkey-mind. It shouldn't feel like work to do these things. Rather, it should feel like a letting go. Like a release of weight. If it feels like work, you are probably trying to use your rational mind to make something happen that you can't make happen.

• What about money, illness, fill-in-the-blank? When you have a stack of bills you can't pay, or your health is dire or your relationship is on the ropes, it can certainly feel like there's no room for such frivolity. For whatever reason, we see much of this time spent on art or daydreaming or play as silly, childish. My response to that is to say that it is. And that's exactly the point. As children, we need play. We need to dream. Why should that need, so fundamental, so essential, simply go away at what, the age of 12, 14, 18? Now that's a silly thought. Yes, we have responsibilities, and we do not play or daydream all day. But we must make room for some of it, to remember the lightness that is not just possible, but is actually what we are. Steve Ross met a lot of enlightened yogis and gurus in his travels, and he says that all they do is laugh. So no matter what your objection, make a little room for lightness and breath. If nothing else, it will help you cope with whatever your problem might be.

Again, you can't force an epiphany. But you can improve the odds by cultivating the right conditions in your mind, body and behaviors.

In a sense, all this boils down to giving yourself permission to play and be free of your worries for a while. Permission to be present and enjoy whatever is happening now. If a flash of insight decides to make a visit, so much the better, but even if it doesn't, well, at least you get to have some fun.