What follows is a conversation with Brent during one of our sessions. Brent is a person I have been working with for a while now who has been diagnosed at a young age with autism.
Before we started the session he came with his usual “I don’t feel like it to today.” After 5 minutes of struggling to balance on a wooden ball, he shook it off and we went for it. We worked a little bit on expanding the breath and internally sensing the body, looking for what kind of spontaneous movements he wanted to do.
Then we went to the park to observe how nothing in nature is perfect or symmetrical, therefore perfectionism is maybe not so natural. While observing how ugly the tree was in front of us this season, we did a standing practice where we ‘protected our fire.’ After doing about 15 minutes of this practice he said to me:
“it is wonderful to notice that you can look at your fire, but also beyond it, and also to the left, to the right, but it is too easy to fall into just looking at it from the front and forgetting all that is past!”
Yes, Brent has a remarkable way of expressing himself so I will let him do the talking. Here is a transcript of his recent thoughts on our way of working together:
“You have to learn to let go.” These are the words they have been telling me since the beginning. You have to live more in the moment. You have to learn to accept. But these are one those things that you cannot communicate in words… It just is not possible!
For example, one week ago I had a quarrel with my girlfriend. Some things had happened in her life and finally she will now do some of the things I once advised her to do, but of course not because I told her: because she now has had a couple of experiences through which she understands it herself and realises it is like this and that, not because someone else told her – through her own experience!
And that is something I noticed in my experiences with psychiatry, there you totally do not get this. There you receive the experiences of other people or “we are psychiatrists or psychologists and we know it should be like this.” But this does not help me because I cannot just accept it like that! A human being has to discover it himself, I have to have the experience myself to know: “this indeed is the way!” Frustrating!
I really find it regrettable that I was not able to do something like this when I was 11. Because I really have something with movement I’m now realizing. There are people who do not have any affinity with movement but I do and I easily make connections through movement and subsequent reasoning in my head so for me it kind of is the perfect combo. I do notice now that I can move my body and at the same time deeply put in multiple things and connect them as you do in your way of working.
(Click here to read Brent’s experience with complex coordination practice)
But I really wish that when I was 11 and had fits of anger, that there was someone who said “come, let us use these things for something else and let us ‘physically reason’ how you are feeling.” I find it a bit sad that I only find out about this later in my life but it is what it is and maybe it also is no coincidence. Maybe I had to have those other lesser experiences to realise that this does work for me to then… who knows… do something with this myself to help others.
Besides, I also do not really know if this way would work with the autistic people of my group where I live because maybe they would not find enough connections with the movements. Because I tried to explain “how do I define what Olivier does?” and then there comes ‘movement’ and… It just is not easy to put it into words.
For example, a couple times they did yoga sessions with the group but in the end everyone fell asleep and that is not the purpose. One girl of the group did tai chi but it gave her stress. But that is, I think, all because they do not find anything beyond it, they do something and yes they do it, but they cannot pull it out of its context and bring to to their own context. And that is so unfortunate.
Also disappointing for me is to observe that very little of the autistic people I know work on themselves. Few go to a therapist, and this by the way is also a form of therapy for me. Little work on developing themselves causing them to remain stuck in the same bubble.
This post was originally shared in a newsletter sent to participants of the ‘ReHeats‘ I organize a couple of times year to reheat and practice certain ideas and principles around the interrelation of our physical structure, our thoughts and emotions in a temporary intentional community. The writing comes straight from my notebook after letting myself fall into a bad mood and wanting to objectively represent how I had allowed it to happen.
Enter, How I Get Into A Negative Mood
The weather had decided it for me. Today was going to be a lazy day. What else would it be?
The sky was gray, the rain was just about to erupt from the dark clouds, gloomy faces were rushing mindlessly through the street when I peeked through the window.
The conditions of the day made their message very clear to me: today I stay in for a lazy day.
I put myself down in the sofa with my laptop, scrolled a bit, opened some random tabs, watched 5-10 seconds of half a dozen of clips that automatically start playing on Facebook before I noticed a 30 minute video in the area of my interests.
I watched 5 minutes of this, then paused it. I found another video: one of those Fail Video compilations where people hurt and humiliate themselves. It was funny for a couple of minutes but then I got bored with this as well.
In the meanwhile almost an hour had passed. My body had started to slowly melt into the shape of the sofa and my lower back started to hurt a little bit and yell to me to change position but no no no not today because the weather decided for me: it’s a lazy day.
This vicious circle of mindless dabbling continued for a while until I got a feeling of enormous disgust towards myself as I realized something about how laziness, inactivity and winding down had changed since I was a kid.
I got into a bad mood and became negative after that hour, not very enthusiastic about life and thought to myself “normally I am not like this, what has triggered these feeling?”
So I pondered “maybe I should do what I suggest other people to do” and started to very analytically make a list of what got me into this bad mood and came up with the following:
only looking forward with eyes, not looking around / rigid neck
shoulder rounded forward, sunken chest and mid spine
sinking down in sofa instead of keeping expansive spine
grinding teeth instead of relaxing jaw
mindless scrolling on social media, zero attention / ‘here but not here’
comparing my life with single online pictures of another person who I barely know
feeling unconnected
I realized something for myself about this trap that the ‘connected’ world has created. This laziness I decided on was not true inactivity or non-doing as the Taoists call it. It was a poisonous attention-less kind of activity that I have to stay away from. When I started to enlarge these feelings, internal dialogue and physical disturbances that came up through these activities I got horrified with what this type of death-in-life activities could do to me in the long run. It was the loudest possible Alarm Clock! “What will I become when I keep doing this?”
Most of all I felt what might be some of the most significant things for me to stay aware of. I felt it is less a matter of what I do but more what NOT to do when talking about bad moods.
My antidote I found the next day, still feeling a bit gloomy I decided it was time to cut this self-inflicted crap and I decided to go out and move around. I went to a local park to do my Tai Chi practice and for the first couple of moment I started thinking ‘Man, even this is not working!’
I was practicing with wrong effort, I was expecting something instead of trusting the process. So I let it go and just went through the form, trying to be attentive to every joint in my body – every shiver where I was holding a bit of tension, where my breathing was feeling a bit more restricted.
I started to forget a bit about my expectations. Then, after having passed from my ankles all the way up in the body I got to the section of spinal movements and started my usual 18 repetitions of what I like to call Panorama Spine Circles.
In this movement I look to the side, arching in the whole spine, shifting my hip and looking all the way back completing the circle at the other side. I basically got a 360 degree view of everything that’s around me in the park: I saw all different trees, bushes, grass, flowers, people walking their dogs. I tried to not allow myself to get blurry in my vision, tried to not miss any blind spots. I refocused as soon as it happened: I LOOKED AROUND AGAIN, I REALLY REALLY LOOKED.
And my whole mood changed, I started to feel free again from the inside. It was a message of big importance for me that week because I realized something very deeply. I freed myself from the negative mood that I got myself into by being so careless with my attention and not looking around outside nor inside, from getting bent by the conditions of the day instead of taking responsibility of and for myself.
I realized what I had been lazy to: I had been lazy to myself, I had fallen asleep to myself.
Falling asleep had been the LOUDEST form of ‘alarm clock’ by seeing the consequences it could have if I kept up this sleep.
What are your ways of falling asleep? What are the triggers of your negative moods?
What changes in your physical structure, what are your internal dialogues like, how do you feel? Observe if you can catch them and make a list:
A couple of weeks ago I went to a lecture that attracted me through the name that the teacher gave it, he called the lecture “Developing Common Sense.” In this lecture, the teacher – Rik Vermuyten – compared intellect with intelligence. We went over the elements that make up more intellectual thinking and intelligent thinking. We talked about what was the oldest, more developed and more recent way of thinking.
Intuition and instinct were talked of as parts of intelligence or common sense – they work more expansive (‘more Yin’)- while ratio is part of intellectual thinking, and works more restrictive (‘more Yang’).
At most schools the predominant way of education is developing intellect – or what the teacher called uncommon sense – which from being more restrictive, leads to a decline in creativity, growth and development of the student. If the student doesn’t complement his traditional school education with other things.
Freehand drawing exercise, as reproduced in New Methods in Education (1899), through Stephen Ellcock’s excellent facebook page
The teacher used the imagery of intelligence thinking as seeing the unity in reality, while intellectual thinking is about dividing reality – putting it boxes. Both have their uses of course, and without the latter we would not have a scientific method. But he emphasized that if you do not return to seeing the unity – the whole – in things, you give value to the differences (the boxes) – and you take these differences seriously. And that is where it becomes dangerous.
In line of the above, a recent practical read on Gurdjieff’s exercises to develop self-observation and self-remembering compared knowing something with understanding something:
Understanding is defined as the resultant of knowledge ánd being.
When we begin to understand what we did not understand before, there is the chance of change precisely through the understanding.
Man is a self-developing organism which means that man cannot develop under compulsion but only through internal freedom, which is one’s understanding (knowledge + being) that a man can evolve.
And it is this internal freedom element that I feel is what is missing in most teaching. This teaching without telling, that attracted me towards certain people and has intuitively told me to keep away from others.
With this lecture in mind and the experiences I’ve had with my own teachers I started to ask myself a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now: which one of the teachers I’ve met had this ‘common sense?’ And subsequently,
What is a good teacher?
At the moment, I feel writer Henry Miller comes closest to defining the type of teacher who teaches (without realizing he is) teaching when describing an old friend his as a “Living Book”:
Without being in the least aware of it, I was receiving from this man my first real schooling. It was the indirect method of education. As with the ancients, his technique consisted in indicating that “it” was not this, not that. Whatever “it” was, and of course it was the all, he taught me never to approach it head on, never to name or define. The oblique method of art. First and last things. But no first and no last. Always from the center outward. Always the spiral motion: never the straight line, never sharp angles, never the impasse or cul-de-sac.
Yes, Lou Jabobs possesses a wisdom I am only beginning to acquire. He had the faculty of looking upon everything as an open book. He had ceased reading to discover the secrets of life: he read for sheer enjoyment. The essence of all he read had permeated his entire being, had become one with his total experience of life.”There are not more than a dozen basic themes in literature,” he once said to me. But then he quickly added that each man had his own story to tell, and that is was unique. I suspected that he, too, had once endeavored to write. Certainly no one could express himself better or more clearly.
His wisdom, however, was the sort that is not concerned with the imparting of it. Though he knew how to hold his tongue, no man enjoyed conversation more than he. Moreover, he had a way of never closing a subject. He was content to skirmish and reconnoiter, to throw out feelers, to dangle clues, to give hints, to suggest rather than inform. Whether one wished it or not, he compelled his listener to think for himself. I can’t recall ever once receiving advice or instruction from him, yet everything which issued from his mouth constituted advice and instruction … if one knew how to take it!
– Henry Miller, Chapter Living Books in The Books In My Life
What, in your experience, are the qualities of a good teacher?
Observing people has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I enjoy setting myself down with a book in a local café, pretend that I’m reading and then take a look at how the bartender is stressing out over clients, how people are enjoying or disliking listening to the story of a friend, people fighting verbally in cycling traffic, awkward situations of people meeting an old friend they would rather avoid today, other observers realizing you’re also observing, all of that… I love it and every time it teaches me something.
Recently, this fascination of observing people’s daily behavior has gotten a bit more specific through the stuff I’ve been reading and the teachers I’ve met formally and on the streets. My observation has shifted towards the physical behavior of people: the postures they hold, hand gestures they use, their facial expressions, what parts they are holding when walking, etc.
What I try to do often, is when a certain posture intrigues me is try to mimick it and observe how it makes me feel or what I associate with that posture.
I have been focusing my attention on different closed and open positions – both static and dynamic – and what they communicate to me, and maybe communicate in a universal way that everyone intuitively understands.
Better than to explain it, you can test for yourself with some of the artworks, pictures and videos by either putting yourself in these postures or observing your first associative thoughts with the postures. Observe some of these paintings for example:
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Nick Cave’s posture and facial expression during this song:
Compare this to what the following communicate:
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Or Jack Lalanne “working out his face” and Henry Miller’s general playful open posture and mannerisms all over his documentary:
Also, one example everyone probably has heard of, is the test of the ‘fake smile’ research where they showed that holding a stick between your teeth – creating a fake smile – showed “physiological and psychological benefits from maintaining positive facial expressions during stress.”
Further, one of my “street” teachers once shared with me that he used simple coordinative movements to relax people who were suffering form high stress and tension in a psychiatric hospital.
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff in his “Work” spoke about his method of using movement as a way to bring about certain thoughts and feelings:
You ask about the aim of the movements. To each position of the body corresponds a certain inner state and, on the other hand, to each inner state corresponds a certain posture. A man, in his life, has a certain number of habitual postures and he passes from one to another without stopping at those between.
A student of Gurdjieff, Jerry Brewster, in his Loft Tapes of group work sessions, explains it in a compelling vicious cycle of our habits. He shares that
Our habitual postures are connected to habitual emotions and habitual thoughts in a strange dance – if you have a certain association, then you take a certain posture and have a certain feeling, so it’s very difficult to think anything new, to feel anything new, or to sense in a new way – if you try to change it’s impossible because each center is supported by the other two.
Further, if beyond the intuitive understanding of this you want a scientific backing of this subject, Stanley Keleman has spent a lot of research on this topic that he named Emotional Anatomy.
Jerry Brewster talks about the importance of struggling with these habitual reactions physically, emotionally and mentally to make a change – to break this habit loop:
posture > emotion > thought
thought > posture > emotion
emotion > thought > posture
Brewster proposes that, “if I can interfere with a posture then I find I’m free of both the emotion and the thought tied to that posture.”
The first thing is to become aware of our postures we go back to when we have certain thoughts or emotions – this is where Gurdjieff claims that the problems lies because we do not know what our habits are but to me this is also where the fun part begins: from observation, you start to observe what your habitual postural habits are and start to play games with it.
Gurdjieff suggests that
Taking new, unaccustomed postures enables you to observe yourself inside differently from the way you usually do in ordinary conditions.
Therefore ways of using this knowledge in your daily life could be:
to play through self-observation with your postural habits and the associations and identifications you make with these
you can practice open static postures and dynamic movements to create the effect you’d like to evoke
For both of these it would mean that you will need to become aware (“to stop sleeping”) of your existing habits, and in best case that an honest and caring (group of) partner(s) helps you to become aware.
A couple of examples of the work of people I’ve met who promote this practice using movement as a tool I shared below.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a session that was named “nature as coach.” One of the interesting exercises the teacher did with our group, was the following:
the teacher had us state a question on a problem we had to deal with in our mind, then we had to take a stroll in the park and stop at the first thing we noticed that intuitively we felt could provide us of an answer.
One of the women in this group shared her experience. Her problem was that sometimes she had dark thoughts and her question was what she could do to deal with these. Her solution when taking a walk came in the form of a tree with a really big trunk and enormous set of roots.
She said that the sight of this tree signified grounding to her. The trunk told her to ground herself back to the earth instead of diving deeper into the problem.
The teacher thanked her for sharing her observation. The follow-up was what I liked most about this walk: she asked everyone in the group to share what they saw in the tree-trunk in relation to the problem.
One rather pessimistic woman told us she thought the roots gave her the feeling of getting strangled. I saw shadow and light in the tree which to me made clear that both are part of nature and by consequence part of life. As more people shared their interpretation, I realized something I had just read in a book by Jodorowsky:
“For me they are no different, reality and dreams.”
We noticed that each of us saw a different reality in the same tree or focused our attention on completely different aspects of the tree.
Contemplating on this story today, brought me back to the days when I was reading a lot of the stoic philosophers who have this exercise of objective representation to deal with a certain problem.
An example of this technique of Marcus Aurelius I still enjoy to not allow myself to be impressed by strong personalities (17):
“Think about what they are like when they’re eating, sleeping, copulating, defecating. Then think of what they’re like when they’re acting proud and important, when they get angry and upbraid their inferiors.”
– Marcus Aurelius
The stoics believed that people are not troubled by things that happen to them but by their judgements of what happened to them. This brings me to The Work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff I have been researching on and off for the past year or so.
In the works I’ve read on Gurdjieff it seems to always come down to start with the exercise of constant self-observation.
Gurdjieff makes a distinction between Inner States and Outer Events. The exercise lies in making this distinction in ourselves at all times. This is the start of the personal work that he proposes.
By purifying our inner life, we kind of change the way we see our relationship with outer events that happen to us. And if we realize that a certain inner life attracts a certain outer life, we will change the nature of events that will come to us.
One way to do this is to define the nature of the Outer Event to make it more clear instead of going with your immediate emotion, similar to objective representation of the stoics.
For example when you lose your phone, you could say “This is called losing something.” Or when someone sends you a text with bad news “This is called receiving bad news.”
Define the Outer Event before it influences your Inner State. As a consequence, this implies that towards most events that happen to us, one has to react not at all. To let the Inner State stay unaffected, to learn to be passive.
This was how a senior Malaysian lady — they called them “aunties” — greeted me when I arrived at my first meditation retreat in Taiping Malaysia, after I told her I had no experience with this whatsoever.
This one sentence kind of embodied the all-around feeling I had of the community I would be spending my next two weeks with: warmth and support in our common body/mind practice.
What I’m going to do in this post is share some of my notes of the Practice Workshops and Dhamma talks that were organized during the day. Raw from the notebook, not too much structure, without too much extras added and emphasis where and how I emphasized in by book.
Before I start I’d like to thank my teachers Kit Laughlin and Patrick Kearney for sharing their amazing knowledge and experiences with us. Every morning Kit taught a stretching & movement meditation class, followed by afternoon sessions of lying down meditation. Patrick taught us the basics concepts in Vipassana meditation through theoritical and practice sessions. Both of the teachers also made time for personal questions about the practice.
Looking back at this experience one year later, I now realize this retreat was a life-changing event for me so I’d like anyone who has any doubt about attending this type of events to get a clear view what goes on here. For more info about this retreat, look up the website here: http://www.sasanarakkha.org/
Finally, if I can share one personal thing about practicing the mind— especially for Westerners like me who focus on knowing everything before starting — is that intellectually understanding what it is about doesn’t change much, you just have to practice a lot.
Day 1
Today Kit taught us how to get into the sitting meditation posture:
– Sit down on the floor with your legs crossed and lean forward with an arch in your back
– Sit back again and keep the arch in your low back when sitting back down on your cushion until you’re settled
– Sit up straight and feel a kind of soft activation of the abs
– Lift your chest slightly up and forward
– Chin back (think “rope pulls your head up”)
– Hands can be placed in different positions: palms facing up/down on the knees, fingers crossed on your lap,… pick a position that feels right for you can that keeps your shoulders from moving forward
Day 2
First Lying Down Meditation today. As many of the retreatants did, I fell asleep.
We had an introduction session with the other “rookie meditators” today. A lot of the beginner questions were answered here, which really felt like a relief to me. Good to know I wasn’t the only one worrying about these things.
Some typical questions:
– Why do you guys bow three times before meditating? Is it necessary?
– Is it normal to feel pain during sitting meditation? Is it ok or should I stop meditating?
– What is the “best way” to meditate?
Basically the teachers explained that there was no dogma in their approach of teaching meditation. The goal at the retreat was for each of us to experiment, have fun with the different options you have within sitting, walking and lying meditation — and eventually leave the retreat with a meditation practice we can sustain and further develop at home.
One analogy that Patrick Kearney, our teacher, used was the following:
“Kids learn electronics by themselves because they make it a game, they make it fun.”
A quote that always got my attention when I entered the practice hall.
Day 3
Dhamma talk on the difference between doing something with awareness vs mindfulness.
Example:
Driving your car through a couple of streets and arriving at home without really remembering how you drove home. You did this with awareness (or else you would have probably killed someone), but not mindfulness (no remembrance of what you saw for example during you drive home).
Day 4
Introduction of different options for grounding objects during the morning Practice Workshop. The grounding object in meditation is the thing you focus on when you sit/walk/lie down/stand.
We played around with concentration on
– breath (rising and falling, counting breaths,…),
– sound,
– and feeling (soft/hard, dry/wet,…).
During the Dhamma Talk we went a bit deeper into the concept of the Grounding Object and the Secondary Object.
A quick definition:
Grounding object = the home base
Secondary object = where our mind goes if we lose attention on the grounding object
On the eventual goal of our meditation practice, Nirvana, Patrick said:
Nirvana is the end of the path where there is nothing more to gain. It’s a one way street.
On memories:
Memories are a fiction made in your mind. Within these fictions we find certainty.
But, ask yourself, without these series of stories,
Who would I be?
Another set of definitions of Nirvana that Patrick gave us:
Nirvana is complete spontaneity without any baggage from past experiences.
Life lived without the concepts of narrative.
By striving for this we find freedom of action that would otherwise be impossible.
Three fires that keeps us from attaining this are:
1. Attachment/desire/greed
2. Aversion/hatred
3. Delusion/ignorance
Fuel feeds the “fire.” Our goal is to find the fuel — to find out what feeds our suffering — instead of just focusing on the fire, the suffering itself.
What is the source?
What are the attachments?
What do we cling to that feeds our desires, aversion and delusions?
Or,
What are attachments that could cool down the fire?
“Why do we meditate? What are we doing in meditation?”
We meditate to find out what the fuels are to feed the fire.
We are training to see this just as it is.
In life we’re are constantly creating stories/narrative to fit what happens to us, to our desires.
So the goal of the meditation technique is to see everything as it really is — to change our relationship to experience.
The type of meditation we were taught was called Satipatthana or Mindfulness Meditation, which consists of 4 aspects:
– Body
– Feeling
– Heart
– Mind
The interesting thing about this method is that it is not object-specific and not technique-specific, which basically means you can customize it towards your tendencies.
In contrast, when you’re doing Transcendental Meditation you have to focus on a certain mantra. If you lose the mantra, you’re not meditating. In visualization, you need to concentrate on a sight: lose it, and you are not meditating.
In Mindfulness Meditation, say you’re meditating for 30 minutes of which you were distracted for 25 and focused on your breathing for 5 — then you are still “meditating” if you were mindful of the fact that you were distracted. You kind of caught the distractions with your mind.
On this type of meditation not being technique-specific: you can do it anywere: you can walk, sit, or practice lying down.
They are all different exercises to attain the key of this practice: your re-education towards experience.
Satipatthana Meditation is meant to be lived.
Mindfulness is a daily activity, a habit that reminds you to be aware.
Day 5
We practiced awareness of a couple of different elements in using breathing as the grounding object in your meditation:
– Notice the length of breaths
– When does your breath start? When does it finish?
– What direction does the breath go? Vertical? Horizontal? Spiraling?
– Where do you feel the breath move in your body?
In this way, you learn that — if you’re really mindful about the breath — meditation will never be boring because it’s never the same. If it’s always the same, then you’re not mindful.
On Right Effort vs. Wrong Effort:
If there’s strain, then it’s wrong effort.
You should not try to make it happen, don’t force it.
If you’re straining, good you’re mindful of it — just stop the practice. No biggie:
“Sometimes breathing goes on a lunch break.”
Watch the movements, don’t do them.
In the Dhamma talk we went a bit deeper into how we react to what happens to us:
Normally our experience when something happens to us is:
“Did I win/lose/gain something?”
In mindfulness we learn to look at the situation as it is:
It doesn’t matter what happens.
It matters that you are aware of what happens.
We follow our experience wherever it takes us. Yes, it’s hard.
And it is hard exactly because we have a fixed idea of what should happen to us.
People have concinved themselves that they know what is supposed to happen to them while it would be better to learn to be open to unpredictability, be ready to adapt because that is how the world works.
Day 6
Practice on using the body as object vs feeling as object.
For example: watching the breathing vs feeling the breathing.
“Feeling is so obvious that we don’t notice it anymore.”
Our response — how we are moved by the experience:
– Pleasant: craving
– Painful: aversion
– Neutral: delusion
On the distinction of physical vs emotional/mental as a problem in Western culture vs Buddhism:
“Memories of past experiences are embodied in your physical body.”
“If I know that mindfulness is part of the body, then everything you do becomes part of mindfulness.”
The delusion of naming/labeling everything:
“As soon as the mind comes up with a name for it, the problem is we think we get it.”
“If we name things differently, we live in a different world.
Mindfulness meditation is like a new habit you put on top of everything you were already doing:
Continue what you’ve been doing in your life, but do it mindfully.
“It’s not about the thinking or no thinking.
It’s about the mindfulness of the thinking.
It’s not about the ‘something’ but
the awareness of the ‘something.’
Learn it as a new habit: the awareness of … .”
Day 7
Today we learned about how “when you are not mindful of the images the mind throws up, you allow it to develop into a story instead of being of ware of the thinking spark.”
The goal was to note these sparks: to become deliberately aware of them.
We were told that:
Thinking is not the problem.
Your relationship to thinking — the addiction — is the problem.
On the commitment principle:
We believe the stories
we tell ourselves.
And then we try to live
in a way
that makes these
STORIES
true to life.
Then we proceeded to do an experiment, on of my favorite exercises during the retreat: “Treat all your thoughts as lies. Treat them as not serious. Because the thoughts are not important, our relationship to the thoughts is. Try to objectify your thought stream, try to objectify your though subjectivity. Stand back and observe.”
This exercise reminded me of a quote on False Perceptions of Marcus Aurelius and taught me that there are a lot of parallels between all of the stoicism I had been reading and the theory I received during these talks, only the practice of the stoics and the buddhists seemed a bit different:
Your ability to control your thoughts — treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions — false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It’s what makes thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and submission to the divine.
– Marcus Aurelius, Book Three
A line from this exercise that’s in my notebook from this exercise that I think is pretty funny:
Hi False Perceptions!
I know what you came here for.
But what you are telling me
IS ALL A LIE!
SO, PLEASE GO AWAY!”
In the evening we had a Dhamma talk on Mindfulness as Memory and How That Connects with Wisdom.
Mindfulness
Keeping in mind the present.
Remembering the present.
What happens NOW
contained what happened BEFORE.
What happens NOW
is constructing THE FUTURE.
This is how learning and understanding happens
OVER TIME. In one moment
not much is happening,
things develop,
CULTIVATE
over time.
2. Retentiveness
The capacity to wait for something to emerge, which means
you must be willing to
LIVE
with
FAILURE.
3. Memory
The ability to bring out from
THE DEEP PLACES OF THE MIND
something that was stored there once.
By dealing with and going through all these problems
we are developing a skill.
4. Lucidity of wisdom
To see patterns and directions.
How do I navigate this data?
How do I move with it?
Mindfulness practice is
being aware
in such a way that
WISDOM
can emerge.
Move smoothly.
Track it.
There’s a flavor to it. Notice it. How does it feel?
The present expands!
It takes time.
Old habits keep emerging.
We forget. We remember. We forget. Remember…
Just keep working on the skill.
Develop a curiosity for it.
Make it a craft.
Play. Experiment with it.
Modify it and over time
develop your creativy
and MOLD IT TO YOURSELF.
My favorite spot for lying meditation practice.
Day 8
In the practice workshop today we worked on the difference between:
to be aware of vs. to be aware in
A valuable lesson on practice I got today (especially being a person who put in a lot of time training) is that “in practice it’s impossible to fail because it’s practice.” Also a sign of progress in meditation was explained as “becoming aware of the fact that you’re distracted,” because there is a difference between “being distracted and knowing you are distracted and being distracted and not knowing you are distracted.”
The subject of the evening Dhamma talk was Vedanna or the affective aspect of experience, the aspect of an experience (for example eating and the flavour of the food) that we enjoy:
Vedanna is
the world as
we are given it
before we make
something out of it.
Day 9
Body, feeling, heart and mind — as meditation objects:
When using the body as a meditation object, you always come back to the body during your meditation and by doing that you come back to NOW. That’s why the body is a good meditation object to work with.
2. Feeling — that which has the capacity to move us
Beauty vs. ugliness
Where do my eyes linger vs. where do the eyes skip over?
It’s important to get sensitive to what it is I am doing to realize what is meaningful to me? What is my desire in a deep sense?
Superficial desires
What I want now?
Deep desires
What are my deepest aspirations or what do I want do accomplish before I die? What am I doing with my life? What is it for?
We want to LIVE BETTER
but in order to
DO THAT
we have to become sensitive to what
we’re doing
NOW.
3. Heart/Mind — our experience package
The aware-center.
What undergoes the experience
The Soul: the felt essence of a person.
One’s inner state: how I am at this present time.
For example:
“How are you?”
– “Good.”
vs.
“How are you?”
(you go into a meditative state, look deeply inside, and explain ‘how you are’ at this time)
– “I am … at this time.”
Awareness is like water: pure, transparent.
Meditation is about clarifying awareness.
To open this all up:
Where are my decisions coming from?
Why do I ‘got to do this?’
What’s going on?
What’s moving me?
How am I moved?
And how can I make better decisions?
Day 10
“What is the practice for?”
Think of painting.
It starts with a single dot.
Then one more,
one more,
one more,
…
And suddenly a pattern emerges.
The meaning is in the pattern because from the pattern an insight follows.
It’s the distractions in our practice where we get the eventual insight from:
We’re developing concentration,
but there’s value in the “cracks” of our concentration:
the cracks are packages of experiences we can learn from.
We have to ask ourselves: what is feeding this? what is the cause?
This is how we learn from the patterns.
“Settle into your pain, just as you would in your
FAVORITE EASY CHAIR.”
Patrick mentioned 5 obstacles that disturb our practice:
Desire
Hatred
Stiffness and dullness: too little energy
Restlessness and worry: too much energy
Paralytic doubt “I can’t do anything”
We should note these in our meditation both in
presence: is the problem?
absence: is the problem not there? (was it there before?)
We need to familiarize ourselves with the patterns by asking ourselves questions:
What do I do that FEEDS these obstacles?
How can I abandon this, let it go?
How can this aspect of this problem be outgrown so it does not return?
What we need to do is to develop mindfulness so we learn to recognize this ‘presence or absence’: a continuity of awareness which has a smoothness to it, a smooth flow.
A clear perception stimulates mindfulness.
How do I make it stronger?
Encourage it?
Learn to live in it?
Through developing an understanding
based on seeing
experience as clearly
as it is.
A different way
of seeing the world.
The little tree and the big tree. I laughed at my over-obsession with progress.
Day 11
“The wise treasure the awareness they have cultivated as their most precious possession.”
Today, we talked about insight:
about training ourselves to
notice change
We learned that if you want to develop INSIGHT,
you need to become interested in CHANGE.
“The insight meditator becomes a ‘connoisseur of change.’”
One consequence of this, is that you can never get bored in your practice — and if you do get bored, it means you’re NOT seeing the change.
We were told to continually ask ourselves: “what’s new?” because
Wisdom is like a breeze flowing
through an open window.
You cannot control the breeze,
but you could open the window.
We make it complicated,
because we want something out of it.
It’s the consumer-mentality:
“What’s in this for me?”
The only thing you need to do is to be aware of the body
without wanting to get something out of it.
Without a sense of something to win or to lose.
It is just
WHAT IT IS.
Once we realize we don’t want something from it,
it’s great.
It is just what it is.
We need to cultivate a sense of PLAY with it:
to practice at this moment just for the sake of practice.
We work to get something, we play just for it’s own sake.
That is why you need to EXPERIMENT.
To get a sense of intimacy with the practice.
Experiment because it opens up RIGHT EFFORT.
At the end of the evening Patrick shared a story about a retreat he attended where it was constantly raining.
In short, the ‘tourists’ who were attending the retreat were complaining because of the constant rain. They said “the rain was bad!”
The teacher then went on sharing a story about the farmers outside the retreat location who were probably very happy right now because the rain gave them a nice harvest: they thought “the rain is good!”
Finally, the teacher concluded that both of them were looking at rain with wrong judgment:
The rain is not bad.
The rain is not good.
The rain is just wet.
Day 12
We talked about two phases of insight:
Before independence: desire, aversion, delusion
After independence
In phase 1 “we want something better than THIS, so we practice to get it.” The practice is instrumental.
We have ideas, fantasies about what we want in the future created by delusions.
In phase 2, independence, any alternative to THIS becomes really impossible because you became very intimate to THIS.
We realize that
everything that happens,
happens because of multiple
other things
out of my control.
Show me your current state of mind!
Show me who you are!
Who am I?
No description works.
No concepts work.
What is real is
WHAT WE DO.
Performance,
not description.
Not the stories others tell about us
No the stories we tell ourselves.
YOU can not be described.
I can not be described.
I live independently,
not clinging to anything
in the world.
How do you live independently?
We uncover to what we cling, we uncover our distractions. That’s why knowing our distractions is so important: we learn form them.
Relax
If we relax — at some point — we let go.
Clinging takes energy.
Doing the dishes is good practice.
Day 13
Today’s Dhamma subject was “How do you find The Truth?”
How do you find the truth, in a society where there are already many truths?
How do you live?
Greed.
Hatred.
Delusion.
The characteristics of The Unwholesome.
It means they are not whole.
Because they have something extra? or less?
They pursue a lifestyle that HARMS them.
Why would you go after something that’s hurting you?
BUT…
everyone is doing it!
AHAH!
Unwholesome or wholesome?
Blameless or blameful?
I don’t know,
what do you think?
Non-greed. Anti-greed.
Non-hatred. Anti-hatred.
Non-delusion. Anti-delusion.
=> Long-term welfare & happiness list of ingredients.
The four sublime states:
1. Love/loving kindness
2. Compassion
3. Joy
4. Equanimity
These are the universal values for a stable, civilized society.
If everything depends on
YOUR EXPERIENCE,
then isn’t it important
to train
to clarify
what is your experience?
Imagine you’re
always moved
in a smooth way.
Never in a hurry.
Calm.
Free in attitude.
Steady in his practice.
Day 14
Who/what is the Buddha?
One who knows,
One who has woken up.
A collection of qualities developed to the ultimate degree.
A posture that embodies these qualities.
Day 15
Our last full day today.
“It’s not for sure.”
Things that start, end.
Endings are bad.
Endings are good.
No, endings are just things that happen to things that start.
Kit and Patrick talked about most people have lost their connection with their body and the signals it gives you.
When the body is calm, the mind has more chance to become calm as well.
When the body is agitated, the mind has less chance to become calm.
So calming the body is a good first way to calm the mind.
“You need to prepare the instrument.”
When you are more comfortable, more relaxed in your body, your mind practice can develop faster.
Day 16
My last day at the retreat.
I talked a little to Kit Laughlin before leaving and he told me about the name of his company: Shoshin — Beginner’s Mind.
“At 29, 30 years old I came by this
and realized you can’t
really learn anything new
if you don’t have Beginner’s Mind.”
– Kit Laughlin
A lot of books read over the years condensed in a short set of words with deep meaning to me, as a daily reminder to myself.
10 words to live by
Antifragile
things that gain from disorder. trial and many small errors. de-centralize the trials.
Exemplar
embody what you’re trying to say so you don’t have to speak to say it.
learn to never compromise on your values. find your meaning in life and let it guide you.
Human
always choose the most human option. community, not business. human beings, not clients. doing and reacting, not planning. being, not working.
Eudaimonia
virtue. to consider what is really good and how to achieve it. human flourishing. practical and ethical wisdom.
Ataraxia
think of Seneca, Marcus, Epictetus, Montaigne. inner citadel. freedom from anxiety. objective representation. to see things as they really are. no false perceptions.
Prosoche
the art of attention. mindfulness. vipassana. breathing. remember yourself to be aware.
Memento Mori
remember you’re going to die. don’t live as if you have endless years in front of you. no such thing as down-time, no such thing as free-time — all you’ve got is lifetime.
Adaptive
nature is chaos. change the only constant. above all, be adaptive.
Erudite
develop knowledge/skills based on personal preference, intuition — not utility. take long walks and walk slow. use procrastination as a natural clock. become better at doing nothing, that’s where your mind goes to work. sprezzatura, style over efficiency, productivity.
Play
everything is an experiment. it’s all lighter than you think.
Three mental exercises of Stoic philosophy you can use to enjoy life.
How am I supposed to live?
No one ever teaches you that in school, right?
It’s too confrontational, too wide of a subject maybe — too hard. Our teachers probably didn’t have a clue either.
While actually, thought schools like Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism in the 3rd century BC were founded to ask and research just that:
what’s a good way to live your life?
Their aim: reach a state of eudaimonia — or ‘human flourishing’, ‘happiness’, ‘joy’.
So basically these guys were trying to find the recipe to be happy — some even wrote what you could call a blueprint on how to live a good life.
One of the findings of the Stoics was that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia.
Ataraxia means ‘freedom from anxiety’, a state of equilibrium: the art of not getting too carried away when things go well, and not plunging into despair when things go bad. Not too up, not too down.
So in short, the first prerequisite is that you need to have control over your emotions; your emotions shouldn’t control you.
Their second finding was that one of the human weaknesses, that keeps us from enjoying life, is our ability to pay attention to the present.
Similar to Zen Buddhism, the Stoics emphasized the importance of ‘living in the now’.
The key here is to cultivate prosoche: the art of attention. Or mindfulness as we talk about it now.
As Seneca wrote:
“Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is, can never be bored with life.”
Thus, these are the two findings of the Stoics for enjoying your life:
Learn to control your emotions
Prosoche: develop the art of attention
As always: Simple recipe. Not easy to execute.
That’s why the Stoics made a game out of it: they developed Mental Exercises or tricks to help you enjoy life more.
Here are three Mental Tricks that you can use in everyday life on your path towards eudaimonia:
1. Imagine you’re going to die
Imagine that today is the last day of your life.
Are you ready to face death?
Imagine, even, that this very instant — right now! — is the last moment of your existence.
What are you feeling?
Do you have regrets about not having done something?
Are there things you wish you had done differently?
Are you really alive right now? Or are you consumed with anxiety, panic, regret?
This type of mental exercise opens your eyes to what really matters to you and reminds you of how little time you actually have in this life, how much time is constantly slipping away.
Think of yourself as dead.
You have lived your life.
Now take what’s left
and live it
properly.
I wrote a longer piece about people who actually did this here.
2. Practice Amor Fati: Love what happens to you, even if it sucks
You should be able to accept everything that happens to you as it happens to you — without always giving in to the useless desire to change the situation.
So instead of battling whatever happens to you, make it a habit of saying Yes to it. To move on, stronger.
Turn obstacles upside down so that setbacks are always expected, but never permanent. In this way what hinders you, empowers you.
Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish,
but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen,
and your life will be serene.
– Epictetus
3. Use the side-stepping technique: drop what’s bothering you and just look the other way
When Renaissance nobleman Michel de Montaigne felt afraid about dying in his later years, he knew he could not help Nature — but he also had a hard time facing reality.
That’s why he decided to just look the other way — literally. He calmed himself by looking back with pleasure over his childhood:
If I cannot combat it,
I escape it;
and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.
At least once in my life I want to experience complete silence. Nothingness.
I remember one of my teachers in primary school claiming he found himself in a situation of complete silence when stuck in a desert somewhere — I don’t know if that’s true or if it can even be done but the thought of it never left me.
This attraction to silence lead me to Zen Buddhism — a subject I will start to explore more in the coming months.
I first read about it in one of the lesser known books of Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums:
Then through Bruce Lee’s works I went looking for a resource to get an introduction to Zen Buddhism.
It was on my reading list for three years or so but I finally started reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. Suzuki is the person who brought Zen to San Francisco in the 60’s. You’ve probably seen this quote of him pass around somewhere online:
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
So I started reading the book and immediately realized that:
I’m too goal-centered and that makes me nervous
I should do less more often, without expecting something from it
Doing less, I will try to accomplish through sitting — Zazen.
Last year I took a class in meditation but never followed through so now I immediately put up this Habitforge-thing that sends me e-mails and asks me if I did my 5 minutes of meditation today.
The main thing I’m getting out of this book though is just to do — without constantly adding any additional results to it. I think this might be one big cause of unhappiness and stress in the Western world because I see it all around me and most of all in myself.
We’re always aiming for and keeping our eye on progress which makes us lose sight — and enjoyment — of the process.
To live for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
And that brings me to Shunryu Suzuki’s take on something we all want in some way — whether it’s in our careers, in sports, in social relationships,…- we crave progress.
Suzuki on finding progress frustrating because it’s slow:
After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little.
It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet.
Suzuki suggests you try this way of thinking and doing instead:
In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, “Oh, this pace is terrible!” But actually it is not.
When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.
We can say either that we make progress little by little, or that we do not even expect to make progress. Just to be sincere and make our full effort in each moment is enough.
Therefore to continue should be more than enough. To continue should be your purpose.
Sincerely, with full effort.
When you practice, you should just practice.
If result comes, it comes.
Forget progress. Doing it should be your goal. That’s what you should attach to because that’s what you can control — true, god-honest, mindful action.
These characteristics might not sound like the most uplifting reading experience, and you’re right — it isn’t.
It shouldn’t be either. That’s not life.
Realness is another word that comes to mind when describing Bukowski’s writing.
Bukowski is raw. He’s total emotion. And he delivers what he sees around him uncooked — with ZERO FILTER.
And that’s exactly why I’ve read a dozen of his works.
He writes about it all. Literally.
He elaborates extensively about his problems with women, his thoughts on taking a shit, alcoholism, his abusive father, his horrible acne during childhood, not fitting in anywhere as a teenager, the bosses he hates… he doesn’t miss a thing — he pukes it all out.
Bukowski writes about daily, ordinary life in a way only he could.
Through his style of writing he’s produced some of the most straightforward, direct — and certainly offensive — writing you will ever encounter.
Bukowski raises honesty to a level that might get too real for most. You either appreciate his stuff or choose to not tolerate the products of his mind. I don’t think there are many who kinda like Bukowksi. You either do or you don’t.
Similar to that other great in American lowlife writing, Henry Miller, Bukowksi chose a life of regress, not progress:
“What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure… It is time that we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive — but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.” (as quoted by Brasaï in Henry Miller: The Paris Years)
Bukowski’s way of life, his books of literature and poetry have deeply influenced my thinking in the past couple years. Even though I don’t agree with everything he said or did, I do think there’s a lot of value in what he wrote.
Below I wrote down a couple of subjects he taught me about — along with a paragraph of his writing or poetry to state the point.
ALONE IS THE HUMAN DEFAULT, RELY ON YOURSELF
No one’s going to do anything for you. In the end, you’ve got to do it all yourself.
“to create art means
to be crazy alone
forever.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
“What’d Picasso say?”
“Well, I asked him. I said, ‘Master, what can I do to make my work better?’”
“He said, ‘I can’t tell you anything about your work. You must do it all by yourself.’”
(Factotum)
“the price of creating
is never
too high.
the price of living
with other people
always
is.”
(You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense)
“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.”
(Love Is A Dog From Hell)
THE OBSTACLE BECOMES THE WAY: TAKE IT AS IT IS & MOVE ON
Face the situation at hand as it is and work around it. Only your mind can make unbearable what happens to you—don’t be like that. Everyone has a hard time, not everyone feels the need to whine about it. Do what you can with what you have and keep moving towards what you want.
“contentment-
I wouldn’t call it
happiness –
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring
[…]
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the fire.”
(You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense)
ON BOOKS
Bukowski frequently mentions the authors he read (Fante, Céline, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway,…) during childhood and how they found him/saved him at just the right time.
“To me, these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They were the only voices that spoke to me.
[…]
“Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.”
(Ham On Rye)
“I like to think about these people
they taught me so many things that I
never dreamed of before.
and they taught me well, very well
when it was so much needed
they showed me so many things
that I never knew were possible.
those friends
deep in my blood
who when there was no chance
gave me one.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
ON SOLITUDE
Solitude is ok. My first positive experience with solitude was when I read a quote by Picasso: “Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” Before that I thought I was weird for enjoying time alone. Extroversion seemed to be a trait you needed to have to do something in this world — something I had to work on. But I didn’t like it — I’m an introvert and I got ok with that by finding out about authors like Bukowski, who became like companions in getting to know myself. I learned this thing that extroverts get energy by being around people. With introverts it’s the opposite: they stock up on energy by being alone. If you know who is you and what you need, acting upon this really helps a lot.
“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it.”
(Factotum)
“I didn’t like parties. I didn’t know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren’t. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.”
(Factotum)
“people need me. I fill
them. if they can’t see me
for a while they get desperate, they get
sick.
but if I see them too often
I get sick. it’s hard to feed
without getting fed.”
(Live Is A Dog From Hell)
“the walls are your friends.
learn your walls.”
– What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire
ON TRAVEL AS ESCAPISM
My first real thinking on the motivations behind travel came up after a quote I read of Emerson. Basically Emerson said that before you decide to travel, you should realize that you are taking YOURSELF on the holiday as well — it’s not like you’re leaving your problems all behind when leaving the country. Therefore mental clarity, clear reasoning should precede travel. Mindless traveling just because you don’t like your current situation isn’t going to fix a thing — thinking through your issues might not fix a thing either, but it’s what you should start with.
“my holiday is an
evasion, my reasoning
is not.”
(Live Is A Dog From Hell)
ON PEOPLE SEEING YOU AS THEY WISH YOU’D BE
Other people will often feel the need to expect you to become who they want you to become. Parents often do this for example. Most people don’t know what the hell they’re doing and often judge themselves unfavorably so don’t take note too much of what others tell you.
“you invented me
and I invented you
and that’s why we don’t
get along
on this bed
any longer.
you were the world’s
greatest invention
until you
flushed me
away.”
(Love Is A Dog From Hell)
“I get too many
phone calls.
they seek the creature out.
they shouldn’t.”
(Love Is A Dog From Hell)
“if you get married they think you’re
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you’re
incomplete.”
(You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense)
ON FEELING BAD ABOUT YOURSELF
Everyone has bad days. Some more than others. Bad days don’t matter, what matters is to how you react to the situation. Some people spend their whole life feeling bad about themselves: it’s their standard reaction to everything — everything that happens to them is an excuse to, again, feel miserable about themselves. Their drama is the only thing that keeps them alive, they actually crave it: it’s all they have, it’s their driving force. If you meet these people, you’ll know immediately because they love to tell you all about it, and would love it if you’d become part of their let’s-all-be-miserable-together gang. Murakami, in Norwegian Wood, wrote this about self-pity and he’s right: “Don’t feel bad for yourself, only assholes do that.”
“amazing, how grimly we hold onto our
misery,
[…]
not hours of this or days or
months or years of this
but decades, lifetimes
completely used up,
giver over
to the pettiest
rancor and
hatred.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
“things get bad for all of
us, almost continually,
and what we do under the constant
stress
reveals
who/what we are.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
“there’s no courage there, just the desire to
possess something — admiration, fame, lovers,
money, any damn thing
so long as it comes easy.
so long as they don’t have to do
what’s necessary.
and when they don’t succeed they
become embittered,
ugly,
they imagine that they have
been slighted, cheated,
demeaned.
then they concentrate upon their
unhappiness, their last
refuge.
and they’re good at that,
they are very good at that.
they have so much unhappiness
they insist upon your sharing it
too.
they bathe and splash in their
unhappiness,
they splash it upon you.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
“I’m not a priest.
I’m not a guru.
I probably have more bad moments and self-
doubt than any of those who
phone me.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
“I have gotten so used to melancholia
that
I greet it like an old
friend.”
(Love Is A Dog From Hell)
“Life’s as kind as you let it be.”
(Hot Water Music)
TO SEE PEOPLE AS THEY WERE, BEFORE LIFE DID IT’S MOLDING
We only see the results of people. They became the person you see in front of you by living their life. They didn’t start out this way, they became who they are now by going through the process of life. Everyone has a story. Don’t just judge the result.
“but, under all that, to me she’s the flower, I see her as she was
before she was ruined by the lies:
theirs and
hers.”
(You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense)
ON NOT DOING ANYTHING UNTIL IT HAS MEANING FOR YOU Working just for working — because we like to be busy all the time — doesn’t add much value. Yes, that’s what people do. Work. Work. Work. But often it’s just senseless activity that pays the bills — or keeps you from getting bored. It doesn’t have any real value — either for you personally or for the people around you. What Bukowksi taught me is to look for meaning first, thén work at something that has meaning for you. Or if you don’t find it right away, to keep looking around ALL THE TIME. Whatever you do, never stop looking. As Steve Jobs said: “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” If you don’t, you might become part of — what Bukowksi calls — the dead-before-death gang.
“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst possible way, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”
(Ham on Rye)
“the real miracles are the thousands of tiny
people who know exactly what they are doing.”
– What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire
“Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.”
(Post Office)
“Only boring people get bored. They have to prod themselves continually in order to feel alive.”
(Hot Water Music)
ON NEVER COMPROMISING Last week I read this interview with Nicholas Nassim Taleb. When asked about his greatest achievement in live he answered: “I learnt to never compromise.” From his writing — and basically the way he lived—Bukowski seems to have agreed.
“and you realized that the promises
you made yourself were
kept.
that’s plenty.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
ON FAILURE & REGRET You can only really say it’s failure if you haven’t given it a fair try. Never bothering to try, will start eating your from the inside. Ignoring the voice inside will kill you eventually so when you start boiling — when the Beast of Intuition tells you you should do it—act upon it! As René Crevel said: “No daring is fatal!” If you fail, at least you get the lesson. Our time here is short. Memento Mori! Remind yourself often of the fact that you will be dead soon. If you realize this you’ve got nothing to lose. Don’t waste time being shy about what you want out of life.
“regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.”
(You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense)
“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
(Post Office)
“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”
(Post Office)
“and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat seems right or wrong –
an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.”
(Love Is A Dog From Hell)
And to finish up, one of my favorite Bukowski poems “Roll The Dice”:
“if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.
if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.
all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, its
the only good fight
there is.”
(What Matters Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire)
olivier goetgeluck 