Conviction
If a thought grows out of the workings of the brain, then a Conviction is the guidance that grows out of the Heart. Integrity is a conviction of self esteem working with in a family and out to a community and our Globe, this blue pearl.
It is not a clever argument, a conviction is a firm belief. I believe that most often it is not verbally sharing a belief but the very living integrity that moves others into action. As a parent I had first hand proof that it was the way I moved, spoke, treated others, and lived my every day life that was the great teacher. It is my actions that I impressed on those under my care how to behave both in times of joy and those many times of struggle.
Just a few days ago while I was leaving an appointment I was told that she was glad I talked with her since I always leave her with a smile on her face! That could be none other than the conviction of joy in my heart that rounds out the sounds my words try to convey.
Conviction is a seed for understanding the infinite amount of time and energy each of us have to complete the thought, contained in a word and that string of words that brings people close to one another. The evidence is in the action that always speaks louder than words, thought without words we would all be miming with painted faces and stripped leggings.
I remember with great fondness the time I drove my dearest teacher and monks around on their errands. I would sometimes have a group of monks in my car on the way to the grocery store. There were times when visiting monks came to see my teacher and I was asked to take them window shopping. Most often they wanted to go to the poor part of town and look around in the thrift stores in that community. My teacher liked to go to great malls in various towns around where he lived. People who view their lives as Spending Time, learn by watching the way true meditating servants of the common good live, is a great adventure and gift in itself. This also taught me to watch how people mirror my behavior.
There were no words shared but the conviction that was taught, is to always want to see every part of the world with no fear. I walked with conviction born out of inner integrity where few choose to shop.
In fact, one day, long ago I was in such a very thrifty thrift store with three or four travelers when I found a big packing box of High Loft European Goose Down ‘Famous Label’ with the embossed coat of arms, (Ralph Lauren), king size pillows for fifteen dollars each! What a great surprise. The next day I went to Bloomingdales and found the regular size of this same pillow for three hundred dollars each! I guess it was not being afraid to window shop deep within the wrong side of the tracks! Probably these pillows were not sold earlier because the usual clients did not know what they were or their exorbitant usual cost.
The conviction in my heart is: we are all worthy people! No matter how much stuff we have or how much it cost.
Trauma
Something is tearing at my tender heart, it is a condition of life. I am reading a new book, Trauma, by the noted author Mark Epstein.
I warn you all that the font used is very small so you have to hold the book differently and really concentrate on reading. This book is helping me see as I struggle to move forward. I went to his book tour a few days ago. It was a real insight from a psychological view. His talk was very practical. Mark spoke from his experiences of eating mindfully as a simple act of not putting more food into your mouth until you have completely finished chewing and swallowing the first bite. My taste buds are singing as they send the good impulses to my brain which then tells my mind/body that good food is fuel for delight.
Then there is the physical brain, amygdala, over active that is the touchy function of our body mind system. This is the sentnal communicator of stress. One step at a time to turn your attention to the impulses is to turn toward Kindness; Be Kind to yourself.
Ask yourself, what does being kind to myself look like at this intersection. Find what will let you feel you are being Kind To Yourself and Do That Action. Being Kind to yourself is a source of awakening. Kindness is a light on this place you and I are going through, today in the here and now
Our understanding that living with and through a Trauma is NOT Fun. This is a source of connection that allows us, you and I, to care about each other and send our caring support out to all our friends and family.
Last night I painted my toenails. I have not done this in months. I just want to tip toe today with a small caring sparkle.
Emotions are as real as a table, sometimes hard and heavy, “without the hurt the heart is hollow”.
Hug This Emotion!
Crystal clear sweet sharp clarity in taste and poise, touch and scent, in beauty for all eyes to see.
I left New York and the east coast of America for the weather and unanimity of the bay area but I do not long for my past as a ‘home’. In fact I went back for several weeks last year for my birthday. I saw all my dearest best friends and retraced the steps that helped build the person who has this life I now live. I noticed that I am traveling at an inner pace which is different than the outer wave length lived in those seasons that now will always be my past.
I am home in my heart and at peace as I strive to see the energy in its more refined layers of My Material World! Accomplishing everything everywhere without exception!
In Bayard Rustin’s Back Pocket
A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin: Band together! The two men worked to bring civil disobedience, non violent assembly, and public intellectualism, the public intellectual discourse against the halls of Power. From his father, Randolph learned that color was less important than a person’s characterand conduct. From his mother, he learned the importance of education and of defending oneself physically against those who would seek to hurt one or one’s family, if necessary. Randolph remembered vividly the night his mother sat in the front room of their house with a loaded shotgun across her lap, while his father tucked a pistol under his coat and went off to prevent a mob from lynching a man at the local county jail.
Can you find any people rising up to become leaders with such strong intuition and usefulness to humanity, as a whole society, in our current time of Tyranny as Mr. Rustin and Mr. Randolph?
Have we started to move into Protest and take a stand to pressure Politics. The most extreme elements of those, drunk on power, are working hard against the belief that we are all members of One Global Family.
What is the chance that those of us who stand for our American Constitutional Right To Privacy? Personal right to a private life and private communication, which is a building block of real democracy must find a leader as Bayard Rustin was.
Goodness is normal, caring about other people is right, and the natural normal aspect of our evolution, to walking upright on two feet: bipededness
Is there any one reading this who is completely against and ready to stand up against the kind of Big Government that passes laws which currently condone mass surveillance, penalize both legitimate protest and dissent, using the News Media they own, issuing a flood of bad press against all organizing including the Occupy Movement platforms?
The ability of people to move into the landscape of life by moving into the the light, the light in the world and there is a light at the end of the tunnel is essential for life itself. I am ready to make this assent. I believe that now is the time to gather together and walk peacefully together functioning and acting as the Heart of Our Country.
The Grover Norqust Gang is actively working to suppress and ignore our Constitutional checks and balances. Not one of the American citizens voted or elected this man. His group are funded and backed by big corporations in concert with wrong military minds, and bought politicians intervening world wide. Grover Norquist orchestrated the Iran/Contra, by funding Oliver North! Norquist has designed programs which have taken over our Congress.
Where is Thomas Paine? He emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin! Where is a man with the character and cash of the likes of Benjamin Franklin NOW? Paine had the good fortune and timing to arrive in time to participate in the American Revolution. His contribution was the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America’s independence.
Where are the powerful intelligent peacemakers hiding? I hope to, by this post, to draw out men to serve simply and simply serve. In the way Rustin served as an unidentified member of the American Friends Service Committee‘s task force to write “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence,” published in 1955. This was one of the most influential and widely commented upon pacifist essays in the United States. Rustin was a member of the New York City Fifteenth Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). He traveled widely in service to peace.Can we look to the Quaker’s for resistance and leadership?
FREE FOOD Saturday
Guardian Mayonnaise: Elect Greenwald
Glen Greenwald, I want to thank you….
I want you to know that I support your work to stop the fake security masking truth. Thank you for publishing the stories about Prism and the other sweeping privacy invasion.
Please…Let me know how I can with my one individual action join with all those who are wanting to reach critical mass. Together, Mr. Greenwald, help us get together to stop the global Tyranny. Let our American Government know that what Obama has done and continues to do that ignores Several Amendments of the Constitution. Our Founding Fathers wrote the constitution to assure individual and group civil rights and boundaries to freedom.
I do not want to wonder why almost all the elected officials are listening to my life. I am unhappy that my President and all government servants feel it is ok to catch my every key stroke, every whisper, and every movement I make.
Bradley Manning must be released from prison. It is time that the Nobel Award Representatives award Private Manning for having the courage to let all world citizens that they are being watched in a totally illegal way.
Now is the time for the infinite power of creativity generated by privacy and personal freedom.
Any Minute Mindfulness
I am standing in the glistening azure water at the Lions Pool in a park in Oakland California. I have escaped from a family farces of verbal abuse that felt like a energy vampire had sucked all the joy out of my being. Now I was standing in the water saying to my self over and over, ‘I Am Here Now.’ It felt like heavy lifting. Just saying the words of this mindful sentence was like dragging an entire building of historical emotions into the proper receptacle. That was then and this is now. I was not going to get lost again. I had to tell myself that what had happened was not happening now. I struggled to take the time to look around at my surroundings and get my balance. I was working on being Mindful. At any minute now, I was mindful.
This is such a good thing! That the word Mindfulness has entered the main stream vocabulary. It is a sign the masses have a notion that they have a brain service station. At last I have some glimmer of understanding that my mind has some directing process in life.
Like driving in the evening, the headlights on a car serve to show us the path ahead. The actual understanding that our mind can function in this way to help us see where we are, and what is ahead, is a wonderful step. This is the first step for peacefulness. This works from the inside out for both the individual and global life.
This is True: Being A Good Person
Using the word, Mindfulness, in work places and in schools is a sign that populations are becoming aware of the existence of a mind. It shows there is an interest and hunger to become familiar with the concept of mind. What is this aspect of my being and what does it actually do? The inner thoughts and tools are very ancient. You can search the concept and how it developed in India.
HHDL gave a teaching this year which you can take time to watch:
http://dalailama.com/webcasts/post/288-opening-the-eye-of-the-new-awareness
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
~ Audre Lorde
For this, (Mindfulness), we have to forget things like “I should be mindful of this or that”. If you are mindful, you are already creating a separation (“I – am – mindful – of – ….”). Don’t be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walk walk. Let the talk talk. Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the work work. Let sleep sleep
Hurry up, at any minute I will be mindful!
Looks Like An EKG
The other day a wonderful friend came over just to touch base and catch up. It is so nice in what has become a societal norm of digital communication to have actual face time together. Research in Face Time is proving to be an important constituent for human health. I get to experience actual “I Like You” that brings the sunshine into my home and heart. It is a shared tenderness.
He came over to also tell me about a position he will be starting in a few days or a week. And I am delighted for him since this is something I truly wanted to enact three years ago. I get to see how an idea when placed at a certain intersection takes time to blossom. The real truth is knowing how to place the idea and just who to communicate with and what is the right time.
My friend is going to do a great service which will change the way the first group will think and feel. This seed will move out to touch the others through the contacts the beginners have in their world.
Mindfulness is such a buzz work that the idea of MIND and what that is gets lost in a path of attention. I have seen this in meditation training where hungry seekers are told to just sit still in funny positions and eventually the pain will subside. Is this the path to the inner world, REALLY?
Embarking on a Mindfulness path has to begin with some sense of this ‘mind’ to use in the practice. The Mind is a function of our human nervous system. It is the Thought Producing Pump. Take a look at an EKG. It shows various waves. It is the brain function in the same way that Blood pressure is the Heart function.
My brain pumps out 85 thoughts per second. Many of these thoughts are living communication from various parts of the body back to the brain. I am not consciously aware of all that is going on along my skin, but my brain is because of the communications system that is a traveling thought. Men have more sexual related thoughts every second than woman.
When I was invited to take a Citizens Police Academy 14 week class I learned that the police know that some men get aroused when a breeze moves their clothing. It is a part of this Mind Pumping thought producing that causes so many people to move into action with out giving it a thought. No real reason for doing or saying other than the urge pushed by uncontrolled thoughts.
The start and turn toward being mindful is grace. Your self respect is vital. Primarily, to take a time to look at and get to know what is going on in your mind. Before you try and struggle to control your thoughts about this and that, take time to actually look at the thoughts being generated. Sit and listen to your own scattered thoughts. Watch Your Mind. Close your eyes and see into the vast countryside of your mind as the thought butterfly flutters from this to that possibility.
Then you will be able to CHOOSE where to place your attention. You will not be struggling to stifle the process. Your mind and body will be moving together in the garden of delightful choices. You will choose to see the sun in your heart as a vast and calm moment of the true and real present. You will feel your body in your pants sitting on the chair. Since there is no struggle with any history or any desires for a goal in some imagined future, you will be in this present moment.
I look forward to continuing this conversation with all of you. Please write back with any questions or problems.
R E S P E C T
It’s preposterous how I let things, important projects, important letters, forms, calls, just slide away and out of the window of opportunity. Then I create a personality issue like low self esteem or blame. Letting life flow recklessly along without adequate direction is causing me pain.
One step to mitigate this pain problem is to generate an inner sense of peacefulness. To Love inside your heart for yourself and gratitude that you are here now investigating the possibility of inner peace changes thinking. Peace, which you can send out as a general cloud of positive thought feeling and a prayer extended to all the people you encounter and all beings around the globe is a great tool for understanding how to feel peace. What does Peace feel like inside your body and mind?
The ‘Gratitude Attitude’, I first encountered in a meaningful way at a TED slash BIL conference in Monterey, California, either in 2005 or 2006. A very productive and gentle man gave a talk about generating gratitude by using the simple act of the manner you use signing your written communication.
Instead of ending with Sincerely, Best Wishes, or Best, which have lost any meaning and have become an ‘off handed’ thing clunking at the end of the conversation, you can choose to place a thought from your heart.
He impressed me with his valor and the importance for using a communication mode which becomes an action, that both woke the writer up to how very lucky they are, and to wish a good heart attitude (emoticon Hearted), to the reader.
He instructed us to try the experiment of signing our letters and texting with a feeling of goodness; With Respect and Gratitude, or With Gratitude and Respect.
I have adopted this ending for my letters. I feel good that I take a moment to allow myself to rest in the idea of just how lucky I am. Gratitude, not only to be breathing but to be living in a time and place where I am truly grateful for being able to write letters.
Rewiring the System 