Līlā retweeted
“Meditation is not something that should be done in a particular position at a particular time. It is an awareness and an attitude that must persist throughout the day. To be effective, meditation must be continuous.”
~ Annamalai Swami
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Līlā retweeted
Only when one has emerged from the cessation of perception and feeling is there awareness of the emptiness, the signless, and the wishless.
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Līlā retweeted
Such an achingly gorgeous poem by Rilke. A love poem to God, indeed.
ALT I am a city by the sea sinking into a toxic tide. I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown had poisoned my mother as she carried me. It's here in all the pieces of my shame that now I find myself again. I yearn to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing. I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart— oh let them take me now. Into them I place these fragments, my life, and you, God—spend them however you want. II, 2 — Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
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Līlā retweeted
“Because my will is simple as a window
And knows no pride of original birth,
It is my life to die, like glass, by light:
Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.” - Thomas Merton
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Līlā retweeted
Euripides' The Bacchae for The American Repertory Theater (1997/1998)
Direction by François Rochaix. Costume design by Catherine Zuber
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"stay present to whatever you're experiencing, including resistance to experience" is a complete path
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Līlā retweeted
im convinced one of the big reasons adhd specifically faces this kind of skepticism and dismissiveness is that, as a disability of executive function, it raises questions that threaten to erode the foundations of everything we assume about free will, motivation and responsibility
I got a coworker who claimed she couldn't show up at 9 because she has adhd.
She regularly rolled in at 10.
Our boss decided that she'd give her a bone and set our core, in-office hours as 10-3.
Coworker started rolling up at 11.
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Līlā retweeted
kevin kelly - your life's goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be
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Līlā retweeted
A little metacognition is a dangerous thing.
And
Better to never begin, than to start and not finish.
There are many very painful pubescent phases of development, including in metacognition, self awareness, theory of mind and emotional maturity.
Narcissists are stuck at a hellish level of development, having just begun to form a self, but not enough to stabilise it. They admire psychopaths (as with the case of Trump to Putin) because the psychopath never even started a process of developing a proper self/other understanding, secondary emotions and empathy. So psychopaths appear so much more regulated and unaffected by the world - however incapable of relating in omni win ways. The narcissist wishes they could be like that... but they began. And only just began at that. Like having grown little 6 year old legs but being expected to run with 20 years olds - of course they will cheat to keep up.
Narcissists are emotional infants - terribly dependent. But even most adults are only emotional teenagers (hence the phrase 'life is high school')
Better to never begin, than to start and not finish. But best of all is to make it through and mature, because something new can come into form and stabilise and that thing is love.
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Daniel is a deeply sincere and compassionate practitioner. We are in a consultation group together and the depth of care & commitment he brings to his work is consistently inspiring to me. I highly recommend working with him.
hi friends - i have space for 10 or so new students/clients, and i'd love to invite anyone who's interested to have a free intro call with me
helping people with meditation practice and attachment repair has been my full time livelihood for almost a year now, and i'm grateful to have found my way into such meaningful work. i'm coming up on around 450 hours of sessions given
this work is so interesting and there's a million dimensions of it, it's hard to describe succinctly!
on one level there's the "unfolding" dimension - a session is a space for the client to be seen in their goodness and completeness just as they are, with no need to perform or change. loving the truth of a person's experience and knowing that their wholeness and growth are inevitable results
on another level there's the teaching dimension - inner work is like the coolest skill tree i've ever found, and i've loved teaching my whole life. some of the things i often teach:
-somatic awareness/interoception
-mindfulness of emotions
-expressing and sharing emotions through words and body
-shamatha meditation
-metta and compassion meditation
-insight practices
-engaging in IFS or core transformation (parts work is a bunch of skills imo)
-ideal parent figure meditation/practice, and other skills around attachment repair
there's also the coaching dimension, which is actually live helping someone navigate their inner world, helping them connect their own innate wisdom and compassion with the tight, hurting places
and sometimes there's even a mentorship dimension - offering guidance on the longer arc of someone's path, or guidance on how to navigate challenging situations in their life, or just connecting them to other resources in the vast ocean of stuff that's out there
feel free to comment or DM me if you have any questions about this work, or follow the link in my bio to sign up for a free intro call
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"When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order."
- Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine
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Līlā retweeted
meditation/therapy research is cool because it turns out that "i always feel like there is something deeply wrong with me" is actually somewhat of a tractable problem and self-acceptance is learnable with the right inputs (or, self-hate is unlearnable)
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Līlā retweeted
i use "hell realm" loosely to refer to a state in which
- you are suffering enormously
- the suffering is sticky or persistent, refuses to dissipate, regenerates, feels correct, justified, necessary
much social media discourse is "viral hell realms" - content created from inside a hell realm implicitly or explicitly trying to pull its audience inside the same hell realm. to briefly gesture at examples one could speak of a misogynist hell realm, a misandrist hell realm, various political hell realms, a climate change hell realm, a trauma hell realm, a neurotic parenting hell realm, a singularity hell realm. imo it would not be wrong to call viral hell realms demons
emotional flavors associated with hell realms are more or less the obvious stereotypes: paranoia, hatred, rage, grievance, resentment, jealousy, envy, self-pity, despair, etc. you can apply a cartoon character test: if a cartoon character was suddenly filled with this, would it be an indication that they were possessed or corrupted by an evil spirit? would they suddenly sprout fangs, have black smoke curling off of them, etc
(it would be easy to misunderstand this as being about "negative" emotions. we have to carefully distinguish fear from paranoia, anger from hatred, sadness from grievance and self-pity, and so on)
antidotes to hell realms are the sappiest shit imaginable: gratitude. love. the brahmaviharas: metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (empathetic joy), upekkha (equanimity). patience. forgiveness. mercy. grace. the light of heaven. the care bear stare. friendship. laughter. joy. beauty. mourning. prayer. you can again apply a cartoon character test: if a cartoon character was suddenly filled with this, would it be an indication that they were blessed by an angel? would they suddenly be filled with light, sprout angel wings, etc
choosing the antidotes to a hell realm from inside the hell realm is not easy (if it were easy they wouldn't be hell realms). the hell realm will try to convince you that the antidotes are poison: cringe, lame, uncool, unserious, naive, embarrassing, unsophisticated, frivolous, kitsch, banal, childish, girly, gay, woo, fake, selfish, morally corrupt, a betrayal. alternatively the hell realm might try to convince you that *you* are poison: you don't deserve this, it isn't for you, it's for other better people, you are a creature of darkness, loser, barely even human. i don't know that i have a better response to this than to say that you have to find a part of yourself that believes in straightforward, uncomplicated goodness, ordinary human goodness, and you have to crawl towards whatever goodness seems even remotely reachable to you from where you are even if you only have a single pinky available (so to speak) to inch yourself forward with, even if you can only manage to inch yourself forward once a day or once a week or once a month. finding a single thing to be grateful for, even if it's just that you aren't literally dead or suffering even worse than you currently are, is much better than nothing. finding a single person you're willing to pray for is much better than nothing. turning away from hell and towards the light is a habit you can build, no matter how slowly
more reading:
- the great divorce, lewis
- opening the heart of compassion, lowenthal and short
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