The loop messages have been playing at high quality, as though a layer has been sloughed off, leaving programming clearly exposed. This time, it isn’t a critical voice, but an even more constant beat, surely affecting the rhythm patterns of movements and breath overall. I hadn’t realized this further layer before, perhaps because when I compare what it was like “before”, mind is deeply open and quiet much of the time. Sill, it feels great to notice the minuscule skips. When the loop is exposed so well I can, as though undoing a mistake in a knitting pattern, easily reach my needle in to release it.
The most common loop I’m picking up on? “I’m tired.” I’m not even tired half the time I notice this! And there’s the feel of a shield of some sort, likely deflecting the previously-expected critical voice that dropped away. So far, I’m able to stop to ask “Am I, actually, tired?” Or sometimes, more accurately, “Are you?” “Who are you, saying you are tired all the time, anyway?” “Let’s teach you some new tricks. What’s more fun to say?” More fun than “I’m tired” is “I’m happy”, for instance.
If I am tired, I might still ask “Who are you talking to?” Is there someone (in memories) I’m trying to get not to exhaust me further, someone I wish would allow more space, rest? What if I offer that? Even just being willing to let go is relief.
Speaking of new tricks and phrases, I had a few ‘proud of myself’ Spanish moments in the store today. An older couple beamed at my attempts to help in their more comfortable language. My heart was so moved by their appreciation. Overhearing the exchange, a co-worker praised our attempts to understand each other as well, adding that she likes to hear the way I use English… “so many different words.” When this coworker was growing up in Nicaragua, no one took much time to help her along, so she too feels limited and is learning from our diverse Miami community, where so many Spanishes are spoken.
Her compliments, and the story behind them, sparked a pause as I reflected on neglectful periods of my own upbringing. There’s certainly a case to be made for my being left to my devices too much as a child, while at the same time, I managed to enjoy many enriched experiences and friendships along the way. I’m so thankful for an attentive early education, for instance. It wasn’t either/or.
A common thread through my journals is the difficulty of weaving contrasting narratives when one cares about being and becoming genuine. There aren’t many heroes or villains in my stories, but there are a few, and I’ve become capable of honest apology alongside becoming capable of giving difficult feedback when needed. Like learning knitting and Spanish and qigong all at once, capacities grow together.
The dramas evoke emotion and meaning, so I haven’t been able to convince myself they lack value to my life and mind. Many are romantic, but not just; dominant themes are ethical quandaries and chosen family, amidst backstories that span multiple lifetimes. Distinct cultural paradigms. I love especially, exploring different ways of thinking about time, seeing how calculations play out iwhen characters buy into various conceptual measurements of what constitutes virtue and goodness.
It isn’t that there isn’t anything comparable, but very little in Western television resonates with me beyond ‘entertainment value’, whatever that is. When I talk to my therapist about the shows, as part of a ‘bundle of behaviors’ I get lodged into from time to time, she asks “What is it that you are getting from them, that you are not finding elsewhere?”
I reply with the answers I just gave, but there’s something else. She knows this and is waiting for my real answer. Me too.
My strongest childhood memories of television find me sitting on the floor of the great room of my elementary school, the space filling and emptying around me. Captain Kangaroo. Feelings around being the first one dropped off to school or the last one picked up, watching the teachers watching the door. The impressions are strong, even though this might not have happened often.
During weekends at home, Shirley Temple was often on TV, Tarzan, sometimes Fred Astaire at night. Astaire in fact, became my first crush, so much so that I teased my ex-husband about choosing him for the Fred shape of his head. I still love songs from those musicals, still feel happiest wearing long flowing dresses that swish and move in time, while as an adult, viewing the productions through a more critical eye. A child doesn’t ask themself what or who is missing from a story, or why.
Shall we dance Or keep on moping? Shall we dance Or walk on air? Shall we give in To despair Or shall we dance with never a care…
Later, my mother would have me videotape soap operas when I got home from school, so she could watch them after work in the evenings. Neither of us could program the VCR program to record correctly, and if I watched, I could edit commercials. I’m not sure if she asked me to do that, or if I liked them; it was more like second-hand smoke.
Saturday morning cartoons were a big thing, for other kids. While staying with a friend I paced restlessly as she watched her favorite show, tortured because she lived in an apartment building with a big pool I’d woken excited to get into right away. Speed Racer broke through the cartoon barrier eventually, though I can’t place what it was that caught my interest enough to wake a full hour early to watch the show before Jr High. The Japanese creator of the manga Mach GoGoGo, self-taught artist Tatsuo Yoshida, was inspired by Elvis and James Bond movies, which makes perfect sense. It was definitely a vibe. I wouldn’t want to watch it now, nor tamper with the early memories.
As soon as I moved out on my own (for certain values of my own), I traded soap operas for CSpan and BookTV, making efficient use of time. There was such an urgency I felt, to become someone of substance! And for the most part, I kept to that going forward, gravitating toward what I could justify as enrichment, with the kids once they arrived, as well. We watched animal and science shows, and there were long periods in which we didn’t have a TV at all, or where I closed it behind cabinet doors, restricting hours it could be on.
As I write this, I realize I may have strongly factored the influence of TV when sleuthing out reasons my mother was depressed, and later, suicidal. Alongside soap operas came Phil Donahue then Oprah, and she, like many mothers then, began to talk about childhood wounds and injustices more, and more dramatically. There was more crying, more shopping and debt. Arguments with my step-father intensified. My sister was born.
Always interested in biographies of suffering, I believe my mother couldn’t always tell the difference between her own stories and the stories she read, then the interviews she watched on TV. She began to re-frame her own narratives with those others in mind; I was captive audience for tales I couldn’t process. Terrible decisions to come would be justified by past-life regressions she learned about through Shirley McClain. Thanks, Oprah. Then, pendulum swinging the other direction, televangelists entered the scene.
No wonder my relationship with TV is so charged! These days my mother watches Fox News for hours, and ways in which I think and live differently are taken as attacks. There’s nothing we can say to one another, although with distance, compassion for her overall suffering is more present. The sleuthing energy is not needed to protect myself anymore, but for inquiry and exploration. Hopefully that exploration becomes increasingly generous, ever more transformative.
Hm. I’ve unexpectedly written into another layer of answer to my therapist’s question “What is it that you are getting from them, that you are not finding elsewhere?”
There is integration and healing going on.
I mean, take the show I watched a few episodes of last night, Our Blues. It’s melancholy, and I’m affected by how direct-facing and sad, yet beautifully too, the relationships are portrayed. Older actors express the disillusionment of aging… accepting one is not getting back some things they’ve lost, not going to become most things they dreamed of becoming. This, alongside of bright youthful memories.
There’s a phrase a wise friend introduced me to: nostalgia for the present. Even our brightest memories are not complete; if they were, they wouldn’t be quite so bright. There are angles we edit to isolate the strongest dose of what’s desired in any given moment as we flip through the channels, remixing impressions. Nostalgia for the presentsees that it isn’t really the past, or redoing of the past one is craving. It’s always about genuine peace with the present, ‘the (current) whole catastrophe’. It’s okay to feel more than one thing at once. In fact we must.
There’s a story to continue to tell here, about the other side of the coin re permeable boundaries, mandalas of connection, and how to love, even so.
In line at the market, buying writing icing for the Congratulations cake we bought to mark successful getting of the big job by a family friend (intensive process they went through beforehand, getting a hotel to prep, for weeks, basically falling off-grid). An older gentleman looks back to ask if I’m in a hurry, gesturing that seeing I have so little, he would let me go ahead. I explain I just have “I’m in a hurry” energy, whether in a hurry or not, which gains a chuckle all around. I’m not sure it’s true, but it might be.
Everyone continues through the line. All is pleasant, normal. By the time I reach my car however, I’m highly sensitive. I look around and see many older people walking slowly, carefully. Some help one another. I felt sore most of the morning, a little worried about how work might go later, but now I’m standing still, deeply wondering how anyone manages anything at all. Everyone seems so very frail.
I watch the well-mannered gentleman get into his vehicle–a small van, although signage isn’t clear–and realize he must spend long portions of his day waiting.
I’m not waiting, but I’m not going anywhere, either.
Trying to put my finger on this sampling of experience, I’ll call what occurred ‘all-in-the-same-boat-ness’. It was profoundly strange, a little Lynchian. I’ll resist the urge to attach meaning or value, just remark that everything was certainly thin.
A few times this week I noticed, more exactly than usual, rippling effects of small gestures into undulating patterns, noticed how I can’t precisely tie them together, but as in this case, find myself in a wide mind then step back to trace. This gentleman’s gesture seemed to slow everything down, which was a reminder to appreciate the whole scene and all appearing in it–including me–as a shimmering mirage. Everything, including fragility and pain became ‘wonderful’, in a way.
While I know I’m still to some extent drawing the lines myself, in TSK terms, I’m also asking to see that the level as changed by asking when that so-called change occurred. Of course it never did.
I’m surprised! It’s been over a week since I wrote the previous entry, during which time I’ve listened to several Vajrayana related audio books–a few multiple times. Not all the lessons (mostly talks given during retreats) hit me the way Bliss of Inner Fire did, but understanding feels to have taken a leap, integrating the disparate knowledge too easily left in piles all over my mind.
(free stock image, not me)
Integrated knowledge comes with such feeling of relief! So much that seemed wasted or lost reveals itself as quite there, within a larger vision. All is re-contextualized as the mandala mosaic finds its flow again.
Energy is freed!
I’m so glad that although it seems indulgent to hunker down into binge mode with these books, I’ve continued. The freed energy contains its own will to follow through, and understands how best to concentrate those efforts. Now, to let it.
Gorgeous: Dublin Library
A few years ago, I changed strategies about spiritual practice, frustrated with what I labeled my obsessive and indulgent tendencies: staying in learning mode and not ‘doing anything with’ what I’d been learning. But I wonder now, whether that shift was unwise, untrusting of intuition. “Not doing anything with” is a judgement made by someone on the outside, not actually what I believe to be true.
The critical voice has lessened with meditative spacious and therapy, yet I do survey the landscape from time to time, grieve what has been forfeited in pursuit of its pacification. I ask, What would someone who loves me, say? She would say that although my process may not look like that of others, it is worthy nonetheless.
When things come together and open, I’m reminded how fortunate I am, to be on the path I’m on… that even dropped in the middle of a family that could be hellish and frightening, abandoning and cruel, my aspiration stubbornly leans toward compassion, practices of love and bliss and goodness.
The Rest
From the corner of a room where my mother’s body lay beaten, I wrote this poem.
French doors frame a trapped child frozen In an instant.
Soul split, I walked away, leaving in tact the rest I now return for, with a pen.
The above was written over 30 years ago, dropped whole onto the page. I then read it, realized it was true. Writing has always been integrating, healing. Fortunate are those given (nod to Pullman) a subtle knife.
I set out to do a few restful-yet-meaningful things while out on a leave this month. Yet, surprise surprise, found several other rabbit holes instead, all of which led predictably back into my comfort zone of philosophy/creativity. The hook this time, was serendipity, looking into what progress might have been made on a study exploring such since last I checked (nothing that I could find). See: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01405-7
This scientist identified a few ways serendipity seems to come about, an intriguing one of which of which is ‘controlled sloppiness’. The word itself traces back to a 1700s Persian fairy tale about The Three Princes of Serendip who were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” (Wikipedia) The description conjures a Monty Python skit, doesn’t it? Or something along the lines of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
I found a few podcasts, which led to audio books (I’d recommend The Flip as pretty okay with flaws), which I listened to while playing Archeus, a Pokemon game. 🙂 I then wandered over to Audible again and for laughs thought to look at Tibetan Buddhist offerings (I had low expectations). One can easily find Pema Chodron or a few others on audio, but what I wanted was something in keeping with my theme: imagination-based, tantric.
And what do you know, there are a few books by Lama Thubten Yeshe, even free with my Audible membership; the one I’m reading so far is perfect! Well, perfect without being perfectly read, for instance “Rinpoche” is pronounced “Rinposhe” throughout. Once you consider how often that word is used in any Tibetan Buddhist context, you’ll understand it is no small issue. 🙂 However, the pronunciation soon felt like a small price to pay for the wisdom that unfolded, resonated, soothed. It even became endearing after a while.
It’s an odd thing, but probably not as unusual as it feels to me, that I’ve never finished preliminary practices in a concerted way. I fell in love with certain mantras and visualizations, have practiced those fervently at times. Nevertheless, I’ve also been unusually fortunate in teachers and spiritual friends, some who have practiced traditionally for multiple decades, others who have beautifully cobbled together practices of their own. Life keeps giving me a lot to take in and far too much to narrow down, endless windfalls.
I want to remember something stated strongly in the book: Empowerment (ritual) only activates what is already there. The practices are about allowing allowing. Whether or how I do them is about my own receptivity, whether I give myself permission… sabbath for man rather than man for the sabbath, etc.
A favorite market, now shuttered and grafittied. The photo fittingly a blur of change taking place in time.
I once asked a teacher to help me grok the idea of karma in more than a zero-sum, exchange-level sense. It was early on and I’d not yet learned much about dependent co-origination. Even if I had, all that would have changed about my question is that I would have articulated it with more complexity and confidence.
What I wanted to understand was the experience of karma to a person, viewing their own life, but what I said was something like “A grand blossoming tree, heavy with fruit, grows healthily in the same grove another withers. Why?”
Perhaps I should have asked, “What’s a good way to work with the uneven and contradictory way (my) karma appears?”
“Appears” is a key word here. Being presented with a paradox/puzzle is a signal to grapple with non-duality; one is being asked to stay with a koan long enough to see meaning evolve. That’s tantra. The Bliss of Inner Fire: Heart Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa talks a lot about the “stubbornly persistent illusion” of karma and time, without using those terms, but I hear it. There’s even a me who groks it… the me who believes cultivating the inner garden comes first, trusts doing so. She’s the Mary, of ‘Mary and Martha’ fame, who leaves the guests and dirty dishes for later while Jesus speaks.
The word imperfectionism appeared in the air around me this week, for good reason. Since the beginning of the year I’ve taken on several things I can in no way fully accomplish quickly–things that require prayer. By which I mean, I can’t see the end of them and must leave space for pregnant possibility.
These aren’t things I have to do : knitting, going into the next phase of healthy eating, becoming fluent in Spanish, but they all reach toward greater fluidity in my life, melt away at frozen habits. They also all seem important to do now, at the same time, contributing into the same eventual leap, if you will. Can I know what that leap is? I can not. Is that unnerving? Yes.
In pursuing what I can’t see the end of, some other things, which have seemed right and comforting before, drop away. I risk that should I reach for them down the line, they will no longer be available.
When my kids express feeling stuck, concerned they aren’t heading somewhere, I can easily trace for them that from the outside, there is progress. I can easily encourage them to have faith in the whole they can’t quite see, and in doing things they’re drawn to for their own sake, trusting intuition. And I do believe that’s right, that the years my son has spent learning to draw, only for that interest to drop off, contributes now to his concentration on music, whether or not he can draw clear lines between the two. As a parent, do I wish he would develop the same interest in say, coding? Yes I do. 🙂 But I keep that in check.
Backing up from the beautiful human dilemma of trying to drive destiny, I realize that what’s sometimes missing is synthesis, synchronization. It is fine to do ‘all the things’ and more, but to be worried over whether any or every particular action matters is a programmed and heavily agenda-ed perfectionism. In social justice circles there is some discussion of whether it traces back to a colonistic mindset which sells the idea of civilized and non-civilized cultures. How do we extricate ourselves from such deeply ingrained ideas that seem on their face–inside systems of time and space–to be right?
Accepting this, the only answer seems to be leaning even further into the unknown, the greater non-doing portion of the equation.
“When humans ascend they arestill human. When humans descend they are still human.” -Heaven Official’s Blessing
I can’t get enough of reading these days; the outwardness of the last few years, for better or worse, may have finally reached its fill. Just in time, work conversations have become book-swapping, friendships taking on new risks and dimensions.
It is a surprisingly vulnerable thing to recommend a book to someone, or to read a book they’ve recommended when it is a relationship not begun on those grounds. Suddenly half of my co-workers are reading Madeline Miller’sSong of Achilles, so along with Circe, I decided to read (well, I listen to) that again, while also reading a series of detective/mystery novels—>normally not my thing, but I’m enjoying. The writer is Kate Atkinson, and she’s clever enough that I find myself smiling in surprise often, even in moments I’m not ‘supposed to’.
Of course, there is also TSK.
If I’m completely honest though, the books I’ve been zipping through in long sessions, relishing in an immersive way, are the Chinese novel adaptations of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Heaven Official’s Blessing*, which I quoted at the top, is one of three sets of three, and creates a tangible world quite near (to me) to fantastical virtual reality adventures. I’m especially drawn to the natural way in which reincarnation is handled, with characters sometimes remembering previous identities and lives, working out karma. They’re both fun and thoughtful, escapist and contemplative.
Just a few months ago, what I needed most was music and chatter, endless new encounters and conversations, puzzle solving, surprises and busyness. The store, which had always been a back burner place I wandered to clear my head, was there to take me in, giving me a place to actively settle worry and restlessness.
Especially, I hadn’t realized how the drumbeat of pre-Covid cafe’ writing sessions–being with people yet not–had well balanced my life and ordered my time, until I could no longer refuge that way. I used to call those sessions my finishing places, since I would often start many things, then finish them away from the apartment.
Now, although a few cafe’s and libraries are again available as third places, I’ve lost the strings. ‘Home’ is once again writing and writing, reading and reading, fantastical lands and listening to the wind outside. Which is me? I’m the last to know, and ponder whether the shift is simply a coping mechanism gently helping settle the reality that health might not allow me to continue as I have been, mitigating despair.
The last few weeks have been a blur of doctors’ appointments and too much laying in bed, waking uncomfortably in the middle of the night. But also of dreaming vividly, experiencing edges between realms more softly, then embracing such softness as none-other-than. I’m not sure there has ever been a time in which I was less concerned with being good, being interesting, being this or that. I do keep in mind that when I look back on my life, times like these have been richer than I realized when in them.
I’m not yet resigning, not even from the store, but perhaps easing into surrender.
*Disturbingly, there seems some validity that this author has been detained in China for at least three years for distributing books with so-called BL content, even though her TV adaptations passed censorship with skillful editing. It isn’t illegal to write romantic relationships between two of the same gender, but it is illegal to sell such materials, so tightrope lines! With infuriating and intellectually lazy book banning trends in the US, we (I’m in South Florida) do well to remember the “freedom” we’re always touting as making this country unique, symbolic though it may be.
There is no 100% analogy, but one of the ideas I like to consider contemplatively is ‘outward’ life as a mirror of mind, and mind as a kind of petri-dish in which influences have a chance to interact. It does seem to me that although I can’t always choose the influences (I can choose some), I can and do bring a kind of base solution of mind into which those influences sit. The solution may be heavier or lighter, more or less agenda’ed or relaxed; influences and impressions will sit a longer or shorter time before giving read-outs or a suggestion.
Those awaited for precious read-outs might then be almost too subtle to hold, or read like giant billboards fallen across my path, forcing me to stop, or act.
LA Story
Ah, I just had the biggest smile thinking of the film LA Story.
I wonder if it is still as great as I remember. 🙂
This isn’t meant to be a commentary on free-will btw, because I’m only describing how things seem. Admittedly, it is a dreamy sense of everything, likely rooted in years of dream practice and fantastical imaginative play.
But I think there’s something to it, too.
Now that I attend therapy sessions only every other week, there is so much to catch up on, but also greater chance for happenings to have taken a few different turns, or for circles to complete. The patterns are more intricate and leveled. Like this morning… I began with health, since health and anxiety around health appears to be a driving narrative at the moment., but the health conversation moved quickly into recent decisions I’ve made to trust myself in ways I hadn’t recognized myself doing, and some dare-I-say-it, stable corewell-being at the center of that confidence.
Valentine’s Day this year (even though I spent the actual day at a doctor’s office) was a chance to recognize the loving gestures I’ve made toward myself, believing my own impressions when chances have arisen to turn against myself instead. As we talked, disparate strings showed themselves to be not so disparate after all. I shared too, what I first framed as a very silly dream that nonetheless kept whispering “Look more deeply.” And indeed the dream became quite profound when mixed with my therapist’s humor and validation, our shared laughter bubbling over like that mischievous teenagers. Suffice it to say, there was an unlikely and out-of-place experience of intimacy, in which a pedestal-ed teacher was wonderfully ordinary.
In that ordinariness, life was easy, alive and free, and there was not a thing in the world I needed to do to earn that. Just let it be.
[[I haven’t picked up the book for a few days, but continue musing on the feeling and notion of the the book itself, even closed(!), as a practice. Why, oh why, is the way I work with things so odd, when compared against what others describe!]]
One of the few notes I have from childhood is from an elementary school teacher at the Playhouse and Biltmore School, who asks my mother to please stop putting barrettes in my hair, because instead of napping I take them out and play with them, distracting the other children.
“Stephanie is disruptive.”
And I’ll admit, there is something disruptive about me, something mischievous I’m always trying to pin down and trim away at to be able to settle down and fit in. Sometimes at work, I call it “puppy dog energy”, hoping others will see me in a playful rather than nervous way when I can’t help myself and say something I absolutely know better than to throw into the mix during simple small talk or break room conversation. Why do I do this?
“Stephanie is disruptive.”
I remember the relief I felt when a friend introduced me to Padmasambhava, suggesting I pick up the book Crazy Wisdom. I wasn’t privy then, to all the stories and controversies surrounding Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, so when the text hit me like a lightning bolt, I had no hesitation letting go into the experience of getting to know the aspects of mind and expression he channels so potently. I read the book quickly, unpacked it longer (and still). To describe that feeling in the context of this post, it was “Ah, there is a teacher who, instead of feeling Stephanie is disruptive for playing with the barrettes in her hair and wanting the attention of other children, would be delighted by these qualities and tendencies!”
When talking to my therapist I once described the need I have to constantly remind everyone and myself “that we are human”. When I feel energy go flat, or find myself in too rarefied a group, I want to stir it up, and am allergic to ego policing. A case can be made that we already feel human most of the time, so spiritual practice should lead us beyond, however we must remember that contemplative practice opens endlessly; what makes sense at one level may be disregarded at the next, only to pick up again yet later. Over time practice becomes fluid the way that working with recipes gives way to more and more experimentation as ingredients become familiar.
I’m learning to knit right now, and I find that I can’t multitask in any way without tangling my project. I need quiet and full concentration. When I see the more experience knitters around me, they chat and sing, watch TV and listen to books or podcasts while knitting. They throw it down and pick it up at a whim! I can’t do that now, but one day, I will. I’ll work with various kinds of yarn and make different types of stitches. The practice will become easy.
So, there’s a way in which I’m in this place with TSK. It is giving me permission and more trust than it did before. As with the “too late” shift I wrote about, it is almost like the book is curious about me, asking more open ended questions. There is intimacy present, a gentle walking-along-together-on-a-beautiful-day conversation. “What do you see?” “Yes, that’s fine.” “Nice.” Since it is TSK asking these questions, already I hear them as coming from the particular and peculiarly bright place I experience asbeingTSK, and feel loved and understood–the opposite of corrected and scrutinized as a troublesome student it is hard to have around.
I’m tempted to write about guru yoga in this context, but will set that aside for now.
So I’m reading a book. Actually, since last writing about books here I’ve gone through around twenty, but this one seems fitting for the blog.
I’d never heard of Sophie Sabbage before this year, nor her first book about coming to terms with a terminal cancer diagnoses. Not to be flippant but I have always thought “I’ll seek out cancer comfort literature when and if I need to, thankyouverymuch.” Perhaps that has been a mistake. The descriptions of her diagnoses, and the treatments that come up occasionally in her second book, Lifeshocks, and how to love them (which isn’t focused on cancer specifically, but is sensitively informed by such), are some of the most fascinating. That she has the presence of mind to describe so specifically, what is happening to her, is weirdly empowering for someone like me, who finds it hard to stay looking into deep and heartbreaking problems that have no solutions. That’s precisely when I want to get busy with something else, move on to something I think I can affect.
Cancer is just one of the topics she presents to open in to the underlying topic of her life’s work, teaching the material of her menor, Dr. K. Bradford Brown. A friend who attended More to Life workshops twenty years ago has continued to integrate the message since then, which suggests something worth exploring.
About midway through, the title word itself >> lifeshocks << is beginning to replace another word in my mind: >> awakening <<. Lifeshocks may be a better word to describe what I’ve been personally studying for so long now, once the case is made. Awakening describes something that seems ‘good’ or ‘better’ than what was. It implies in itself, a judgement about what one didn’t know before, or about others. It IS meaningful, and close to what is meant, so I’ve embraced it until now.
It isn’t that it is wrong to use the word awakening when relating the stories of masters like Ramana Maharshi or Eckart Tolle, who were rendered ‘quite different’ upon enlightenment experiences, but lifeshocks describes what we all work with all the time, at varying degrees and scales, down to microseconds… each time an expectation is thwarted. In a sense, we are lifesthocks creatures, orienting and reorienting ourselves all the time, responding and redrawing anew.
This is what exposing lifeshocks give us: the chance to be fully authentic, to find our true path in life and to accumulate an inner wealth that no amount of material wealth can match. Whoever we are and whatever we are up to, they will hammer on our pretences and call us back to love….
– Sophie Sabbage
Many of the tools she shares from the course fall in line well with similar inquiry techniques taught by the likes of Byron Katie, but so far I like the gentleness of her approach more. It seeps in.
There are a few points in the book where I stopped relating to her very much, as the particular struggles of hiding her inherited privilege felt enviable rather than pitiable, but she was well aware of that when she chose to include those stories. In a way, they exactly illustrate the difference between what she is conveying and other like-messages, and form an intimate relationship with the reader.
~ Singing Gecko 