D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 4
April 4, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Study A Simple Object
Today's Exercise: Study A Simple Object
[Preparatory Note: they say that most people "cannot see the forest for the trees". The fact of the matter is that they don't see the leaves for the tree either. It is amazing how little detail we actually absorb as we move through our world. For this exercise we are going to take a simple natural object such as a blade of grass, a leaf from a tree, a flower or a stone and study it in detail. This exercise will take about 5 minutes and you may want to procure your natural object ahead of time. You want to be sure to use a natural object because natural objects have greater complexity than something man-made like a ball bearing.]
Turn off your cellphone.
Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed and can think.
Establish a meditative breathing pattern of long exhales and equally long inhales.
Spend at least 3 minutes studying the details of your simple natural object. Notice its color, structure and texture. Feel it in your hands. Smell it. Notice its shape and the elements of its form including any substructures.
Think about how much detail there is in this single object and how many of these simple objects there are in the world. Notice that every one of these simple natural objects are just as complicated and detailed as all the others and yet none of them are exactly alike.
Spend at least 2 minutes considering how much of the detail of the world you actually miss by not paying attention to it.
Training Note:
One of the side effects of the post-Industrial Age is that we have become obtuse. We are so overwhelmed by stimulation, that we hardly notice anything. This was not the case for our ancestors. Life and death could hang in the balance of a bent blade of grass or a footprint in the dirt. While awareness can keep us safe from harm, it also increases the quality of our life experience. Martial artists train to habitually notice the hands of approaching people and can spot weapons before they are a threat, but they also notice the grace of an elderly woman's hands or the scent of a rose as they pass by. Awareness gives life intense dimension and detail deeply enriches the experience of living. We see this in many manifestations: the vintner who can taste the subtle complexity of wine, the chef who tunes into nuanced flavors, the carpenter who can see variations as small as a 1/64th of inch with the naked eye. Awareness is the the road to mastery. While you are jamming out on your iPod, you may be missing the particles of your existence. You can actually practice awareness. Start tuning into details by practicing the art of noticing on simple natural objects.
Karmic Benefits:
Wake Up, You Are Missing It: when we begin to become aware of the details around us, we simultaneously become aware of how unaware we really are. In the ancient times before mass media, noticing details could get you killed which gave everyone a great incentive to pay attention. As the world has become a safer place and is designed and redesigned to accommodate human thoughtlessness, we have very little incentive to pay attention to anything other than our internal dialogue or mind cartoons. We actually only observer a tiny fraction of our world. This makes us horribly out of touch and might explain why we are trashing the planet. The devil is surely in the details, but so is the magnificence of existence.
Step Out Of Vague Concepts And Embrace Intricacy: the intricacy of existence can be astonishing and beautiful. Of course, we do not notice this until we tune in. When we walk by a garden, we vaguely notice little wads of color and rarely take time to notice that flowers are actually intricate living organisms. This means that our conscious is filled with vague forms that are barely distinguished from one another and, in some instances, renders our entire world into one big blur. This is the by-product of mental laziness and it diminishes the quality of our experience of life. But it does not have to be that way.
The Richness Of The Human Experience Lies In The Details: when we step outside the blur we have the opportunity to truly embrace the miraculous quality of existence. We come to bear witness to complex interrelationships that make up even the simplest things. We also begin to notice that the structure of our world is not random, but rather, has an organization to it. Understanding this organization gives us the potential to harmonize with everything around us. It is only through awareness that we can truly know that we are alive.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
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Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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April 3, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Confront An Injustice
Today's Exercise: Confront An Injustice
[Preparatory Note: finding an injustice to confront will be the easy part of this exercise. The world is full of unkindness, unfairness, oppression and cruelty. In this case, you do not have to actually confront the person or entity that is creating the injustice face to face. It will suffice if you confront the injustice in some sort of public stand. This can be by leaving a blog comment in response to a publicly printed news article describing the injustice. It can be done by calling out the injustice in a public forum. The rules of engagement are that 1) your confrontation must occur in the public eye and 2) it must be done in a forum that is likely to be viewed or reviewed by the person or entity committing the injustice. You confrontation must be 3) non-violent, devoid of hate or the language of hate and 4) you must speak or write more than 100 words in defining the confrontation (tweeting will not suffice).]
Find a quite place to contemplate and establish a breathing meditation of long inhales and equally long exhales for 2 minutes.
With a relaxed mind, spend 5 minutes contemplating the acts of injustice that make you sad. Notice that we are not considering acts of injustice that make us angry. Acts of injustice that make us sad have already tapped into our natural sense of compassion and we want our confrontation to come from our compassion.
Select a forum to take your stand. Instead of taking a stand against the injustice, formulate your stand in favor of the thing that should exist in place of the injustice. This may take some thinking. Notice that you will have to weed through your own negative emotions to locate the positive statement that you are going to make.
Take your stand and fill the space occupied by the injustice with a statement of your stand for what should be in the space instead. Follow the rules of engagement noted above and make sure that your real name is associated with your stand. Make it clear to the world that it is you that is standing up for whatever you have chosen to champion.
Training Note:
Human beings are natural complainers. They can talk for hours about what is wrong without ever considering a solution to their woes. In a universe that is often indifferent to fairness, we tend to develop negative emotions when we see an act of injustice. This doubles the damage. There is now an injustice and a complaint, but still no antidote to the injustice has filled our thinking. Injustice must be confronted with its antidote in order to provoke a solution. An injustice confronted with a complaint is just a bigger problem. If someone is being treated unfairly, it does little to complain of the ill-treatment unless we can state affirmatively how the person should be treated. Consider these two statements: "fight racism"; "demand equality". One destroys and the other gives birth to something beneficial. True confrontation is never an assertion against something, but rather an assertion in favor of a beneficial alternative. This is a much more powerful way to remedy injustice in the world without creating additional damage.
Karmic Benefits:
Hate, Even Hate Of Injustice, Is Destructive: destruction comes from power being asserted against something that exists. An alternative form of change that avoids destruction is transformation. Transformation begins by asserting what should exist as opposed to asserting what should be destroyed. Transformation harnesses the natural syntropic power of creation rather than using destruction as a precursor to change. Destruction leaves wounds and wounds slow the evolution of transformation. The vapor trails of the two methods are substantially different and, often, so are the results.
It Is Much Easier To Stand For Rather Than To Stand Against: standing against something causes the opposition to push back. This enhances the conflict without doing much for resolution. This is not to say that conflict does not have a place in the evolution of the world, clearly it does. In many cases, however, conflict is often the byproduct of unskillful confrontation rather than a situational necessity. A skillful confrontation opens a path to resolution from the start.
Why Empower Your Opposition: because conflict empowers the opposition it is frequently self-defeating to use it as a method of change. When we push against the status quo, the status quo pushes back. Conflict favors the perpetuation of the status quo. Confrontation between an injustice and its alternative does not automatically frame conflict. Sometimes, stating an alternative provides a moment of illumination that allows confrontation to transform into agreement. It should be noted that confrontation and conflict are not the same thing.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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April 2, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Take A Contribution Inventory
Today's Exercise: Take A Contribution Inventory
[Preparatory Note: one of the side effects of the "Me" Generation is that we think that we are self-crafted people. This is utter nonsense. In fact, there is no such thing as a "self-made" person. Starting with your DNA, you are nothing more than the sum of the contributions made to you, though you may be able to claim some credit for how you have organized those contributions into the collage of being you call "self". The vast majority of us use names that we did not give to ourselves. We did not teach ourselves to read. Almost all of our knowledge of the world comes from someone else.
The decisions that we have made as to how to see the world and how to behave in it have been equally assimilated from others. We have followed examples of behavior, be they helpful and destructive, that we learned from others. Human being is a creature of assimilation and integration representing very, very little original work. We take into ourselves the thoughts and behaviors of others and assemble them in a way that creates some measure of variation and then pass our being on to others. This may actually prove to be a fundamental part of the entire evolution-provoking design our species.
The purpose of this exercise is to notice where the fragments of our being come from and to honor what we have assimilated that we consider to be honorable. In so doing, we actually empower these gifts of being and make them stronger.]
Take 5 minutes to step outside of your life in a quiet place. Turn off your cellphone. Establish sound breathing with long inhales and equally long exhales.
Reflect on the skills that you have that are useful to you. Write them down in a list.
Reflect on the things that you know about that are useful to you. Add these items to your list.
Reflect on the moments of great kindness and contribution that were given to you. Add these moments to your list.
By each item on your list, write the name of the person who was the source of the knowledge or kindness that you received. It does not matter that you actually knew the person who made the contribution. It does not matter whether or not you like the person who made the contribution. The object of this portion of the exercise is to simply identify the source of the contribution.
Take 3 to 5 minutes to review the list contributors and thank them in your mind. The point here is to have a moment of gratitude that is experienced simultaneously with the awareness of the contribution and the contributor. Make sure that you review each item individually and fully recognize the contribution as a gift and the contributor as a benefactor.
Training Note:
We live in the delusion that we are independent and self-defined. This could not be further from the truth. Human beings are actually more like cells in a larger organism than they are individuals. If you lived in a vacuum of being and received no contribution from anyone, you would die in a matter of hours or days – even now as a grown adult. Even something as simple as running tap water is a contribution that is made by hundreds of people. Even if you were living as a survivalist in the woods by yourself with a stone knife, your ability to survive would still be predicated on things that were taught to you. Newborn babies simply do not survive without contribution. A sea turtle can leave its eggs on a beach and its offspring will be born and attempt survival without contribution, but this is simply not the human condition. We are creatures that require integration with each other. We are elements of a social organism that thinks that it is a collection of individuals and thought is simply not true.
Understanding our "dependent origination" or essential interconnection is a vital insight to successful living. We did not get here by ourselves and will cannot stay here by ourselves. One of the by-products of the Information Age is the "atomization" of humanity; the tendency for people to seek isolation from others and to live alone. While very few of us could live in nature alone, most of us seek to benefit from our advanced technological society, but increasingly attempt to avoid the emotionally complicated process of actually being related to each other. More and more people are opting to avoid long-term sexual relationships, families and child rearing. We are increasingly building the delusion around ourselves that our existence is about the "me" and nothing else. Our skillfulness at sharing being in relationships and communities is atrophying. Teenagers are opting for "hooking up" to satisfy sexual needs without creating the traditional relationships that used to be the foundation of human society. As we slide deeper and deeper into singular virtual reality, we are losing the very thing that made us human in the first place – shared being.
Karmic Benefits:
You Are Not Alone, Not Even If You Want To Be: in our highly complex and integrated society, most of us would not survive for more than a month or so if society suddenly no longer existed. We rely on human integration not just for emotional support, but for nearly everything including water and food. This is nothing new. Human beings have always relied on basic communities to survive and have a very difficult time surviving without them. What is new to the human race is a trend toward "virtual isolation" – insulating ourselves from others in order to reduce or eliminate the emotional difficulty of social integration. It is an attempt to have the best of both worlds: the technology of a highly integrated society with an isolation often confused for solitude over which we believe we have singular control. While this trend appears to be an inescapable trajectory of human evolution, it is taking us out of balance with the biosphere and our own species.
You Are The Sum Of The Contributions Made To You: the delusion of self has most of us believing that we are unique works of art when what we really are is highly plagiarized assimilations. It is true that we each express ourselves uniquely and that being unique is very important to most of us because we need to be reassured that we are possessed with a self and that this self is worthy of the effort that we put into it. It is a cat chasing its own tail. The delusion of "me" is the ultimate source of all human suffering. This is not to say that we are fungible components of a uniform humanity. Far from it. What seems to be most problematic for human consciousness is that we seem to be stuck in a sort of bipolar dualism between the need to be an individual and the fear of losing our individuality by recognizing our membership in a community, society or species. We are intensely aware of our cognitive processes that are localized in our own minds and seek to protect self above all other things even though self is the sole and universal source of suffering for our species. Coming to know ourselves as an amalgam of contributions from others at least gives us some access to perceiving ourselves as phenomenal shared beings and accessing the benefits of this shared being.
Isolation Shrivels Your Existence: as we isolate ourselves emotionally and physically from others, we believe that we are safer and beyond the reach of the chaos and suffering that pervades our social awareness largely due to media saturation. The truth is that we actually become weaker because our coping skills begin to atrophy. The more we isolate ourselves, the more uncomfortable we become with social interaction. Instead of developing the skills that lead to effective living in a fully integrated social existence, we shrivel up into an increasingly intolerant persona that becomes increasingly agoraphobic over time. This is not evolution, but rather, something quite the opposite. Engaging society and our world despite the chaos and confusion is like hitting the gym for you mind. It is the arena in which we build life skills. Skill is the more evolved response to change, chaos and perceived risk — not hiding in bubble of virtual reality.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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April 1, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Write Your Epitaph
Today's Exercise: Write Your Epitaph
[Preparatory Note: this exercise requires very little preparation other than to set aside the time to do it and to understand the meaning of an epitaph. While epitaphs can serve many purposes including the making of jokes or to recite ancestry, this exercise is designed to have you contemplate what you life has meant so far. One could say that such a description of meaning is entirely subjective and it is in many ways. If your epitaph would read "here lies a pretty nice guy", presumably there would be some people who would agree and others who would not.
There are certain elements of our character that most people would agree are present and representative of us. If you are quiet and shy, no one would likely say "here lies the life of the party".
An epitaph for the living is chance to do a reality check on what is really showing up in your vapor trail. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, it is an opportunity to take a look at the course of our lives before they are over and while we still can change what will ultimately be the last words said about us.]
Find a quite place where you can think to yourself and will not be disturbed. This exercise will take between 5 minutes and an hour depending on whether you struggle with it or not.
Make a list of the 6 most important things that you feel could be say about your life it so far. (You can make you list longer if you would like.)
Select 3 of the things on your list and write them into a definitive summation of your existence to date. You selections must ring true int he ears of people who know you.
Read your epitaph to 2 close friends and get their feedback. (This part of the exercise is designed to limit self-delusion.)
Training Note:
We are generally quite detached from how the world really sees us. Most people tend to sanitize their view of themselves or see themselves in an exaggerated self-effacing light. The point is that we do not keep in mind what our lives are really about nor do we tend to give much consideration as to what our lives mean to others. This fundamental disconnection has us wander off into many directions, some less harmful than others. In this exercise, you must read your epitaph to at least two people and find out if it rings true for them. To do this effectively, you have to try to look at yourself in the way other people look at you instead of how you might see yourself. While others might not know about your secret inner being, the point is that only the being that touches others is of any real consequence. Your own assessment is simply a matter between you and your own internal self-image and is, therefore, fantastical.
Karmic Benefits:
What The Heck Are You Doing Here? Attempting to sum up your life in a few sentences forces you to dig into the most apparent meaning of you life. "Apparent" is an important distinction here because only the meaning that communicates to others really counts. People do not see participate in your self-image. They have their own image of you. If your internal image does not match how others see you then it is safe to say that either you are not actually creating that meaning for others that you think you are or you are not expressing it such that others know about it. This does not mean that others do not sometimes make up pretty twisted ideas about who we are. They do. They tend to be more objective, however, in their assessment of others, just like you are.
What They Say About You When Your Dead Is One Of The Most Profound Indicators Of How You Lived: we often fool ourselves that we know ourselves better than the people around us and in some ways this is true. But the story we keep about ourselves that is not shared by others mostly a fantasy. It is our impact on others that is the measure of our life as far as the world is concerned. Getting the internal version of ourselves to match the external version of ourselves can often be a challenge.
You Are Your Vapor Trail: your description of yourself is not nearly as accurate a the record of your life left behind in your vapor trail. The trail of impact you leave in the world as a consequence of your thought and action is the "reality" of your existence. Many a child beater saw himself a charitable being. While this is an extreme example, the truth is that we do not spend much time considering the impact that we have on others nor do we often view our lives from the outside in. When we do, however, our perception ourselves both inside our minds and in the outside world starts to align.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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March 31, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Create A Day Of Rest
Today's Exercise: Create A Day Of Rest
[Preparatory Note: this exercise works best if you can do it for an entire day, but if you cannot, you should try to do it for at least 2 hours. In the ancient times before the internet, not even slaves worked every day. In nearly every religion there is the concept of a Sabbath, or a day of rest and reflection. As human beings immerse themselves further and further into their own virtual lives, we find ourselves incredibly busy and yet producing very little of true value for ourselves. Older members of our society remember when things were different, when at least one day was reserved for church or temple, family gatherings and a reprieve from busy-ness. This allowed people to clear out their minds and reset their stress levels back to zero. The Sabbath was not just necessary for the worship of gods, it was necessary for the well-being of people.
Modern human beings are in a perpetual state of busy-ness. This is simply not healthy on a variety of levels. We neglect our family bonds. We neglect our need for real rest. "Real rest" means no cellphones, no televisions, no video games. It means to create a complete break from stimulation so that the mind can regroup. It means taking the time to engage your physical life with your bare hands and an unprocessed mind. It is to find the real you in the real world, if only for one day a week.
This is perhaps the most difficult Karmic Workout to date because to do this exercise you are going to have confront the virtual storm cloud the dominates your existence. Just to contemplate a day of rest, for some, is exhausting. A flood of things will come up that will threaten the time you would designate for this exercise. But you must confront one very important fact: the things that would displace a day of rest are really not that important. Not only are they not important, but they are probably trivial in comparison to taking a day to spend with your family, honor your ancestors, contemplate your life or other wise separate yourself from the hamster wheel of life. We have lost our ability to engage in true repose and it is killing off our humanity. Even if you don not want to, do this exercise anyway at least once.]
Set aside a period of time for real rest, ideally this would be a whole day.
Do not use electrical devices of any kind during the designated period unless it is a medical device needed for your survival.
Turn all communication devices off. You get bonus points if you go "full Amish" and not use any electrical devices in your house at all from sun up to sun down.
Stay home or go on a planned outing that does not involve technology other than transportation. If you travel, try to walk or ride a bicycle, but if you must drive do not listen to the radio. Picnics are perfect for this exercise.
Set aside at least one hour to consider the well-being of yourself and your family. This can be a conversation with family members or neighbors.
The day should be marked by gratitude for your life and the lives around you. Locate your compassion for family and friends, but for yourself as well.
If you find yourself thinking about work or projects, start your breathing exercises and clear you mind.
Training Note:
Modern people have almost no capacity for stillness and repose. This is not the natural state of humanity, but rather, a condition state of agitation that we have programmed ourselves to live with. Do not expect that this day of rest will necessarily be serene and comforting. In fact, you find it to be torture as you grapple with boredom, anxiety for not mentally tending to all of the trivial matters that you are attached to. A true day of rest takes practice. But like anything worth being good at, rest and repose become part of our skill set when we work at it.
Karmic Benefits:
Stand Down: without realizing it, you are being pounded with stimulation all day long and have almost no time consider what it all means. This mass of information causes us to rely heavily on our rational processes without allowing our intuitions and emotions the opportunity to digest the meaning of information. This can lead to a disconnect between our emotions and intuitions on one hand and our intellect on the other. The problem for a human being is that we are designed to use all of these process and not just some of them. Taking a break from the onslaught of information gives our mind time to adjust and balance itself. This makes us stronger and lends clarity to our understanding of the world.
Tune In: you can have a to-do list a mile long and be intensely focused on your email and text messages streaming through your mind and still be utterly unaware of what is happening in your life. Life happens in a physical world. Life does not happen in sound-bites or graphic displays of razzle-dazzle, but we get confused when we have immersed ourselves in too much abstraction. Breaking from the delusional world, even for a short period of time helps us preserve our perspective.
Make Repose Important: we kid ourselves about how important busy-ness is. It is sad, really, when you stop to think about it and we almost never stop to think about it. We do not set aside time to disengage for the fizz of our trivial lives. We do not take time to contemplate. If viewed from a distance the human race looks like a species caught in a collective hallucination. Returning to a base of natural consciousness is essential for mental balance and to the resolution of emotional and rational complications that can grow into large problems if left untended.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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March 30, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Fast For A Day
Today's Exercise: Fast A Day
[Preparatory Note: the human body was designed to go without food for days and days at a time. The average American can go nearly a month without eating. Having said that, if you have health issues such as diabetes, hypoglycemia and a variety of others, you need to consult your doctor before trying this exercise. If you have an eating disorder, your version of this exercise should be to eat a perfectly healthy diet for 24 hours. People suffering from anorexia or bulimia should never fast for any reason.
For this fast, we are going to ingest nothing but water for 24 hours. It is a walk-away fast meaning that we are not going to prepare by loading our diets before hand, we are just going to stop eating for an entire day.
You should prepare to take notes whenever you become conscious that you are fasting. You want to be able to watch your mind as you fast and writing is a great way to make sure that you don't just notice what is going through your mind, but rather actually formulate solid cognition as you notice.]
Stop eating. It is easiest to start a fast when you wake up and simply refrain from eating for the day. Starting a fast after you have already taken a meal in a day can make hunger pangs more intense.
Notice that when you get hungry when you are fasting that there is at least a mild level of panic associated with the sudden awareness of hunger and then the secondary thought that you cannot eat.
Make notes when you notice that you are fasting. The real purpose of this exercise is not about food, but rather, is to notice how your mind reacts to not eating. Make particular note when you are tempted to cheat.
When you resume eating the following day, do not gorge yourself. Make sure that you start with a light, but nutritious meal.
Training Note:
Food is woven into our thinking in a very broad pattern and it has become a much more complicated matter than simply acquiring fuel for survival. When we eat, he often have positive emotions and become as addicted to them as we do the food that we are eating. If fact, that is the primary process of addiction – the sensation of positive emotions associated with a particular activity such as eating, smoking or drinking. We become slaves to the need to feel good emotionally and that, in turn, shapes our behavior.
Fasting gives us the opportunity to see our relationship to food from a different perspective. When we fast, we get hungry and when we ignore this reminder to eat, we might even experience a little bit of panic. For many people, going an entire day without food can seem like a very hard thing to do. Your mind resists it partially out of a sense of threat. We are programmed to eat even if we have to kill to do it. This is part of our survival programming, however, it is not nearly as ferocious as the emotional thumb-sucking we do around the comfort that eating gives us.
Karmic Benefits:
Disconnect Yourself From Addiction: there is really only one reason to eat and that is to obtain the basic building materials that your body needs to rebuild itself and to acquire energy. In modern times, however, this is often the last reason that we eat instead of the first and only reason. Many of the emotional interconnections that we make with food can actually hurt us. We eat to feel happiness. We eat to relieve stress. We eat because we are bored. Breaking up these harmful emotional connections starts by seeing them for what they are and to see them, we have to call them out.
Observe Your Basic "Wiring": when we have a insightful relationship between mind and body, we eat purely to maintain our physical well being and never to to create an emotional response. We select foods that we need instead of those that we crave because they give us a "food high". More people die each year because of food addiction than from any other type of addiction including drugs and alcohol. Addiction is addiction. Seeing how our mind relates to food is the first step toward developing a purposeful relationship to eating.
Gain A Toe-hold On Living On Purpose: the fact that we get up in the morning and go to work, pay our bills and have a place to live leaves us with the delusion that we living on purpose. The truth is, if we were to look at it minute by minute, most of our lives are spent in a relatively chaotic state. We do not seem to have complete control over ourselves and the thought of going to the gym or eating properly can seem, for some of us, as a huge burden. Even for athletes, there are other parts of life that get ignored for the same reasons that non-athletes overeat. You cannot take control of you life all at once. It starts by noticing, distinguishing and reinterpreting your own behavior piece by piece.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
Enter your email address to subscribe to TLB's Daily Karmic Workout:
Delivered by FeedBurner
March 29, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Smash A Mental Block
Today's Exercise: Smash A Mental Block
[Preparatory Note: for this exercise you are going to need the assistance of at least two friends. Mental blocks are nasty buggers. They can keep you from paying your taxes, getting your car registration renewed, getting critical health check-ups. They can even kill you. All of our of thoughts start out weak until we start to consider how we feel about them and start associating our emotions to our thinking. The juice of emotion can provide momentum or it can paralyze us. When we live in denial or when we are resisting something, our negative emotions act like wedges under the wheels of our car. Because we cannot get traction and momentum, we are stuck in an inert state completely paralyzed. The secret is to avoid associating tasks with meaning that creates pain and discomfort. Complaining about a task is a quick route to procrastination.]
Spend 3 minutes identifying things that you know you should do but have put off and are likely to continue to put off. It may be calling your mother. It may be paying a bill. It may be cleaning your sock drawer.
Make a list of actions being thwarted by procrastination and mental blocks. You will know that this exercise is working because you will not even want to write down the items that represent true mental blocks. If you want a really good list, ask your spouse or significant other to make the list for you.
Pick the worst item on your list, but it needs to be something that can be done in an hour or two at most. Do not pick "paint my house". You can use the exercise again for that if you want to, but for now we are going to practice on something a bit less time consuming. Do not pick something that you were going to do anyway. That is would not be working through a true mental block. The uglier the mental block, the better.
Now call two of your closest friends and tell them about your mental block and ask them to check back with you by the end of the day. Give them open license to bug you as much as they want until you take the required action. Give them permission to to tweet, post or other wise broadcast your promise to complete the action, if you do not complete it by the end of the day.
Set up a penalty for failure. It has to be something painful such as buying your friends dinner if you fail or wearing a clown nose for week.
Notify your friends when your task is complete.
Notice what has changed in your thinking regarding the mental block you just cleared. Most people usually feel like a weight has been lifted off of their lives then they break through a mental block. But where was the weight that has not been lifted?
Review your entire mental block list after you have cleared one item from the list. Usually, overcoming one mental block gives you momentum to overcome others.
Training Note:
Mental blocks are more than a matter of not wanting to do something. Somewhere in our consideration of the actions that we need to take are ideas that we associate with some sort f pain or discomfort. Every time the action comes to mind, we immediately feel this pain or discomfort and in our haste to avoid pain, we avoid action. Often the discomfort is pure delusional.
Psychologists call this avoidance behavior. Avoidance behavior degrades the quality of lives because it has living with our heads in the sand. The purpose of this exercise is to smash through the block, but more importantly to study how we block ourselves in the first place. Yes, it is wonderful that we are getting past our procrastination, but it is even more wonderful when we can see how we set ourselves up to stall out and develop some skill in breaking through our mental log jams. What we are looking for is the meaning that we associated with the task that needed to be done. We can clear all mental blocks by simply changing the meaning that we have associated with the task that is creating the pain and discomfort. The process here, therefore, is to confront these negative interpretations of a task, distinguish the meaning and then change the meaning.
Consider something simple like the matter of someone not calling their mother. The meaning causing the resistance may not be the call itself, it may be some other thought that one might have related to talking to her mother. "She is just going to yell at me for …" "I will have to listen to her endless stories about …" "She always makes me feel like a five year old." The bottom line is in this person's mind talking to mom equals pain. Because the pain is vague and undefined, it has actually more strength then if it were distinguished.
The excuse is not the meaning we are looking for, but it is a byproduct of the meaning that we have assigned to the action. "She will make me feel guilty" is the excuse. "Talking to my mother makes me feel bad about myself" is the meaning that is actually causing the pain that is acting as a mental block. Ideas that give us pain usually very simple and straightforward statements of isolated logic, but get buried in mountains of internal narrative and are therefore often difficult to distinguish. "Calling mom hurts." "Making my bed hurts." "Doing my taxes hurts." This is the beginning of locating the meaning that we have assigned a task that keeps us from doing it. If we ask why this is so, we get our narrative, but a more direct method is to say "why have I made this painful – it is just a phone conversation, it is just filling out a form", etc. Seeing delusion as delusion destroys it. Without much additional effort.
Karmic Benefits:
Complaints Steal Your Motivation: complaining is a way of consciously asserting that something is problematic. When we whine about it, it gets worse because we have now attached emotional pain to our complaint. This means that every time we think about the subject, it is painful. Sticking to the facts helps. "All I have to do is wash the windows, I don't have to build a house" is the type of realization that puts tasks in perspective.
The Double Dilemma of Mental Blocks: we are usually feeling two distinct pains when we mental block. There is the emotional impulse causing the block and then there is the second layer of frustration with ourselves as we come to realize that the block is making things worse. Because this lives in our minds as a general sense of discomfort, our chances of breaking through get smaller the longer we let the matter go unattended. Confront the discomfort and you clear the path for action.
The Joke Is On You: the truth in the vast majority of cases is that we hold ourselves back by making up fantasies and delusions that we do not even realize that we were fabricating. When we confront real obstacles they are not nearly as frustrating as our imaginary ones. That is because they are tangible and we actually have great access to dealing with them. Ghosts are much scarier than real monsters because we are not sure what or where they are.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
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March 28, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Settle Your Accounts
Today's Exercise: Settle Your Accounts
[Preparatory Note: you can actually do this exercise with s spread sheet, but paper works just as well. You are going to prepare a ledger with two columns. The first column is titled "My Values". The second column is "Effectiveness Rating". Begin to fill in your ledger by listing the things that you believe in and your ethical, religious and moral values. Put them in order of priority with the most important ones at the top of the list. This will actually take more thought than you think. You might even notice, since we have spilled the beans on the effectiveness rating to come, that your values change as you consider the rating that you will have to give. DON'T CHEAT. Simply, list your values and things that you say you are about in order of priority and let the exercise work on you. ]
Prepare your values ledger with two columns. Mark one column "My Values" and the other "Effectiveness".
Take your time thinking about what your values really are without considering whether you are living into them or not. The idea is to take an inventory and physically write down what you believe in. Writing these values down is very important. Writing gives your values real presence in the physical world.
When you are satisfied with your value list, set it aside for an hour. Return to you regular routine. You will probably keep thinking about your values, but try to separate making the list from performing the evaluation.
Return to your list and start rating what percent of the time do you uphold each value in the first column. Move quickly through the list. Your first impression is likely to be the best.
As you rate your effectiveness at fulfilling each value, ask yourself what others who know you would say. Your rating is based on 0% to 100% effective. This is a preventative measure that will reduce the amount of self-delusion in the exercise although it will not eliminate it entirely. Try to be as objective as possible. You are not going to show this to anyone, so it is really a matter between you and your conscience.
When you are done with your effectiveness evaluation, average the percentages to give yourself a total score.
Spend at least 5 minutes contemplating the outcome of your effectiveness evaluation.
Ask yourself what your life would be like if you were perpetually aware of your your values effectiveness rating as you went through life.
Training Note:
Human beings love to make up stories about themselves. We make high-mined speeches to ourselves in the shower or in front of the mirror of what we stand for and imagine debates and conversations that we don't really have that depict ourselves to ourselves with righteous and even sanctimonious furor. But when push comes to shove, we are creatures of the path of least resistance. We do not stand up for co-workers; we do not volunteer to feed the poor – we just play that guy on TV in our minds. For most of us, what we believe and how we live is a mismatch. If we look at the principles that really guides our behavior we see a completely different person. Laziness, self-concern, greed and a host of other less respectable values show up in our vapor trail. How can we be so disconnected from ourselves? It is easy. We don't keep track.
Karmic Benefits:
Taking Inventory Is An Chance To Take Stock: rarely do we stop and take time out of the hustle of our lives to really think about what we believe in. Because we do not stop and think about it very often, we do not ground ourselves in these principles firmly enough to grow roots into them. Taking an inventory of your values may be disappointing at the beginning, but it is the first step toward identifying our values and then consciously standing behind them. This can change the course of your life.
You Are Not Who You Say You Are: our self-assessments usually cut in one of two ways, but are rarely accurate. Our value effectiveness rating is mostly likely either too optimistic or too self-effacing. While objectivity is nearly impossible for human beings in detached circumstances, a snow flake has a greater chance on the surface of the sun than we have of being objective about ourselves. This is particularly true about assessing our performance in accord with our values and principles. But this exercise is not meant for objective evaluation. It is meant to create insight. What we are really trying to notice here is the conversation in our minds about values and principles – or the lack of a conversation! We want to tune into excuses and rationales for why we do not live up to our own standards. We want to hear ourselves make the case for why we do live up to our own standards. Just having values on your mind gives them influence over the way you live. Behavior always follows what's on your mind.
There Is Nothing To Do But Think About It: when we notice that we do not measure up to our own standards, we usually start beating up on ourselves. This is a waste of time. First of all, self-demeaning thinking just prompts us to think about our standards less so that we don't have to be mad at ourselves. The purpose of this exercise is simply to place your values and your effectiveness assessment on the top of your "awareness pile" so that our values start to shape our behavior through the ordinary process of cognition. There really isn't anything to do other than think about what you want to be and look for opportunities to express the best ideas of your thinking.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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March 27, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Declare A War
Today's Exercise: Declare A War
[Preparatory Note: Our general understanding of war is that it is destructive, violent and usually senseless. And yet, the real meaning of war is that it is a committed stand that is so important that there is no backing down despite the possible consequences. In our modern times, we consider everything to be negotiable and will bend ourselves into pretzels to avoid conflict. Our "comfort culture" has de-evolved our emotional strength to the degree that most of us cannot cope with open confrontation. While some people try to dress up this fear of confrontation as "civilized", it is actually quite the opposite. There is nothing civilized about denial. Our addiction to comfort is shaping our ethics. We will tolerate considerable injustice in the world as long as it is happening to someone we do not know and does not interrupt our internet connection or our favorite reality TV show.
The true nature of war is not the fight against something, it is the struggle to cause something to exist. It is actually a force of life. Surely, we take stands to stop certain harmful things like violence or racism. But what we are really doing is trying to cause freedom from violence or racism to exist. In other words, we are trying to cause peace and tolerance. We often forget what our stand is when we get fixated on the destruction of what stands in our way. This focus on destroying obstacles is a form of ignorance. In the world of being, resisting or attacking something only makes it more present, not less present. One of the reasons that racism remains in our society is that people fight racism by hating racists, which is actually self-defeating because it is, in and of itself, racist. When you hate a racist you create two racists - the original racist and yourself. Like all wars of hateful means, you have just defeated yourself.
People lose focus on what they believe in. Rather than stand for something, a struggle soon becomes a conflict defined by standing against something. This is why in the 21st century just as many people die of torture and military conflict as they did in the Middle Ages. While many of us have been successful in avoiding conflict, we are not resolving harmful thinking and behaviors that hurt the human race and degrade the human condition. The greatest social leaders understand this principle. Martin Luther King did not preach that blacks should fight whites. Consider his words:
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
This is a declaration of true war. This is a demand that a set of circumstances will exist and calls for the destruction of nothing. It is not about what he is against - it is about what he is for. This is a warrior's true posture.]
Consider what is missing from the lives of the people you care about. It can be pretty much anything, but you will know that is worth standing for because it stirs your passion and ignites your love for life and humanity. Great causes are not issues. Great causes are movements of being founded on deep compassion and inspiration. It might be "nurture for all children", "harmony in my community", "freedom for all people", "health and well-being for my town".
Notice that a true statement of being worth standing for sounds foolish if limited to a single group of people. If it is not universal, is probably not worth declaring war over. If you find a speck of hate in it, you are looking in the wrong place. Spend 10 minutes considering what it is that you can devote yourself to celebrating with the hours of your life.
Declare a war to cause the being to which you are devoted to come into existence everywhere you can cause it to exist.
Enroll others into your "army" to help you cause the being you have chosen to come into existence.
Create a symbol of your cause and keep it near you to remind you what you stand for.
If the mere thought of this declaration makes you feel tired or uncomfortable, confront your apathy.
Training Note:
When we were in school, no one taught a class on causing transformation and change in the human collective consciousness. They taught us to do all sorts of mostly useless things, but the knowledge that we needed the most was largely neglected. In the ancient times before the internet, people banded together to discuss and cause the world that they wanted to live in. Nowadays, there is an increasing trend toward human "atomization", in other words, individual isolation. Increasingly, the effect of the Information Age is causing people to live alone and isolated from others so that we can live out our own cushy individual reality. This is a lifestyle that immerses us in delusion. Worse, the problems of humanity have not gone away – we just tend to ignore them. This detachment from humanity is causing our communities to atrophy. It is creating a world of 7 billion comatose individuals that are content to eat, sleep and delegate the majority of their experience to virtual reality. It is making us cranky and intolerant towards others who happen to bump into our personal bubbles of isolation. Consider the rage you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic.
Despite covering ourselves in ontological bubble wrap, we are still unhappy. Despite all of our entertainments and comforts, the world still presents us with bad news. We believe that our governments are supposed to be a concierge service catering to our prosperity. We believe that those pesky people fighting for freedom in foreign countries are an annoyance. We spend more time shopping for shoes on the internet than we do helping our neighbors.
This exercise is about declaring two wars. The first war is the war for human involvement and relatedness. In other words, to get to the point that you can declare a war to cause change in your world, you will first have to a declare a war to make yourself get up off the couch.]
Karmic Benefits:
Step Outside Of Your Dreamscape: if everyone in the world was actually engaged in the conversation for the quality of life openly and publicly, we would have far fewer problems in our society than we do. Why? Because problems do not exist when they are being engaged and resolved. Isolation allows troubles to grow, because trouble is not being confronted. The karma of waking up and managing difficulty is peace and prosperity.
Understand That You Are Responsible For World Peace And The Quality Of ALL Human Life: the world does not owe you anything and, in fact, it is not obligated to even accommodate you remaining alive. If you want to have a peaceful, prosperous and happy life, then you need to work that out among the chaotic forces that are utterly indifferent to your continued existence. Whether you like it nor not, you are responsible for the quality of not just your life, but life in general. If you think that you can take of yourself without accommodating others, you will find yourself with unhappy neighbors or in a war with nations that your selfishness has offended. The only way to provide for true peace and happiness is to cooperate with the rest of the human race that wants the very same thing. The more we neglect humanity, the more humanity becomes a threat to the well being of us all.
Shed The Laziness That Is Killing You And The People Around You: the most dangerous conditions in the human experiences are the ones that are neglected. Every atrocity, every injustice could be prevented if the world refused to allow them to happen. This requires, however, engagement, compassion and a willingness to live your life for the mutual benefit of people and not just yourself. Every moment in which you have ever suffered has been a moment that you spent thinking about yourself to the exclusion of all other things. When you get over yourself and engage in the mutual struggle for peace and happiness for others, your suffering disappears. Ask any mother who has experienced the excruciating pain of child birth whether or not it was suffering. Pain and suffering are not the same thing. Many painful things in life are actually devoid of suffering. Human beings are at their strongest when they stand up for the benefit of others. It is the greatest power in the human experience.
It May Be Fiction, But It Is One Heck Of A Karmic Workout.
Read The Lotus Blossom, D. M. Kenyon's fictional account of a teenage girl who turns off her cellphone and enters the very real, but mystical world of Budo warriors. Humorous, irreverent and heart-wrenching, The Lotus Blossom is an unforgettable tale of a Midwestern teenage girl's transformation into a budo warrior in the midst of the turmoil of the Information Age. Available in all digital formats, paperback and soon to be released in hardcover.
Available at : Amazon.com Smashwords.com Barnes & Noble
Share Your Experience:
Leave a comment when you have completed the exercise.
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March 26, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout – Confront Your Own Ignorance
Today's Exercise: Confront Not Knowing
1. On a sheet of paper (it is important to the exercise that you actually write this down) write down the answers to these 3 questions :
What is wrong with the political system in your country?
What is wrong with the global economy and whose fault is it?
What is wrong with your least favorite social or political group?
(You are not going to show this list to anyone so you might as well be as nasty about this as you want to be. The important thing is to state completely what your complaint is and be totally honest.)
2. Look at the answer to your first question. Where did you get that answer? In all likelihood, you are not an expert on the intricacies of governmental policy. No one person is. That is why government has whole departments. If we did not need them, we could just have a king and leave it at that. There are, in fact, very few people who can say that they are experts in governmental policy and those guys don't even agree as to what the problems are. The truth is that the state of politics is horribly complex and you don't know why much of anything is the way it is. It has not stopped you, however, from having an opinion about it. Consider where your opinion really came from?
3. Look at the next item in the list. If you don't understand politics, you surely don't understand global economy. Do you know what a credit default swap is? How does the Grecian debt default effect the Euro and why is the valuation of the Euro important to the price of beans in your country? If you don't know the answers to these basic questions, you have no idea why the global economy is the way it is. One thing is for certain, it cannot be reduced to the one or two sound bites that make up your opinion on the subject. Where did you get your opinion and is it really your opinion?
4. Look at the last item on your list. Is the group that you have a problem with an "us" or a "them"? Odds are that it is a "them" and this means that you are not an insider to that group. Do you know what it is to be a member of this group with which you have a problem? Do you know what it is to be a black male or a white Evangelical? If you don't, how could you actually "know" what you are talking about? The odds are that you don't, but it has not prevented you from having an opinion just the same.
5. Spend 5 minutes contemplating the following:
When you don't know something you speculate and formulate a speculative opinion.
When you speculate, you hold your speculation to be fact even though it is fantasy.
When you don't know something, you are really vulnerable to the opinions of others and the odds are they don't know what they are talking about either.
You can be easily conned into animosity, anger and hate when you do not know about an important subject that effects you.
Most of the animosity that you feel in your entire existence is over things that you do not truly know about.
6. What would happen if you just lived in a space of "I don't know about that"? First of all, how would it feel once you got past the fearfulness?
7. Consider that not knowing is better than living with a hateful superstition.
Training Note:
There is nothing easier to manipulate than a mob of unknowledgeable people. You can get a mob of the ignorant to start wars. You can get a mob of the ignorant to abuse targeted social groups. Ignorant people can be fed opinions that feel good to them, but are not based on fact. You can get them to murder Jews. You can get them to starve children to death. The history of the human race proves that the most dangerous force in the human condition is ignorance that is undistinguished as ignorance. When you don't know that you don't know something, you are far more dangerous to others because you mistakenly act with certainty. We only kill when we think we know what a thing mean. Consider that the chaos of the rapidly changing Information Age is not really being caused by things being wrong, but by people believing that things are wrong because they do not truly understand them. Apocalypse is born of ignorance, not clarity.
Karmic Benefits:
Knowing That You Don't Know Is Not Ignorance: most of us know that we don't know how to do brain surgery. This is a very good and useful piece of information that prevents us from cracking open each other's heads to try to fix them. Because we don't know, we go looking for answers outside of ourselves. We consult experts like brain surgeons who do know about brain surgery. Knowing that you need a brain surgeon is almost as valuable as being a brain surgeon because it gives you a clear path to the knowledge that you seek.
Not Knowing That You Don't Know Makes You Doubly Blind: when we don't know that we don't know we are completely lost. We take action without information, skill or clarity. We do huge damage because our actions are nearly random responses to a specific set of circumstances. Three hundred years ago, everyone thought they knew that crop failures were caused by women in their villages practicing witchcraft. They murdered these women by the scores. What will we figure out a hundred years from now that will make us look equally foolish. There will be many things that we did not know that we did not know that will cause history to remember us as fools.
Even A Blind Man Can Make His Way Down The Street: knowing that you do not know gives you power to adapt to your circumstances. Just because you cannot see does not mean that you cannot be functional. Knowing that there are unseen factors in your world allows you to proceed with caution, but proceed just the same. We are then free to adapt to our blind spot and work around it. You don't need to know what is in gasoline to know that you shouldn't drink it.
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