Reason Breeds Insanity

Today while meditating, I think I stumbled on a truth about myself: It takes me a long time to settle down. Part of this style of meditation is learning to settle on your breathing while letting your thoughts roll along behind them. Dr. Wolfe used the analogy of driving. When we drive we pay attention to driving the car, but we have conversations and we think about other things. Our attention remains on our driving no matter how invested we are in those conversations. Last night, and again this morning, I realized that my attention can remain on my breathing while I am thinking about other things and it takes me this place somewhere between being awake and feeling asleep. Strange noises startle me there, but my thoughts seem clear and concise. They seem like they are running on a projection screen. Dr. Wolfe compared it to a movie theater where the image is being projected onto the front of the screen, but it seems to me to feel more like one of those backlit projections where the image shows through the screen. I say this because when you project something from the front, if someone walks in front of the screen you see a shadow rather than the image. If you project it form the back of the screen, if someone walks in front of the screen you get a clear picture of them and the movie. It is like they are moving together and you can see them both, but you aren’t distracted and no part of either image is compromised. Call me crazy, but that is how meditation is. I can tune in to my breathing like a backlit movie, but the other thoughts can walk in front of the screen without compromising the image of the breathing or casting a shadow on that image. My problem with this then? I get to this point at the very end of the time right before the chime sounds to signal the end of the meditation. I am sure it takes practice to make this happen earlier, and I am willing to wait.

I have noticed one almost instant benefit of meditating: I find that I can concentrate better in interpersonal communication. I usually have a hard time focusing on what people are saying without letting my mind wonder, but today when I had coffee with Amber, I was very real and present with her in a way that I haven’t been with people in a long time. I feel like it is tempering my moods (the highs and lows of it all) for which I am sure Becky will be grateful. For many reasons, I feel like I am tuning in to myself and the earth. If you have ever been in the woods and felt like the trees were speaking to you, that is how I feel. It isn’t just meditating.

I am at a place in my spiritual development where I feel like I can release some more of those constraints. I mean being hemmed in by regulations. I am at a place where I can say that I think there is more to spirituality than can be contained in what we consider as Christians to be holy writ. I have known this for a long time, and I could say it for a while, but to really feel like it is okay to express it out loud and to admit that I am not scared of going to hell because I don’t really even think it exists. That is new. I am okay with the idea that God may reuse my soul. I am fine with thinking that my dead body could decompose to feed a tree or a worm. I am okay with not knowing or pretending to know what happens next.

Dave talked Sunday about simplicity. Why DO we make things so much more difficult than they need to be?

Part of trying to become a professional and part of attempting to carve a place in academia is giving papers at conferences, but I must say that one should write the paper before being accepted to a conference. You see, I have been accepted to our own local conference PCM, and it is in three weeks, but I haven’t written the paper for it yet. I also haven’t even started my stuff for PCA, and I need to find somewhere that has Inside Brookhaven Obesity Clinic on video. I can find most of the episodes on YouTube, but I am not sure if that is the appropriate means through which to show video clips at a conference. I guess I will take my chances. Maybe if I write to TLC and ask for copies of the first season they will send them to me? I am not sure. So all that said, I have to do my presentations for Will’s class and for Pat’s class soon, as well. I suppose I’ll spend all afternoon doing that.

Meditation, I think as my friend Myra’s son, Phil, might say may be the key to all of this. I have only done it four times, and already I feel calmer and more well adjusted. When I meditate, I feel this warm sensation come over me; my body literally gets hot enough, so that were my hands were resting on my legs is hot to the touch. I am not sure that is the physiological response that one is supposed to have when meditating, and actually, I think it may be the exact opposite of the one I should be having since most of my friends got cooler.

One more reason to love my pastor. He is filled with compassion.

Today, I spent the day meditating, going to our local co-op, White Feather Farms, having coffee with a good friend, and wishing that I could somehow make my grandma better or petition God to let her die. Tomorrow is her 85 birthday and she will spend it lying somewhere in the already but not yet. She doesn’t remember any of us. She just lays there moaning. I had to pour grape juice into her mouth and coax her into swallowing it, wipe her mouth, and then coat her lips with waxy chapstick so she wouldn’t pick her lips right off her face. She can’t suck from a straw. She can’t understand why we want her to eat. She asked me, yesterday, if my grandpa, who has been dead for 30 years, told me when she gets to go home. I hate it that other people have to make decisions for her, and it might sound mean that I want her to just go ahead and die, but I want her to be able to be with my grandpa. I don’t want for people to have to pour things in to her mouth and make her swallow. I want her to be feisty and bowling and baking and cooking her really bad over-cooked green beans or her amazing Christmas cookies. I want her to bitch and fuss over the way my mom and I make baklava. I want her to keep buying jogging suits even though she has a closet full of them already: Goolagong. I am not heartless, I just can’t stand to watch this crabby old lady laying there like a two-year old grunting out her answers from between her gums because she doesn’t remember what her teeth are for.

EDIT:
Stuff from my other, old, defunct blog. I love chocolate chip cookies. I grew up watching cookie monster, and I find absolutely nothing wrong with his insistence that cookies are amazing! I could eat pizza, spaghetti, chocolate chip cookies, or ice cream for every meal. I would and do argue that these four foods are possibly modern-day manna given to us by God for our sustenance. Perhaps, I don’t wake up to find chocolate chip cookies covering the ground in the morning, but I do try to pretend sometimes that I have my own spaghetti tree. Have you ever read the kids book More Spaghetti I Say? While it does err on the side of the carnivorous, I have to say it is how I feel about spaghetti. Really, it’s the way I feel about most food.

Since becoming a vegan a mere 19 days ago, I have had this intense craving for chocolate chip cookies precisely everyday, but more intensely this week since, as I have indicated, I have been feeling a little frumpy and PMSish. PMS always incites the chocolate fervor that lies dormant in me the rest of the time. I may have said before that I like caramel or vanilla flavor ten times more than chocolate. But there is something about putting it in a cookie that really turns me on a bit. I was inspired by some mix that my brother had in the car. It was bananas, chocolate chips, nut, etc, so I decided to go out on a limb and make my cookies with bananas, too. They are fabulous! And, since I used carob chips, they are absolutely animal free!

I also get the bonus of Becky’s homemade spaghetti sauce, which is the best sauce I have ever had and different every time. I have to say that I am excited about dinner tonight. And since More Spaghetti I Say is about monkeys and monkeys eat bananas (or in the case of the book, spaghetti), I should have myself a little after dinner reading time too.