Category: Another’s view

From "A Mind At Home With Itself"

Question asked of Byron Katie; and her response.

"Mind is everything; mind is good," you say. Are you talking about awareness? Why do you use the word mind here? Why don't you ever use words like soul or spirit?"

"What is there to be aware of other than mind? So mind aware of itself is awareness. And when mind is aware of itself, it realizes that not only is it not personal, it doesn't even exist; its an illusion. Prior to "I" there was nothing.  The "I" comes second, out of the nameless first. The apparent mind that questions itself begins to understand where it comes from, which is pure love, or lack for a better word. So if it's not the song of love it's a distortion of the nature it was born out of."

As for words like soul or spirit, I don't use them because I don't know what they mean."

Her comment that she didn't know what spirit and soul meant, brought me up short. 

What do they mean?

What is my experience of them?

Where are they found?

What do they look like?

Feel like?

Compared to the engagement we have with our minds; how often are we in conversation with our souls? Can we do that?  What I have called my innocence – was that the soul?

Is the spirit equal to the awareness – are they interchangeable?

Is the soul who we were prior to obtaining a body and is that where we return?

Are Spirit and Soul words from religion?  Do we use them outside of what we call a spiritual experience?

Can we dialogue with them like we can with the mind.

If awareness can question the mind, can awareness question the soul?

This is all very intriguing to me.

She was also asked, "You say that the mind can never be controlled. But sometimes you say that mind is everything. Is the first mind the ego and the second mind awareness?"

"Yes, "Awareness" is a way of saying that the ego is perfectly understood. Awareness is never tricked by what the ego thinks. It always knows the difference between what is and what isn't."

I love that awareness is never tricked by what the ego thinks.  I agree.  In my experience, my greatest resting spot has been with awareness. I feel completely trusting in it. It is what I have called truth or reality. Awareness is.

And, this question.

"If someone asked you Subhuti's question – "How should people control their minds? – what would you say?"

"First, I would invite them to be aware of their stressful feelings.  A feeling is like the mate to a thought appearing.  They're like the left and the right. If you have a thought, there's a simultaneous feeling.  And an uncomfortable feeling is like an alarm clock that says, "You're caught in the dream." It's time to inquire, that's all. But if we don't honor the alarm clock, then we try and alter and manipulate the feeling by reaching into an apparent external world. We're usually aware of the feeling first. That's why I say it's an alarm clock that lets you know you're stuck in a thought you may want to investigate.  If it's causing you any kind of discomfort, you might want to inquire and do The Work."

There is a direct correlation between our feelings and our thoughts.  Oddly, we often think we can just think differently, without actually doing the investigation of whether a thought is true or not.

It is very interesting that our untrue thoughts can prompt feelings.

What I have noticed in my own life, is that I don't like the way stressful thoughts feel in my body.

I have learned how to reduce and eliminate stress by questioning the thoughts and not trying to subdue them or override them with a different thought.

There is integrity of a thought that has to be explored.

Is it it true for Me?

What I had found in questioning stressful thoughts, is that it is most often a struggle between what I want and what others are free to do.

Mostly, I would say, we want to control others, more than our thoughts.

When you literally give others their freedom, you actually gain peace.

This book and her experiences may be very confusing and challenge many beliefs and thoughts we have been taught about our self, life and our minds. Yet, what she says rings true. 

When I first read her books, I was relieved and anxious at the same time. It felt like I was cheating on my beliefs and thoughts I had about being in the world. 

She, however, was the first one who brought great relief to me, when my world tipped upside down. She agreed with what I had to accept. She didn't try to change it or me.

She was the awareness I needed to see what was.

She says, that inquiry arose in her.

The ability to question our thoughts.

It awoke in me too.

I don't recall prior to 46 years old ever being able to fully see the mind.

A mind without awareness is scary to me. She says, that only a confused mind hurts others.  I agree. 

The first book I read from her was, "Loving What Is."

As I sit here pondering how my life has been changed by awareness; I can't say the same for soul and spirit.  I just might have to agree; that I don't know what they mean.

My experience of them has been thoughts.

Whereas awareness has felt like a presence, a wisdom or knowing.

How interesting to ponder the landscape within.

"Every no I say is a yes to myself. It feels right to me. People don't have to guess what I want or don't want, and I don't need to pretend. When you're honest about our yeses and noes, it's easy to live a kind life. People come and go in my life when I tell the truth, and they would come and go if I didn't tell the truth. I have nothing to gain one way, and everything to gain the other way. I don't leave myself guessing or guilty."

"If a man wants to have sex with me, for example, I don't have to decide about my answer. I'm married and monogamous; my "No" pops out with a smile. I'm actually giving the man the greatest gift I can give: my truth. You can see that as a boundary, but if a boundary is a limitation, a contradiction, that's not how it feels to me. I see it as integrity. It's not something I establish; it's something that has already been established for me. Saying no isn't an act of selfishness; it's an act of generosity, both to myself and to the apparent other."

Byron Katie – from her new book "A Mind At Home With Itself

One of the greatest pieces of wisdom I heard from Byron Katie was that my No to you is a Yes to me.  

It feels so kind to me.

I love that I have the ability to say No.

It hasn't always been in my vocabulary.

The reason it wasn't in my vocabulary, was because I wasn't in my life.

Or, more true, the truth wasn't part of my life.

My ability to say yes OR no, is my greatest gift I have given myself.

I do not pretend.

For it would be a pretend Me.

I don't like how that feels inside of me.

Dishonest to me.

I can say yes to the hardest things and in doing so have created a self of integrity and it feels so good. For sure not limiting; but endlessly expanding.

What some see as boundaries are really self honoring or self defining moments.

I have said, and I still believe, that the opposite of being a victim or being abused etc, is the ability to say NO…to have the choice.

When we are in a relationship, where you can't say No, it isn't a healthy relationship.

The greatest gift we can give another is their ability to be authentic.

I love when my granddaughter says, "I don't want it".

It is her truth.

I honor it.

I don't try and change her mind. 

She is defining who she is.

The boundaries some see against them, are actually the defining boundaries of who we are.

Who you are is made clear by what you say yes to or perhaps your inability to say no.

My noes didn't create a contracting life; but they opened up the infinite possibilities of being me. I love my noes as much as I love my yeses. For they are all yes to me!

My noes are much more self-defining and feel extremely self-loving.

And, free.

I am able to freely express myself as myself.

The noes do create the outline of who you are.

"The Body Keeps Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D. is the most comprehensive book I have read about the affects of childhood trauma on our lives.  And, how the medical community is in the learning stages of how to effectively deal with adult children of abuse.

I am listening to this book, but ordered the hard copy to use as a reference.

Here is about the brain and trauma…  This is long but so insightful as to what happens in the brain.

"SHIFTING TO ONE SIDE OF THE BRAIN"

The scans also revealed that during flashbacks, our subjects' brains lit up only on the right side. Today there's a huge body of scientific and popular literature about the difference between the right and left brain. Back in the early nineties I had heard that some people had begun to divide the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn't paid much attention to this idea.  However, our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left."

"We now know that the two halves of the brain do speak different languages. The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential and analytical. While the left half o the brain does all the talking, the right half of the brain carries the music of the experience.  It communicates through facial expressions and body language and by making sounds of love and sorrow: by singing, swearing, crying, dancing, or mimicking. The right brain is the first to develop in the womb, and it carries nonverbal communication between mother and infants. We know the left hemisphere has come online when children start to understand language and learn how to speak. this enables them to name things, compare them, understand their interrelations, and begin to communicate their own unique, subjective experiences to others."

"The left and right sids of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways. The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth – the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved ones virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four."

"Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling."

Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. Without sequencing we can't identify cause and effect, grasp the long-rem effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are "losing their minds." In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of the executive functioning."

"When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past – they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen.  After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you "never listens to me." Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and over time our research demonstrated why."

"STUCK IN FLIGHT OR FIGHT"

"What happened to Marsha in the scanner gradually started to make sense. Thirteen years after her tragedy we had activated the sensations – the sounds and images from the accident – that were still stored in her memory. When these sensations came to the surface, they activated her alarm system, which caused her to react as if she were back in the hospital being told that her daughter had died. The passage of thirteen years was erased. Her sharply increased heart rate and blood pressure reading reflected her physiological state of frantic alarm."

"Adrenaline is one of the hormones that are critical to help us fight back or flee in the face of danger. Increased adrenaline was responsible for our participants' dramatic rise in heart rate and blood pressure while listening to their trauma narrative. Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, takes much longer to return to baseline, and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term healthy issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual."

"We now know that there is another possible response to threat, which our scans are't capable of measuring. Some people simply go into denial. Their bodies register threat, but their conscious minds go on as if nothing has happened. However, even though the mind may learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, the alarm system signals don't stop. The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize and collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs, and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep score…."

He goes on to say further on:

"For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of taking about distressful feelings can resolve them. However, as we've seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of doing that. No matter how much insight and understand we develop, the rational brain is impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier to talk about what has been done to them, to tell a story of victimization and revenge – than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience."

"Our scans reveal how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be "there" and did not know how to be "here" – fully alive in the present." Bessel

What we call mental illness, often is the affects of living through a traumatic childhood.  Our brains are literally affected – while our bodies truly keep score.

I highly suggest listening to this book, if you want to understand your own traumatization or that of someone you love.  This book makes complete sense to me and how inept our medical system is to help us navigate through our affects of early childhood trauma! 

Often the diagnosis isn't childhood trauma, but the effects of it.  

How our body responds and not the cause of it.  We often treat the symptoms but not the cause. And, how do we treat childhood trauma, compared to how we treat depression???

I love this book on so many levels!

Incredible information – The Body Keeps Score! What an amazing human body we live in!