You're Full of It

I walked through the forest and onto the shore of the Puget Sound by moonlight, and through the trees, I could see the moon, shining in all Her glory just on the rim of a cloud. Light shone humbly through the trees, gently guiding my footsteps through the mud. And as I stepped onto the beach, I saw the water, calm and peacefully offering me a reflection of Her. I looked up at the moon. She is big tonight, powerful and enchanting. I almost could not bear to move my eyes away from Her. And I thought, how much I'd love to take your hand and walk through this forest, to guide you to the shore and sleep beneath the moon. I thought, Her beauty and her force in the universe drives me forward, and it drives me to you. Her power is something beyond words- this lack of words is a feeling I'm becoming ever more familiar with.

Love, too, is a powerful force.

Thank the god and the goddess for the moon, for love, and for the words that never give up in trying to express those things which are beyond form.

Orissi, Polka, Hora, Tango- whatever...

"Hard times require furious dancing."

There are billions of cells in the human body, constantly adapting to the temperature changes, the changes in acidity, the pains that come and go, the memories that flood the body, the sensory stimuli, and all manner of things going on throughout the body, mind, spirit, and external environment. We are constantly engaging with new experiences, be it internally or externally. We experience our environment through our bodies; sounds through the ears, visual stimuli through the eyes, taste through the tongue, etc. All these stimuli are perceived by chemical and electrical signals in the body from one cell to the next- from sense organ to brain. Now, let's make a distinction here between mind and brain (and you know how much I hate distinctions). The brain refers to the anatomical, physiological gobbley-gook of neurons that looks like gray spaghetti. There is a general consensus in the scientific community that the brain is one of the most complex areas of study in the human body. The mind, however, is not as simple. There is an old story in Zen tradition where a student tells his master that he has no peace of mind. His master responds by saying, "Point and show me your mind and I will pacify it for you." Confused, with one finger extended, his student, doesn't know where to point, and says, "I can't find it!" He realizes that the mind is intangible, the master responds, "Then it is already pacified."

The mind is not a physical entity, it is without boundaries, and it is outside of the realm of space. The mind is the capacity for connection, it is the act of connecting image-to-image, image to feeling, person to person, and it is the network of those connections. The mind is the composite of maps made by the brain of images from our environments, signals and messages sent and received in the body and between body and environment. These maps incorporate the information of the raw stimulus, the way in which that stimulus was received, and the other maps with which this map overlaps.
The chemical and electrical signals that communicate the external world to the brain are simultaneously or sequentially being sent to the rest of the body. The body responds to these signals with alterations in cell structure, responsiveness, and release and/or absorption of certain specific chemicals. These cellular adjustments to the information of stimulus cause further adjustments in other cells, and etc, etc, until an equilibrium has been regained. The subjective experience of those cellular responses is the emotion. The emotion is drawn into the map of experience of that stimulus.

One of the things included in that map is the position of the body when stimulus struck. Now obviously, for most experiences, that is not a static image (we move), and those movements, from the cellular level are mapped into the mind's image of our experiences. The cellular adjustments to stimuli also influence our body's physiology (tension in muscles, change in metabolic rate, temperature, etc., which are also mapped. So in the future, our mind can re-engage maps or parts of maps and does, all the time. However, in -re-engaging maps, we may also be re-engaging emotions, as well as physical tensions that become tendencies, and then become habits, and then become a part of our personalities. We develop chronic tightness in the shoulders, for instance, after a particularly traumatic experience that we keep reliving in various situations, until one day, with mindful awareness (and possibly under the guidance of a professional), we can slowly allow the tension to dissolve, as we rediscover the roots of the tension, and work towards a mental and emotional equilibrium. This is often referred to as the “memory of the body” (for more information seen The Body Remembers by Rothschild), and this kind of therapy is often engaged in somatic psychotherapy, and also in trauma therapies.

Alice Walker’s collection of poetry is titled, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, and in her recent work, Overcoming Speechlessness, she refers tells the story of working with CODEPINK and being in community with Palestinian women in 2006 on the Gaza Strip. She testifies to the stressful and heart-wrenching journey even to get there, and then she takes the reader through the pain, sorrow and incredible connection to women in tragedy. After sitting and listening to these women recount their suffering and supporting one another in the fact that they have survived it, all the women “went across the hall to a big common room where music was turned up full volume… Sitting didn’t last. Without preamble [Alice Walker] was pulled to [her] feet by several women at once, and the dance was on. Sorrow, loss, pain, suffering, all pounded into the floor for over an hour. Sweat flowing, wails and tears around the room. And then, the rising that always comes from such dancing; the sense of joy, unity, solidarity, and gratitude to be in the best place one could be on earth, with sisters who have experienced the full measure of disaster and have the heart to rise above it. The feeling of love was immense. The ecstasy, sublime. [Alice Walker] was conscious of exchanging and receiving Spirit in the dance… this Spirit that knows how to dance in the face of disaster, will never be crushed. It is as timeless as the wind. We think it is only inside our bodies, but we also inhabit it. Even when we are unaware of its presence internally, it wears us like a cloak.”

This is a testimony to the power of movement to awaken within us that Spirit which we inhabit, and that heals. It is the power to unlock the maps in the brain that allow for emotions of love to flow through the body, and which are a necessity in the exchange and in the receiving of Spirit.

We are constantly dancing. The cells within our bodies dancing with each other, with other substances, dancing in a balance with the maps of our minds, our minds dancing with the brain, the brain with the body, and body with environment. So really, all times require furious dancing.

Pacific Northwest: When it Rains, it Pours...

When I missed registration for classes when the quarter started, I went into freak-out mode big time. There were tears, there were moments I thought that if I didn't get a hold of my breathing, I would have a panic attack, there was the overarching umbrella of fear, uncertainty and despair. But there was also a dose of faith, small though it was, it was there.

That night, my dad recounted to me a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a lesson in perspective: "...and as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him."
--
And now, two weeks into the quarter at school, I've been admitted into a program in which I didn't think there was space for me, and I've been assigned to a professor in another class who is more than willing to work with me on an independent project. Not only that, but I'd also hoped (before being admitted into the program I'm in) to take a Developmental Movement Therapy class and had approached several health clinics looking for volunteer opportunities- all to no avail. Until today- when the professor of the DMT class asked if I would be interested in taking (or auditing) the class, and the Natural Health Clinic contacted me about volunteering.

You know what they say about the Pacific Northwest...
When it rains, it pours!

although the weather has been looking brighter these days, too...

Stranger Than Fiction

I've written about language in this blog before, but I'd like to revisit a thought;

The construction of communication begins with a sensation, a feeling or an experience; then whatever biases, previous experiences and emotional attachments shape the energy generated by that experience to then be translated into thoughts using whatever language we've happened to be exposed to. Then, it gets really crazy. Whomever we've been speaking to, then filters, subconsciously, what we've said using their own biases, previous experiences and emotional attachments to translate the words we've chosen into energy (a thought, or new belief) that is usually completely different from the sensation or belief we began with, and had wanted to share.

[I heard an expert on ancient Sanskrit texts speak the other day about how careful we must be to take responsibility for what we hear. He told us we did not have permission to quote him, we only had permission to say, "I heard Salvatore Zambito say..." because he had been confronted so many times with accusations of things he hadn't said, but had only been heard saying.]
An example:
My father used to encourage myself and my sister in making difficult moral choices by telling us, "The right thing is usually the thing that's hard to do." However, my sister and I had both, somewhere along the line, developed the belief pattern that we were undeserving of certain things, and that pleasure and joy were not intended for us. Thus, we translated my father's advice into the belief that the thing that is hard to do is the right thing to do.

One of the results of this, is that I've developed a very hard time reading fiction. Fiction to me, has felt like a waste of time, a luxury I can't afford, decadent and useless. I do, however, LOVE to read. I love to read books that inform me. Stories of made up people make me anxious, and it has felt to me, only a step or two above reality T.V.

Cut now, to the chase: I'm reading Mists of Avalon, the Arthurian myth. And it's great. But it is not of my own accord. The Mists is required reading for a course called, Dance of Consciousness, and at first I was wondering, "Why in the world are we reading THIS," but I'm beginning to see through self-awareness as I read, how my consciousness is altered. And although, I had taken great pride in my aversion to fiction, thinking myself too sophisticated for make-believe stories, (I remember laying at the beach with a friend who was reading the Gossip Girls series, while I read about the contributions of quantum physics to medicine in The Biology of Belief, by Bruce Lipton (a phenomenal read that changed the course of my life, by the way)) I find myself now, unable to put the Mists down.

I think, it has something to do with the book being required of me- my own value in education, trust in my professor, and my work ethic are all working against my aversion to fiction and, lo and behold- it has lead to my appreciate of it!

I have been reading for about a week now, and am about 250 pages deep. The first night I read, I was up until 2 in the morning- without having noticed it (and my friends have nicknamed me grandma for my early sleeping schedule!). Despite my usual habit of having background music play while I work, I felt compelled (after discussing with a friend the effects of multitasking on the brain) to read in silence, which, after several minutes of reading, was suddenly filled with the voice of my imagination, narrating the scenes, hearing the sounds of the story; it wasn't silent anymore.

And as I read the words that echo feminist thought twisted with white-supremacist tradition, the words whose shadows fall over centuries of telling and retelling, I could see the words' foreshadows into their future- my present moment, and the truths of this mythical world supposed to have existed millennia ago, seem to be true for me, now, too.

Dance of Consciousness

The word consciousness is commonly defined as "an alert cognitive state in which one is aware of oneself and one's situation." We use the word when referring to someone's concussion, self-esteem, or mindfulness. It is a term that permeates the physical, emotional and spiritual bodies. In fact, these images are three of the images that come up on the very first page of Google Image search results when prompted with "consciousness" as the search word. These images represent the physical, psycho-social, and spiritual components of consciousness.
C. Robert Cloninger draws distinctions between consciousness, awareness, and, cognition in his book, "Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being,"

"Awareness is a synonym for consciousness... Furthermore, the words aware and conscious both refer to our sense of recognition of something in relation to our self. However, the word conscious emphasizes feelings associated with inner recognition. A third word, cognizant, emphasizes outer recognition on the level of reason and intellectual knowledge rather than on the level of intuitive feelings... Intuition is defined as immediate apprehension, or direct perception and recognition, independent of any reasoning process. In other words, intuition is an inner sense or senses that act like an in-built mirror of our self and the world in which we live."

Studying consciousness involves the integration of neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, physics, genetics, physiology, and chemistry, and undoubtedly other fields as well. The subject of consciousness is often charted as the territory of religion, and in a society hypersensitive to political correctness and freedom of religion (thank goodness!), we become lax in moral and spiritual development. This is partially due to fear of offending others or confrontation of our beliefs (which just goes to show the determination with which we believe things), and partially due to the laziness that arises when presented with a seemingly overwhelming and challenging task; such as health, enlightenment, or changing beliefs and behaviors. We get knee-deep into relativistic fallacy and shy away from taking a strong stance in what we believe, and have no way to encourage people towards growth. Now, I'm not supporting religious dictatorships, but merely suggesting that we begin to raise these questions in homes, schools, and public forums.


What does it mean to have consciousness?
How do we "raise consciousness"?
How do we measure levels of consciousness?
And why should we care?

Well that's just what I plan on finding out. Stay tuned...

It's All Uphill From Here

In case you haven't checked out the page on my blog; Bike to Build: in the Himalayas- do it now. I'll wait.

...



Pretty cool, right?!

Well yesterday, I started training. I did a 12-mile road bike ride starting at about 800ft elevation, probably without much gain, although those hills are killer.
A little reflection on yesterday's ride:

I remember hiking about a year and a half ago in the Columbia River Gorge in Northern Oregon with my sister. My sister is stronger and faster than me in almost everything. This particular hike was when I really came to peace with that. Always about 5-10 paces behind her, I was huffing uphill: the sound of my breath overpowering the sounds of birds and soft rainfall around me and failing to smell the fresh air by breathing deeply in and out of my mouth, my glare was down at my feet, making sure I didn't trip over anything as I tried to hurry my pace to catch up with my sister. There came a point where I stopped trying so hard to match her footsteps. I took a breath in through my nose, looked up at the beautiful temperate rain forest around me, and most importantly, I stopped berating myself. The voice of, "I can't," quieted, and I could hear my footsteps on the wet leaves, my breath, the birds, the kiss of water against the treetops.

I wrote previously about a short backpacking trip I took last summer in Colorado with my boyfriend, and how we stopped just above a pretty steep pass and he asked me how I felt. I answered, "I feel inadequate, like I can't do this. Frustrated. Tired." Or something along those whiny lines. He looked at me, and said, "Would you shut up?" I was slightly taken aback, and in that moment I caught a glimpse of my surrounding environment at 1200 feet in altitude in the Colorado Mountains, snow covered peaks, the sun just over the crest. And I thought, "Wow. I've been harping on all this negativity, when THIS is surrounding me?! What a waste of energy." I looked back at my friend, and thanked him for telling me to shut up.

While biking yesterday, after about 40 minutes of this somewhat steady uphill ride, my mind and I were deeply entrenched in some ugly warfare. That same, nasty "I can't" voice was louder than my breathing (which was pretty hefty), and I was about ready to give up on the goal I've set to bike 480 km from Manali to Ladakh, India. Then I reached the top of the hill (one of many), and again took in the view of the sun peaking over the clouds beyond the mountain peaks, the river rushing past and the rich smell of manure that I've come to love. Then I kept going.

On the way back, a mostly downhill ride, my riding partner (the same gentleman who so lovingly told me to "shut-up" last summer) commented on my supremely improved attitude. I reminded myself of a hike with my sister where she observed that she is always in a much better mood when the hike is descending rather than ascending. In other words, downhill = happy. As we rode our bikes near top speed, he asked me why I was in such a sour mood earlier.
I loosened my grip on the brake, and proclaimed, "IT DOESN'T EVEN MATTER!"

So while, I'm still unsure of my capability to ride almost 300 miles through dirt roads in Northern India with a top altitude of 17,580 ft., I haven't given up yet.

"Eduventurism"

I have not been enrolled in any traditional educational institution since early December, and while I definitely miss the atmosphere of a community of learning, I've not stopped learning by any stretch of the imagination. One of the greatest things about not being in school is the amount of time I have available for leaisure reading (although most of my leisure reading prompts the people around me to ask me, "is that for school for or fun?"). It's amazing to me how lost this pleasure had been for me; this idea of reading for fun, for the sheer beauty of mental stimulation and entertainment. It seems like our lives in the 21st century are so full of constant over-stimulation in the form of media, electronic devices, and just the general underlying stress of our daily lives (very aptly described by Dr. Candace Pert in Molecules of Emotion, that the thought of engaging more mental energy to read seems either daunting or exhausting. Considering, especially that the general social attitude towards reading stems from the experiences starting as young as 5 or 6 years old when the teacher pulled the pen out of your left hand and told you draw with your right hand, or in middle school when summer reading assignments are about as boring as they are obscure and the intentions of such assignments are far from child-oriented. Reading is seen as a task, met with responses of children watching their weekend plans destroyed.

And yet when we are given the luxury of "free time," and the option to do with it what we please, it may be surprising what we end up doing. For example, I'd been working in retail, about 50 hours a week, three of which was spent on the same shift as a 17 year old, high school student, a very sweet boy, we'll call him Greg. Greg was preparing for the HSPAs, a state-wide test given yearly to keep track of the progress of students etc., and he brought his "practice problems" to work one day after school in case there was any down-time. I watched him do a couple of problems before jumping up and asking him to make me copies of his homework- I wanted to do some math.
Let me repeat that. I wanted to do some math. I hated math in high school and I haven't taken a math class since senior year, in fact, I haven't taken a math class seriously since junior year. And all of a sudden, the prospect of figuring out how fast train C was going from point A to point B was not only challenging, but fun.

Malcolm Gladwel talks about teh variation in success, in his book "Outliers" (which I highly recommend), and he discusses the widely-held belief that Asians are better at math. His argument is that because Asian languages have a more logical numbering system (ie, twentyone is literally "two-tens-and-one") and because the words for numbers are shorter, and therefore take less time to say (the human brain can only easily remember what can fit into a 7 second chunk of time), Asians have a leg-up on what most Europeans, or at least, Americans have difficulty with- math. His argument suggests that it is not something innate about Asians, but their environment that allows them to hone better math skills over time. (Gladwell presents these points in a much more concise and understandable fashion with more detail.)

This argument gives us hope, because it means that, like Asians and math, it is not necessarily the information presented in schools, but the environment in which we are placed to learn. This is one of the biggest reason why I myself have loved college. The incredible opportunity to be engaged, constantly, with other students, thinking, learning, experimenting, exploring; it is a unique community- one that I have missed during my time off from institutional forms of education. Other aspects of school have been, thus far, less inspiring. While we all learn relatively huge quantities of information in school, some of the most important lessons we ever learn are not the ones taught in class rooms, and even though I learned a lot of very useful and interesting information in my old college (hereby referred to as college A), probably one of the most important things I learned was that there are many ways to an education, and college, or formal institutionalized learning is not necessarily the end-all-be-all.
And thus, I am on to college plan B!

love and props go out to my friend and fellow "eduventurer"!