I Am Nautre

Today while meditating I came upon some ideas that pull together several themes in the form of a series of areas around which I want to develop rituals and processes that facilitate identity transformation.

Themes

Intouchness: Start with strengthening intouchness as a foundation for other more specific explorations of self as nature. Identify persistent themes that emerge in the process of strengthening the ability to stay in touch with the ever changing totality of our experience and let that begin to define my path of action.

• Health; focus on a particular health concern for me individually, my family, and my local more than human environment
• Write it down
• Talk to others about it
• Begin new actions
• Tie it all together with intouchness

Past, Present, Future Co-arising: Examine the sense of time and change from the perspective of strengthened intouchness. This is where the linear sense of time should be disassembled. In natural systems how does time operate? The experience of past, present, and future are co-arising and we as choosing folks change all three at once in our transformation of identity and adoption of new actions. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been meditating recently in an attempt to provide a ritual, some time and attention, to nourish my transition from an identity that confines self to the separate sense of self abstracted from nature to a sense of self that is not separate from nature. What has made sense to me is to focus on the sense of being in a relationship of touch with all of my experience whether traditionally viewed as inner or outer. Intouchness isn’t a real word as far as I know but it is the word that comes to mind when I try to capture the sense of holding all of my life as the experience of nature.

When I am nature the value and meaning of experience changes. Everything is the same in its value and no thing defines a separate self, or a sense of personal identity that holds what is inside my boundary of skin as not part of what is outside my boundary of skin. When viewing all of my experience as equally valid and non self defining the sense of relationship to all experience, continually changing as it is, is that of touch. All things I am aware of are touching each other in some way where all are reciprocally inter penetrating and effecting each other. All of this is me and the sense of this, as far as I am aware of it, is that all of it is communicated through touch relations. By touch I don’t mean the tactile sense of skin alone, but that in the entire sense of awareness what is known is the knowledge imparted through the action of all things touching each other and effecting each other. Part of this touching is the passing of energy and matter across the semi-permeable boundaries of things, another part of it is the awareness of touch and the matter and energy that doesn’t pass across a boundary but is known in terms of its contact with an object boundary, the third aspect of touch is the totality of information that is communicated through touch. Additionally this process of touch is multi directional and dynamic in the ways that reciprocity of touch changes everything all the time.

In meditating on intouchness I am able to experientially explore my experience without attributing an exclusive separate self to any aspect of my experience. Touch values all experience the same, as everything interrelates and nothing is truly separable from the total process of touch. Abandoning the idea that some things are nature and some things not, some things living and some things not, somethings are my self and some things not I am then able to move in the totality of the sense of the intouchness of everything. This feels just right and meditation seems to be a way of noticing the intouchness of all things and to strengthen my sense of that process as the primary activity of my living. Realizing that I am nature, not apart from it, not for it or against it, and that nature is all inclusive (not just comprised of the things that are obviously alive) opens up the sense of intouchness and the sense of intoucnness reinforces the understanding that I am nature.

My first attempt at unifying the personal and the environmental in a single identity and then embarking on a unified clean up of self within and without the skin self boundary has failed the first week plan. I have gained weight, not meditated and have mostly lost sense of unified identity I was experiencing earlier.

Failure is a relief, failure is interesting, failure can be a path to follow into something new. So where new? Where, in what direction? Am I looking at this process with new inspiration and insight but with old eyes.

Should I deal with the sense of being entoombed in my adaptation to my culture and family circumstances first? Should I deal with unconscious assumptions about causality? Should I stay on the knife edge of frustration and dissatisfaction? Should I start at the first step of a 12 step approach? Should I pray to my larger self? Should I go micro and Buddhist with the ninandas?

Out of this I want to startaking a starting ritual and practice.

I’ve run fast and far
Now come to a stop
Now a stop
A rest
For now

Maybe I will just stop with this linear planning. Instead of a start I think I need a stop. What would happen if I stopped? My first thoughts are that I would need to find a way to intensify and prolong my ability to keep past, present and future together in my awareness. In addition I think I would have to come up with ways of staying in touch relationship to everything I experience on both sides of my skin boundary. I like the Buddhist attitude expressed in the sutra of Huneng of being neither attached nor detached from any experience, that feels like my image of being in a touch relationship with everything I experience (we are in touch). It would be interesting to see if intensifying those two ways of experiencing would lead to a way of healing nature on both sides of my/our skin boundary.

Since I am nature I am going to start where I can do the most immediate good, my non-extended small personal body. My body is polluted both within the boundary of my skin and outside my skin boundary. Rivers are clogged with the excess and toxic byproducts of industrial consumption, so I am sure are my arteries, blood and tissues. There is excess, fat, silt, trash, that is interfering with my living in a way that contributes to the good of all in a stable way that healthy living systems grow. Healthy living systems don’t grow in complexity and diversity, occasionally producing brilliant innovations in functionality, through excessive use of the energy of the sun, more and more, faster and faster, but through the gradual incorporation of energy from the sun interacting with the chemistry of the earth. That is how we came to be and this is how we will heal.

Focus on Developing Robust Vibrant Health on Both Sides of the Skin Boundary

First Week

• Taper off sugar to a full elimination by the end of the week
• Taper off coffee to a full elimination by end of the week
• Exercise at least 3 days during week
• Stretching at least 3 days during the week
• Meditate for 20 minutes at least 3 times during the week
• Establish a schedule for my exercise, stretching and meditation
• Look for local healing opportunities related to water, soil, vegetation, and pollution rehabilitation
  Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I hear people talk, or writers write, about “the environment” I feel uneasy. It doesn’t matter whether the person speaking or writing is advocating consumption or conservation of “the environment”, something in the way environment is objectified and we as people are separated from “It” is deeply disturbing to me. When I had my primary insight into the truth that I am the environment, there is no separation between a me and an environment, it was from following this discomfort and seeing where it took me.

Accepting and paying attention to uncomfortable feelings and thoughts is one of my favorite methods of provoking personal growth. I have learned that the excluded aspects of my life, those I have found unacceptable, ofter continue to request attention and often do that by creating tension, discomfort, and other negative kinds of experience that I eventually have to pay attention to. If I can honor these aspects of myself by listening and engaging them, letting them into the light of my more conscious appreciation, and then giving them a role in my life I typically end up a more comfortable and capable person. I am going to add some detail to the insight and try to rekindle the feeling of it through a retelling of the insight and consequent change in experiential perspective.

After Joanna’s introduction to the work that reconnects workshop I felt my living engagement with self and world very deeply and openly. When I started to allow my discomfort, frustration really, with the idea of an environment that is in peril, that can be saved or destroyed, that people can advocate for or against, it quickly became apparent that that discomfort was based on a culturally mandated fiction of separation that I was not willing to perpetuate in my own thinking, feeling, and behaving. It was like letting go of the last bit of my personal maintenance of that fiction and the effect was immediate, the idea and the experience of being nature, that I am nature, that there is not any difference between me and nature, became my frame of reference to all my experiencing.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am going to pursue a shift in identity that has been developing in me for some time but only recently has it emerged with an intensity and clarity that felt like a transition point. A few days after attending an introduction to the work that reconnects facilitated by Joanna Macy I had an experience that I described as follows.

This morning I started to let myself feel the discomfort I feel about the objectification of nature. I acknowledged my discomfort and it lead to something unexpected, a visceral realization that i am nature, not something different than, not something separate from, but I am nature speaking, knowing, choosing, acting, existing in a state of ever-becoming. This has been lurking as a discomfort for quite a while and I am glad I allowed it to speak to me. I am nature. Everything is nature. Nature isn’t just the animals and plants, it is everything together and that is the dynamic living process we all are. The knowledge, deep, real, undeniable arose in me, i am nature. The other thing is that as nature I am self correcting. So enacting that and seeing where it takes me is what the weekend was about, I am nature, we are nature.

This shift in identity seemed to feel just right to me. Many issues were resolved and I felt very alive and engaged. Now the issue for me is going to be how to keep unfolding this way of seeing into the fabric of my living. In the past I have used many different methods for exploring and transforming my way of experiencing self and world and I will continue with the ways that have served me best in the past and hopefully develop some new approaches as well.

I am doing this as a process of public writing because it helps me focus, intensify, and commit to my process of transformation and also because doing so publicly might offer support to others who are also working on transformations of their identity that move beyond the separation of self from nature.

Well, spending two days with Joanna and participating in the exercises she lead was wonderful. I loved being around all the people, getting to know some of them and generally doing more crying, hugging and looking at people in a deeply engaged and appreciative way. The permission to really connect with each other was, for me, a wonderful tonic. I love people and am rarely in a situation where I can connect deeply, what a great experience. Joanna took us through the four stages of the work that reconnects, coming from gratitude, honoring our pain in the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth. The people were so interesting and intense, we are all part of the Great Turning, the early adopters and change agents of the edge of a wave of the planet’s push toward preserving it’s living vibrancy, diversity, and the kind of stability required to continue building ever more complex forms of life.

I loved connecting, hugging and crying when speaking from the depths of our passion and pain. I began to get more comfortable as time went on and spoke my truth form a place I never get to speak from. I got to dance. I’ve wanted to dance for months (I have been an almost completely non dancing person) and I got my chance, after a brief bit of self consciousness I started to warm up and after a while I was dancing with abandon, dancing the dance of being alive, the dance of gratitude and joy, amazing. I hope the amazing people who participated will show up on Joanna’s website after I launch it so we can see what develops. There are a lot of people I want to explore connecting with and learning from. I hope the delays I experienced yesterday don’t dissuade anyone from coming to the new site and connecting with each other, I would feel real bad about that. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been seeing the implications of the Buddhist dependent co-arising causality model. On the level of individual psychology and time the changes that occur in my perspective are liberating. When I understand that there is no linear process to adhere to in my psychology I realize that i am not bound by the line from the past propagating into the future as the western psychological model mandates. It isn’t that the past doesn’t exist or isn’t part of what conditions the present it is that there isn’t a linear past and future with the present just being one of Hume’s distinct moments.

There is no end point which means there is no perfection, no static goal, no effect of the cause which is the full realization of the cause. Without a starting point cause (all potent) dictating the effect or end point, there is no necessary line. This turns nouns into verbs. My most potent realization during the re-owning of my adopted infant self left behind in identification with my biological mother when we were separated was I have a right to be. I can now see the linearity in that statement, the linear causal model deeply assumed. Now it becomes, being is right, the active process of be-ing is inherently right, not that it is right to be, or that I have a right to be, being is right, an active process of birth and change is right. Yep! Read the rest of this entry »

In meditating the other day I started to see how my experience, as a 12 or 13 year old, of the formless, as my mind flew past the edge of space and the return to my body through the funnels of light, each one having its own world and beings, where both form and formlessness were present together, is taken into account by the Buddhist model of causality that Joanna Macy calls dependent co-arising. In the formless state unaware of particularity there was an intuitive knowing of all things even without any awareness bounded objects. When returning to the awareness of my bounded living self I was aware of both form bound experience and formless at the same time. From either perspective both are inherent in each other, they dependently co-arise.

The way this came up in meditation was that in focusing on awareness of breathing I found that my mind wanted to fly out toward the formless. The two movements toward awareness of breath and flight toward awareness of formlessness seemed antagonistic at first but the false choice quickly became clear and the practice of awareness of breathing seemed to be a nice place to allow the two aspects of life to co-exist in my awareness. The western linear causal trap is to force a false choice to align with a causal starting point, so one side becomes the origin of the other, the source, the right side to identify with. It is much more true to my experience to regard them both as simultaneous and inherent in each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you causal agents
And line combatants
I thank my ignorance
My participation in the line dance
Of our combat

The tearing apart has left a hole
For the tiny seed of wisdom
To find soil in which to root
Brothers and sisters of the fight
We toil in vain

There is no start to our problem
The line on which we fight
Is drawn not in the sand
But in the mind
In the assumptions
That lure us to the line
And call our fighting hearts
To action Read the rest of this entry »