January 2010 Reading

Sunday, 31 January 2010 15:44 Written by Lezlie Laws

Morning Reading (lectio divina):

1.  The Dark Nights of the Soul:  A Guide to Finding your Way Through Life’s Ordeals,  

     by Thomas Moore.  (notes below)

2.  Radical Acceptance:  Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha,

      by Tara Brach

3.  Shambhala Sun, March 2010. (notes below)

Later in the day reading:

1.  Yoga Journal, February 2010.

2.  Yogabody:  Anatomy, Kinesiology, and Asana, by Judith Hanson Lasater

3.  The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein (a novel) (notes below)

4. An Italian Affair, by Laura Fraser  (notes below)

5.  Izzy and Lenore, by Jon Katz (see Jan 31 blog entry)

• Some notes on The Dark Nights of the Soul.

life conspires to stop you in destructive behavior 

take rest

stop controlling

live in the moment, be present

take one step at a time

drop attachments

open your heart

rely on something beyond human capacity

get out of the way of life, of creation

trust the process of life- it is unfolding with purpose

something is incubating in you, preparing for life

the dark night saves you from being stuck in your small self

let transformation take place – let change happen- see life as a series of  

    transformations

what does life want from me?  (not what do I want)

be in the bardo (space between death and new life)

distinguish resistance against the dark night and the dark night itself

watch the resistance

get out of the personal – there is a larger process of the soul taking place

illness is connected to the karma you have gathered over the years

in sickness the soul comes to the foreground (p. 287)

Big themes for me:

something emerging

shift from small self to larger self, to life as a process instead of my little life

new way of being, new understanding of energy, new understanding of what life

    wants and how it unfolds

yoga, the body, the mind, the spirit – union

how energy works – how I block energy

creativity linked to spirit, to expression of life, to fullness of life

how to be open and accepting, how to be in the experience instead of placing

    expectation upon it

let life unfold instead of controlling it

trust in the process

drop anxiety about what you’re supposed to do – anxiety is contraction and

    contraction blocks the creative process

•  Comments on The Art of Racing in the Rain.

This was the sweetest little book!  I enjoyed it.  It’s not high literary reading, but it was a convincing story, told from the point of view of the dog Enzo.  Not an easy thing to do, but I swear, Stein pulls it off.  Enzo’s master is a race car driver and Enzo has learned many good lessons about life from watching Denny grow as a driver, and as a man.  So the metaphor here is learning how to steer into the curve, how to move with the car instead of resisting it.  It works, and I liked it a lot.   And you can’t help falling in love with Enzo.  He is so loving, so wise, and he wants to be a human being so bad.  Even though you know it’s schmaltzy, you’ll cry at the end.

I think I will use this in my course next year.  It’s an easy read, nicely written, and though verging on sentimental, it still speaks to the remarkable connection that humans have to their dogs.  The guys will love this one because of all the good racing scenes, the girls will love it because of the good love story, and everyone will fall in love with Enzo.

• Notes on An Italian Affair by Laura Fraser.

My hairdresser gave me this book to read, thinking I would enjoy a good romantic story.  I know better than to take reading recommendations from casual acquaintances.  She has no clue about what I like, of course.  Still, I’ve been laid up for a while, and I gave myself permission to do some light reading.  So I plunged in to Laura Fraser’s story about her long-term affair with an Italian lover.  Over several years they met in exotic locations and sunbathed on beautiful beaches, swam naked in waters of all temperatures, ate rich food and drank extraordinary wine.  The lover, called only the professor, lives in Paris, is happily married and has two children.  Fraser, a travel journalist, is divorced after 18 months of marriage, and disoriented by her perceived betrayal by her husband.  

    She takes us from port to port, interspersed with boring chapters of her life back in San Francisco.  Even the travel writing was pretty boring, lacking any beauty in the description of what must have been remarkable scenery. 

     But the worst part of this book was the fact that the entire story is told in second person point of view.  The entire story!!  Second person is difficult to pull off for even a short passage, so I should be impressed that she could sustain it for 226 pages.  But why on earth would she tell a story of a love affair in SECOND PERSON.  Second person is a distancing point of view.  It doesn’t make introspection easy.  And maybe that’s why she wanted to use it.  She obviously did not want to think very deeply or originally about what was happening to her.  So the very thing I love about memoir, the interior landscape of the writer, was missing in this book.  And for this reason, I consider this a very bad piece of writing.  Even the erotic passages were bland and unmoving.  Oh Laura, I’m so sorry for your affair.

   This reviewer's advice:  skip An Italian Affair.

•  Notes on March issue of Shambhala Sun.

This issue is subtitled “A Guide to Mindful Living.”  It is a special issue on how to experience the benefits of mindfulness in all aspects of living.

    In his editorial, senior editor Barry Boyce says that mindfulness is about “letting go of the project of creating ourselves and instead paying gentle, firm attention to whatever presents itself.  One moment after another.”  Oh how I wish I could keep those two sentences in front of me every second of my life.  This seems to be my work now, to examine the ways that I “present” myself to experience and to consciously drop presentation and allow authentic experience to rise into the space that is created.  That shouldn’t be hard to do, should it.  But in some arenas of my life, it is a herculean task.

     The invitation of this issue is to cal us to a “way of living less caught up with self and more about just being—finding relaxation and awareness to be our natural state.”  The Buddhist path provides us with approaches for working with behavior that seems to block this natural state, such as wandering thoughts, laziness, negativity, etc.  Awareness, says Jon Kabat-Zinn in his article can modulate our thinking, so that “we become less driven by unexamined motivations to put ourselves first, to control things to assuage our fear, to always proffer our brilliant answer.”  This sentence seems to describe so many of us as we move through our days.  The practice of mindfulness then is a way to begin to identify those unexamined motivations, to catch myself as I act out of some old conditioning that no longer serves me.

    Kabat-Zinn explains another important benefit of mindfulness:  “Healing and transformation are possible the moment we accept the actuality of things as they are—good, bad, or ugly—and then act on that understanding with imagination, kindness, and intentionality” (78).  And also inherent in mindfulness practice is the notion that we can’t think our way out of a problem, as I so often want to do.  Pause, drop resistance, be open, listen, breathe—so often these actions allow insight or peace that thinking can’t achieve.  Kabat-Zinn concludes his article by saying,

“There’s nothing wrong with thinking.  So much that is beautiful comes out of thinking and out of our emotions. But if our thinking is not balanced with awareness, we can end up deluded, perpetually lost in thought, and out of our minds just when we need them the most” (79).

    And finally, in his article, Dan Seigel says mindfulness, “instead of being seen primarily as attention or emotion regulation, might be considered an ‘internal form” of attunement—one in which the observing self is open and accepting, tuned-in, and curious about the exeriencing self.”  I so like this definition of mindfulness because it dispels the notion that mindfulness is the passive acquiescence to whatever presents itself.  Rather, it suggests the importance of being alive (awake) to what is being experienced, curious about it, and open to the possibilities for change, growth, awareness, or transformation that reside within each moment.