Moment of Mind November 2020

Moment of Mind

This week is an invitation on inquiring into the nature and experience of love. When we feel love, we are always experiencing it from within, even if it looks like it comes from somewhere else.
If I had to come up with an “opposite” to love it would be limitation. Love feels expansive to me while limitation is the opposite. Sometimes fear feels like that. We could say limitation is fear and vice versa. Love is there all the time and gets covered over by a convincing mind-static of limitation. Love is infinite and could be considered a never ending resource.
And it can only be experienced from the inside out.
We are taught from a very early age that this is not the case. We are conditioned to believe that love is finite. That it can be taken away from us. That it comes from the outside in and if the object of love disappears, so does the love we feel. I’m inviting you this week to question that unexamined conditioning.
As a starting point I invite you to practice inquiring into the sensation of love. Consider bringing to mind a being (human or more than human as our animal friends can help illustrate this truth) or a place that you love. As you bring it to mind notice what love feels like. What are the sensations arising within awareness? 
What does love feel like in the body before the mind claims and labels it? 
Feel it as fully as you can and notice if any other sensations or feelings show up. If thinking wanders away, bring it gently back to whatever person, location or more than human being you are bringing to mind.
I wonder if you notice new thoughts and sensations and feelings arising, and then changing?
Let yourself consider that the person, more than human friend, or the place were brought to mind via thoughts. They aren’t physically here – they are concepts, representations, not real. They exist as real somewhere…and the thoughts are not them, the are only fictions.  And yet, the sensations and feelings you experience, the ones brought to life through you, are very much present. 
Love cannot be measured because it’s not finite. We can’t take love out and plot it on a measuring stick or pour it into a cup and portion it out. It can feel like there’s “more” or “less” love for someone or something based on how many more stories arise in the mind covering over innate love. When connection happens, those stories drop away and love is felt. Kind of like when you’re in a fight with someone – pretty hard to feel that love in the midst of it – and it’s still there, underneath the conflict.
Anytime you want to experience it, you can bring someone or some place to mind that you love and there it is again. 
The mind might be questioning right now (it’s so good at its job) how love can arise when that person or more than human being or place isn’t actually, really, there except in imagination. It’s a good question. That feeling we call “love” arose in the space of living awareness that you are. Notice that nothing had changed about the setting or circumstance other than the thoughts guided into the mind. 
When we experience love, whether it’s during a connection in real time, or when it’s arising in this exercise, in my view this is a momentary pausing of analytical mind activity, where the thinking self-noise parts, and love comes through. This is how I experience ease and connection too – like constants that pour through a curtain when it parts. That curtain is what I call “thought”. Love is felt always inside-out, it bubbles up and you are the one who experiences it. 
I invite you to play with this activity a few times and would love to hear what you notice! Much love, Tia

Love for your Inner Science Activist Nerd

My inner science nerd appreciates learning new information about old stories that…turns out were incomplete. Finding Mindful Now’s mission also includes supporting folks in expanding their emotional capacity. One way we do this is through awareness.
Here in the United States we’re entering the week of a holiday that has a lot of mythology around it. It’s called Thanksgiving. While the concept of giving thanks is beautiful every day, and at any time, the his-story we’ve been told about what happened and why we have this day is fraught, with lies and holes in it. The biggest element of this is that there’s a pretense of Native Americans being “given” rights by the settlers…rather than those being taken from them, along with their land, mass genocide, and the attempted erasure of them and their cultures. For some Native Americans the 4th Thursday in November is a National Day of Mourning and grief even as it is about gratitude for survival. 
In the spirit of honoring the people who were forced to sacrifice their land that now holds and supports settler-descendents like me, this is a handful of resources so you can learn more about the lesser known history. These resources come from Teaching Tolerance and my own searches.

• Reclaiming Native Truth website

• On Thanksgiving, Native American Students reflect

• Native Knowledge 360˚

• 6 Native Leaders on what it would look like if the US kept its promises

• Contact Timeline for the Mashpee Wampanoag

• US policies against Native Americans timeline

• The Forgotten Slavery of Our Ancestors – about the enslavement of indigenous people

• Native land map (not complete, still a good start to learn about who was here before you)

• GIS map of US treaties called Tribal Connections from the US Forest Service

• Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA

• Land Reparations and Indigenous Sovereignty 

• Donate to the Native American Rights Fund

I invite you to click on whichever one of these resources pulls most strongly and begin relearning as part of many actions for repair!

Integrative Practice

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” -Carl Jung

In the last few months I’ve been exploring a deepening of being with sensations, feelings…and even thoughts, as they move through. Mindfulness practice is one way of combining attention with sensory experiences to feel the being-ness that you are – having the feeling and sensing experiences. In Forest Therapy those experiences can be pleasurable and healing as the support of the land and witnessing of the more than human world allows emotions to release.

And, we’ve been socially conditioned to avoid all sensations the mind has been taught to reject and judge as “negative” at all costs. What if those sensations are just as temporary as the ones we seek to cultivate? What if the effort that goes into resisting them reinforces and strengthens them? What if the attempt to seek out relief is part of what keeps it away?

I’ve been exploring these questions as I explore looking through the limitations of the self identity. The practice below is going to sound super woo… inspired by Carolyn Elliott‘s book Existential Kink with elements from a book called Busting Loose From the Money Game by Robert Scheinfeld (most unusual book I have ever read).

Here’s one example being-with-sensations practice to try on. I continue to explore this as I have years of conditioning for avoidance built in to unlearn. Each time I feel tightness, constriction, discomfort, anxiety, anger, frustration or any other feeling my mind rejects and judges as “bad” inspired by both of these books:

I dive right into it and FEEL it fully.
When I feel it most, I say, THIS (sensation, thought, feeling) is the power of consciousness in form,
As I breathe in I feel this power, as my expanded self.
As I breath out, I feel this power flowing through me, I reclaim it and feel that expansion.
I receive the power of consciousness that creates through me.
I receive the power of feeling moving through.
I appreciate experiencing all of it.

If you try it, I’d love to hear what you notice!
Much love,
Tia

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