Moments

Discovered a hole in my sock. I think this somehow makes the toe look cute.


Throwing out old toiletries the fun way: squeezing them out of their tubes into the garbage. 5-year-old Sunscreen, 7-year-old-sunscreen, and aloe vera gel.



I do a meditation in the mornings where I focus on the flame of a candle, so I've been working my way through my supply. I recently found some candles from my early childhood while cleaning up at my parent's house, so I thought I'd use them. The one I'm currently using is a wizard. He started off with a tall pointy hat, but that burned down quickly. Once it got to the point where the flame was where his head had been, I thought it was nicely symbolic, so I took some pictures.

This one is cool because there is a part of the meditation where I move the candle flame to the center of my head. To fill my mind with light, and empty it of thoughts. Wouldn't it be nice our minds were like a candle flame in a windless place: still and undisturbed, yet illuminating all around it. No wonder he's a wizard.




Sometimes from the depths of that silence, inspiration strikes!



And with enough practice of this Jyoti (light) meditation, one's mind becomes as subtle as the emptiness from which all things are born. The hollow center of the mustard seed. The nothingness of the zero-point field. The emptiness within Krishna's flute. The silence from which the entire universe emanates.



The hole in the donut that makes it so tasty.

Hoping for this outcome, as well as wizard powers, I continue to practice the Jyoti meditation every day, early in the morning, while it is still dark and the rest of the world is sleeping comfortably in their beds.

Flowers are blooming all around my parent's house. And even around my apartment in Queens. When was the last time you've really looked at a flower? Really looked at it, up close and personal. It is a sculpture of incredible beauty, sensuality, and subtlety, combining visual aesthetics, pleasing kinesthetics, and subtle, intoxicating smells.




Rarely have I seen a manmade creation begin to approach the luxuriant subtlety, complexity, and detail of these naturally occurring multi-sensory ever-changing art installations.





So I suppose this is just a tribute to the freely given riches of nature we are surrounded by, every day. The only cost of admission is the willingness to look with the eyes of wonder.

And no, I'm not on drugs. Just the natural high of appreciation.

Much love to you all. I'm still focusing on productivity hard-core, but I don't want to bore you, so I thought I'd mix it up a little bit. And my own inner voice of wisdom is telling me I'm getting a bit too rigid and intellectual with all that. Too much cold mind, not enough warm heart. So, today, pretty pictures.

Happy Birthday!

It is my birthday. Also, it's Buddha Purnima. Which is a full moon? And somehow related to the Buddha. I'll take it.

Generally, birthdays are about celebrating oneself. Getting gifts. Getting things your way. But what I want today is not anything for myself. What I want is for you, my friends and family, to be happy. Also, being kind of immersed in Vedanta, it seems silly to celebrate my 'birth' since there never was a time when I was not, nor you, nor any of these rulers of men, O Arjuna. I was never born. But this perticular leg of the journey began 30 rotations of the sun ago, so it's a good excuse to do things that are importaint to me. Like send love to the people in my life who make it good. I suppose that's a bit partial, and perhaps I should send love to everyone, ever. Which I do, most mornings, so... Good on me, I guess? I'm going on a tangent. I owe a debt of love that I am happy to pay, to you who are the treasures of my life. One of the first real bits of wisdom I learned was that true friends make life good. So let me thank you for that. There. That's my birthday present.

And here's something I told myself this morning during my annual Soliomancy sunrise walk: Remember and accept that God (or whatever name you call the Ultimate) loves you. Has always loved you, will always love you. There is nothing you can do to change that. God is at least as loving as a perfect mother, who loves her children even when they are naughty. Maybe she will dole out disipline, but it is done only out of love. 

Know that God never wants you to think of yourself as weak, sinful, or fallen. God wants you to think of ourself as a child of God, as God himself. Think of yourself always as worthy, strong, skillful, with unlimited capability and dignity. Verily you are incarnations of divinity. Live that. Accept that. Enjoy it. Stop worrying, if you can. It's all going to be alright. And even if you can't stop worrying, at least be kind to yourself. Because me and God care about you. We don't want to see you beating yourself up. We just want to you to be happy. Happy and carefree. With a heart full of love.

The Bhagavad Gita says: act, without attachment to the fruits of action, with awareness of the Atma, the Self, dedicating all actions to that form of divinity dearest to your heart. That is the way to make all action spiritual practice. That means, if you do this, it's as though you are spending the whole day in spiritual practice. This is from chapter two and three of the Bhagavad-Gita. (And a whole bunch of other chapters as well, I think. But those were the two that I read today.)

I can vouch for the effectiveness of this practice. It is one of those deceptively simple things that tricks you into not doing it because you think it's too simple to work well. Or maybe it sounds too simple so you think you're not understanding it right. But no, it's pretty simple. And very effective. It takes a whole load off your shoulders. Dedicate your action like this and renounce the fruits, and God himself (as Krishna) has said he will take care of all the rest. Just do your sincere best effort, and you're good.

This concludes my birthday message. I hope your lives are wonderful. You're happiness is my happiness.

Isaac

The Wrong Side of the Bed: Failing Well

Wednesday was a hard day. I can't remember the last time I've really 'woken up on the wrong side of the bed.' But that day made me understand that saying with a whole new level of reality.

I wish I knew what the cause was. Ostensibly, I slept in (till 5:07! The indolence!) and so my morning kind of dragged on and got off to a slow start. (Like today, in fact.) But I can't see that accounting for it. "OK, what 'it?'" You ask. Well, that whole day, I just felt...Bad. All my old addictions flared, all my old habits of procrastination, feelings of badness, self-criticism. It was kind of boggling. It felt like the ribbon of Grace that has been sustaining me moving forwards... this feeling of self-confidence, and self-kindness. This feeling of being kept company by a real and loving friend (God) all the time, or at least whenever I choose to call on him. All that was... not totally gone. But... less. Not powerful enough to sustain me and move me forward as it had been.

But I was prepared for this. Some of what I have been reading is about how to deal with the bad days. We all have bad days. But what you do with those bad days is super important. It's important to learn how to "play poorly, well." meaning, if you're playing golf and you're having a really bad day, you need to have the discipline to not beat yourself up, not let yourself continue into a self-pitying death spiral and keep getting progressively worse. Instead, you play your best, which that day may be pretty bad. When I saw what a bad day it was, my goal was just to 'maintain altitude.' Or perhaps, 'maintain attitude.' I accepted that I wasn't going to be doing any climbing, probably, but I could at least not go into a nosedive. So I took a long nap. I wrote stormy stuff in my journal. I worked through (some of) my three thousand plus email inbox, deleting old emails. It was an almost useless job, but it was about all I could get myself to do, and at least it was something that wasn't actively pushing me deeper. And even had a slight positive benefit. I tried sitting down and asking my higher self what the heck was going on. I went for a walk. It was an unpleasant and largely unproductive day, aside from the meetings that had already been scheduled and thus were required of me. (Hey hey, that sounds like a promising tool for helping during future 'bad days.')

But I count that day as a great success. I feel like it's the hard days that really show me where I am, in terms of personal development. And being able to handle the hard days well will lead to eventually being successful with my goals.

The next day was similar. Not as bad. Starting to get some momentum back, but still fighting against a wall of blah and negative inner voice. Where once there had been proactivity, now only procrastination. I could feel that draining voice so clearly, "oh, man, this sucks, you suck. anything you're going to do right now will suck." And I knew that this was the most important time for me to take courageous action.

Sometimes, to do something, even though you 'know' that it's going to suck, and your hearts not in it, and all the voices in your head are telling you to just give up, is the hardest thing in the world. But that is the critical moment. I have these deep grooves in my brain. Like wagon ruts. On a two-hundred-year-old wagon trail that's been in use every day. The grooves in the ground are so deep, it is impossible to turn the wagon off the path, once it's on it. The wheels would just break or be ripped off or something.

These ruts in my brain say, "when it gets hard to do something, when it becomes unpleasant to imagine doing it, you must never start the thing. Or quickly give up on it and go do something else. Eventually, the discomfort will pass. The stars will align, and you can go back to doing that thing, for a while."

This is perhaps the most important difference between people who are wildly successful and me. The wildly successful people feel the discomfort, and... I don't know what they do with it. But they keep working. Either because they need money enough to put up with the discomfort, or they have developed some magic technique of making it poof away, or they have just developed the habit of plowing ahead regardless of how they 'feel' about it.

In order for me to be more like them, I must destroy those deep wagon tracks. Generally that's done by driving the wagon criss-cross over the tracks, especially if it's just rained and the soil is softer. You make new tracks, over and over again, going in totally different directions. until you can barely tell where the original tracks were.

This analogy has gotten 'off the tracks' itself. All I mean to say is, That next day (Thursday), when I could do more that just hang on by my fingernails, when it was the hardest day possible for me to do the important things (but was still possible), that was the most essential day for me to do those important things. I needed to make new tracks. This was the part of the trail that I always got stuck in. This is where I'd always lose my momentum. This is what prevented me from accomplishing any of the big things I wanted to accomplish. This day was symbolic of the struggle of my entire life. If I could change it, just today, I could change it, forever. Any day.

So I girded my loins and proceeded to mostly but not entirely fail to do that. Once again. I would call that a success. I'm not looking for remarkable changes instantly. I'm just looking for my sincere efforts to oppose and re-write that pattern. I resolved to go do the next thing. I got distracted by a piece of paper. No! back to the thing. OK, I needed my book, into my room to get my book. Distracted by another book. Skimmed through the other book, finished. Arg! Again! Back to the task: I went into the room I was working in. I did the thing! Yay! Success! I procrastinated so much I didn't have time to do any of the other things. But rather than sinking into despair, I looked at my efforts. They were sincere. I looked at my results... I think they were better than they would have been, in the past, when I didn't try to oppose that rut. Or rather, where I tried to oppose it obliquely: trying to make myself feel good so that I could work on the thing.

That's like my other realization: the Doom Cloud is dispelled not by meditating or therapizing it away, but by doing the action that I'm avoiding doing which is giving rise to the doom cloud in the first place.

In the same way, I become productive, not by making myself feel good and happy so I can be in a good mindset to be productive. I be productive by being productive, however I feel about. And once I start being productive, I generally feel better about it. Or at least go from feeling bad about it to neutral. "Screw it, just do it." Is perhaps the motto? As in, to heck with the bad effect my mood or feelings about the project may be having on the project. I will do it, anyways.

This is not to say I'm being insensitive to what feels like the right thing to do. I'm being hyper sensitive to what feels and seems like the right thing to do. I am using every faculty I have at my disposal: common sense, discrimination, all the information and past experience I've gleaned, logic, my subtle feeling/intuition level. All of it. And then I give it my best guess. And that is what I'm doing, regardless of how I 'feel' about it. Because it may be something I don't want to do. Or am scared to do.

I should say, that is what I'm trying to do, with all my might. Because right now, I'm a limp lungfish flapping it's way bonelessly up a steep incline. I am not very effective. But dammit, I am not going to stop the effort in the slightest. Because it's having some effect, and some is all I need. If I am just a tiny bit better at fighting this, every time, eventually I will be good at it.

Conversely, that means, and I must be prepared for, being a lot bad at it, for a while. As long as I'm prepared for that outcome, I won't give up. I'll know, "yup, this is me being really bad at this. Again. We knew this would happen, and will continue to happen. But this is the only way I will ever get not bad at it. And I am getting less bad at it, steadily. So you know what? Awesome. Kudos on your effort, your bad but getting better. Don't give up on it ever, and soon you'll have fair weather.

So, I can't conclude this by saying I'm doing well. But I'll conclude by saying I'm doing pretty badly, but I'm doing it really well.

-IOut

Only a few of many stories. Creeping Cloud of Doom Evaporation

There are so many stories I want to share.

I was sitting in the living room, staring absently out the window, and my daydreams suddenly shifted towards the sexual. Suddenly, two small, mating birds slammed into the window with a disquieting mixture of soft thunk and hard twang and then fell down out of site. Not ceasing their activities, apparently uncaring about the collision. A few seconds later I saw them hopping away from each other, unruffling their wings and carrying on with the rest of their day. I'd put that under, "God see's your thoughts, but he has a great sense of humor."


I was outside in the forest before sunrise, offering all I was to the Great Mystery, and in the stillness afterward, a herd of deer walked right around me. Maybe as close as 30 or 40 feet to either side of me. It wasn't till most of them were well past that one of them smelled something was off, and started huffing a bit nervously. But not nervous enough to run. Just to be cautious. I think I was sitting among them for about thirty minutes as they slowly moved past me, grazing. I take that as a thumbs up for doing that particular spiritual practice.


There are more. Some connected to pictures. Some from weeks ago, or even more than a month. I wish I had time to write all of them down. There are so many things I want to do. If I only had a fourth of them to do, with only one big thing at a time, I could devote the appropriate amount of time to each. Writing my current book. Finding and applying to a good grad school. Writing any of the many other stories in my "to write" files. Working on improving my teaching/life coaching skills. Finishing my website searching for new clients re-writing the play memorizing the lines honing primitive skills improving my drawing digitizing my visual memoir improving my herbalism-

and most of all learning how to be super efficient and productive. Because that is an incomplete to-do list.

So learning how to be hyper-productive while staying playful and happy is the main thing I'm working on now. I apologize for all the stories being left untold. I dream of the day when I have time for all of them. I dream, but I make plans too. Make plans and take actions.

Here's one thing I've learned: the Cloud of Creeping Doom? (an earlier series of posts) I figured out how to solve it.

Turns out it comes from procrastinating on doing something. The doom is the feeling of, "man, I should really be doing this other thing right now. I'm just screwing myself deeper and deeper into a hole (to mix metaphors) by continuing to do other stuff. Each second that ticks by makes the eventual outcome worse and worse."

The solution to this--now bear with me, this was quite a jump for me, it took me years to finally figure it out, so you may need to go back and re-read this--the solution was:
I needed to stop doing other stuff, and do the thing that I was avoiding doing.

I recall my ex-girlfriend saying something along the lines of exactly the same thing, to which I replied something like, "It's not that easy! I need to feel my feelings and process my guilt or figure out the root of where this fear is coming from--"

But nope. No, it totally is that easy.

If she ever hears this I hope she gets to bask in the delicious "I TOLD YOU SO!"-ness of the moment. It's rare that we get to be so distinctly right and someone else so distinctly wrong, and even rarer for them to realize and admit it, so it must be utilized to the fullest by smashing their face into their inaccuracy like an abusive mad dog owner pushing his dog's face at its own ill-placed poop while saying, "look at what you have doooone! Seeeee! See your mistake!!! REPEEEEEENT! BUUUUUUURRRRN!"

That way they (in your imagination) will never have the temerity to take your advice as less than gospel, and will writhe in wretchedness on the ground, begging for forgiveness for their foolish lapse of trust in your sagacity.

This is actually the secret dance that goes on in my own head whenever people don't listen to me about something I'm sure about and then they are proved obviously wrong. To my knowledge my ex does not have this same obsession or any desire to do such a thing. But being a good sport, I figure I should let other people enjoy doing this to me, since I (used to) secretly crave doing it to others.

So I now hereby do it to myself. In the hopes that other people who suffer under the same misconception learn this lesson faster than I did.

In a nutshell (God I love that phrase. And nutshells. And nuts.):
If you are feeling the Creeping Doom of niggling worry, anxiety, or fear, about something coming up, or something left undone, the solution is to do that thing, or do the prep work for that thing. Start right away unless your hair is on fire. Maybe even then, if you can do it on your way to the sink.

In a smaller nut: If you are feeling anxious about something left undone, then do it.

This may seem overly obvious to those of you not cursed with expert-level procrastination. For you 'proactive since they were in diapers' types, I can only say, it's more of an issue for some of us than you might imagine.


OK friends, goodbye for another week.

I O(ut)

I may be a robot, but I'll be the most hard-core kick-butt robot you've ever seen

I've decided my life is going to be awesome. I am just straight up going to do all the things that are necessary to make my life blazingly alive.

This starts with a simple question:

Right now, this second, what is the best thing I could be doing?

And then I continue to ask myself that question, over and over again throughout the day.

It sounds good doesn't it?

I am vibrating with excitement.

Why? Because I’m confident I can do it. I have faith in my teachers, and myself. I have learned the secret to being unstoppable, and I’m finally implementing it.

Roger bravo, enact plan Alpha: living my dreams.

If I don't know where to start, then I need to figure out where to start. That's step one. I've already got that pretty much taken care of. Where I need to start is figuring out what I want. The things I want to do, be, have. These things may change. that's fine. But I need my best current guess, to get started.

My things (subject to change without notice, but have remained fundamentally unchanged for a while):

-Achieve the ultimate spiritual goal of Life

-Live in a spiritual, nature-centric community where I can grow my own food and other necessities. Somewhere I can commune with, play in, and learn from nature. Somewhere I can walk next door and spend time with other people interested in the same kind of things. Somewhere I can raise a family in a supportive environment.

-Working with a small group of friends in a nice environment (I'm thinking home office) on something creative and of benefit to the world. Involving teaching (especially personal growth) and writing. (and probably art of other sorts as well).

-Helping people open their hearts and light the fire of inspiration and love in them, and live a great life.

There are some smaller ones as well. I want to become a herbalist. I want to develop superpowers. I want to explore and understand the mechanics of how the universe works. I want to work with stories. I want to support myself comfortably doing what I love.

But before I even finish with getting totally specific and clear with that, there are other things to do: planning out my spiritual exercise regime. Working on being in constant contact with my True Self. Creating a daily routine that charges and aims me like an arrow pulled back in the bow ready to strike the target. I’m already meditating, communing with nature every day, journaling about new ideas and solutions, taking some time to visualize and feel what I want in my life and in myself. Now it’s a matter of refining that process. Making it more and more effective.

Second, I need to get a grip on my productivity. I already did the whole wake up super-early and do a great morning routine for 30 days straight a-la The Miracle Morning. And am still doing it. Will do it forever, since it makes my day so much better. However, I’ve noticed my morning is incredible but then the rest of my day gets progressively saggier. I want it prim and bountiful like my mornings. So I've embarked on a journey to organize my time and energy effectively. I'm getting better at habit forming, so I should be able to implement all the good advice I find.

Do you know how totally impossible any of that would have been for me, two years ago? Two months ago?  It makes me cackle like a mad scientist dancing around his reanimated corpse-creation.

“They thought I was mad! They thought I’d never be able to do it! But I showed them! I showed them aaaaaaallllll!” (Cue dramatic lightning and thunder)

To be precise, my friends and family have been very supportive of me from the beginning, and the derisive “They” were all voices in my head. Regardless, I have showed “Them” that they are all fools, fools! 

I knew that if I could just get a grip on myself and my own behavior, to the point where I could start consciously entering new, good habits and deleting old bad ones, I would be unstoppable, because I had so many good habits to implement. The giant problem was I just couldn’t get myself to consistently implement any of it. Well, now I can! MWAhahahaha!

I need to give credit where credit is due. First, to the great benevolent intelligence of the universe. Second to all the incredible teachers I’ve encountered, flesh and blood, book and otherwise. And finally to the much more concrete relationship I’ve finally established with that great benevolent intelligence via the help of those teachers. That Divinity is the single most powerful transforming quality in my life and everything else has been possible because of it.

(In case you’re curious about how that’s come strongly into my life: that Light has been accessible to me to the extent I’ve been able to trust in it and to the extent I’ve listened to and followed the dictates of my own inner sense of right and good. And that has been a slow, steady, compounding process. I decide to trust in it a little, to follow my inner sense of rightness a little, and my life gets better. So I trust a little more, and my life gets even better. Etc. And it increases like an exponent. Like doubling pennies.)

I am now bound to succeed! Because I cannot fail. I’ve learned the secret to NEVER FAILING! If I ‘fail’, I just turn to the nagging, depressed voice in my head saying,

“I want to give up. I suck. See, I’ll never succeed. People hate me now.” and I say,

"Hey, I love ya, but that's not helping at all. Do you want to have all this awesome stuff we both want? Then root for me, and let's learn from what went wrong and figure out how to do better next time.” And the voice replys,

"Well, I'd really rather rip you apart, but I guess I do want all that good stuff, so I'll stop, I guess. For now."

Every failure just makes me stronger. I’m like the Replicators in Stargate or the Borg in Star Trek. I have become the terminator. I am unstoppable. Your clothes. Give them to me.

This begs one important question from me:

“Isaac, it sounds like you’re just turning into a productivity robot. You have no free will, you just take inputs and carry them out. You’ll turn into an emotionless joyless mettle productivity machine.” To which I say,

“That is so much better than what I have been, ergo a blob of Jabba-the-Hut-likespinelesss flesh merely consuming whatever sensory delights were within easy groping distance of my bloated and immobile form while squirming away from anything unpleasant. I may be a robot, but I will be the most kick butt, awesome, helpful robot you’ve ever seen!”

But I won’t become a robot. All of this habit forming and discipline is for the sake of love and love alone. That is my compass. I’m just acquiring better tools to go where it’s pointing. 

All this is not really new news. I've just stepped up my level of clarity on how to accomplish it. 

Here's to the journey!