from the movie “War horse”

I went to see this movie yesterday, a crippled drinker husband says to his wife: “If you stop loving me, I wont blame you.”

She responds: “I might hate you more, but I wont love you less…”

This is one of the best understanding of love I have heard lately: Love is always there. You might get mad, you may be disappointed, you may disagree, you may even hate… but this has nothing to do with the love you feel. Love  doesn’t exclude other feelings, neither other feelings extinguish love. It is not one OR the other. It is all together. It is not because you love that you can’t feel antagonist sentiments. You love, your heart is open, so you are likely to feel multiple emotions.

You could even consider to leave that person, you can get divorced and never want to see that person again, but still love  him/her.

Challenged by Nietzsche

Nietzsche challenges us and disturbs us but that’s a good thing to do with a new year ahead.

Nietzsche puts down the Idols of modernity:

1-Liberty:

For Nietzsche, Freedom is the will to embrace our own responsibility in leading our lives. Freedom is the ability to create a life according to our own special values (he warns us of our ability to assimilate values from external sources: family, society, system or in reaction to them). Freedom is based on our own strength, on our ability to escape conformity and not on the liberty that can be granted to us by a State or a Law, nor the liberty to live like everybody else!

Why would we want liberty if it only means the liberty to choose what has already been packed for us?

2-Equality & Progress:

If equality is the leveling of valleys and mountains… Why would we want equality? Wouldn’t we have more to loose than to gain? I thank Nietzsche to open my eyes on that: Why would we want no differences in our horizon? Why can’t we enjoy diversity? Is a mountain “better” than a valley or a valley “better” than a mountain? And if we level both, with what would we be left with? Why should one be “better” than the other one?

Comfort and uniformity kill creativity, kill inspiration for greatness.

Greatness is not “being better”, greatness is not about being rich, or famous, or powerful…Greatness is authenticity and spirit: any life lived with both ingredients is a great and meaningful life. Modernity has tried to make us believe that progress and money will always lead us to a greater good… is it really so?… at what cost?

There is no a unique universal recipe for happiness (like money or a nice house with a white fence), some people don’t even WANT to be happy, some other just want to live life upon THEIR values!

3-Reason:

Nietzsche believes reason will not allow us to live meaningful lives, that reason can’t grasp reality and that there are very different kinds of knowledge. He invites us to trust more our body and passions, to embrace the concreteness of our life, to identify our values, to be the hero of our own adventure of living. Even more: if living is an art, we shall put reason aside and boost our creativity.

He also attacks Spirituality: Nietzsche considers spirituality self-repudiating and I differ with him on that: I believe we can embrace spirituality without deprecating our own physical existence, I believe we can unify both and this is precisely the challenge of a meaningful life. Don’t we need the strength of our spirit to be the hero of our own concrete life? And, can our spirit grow without connection with the infinite?

So, what does Nietzsche leave us with?

Our responsibility to create our own authentic life, to fully engage in that task, not been neither a spectator nor a follower and not even a leader because a leader puts himself at the service of others. Be an artist in search of beauty and meaning.

I like Nietzsche’s disturbance, I like when he invites us to face our idols and question them. It is politically incorrect to have doubts about the sacred ideals of liberty, comfort and happiness… but I think we can grow and expand from his questioning and this vision of being the creative actor of our own adventure. 

Golden Gifts

A mom was driving her kids to school when she realized she left her mobile (Blackberry or iPhone) at home. It was to late to go back and get it… She felt very nervous. She wouldn’t be home before the afternoon to have her phone back! Nobody would be able to reach her, she wouldn’t be able to contact anyone, no bbmms, no twitts… Total isolation!She spent all morning not knowing what to do with her hands, she felt an almost unbearable void around her and inside her, she was distracted, unfocused… just like someone struggling to quit smoking, or quit drinking…she thought.

This woman had 2 choices:

1-Promiss herself not to forget her mobile anymore…. Ever.

2-Observe her addiction and reflect upon it.

In this second case, she had 2 choices again:

1-Justify: Mobile are necessary, something important could happen and I need to be reachable, plus, it’s nice and fun to receive bips and news and comments from everyone, it makes me feel integrated, alive, important, connected…

2-Look at the women she was converting herself into, ponder if that was who she wanted to be and decide if she would want to change her behavior.

 

There are events in our lives that come to us as mirrors, to help us look at ourselves, to stop and really observe what we are doing and how we are living. They are golden gifts but many times we don’t see them… or we don’t want to look at those mirrors.

 

 

What about this other story?

Many years ago, my friend K read an article about the humiliation people living in dictatorship have to endure. She was living at that time in a happy, free, nice country but she realized her marriage was a dictatorship and that she was living humiliated most of the time. This article came into her hands and she had the courage to look at the mirror. She decided she would not stand that anymore, she eventually divorced and wrote a thankful letter to the author, Vaclav Havel.

 

How do I deal with Pain?

I am talking of EMOTIONAL pain…  emotional pain causes physical pain and unhealed emotional pain may cause physical illness…

Things happen in life and we cannot avoid pain.

Pain is a wound in our heart. Pain is many times unbearable. Pain can be so strong that we might feel we’re gonna die.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Fisrt: Breathe.

Breathe into your pain, hold her. Be compassionate with yourself. Surrender in cherishing arms if you have them, in your own arms if you don’t.

Breathe… Stay there and breathe…You don’t have to do anything, you don’t need to react… Just cradle your pain… Focus on the healing power of your inhalation and your exhalation…

 

Buddhists indeed say that life IS suffering. It is their FIRST TRUTH: Life IS suffering.

Let’s see what we can learn form them:

The first suffering is the suffering of suffering: the pain of being hurt, the pain of not being happy.

The second suffering is the suffering of change: growing old, knowing (and fearing) that nothing lasts…

The third suffering is the suffering of uncertainty and anxiety: knowing that lots of things that happen to us are out of our control,that they depend on a vast network of causes and conditions we cannot control.

The SECOND TRUTH is that there is a cause of suffering: Attraction and Aversion. That is: our Attachment. That is: our inability to recognize that everything is impermanent (even our pain!). We accord much importance to things that are attractive or aversive, we desire them or dread them, as if they had a nature… but they don’t… everything is selfless and interdependent. We treat change as something to be resisted rather than accepting that it is the very nature of our lives.

The THIRD TRUTH is that there is a release from suffering: we can’t eliminate pain nor change from our lives, but we can reduce the suffering they cause, how? Understanding and accepting reality as it is: impermanent, selfless, interdependent.

The FOURTH TRUTH is that we can remove our confusion through the EIGHTFOLD PATH which consists principally of: action (right action, right speech), thought (right view, right meditation) & mindfulness.

So relief of suffering can be found in accepting change, accepting that nothing IS good or bad, desirable or dreadful, cultivating faith and our ability to adapt, learn, forgive & grow.

The relief of suffering can also be found in cherishing arms & self compassion, because love cures fear and pain…

If you are often in pain, you might consider learning from the Buddhist truths and when pain hurts you, turn to your self-love and the arms of your loved-ones.

 

 

Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes

Let everything become your teacher.

Ask yourself if you are seeing this person with”fresh eyes”, as he or she really is, or if you are seeing only the reflection of your own thoughts about this person.

Cultivate a “Beginner’s Mind”, a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time.

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to your own experience.

The habit of categorizing and judging our experience locks us into mechanical reactions that we are not even aware of and that often have no objective basis at all. These judgments tend to dominate our minds, making it difficult for us to find any peace within ourselves.

When you feel connected to something, that connection immediately gives you a purpose for living.

Face your pain, do not avoid it, breathe into it, learn from it, do not try to get rid of it, embrace it.

Be mindful: be where you are.

These are excerpts of “Full Catastrophe Living” by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Love is not a feeling

Thanks to my friend Yana, I have been reading David Richo’s books excerpts. I found lots of very creative perspectives. For example, he invites the reader to face the fact that change is inevitable, that we might gain much more by letting go than staying attached to what is… But where he really surprised me was with this affirmation: “Love is not a feeling, it is a choice.” It made me remember of my Philosophy teacher  Emeterio Gomez who invited us to reflect upon the differences between “Loving your child, loving the cashier at your local supermarket and loving the person that had harmed you.” That reflection is a good way to perceive what love might be, what love can be.

I love passion, I love being in love, I enjoy the feeling of loving all my loved ones, as something that springs naturally from my heart, something that overwhelms me, that makes me feel alive and it seems to me so very different from a choice! A choice is a mental decision isn’t it? How can be love a mental decision? That wouldn’t be love then!

Well, I think David Richo is right. There is a choice prior to love, the choice of allowing the feeling to rise and grow, the choice to put fear aside, the choice of opening our heart. There is also a choice, once love is there, to nurture it, to make it as sublime as possible, to remain mindful of it, to avoid controlling the loved one. And when love has been hurt, there is also the choice of keeping our heart soft and not let the pain harden it, the choice of feeling the grace of forgiveness, the choice of acceptance.

It looks like what David Richo is inviting us to do, is to focus on our heart rather than our ego! And I like the invitation! You can read more and download the free book at: http://davericho.com

Thank you Aldous Huxley!

In “A brave new world”, Aldous Huxley shows us a society living in happiness. People are conditioned to love their job and place in society, people have no family nor durable partner, so there are no struggles nor attachments, therefore there is no pain, therefore everybody is happy. People are never alone so there is neither individuality nor boredom. After this reading, I wonder if the pursuit of happiness is really a good thing to achieve. As I have written here before, our culture despise for sadness, weariness and loneliness might be leading us in the wrong direction: We don’t have to be happy at any cost! When we are sad or lonely maybe it is precisely when we are most connected to our humanity!

Views of Daoism

Dao is “The way”, the way we live our lives, the way the universe works and the way we think about those things and understand our lives.

The concepts we use to think are projections of our own concerns, we use them to attribute properties and value to things that have no intrinsic value. These projections distance us from reality and make it imposible to us to see reality in its infinite manifestations and shades. We ought to stop labeling, stop making distinctions, stop cutting reality in chunks. Reality is a whole. When you see good, you create bad; when you see winner you create looser…

To make decisions we just have to act spontaneously, following our intuition and passions, staying in harmony with all things. We should get rid of wisdom, reason, justice, kindness, cleverness, profit and rigidity; Wear the undyed, hold the uncarved, return to nature…

We are just participants of a vast array of processes, our achievements are the consequences of many processes in which we play only one part. We can never say:” I made it, I succeeded” because for sure, several circumstances made possible that very success.

“Our self-centered, goal-directed behavior is often exactly what gets in the way of accomplishing our goals.” This is a nerve breaking affirmation for any “occidental” individual because we are formatted to define goals and do as much effort as it is required to achieve them, the bigger the effort, the bigger the success. Daoism presents a completely different perspective: be spontaneous, follow your instinct, be align with your true self, experience effortlessness, tune in with the whole and you will see your goals achieving in cooperation with the whole.

2 important points of view of daoist are the following:

1-Cultivation and effort appear only when we lose our character, the Dao urges us to recover our spontaneity and natural state. The artificial values of society we learn through “cultivation” often lead us to decadence and corruption.

2-When the way is lost, virtue appears, when virtue is lost kindness appears, when kindness is lost justice appears and when justice is lost, ritual appears. That means: When we have lost our ability to go with the flow of the whole, in harmony with all things, we will need to be virtuous; if we cannot be virtuous, at least we will expected to be kind and when we are not able to be kind, we will need justice to oblige each one of us.

Daoism tells us to live our life as if we were water: not resisting, going with the flow, making our way around obstacles, manifesting our very nature and spontaneity, nourishing everything we make contact with.

Possibilities are just as important as achievements.

Rigidity is death, softness & weakness is life.

Why I have no doubts about having children or not? (For my Barcelona friend Gloria)

Because children bring the lessons we need to learn in life, they are our masters.
You could answer: “I don’t want any lessons! I want to succeed in my job and enjoy life!”
I say: -Why do you want to have success and enjoyment?
You will say: -To feel fulfilled.
and I will add: -Growth and flourishing are the best way to fulfillment.
You might insist:-My personal way to flourish, is to find success and enjoyment.
I answer: -Success is external and enjoyment is ephemeral and limited, growth is about you and is limitless.
You will go on: -And what about all the money and all the time I will spend on my children…?… I can learn much more anywhere else!
My answer is: -That is exactly what you will learn: How to make that time enjoyable and meaningful. There is no other way to learn than from the heart.

Aristotle’s reflections about a good life.

What is the highest good of all, what is our highest aim as human beings?
Pleasure?… Aristotle says it is not distinctive of humans.
Honor?… It is more about who confers it than who receives it.
Excellence?… You can excel in one area of life and be miserable in another one.
Wealth?… Is just a mean to something else.

We do look for Pleasure, Honor, Excellence, Wealth, because we believe through them we will be happy.
What really makes us happy, our highest aim, is to flourish.
How do we achieve that?
Aristotle says we need:
From within: Virtues, Practical Wisdom, and Moral strength.
From the external: Material goods and Connection with others.

Happiness requires actions in accordance with virtues, actions require choices, choices require wisdom and actions need moral strength to be executed.
Practical wisdom gives us the skills that enable us to attain our goals.
We need more that good intentions and good character if we want to accomplish things: to put our desires and thoughts into actions we will need Moral Strength.
Moral strength is being able to postpone gratification, to resist immediate temptation and to be able to face pain.

Virtue: Virtue is not a natural behavior but what is interesting about it is that once you have practiced the virtue, it becomes natural to you and pleasurable, that’s why educators and parents are so important in developing children’s virtues: the child has to face the pain of practice virtue in order to experience the benefits and feel the pleasure of flourishing. (Have you ever thought of Aristotle as an alternative to Dr Spock?)
Virtues are means between two extreme vices:
Courage……… between Cowardice and Rashness
Generosity…….between Stinginess and Profligacy
Dignity……….between Self-deprecation and Pomposity
Wittiness……..between Tediousness and Buffoonery
Friendliness……between Grouchiness and Promiscuity
Honesty……….between Dishonesty and Tactlessness

Serenity………between Inaction and Stress
Acceptance…….between Passive and Demanding