As we embed the practices outlined in this book into our daily lives, we increasingly view painful events as learning opportunities, not experiences to be avoided. A process of catharsis is initiated as we unravel the intricate webs of subliminal causes driving our behaviours. Awareness and wisdom develop as we iterate through rhythms of growth, stress, rest and understanding. Over time, this leads to the removal of repressed emotions, negative filters and habituated patterns that, up to now, have been limitin and inhibiting us.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
ATTAIN FREEDOM THROUGH DISCIPLINE
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
As a child growing up in Pennsylvania, Martha Graham felt like a fish out of water. A deep desire to express her innermost feelings to the world was incongruent with the time – early 20th century – and place – a dark, sooty industrial landscape of steel, tanneries, soap, and glue factories – into which she was born. Add to that a strict Presbyterian upbringing and one can imagine the frustration a little girl with a wish to connect meaningfully with others must have felt.
Her life changed course one fateful day in 1910 however, when Graham’s father took her to see her first dance performance. The young girl sat silent and spellbound, transfixed by the lead performer’s ability to express emotions in a way that wasn’t verbal but entirely visceral. The experience ignited an intense desire in her to take to the stage, and so it wasn’t long before she started dance lessons. Through a combination of passion, persistence, and patience, the seventeen-year-old would go on to invent a whole new language of movement, revolutionize the genre of dance, and become one of the great American artists of the 20th century. Fast forward six years, to the summer of 1916, an awestruck Graham arrives at the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, the first of its kind in America, where she quickly realised everyone had ‘just one great passion, the passion to create beauty.’ While co-founder Ruth St. Denis initially believed Graham too short, shy and old to become a great, her partner Ted Shawn, seeing potential in the 22-year-old, gave her a chance by taking her on tour. He was rewarded by Graham’s first solo performance as the audience were blown away by her explosive energy. Everything taught to the ‘young tornado’, as Ted came to call her, was transformed into something sharper, more poignant and evocative. She was somehow able to inject new life into old routines and, in the process, she too seemed to come more alive.
This turned out to be a major inflection point in Graham’s life. She had stumbled upon a path, her path, towards what De Mello and other mystics call aliveness, or coming alive. A path which straightens the more we inhabit and integrate mind, spirit and body through a continuous deepening of intention and attention. By devoting her life to developing a way of moving that could tap into and express humanity’s deep well of emotions – from rage and grief to passion and ecstasy – Graham had embraced an unusual yet powerful way to enter this state of aliveness.
The Martha Graham Method, as her techniques became known, was ostensibly a set of dance routines. At a more vital level, however, it was a mix of yoga and meditation, albeit with an intriguing twist: it connected and communicated with an audience, often by eliciting extreme reactions from empathy right up to utter revulsion. Powerful effects which can be traced back to the way the choreographies were developed: as an experimental process in which Graham dug deep into the rawness of her emotions until she found ‘some little secret language which speaks for your body and for your heart.’
Believing the body’s truest expressions arose from the torso, she designed endless exercises to build up muscles in what she called this ‘house of pelvic truth.’ All routines began with a contraction in this area of the body, almost animalistic and sexual in manner, so as to evoke emotions in both performer and viewer. The courage to publicly showcase such culturally taboo material speaks volumes to Graham’s willingness to put her whole self on the line. She drew strength from the belief that her vocation was more a religion with rites than an art with empty gestures. That she had been bestowed with a divine responsibility to develop its doctrine and dogma, based entirely on a vocabulary of movement. She even professed to feeling possessed not by a demon but the ‘driving force of god that plunges through me’ – this ‘is what I live for.’
Coming alive to this driving force and communing with its essence is the marrow of all myths, religions, rites of passage and philosophies. It’s the not-so-mystical state in which we connect to what’s deep inside and permit it to take the helm of our lives. Entering this state has one key and constant requirement: a willingness to be present on the tip of fear. Being hungry, striving onwards against the elements, finding food, eking out a means to support our families, facing up to others in the tribe trying to push us down the pecking order – this was the way of life for our ancestors.
And those who found a way to use this adversity to their advantage – by converting it into a path of survival which made them stronger and wiser – were naturally selected for procreation. Maybe this is why we feel more alive when we face our fears, when we stare down our demons; when we tap into our deepest angsts and find the strength and courage to remain present with the pain, we connect with this innate and powerful aspect of existence.
The French have a term ‘elan vital’ to describe the essential energy that animates and moves us through life. What we all yearn for deep down is to tap into this sense of aliveness. The only problem is that it can feel alien and frightening because it takes us out of our comfort zone. So many of us choose to stick with what’s familiar rather than risk the feeling of losing control. Studies suggest, however, that being in this immersive state – other terms used for it are ‘in flow’ or ‘in the zone’ which create similar feelings of agency and empowerment – is humankind’s most innately successful mode of operating.
A requisite to reside here is an ever-deepening attention born from an intention to stay with whatever arises, be it painful and demonic, enjoyable and godlike, or anything in between. In this way Graham wrote, you are ‘permitting life to use you in a very intense way’ which is sometimes ‘not pleasant, sometimes its fearful, but nonetheless it’s inevitable.’
Graham’s predilection to get in touch with her inner truth can be traced back to her childhood, in particular her relationship with her father.
As an alienist (the pre-Freudian term for a psychiatrist) who specialized in nervous disorders, George Graham spent much of his time analysing the way people spoke and moved. He planted the idea in her mind that ‘movement never lies. You will always reveal what you feel in your heart by what you do in your movement.’ This, Martha maintained, was her first lesson as a dancer, and inspired the driving principle that shaped her entire career: that ‘movement is the one speech which cannot lie.’ Over a century before Drs. Peter Levine and Bessel van De Kolk leveraged psychological rofiling and neuro imaging to affirm the whole body’s role in mental health, Martha Graham intuitively understood that people may deceive with words but the body always keeps the score. An avid reader and lifelong learner, she combined such insights with aspects of Zen Buddhism and Jungian psychoanalysis to develop a dance technique that not only utilized, but strengthened, this mind body connection.
And while she may have felt God flowing through her, she used its power to divine her demons. To perceive, accept, inquire into their nature, and ultimately naturalize a process for hunting and healing emotionally-charged patterns of conditioning. This personalized process manifested as a practice – simultaneously dance, yoga, meditation and entertainment – still popular to this day, having cemented itself alongside ballet as one of the few serious dance forms to stand the test of time. An extraordinary achievement which comes down to a single choice Graham made early in life: the conscious decision to come alive, and to keep doing so, at all costs.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
It was the grandest of commitments that took tremendous discipline.
And while she faltered at times in her life, she would always return time and again to her ultimate mission. Right up to the day she died, having spent eight decades building up a craft she referred to as a ‘gesture toward the truth.’
The arc of Graham’s life story is analogous to the PAIN Process. We can, for example, map key aspects of her life to its four phases:
- Perceive – Early in life she became aware of a deep inner drive to meaningfully express herself in a way that words could never capture.
- Accept – Showing immense courage and determination to honour her calling, she steadfastly sought out and acknowledged what she found to be true to all human experience, even if the results were personally challenging or culturally taboo.
- Inquire – Persistently and patiently, she devoted her whole life to developing a unique method that allowed her to explore the inner landscape. Her curiosity drove her to continually craft new ways to express its contents to the world through movements of the body.
- Naturalize– With tremendous discipline she directed her passion, day in and day out, towards a calling and way of life that had deep meaning for her. She adopted and embedded a process and system designed to bring her, and her students, further along the path towards self-discovery, wholeness and aliveness.
Every day, Graham demanded hard work, energy and mindful focus from herself and her students. This, she explained, was the only way to achieve life’s ultimate task: attaining ‘freedom through discipline.’
Practical Exercise: Sitting with Demons
Ajahn Chah, one of the great Buddhist teachers of the 20th century, gave the following practice as an instruction to his students. Try it out.
- Put a chair in the middle of a room.
- Sit in the chair.
- See what comes to visit (welcome everything, especially your demons).
PAIN Point
With sustained focus and effort we can systematically strip away the harmful desires and insecurities that shape our habits and inhibit our lives. Discipline in this endeavour leads us to the freedom of unconditioned choice.
DIVINE YOUR DAEMONIC SPIRIT
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph Campbell
Western culture has long promoted the idea that pain is wrong. That it’s some kind of mistake. It’s a perception rooted in the word’s Hellenistic origins. Poinḗ was a ‘daemon’ or spirit whom the ancient Greeks believed punished people on behalf of Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution. Over time, the name assumed additional meaning – it came to represent the penalty for anyone displaying hubris towards the gods.
As Latin subsumed Greek words, and Christianity adopted many of its traditions and beliefs, it’s not hard to see how punishment and pain coagulated into a single concept. To the point where pain is now considered not just the consequence of a mistake, but the very mistake itself. A conflation that’s further cultivated by today’s prevalent perception that persistent pleasure is not only attainable but a basic human right. The flipside, of course, being that pain can somehow be permanently banished from our lives.
Poinḗ was just one of many spirits whom the Greeks believed sent ‘dreams, signs and illnesses to men.’ We see mention of them in Plato’s ‘Symposium’, an allegorical text in which a priestess explains to Socrates that ‘everything daemonic is between divine and mortal,’ with their chief role being ‘interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men.’
Socrates also claimed to have his own personal daemon who whispered into his ear, telling him what to avoid (albeit never what to do).
In ‘The Apology’, another Plato text, the founder of western philosophy refers to this spirit as a ‘sign,’ suggesting he considered it more a channel of inspired wisdom or elevated consciousness than an external entity in its own right.
Such an interpretation ties in with other illustrious figures throughout history, each of whom claimed to have their own daemonic guides.
Within Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for example there dwelled a spirit that drove him to fulfil his destiny, while Albert Einstein was beholden to an inner voice that shaped the direction of his speculations. Leonardo Da Vinci, too, had a sense of fate that could be viewed as daemonic in nature. All spoke of an inner force that guided them in the direction of their destiny, towards a deeper alignment with a larger wisdom one might call inspiration (which translates from its original Latin as ‘breath spirit into,’ often prefixed, of course, with the word ‘divine’).
A prefix which, in light of the above, is not as fantastical as one may think. For we are now arriving at a point of understanding where ideas of Hellenistic ‘daemons’ and our modern psychological demons converge into a quasi-divine force. Supremely natural energies that remind us of our overriding objective and purpose in life, that which outweighs any dream, ambition, or aspiration, simply because it’s the precursor and catalyst to their attainment. We’re talking, of course, about the great task of exorcising ourselves from the control of a lifetime of conditioning.
Maybe this is why Socrates, Plato, and so many other great thinkers in history sought to understand and befriend these spiritual guides.
Perhaps they knew therein was a deeper intelligence, one that was dangerous if mishandled, misunderstood or mistaken for something else. If treated with respect and curiosity however, the associated risks could be avoided and its wisdom gleaned.
There are many ways to go about this, some less intuitive than others! The 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, for example, figured the best way to tap into this inner force (which he calls God in this case) was to do, well, nothing. Simply stop: thinking, reacting, resisting, moving. Even better, he said, go backwards. He describes this approach in his extrapolation of Matthew 6:33: “Seek Ye First God’s Kingdom”
‘…what does this mean? What am I to do?…
Ought I to get a position corresponding to my abilities and powers in order to bring this about? No, you are first to seek the kingdom of God. Ought I, then, to give all my fortune to the poor? No, you are first to seek the kingdom of God. But does this, then, mean that, in a sense, there is nothing for me to do? Quite right—there is, in a sense, nothing. You are to make yourself nothing, to become nothing before God, and learn to keep silent—and it is in this silence that you begin to seek what must come first: the kingdom of God.
‘Thus, in a godly way, one goes in a certain sense backward, toward the beginning ….The beginning is this art of becoming silent… in the deepest sense, silent, silent before God.’
Stop moving forward, purposefully go backwards, step back into silence to connect with the divine in ourselves. Kierkegaard believed this was the key message of the famous biblical passage. Whether we infer ‘divine’ in this case to mean wisdom, awareness, peace, wholeness or something more super-natural, all inferences point to a greater power inside each of us which we can somehow tap into. And yes, contradictory as it may seem, the receptacles of this power are our demons/daemons.
T.J. CONNOLLY
Practical Exercise: Processing Emotions
Sit or lie down in a comfortable position; close your eyes and take three slow, deep breaths, then:
- Find an emotion— e.g. fear, anger, jealousy—and try to feel it fully. Let’s say you choose fear; silently say to yourself, “I am afraid.” Fully experience what it is like to say and feel “I am afraid.” Stay with this experience until you feel it completely.
- Now, instead of saying, “I am afraid,” take a breath and say silently to yourself, “I feel fear.” Notice the shift from “I am” to “I feel.” Experience this shift and the new relationship.
- Now, shift again by saying silently to yourself, “I am aware of feeling fear.” Experience awareness of feeling fear fully. Shift into an observing awareness. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from shifting who or what fear is appearing to. Now, let your awareness shift again as you say, “Fear is welcome.”
PAIN Point
Intuition, inner guide, insight, divine inspiration – these are all synonyms for wisdom. A form of experiential intelligence that only arises when we are present with ourselves. When we wait and listen patiently, courageously and compassionately for whatever bubbles up from within.
TAKE THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
Jerzy Gregorek
In a 1999 interview, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spoke of a time when he used to mow neighbours’ lawns for money. While out on his rounds one day, an old widower asked him to come round to his backyard which he found to be full of ‘regular old ugly rocks.’ After gathering up a dozen or so, his neighbour proceeded to take out a dusty rock tumbler from his garage that comprised of a large coffee can and a motor with a rubber band passing between them. After hurling in the rocks, along with some liquid and grit, the old man turned the contraption on and, amidst the thunderous racket, told Jobs to come back the next day.
The following morning Jobs watched in awe as the old man opened up the tumbler to reveal the most ‘amazingly beautiful polished rocks.’ Through the simple routine of repeatedly rubbing up against each other, he witnessed first-hand how something plebeian could be transformed into something exceptional. For the rest of his life, Jobs recalled this encounter as a powerful metaphor for a ‘team working really hard on something they are passionate about….bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise and working together, they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.’
While the ‘Parable of the Stones’ (as the media later dubbed it) is a great analogy for the value of friction in teams, it’s just as applicable for dealing with the internal friction of pain we experience on a daily basis. The reality is that most of us go to great lengths to avoid painful situations or people who rub us up the wrong way. As a strategy this may work at times, but life is prone to present us with prickly problems and people who are not easily sidestepped. When we can’t physically avoid them, we usually default to psychological evasion techniques such as suppression, distraction or projection.
If not onto others, we push the problems out of our thoughts, deep down into our bodies. This psychological trickery happens in a split second, completely below the radar of conscious awareness. We simply assume the world is wrong or mistreated us in some way, and we’ve reacted accordingly. But we’re actually behaving more like puppets than intentional beings, manipulated by deeply embedded patterns of conditioning. In other words, life is happening to us, not being experienced by us.
Thankfully, there’s a better way to deal with, and process, the fractious events of life. They can, in effect, become valuable tools for increasing self-awareness if we view them, not as something to be avoided, but as heat-seeking missiles for our demons. Pointers to aspects of ourselves that we’re not yet aware of. Once made apparent, we can then work to free ourselves from their control by first accepting then inquiring into their nature and effects with courage, equanimity and compassion.
There are always opportunities for self-development and refinement to be gained from difficult situations and people, and the painful feelings they evoke such as anger, resentment and jealousy. That is, if we approach them with a mindset that’s not fixed on preconceived ideas.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck refers to this approach as having a Growth Mindset (as opposed to a Fixed Mindset). It involves aligning one’s view on life to the reality that conditions and qualities are not carved in stone, but can be cultivated through a wise and persistent effort. It’s a way of living that thrives on challenges, difficulties and setbacks, seeing them, not as something durable or defining, but springboards for growth and awareness.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
None of this is new of course. The idea that hardship purifies and makes us stronger has inspired folk wisdom, mantras, myths and idioms throughout the ages. It’s also the central tenet of Stoicism, a Hellenistic school of philosophy that greatly influenced Roman thought, which in turn influenced much of Christian theology and the wider Western world. The Roman philosopher Boethius, for example, maintained that bad fortune is better than good fortune because the latter induces foolishness and a false sense of happiness in worldly things. Whereas bad fortune, he upheld, teaches us the truth about ourselves and the world, and ‘we need truth, even if we must suffer for it, more than comfort or pleasure.’
Boethius’s words touch upon the core message of this book: that truth and pain are fateful bedfellows which, when faced with courage and compassion, bestow us with the gift of seeing things as they really are, not how we desire them to be. In other words, pain has the power to set us free. Author Peter Kreeft summed up this idea another way when he wrote: ‘Either you feel great tragedy and ask why, or you don’t, and then you are living an even greater tragedy and have even more need to ask why.’
The immense value of willingly suffering the inevitable pain of life – as opposed to resisting or running away from it – seems to be its ability to eradicate all that obstructs us from reaching our authentic selves. Like an axe that continuously hacks away at our faults and imperfections, it prunes back all the egoic adornments we’ve draped upon ourselves over a lifetime. Gradually we become lighter and freer as all that remains is the trunk of our Selves, the core of our being.
But if facing up to pain is so good for us, why does it feel so bad? And furthermore, if suffering brings us closer to ultimate wellbeing, why does the medical establishment promote the idea that the reduction of suffering, pain and stress is critical to good health? A study conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides intriguing answers to these questions. In 1998, they asked approximately 30,000 adults two simple questions: ‘How much stress have you experienced in the last year?’ and ‘Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?’ Over the following eight years they tracked the death rates of participants using public health records. The results were surprising. Those who experienced high levels of stress in the previous year were found to have a 43 percent increased risk of dying – but this was only true if they also believed stress was harmful to their health. On the other hand, those who experienced high levels of stress but didn’t believe it was harmful were found to have the lowest risk of dying – of all participants, including those who experienced low levels of stress!
Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that it was the belief that stress is bad for you – not the stress itself – is what was killing people. In fact, they determined this particular belief to be the 15th highest cause of death in the United States. So many self-help books, gurus and articles recommend reducing stress and anxiety by ‘believing in ourselves’, ‘forgetting the past’ or ‘removing mental clutter.’ This all makes sense, generally, but is it actually helpful?
They presume people are in a strong psychological space to start with, a safe and secure place where it’s simple to see their logic and just install new habits and beliefs – without dealing with underlying traumas, anxieties and fearshame-blame loops. The problem is logic doesn’t work with emotionally-in fused demons.
It makes much more sense therefore to focus our efforts, not on positive psychology, but negative psychology. Permanent solutions over superficial hacks. Taking one problem at a time and working through the various techniques and practices outlined in this book. By no means is this an invitation to become a masochist who seeks out pain and suffering. Who needs to?
Life is full of it anyway. It’s simply saying: if we’re stuck in a ditch, lets dig ourselves out first. Get to basecamp before eyeing up the mountain. And we do this by using whatever daily life throws at us as fodder for growth, as catalysts for transformation.
HOW TO HUNT DEMONS
Some folk refer to life’s continuous onslaught of adversity as FGOs (Fucking Growth Opportunities). Stressful encounters are painful, in other words, but they’re also precious chances to iron out the chinks, round off our edges, and eventually we may end up, not as polished stones, but more polished human beings. All we need to do is keep showing up for each and every FGO. This is the path of most resistance. It’s the surest route to higher ground.
Practical Exercise: Pain is Part of the Process
Find somewhere quiet and ask yourself the following questions:
- Think about all the hard things that you’ve faced in your life up to now. All those problems and challenges you have overcome. What do they mean to you now? Have they made you stronger, wiser, more resilient?
- Will there ever be a time when you will not make mistakes? When you will not experience pain?
- Acknowledge that the more you do, the more mistakes you will make and the more pain you will feel. This is all part of the process of life.
PAIN POINT
Just as chaos gave birth to the universe, struggle gives rise to growth.
Overcoming obstacles, learning from the pain of mistakes, this is how we develop, how we realize our potential. It’s a law of nature and, who knows, may also be the meaning and purpose of life.
To Struggle, Overcome, Learn. Repeat.
Welcome The Wisdom of Self-Compassion
Neff, Kristin. “Self-compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind.” William Morrow, 2011.
Pema Chódrón. The Places that Scare You: A guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.” Shambala Publications, 2001.
Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”
Random House / Bantam Dell, 2006.
Germer, C. & Neff, K. D. (2019). Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). In I. Itvzan (Ed.) The handbook of mindfulness-based programs: Every established intervention, from medicine to education (pp. 357-367). London: Routledge.
Kristin Neff , Christopher Germer. The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook: A Proven Way to Accept Yourself, Build Inner Strength, and Thrive.” 2018.
Ken McLeod. “Wake up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention.” Bravo Ltd, 2002.
Tara Brach. “Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN.” Penguin Life, 2019.
Walpola Rāhula. “What the Buddha Taught.” Grove Press, 1974.
https://mindworks.org/blog/buddhist-meditation-techniques-practices/ (High level overview of different types of buddhist meditation practices)
Swami Girijananda. “Tonglen for Our Own Suffering: 7 Variations on an Ancient Practice.” Rudra Press, 2015.
Thich Nhat Hanh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VAJTHwl46E&vl=en (the Buddhist master describes his own practices and words of self-compassion he uses with himself), 2020.
Girijananda, Swami. “Tonglen for Our Own Suffering: 7 Variations on an Ancient Practice.” Rudra Press, 2015.
Quotations:
“If you think that compassion implies softness, there’s no way I can describe compassion to you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard.
Compassion can be very rude, compassion can jolt you, compassion can roll up its sleeves and operate on you.” Anthony De Mello. “Awareness.”
“A Buddhist Master…as he bowed deeply.” Ken McLeod. “Wake up to Your Life:
Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention.”
“Peace, true peace, is only to be found through suffering, and we must seek the light in darkness.” Thomas Merton. “Ascent to Truth.”
“Some men believe in the power and value of suffering, but their belief is an illusion. Suffering has no power, no value of its own.” Thomas Merton. “No Man is an Island.”
“we see how our self-aversion has prevented us from being close to others…and we begin to grieve our unlived life”. Tara Brach. https://www.tarabrach.com/connecting-with-our-soul-sadness/ (Blog: Connecting with Our ‘Soul Sadness’), 2012.
Realise There Can Be Only One
Perls, Frederick (Fritz). “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim.” The Gestalt Journal Press, 2013. (Compiled and edited from transcriptions of threeworkshop/demonstrations that took place at the Esalen Institute in 1968).
Perls, Frederick (Fritz). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPekrkRxv-M(“What is Gestalt”), 1970.
Harris, Annaka. “Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind.” Harper, 2019.
Robertson, John. “The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction.” OUP Oxford, 2015.
Harwood, Jeremy. “The Freemasons: Rituals • Codes • Signs • Symbols: Unlocking the 1000-year old mysteries of the Brotherhood.” Lorenz Books, 2021.
Charles Darwin. “The Origin of Species.” (originaly published in 1859, but was not widely accepted as fact until the 1870s) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ehrenfels/ ( Overview / background of Christian von Ehrenfels and his work).
Mulcahy, R. (1986). Highlander. Twentieth Century Fox.
Perls, Frederick (Fritz). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0j6FIxIog (“Three Approaches to Psychotherapy.”), 1965. (famous Fritz Perls counseling session in which he demonstrates Gestalt therapy, an experiential approach that emphasizes personal responsibility, focusing on the individual’s experience in the present moment and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation).
Quotations:
“The civil war of inner conflicts weakens the efficiency and confidence of the patient, but every bit of integration will strengthen it. “ Fritz Perls. “Three Approaches to Psychotherapy.”
“to lie on the couch for years, decades and centuries.” “the word Now, the present.” “is nothing but the gap between the now and the later. As soon as you leave the secure basis of the now and jump into the future, you experience anxiety.”
“notice our chronic anxiety is that we fill the gap…with insurance policies, right character formations, daydreams, and so on”. “if we reduce the later to the now the anxiety is bound to collapse”. Fritz Perls. “What is Gestalt” “in the end, there can only be one.” Conor McCleod. “Highlander.”
Tap Energy not Time
Paul Davies. “About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution.” Penguin, 1996.
Lincoln Barnett. “The Universe and Doctor Einstein.” Bantam Books, 1982.
Sam Harris. “Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion.” Black Swan, 2015.
Whiting, F.W. “Being Oneself: The way of Meditation .” The School of Meditation London, 1985.
https://www.britannica.com/science/thermodynamics (Summary of laws of thermodynamics, including second Law). Brittanica.
- Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez. “Towards a statistical mechanics of consciousness: maximization of number of connections is associated with conscious awareness.” American Physical Society, 2016. (study that suggests human consciousness is a side effect of our brain moving towards a state of entropy).
Pema Chodron. “ Becoming Bodhissatvas: A Guidebook for Compassionate Action.” Shambhala Publications, 2018.
https://www.britannica.com/video/185529/ball-theorem-topology. “Understand the hairy ball theorem topology.”) Brittanica. (Summary article and good video explaining the hairy ball theorem in lay terms).
Quotations:
“The apprehension of time is caused by the perception of the changing instant, the apprehension of eternity by that of the enduring instant.” Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica.
“has no independent existence apart from the order of events by which we measure it”. Albert Einstein. “The Universe and Doctor Einstein.”
Source Strength in Silence and Solitude
https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home (official website of the Big History Project).
Steven Johnson. “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.” Scribner, 2002.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. “The First and Last Freedom.” Rider, 2013.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.”
Basic books (reprint), 2018.
Kanwetz, Nick. https://www.trainerroad.com/blog/science-of-supercompensation/ (“The Science of Supercompensation and How It Makes You Fast”).
Traineroard website article.
LeShan, Lawrence. “How to Meditate.” Little, Brown and Company, 1974.
Quotations:
“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action. “ Peter Drucker. “The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done.”
“little knots, wrinkles, and flaws.” “wiggle.” “space in the form of new elements, creating new star-forming nebulae, continuing its circle of life.” https://www. bighistoryproject.com/
Become A Spiritual Psychologist
Melody Beattie. “Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself.” Hazeldon, 1986. (awesome book on addictions and co-dependencies).
Watts, Alan. “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” Pantheon, 1951.
Henri J. M. Nouwen. “The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.” HarperOne, 2009.
Joseph Campbell. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Pantheon Books. 1949.
Bill De Mello. “Anthony De Mello: The Happy Wanderer.” Orbis Books, 2013.
Written by the mystic’s brother.
S.N. Goenka, William Hart. “The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka.” Harper Collins, 1987.
Goleman, Daniel. “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter more than IQ. 25th Anniversary Edition.” Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
Sharon Salzberg, “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness.”
Shambala, 2018.
Yuval Noah Harari. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1_YhlXiuxE (interview in which author Yuval Noah Harari speaks on Vipassana, Reality, Suffering, & Consciousness)
De Mello, Anthony. “Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.” Image (reprint), 1992.
Quotations:
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
Khalil Gibran. “The Prophet.”
“Once upon a time, a student…stop the pain.” (Guru/cave story). Melody Beattie.
“Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself.”
“the most difficult thing in the world to do is listen, to see….you will wake up in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.”
Anthony De Mello. “Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality.”