By Brian Alger on 10/21/2011
[Exploring Life] When we are sabotaged we are in some manner undermined, injured, attacked, or vandalized. Sabotage retrieves imagery of warfare in which one side secretly attempts to destroy or disable critical facilities, structures, or positions of the enemy. The essence of sabotage lies within opposition and hostility directed toward a perceived threat to our well-being. It is most potent when we are unaware of its influence and effects on us; the art of sabotage is to make its presence invisible, to cloak its intent, and to camouflage its touch. We are imprisoned by sabotage when we are unaware of its presence.
It is strange that we are capable of sabotaging our own lives, the lives of others, as well as the natural environment around us. Self-sabotage is energy within that inhibits the full expression of our creative presence. It means that our actions and behaviours, conscious or unconscious, in some way limit and confine our embrace of life, and we undermine our own creative expression. From a spiritual perspective, self-sabotage means a repression the soul, the restraint of our innate creativity and expression. To restrain the soul is to restrain the expression of life itself and to restrict our presence to bland and arid interactions, habits, and routines. Life, as a creative expression of our presence, becomes dull and unimaginative. To life ourselves out of these restraints, it is important the we first expose and reveal the inner landscape of self-sabotage so that we create the possibility of cultivating more inspiring and imaginative approaches to living.
Continue reading “Experience: Release From Self-Sabotage”
Posted in 5. EXPERIENCE | Tagged aging, attention, authenticity, awareness, concentration, connectedness, death, dying, ecopsychology, fear, gratitude, imagination, inevitables, magic, mindfulness, mindlessness, mortality, natural, nature, sabotage, soul, unlived-life |
By Brian Alger on 10/14/2011
We find ourselves today in the midst of an economic storm born in the shadowy underworld of corporate greed, want, superficiality, and narcissism that threatens the sustainability of our immediate lifestyle. And we stand together in the midst of an approaching environmental tsunami in which our attempts to own and commoditize the natural world will inevitably turn against us and threaten our very survival. Intensifying our sense of confrontation with the world around us are fundamentalist and extremist movements that embrace lunacy under the guise of religion. Economic, environmental, and religious virulence immerses each of us in a global confluence of angst, anxiety, and fear disguised as progress and development. The debt crisis is not limited to the realm of economics. The real debt crisis lies deep within the camouflaged and well protected realm of our own narcissism.
The description above is a vast and fragile generality. Not all of people suffer from these various forms of indebtedness. It is to say, however, that the general presence of these crises is real and each of us walks among them every day. For an empathetic spirit, the walk can become infectious and the vast surround of angst and fear can work its way into the presence of the sensitive person. An affective person is not a weak person; an affective person is an individual that feels and communicates their surroundings with emotional vibrancy and intuitive sensibilities. Equanimity, or the ability to remain physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritual “equal” or “balanced” in all circumstance is a fundamental spiritual quality. What does being “equal” or “balanced” really mean?
Continue reading “Spiritual Quality: Equanimity”
Posted in 3. SPIRIT | Tagged awareness, balance, confusion, emotions, equanimity, fear, gratitude, impermanence, inevitables, nature, spirituality, suffering |
By Brian Alger on 10/04/2011
Ryan Rivera is the publisher and founder of the Calm Clinic, a website designed to help people find valuable information about anxiety disorders. Ryan speaks directly from personal experience. After spending seven years suffering from panic attacks, severe anxiety, agoraphobia, social anxiety, unbearable physical symptoms, headaches, neck pains, constant tension, diarrhea, palpitations, pounding heart, Ryan reached a tipping point and found a way to embrace a movement toward the elimination of anxiety from his life. Ryan found Exploring Life through the article, Emotional Terrain: Anxiety – Fear in Search of a Cause, and has kindly offered to contribute an article.
Anxiety affects all of us to one degree or another. No one is immune from its influence. In my own experience, I have found that a great deal of what I become anxious about is in fact a complete fiction constructed by an over-active imagination. When we choose to go inside our anxiety to reveal its source, I felt a sense of irony in realizing that often my own periods of anxiety were self-induced. However, modern society seems to have a morbid obsession with anxiety and the media all too often seem to obsessively and foolishly fan its flames. Anxiety can also take the form of a weapon of deception, manipulation, control and submission that imposed upon us by an external agent. In other words, anxiety can force itself upon from the outside. Regardless of its source, anxiety simultaneously affects body, mind and spirit, and therefore changes our very perception and appreciation of life. In this article, Ryan focuses on the inexorable link between food and anxiety.
Continue reading “Food: Eating Healthy to Alleviate Anxiety Disorder”
Posted in 1. BODY | Tagged anxiety, distraction, emotions, food, healing, health, mental degradation, panic, suffering, tension, well-being |
By Brian Alger on 09/23/2011
[Exploring Life] When we receive an education we are placed into a system of prerequisites that have been determined by an amorphous agency. By definition, education is an experience that is predetermined, imposed, rigidly structured, and bound to a self-reinforcing system of evaluation. The essence of the education system originates in automation, mechanization, generalization, and abstraction. Education uniformly prepares us to successfully participate in the static cultural assumptions of the status quo. We gain familiarity with other people’s thoughts, ideas, theories, and stories, which we seem to adopt as if they were our own. This is, however, exactly what education needs to be since it is far better to be part of the machine than it is to be exiled and be forced to survive on the fringes of society. In this sense, education is cultural survival.
Life, as we know, is fluid, emergent, immediate, and mysterious. We are all faced with these things called the inevitable in life including death, aging, the unexpected, and the unknown. Even though we may possess cultural security and safety in the form of a career and family, life is a far more powerful and numinous force than culture can ever hope to be. A dark night of the soul is a numinous force of life that initially shatters our cultural assumptions leaving us adrift in the foreboding tempestuous currents of not knowing, failing to understand, and debilitated awareness. We may stand on the pinnacle of cultural success, only to face the harsh reality that it is ultimately a house of cards. A dark night is a different form of education that is imposed from a mysterious source but in no way embraces prerequisites, automation, generalization, and abstraction. The reason for this is quite clear, when we enter into a dark night of the soul, we do not know where we are, why we are here, or how to proceed. That is to say, we are forced into the deepest mysteries of our being.
Continue reading “Spiritual Endeavour: Dark Night of the Soul – 4″
Posted in 3. SPIRIT | Tagged anxiety, apprehension, assimilation, assumptions, attention, awareness, belief, belonging, comprehension, conditioning, creativity, culture, darkness, depression, education, fear, gratitude, inevitables, knowledge, learning, medium, mental discipline, point-of-no-return, prerequisite, presence, regret, sacred, self-reliance, soul, spiritual response, spirituality, stress, threshold, transience |
By Brian Alger on 09/16/2011
[Exploring Life] Breathing Into Discernment: The first article in this series explored the importance of developing breath awareness as a means to explore the intuitive and deeply integrative realm of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that flow throughout the confluence of our everyday lives. Breathing affects everything in our experience, and our first task is to be able to witness and observe how the flow of breathing is altered by the endless variations of moods, reactions, worries, behaviours, expressions, and attachments that conspire to shape our orientation to and presence in the world. Breathing is one of our most trusted and essential mentors in life. Improving our quality of life, that is to say, improving physical, mental, spiritual, environmental, and experiential well-being must begin with the simple and deeply profound act of breathing.
I believe our breath is a trusted mentor and guide that speaks to us in an ancient intuitive language of the bodymind. The first task of any human being throughout time is to take the first breath. Indeed, our final task in life will be to take our last breath. In this sense, breathing marks the beginning and end of life, and permeates everything we experience during our lives. However, we live in an age in which we often seem stuck in our own heads immersed in a kind of addiction to thought, in the absence of intuition, contemplation, and all too often wisdom. Working with the breath in a conscious manner can be difficult, and if done without care, can have a shadow side. What do we do once we are more attuned to changes in our breathing patterns in the midst of a troubling or difficult experience?
Continue reading “Breathing: A Confluence of Body, Mind, and Spirit – 2″
Posted in 5. EXPERIENCE | Tagged attention, awareness, balance, breathing, confluence, death, discernment, dying, emotions, fear, gratitude, grief, healing, impermanence, inevitables, intuition, journey, loss, memory, point-of-no-return, regret, sadness, soul, spirituality, stress, suffering, threshold, transience, well-being |
By Brian Alger on 09/09/2011
[Exploring Life] The essential purpose of creativity is the provision of security and sanctuary from the confluence of situations and circumstances that circumambulate our presence in this world. That is, our creative capacities are most effectively used to nurture, cultivate, and care for ourselves, the people around us, and the earth itself. Creative resilience is the energy of reaching inward in order to understand ourselves so that we may learn to authentically express ourselves participate in life in the spirit of belonging and cooperation. All meaningful creativity originates in deep self-awareness of our presence in the midst of the inspired landscapes and life forms that coalesce into the earth. To be creative means that we use our lives to cultivate compassion, belonging, and gratitude by virtue of our presence.
This interpretation of creativity, perhaps, somewhat unusual. Often we imagine creativity to be something belonging to the world of art resulting in the production of aesthetically pleasing objects. In this sense, art is the use of our creative capacities and skills to produce something that is beautiful, compelling, and unique in perspective. This is, of course, a perfectly acceptable meaning for art. However, the essence of art lies not in the things we make as the ways in which we express our presence here on the this planet. In other words, the artistic sensibility is attuned to the care of specific qualities of the soul such as beauty, wonder, gratitude, empathy, belonging, compassion, and cooperation. It is in this spirit that we are all artists in pursuit of an inspired and imaginative life.
Continue reading “Creative Resilience: The Elements of Creativity”
Posted in 5. EXPERIENCE | Tagged aging, attention, authenticity, awareness, belief, belonging, conditioning, creativity, culture, death, earth, fear, gratitude, healing, identity, imagination, impermanence, inevitables, love, nature, presence, resilience, sanctuary, security, solitude, soul, spirituality, suffering, survival, threshold, unlived-life |
By Brian Alger on 09/01/2011
[Exploring Life] We live in an age of instantaneous global communication. We also live in an age of mass somniloquence. Each of us secretly desires the intimacy and art of a deeper more compelling conversation that authentically explores the alluring mystery of being alive. When we engage in authentic conversation we explore and exchange our thoughts, feelings and attitudes about the nature of our lives. The various masks we wear and various roles we play within culture and society have no place in authentic conversation. Hidden within the wonderful inventiveness of our new technologies are the seeds of isolation, dislocation, and superficiality. Even though we communicate with each other more and more, we seem to have less and less to say.
The speed and quantity of communication technology is steadily increasing in both speed and magnitude; we can say more and more at greater rates of speed to an increasingly larger audience. The endless drone of the news media have embraced this modern advancement and in doing so clearly reveal that “reporting the news” is about dressing up banal and superficial content in fashionable yet misleading language. All news is old news. More and more people are going weary of the endless tirade of cultural fodder ever more invading our lives through digital infiltration. The Internet, an environment for sharing, has been hijacked by our cultural addiction to materialism, consumption, commodification, ownership, species superiority, and of course environmental degradation. We are in many ways a suicidal species for a cause that is at best delusional and neurotic. It is this very addiction that has made our conversations shallow and dislocating; it is this very addiction that will destroy the earth unless we heal our presence within nature. Unless we embrace authenticity in living, we may become our own demise.
Continue reading “Creative Resilience: The Art of Authenticity”
Posted in 4. ENVIRONMENT | Tagged artistry, authenticity, belonging, commodity, communication, creativity, death, earth, education, feelings, healing, heart, identity, imagination, impermanence, inspiration, knowledge, life, mental degradation, mystery, nature, resilience, reverence, sacred, self-reliance, selfishness, spiritual response, suffering, transform, transience, unlived-life, wilderness |