Aging: Senescence as Creative Inspiration
[Exploring Life] It is strange to contemplate aging. The process of getting older often seems so gradual as to be imperceptible. The idea of getting older can create a sense of discomfort since the very mention of it requires us to come into closer proximity with the reality of our own impermanence. We have an [...]
Memory: The Cult of Remembrance
[Exploring Life] How many misleading or false beliefs and assumptions do we preserve in our memories? And how many of these false beliefs and assumptions have been assimilated as a result of cultural conditioning? It would be immensely difficult to conduct a statistical inventory of our memories in order to quantify the exact number of [...]
Breathing – A Confluence of Body, Mind, and Spirit: Breathing Into Experience
[Exploring Life] Breathing Into Discernment: 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 [...]
Nature of Belief: The Realm of Evidence
We interpret our experiences in life through a complex and often hidden network of beliefs. The human brain is a belief engine; beliefs are the apparatus and raw materials of the mind. They lie at the core of our emotions, determine our subsequent behaviour, and shape the course of our lives. In a basic sense, [...]
Spiritual Quality: Presence – The Embrace of Life
[Exploring Life] An external presence means that we share some kind of proximity with other living force in our world. This kind of presence may be visible or invisible, readily perceptible to our senses or it may be intuited as a felt-presence that does not present itself as everyday sensation. The invisible tends to confound [...]
Points of No Return: On the Loss of My Parents – Last Words
[Exploring Life] Closure means to find a resolution to a significant event in a person’s life. With respect to the loss of a loved one, closure ultimately means to find contentment and gratitude as the final and most significant outcome of death. This is the twelfth and final entry I will dedicate to the series [...]
Emotional Terrain: Grief Transforms Time
[Exploring Life] Grief possesses great agility. It emerges subtlety yet its presence is potent. Grief, I am beginning to understand, cannot be equated to more distinct states of being such as the quality of sadness that results from loss. The dimensions of grief are far more extensive in nature. Loss and absence are, of course, [...]
