What a beautiful posting-Thanks

MsL -

That's wonderful. Thank you. (Just had the chance to listen to it on one of my kid's laptop, where the sound isn't working on Dad's PC.)

I took it as saying that connection with sorrow was the mark of actually connecting with not only one's self but everyone else. And any shread of authenticity required that you be prepared to go there.

Witness the events of the last day in Haiti.

namaste,
Mike

Hi Mike,

I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I see our forum as a place where we can come and be ourselves present in the moment. In so many ways we all provide each other a shoulder to cry on. It's very moving to see how many reach out to help each other.

"It's not a bad world brother"

namaste

MsL

Sometimes music touches me like nothing else can. I think that it can be incredibly therapeutic. I love scream singing at the top of my lungs in my car when I am having an icky day.

Today made me sad- I think I spent a good portion of it crying in front of CNN. I just want to encourage people to do a little bit, give what they can. Doctors Without Borders is a wonderful organization. I was really happy to learn that Ojai (my town) is sending its search dogs to Haiti. For some strange reason (we're a really small town) we have an amazing foundation that trains and deploys rescue dogs to disaster areas. They are being paired with the firefighters that are being sent from L.A.

It's hard to stay positive with this situation, but I try to think about someone going home to their family because of these dogs. Even though that still makes me cry too!

Lynn

When I read Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (2005) I was struck by how much her treatment of acceptance in the face of the ultimately unacceptable reminded me of the hard-boiled existentialism I had read too many years earlier.

Then, on the last page, she finally quotes Jean-Paul Sartre in a blinding finale, “There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free or not free.” We are free if we enter into each moment solely as the present. We are not free if each stimulous in the here and now just plays on a thousand strands of undigested history, so that what we are aware of is not the moment itself, but the revereration of all that has come before.

Put it another way, better we be attuned to the clapper than the sound of the bell. 'Cause if you can deconstruct the bell (know what is in response to the moment and what is just produced by old patterns) you stand a much better chance of experiencing the action of the clapper.

And no where is it truer than in dealing with chronic pain. We can either tell ourselves stories about it until we are blue in the face, e.g. catastrophising, or we can get down and dirty with the pain, and know it so well that we see it break apart into strands. Given the choice, I"ll stick with awareness.

Mike