Manifest Spontaneity

I spent this last weekend at Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont.  I was there for a leadership intensive with Shastri* Nick Kranz focusing on the practice of social meditation.  Already, I can feel myself being drawn into the role of the slightly detached explicator as I write this, wanting to explain the word ‘Shastri’ and what the practice of social meditation is.  That role is very comfortable to me.  I think I actually do that with myself as way to distance myself from difficult feelings.  Information and it’s accuracy is soothing to me; it’s how I get ground.   Last weekend was hard.  Social meditation is about creating a culture where the norms and customs nudge us toward being genuine and awake, in touch with our humanity.  Doing this practice and being around 55 other people doing it too makes any disingenuousness on my own part vivid.  Not always clear.  I didn’t always have a clear idea of what was going on, I just knew ...

Last weekend I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.  I got to stay with Graceheart, which was good because I needed the support, and she’s a pro at support, especially when it involves letting me feel yucky feelings.  Yucky feelings there were a-plenty.  Right now I feel stuck.  The projects that I’ve worked on up until now, that I’m presently trying to finish up aren’t compelling to me.  When I look at them, I think something like, “Why would anybody want to devote part of their life to understanding THAT?”  Those projects are taking up most of my mental bandwidth right now.  The research that I’m more interested in right now, that I could see myself working on in a post doc, is not what I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about over the last month.  I was describing this to Graceheart’s flatmate, when she asked me why I got into this field in the first place.  I could not think of any compe...