I’m constantly attempting to stretch the boundaries of our understanding of agency to show that the free will we think we have is an illusion. That while the brain undoubtedly decides (based on memories) what to do in the moment, there’s a microsecond pause during which we can, if we are fully aware (mindful, if you like, though I loathe the word – mind empty is better! Aware or realising are better still!) see or fully experience the state we are in.
In this microsecond, or possibly quantum, gap, we bring into play a meta or overarching experience of our awareness that is a part of but also an extra dimension of consciousness. It is in this state that we can see ourselves angry, sad, stressed, in love, etc, and we can see that all these are reactions to previous actions.
In seeing this, we can, if we are very careful with our attention, elicit, that is, allow to come into being through us, an attitude. The most rational attitude to take to our situation is compassion, or kindness, or love. And this is us cooperating with the cooperative principles that run through every system, living and more-than-living. Everything cooperates.
This is like the Dao, or flow, or The Way. We become a part of The Way. Our practice is The Way. We disappear into it, and yet remain ourselves. In fact we are more fully ourselves than we are in the state of reactivity, which is part of Karma, Cause-Effect, Samskaras building scar tissue on scar tissue, tightening us into the knot of suffering.
When we are practicing in this Way, we let love, or compassion, or kindness, do what needs to be done. In that microsecond, instead of reaction, we become responsive.
I think this is what sages have been talking about for generations. Thich Nhat Hahn has said this time and again.Jesus of course could be said to have said this: I am The Way. But the I that he referred to is itself The Way. It is love, compassion, and the cooperation of all things with each other that we have the possibility of becoming one with.
Ultimately, it is the way that you practice that counts.
We call this something – a heart shape, or a piece of seaweed – but even the words are just an idea. Becoming silent, we have the capacity to see this just what it is. An emergent culimation of relationships dynamically moved through the dimensions. We tend to see the boundaries, the edges of things, and we are, of course, hardwired to differentiate. But differentiation is a useful perceptual tool. What is really happening is worth considering too because it shows how interwoven the observer is. We are not apart from it, we and it are different points in this shifting moment. This moment is not even a single point but moves like a saddleback between that, and that.
Why is this important? Because we’re utterly dependent upon how we see for how we respond. Where we see ourselves as boundaried, and see those boundaries as under threat, we react to protect just ourselves. However, when we see how our relationships hold us as emergent elements within a matrix, then our responses can become meaningful on a much more dynamic and subtle level.
I was so looking forward to going to boarding school. I’d told my friends and they were impressed. It was for rich kids, they said. I was proud of my family and pleased that I’d be living up to the dreams and ambitions of my grandparents who, I had been told, were taking financial responsibility for this great step into the upper echelons of British society, a place they very evidently occupied. We, children of their second, dissolute son, were at the margins of such society. This would ensure our place. The daughters of lairds and lords, viscounts and barristers. We packed our trunks, metal boxes belonging to my mother’s father which he had used to carry his belongings during the war, and which had been painted for us, blue for my sister, red for me, with care. Bed linen. Underwear. Toiletries. Uniform. Pets. My Guinea pig, Arthur, was coming with me (named after King Arthur. Maybe… what will you call him? I’ll call him after …. Arthur? That’s nice. No, wait… but he was christened then and there. A lovely black sleek animal that quivered and talked to me and within weeks of my arrival at the school would be dead.
The next term was less benign. I recall clinging to the bannister when told it was time to go back to school. My mother unhooked my fingers one by one.
Why did no one ask what was wrong? Did they just think I was a cry baby? Why could they not see that I was broken, afraid, terrified of the humiliation, the shame, the bullying and the secrets?
Daily writing prompt
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
Well well, this is going well, isn’t it? I can’t seem to find a way to simply link KnowYogaIreland which is my website where you’ll find everything you need to know about me now (although this is still fun as an archive, and I have lots and lots I could continue to add here). In any case, this website is really just for LOLs now, so if you got a business card with this address on it, see this as a minor diversion. Life is full of them. Life is a minor diversion. Connect!
We all suffer from a nagging sense of fear, or anxiety, or dissatisfaction, or loneliness, at some point. To recognise that this is in some sense an illusion brought about by the patterns that contain and occupy us like fractals which then bloom into other possibilities related to the last is not to relegate everything to the realm of myth. If I’m real, so is my experience, and so is yours, so are the fires and floods, pandemics and plastic pollution, corruption and courage that occupy the airwaves and our conversations when we are not thinking about sex, or food, or how to win an argument.
We are certainly the creators of our experience in the sense that we experience what we pay attention to, and that’s a creative act. But of course there is an ‘out there’ to contend with too. To pretend otherwise is to risk the kind of arrogance that drowned King Canute. There must be something that links these two, a line between what is happening, and how we bring it into awareness. It is this ‘how’ that matters.
With just enough effort, and just enough surrender, we can align with the liminal edge that is awareness of existence as it is happening, a respect which is reflective watching, but which is also an opening, like a portal, to love. This kind of awareness can become as habitual as the worries and nagging fears, as the addictions and desires, that have previously consumed me. I can see just what is here, and see too how such disparate events as previous experiences and the weather have brought it all to this, and thus both compassionately but also dispassionately disengage until there is no more accumulation of previous experiences and activities based on reacting with rage, jealousy, resentment and greed, but only the kindness of respect, watching. I cannot do much about the rain, or sun, but I can engage in the ecological emergency as an emergence, an opening into the possibility of altering direction, of mitigating suffering. Almost all that happens to us does so as a matter of contextual idiosyncrasy. Reflecting on that I can see I, too, emerge in context. Awareness takes me to the edge of this, where there’s a shift, the universe aware of itself here, now, through me. what else can I allow to come through this being me if I respect what is happening now?
I finally had a conversation with the acquisitions editor in Palgrave about delays with publishing my second book (I’m a contributor and editor. It’s a joint publication). Today, or over the weekend, I’ll go through the final edits, I hope. It would be wonderful if this could be published soon. It’s got such a strong coherent emphasis on how philosophy is a practice that is as pragmatic and effective as getting the plumbing right in a house. The house in this case is our oikos, our home. We don’t own our home, though. Our home is what we’re born into. We’re here on the sufferance of all the species who made space for us but who we’ve exploited and abused, like traumatised teens. What traumatised us? Our inability to feel at home, for one thing. Our misunderstanding of our place here, for another.
Here’s an (edited) extract from one of my chapters
Making friends with the Earth is an essential part of the equation in how we reconcile ourselves with the fractured relationship we have and how we approach its repair. Making friends with ourselves also demands attention. The story goes that we are addicted to consumption (Tim Morton has written beautifully about this). Consuming goods is bad for us when it is bad for the systems that we exploit and abuse to obtain those goods. Consumption the disease provides a handy metaphor, but cancer might provide another. As cells within a body overreach their urge to replicate, the body itself starves. Yet we cannot seem to stem the flow of energy inward, even as the world crumbles around us.
Addiction and the wisdom of insecurity
Just today the news of insecurity, political and social, caused by ‘climate change’, was released. We were writing about this in the eighties in Oxford. I wrote a paper about how splitting off refugee flows from acceptable reciprocal relationships between nations, herding refugees into camps or detention centres, or otherwise criminalising survivors of land wars, ideological fundamentalism, or torture for self expression, ultimately leads to the bubbling anger in which terrorism foments.
Addiction is a kind of fragmentation. Two parts of the brain no longer in communication. Gabor Maté has explored addiction as a learned response to trauma using the metaphor of hungry ghosts. Those lost souls of Buddhist cosmology with tiny mouths and huge stomachs spend eternity attempting to satiate a raging and inconsolable appetite. He has also advocated that, rather than disown the addict as the unacceptable ‘other’, we reimagine them as our shadow self. This befriending of the rejected self parallels the befriending of the Earth. To reintegrate is also to rehabilitate or rehome ourselves through practices that have long roots in Asian traditions of thought and their associated embodied philosophies.
I’d recommend that today we practice owning the unacceptable ‘other’, even in just a metaphorical way. We can imagine, until we can find a way to talk to those we know hold the key to shifting how we, the species, respond. What we all respond to is the emergence of all that will continue to clamour for our attention, until and unless it becomes too late.
I get a lot of email invitations to meetings, usually in some respect associated with lobbying for changes in legislation so the ecological emergency gets more prominence. I sometimes don’t know what the organisations are or what their mission statement is. So I decided I’d better think about my own mission statement. What is it I’m attempting to do here?
Mission statement: to educate, connect with and motivate people to take effective action in the ecological emergency. I do this through clarifying the practice of philosophy, and showing how revising how we think about free will, understanding ‘the good’ of systems, and attuning to compassion, all dovetail to empower us to respond, rather than react. We become more resilient, more effective, and more powerful through realising our part in raising awareness, networking, and making change happen.
Now I have FOUR possible retreats. Please let me know if you want to join one! I’m going to visit the beautiful Glenville Park on Thursday to have coffee with Silvia and talk about the possibility of hosting a retreat there. This is a fantastic place with a wonderful atmosphere. If you want to feel as though you have stepped out of your life into another world, please watch this space!
In Mayo, UISCE has offered me its beautiful space to host a retreat on Saturday the 14th November 10.30-3.30, and the following weekend, I’m hosting in Myross Woods House, Co Cork, near Leap.
The final place I hope to host this year is in Gort, Co. Galway – but I had better not say anything about that just yet, because I still have some calls to make!
Please come. You support me. You support yourself. You’ll go away feeling as though you have a mission to undertake too, but with all the tools that make you strong enough to tackle the enormity of what we all must face. Namaste!
I’m having some technical issues with this site. Largely because it’s become too complicated. I’m working to scale back. You live, you learn.
If you want to book a retreat with me, either on the 14th November 2021 in North West Mayo (UISCE, Elly Bay) – a Sunday – or on the 20th November – a Saturday – in Myross Woods House, Leap, West Cork, then the easiest way is to email me. You can pay me via Paypal using my email address – but write first, please! Just a line so I know who you are and have a contact number and name. If you really can’t afford 45 euro and you really want to come, email me and we’ll see what we can do. I need to cover my costs for the venue, the lunch, and transport. I also want to make a living out of this. But I’m not looking to make a fortune, and I’m certainly not looking to exploit anyone, so please let’s chat. My email is looseyoga@gmail.com. You can also write to me at knowyogaireland@gmail.com.
If you are interested in the courses I’m planning online, email me. I will add you to a list of people and get something off the ground early December. It’s a 28 day course and it’s based on a book I’m writing. I’m also creating a 28 day course for Insight Timer. I teach on Insight Timer regularly and I’ll put up a schedule here so you can find me more easily if you’re interested in attending live offerings there.
As I say, this is how I want to make a living. I think I’ve got something useful to offer people who are anxious, angry or sad about the ecological emergency, or even people who want to know more about what this inside-out approach might feel like. But I also want to work and stay connected in the physical world. So I want to find a way to have access (I don’t need to own it) some land, preferably in Ireland, to rewild. I’m not in a position to live on it full time at the moment – I have personal commitments which I want and need to honour. But if this was a group effort, I’d be happy to be involved with others who want to live in a reciprocal relationship with one another and the more-than-human world. Let me know what you think.
I wrote something for Medium this morning (another attempt to add to the many strings which I hope will provide enough resonance to provide a living) and hoped it would link to here. It doesn’t. Some of you might be interested enough to read it so I’ll paste it here. I also wanted to add that I’m doing my best to sort this site out, but that I can’t find out how to change the dollar signs to euro. The courses are 45 euro for four hours of yoga, meditation, relaxation, immersion into natural connection, and creativity, including lunch, and the online course is 99 euro for 28 live sessions with me on Zoom. You can also book an hour with me on Zoom to talk about your understanding of my philosophy, and for tips on practices that might help you with your personal exploration and obstacles. Talking of obstacles, here’s the apple story:
We all have relationships with colleagues, family members, or others who are close to us, that don’t work. Sometimes we know that this person is toxic. A bad apple. Their presence can cause us to close down and be unable to function effectively. Or we can find ourselves triggered into rage. We may find that we mirror their actions, and that can be particularly frustrating, giving us a sense of not being separate from the individual, and increasingly disempowered. What can we do?
We can change the story. “No matter what the stories are — no matter — what other people have done, no matter what you’ve done — there’s a way of looking at them that can put the mind at rest.” So says Thanissaro Bhikkhu in “The Story-telling Mind”. How, exactly, do we change the story we tell ourselves about what is going on? In the end, in Buddhist meditation teachings, and in much of what Zen and Yoga advocate, we can learn to let go of the stories altogether, and come to a point at which we are in the whole swirling flow but none of it affects our sense of belonging to the groundless ground of being. However, until this happens, or until it happens all the time, we are going to have to deal with, or bring to our own awareness, the kind of stories we tell ourselves. This is the story, then, of the bad apple, and how we can look at things differently.
Firstly, we can use a key verse from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. This verse is so powerful that I would highly recommend you learn it as a meditation tool regardless of your own tradition or beliefs. It’s nothing short of a classic. Here it is, as a teaser, in Sanskrit (unless you read Sanskrit, in which case the game is up!):
This sutra is my first recommendation. The second is to recall and practice the Daoist contention of how we respond in battle, since this is a key practice in dealing with things that are out of control, and without benefit, or actively harmful. The third source I’ve called on here is an adaptation of an approach advocated by Dr Gabor Maté, the wonderful psychiatrist who has worked extensively with people with addiction issues and which we all know can cause behaviour that is deeply damaging and destructive, the epitome of ‘bad apple’ acts. The beauty of using Dr Maté’s approach is that we inherently recognise that the underlying cause of malicious action is rooted in trauma. Even though the impact is harmful, we can separate the wheat of the person who, however destructively, longs for the same sense of belonging, love, connection and other human and more-than-human needs that we all seek for, from the chaff of their destructive, harmful or even evil actions.
Changing the story about your relationship with the bad apple requires four skills: 1. Understand that your attitude matters, regardless of who you are engaging with. 2. Understand that everyone, including the ‘bad apple’ is acting out of good intentions. We all want to be loved, to be valued, to have security, and a sense of connection. These and many others are basic common needs. 3. Be curious about what you cannot see. Be particularly curious about how your actions affect others, even if you cannot see the results of your words or deeds. And remember, not acting, or being absent, is also action and 4. Exercise patience. When you want to change things, it takes time.
Firstly, then, dealing with a bad apple requires recognising that the kind of choice we have in the situation lies in our attitude. The Sutra 1.33 again:
Elicit an attitude of friendship towards those who are at ease and happy; elicit an attitude of compassion towards those who are suffering; develop a sense of joy in the presence and knowledge of those who are consciously doing good, and develop a sense of equanimity towards those who are deliberately causing harm. In this way, you will find that your mind stays clear and lucid. It is the fourth, Upekshanam, that I particularly recommend in the case of bad apples. We need to create a space so they can deal with their issues without our reactivity fuelling the vicious action.
This resonates with the second, the Daoist injunction is to allow the energy that fuels the opponent (the bad apple) to burn out. Thus, self defense is permissible and indeed, recommended, but evading, or creating a space from the seeker of conflict, physical or psychological means there is nothing for them to infect. Eventually, with skill, they will dry up at the lack of conflict, and so you will maintain your calm, and find that the battle is over. I will come back to this when talking about adapting Dr Maté’s approach.
Going back to stories and the analogy of the bad apple, we know that the story of the bad apple came from storing apples in a barrel. We store apples to keep them through the winter, and the way we store them means they’re sometimes touching. If they touch, they can create bruises. Sometimes a gas released by riper apples, ethylene, causes apples to ripen more quickly, becoming more susceptible to drying out, or to a mould that eats them out, and makes them less palatable to us.
We can change the story and imagine that the bad apple is actually an over-ripe apple that needs to be jettisoned, separated from the rest, because it is already ready to be absorbed, so its seeds can grow in good earth. The mould that grows and infects the rest is just a fungus. It is not right or wrong, good or bad, in itself. It is just in the wrong place for what the rest of the apples are needed for: sustenance. Nourishment. To fuel the household. Beyond the household, or relationship circle we are in, the bad apple may actually do some good.
Thirdly and finally, we can see how this accords with the approach of Dr Maté. We can adapt his injunction to love, but only to live with those who we can be with in a state of peace. If we find ourselves in an abusive relationship with someone, we must very firmly and politely close the door on that relationship, at least for now. We have two reasonable and one unreasonable way of treating a relationship that causes harm, or chaos, as is so often the case with the bad apple, or, in Dr Maté’s context, with those with addiction issues. We can embrace the other, reiterating our love for them, and keeping them in our lives, because we know we have the resources and space to accommodate them. Or we can express our love for them, but let them know that we cannot have them in our lives right now. This is difficult but sometimes necessary. The first is like giving space to the bad apple, in a pot in our home. The second is like taking it outside and seeing if it will grow in the open, beyond our door. The thing that we cannot do, because it is unreasonable, is to bring the bad apple into our lives, and say that we will change them, that we love them and we are going to make them ‘good’. This is unreasonable because it is beyond our scope. Our work is not to change another. We have neither the means, nor is it an appropriate aim. Our work is to change ourselves, to change our own story, and thus to change how we relate from here, now. If we can understand this, we will find a marvellous interdependent arising of interconnections, and our own calm as a balm and a balsam.
“The scientific truth is that we are contextualised, and inseparable from context. Therefore seeing problems as being “outside” us assumes that a technological approach will and can fix them. It can not.” (edited from Love is Green: compassion as responsibility in the ecological emergency, 2019, Vernon Press)
This truth is that we are interconnected, and therefore that the problems outside us are inseparable from the problems inside. This is as true of the ecological emergency as it is of the problems we have with other people, or indeed with ourselves. The Yamas relate primarily to how we treat other people. I have extended this to include how we treat the more-than-human world. But these also reflect how we treat ourselves, so in a sense, this limb and the limb that relates to our behaviour towards ourselves are almost inseparably intertwined. This is an important element in Satya, because Satya means truth.
If Ahimsa is the injunction to first, do no harm (and in positive terms, act, if you can, with compassion and love) then Satya is about demanding that we are honest with ourselves and that includes being honest about where we are. This means we have to be very honest and admit that seeing where we are is a real challenge. Imagine trying to see yourself without a mirror. In a sense, we have to look at the world to get a reflection of what and where we are. We see what we are looking with, as much as with what we are looking at.
To understand reality, we need to begin with what we know, which is much less than what we assume, or invent. We know that physical reality is governed by possibilities, and social reality is governed by agreed conventions. A natural, or scientific law, can only tell you that there is an excellent chance that if you jump off a building, you will obey the law of gravity. However, it is only ever an excellent chance, because ultimately, the laws depend on quantum physics, an Alice-in-Wonderland world of paradoxes and uncertainty.
Social reality is the realm that allows us to call various bits of metal, plastic and paper “money” and to ascribe an agreed value to them. Language is social reality, a series of signs that we use to denote objects or ideas. Social reality and physical reality intersect. Ideas create ideals and ideologies, and ultimately, the possibility of war and conflict. Ultimately, social reality can kill.
This is at the heart of the ecological emergency: if we make the mistake of thinking that there is only one way of seeing the world, we are mistaking social reality for physical reality. The two interact all the time of course. Physical reality – biodiversity loss, climate change, population growth, pollution – affects social reality – polarisation of attitudes, less interaction with nature, weather systems treated as the enemy. And social reality – consumerist culture, a fascination with the megarich, Trumpism – affects physical reality – resource depletion, habitat degradation, storming of the Capitol.
The feedback loop is not inevitable. If you understand your own role and how your perception of the world works, you can change how you see.
We are going to focus in this chapter on the first of the Yamas as the key attitude to open the doors of enlightenment. As I said in chapter one, Yama means death, since Yama was a god of death in Indian mythology. Death is the ultimate restraint, but also the ultimate liberator. We need to kill, through restraining, the attitudes that have led us on the road to ruin in the past. These attitudes have not only led us to ruin personally. They have also led our species to the brink of ecological collapse, killing trillions of other creatures, and annihilating species and systems in the process.
The Yamas are the first of the eight limbs of yoga, and in true ecologically aware style, we can think of these as limbs of a tree (or a body, like that of a spider). The spider analogy is not used much in yoga probably because people don’t really like spiders, but spiders are an essential part of ecosystems. They have been around for about 400 million years and are one of the oldest land animals. Their appetites for small insects keep in check many of the mites and bugs that would otherwise make our homes uninhabitable. Their webs are marvels of engineering precision, chemical brilliance, and mathematical and artistic wonder. The tensile strength of a spider’s silk is ten times as strong as steel.
Know Yoga Ireland 