You Make the Meaning
What is the purpose of pain? In a very broad, but direct sense, it serves as an opportunity to stop what we’re doing, re-evaluate the situation, and make changes to what or how we’ve been living. The rational mind craves an explanation for the how and the why this is happening. This can be a helpful exercise, as long as we don’t get caught up in identifying who we are with the process of pain or spiral into negative thought cycles about it.
I was recently stung by a yellow jacket while hiking near the Oregon coast. It did not feel particularly pleasant, but I felt fine and continued my trek back to the car. Over the next two days, what began as some mild redness at my ankle turned into moderate swelling and the cardinal signs of infection started to present and travel up my leg. There is a time and a place to seek medical attention, and this was one of them. Owing to the swelling in my foot and ankle, it became difficult to stand and walk. This presented a major challenge for many reasons, not the least of which being the requirements of my work. I was forced to slow down, and as frustrating as it was to not be able to do, especially at the pace I was operating, it gave me a chance to evaluate how I was doing.
I was going too fast. The ratio of doing to being was heavily skewed. There is a time to push, but there is also a way to push that won’t lead to burnout. I can’t say whether there was a cosmic conspiracy that organized to have that one wasp sting me where it did, when it did. I do believe that the notions of entropy and randomness reflect a limitation in the perspective of the observer. The patterns of life are always weaving. Depending on the scope and scale of what you’re trying to look at, it will appear infinitely complex - but that doesn’t mean it’s chaotic. This could lead to an epistemological regress - ultimate uncertainty about what can be known. From a practical point of view, what I believe is that we have the ability to ascribe the myth and the meaning to the experiences we have. I am choosing to see the wasp as a reminder to be mindful, to move and think at a natural pace, and to trust and continue to be in awe of the brilliant intelligence of the human body’s ability to heal.
A Conscious Imperative
"Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected...as the old consciousness dissolves, there are bound to be synchronistic geographic and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of which we are witnessing now." --Eckhart Tolle
It has been snowing ash in Portland. For the past few days, stepping outside to afternoon temperatures near 100 degrees, into a haze thick and grey has been akin to stepping into a sauna that is burning campfire wood with the flue closed. Instead of the cloudless blue of summer, or the cool grey overcast of the rest of the year, the sky has taken on a white density. Folks walk around with bandannas and face masks, there are minimal bikers on the road, and few people are outside. It feels more like fallout than school season. As the West burns, the Gulf of Mexico floods, and the eastern seaboard braces for increasingly strong hurricanes.
We are now in the Anthropocene, the time when humans are aware of and can objectively measure the extent to which their activities have an impact on the planet. The brilliant human intelligence that has led to the technology and development of modernity has also served to amplify the destructive capability that unconsciousness has on life. On an individual level, allowing the ego to drive thought and action leads to fear, greed, and the desire for power. The ego is fueled by attachment to form - because it cannot feel, it must have. At the root of this is the false premise that humans are somehow separate from or even superior to Nature. Humans, like all of the other life on this planet are of Nature. Viewed from this perspective, the health and sanity of our individual thoughts and actions contributes to the health and sanity of our collective thoughts and actions.
The intrinsic connection Mr. Tolle refers to is how the state of collective human consciousness is being reflected in the material world it inhabits. As the quantitative impact of humanity continues to increase, it is more important than ever to look at the quality of this impact. What are our thoughts and actions doing to ourselves, each other, and the environment?
One of my yoga teachers recently shared that the current darkness and perceived chaos happening in the world is not necessarily the darkness of the tomb; that instead it could be the darkness of the womb. An opportunity - and at this stage an imperative - for humanity to birth itself out of the darkness it has created from living unconsciously.
Consuming Consciously
Your diet extends far beyond what you eat at meal time. The nutrition (or lack thereof) you obtain from the food you eat is a combination of quantity, quality, and value. If you don’t eat enough, or if you have too much, you won’t feel great. If you have the “right” portions, but they’re made of junk, that won’t be great either. A third consideration, which I think is as important as quantity and quality, is value. How are you consuming? Are you taking notice of what you’re eating? Are you eating alone or with friends and family? Are you watching TV, trolling the internet, stressing about work? Are you paying attention to not only the food itself, but the experience you create when you eat it?
Consuming food is the most accessible example for the talking about consuming consciously. Your brain and your body consume everything that you expose them to. Activities that you do on the regular become a “diet” for your senses. If you sit a desk all day, make an effort to move. You wouldn’t eat white rice for 75% of your meals, so don’t subject your body and your posture to the cast of a chair for 75% of your time awake. The information you expose your mind to becomes the nutrition (or lack thereof) for what you think, how you think, and how you feel. Listening to Mozart on the ride to work will have a different impact on your mind than listening to talk radio. Reading Rumi or Rilke will provide different nutriment than the news. Having an exciting conversation with someone (in real life) about bike mechanics, coffee, or whatever you find interesting will be more novel, more energy rich, and provide more value than casual observations about the weather.
What we eat, what we listen to, what we read, who we engage with, and what activities we perform - consistently - will serve to mold who we are and what kind of experiences we have. We live in a time when we are overtly and covertly pushed to consume. If we can bring this process to a more conscious level, we give ourselves the opportunity to make a choice to ask: how much, what kind, and is this important to me?