I came across this short movie by Peter Reynolds via Patty Digh’s excellent blog 37 Days. Bonding with our “inner child” has been all the rage these past couple of decades. Personally, the whole idea of an inner child has not particularly thrilled me. It has always felt trite and too contrived. Yet I know that a part of me still has my childlike wonder, creativity and incessant desire to learn new things. This child part of me was also not afraid to fail in the service of learning of new things and was much more authentic in expressing her feelings before she learned what was appropriate in her family and the world. The child in me who has now morphed into an adult still lives and still longs to express herself in both good ways and ways that are not always best for the adult version of me.
“He Was Me” provided me with an opportunity to ponder the many experiences that I have chosen to forgo because they are not appropriately adult. Most of these experiences involve having fun, pretending, being silly and much to my surprise, involve a healthy amount of creativity. It’s sad for me to realize that I have an unconscious picture of adults being stodgy, serious, uptight and definitely not fun! This could describe my parents who were my first role models in the world of adulthood. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I think of July 4th, I think of freedom. When I got up this morning I read a bit from Mary Pipher’s excellent new book, “Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World”. I was powerfully moved by this sentence: “Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives.” Although I meditate and have read many books on Buddhism, I’m not officially a Buddhist. However, Buddhism has allowed me to explore the idea and the experience of freedom in a way that I hadn’t previously encountered.
True freedom for me is freedom from my obsessive self-castigating thoughts. My mind produces thousands of these thoughts each day. Mindfulness is the larger container that allows me to notice them and not become one with any single one of them. I’m not often successful in remaining unattached to individual thoughts. They are so inviting, with their magnetic pull toward a seemingly stable identity of me as an insufficient, narcissistic and selfish person. In those moments of ego identification with those thoughts I’m steadfastly not cognizant of any of my altruistic and generous thoughts or actions. I hate myself for not living up to my own ideals and even worse for hurting others by my own insistence on any thought or action that could relate to my own well being. Read the rest of this entry »
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