Danny > Recent Status Updates

So far it feels like a crappy dnd campaign. Very little character development and constant conflict. Hoping it gets better.

Once I abandoned that inner conflict, I was able to see I was a spiritual person if not a religious one. The peace I derived from quietly drawing into myself and tapping my own strength is what led me to forgive. First I forgave myself for moving past Bob's death and not being the living memorial to him that some thought I should be.
Then I forgave Ryan. I wanted him to have a life beyond all this He is not his crime

I believe it is not possible to reach out and grasp your future with both hands until you let go of your past. I have to begin by forgiving myself for letting go.

For me there are no "sides" in all of this, just loss and waste all around. If our society spent less time blaming and dividing when faced with conflict, wouldn't we be in a better position to find solutions that more closely meet our mutual needs? And isn't working with the people who come at the problem from farthest away what builds true community?

The thought of Ryan's facing a long and isolated term in jail does nothing to make me feel safer or any better equipped emotionally to handle living with Bob's death. In contrast, my hope that Ryan may now receive the help he needs to face his demons and create a new and healthy life for himself does give me some sense of safety and healing.

people assume that somehow the criminal justice process will bring us closure. Whoever came up with that idea could not have been a victim. There will never be a process or meeting or ritual or anything that will close the wound…or make what we have been through any less traumatic. We all have to learn to live with what has happened and find a place in our hearts to contain the sorrow, for it will last forever.

We want the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible.
But where is the fun in that?

I love that word 'spoiler, don't you? The idea that if we know what is about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it.
It's so strange that we don't want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension.

You will remember me like this now. Not as a moment but as a person.

To be human is to be scared of our own innate ridiculousness, so we do anything to reduce that ridicule. We clothe our bodies, we procseate behind closed doors, we hide every bodily function, we don't cry in the post office, or sing in the street, and we try to keep our own Ideas in line with what we are told we should think.

Being open to possibility is being open to pain, failure, disappointment, so the temptation is to curl ourselves up like armadillos, And it is perfectly understandable. Sometimes it is easier to press our metaphorical noses into our metaphorical backsides than to look out into the universe.

You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don't need a spacecraft.
All you need to do is change your mind.

People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.

I was there, but not there. I was watching myself in the third person. A character in a life that looked like mine but wasn't. I missed him so much, but also I felt like I was missing myself too. That's the thing with grief. The way it kind of sinks you into death as well, I mean, you are still biologically functioning obviously. You are out there breathing and seeing and talking but you aren't properly alive any mor

I look at what is happening in the world and I see that our whole species is on a path to destruction. Like it is programmed, another pattern. And I just get fed up with being a human, being this small tiny thing that can't do anything about the world. Everything feels impossible.

Can sound help me listen betfer to my own self and to learn more about how I think and feel?
In my opinion the best way to work therapeutically with sound is to use it as a consciousness-altering reflective fool.
The more you work with sound in this way, the more you have the ability to listen to your inner goings on.

Western practitioners use the sound
'AAAHHH' for the same effects. It doesn't really matter what sound you make, then, it's the sustained tone that's sending your body into a deeply relaxed state. After a few minutes, the effect of holding this long, sustained tone may be to expand your sense of space and time, lulling you into an altered state of consciousness (ASC)

Arguably the most well-known mantra is the 'seed syllable' Om (see box, page 78). According to Vedic tradition, Om is the sound of creation - it is the sound that the rishis heard during deep meditation, the sound of God, from which everything sprang. When we chant the Om mantra, we tap into this primal, all-giving, life-affirming energy.

I remember one student telling me that she was treating a woman who was terminally ill with cancer. In her case cure didn't ever happen, but healing did. At the end of the therapeutic sound treatment, the woman said that she felt so relaxed, pain-free and at peace she could quite happily die. She wasn't cured but she was healed of her suffering, so much so that she was ready to let go of her life.

her focus was to rid her knees of arthritis. She told me that she was in so much pain, she wanted it gone in just four sessions. I explained to her that it may be more helpful to think about the next four sessions as being part of a therapeutic process and to see to what degree her symptoms changed during that time, then review.

Healing comes in many forms; fixing on a single oufcome may hamper the healing process and even prevent its full success. A fixed goal might mean you stop looking for further healing once you reach that goal, when perhaps there was more to come. Therapeutic sound practice is a holistic process and healing may not present itself in the form that we originally hope for, or indeed expect (see box, opposite).

the great events of the New Testament have all the wonder and beauty of a myth. Yet they happen in a specific place, at a particular date, and have empirically verifiable historical consequences. The realm of empirical fact is imbued with profound spiritual meaning. Christianity unifies the two realms. The biblical worldview fulfills both the requirements of human reason and the yearnings of the human spirit.

A common metaphor…was that creation is a book written by God. Therefore it seemed appropriate to interpret it the same way as…the Bible. This led to the idea that the creation is overlaid with multiple layers of moral and spiritual meanings. Scholars call this the emblematic worldview because it conceived nature as a collection of emblems (signs or symbols) to be probed for moral and spiritual meaning.

Common sense: There seem to be certain concepts held by all people across all cultures and across all time-for example, that effects have causes, that the material world is real, that there is genuine good and evil, that we are free moral agents, that reason is a valid test for truth, and so on. These concepts are not only universal, they are also necessary for functioning in the real world.

The test of any worldview is two-fold: 1) Is it internally logically consistent? 2) Does it fit the
real world? That is, can it be applied and lived out consistently without doing violence to human
nature?

There are obvious parallels between the fate of art and the fate of religion in the modem
world. Beginning in the Enlightenment, both were stripped of their traditional status as avenues of truth. Both were out on the defensive and reduced to private, subjective experiences. Both were kicked out of the fact realm and relegated to the value realm

Christians began to divide the created world into two spheres, sacred versus secular. They recast morality in terms of negative rules, as though holiness could be achieved simply by avoiding certain parts of creation. They lost the biblical teaching that all of created reality comes from God's hand and is intrinsically good.

Because the material world was regarded as the source of evil and corruption, the monk withdrew into the monastery to contemplate spiritual ideals. Because nature was thought to have little value, the monk did not own property. Because the physical body was a source of sin, the monk suppressed bodily desires through ascetic practices-simple food, coarse clothing, the rejection of sex and marriage.