Philosophy

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Seek To Know Your Uniqueness

He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression.
He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.
—Moshie Safdie, TED 2002

Questions:  What direction does this offer our efforts toward friendship with ourselves?  Will you give us a personal example?

Self-Care Tip – Seek to know your uniqueness

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Love Differently, Love Your Flaws – Be a Tall Poppy

Tall Poppy

Image by Steve Corey via Flickr

To my family and friends, I thought differently.

But since I’ve loved my flaws less harshly, like pointing jeweled fingers;

since I’ve fallen and let myself savor who I was just then, rasping throat from less than gentle sounds, beautifully broken down, a phoenix who was afraid and not afraid to die;

since I’ve been in the same room with myself, my smells, my dying cells, my mistakes and since I’ve loved these things – since then I have loved you.

I thought I was before but this is differently better.

I am loving you when you turn away and miss your opportunity to praise.  I feel myself soften and think how you are mine.

I am loving you when you miss your self-care and come late and forget.

I thought differently before.

I thought I loved you more the other times, but this is.

It is better to see that you will never be who I expected and that you just missed the turn and won’t.

It is better since I have thought more of me.

And although this sounds off; a discordant honk in the culture score around us,

Although this is awkward showing my ankles exposed while I walk amongst tall-poppies, I even love that

and it is not to say I gloat,

just that I won’t run to hide behind my accomplishments

and won’t hide you behind yours.  I love you more because there is more.  This is differently better and I love you.

Self-Care Tip #278 – Be a tall poppy.

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Loving Me without ambivalence – Perfectionism v. Passive Surrender

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The conflict of perfectionism v.v. passive surrender of ourselves to ourselves.

Yesterday we talked about enjoying our failures.  That might have pushed a little much.  But who doesn’t nurse their failure more than their success?  Who doesn’t remember their hurt in life more often than their pleasure?  It can be confusing.

This friend we call, Me, pushes us and holds us back.  But that is not said well enough.  This description implies ambivalence – two strongly opposing forces in opposite directions.  Amidst all the push and pull, we can get confused.  We work so hard on our behalf that we forget we were born flawed and will, at every step of life’s journey, have a constant relationship with imperfect behaviors and emotions all the while having hope for what is better.

I remember in Tron: Legacy that Flynn explained that Clue was created to build the perfect world.  When things became bad and Clue was blamed, Flynn the Creator essentially said,

He’s just doing what he was designed to do.  

Clue, in the name of going toward what was considered perfect, began annihilating everything and everyone that wasn’t programmed right.  Clue was baffled by his Creator’s disagreement and in the end destroyed them both.

Clu: I did everything… everything you ever asked! 
Kevin Flynn: I know you did. 
Clu: I executed the plan! 
Kevin Flynn: As you saw it… 
Clu: You- You promised that we would change the world, together. You broke your promise… 
Kevin Flynn: I know. I understand that now. 
Clu: I took this system to its maximum potential. I created the perfect system! 
Kevin Flynn: The thing about perfection is that it’s unknowable. It’s impossible, but it’s also right in front of us all the time. You wouldn’t know that because I didn’t when I created you. I’m sorry, Clu. I’m sorry… 

We, like Flynn, forget that our beauty is the constant relationship between going toward that which is better for us and allowing for our limitations, regression and failures.  These forces don’t have to be opposing.  Our life is more than an allowance for betterment and foibles; it is a position of value and respect to both.  There is this wonderment that we can in all this chaos be what we should be, now, but still in process of change.  We are all these things and Me, our friend, loves that.

Questions:  How are you doing with your Me who struggles for the whole of you?  Are you able to join Me?  What limits you?  Please tell me your story.

Self-Care Tip #274 – Love what keeps you from your goals and what gets you there without ambivalence.

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Bring Your Separate Selves Together – Personal Journey

National Museum, Czartoryski Collection

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Self-Care Tip #199 – Bring together what you are naturally inclined to do with what you spend your energies on.

When we do what we like to do, what is congruent with our hard-wiring, what is naturally inspiring, fatigue becomes part of our pleasure in my life.  Cliché,

Enjoy the burn,

…is common for a reason.  There are times when pain, fatigue, difficulty and hard-surfaced days are bits of what make life journey one of richness, rather than diminished.  I was reminded by Jaclyn Rae’s Blog-post today, that when we can say,

I’ve learned that I’m tired but still want to do what I do,

…we are paddling the same river our life is floating down.  When we by mental illness, misfortune, choice or neglect, don’t – we are more observant of our lives rather than participants to them.  We find being present in the process difficult.  It’s not something everyone can do in all aspects.

However, we don’t have to be defined by those particulars, choosing instead to do the hard work of processing our choices, our energy and where it comes from, our emotions and see how they weave into our constitution.  Then, some time when breathing hard, limping and spent, we will remember this and reconnect the experience with the choice and the emotion a little quicker.  We will less often separate from the water our life is traveling.  Not become observers but participate more often, more actively, more tangibly with that kernel in us that stays, our essence.  (See blog post, My Essence.)

In the marvelous work, “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Philip Pullman describes us as split persons, a body and a spirit (“demon”) that might be parted by neglect, carelessness, abuse, or other disasters.  But when it is separated, the body suffers and is disconnected from it’s life purpose, what brings pleasure and presence in the world around.  (See blog post, Soul and Body.)

There are medical illnesses that do this, as mentioned above, and in those cases, perhaps all to do is get medical care, heal, treat and get on with life.  Other times, it might be that we forgot ourselves in the midst of caring for children, a demanding job, an opinion that victim-hood defines our life possibilities or what not.  We have options.

As Jjen reminded us some days ago,

The bad doesn’t disappear but it is not a qualifier for the rest of life’s potential.

Questions:  How have you reconnected to your life journey?  Your essence?  What is constant about you in your changing self?  Please tell me your story.

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What Is Your Most Core Desire? That Is Self-Care

It's a Business Doing Pleasure

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Self-Care Tip #191 – Do what you desire to get friendly with yourself.

What is your most core desire?  I am learning more about mine.

I wonder at the improvement in my quality of life since blogging with you.  It is More than the pleasure of writing; which I do love and have missed for years.  It is More than the pleasure of being productive; a natural high for my temperament.  It is More than the self-care tips listed off that roll back; a tide of all that is sent out comes in again to wash over me and change the shape of my life.

This morning I ran into a newer friend.  We came into each other’s lives, catalyzed by the ingredient that this blog provided.  I am sure I would not previously have allowed myself the pleasure of speaking with her for long without it.  My temperament has always been a driving force that pushes me into “the barn.”  I often miss the journey for the end.  This is “The More” that has been given to me.  Connection.

Now people actually look different.  Despite years of medical education, years of psychotherapy and my years of life, I never saw people to the extent that I do now.  Each of us here for a time with our stories, our pearls to offer and each of us with our essence to share for eternity.  It is one more time for me when I am open-eyed, open-mouthed gawking at the thought of “The More” that is still coming.  Better than this.

Think of your most core desire; what you are driven toward by biology, genes and higher intelligence.  What has given you access to that?  Now think about how to go for More.  That is self-care.

Question:  Oh, you know what I’m going to ask…

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Growing Up Is Not Necessarily The Same as Growing Away

 

cant decide so dance

Image by faster panda kill kill via Flickr

 

Self-Care Tip #105 – Grow up, think on your own, and stay connected.  Be a friend to yourself.

Staying connected doesn’t mean loosing your freedom.  Staying connected doesn’t mean immaturity.  And independent thought doesn’t mean disconnecting from others or your foundation in life.

When we move into adulthood, we move into roles requiring responsibility, autonomous decision-making, teaching like parents.   This is confusing don’t you think when we were designed to be connected?  Well when something feels so wrong inside, listen to it.  There is a incongruence with what you intuitive know.  Independence includes dependence

Adulthood means learning to have creative thought while being willing to learn.  It means disconnecting while remaining connected.  It’s not all-or-none.  It’s seeing the strength in vulnerability.  Part of taking care of “Me” includes choosing dependence.

Dependence never takes away freedom.  Sometimes when I listen to people telling me how I should feel or think, I feel caged and start doing things to make me feel less caged.  Unfortunately sometimes that isn’t a healthy thing, like eating chocolate or… well it’s often eating for some reason.  Other people do this too.  They may cut on themselves or bang their head.  Unnecessary, because we are free no matter.  Drugs.  Whatever it is that in the moment somehow springs you from the phantom cage only to put you in another.

Question:  How do you live free yet connected?  How do you deal with feelings of infancy, immaturity, loosing freedom when it comes?  Please tell me Your story.

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Forget About Divisions In Knowledge.

The World Is Flat

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Self-Care Tip #103 – Forget about divisions in knowledge.  Be a friend to yourself.

Knowledge does not separate into parts of religion, diet, stars, or geometry.  It is one thing, although we may not see its entirety.  Like the blind men with the elephant, we might be standing by the foot or the trunk.  But it is one thing.  Spiritual truth, nature, physics, medicine, music, art, it’s the same story told in pieces and in different ways.

Working in psychiatry, I’ve struggled with this because it so often affects my freedom in practice.  It so often affects people’s choices for treatment, people’s choices for lifestyle and their own empowerment with self-care.  It affects the choices people make in medication therapy and in physicians.

Merging the tables of learning affects our quality of life either way.  If we are able to do this, we have less conflict, fewer chairs to walk around.  If we can’t, we find ourselves constantly checking the seating charts.  It’s terrible throwing a party where people don’t know what connects them.  There’s the same discomfort inside of us when our life paradigms are afraid of each other.

Take Crystal.  She is a Latina Catholic.  Or make her protestant Filipina, or say White Texan.  Crystal grew up thinking that what was said by her tias (aunts,) or her pastor, or performed by her grit and spine, lay like bookmarks between human behavior issues and the rest of her life.  Behaviors may have something to do with the church, or emotions with the girls room, or nothing to do with anything in her mind.  Thinking behaviors and emotions might relate to what gave her black hair color, and to why water separates from oil is just bizarre to her.

When, Thomas Friedman wrote The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, he was talking about a leveling of the playing field of commerce.  To take it further, I hear him talking about a flattening of prejudices, knowledge, access to information and hierarchies.  The world is too flat to separate the brain from the rest of the body.  When the world is flat, working as a psychiatrist means enlisting all of science, religion, social issues, hobbies, food preferences, and all the other things that make someone’s life worth living for their treatment.  When the world is flat, a patient trying to get help for their emotional-behavioral illness doesn’t separate it from anything else in their journey.

It turns out that we have a lot of information on where emotions and behaviors come from.  We should use it, don’t you think?

Of course, we don’t have it all.  Not close.  We don’t know how the soul factors in.  We don’t know what miracles are.  We don’t know God face to face.  But we do know that it is the same table of knowledge.  It is the same elephant in the room.  It all comes from the same Love.

Walk around.  Feel around.  Let your quality of life get better.  Don’t cut yourself off from another part of you if you don’t have to.

Question:  How are you keeping your personal journey one that is connected?  Or not?  Please tell me your story.

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Our Changing Reality

She had been gone for 3 months helping her mother transition from life to death.  However, instead of it being a melancholic experience, she felt better than she had since a time she couldn’t calendar.  Back when she had a respect for herself.  Back when she had youth, she had hope, she believed in a generous future.

I had no way of knowing what it was like for me until I left the situation.

Reality is only as real as our perspective.  She came back to a new perspective and her reality changed.  She saw an impoverished life.  She saw need to stop waiting for the better of future’s promises.  She saw disrespect when caring for her disabled daughter and emotionally abusive husband.  She hated disrespecting herself.  She felt this and she rebelled inside.  Holding back her furry with the flimsy lid of guilt-glue.  She cried.  She had just let her mother go and feeling good about letting her daughter and husband go now embarrassed and shamed her.  But there it was.  The thought she hadn’t thought before.  Reality had changed.

I’m told that it is bad for a counsellor to tell someone specifically what to do.  Turns out that my job includes some counseling.  I ran into a former patient today at a coffee shop.  She saw me typing on my computer and learned about this blog.

But you do meds!

Apparently sometimes I’m not that great of a counselor.  Or maybe I am if she didn’t realize I was, with her, all along.

I had to stop and say hello!  I’ve missed you!

(Whew!)

Today, I kept thinking about the way reality changes when we let our perspective get some air.

This daughter/mother/wife will never be the same woman she was before she left for 3 months.  She didn’t know.  And now she did.  She can’t stuff that knowledge.  She can’t disappear it.  She is left with a knowledge.  Is it better?  I think so.

We played with options as we talked.  A window opened in the room and a breeze came through called hope.  That was lovely to share with her and I am grateful.

Maybe when with determined labor we are trudging on in life, we might think of this.  With this memory, we could more willingly accept the urge to walk away just to see for a time.  Maybe a knowing, that we were missing, will come and change us.

Self Care Tip #67 – We might be in a different reality if we walk away.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What has your own experience been?  Please tell me your story.

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Let it Make You Strong

She is young, golden, blushes easily, bright solar eyes, with graceful speech, not rushed or loud.  Like so many others, she doesn’t believe her beauty.   She came to me to get help.  Crippled by anxiety that hits out of the blue, like a hooded man grabbing her in an alley.  She feels during those times like she is dying or going crazy.  She started avoiding public places and became fearful looking over her shoulder for the next attack.  She was humiliated on all accounts by her uncontrolled emotions and thought people could see how crazy she was just by looking at her.  Branded and tortured.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, he made plain the cultural pressure to define what is apparent, seen, and interpreted.  But more importantly he made plain the ability of an individual to define themselves on their own terms regardless.  Hester Prynne wore her letter A at first by mandate and then by choice, letting it represent who she was, where she came from, and where she was going.  She wore her letter and when people tried to change its meaning to something culturally less scarlet, “A” for “Able” she made it clear that she is the one who will decide the meaning of her life’s events.  Her and God and no one else.

When anxiety hits, we are scrambling to understand why.  We think, “What could we have done that is so terrible to have brought this kind of torture on?”  As Hester Prynne began her scarlet letter days bewildered by the force of emotion behind her angry neighbors, so victims of anxiety are bewildered by the level of shame and wild fear they presume must be linked somehow to this judgment upon them.  It becomes their life’s work to determine the meaning of a life with this.

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes,

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not to tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong…

Suffering is a schoolhouse for the courageous.

After some months of medication therapy this twenty-something woman said

I’m not so uptight about things.  …I didn’t know my anxiety was that bad until I got out of it.”  What amazed her even more was how better the rest of her body felt.  “Even physically I feel much better.”  No more chest tightness, body aches, and shakes.

She has the rest of her life to figure out how to say what this disease means and how it plays into the way she defines herself.  She will decide I hope.  Not her family, future husband, church, or Brook Shields.  I hope she will take what it teaches her and let it make her strong.

Self Care Tip #57 – Let it make you strong.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Bringing it Inside

“I read a lot of self-help books, but look at all the difference it’s made in my life!”  Sarcasm noted.  My friend was coming out of a dark melancholy of several years and complained that bringing something from your head into your life is hard.  Another case of trying to keep it real.

People call what we do “word play.”  Mouth flappers.  Those of us whose actions can’t keep up with our mind-matters fend off judgement like OJ Simpson. We’re guilty alright but it’s not murder folks.  Let’s get into the empty seats to applaud the performance of Good Intentions.  Good intentions come in degrees. There’s the thought, the desire, and then the levels of action that happen before and until execution.  Not all life is like playing horseshoes.  There is “win” in process too.

But my friend’s real beef was with the expectation she had that those books and their words would marinate her.  Soak her until she smelled and tasted and essentially became something new and better.  She didn’t think they did.  How does someone somehow bring what is out there inside?

If you want more about some of the biological play on this, read this post.  Basically if you are trying to grow, you are most successful working with a growing-style that is congruent with your temperament.  There are other intersecting paradigms also, including spirituality, external stressors and biology.  Bringing it inside is a balance between paradigms in life.

If I were speaking to my friend though, I’d applaud her thoughts, desires and degrees of action that have constituted her journey of Good Intentions.  I’d invite her into the stands with me and take some time to watch a replay of the parts of her life that made her glad.  That in itself opens us up to what needs to come in.  And we are more able to keep on.

Self Care Tip # 55 – Applaud.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  Do you ever lose yourself in processing?  Tell me your story.

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Do What You Were Designed to Do

Animation of the structure of a section of DNA...

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Nike made it popular.  But did we ever take it and run with it?  “Just do it!”  My girlfriend and I were having lunch together and the topic about our life’s profession came up.  She is bored in her work and would like to get into something more creative and artistic.  In an ideal world, maybe she’d think, “Just do it!” and find congruence with her inner self “just” like that.

However, taking action isn’t only about energy, interest, boredom.  But what is it?  What is it that makes one person take action and another think about it and move on?

One answer has to do with hard wiring.  Some temperaments find that thinking about it is almost as good as doing it.  Imagining what they would have done pretty much satisfies their drive.  Others find that taking action that leads to completion, decisions, just doing “It”, feels like boxes, closing in, closed doors.  They feel separation anxiety just imagining the distance growing between them and their beloved Options.  For these people, maybe the perspective of “Just do it” should be different from our cultural definition.  For them, doing it may mean doing what they do best – grazing their ideas, options, journey.  They are best at playing through life so to speak.

Western culture measures work generally by the opposite of this, although the truth is, our life’s work is what we were designed to do and be best at.  What looks like play to someone is in fact “good work” for another.  What looks like work to another, looks like something they’d rather jump over a cliff than do.

If we want to really get something done in life, we will do best taking inventory of what we bring to life with us.

I haven’t touched on other reasons why many of us do or don’t take action to completion.  Things that have to do with different pathologies.  I’ve only talked about one paradigm of hard-wiring, genetics.  This paradigm is crucial though.  It permeates all others as it is about our architecture.

Self Care Tip # 44 – Just do what you were made to do.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question – What do you think?  Have you noticed this concept at play in yourself or others?

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Be Aware

Cover of "The Psychology of Gratitude (Se...

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We’re sitting at the piano practicing.  She is smart, reading for a year already, beautiful in a way that scares me at times, has advantages that surround her just because.  She isn’t thinking of these things though.  She thinks about the things she is not.  She says, “I can’t do that.  I don’t know how.”  She is not thankful just now about her opportunities.

I wondered, as I was sitting at the piano, if success and gratitude are collaborators.

Gratitude should not be conceived just in terms of a particular relationship. Gratitude is a philosophical emotion. It is, in a phrase, seeing the bigger picture.  …And so viewed, being grateful for one’s whole life is not a “grateful to whom?” question so much as it is a matter of being aware of one’s whole life, being reflective in a way that most of us are not, most of the time.

-Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough, The Psychology of Gratitude

Seems like a little much to expect out of a 5 year-old?  Maybe, maybe not.  But it definitely is if her parent isn’t practicing awareness, reflection, gratitude.

We will have more success in our life’s ambitions if we practice gratitude.  This much I will do and maybe, my little girl will learn to see herself differently too.

Self Care Tip #30 – Be aware.  Be a friend to yourself.