Eleven months after my ill fated move to New York, a few months after opening my own consulting business, I got a call: My successor at my old company had up and left, my old boss wanted to know if I could help fill in for a little while until they found someone else. I loved my old job and all the folks I worked with, I need new clients for…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part four in my blog about hate. Last week, we left off with a real shift, a lightening of my hate load brought about…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part three in my blog about hate. We left off last week with a moment of realization: Hate is not built into the situations where…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part two in my blog about hate. We left off last week exploring all the pain and suffering that comes with being a hater….
Well Dear Reader, it is once again that time when we need to put some of our ‘Interruption In Our Regularly Scheduled Program” Blogs — entries that were written’ real time’ and out of the order of this orderly (ish) blog that tracks the progress of my practice since its inception — back into their chronological place. The next few entries will be about my big ah-ha moments surrounding the…
Immediately after I wrote the blog post, A Topic the Never Gets Old — Me and Mine Again, I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here: I was working on a blog about self and self belongings. It is so clear that I collect items, claim them as my own, in order to reinforce my sense of identity, to prove my…
Immediately after I wrote the blog post Sand Drawings I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here: After I wrote the sand drawing blog I started thinking — how am I changing, decaying, just bits of matter, aggregated together, subject to decay like other bits of aggregated mater that exist in the world? Don’t my teeth wear away like kitchen knives?…
I already had rupa on the brain, so it wasn’t surprising that I found myself on a bit of a rupa roll. Sitting in my apartment one day, I started looking around at my stuff and I asked myself, “Do you really understand these items? Do you know what they are and what they do?” My eyes fell on my favorite stuffed animal — Grux — a real fur bunny…
In all my contemplations about my ‘shield of special’ and my little bubble world — fabrications of my mind that let me imagine an Alana who is safe and comfortable and exempt from the suffering of the world — it was hard to ignore the obvious: My bubble world is full of stuff. I pin my ideas of what is ‘safe’ in my environment, on my belongings like houses and money…
I was at the hot springs and there was this woman there who was so obese. I tried to internalize what it would be like to be so fat, but my heart refused to accept it. The contemplation was shallow, going through the motions, but feeling nothing. I realized the reason why: I don’t believe I can ever be that fat — I am different, I work-out and mind my…