I gotta keep the kosmos going by playing hide-and-seek with myself....

I was going to write something short and glib in response to this question but then I paused and really thought about the slices of time in which I experience myself as having a destiny which I am living out moment by moment as a hardcore sadhaka due to play in a broader arena in the last half of his life........and the experience of brailling out my sadhana, really feeling my way into it day by day in its practice/professional/familial/intellectual spaces.....I'm either living out a preordained essence like a sculpted hand fitting God's Glove or flowing down this socio-cultural vasana like a river down a valley-groove with a sort of predetermined direction but according to my own chaotic fluid mechanic which dances with yours in shared language and variegated aspiration...

..so, as Sartre had it, does my existence precede my essence and I'm here to make it up as I go along.....or, as Leibniz and the other predestinationists gross or subtle had it, does my essence precede my existence wherein my jivatman is scripted from zygote to senesced crinkly taking his dying breath?.......

Interesting one.....as Existence Boy I'm doing it all on my own efforts and can get quite narcissistic and isolationist about life....as Essence Kid I'm secure in the knowledge that God's got it in for me and if I'm a good boy I'll reap the karmic harvest and get promoted into the Division One Guru League....former active and agentic, latter passive and communal.....

Actually, I think it's somewhere between the two....Eddie Izzard has an approximate idea of where he's going in his 'improv' but fleshes out the bones differently according to his onstage mood of the moment.....I think that being here is like that for me....

So I'm here to demonstrate that postmodern Yoga must of necessity include psychotherapy.....that psychotherapy is integral through it's methodology rather than intellectualy lensing it at client pathology.....tha Yoga can be approached in many different wys......to be a father to Lewis and therein bring more wholesome life into the world......

And most of all, I'm here to love. Love is bantered about on this site a lot and `I'm not convinced that it's always meant. So, reactively, I do not use it much; that's my anger issue. But I do mean this when I say that without love, without putting heart into what we do and say and think, we are lost. I am here to find my heart in each living moment and radiate love and compassion from it to every living being and to acknowledge when I don't do that and forgive myself and feel appropriate shame. Yes. I'm here to love. 

Well, my heroic attempt to convert the Gaia community into a mob of custard pie-throwing satanists appears to have been unsuccessful...

Seriously, though, I'm still working on cracking the adamantine shell of my narcissism....I've made some headway over the years but I'm still wont to want to put myself first in some situations and have to inhibit my natural tendency towards selfishness.

Well I'd have to see what you see in order to figure that one out...and since I cannot be you, tat tvam asi meaning something other than submergent identity...then I have to take what you say on epistemological faith...but then those two frames in the johari window which involve the stuff known to others but not to self..and known to self but not to others....well how the hell do `i know what you see?

If we're talking about subtle level experiences in the lower savikalpa samadhic states...well astral matter is extremely pliable and in the low subrle it's much more prone to personal mouldings....higher up, I think, the folk who got there first sort of made a vasana factory filling transcendent archetype moulds with lots of groovy shakti energy so we tend to have visions of these preset godz if we are inclined towards anthropomorphisation.....they get their power from repetative formative-causation bonding i.e. worship so the older ones like Shiva and Isis render powerful experiences to the beholder, being channels for the very subtle energies at that level....which is why Egyptian magick is more powerful than, say, Crowley's Current 93; it's been around longer and therefore used more...part of evolution is about breaking out of the shackling aspects of premodern takes on the elevated states....notably the tendency for your shadow self to masquerade as such a vision of God and fuel your id in a self-righteous way..

Right now I see Griffo the Coffee Demon beckoning me out the house and into the cafe and thereafter to work so I can afford to buy and drink more and more coffee....

Actually I've never blogged with coffee in me....I'm just naturally rajasic.

Trust is neither easy nor difficult for me because it is straightforward...and this is because I view trust not as some woolly feeling to which I am passive victim but a conscious decision predicated upon the degree of congruence manifest in the words and deeds of the prospective trustee....folk who manifest a deep congruence in how they are are folk whom I trust implicitly....jagged people I try to avoid.....

Viewing trust as a decision not a feeling puts me in the driving seat and it is redolant of the Tantric mindset of taking the world into oneself and transmuting its impact in the crucible of ones awareness rather than passively taking what comes up 'out there' and feeling overwhelmed by the world.... the former attitude bestows groundedness, fearlessness and, well, all the stuff that engenders congruence....the latter bestows fear and the potential for all kinds of sell-outs....this is true, original tantra....all the sex stuff is commercial hype and has little to do with the real thing......

What motivates you to ask the question, Siona?

And Who motivates me to ask you?

No curiosity, no evolution...no zip, actually.

Awareness is always curious about what swims within it.

Depends on where the unknown thang lies on a spectrum one-ended with, say, trying out a new sexual position...I think I've done em all although my mate sez number 1124 differs from number 324 only in respect that one crosses ones fingers and I haven't done that one yet.....anyways, the other end of the spectrum is, say, havng a gun pointed in your face or being badly beaten...I've been there too but that's another story.....

I think the more challenging unknowns, usually ones occuring at the torture end of the spectrum, elicit the pragmatist in me...I work out what is necessary to evade or diminish pain and discomfort and then work on settling into accepting whatever I cannot work on or transmute or whatever...vairagya-or nonattachment to the Shakti arising in ones Shiva-will attenuate the attachment/aversion reactivity known as ragadvesa in Classical Yoga so that one is posessed with sufficient equanimity (upekkha) to hold the experience with clarity......

Last night my ex-wife told my son and myself that he could no longer keep his puppy in her house...she is keeping all the kittens her cat has recently littered and 'I just don't do dogs' [with a smile]...Lew was heartbroken....I lost my temper and reminded her that we had agreed joint stewardship of the little creature and she orderd me out of the house....this was highly unexpected....anyways, we have an action plan worked out regarding how our little Lhasa Apso gets card for whilst we are all at work and Lew is at school and, whilst there are many things we need to consider regarding her welfare, I'm confident we'll work it all out...including my moving beyond my personal feelings of outrage and resentment at Lew's mother's abrupt and unempathic actions...

Another major unknown thang which I'm sure I'll be blogging about in the coming months; I have decided to run a Yoga Centre here in litle old Hebden Bridge....I have no cash reserves, no experience of commercial property lease and no artisan skill...but I do have inspiration, energy and I learn fast....so I'm looking at potential properties next Friday....as in everything else; one step at a time....

I don't consider folk to be 'wise' per se...I think that each of us have moments of wisdom, some more than others....I've had folk with little education and few constantly-firing neocortical neurones say stuff to me that has blown my mind because of its combination of penetrating insight, appropriate near-comedic timing and empathic attribution...other times I've had people I truely respect miss me by 100 yards in one blind reachout.....

As I write, perhaps I want to revise my view of wisdom....I don't think I know anybody who bullseyes all the time....but I do know that I love and trust those around me who are receptive to and expressive of getting it wrong...and trade off their experience of shame for intimacy in the moment of admission....

Doing therapy is like all the rest of life in this respect...over the last five years I have shed the invisibility cloak of the all-seeing perfect therapist in favour of the authentic honest bloke who sits in front of his clients and gets it wrong sometimes and feels helpless and struggles with what's left of his own stuff in reaction to what is going on relationally...and admits/expresses this to the other/client in a way which enables that other to stand in their own authority, confronted by the healing experience of mutuality which they probably never got in childhood.....I proceed into relationships with this kind of vulnerability and, as I consider this to be a sign of wisdom when I experience it in others, then I feel justified in ascribing it to myself....habitual joking about my narcissism aside, I don't care for false modesty....wisdom recognises intimacy is won often at great personal cost for a far greater relational karmic purchase....

Those who know that they both do and don't know manifest profound wisdom in my opinion...those who quote willy-nilly offer up a trompe l'oeil of the relational landscape we seek to braille forth into, whether that relationship is with ourselves, others or outer kosmos....Clare put it beautifully this morning when she wrote that the less she meditates and reads mystical quotes, the more she feels something is missing...nice one Clare...

Be well folks, Jon x

I don't subscribe to the notion of lumping everything together and calling it life, covertly anthropomorphising it and then relating to it as one Being who gives and takes and around whom I generate expectations...instead I see 'what is' as an ever-fractallising spaghetti-string morass of transmutable figure-and-ground shaktidance which arises in the basinless basin of my open awareness in all of its upSpiral/downSpiral dignity and deterioration..like a touchscreen phone, each element opens to my touch for me to explore, delight in, be tortured by, pine for, die for, try for, fuck for, luck-out to, throw from, dine of, sign-signify and generally swim in...

...of course when in crisis, like the rest of us, I expect that Shiva will extend a glorious blue hand to me and pluck me outa the muck....you don't get many atheists in a shipwreck; when the passengers are steeped in cold atlantic water, even the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins will be shouting to Jesus to deliver a lifeboat......and I carry this expectation because I've been a good boy Dad, Mother, please reward me with comfort and safety.....thankfully, when I'm not in crisis, I am less regressed as one of God's children, and as a grown-up who defines his own essence and has mostly torn up the script his parents wrote for him, I understand that the notion of karma is dumbed down for monochromatising ethnocentric Hindu culture...be good and get rewarded in this life or the next.....and it's nothing like this....

I used to pray to Shiva each morning to relieve me from the hell I suffered after a three-hour-per-day yoga practice when I began as an unemployed druggie in my mid-twenties.....the unburied memories aroused anger and fear and nausea and I never at that time entertained the idea of therapy....please God release me....but God never did and He did me a big favour because what happened was that I became stronger, intensifying my practice so as to hold my experiences within a larger compasionate embrace and relaxing into the space....one time I even remember saying aloud 'Okay Shiva, go ahead, do your worst, I'm not scared..' and, just like that, I realised that I lost my fear..shedding expectations, I learned to embrace life....

I'm not advocating a stand-alone boot-camp in this....like others, I seek out and find solid support in my partner, friends, supervisors and felow yogis....and I am kind to myself, mostly, which means wrapping myself in eiderdowns sometimes and pushing myself through envelopes at others, it's always kindness when the inner body relaxes and stays free of contraction...I am advocating that we cease to be victims of life and do whatever is necessary to free ourselves from the chains of attraction/repulsion...and that involves letting go of expectations which are underpinned by raga....attraction...

I want beauty to lay me down in a canvas of finest silk and paint me in hues of clear gouache vivacity......I want her to enter me through the scent of arthouse mayhem and pervade each cell of my being with osmotic ardentness.....I want her to shine forth through me into the shimmering air and vaporous eddies of the astral and plough into the morphogenic fields to disarm the adversarial spikes that linger and grow there like ingrown toenails.....I want beauty to tantalise but not infantalise us into the careful seduction of retro-romanticism...I want the gorgeous carrot on a stick that death may never take a bite out of to spur us on to greater acts of selflessness in the face of blind marketforce brutality....I want the negentropic opening of the lotus to the Sun to enshadow the heat death of primetime teevee....yeah, business as usual...off to work in my beautiful car...ttfn..J x

Greatness to  me is like the statue that was never erected to pay homage to the extraordinary efforts of the eminence gris to further the cause whilst remaining invisible as kundalini to an alcaholic to public purview.....at the outset of rapid rise to power, this eminence gris, whose hypothetical name shall be Cardinal Richlieu in memory of that most public of eminence grises, having enabled Louis XIII to gallivant off doing nothing much in juxtaposition of the flamboyantly-wasted life of his son and heir La Quatorze...at the outset, CR did not sek anonymity, but through a vast sequence of critical-path actions designed to benefit others and not himself, CR's public profile never raised cos all the bodhisattvic energy got poured into public welfare.....and CR never fretted about this turn of events, seeking neither harem nor autograph-hunters, gofers nor celeb-club party invites in the knowledge culled through countless existences as  rock gods and conquerers that the thrill of celebrity, like the glow of a weekend new-age workshop, wears off like deep oil drips off smooth white plastic...and CR discovered that true inner greatness lies in the knowledge that the one thing in ones life which remains consistent is that life is ever throwing up ways in which one can benefit others and that the capacity to generate this kind of generosity or dana-paramita as the Buddhists would have it, outlives the greatest gang-bang, coke line, chart hit, grassroots-leaching dictatorship, tainted gurudom or indeed any other form of narcissism......and that this constant flatlines into heat death only when every blade of grass has become a buddha and Brahma inhales His last...yep, CR will have no statue erected to his august personage which is good cos if Jacob Epstein ever did the sculpting it would be fairly bland and he'd probably call it Cardinal Richlieu's August Personage which, in he coming age of acronymming everything would be an unfortunate occurrence and how the hell do I get to write all this stuff, must be channelling Prolix the Hollow Ornate, seventh century mystic Eirish Monk....ah well, it's off to run a new age workshop then.....no greatness for me......

I'd like to be able to say that I differ from them in every respect but this would be one of my more arrogant sub-personalities finding kudos in the notion that I have completely refurbished myself and it would be more hyperbole than truth....

 my parents were working-class folk from the in North East of England, which would map onto somewhere like Pittsburgh...heavily industrialised, sulphorous smell everywhere, people drink and screw and knife one another etc etc.....maybe they don't do that in Pittsburgh but it's a reasonable generalisation of Hartepool where I come from....anyways, my father started of as a docker/stevedore after being demobbed in 1947...three years later he was working in the accounts office...four years later doing a correspondance degree in European Economics from which he received a first....ten years later I'm six and we move to Grimsby cos this is where my dad begins his rapid ascent up the national dock management ziggurat.....ends up managing big docks, doing it very well, gets a DVT, has his lung out, retires.....and now, in his eighties does his crossword, sleeps, eats, goes to the pub, watches TV and that's about it.....

Like my father, I'm smart and I can do jobs well.....unlike him, I have no consistent ambition, losing interest in jobs once I've mastered them..I'm on my third career.....that's why I'm a psychotherapist; infinite variety of people etc.....I can never ever do this job well enough.....mind and heart can always open more and more.....like dad, I don't worry about my work...dad would come home at six each evening often a bit tight from the liquid business lunches but never worried about what was going down in dockland....he delegated himself out of a job, entrusting loads of responsibility to his juniors who loved him for the opportunity of proving themselves......whilst I have tended to hog chores, doing tasks myself much to the chagrin of my subordinates.....

Dad does not show his feelings very much whereas I am emotionally expressive...dad is cankered with a thousand-and-one-prejudices whereas I am open-minded....dad does the dishes right after the meal whereas I've been known to confront a miasmastic decadesworth of plates in the sink....

Where we are both similar; we both like a nice tune and a good film with a beginning, middle and end, none of your art house crap....we can both make excellent farting sounds by blowing into our anatomical snuffboxes.....we're both bald....hate to lose at Monopoly (I lost to dad when we stayed with him this weekend, got real pissed...Tam and Lew lost with grace I'm pleased to say).....love good company and restaurants and open-hearted women.....can add up two digit number columns by tracing a finger briskly down the line....we're crap batsmen at cricket....we're both plain-speaking (which may come as a surprise to those who read my blogs but then this is a daily learning exercise and not, in one sense, an ergonomically significant part of my life so I do as I please...)....

Uh, the cafe's open and I ain't got to mum yet so I'll stop there.....have a good monday folks....I have funding for my yoga centre and am awaiting a decision on an offer I made on the lease of a 900 square foot space in the centre of Hebden Bridge...today I open a new business account..this is sooo exciting....and dad's with me on this one after I told him the business plann...

J x 

I do not get a 'feeling' as such because when I am really present for somebody in a receptive state, I lose a sense of a personal self who feels....

More accurately, it goes like this;like everything else,  a therapeutic conversation consists of a series of very thin timeslices stitched together along a sutra of pure emptiness...in some of these timeslices, I am listening attentively and there's nothing personal arising in the space which I am....then sensations creep into my body as the impact of what is being conveyed (aurally, gesturally, energistically, both pranic and subtle) makes its impact on my five koshas....I'm aware of four of them and only sometimes in tune with the fifth/highest....in the next timeslice, I'm parallel-processing, both listening and working out what is going on for me countertransferentially....this working out involves

1.Sorting out what my countertransference actually is...usually three or four things I am thinking and feeling in response to the other and
2. Assessing what is proactive and what is reactive countertransference...the reactive stuff is the stuff a client is unconsciously attempting to induce in me either as disowned self-material or as a way of getting me to act characterologically as one of his/her parents....the proactive stuff is my 'own' response evinced from my own character and history.....these usually blur quite a bit...
3. Working out how best to respond to the other in a manner healing and beneficial...

Whilst this little lot is happening...and this processing involves witnessing and feeling deeply as well as analysing...I am, in this timeslice, no longer fully listening with a pure undivided attention so it's easier for me o write about what it feels like....

In another timeslice, I might be grabbed by something being conveyed and let go of this procesing to give full attention again and in the next timeslice, process the impact again.....

I do this a lot both inside and outside the therapy room....it hones the mind, develops and matures empathy, is excellent mindfulness training and embraces the Bodhisattva Vow (or maha-vrata if you're more Indian Yogi).

It may sound a bit heady, all this stuff I do when I listen, but in practice, it is not....it's a heart practice in essence and it's what I do for  a living and it's excellent life training and it takes a while to develop, like headstands and 75 second pranayama cycles and speaking Norwegian...I learned two out of three of these as well so see if you can guess which ones

Dar danga binto

Jon x

If by soul one means the anandamaya kosha or very subtle body, well I can quote chapter and verse from oriental and western magickal literature on soul stuff at ya but this would just be, as the Buddhists say, 'fabrication'...which is the tendency to freeze a peak realisation in the amber of vapid conceptualisation and hold this inert once-organic-something in my sweaty palm to show-and-tell....I feel good when I have a heart connexion with people and stuff in my life but I cannot say that this nourishes my soul because I cannot feel my soul at that moment...I can certainly feel my chakras and openness and what have you but the soul is higher up....the place where the tips of your known self reach up and taste the magnetism of the downward-dangling divinity...

I can infer, then, that love nourishes my soul because it is in the loving open ground of my being that enables me to feel my soul's essence.

Then again, maybe it's sherbert lemons cos I'm partil to them and Lewis has to hide the packet away if I see he's bought some from our Traditional Sweet Shop here in Hebden Bridge.

Anyways, I'm off for a week in Crete tomorrow so hang loose kids and I'll call in this evening before an early night.