Bodhi 心 is a recovering vagabond in training to become a Zen Buddhist monk, a long-time student of psychology and an avid improver of the human condition from the inside out, alive in the marketplace, recovering from codependency and substance abuse, formerly a mental-health peer-support worker and currently a full-time healee using meditation, dharma and neuroscience and counselling to recover nervous-system balance after 40+ years of trauma.
Also reading • writing • psychospiritual • health • adventure • alternative living • (motor)cycle maintenance • esoterica • miscellany • literature
https://linktr.ee/bodhikokoro
yuggera and turrbal country
Canva generated AI art depicting “dad feeling self-compassion and trying to pull himself together so he can be there for others on father’s day trauma recovery reintegration” looks uncannily like myself embracing my wounded inner child
To all the men today who think they are a shit dad, I see you through me.
I see what constraints you are living with, between your childhood trauma and the toxic culture that has relegated us to the dustbin of the heartless-provider1. It’s very fucking hard to be compassionate and kind and patient with our kids today when generations behind us were not these things: we didn’t have the role models.
I understand, as you do, that not having the role models doesn’t excuse us from the responsibility to be the good-hearted men we know our kids need. We understand it’s not our fault that our parents didn’t love us the way we needed, but we also understand it’s our responsibility to find the love we need to give ourselves and our kids.
That though, is so fucking hard, especially in our culture, alone, divided, “the village” now a legend we hear about from traditional societies and pre-industrial Europe. It’s really really hard to act and live from our higher true self (where compassion and kindness are the default reactions) when our conditioning and ego and trauma is running the show most of the time because our nervous systems are fried and our default reactions are non-constructive, damaging, traumatising.
It’s very fucking hard to be aware enough, awake enough, and self-compasionate enough to not pass on the trauma we are carrying from generations past. It takes work to reconnect with our true self enough that our default reactions transform out of destructive habitual maladaptions into constructive and compassionate active responses.
On the journey of trauma recovery and conscious evolution, we are gradually ascending in a spiral that brings us inexorably closer to reacting with compassion as a default because that’s all our true self knows. But it’s a journey and a spiral, meaning we have to go through the same tests and lessons over and over again, learning something new each time, and evolving if we are aware of where we tripped up last time.
If you’re doing this, then you’re on the right track and you’re a much-better dad than you are probably giving yourself credit for.
Taking responsibility for your own love and healing and evolution is the absolute best fathering a man can do, because without that our kids are just getting some performance of what we think a father should be and that’s only ever going to be disingenuous, dishonest, not real.
Be your flaws and do the work of overcoming them, of recovering from and transforming trauma and becoming whole again, and know that you’re setting an example of a man who takes genuine happiness seriously and will not settle for some performance of happiness we copied from a fucking beer ad or something.
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I made a video of this post because I know that some folk out there just can’t do reading sometimes and I wanted this compassion missive to reach as many as possible 👇🏼
What I mean by this is that we have been conditioned to provide materially for our families, at the expense of our own hearts and we are now expected to be loving and compassionate fathers despite having those parts of us conditioned out of us by culture. We were made into worker drones to serve the industrial economy and now we are trying to find our hearts again. ↩︎
This is the EP version of this idea that if we don’t have connection with self (which is the definition and consequence of trauma), there is a tendency to seek that connection with other, either other people or other stuff, things external to the self, and wind up sucking the other dry.
Insights are emerging out of some tension that has been plaguing the family for the last week or so1, and a very valuable lesson:
when we don’t have connection with self (which is the definition and consequence of trauma) there is a tendency to seek that connection with other, either other people or other stuff, things external to the self;
knowing our needs is a function of connection with self, meaning that we meet our psychological needs by connecting with self and to connect with self we need to be meeting our needs;
when we give to, serve, or try to help others (without connection with self), we often end up doing the opposite of giving, which is sucking, taking, draining …
We end up sucking from others when we are trying to give, or when we think we love them, because instead of giving we are taking, sucking, a natural metaphysical consequence of there being a void or vacuum where our connection with self once was ~ we become a psychological blackhole, syphoning from others what we can only truly get from connection with self.
The formal term for this is “being an existential suckhole”.
I don’t mean to sound so obtuse ~ I’m just trying to work this out.
We reconnect with self by recovering from or releasing trauma, and through contemplative transpersonal practices (because by ‘self’ I actually mean ‘the part of us that transcends personal identification’).
How do we release trauma and integrate the parts of ourselves that we exiled during events we found traumatising? I cannot articulate that right now but it’s a central aspect of the Heartwards modularity.
I’m sure there’s literature around this and it sounds very much like something Buddha would say (I’m thinking of the “wrong objects” here) and I am interested in seeing that documentation but for right now the insight feels real enough to not need validation.
I drafted a lot more for this post and have hacked it back to the above so I can get something up here for the day. More to come.
Honestly, this book by Gabor Maté is such a banger! Every second page is like this, riddled with salient points and wobbly highlights from reading on the train.
Here in the bottom highlight he puts into words what many of us have been saying to each other for decades: our parents’ good intentions to improve our material security has come at the cost of our emotional and psychological stability.
It’s no one’s fault, just an ideological glitch in the culture, but yes it’s our responsibility to change the culture.
More and more I am starting to take an active role in this cultural responsibility, participating in men’s health circles, starting the Brisvedas Dharma Circle, studying peer work at TAFE and offering experimental coaching in psychological-fitness training …
… because we can recondition our minds and hearts to turn these habits around and create a healthier and more-sustainable culture, one individual, one family, one community at a time.
And as Mate says, there is much to learn about this from the ways of being that are still modelled by traditional societies alive today.
Get in touch if this resonates with you ~ I’d love to hear from you and see how we can put our energy together toward this imperative call to adventure into our ancient future.
We don’t have to continue fumbling along on our own, struggling and wondering what to do in this weird alienating culture of ours.
We can heal our trauma and step into flourishing, and we can do it in this lifetime!
The idea of “cultural safety” came up in class today, and it came to mind that even as an ostensible majority (white, male, educated, Western, relatively affluent) I often don’t feel culturally safe in a lot of social and professional settings because of my divergent, alternative and marginal(ised) spiritual values and beliefs.
It feels like a weird thing to say, that I feel marginalised or like a minority, considering that in many ways (white, male, educated, Western, relatively affluent) I am a majority. But what even is a majority these days anyway? When I fill in forms lately I’ve been listing my cultural background as “marginalised alternative”.
fauxpi prophecy of the rainbow warriors
I say fauxpi because apparently the prophecy of the rainbow warrior was appropriated by “hippies” from a Christian tract and attributed to the Hopi people.
Seeing a fauxpi prophecy about how the warriors of the rainbow would emerge to transform a ravaged earth, I was reminded that a much-bigger scale exists outside my puny concerns.
I’m not terribly interested in whether the alleged prophecy is “fakelore” or not, because it’s enough to be reminded that traditional societies had a much bigger vision of where we fit among the scheme of things.
I saw the prophecy after I’d been talking to Nikki at length about how I’m not doing well enough as a stepfather, and during all that talk I had remembered at least that I’m not the cause of or the solution for all of my stepson’s problems. A much-bigger scale exists outside my puny concerns, and in some way it’s borderline hubristic to think that my influence could make or break his future. There are many factors, outside me and/or my control that are causing Zane’s so-called problems.
Proverbs … because I kept hand-writing “prophecy” as proverbs, which fits better anyway, I think … And proverbs like the faux-Hopi one suggest a cosmology that reminds me it’s quite arrogant to think I could be the difference between Zane doing well or not.
There’s a much-bigger cultural momentum at the heart of these problems, as Gabor Maté identifies in The Myth of Normal, and the challenge of the rainbow warrior is to make change at a cultural level, not just at the family level.
I believe that is already happening. We are seeing more-awakened humans emerging to restore the ravaged Earth.
The prophecy might be spurious, but that doesn’t matter to me. The present is what matters, and I see change happening in the present ~ in myself, and in others around me. The hippie movement is alive and well and it’s wearing all sorts of clothes other than bell-bottomed jeans.
Seeing the prophecy recently has emboldened me to take seriously the calling to continue joining and co-creating the community movement to restore ways of being that are harmonious and sustainable.
I don’t know other words to describe it, but the feeling is strong: heal the internal wounds and help others do so to bring about a healthy world and culture; be healthy and happy and lead by example by, e.g., getting off sugar, learning tummo, healing my back pain and experiencing then integrating kensho, and/then help others to realise these ways of being,
as a service to the planet and our shared existence.
This comes off the back of angsting about Zane and reflecting that I can’t help him much but I can help people who are willing to be helped, people who are reaching out, and helping many this way to help the culture has more value than helping one teenager-I-can’t-help just because we happened to become family. The best I can do is continue working on myself so that I am able to be there when he’s ready.
Meanwhile I find it consoling that there is a much-bigger process of evolution I am a part of that transcends the wellness of a single stepson, stepdad and mother. By healing myself and helping to heal others, I serve a much broader cause.
identifying as trans(personal)
Related to the rainbow-warrior subculture and the experience of being “marginalised alternative”, I am starting to realise that I desire belonging among a suitable subculture, tired as I am of just drifting around on the edges of society, trying to be content with not quite fitting anywhere.
A student at TAFE shared their experience of coming out as trans in the Australian culture and how certain attitudes made this confronting for them. Not unusual ~ it’s well-known that coming out is confronting in a culture that has traditionally been quite homo- and trans-phobic.
It just makes me think of and realise that I feel a similar discomfort and don’t have a banner to fly under such as the rainbow flag of the queer community, though I’ve recently identified with the Mad Pride movement. That’s not quite what I’m looking for either because this unites folk under a banner of spiritual emergency (and even of being proudly pathologised) rather than spiritual emergence.
Where is the subculture for people who value the gradual benefits of prioritising transpersonal practices over, say, the gradual benefits of acquiring material wealth?
In that sense I am trans, in the sense I identify as more than just my personal self or ego. The “trans” label is already taken, so I’m not sure where to go from here. I don’t really need a label exactly, except that it might help me find more of my tribe. I think it’s not dissimilar from someone who realies they are neither male nor female and realises they can identify as non-binary. I feel something similar, except I would call it “non-dualist”. Non-dualary?
the destruction of small ideas
The Destruction of Small Ideas by 65daysofstatic
A classmate was talking about virtue signalling and how the teacher shouldn’t be politicising the classroom by subtly (and not so subtly) advocating that we all vote YES in the Voice referendum. I get it, there should be a separation between politics and education, the same as between church, state and the press, and I value that this classmate brings a self-identified “conservative” perspective because I value having my biases challenged.
Somehow though, we got on the topic of … wait, how did we get there … that’s right, this classmate had been triggered (their word) when other classmates that morning had said Australia is a racist country. This classmate believes Australia is much-less racist than it was, and I agreed ~ I said though, among your everyday people there is much less racism and yet, institutional and systemic racism persists:
First Nations people are marginalised, more incarcerated, have less access to opportunity because of systemic racism, that is undeniable.
Institutions and government departments take generations to catch up with the popular view.
He asked me, “What institutions and departments need to catch up?” and I sensed at this point that I was no longer in a conversation or reasoned debate, and was now embroiled in highly emotional polemic.
I said, “I don’t know,” which seemed to signal an opening to that I deserved to be torn down for my ignorance.
They said, “If they’re marginalised it’s because of alcohol.”
Starting to back away, I said, “What do you mean?”
They told me that when the conservative government took away cash from communities and they couldn’t buy alcohol, things improved. When the Labor government came in and revoked that because they are “do-gooders”, things went to shit again.
I asked, “Do you think we should deprive them of their right to choose and their right to dignity of risk by denying them cash?”
“If they were able to make informed choices we wouldn’t need to do that.”
“Wouldn’t it be better then, to provide education instead of revoking their freedoms?”
At which point, they said, “Yeah but hey, would you let a 4 year old play in the street?”
I said, “Okay, I’m going to call it because I need to go to the toilet and have lunch anyway, and these kinds of views make me deeply uncomfortable.”
By this point I’ve been feeling triggered myself for a while because blaming First Nations marginalisation on alcoholism was staggering enough, so I don’t remember exactly the defense they uttered, but as I walked away, I said, “I’m going to leave you with it to think about whether that’s appropriate.”
I find it unfathomable that a twenty-first century adult could so flippantly infantalise a whole demographic of humans. I find it unfathomable that seventeenth-century adults were able to do this without feeling appalled. But this person, when I told them I was struggling to know what to do about my stepson’s drug addiction, told me I should storm into his room and dump all of his shit onto the footpath if I didn’t want drugs in the house.
I don’t know if I’m some kind of virtue-signalling pinko-lefty bleeding-heart liberal, but I prefer to identify as a budding transpersonal psychotherapist. I had already seen some belligerence and bigotry in their way of presenting their views, so I’m not surprised it has come to this. I’m just glad it wasn’t my sarcasm that caused the problem, as I had been worried about.
the Buddhist path of recovery from addiction
Related to the faux-Hopi prophecy about an awakened people emerging to heal the ravaged earth, I was talking to my Zen teacher Arno recently in the car on the way home from the zendo, and a resolution formed (a sankalpa, you could call it): Why not just go for it and develop an addiction-recovery program that is unashamedly based on Buddhism. I confirmed with Arno that the attachment in Buddhism is like addiction, to illusion. I said, “Once we drop that addiction to illusion, aren’t we free?” and Arno agreed.
It’s a natural progression from there that a Buddhist path to recovery from addiction makes a lot of sense as a Heartwards offering.
He said it’s tricky though because the Buddha taught a transpersonal methodology and teaching Buddhism as an addiction-therapy program kind of detracts from that, or sells it short. But Buddhism is both therapeutic and transpersonal: as a person makes progress along the transpersonal path (letting go of their attachment/addiction to an illusory self) they are naturally going to experience therapeutic benefits. And the “therapeutic” practices like self-compassion support/complement the transpersonal progress/development.
As one practices letting go of their addiction to an illusory self, the “lesser” addictions will naturally fall away as well.
The hinaddictions to drugs and sex and whatnot, if the “greater” addiction to the illusory self, is the mahaddiction.
Such a program would be like Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB), based on Buddhism and other ancient traditional contemplative practices, secularised and supported by neuro(science). Noah Levine is doing something similar already with Refuge Recovery, so there are models around already.
It has come to my attention that there is an opportunity to trade in crypto, and I don’t know what that means beyond a few ill-informed thoughts and half-considered assumptions:
crypto is gambling
shuffling currency around the market is just ‘skimming value’ off the top without actually contributing to society, and it’s immoral to make money without making value ~ to profit from merely shunting other people’s values around
I deserve to die poor
you need to be able to maths
I am not great at mathing.
The opportunity might be an opportunity to challenge a few of these beliefs.
At this stage I don’t know the difference between the terms “crypto” and “bitcoin”, I thought they were the same thing, but I do have a sense the ideology will resonate with me this time.
I think the opportunity has arisen due to a shift internally resulting from the work I’ve been doing to change the way I relate to myself and the world ~ these things present themselves when we are ready to embark on understanding them, in the same way we can try to read a certain book and not resonate or get anywhere with it, until one day it just does.
I’m thinking of The Prophet, which I just couldn’t get into despite many attempts until one day I found myself reading the whole thing aloud by the fire with the pet dog of a guy who had taken me in one winter when I was adrift on my bike for a while.
Another thing about crypto is it might change my relationship with money/currency and how it “should” be gained. After hearing maybe 15 years ago that money should only be made by trading goods and services that bring value to the community ~ shuffling existing value around (such as renting property or trading shares or currencies) was just ‘skimming’ off the top of what others contributed to society ~ I latched on to this belief. I still of course value bringing value and being of service and am now just wondering whether the “game” of crypto might be legitimised by the intention to use any proceeds for supporting services to community psychospiritual health, namely the activities falling under the umbrella of Heartwards.
HDT, the OG of tiny homes!
Along the way, if it changes my relationship to the sort of abundance I need and deserve, then great. Because yes I’ve got some big plans and they’ll need more resources than I am accessing by through welfare.
I remember a fragment of a dream now, where a woman I knew was proudly declaring she was free of the welfare system.
Free of the waged-employment system is also important, which makes me want to read more of the Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and explains my curiosity about crypto. It was N K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy that got me going about this in the morning when I was enjoying the back deck on a Sunday.
The first in the series, The Fifth Season, is a very powerful indictment of imperialism, slavery and exploitation that has got me thinking again about modern wage slavery.
There is no way to get ahead in our economy as someone who sells their time in physical or intellectual labour.
I want to make products and services that are valuable ~ products that sell themselves and services/programs that are replicable, maintaining a turnover of income. One thing that may not sell but would promote the training services and products would be a webinar perhaps about the modularity. People could then buy a self-paced course or recruit me as their trainer. That’s what I’m imagining and I feel it’s practical these days ~ not right now during TAFE but in the present as in the continuation of the future from here.
I’d like to have passive income, to work smarter not harder, but this requires undoing the coding that was written in me by my parents and their generation.
thoughtlogging
A blogging style has been inspired by Dave Winer, one of the OG bloggers from way back when the practice was about logging the web. Thought bubbles dropped in the browser throughout the day are then released at night, just a flow of thoughts and links, if only to keep my browser tabs from overflowing.
humility
Something else alive right now that I just want to note and would like to add to my somewhat daily recitals is that I have an opportunity to make some good connections at TAFE and do some good professional peer work. People are respecting me and valuing me (one of my fellow students even PMd to say so!) and I want to make sure that as I become more confident, because I am getting such positive feedback, that I don’t tip over too much into arrogance.
The risk of sarcasm and irony is high as well, because there is a lot of joking in class and we’re all mucking around a bit because the content is not very challenging and folk are a bit bored.
And hopefully if something happens and I fall from someone’s high-esteem (say I get too sarcastic and hurt someone’s feelings, as I’ve worried about with one classmate in particular who I like a lot and feel respect for but whose ideology is very different from mine) I am not too hard on my self, recognising that mistakes happen and I’m trying to keep my humility about me as my confidence grows again.
I’ve been through this before when I moved from Adelaide to Melbourne to work as a journal editor in my early 20s and suddenly meet with a peer group who valued and respected me. I didn’t know what to do with that feeling, but I think I did pretty well at not treading on too many people’s toes.
It’s related to something I’ve written about before, where I have an excess of joy to regulate when I come out of the depressive cycle, short of being manic-depressive.
wellness + recovery
I appreciated a peer practitioner saying in a video I cannot find right now, that
You don’t have to be perfectly well, to be in recovery
and, I would add, to hold the lamp for someone else on the path. I found the video👇🏼
I got around to uploading the bones of what I’ve started calling “a modularity”, describing the framework that is developing around me for helping others recover from small-t trauma and experience sustainable genuine happiness.
If you’re interested in transcending the inherently limited personal/human ego and experiencing a much-expanded perspective of our true place in and relationship to reality, check it out.
Regulating an excess of joy and optimism is not something I, a “depressive”, ever thought I’d have to deal with and let’s face it ~ it doesn’t fit the stereotype, but in my experience(s) of recovering from depression, this need to regulate an unfamiliar energy of hope and empowerment has become one of the first hurdles I encounter
to such an extent that when I had “my episodes” they were, largely, a consequence of not being able to manage a rapid ascent out of the depressive spiral ~ something my wife and I came to call “escalation”.
A clinical term? Seems very broad and non-specific, not very sciencey, but might explain why the appointed psychiatrist started wondering whether I would qualify for the bipolar box.
Surprise! You don’t get the grand prize of genuine happiness but here, have this booby prize ~ it’s like the high-fructose corn syrup of happiness: very intense and very bad for your health longterm, and only a synthetic facsimile of genuine happiness.
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven | Godspeed You! Black Emperor
But I’m getting there, and pleased that I now have healthier ways of responding when this “symptom of recovery” manifests in the middle of the night in the form of All The Things I’d Like To Do With My Life Now That I’m Not Incapacitated by Despair.
Sounds like a post-rock album!
I no longer jump out of bed to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and attempt to complete a 5000-word essay from scratch. After a profoundly inspiring day at TAFE yesterday, I got myself to sleep last night with some guided yoga nidra and even when I woke through the night, I remembered my tools, directed my attention away from the mind and into the body, got back to sleep.
Success!
Then I woke again, as though by the sheer pace and volume of mental formations.
And after some deliberation, decided, Hey, it’s okay: I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately, I’ll cope with being tired through a day of working bees, I’ve got this.
I backed myself.
Who knew though, that needing to regulate joy would ever be a thing. I learnt that from Filipe Rocha at The Center for Human Flourishing, and will be ever-grateful because now I know what I’m responding to, not some broadly unhelpful term like ‘mania’.
I’m excited about the future! Good for me.
I can highly recommend Filipe’s course by the way, Cultivating Emotional Balance. Emotional balance and fluidity, nervous-system regulation and a general awareness that we are nothing more and nothing less than a spirited collection of environment-sensing cells a few billion years into evolution. Perspective, BOOM! We got this!
I am feeling very blessed and proud to have guided a yoga-nidra session today for our TAFE class ~ we’re training to be mental-health peer-support workers, and part of that is learning self-care practices, which I have been studying and trialing for yonks now:
yoga nidra has helped me self-regulate so much over the years, I am really glad to have introduced some folk to it. One of the students had a gentle emotional release when I guided them to imagine their safe place, and my heart expands a bit each time I think I had that influence on another <<<333
I was going to bring my speaker and just hit play on a recording by someone else, but decided: I didn’t want to lug a speaker about; I could wing it, trust myself, back myself, and that paid off. I did really well, and folks were grateful, another student experienced the hypnagogic state and of course someone fell asleep, hopefully getting exactly the deep rest their body needed but their mind might not have otherwise allowed.
It’s a beautiful and profound practice, yoga nidra ~ popularised by Huberman as NSDR (non-sleep deep rest) if you want to do the version that’s a bit more science-y.
I should say “modern Western” science-y because really yoga is among the original sciences, a true science of the spirit and I’m really glad and profoundly grateful to be joining the ranks of folk who pass that on through culture, which I learnt today has been described as “collective conditioning of the mind”, but that’s another story.
(Briefly: we can undo that conditioning and re-condition our minds and hearts to be more spontaneously compassionate ~ the theme of today.)
May your rest be deep and only vaguely sleepy 🙂 Reach out if you’re curious about yoga nidra, I’d love to chat about it more and trial this meditation-facilitation thing a bit more. Get in touch via Heartwards’ Get Support page.
I’m really proud of myself and very excited because I feel I can say I am in recovery from mental illness, which is no small deal.
Trigger warning though:
I have been debilitatingly depressed for months at a time in the last 10 years or so. I have experienced heart-breaking bouts of acute suicidal ideation and a deep sense of alienation from my self and my worth. (This is a trauma response I have learnt about and am able to see for what it is: no more and no less than fight-or-flight, my nervous system trying to protect me from acute and sometimes chronic emotional pain and suffering.) I have been through 2.5 episodes of spiritual emergenc(y) and about .5 episodes of full-blown acute episodic stress-induced psychosis. I have been dependent on drugs and alcohol and various behavioural addictions since my early teens. I am now 39! Apart from a bit of mild binge-eating or a dose of half-mindless entertainment, I am now nearly addiction free. (The final addiction to drop is our attachment to false ideas about reality.)
I no longer get floored by depression ~ I have learnt and am teaching myself how to respond to life in way that doesn’t result in debilitating overwhelm. I am able to see when my nervous system has been triggered and know that any thoughts (say, of worthlessness) are cognitive distortions. Most days I experience micro-mystical states of deep peace and contentedness that are dependent on no external source ~ due to the self-work I am doing, these moments of genuine happiness are the result of being in relationship with my true self and with reality as it is, compared with wishing reality were how I think it should be.
I am reporting this after an exchange with Zane tonight that previously would have totally derailled me. A minor (but vaguely problematic) exchange that remained minor because I saw what was happening: we were triggered = responding half-consciously from dysregulated nervous systems that believed we were in the past, not the now. I saw what was happening, and exited the situation instead of trying to make Zane see reason (read: instead of trying to make reality or Zane behave as I think they should). Earlier in the evening I had self-regulated after Zane had been pushy and rude. Then we had the exchange where we were triggered and I co-regulated with Nikki. And I have been at baseline ever since, whereas a year and a half ago I would have still been fuming.
In fact I now need to regulate joy because I am so excited about other positive things going on!
Previously I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy these positive things because once I was triggered it would sometimes take me days to come back to baseline. I would let triggering situations hijack my happiness and I would feel so trapped in suffering that suicide felt like the only option.
I didn’t know how to respond to or cope with life in a healthier way, but now I do and am learning more all the time.
So I’ve come a long way!
Nikki is doing really well too and we were able to report to our relationship counsellor today that we each feel we are genuinely healthy ~ at least, as healthy as we can expect. (I’ve since re-encountered Gabor Mate’s idea that a lot of our mental and physical symptoms today are the reasonable responses of our whole organism to the toxic culture we are growing in.) Sometimes we are distressed and suffering acutely, but this does not mean we are unwell. It means we are human. It seems really obvious now, but it’s been a huge paradigm shift to feel that.
The cool thing is … the really fucking cool thing: this sense of wellness among suffering has not resulted from some miracle or fluke; it is the result of some 15+ years of (self-) inquiry, application, research, therapy, meditation, a bit more inquiry, some giving up, a lot of starting again, despair, triumphs, bum steers and mistakes and lessons and gradually a very solid deepening of self- and other-love.
It’s been a fucken journey! It still is. I’m finding my way. Makes my heart swell inside to think of it and report this here.
And like all before me who travelled the Path, I carry a torch that lights not just my way but others’ as well, and apart from being excited about my own increasingly consistent wellbeing I am excited about beginning to support others more on the Path.
I’m starting to offer dana-based coaching, so if you’re curious about that, get in touch at that link. I am starting to offer this in in the most ad-hoc fashion, making it up as I go along ~ join me if you’re ready to explore the Path together.
My enrolment at TAFE Qld was finalised today so it’s now official. I am going to study Mental Health (Peer Work) and I feel ready ~ ready to use my lived experience of recovery to help others move toward recovery and health and wholeness as well.
Did you know the word “wealth” is derived from weal, meaning good health? I find that weally intewesting.
I bought Gabor Mate’s book The Myth of Normal to celebrate enrolment, because we got an advance payment from cLink and I bought myself a 5-subject lecture pad as well because hey, nerds like to live a little as well!
like all before me who travel the Path, I carry a torch that lights not just my way but others’ as well, and apart from being excited about my own increasingly consistent wellbeing I am excited about beginning to support others more on the Path.
I am starting to offer dana-based coaching so if you’re curious about that, get in touch at that link and we’ll arrange a time to catch up.
Kokoro 心 Heart 