return to easy feeling

Yesterday there was a mild bout of existential dis-ease. The cause was a computer glitch - or rather a reaction to a computer glitch. The mindset spiralled into negativity with the thought that I would lose all the web sites that I manage. Anxiety and panic.

BUT … 'I' noticed that ego was involved and 'I' thus thought to engage with non-egoic actions so as to return to easy feeling. Recently such non-egoic actions have included:

01 doodling

02 reading non fiction

03 writing blogs

04 meditating – various methods

attending to online audio and video

cruising social networks

housework with grace rather than grudge

lighting the wood burning stove

listening to radio, watching TV

making music on a yamaha keyboard

shopping, cooking, eating, washing up

taking photographs and editing them

No system has yet been designed for logging how much time is used on the various non-egoic actions but, subjectively, there is the impression that the first four are more effective than others.

Doodling is a fail safe. A blank sheet of paper and four thicknesses of felt pen are acted on and a doodle emerges. There is no conscious forward plan. But there must be a host of decisions made concerning the thickness of lines, the size and position of shapes, and the patterns that fill the spaces. The unconscious keeps churning and a never ending host of doodles emerge. This is flow which is by definition non-egoic and unrelated to space and time.

Reading non fiction is also a fail safe. Real books, Kindle books and text from the internet. There is also audio and video from the internet eg on Google, Wikipedia, Youtube. So many “Ideas worth spreading” (ref TED.com). So many talented individuals (often working in teams) have a simple idea and develop it to book length. There are limits on how long attention can be kept on a book. After some time the autopilot switches on and the text is forgotten. OR the mindbrain goes into dose and sleep mode. In such cases the task is to admit defeat and to deliberately engage with another of the non-egoic actions.

For a couple of years the target was a blogpost every other day, but there was often a falling short. There is no longer a target - go with the flow. There is still motivation to write and to break away from the 'research & lesson plan' mode and to adopt a 'titillate the unconscious and let it flow' mode.

Meditation is not always a fail safe. It comes in many forms. There are full time monks who give their life to the practice. On a more modest level there is the ten hours a day for ten days in Goenka's Vipassana, the eight days over eight weeks of the MBSR system, and the one minute quickie that brings a return from busyness to mindfulness.

With practice it gets easier to notice when the mindbrain is on autopilot and thus to put attention on the breathing – take a deep breath and count to ten. Neuroscience has shown that the brains of experienced meditators differ from those of ordinary people, and that even modest amounts of mindfulness can cause noticeable changes in the mindbrain.

When writing blogs there is some slipping in and out of egoic thinking, feeling and moods. When this is noticed, mindfulness methods can be called up (eg just sit, watch the breath, watch the monkey mind without judgement) and, if these fail, there can be a switching to another of the non-egoic activities listed above.

This article is coming to a close. There is a need for the ending to reference the introduction. The theme is 'ease'. The trigger event was the computer glitch. It is still glitching - but it is no longer causing dis-ease. The non-egoic actions, in this case this blogpost, caused a return to an easy feeling. Cool.