Mindfulness

Back in March 2015, I had been living in Todos Santos for a couple of months having moved from Puebla, Mexico. I was invited to an equinox ceremony by some Shaman friends, on a mountain next to the beach.

I wrote this yesterday on my birthday in celebration of Dr. Danny Friedland’s last living day, Saturday. I wrote about Danny in a post earlier in October.

Money is one of the most vexing topics of modern life. Fortunately for us, two of my favorite thought leaders, Richard Rohr and Lynne Twist, both address money from the perspective of its currency or its soul.

I can be a maniacal multi-tasker. Some of it is due to overcommitting myself. Some of it is the adrenaline rush of seeing how many plates I can spin at once. Of course, if I am completely honest, some of it is an unconscious desire to distract myself from what's really going on in my life.

In the spring, I wrote about the "hermit-age," and this topic continues to be resonant for me, maybe because MEA might buy a former Catholic retreat center and chapel next to a Carmelite monastery in Santa Fe. Or perhaps because I recently visited Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation hermitage south of Albuquerque.

at·​a·​rax·​ia (n.): "A Greek term for a state of being that most modern elders aspire to, in which one is imperturbable, full of lucid equanimity and feeling free; tranquility or untroubled mind.”

In Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling and widely discussed book, Outliers: The Story of Success he talked about the 10,000 hours rule. In the book he cites a paper from American Scientist, by Herbert Simon and William Chase, noting that it takes between 10,000 and 50,000 hours to master something difficult.

"Usually sometime around midlife, we come to a point where we’ve seen enough of our own tricks and we come to feel that my shadow self is who I am. We face ourselves in our raw, unvarnished, and uncivilized state...

Enlightenment is nothing but a series of continual awakenings, the releasing of our own conditioning, layer upon layer, inching ourselves closer and closer to the truth. As we cultivate the courage to go beyond all our fears and doubts and take that first step into the vast infinite world of "not knowing" we will need something reliable to help guide us.

Excuse the expression, but I’m a "metaphor whore." You probably already knew that. I love and use metaphors shamelessly, whether it’s the caterpillar to butterfly journey to describe the three stages of transition or how the fine art of rock balancing is an MEA experiential leadership lesson, or what we call "mentoring stones."