I've got a new favourite youtube channel now!
these videos are such bite-sized awesomeness:
Self-actualizers are very much defined by a life mission
We cannot change anything unless we can accept it.
-- Carl Jung
I'm doing a lot of info-consumption (in other words, crazily reading multiple things concurrently, and being haphazard -- but hey! I defend this with my belief that there's a secret order to the chaos); then I'm doing bite-sized actions cause I can't manage too many things at once, I think. I've sort of decided to treat my self, my nafs, you know, like my pediatric clients -- have achievable goals, and then gradual scaffolding and positive reinforcement is the way! Then pray for divine guidance and long-term (more like life-long) project sustainability.
"... it is generally considered that emotions and feelings, in all of their diversity, are a natural expression of our relationship to life and that healthy or appropriate emotion is a desirable condition. This is not to say that all emotion are beneficial but that they are often a natural response to aspects of our life. In this respect, if I did not experience fear when in danger or grief at a time of loss or anger if I am being abused, this would probably be unhealthy. Many emotions are part of a natural play of our experience that are a necessary presence for health. With this view we might consider that unless we genuinely embrace our emotions fully, we cannot experience the richness and happiness life can bring. Equally, if we are unable to relate to the nuances of our feeling and emotional life, life will become arid and without real engagement and meaning. Our relationships will become mechanical and uncaring. What makes the emotions problematic is the excessive or overwhelming and unconscious dominance of emotions such as anger, aggression, jealousy, pride, desire, fear, and so on that then become potentially destructive and need to be brought into balance.
Within both the world of therapy and healing and Buddhist thinking, therefore, it could be said that it is not the emotions per se that are unhealthy but the way we respond or relate to them. When we do not relate to them openly and allow them to be as they are to move through us, we become bound up with them in an unhealthy way, and they become what we might call an affliction. When we go unconscious, become overwhelmed, or block and suppress an emotion, it becomes unhealthy. It can then dominate us and become destructive to both us and others. This means that we can begin to distinguish between emotion itself as a natural expression of our feeling life and the secondary contraction into an unhealthy relationship we may have with our emotions."
-- Feeling Wisdom, by Rob Preece
Alhamdulillah, I'm suddenly finding myself able to understand a lot of these stuff properly and deeply; I know that that whole excerpt would likely mean nothing to most people who read it (as it would have had to me, not very long ago as well), especially because the bigger idea is better understood from the book as a whole rather than just those bits. I'm finally understanding properly, I think, the concept of emptying your self -- something discussed in most ancient traditions, including Sufi Islam; concepts about ego and the nafs and the personality. About emotions and what they mean to the self, and what their purpose is, perhaps. I'm still learning though, and feel ravenous for this stuff.
I was not twenty when I bought Carl Jung's text, The Boundaries of the Soul, and now I think I'm actually finally ready to read what's in it. I don't think I could put two and two together at all when I first read it as a teenager. Now it's sitting on the ledge of my bed.
Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah!
And Astaghfirllah for all my past sins.
Blessings from God are always unfathomable.
Faith is trust when we cannot guarantee the outcome for ourselves.
(in fact, we actually never can guarantee anything for ourselves, can we?
we can't even guarantee tomorrow.
it's all self-illusion, thinking that we can.)
Choose faith to overcome the anxiety of living,
and not let the fear of life drive you to this self-illusion
i.e. doing things because it's safe rather than right, or true.
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