Milarepa's Demons

Welcome, Mystery. I invite you to sit down and tell me of you...

Several years back I was going through a hard time with chronic anxiety, and a Zen Buddhist friend sent me the above link. The story, she said, was informative...I'd been trying to oust my anxiety by force, and it was only coming back stronger. By generating loving-kindness and compassion for my anxiety and myself, on the other hand, my anxiety would lessen of its own accord.

Jung said the only way to get out of hell is to accept that you're in hell. Indeed, once I stopped trying so hard to "get better," things actually started to get better by themselves. I learned to turn my anger up to Kali-ma instead of identifying it as "mine." There is a reason for every emotion we feel - and like the little demons in Milarepa's cave, they only want a little attention for the work they are trying to do for you. Anger is hard to feel. Fear is hard to feel. But without either of them, we wouldn't learn how to keep ourselves safe from danger. Honor your emotions and give them a little sacred space in your life, and then see what you can do about interacting with others from a space of your choosing instead of defaulting to your emotions.

And know that you are not a lesser person if you cannot rid yourself of all of these demons. In one version of the Milarepa story, every demon ran away...except for one, the last one, who was too big and strong. In the end, Milarepa and this demon lived in the cave together contentedly ever after as roommates. If you have a big demon who won't leave you alone, then make friends with him!

Life Before Birth

The egg you were developed from was created inside your mother while she was still in her mother's womb. The environment in which your grandmother lived can profoundly affect your health, even though she may be long dead and you may have moved to the other side of the world. The more we understand about the long-term effects of DNA methylation, the more important it appears that we eat well and keep ourselves as healthy and detoxified as possible. Not only our health, but the health of our descendents relies upon it.

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via radiolab.org

Jungians say that every character you meet in your dreams is an aspect of yourself. This makes the dream bully encountered in this episode even more interesting!

I've been keeping a dream journal on and off for 20 years now. It started as a writing exercise because my dreams were so strange, and I thought it was a good idea to try to capture the creativity for use during waking life. After a little practice I learned the knack of remembering them when I awoke in the morning, so I wasn't always having to scrawl down keywords in the pitch dark at 3:00 a.m. In about the fifth year of keeping my diaries, I started to see some really strange parallels between dream life and waking life. Often I'd get a case of deja vu, and it would turn out that I'd had a dream two weeks before that was the root of the feeling during subsequent waking life. Not only that, but sometimes via the diaries I would uncover chains of dreaming/waking correlations that snaked back through my life over months or years. For a while I became a little obsessed, but eventually I decided that it probably wasn't anything special, and that my attention was better spent on other pursuits.

We work out our knottiest problems at night, while our bodies are resting and our minds are let off the leash to run about and stretch their legs. I'm not a personal fan of pursuing lucid dreaming, although many people have found that practice to be helpful and empowering. My feeling is that I'd rather let my subconscious find its own way at least part of the time without being entrained to my waking ego, but that's not to say that my way is better than anyone else's. Keeping a dream diary has helped me understand all sorts of waking-life stressors. Whatever your preference, it's a practice I would recommend.