Changing The Moment To Be In The Moment

Changing the Moment to Be in the Moment

or, Stepping Off the Path to See the Path or, How Habit Doesn't Equate to Harmony

Well, today marks the beginning of another semester. Even though I've been very sleepy all day from working all night, it's good to be back at school. The professor had us go through a very interesting exercise today, one that really made me stop and think for a moment. After some general warm up figure studies, he asked us all to switch gears and draw a 15 minute pose with our non-dominant hand. As you can probably imagine, we were all pretty stunned at first, and then incredibly resistant to the idea. It was awkward, it was mind-bending, and it felt more than a little foolish. But we all wanted to be professional and see the task done.

After the pose finished, we took a break from drawing and he had everyone do a quick walk around the room to see the work of our classmates. Unbelievably, the majority of the work was fantastic, on par or even better than the drawings we had done earlier in the class with our dominant hand. The professor explained in thus: because of the strangeness, because of how sure we all were about how terrible the piece would look, we all subconsciously pay that much more attention to what we are drawing. Every line suddenly becomes of the utmost importance as we struggle to make the charcoal go where we want it to go on the paper. By putting ourselves in the most uncomfortable of situations, we are forced to exist entirely within the present moment, unable to be distracted by the day-to-day musings that we can generally handle while drawing normally.

Of course, the goal of this exercise wasn't to convince us to draw off-hand forever. The main point, as he put it, was to apply this mode of thinking every time we go back to drawing, especially when we switched back to our dominant hand in the next pose. Every stroke is important, every shape is vital. We cannot let ourselves get too habituated in our present situation, or we risk wandering off the Path without ever realizing it. Always mind the present waking moment, even when doing something we've done a thousand times before. Chop wood, carry water.

Updates!

Wow, it's been more than a month since my last entry, and nearly two months since I've written anything at length! I've been busying saying yes to things in my life as they come up, but I want everyone to know that I have not forgotten about this blog. I have a bunch of things I still need to write about, and hopefully I will get to at least some of them before the holidays. Until then, welcome newcomers! And hello to old friends! Feel free to ask me questions or submit interesting things!

good words.

When you’re fighting depression or a negative mood …

1. Remind yourself that thoughts and feelings aren’t facts. Often we think extreme and negative things – which are not completely true in reality. Try to get perspective and to be more balanced – and try to counteract accusing, negative thoughts.

2. Be patient, understanding and gentle with yourself. When you’re fighting depression or are feeling overwhelmed then that uses up a lot of your energy. Accept that today is likely to be hard, and put fewer expectations on yourself.

3. Do one small thing as it will help you to get moving - and you’ll start feel more hopeful as you see yourself make progress. Also, keeping yourself busy will interrupt your thinking, and will help to stop your feelings from getting even worse.

4. Although it’s not usually helpful to isolate ourselves, be wise in the people that you choose to be around. If other people are too happy – or too harsh and critical – it will compound your feelings of negativity.

5. Remember that tomorrow could be a better day. You only need to find the energy to make it through today.  

This is Dao.

for betweenlifeandthought

Living with a Chronic Disease (by hankschannel)

Beautiful words by Hank Green on accepting reality and moving forward with optimism and strength. This is Daoism in action.

always room to reblog from the old man's book.