The Black Hole of the Mind

The brain is an odd thing. It can take visual information in, recognize it as a certain type of data, interpret it, and then stop.

I went to the Northwestern Health Sciences University website's Continuing Ed page to check out my class listing, and found it on the calendar page. After I noted that it was listed and that the dates were correct, I moved on. A couple of days later, late in the evening, something clicked in my head. Did I really see what I thought I saw? I went back to the website and there it was, the tuition for my class listed at twice the actual rate. It had taken that long for the information to register.

I've done it, we've all done it; read several paragraphs of a book and had no idea what I've read. Drive somewhere and have no recollection of how you got there.

Being present is a many layered phenomenon. There's being physically in the room. There's directing your sensory organs toward the environment. There's turning them on. There is even the act of performing the motions of engaging with the environment. All these things can happen and still, we are not there. We are not present.

Presence is like.....a distillation. A star, collapsing down to a point of infinite density. It is the moment where an alchemical melding takes place, and all things come together to make gold.

Mindful Self-Indulgence

I am in a bad mood. The kind of bad mood I'm in is not grumpy or mean; it's bad because it has equal parts self-recrimination, self-loathing, and self-pity. Are you seeing a theme here? For convenience sake, I am saying that I am blaming my homeopath.

About 5 or 6 weeks ago I took a homeopathic remedy. We're talking classical homeopathy here. The kind of deal where my intake was over two hours long, and ended up with my being sent one very tiny pill. I popped it down on a Sunday morning and went on with my life. The most immediate result was that I became ADD girl. For that whole day (and probably then some) I was interrupting people, failing to provide my attention appropriately to those who were sharing their important feelings and experiences with me, and, most disturbingly, spilling confidences.

The interesting part of this was that I could see myself doing these things and yet felt helpless to stop it. I don't know which part I am suffering from the most, knowing that I did them or bearing helpless witness to it. It has been a fascinating exercise in mindfulness as I have also been watching myself go through the suffering I've felt as a result of my actions. This level of observance has somewhat mitigated my suffering as the attending personal drama is being fed less and I have a different perspective - less blindly immersive in the experience.

I still feel bad. Nausea inducing, hide under the covers bad sometimes, but being able to step outside of the experience a little bit has kept it from becoming overwhelming and allowed me to see that there is some part of me that is outside of this experience. It does not define who I am.