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The Life-Changing Book Club 1: E-squared

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 This is transcribed from my YouTube video @the-life-changing-book-club THE LIFE-CHANGING BOOK CLUB 1: E-squared 10th anniversary edition by Pam Grout  Hay Publishing Hello This week’s book is this one. Is that backwards? Yeah. It’s Pam Grout, it’s a book called E-Squared, and the subtitle is: Nine do-it-yourself energy experiments that prove that your thoughts create your reality. Ok why am I reading this book? Well, manifesting has been a bit of a thing recently in the ether, and I wanted to explore it partly because of that and partly because my own mindfulness practice has got to a point when I’m thinking, mm, is there really anything in this? Is it time to surrender? And the title and the layout of the book appeals to my rational side in that it claims to be a kind of experimental manual on demonstrating to yourself that there is such a thing as a kind of something that responds to your thoughts.  So first of all, I’m going to say I went into this book with a large amo
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Not

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https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Vector-image-of-invisible-mans-clothing/32709.html Not trying 'When you think critical things about someone, you can stop yourself from doing that. And if you do that enough, in the end it means you get less critical of yourself inside your head.' Eleanor is new in the Mindfulness for Retirement Group and, as some people do, is teaching us  the things she believes she is here to learn.  As the teacher I tend to leave people to do what they have to do, unless it touches on some misunderstanding of the basics. Today I use her statement as a teaching opportunity. 'Thank you Eleanor. Yes o f course, you might want to abstain from being critical, ha ha, but this points to a basic  difference between mindfulness and other ways of dealing with stress. In mindfulness it's not about trying to be better. It's not about doing anything special to correct something you see in yourself, or in other people. You notice and accept ho
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A year of disidentifying - everyone in our dreams is us

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Somebody asked me why I suggest that everyone in our dreams is us.  Because they are. Everyone and everything in our life is us too.
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Refusing to resolve the question

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https://stocksnap.io/photo/dark-room-X4L0SO1PM1 Copyright James Stamler (public domain) At some time in the deepest part of my sleep I wake to the mattress movements of A getting into bed beside me. I'm aware of a slow crackling sound from somewhere on his side of the bed, accelerating rapidly as I listen. He throws an arm into the air with a shout, 'Ahhhgh' and swats whatever is making the sound to the floor. 'What was that?!' 'Ghhhh.' I can feel in my stomach the fear of the worst (fire) and the hunger to know, which I would usually immediately satisfy in whatever way possible. But A's complacent return to sleep-breathing suggests that we aren't in immediate danger.  As I am in a year of letting go I see the situation as a relatively easy opportunity not to resolve my question too quickly. I will refuse to satisfy my mind, and see what happens.  I'm one of those people who has to have a reason for everything. If I can't find a real one I
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The bodyscan meditation experiment

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soles_of_a_Males_Feet.jpg The London sky is empty of cloud and the warmth of the sun has dissipated into space, leaving the temperature low enough to give a fringe of chill to my toes. I sit at my desk and prepare to do a bodyscan meditation.  I have decided, despite knowing that typing and using words will be a great interference to it, to try to describe the experience here on the computer in the moment as I do it. I don't know if it will work at all, but I am giving it a try. Because, well, because that seems like an interesting idea right now.  This is a mindfulness practice, so the purpose is not to empty my mind, but to exercise the awareness of where my focus is, and to return it to the progress through the body sensations whenever it diverges from that. However many times that happens. I plan to drop my attention onto different parts of my body all the way down from the top of the head to my toes. And to start a new paragraph whenever
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The Opposite of Separation

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With grateful thanks to  the source of this wonderful photo  for sharing it on creative commons licence Single-celled organisms like this paramecium, if you look at them down a microscope they look just like the diagrams. The whole structure is laid out transparently for you to see. This is amazing to me because I usually think of diagrams as simplifications of what's actually there. But in the case of these very lively little creatures, what's there is marvellously simple. And if they're alive when you're looking at them, you are struck by how very fast their  movements are. All those cilia, orchestrated in an elegant Mexican wave every few milliseconds.  Cilia are made of an arrangement of tiny tubules linked together by dynein protein molecules. Whenever one of these protein molecules is able to gain energy from ATP molecules floating around in the cell, it changes shape, bends on itself and crawls up one of the microtubules. This bends the whole cilium. Because of t
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