What gets called mental disorder or illness, mild or severe, shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships break down, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated. Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify our mental map of the world. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. We need an accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster and the way an unchanging outlook is maintained is by isolating oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong.



Thursday 4 November 2010

Walking meditation

My preferred form of meditation is to walk.

The basic elements occur naturally, one following-on from another. By focusing first on the breath, it will dictate an open upright posture, and balance will come from knowing that the centre of the body resides in the diaphragm along with the breath. In motion the focus shifts when the eyes are allowed to rise naturally to the open horizon; not a point of constant attention, but the place they come back to, again and again, as you let-go of distracting emotions and thoughts - from a past which is gone, and a future that is unknowable. With the eyes to the horizon and with good posture, then the feet will start to follow the contours of the ground and as if by magic, a ‘bodyscan’ occurs all on it’s own, as the right muscles are stretched, then relaxed along with stressful feelings and thoughts. A ‘mantra’ can be found in the pace and rhythm of the stride, but it must be flexible enough to change in an instance, for walking consistently and repetitively down a ‘made’ road may bring a kind of temporary bliss, but will soon narrow the horizon and an open future.
Posted by at
Labels:

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous15 June 2011 at 15:04

    Agreed we tlk the same language

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown1 May 2021 at 15:57

    Sober group home for women Thank you because you have been willing to share information with us. we will always appreciate all you have done here because I know you are very concerned with our.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)