1. Facing Conflict – you sacrifice mental and physical well being to receive external validation. I do this a lot at work and in my personal life. I stay out with friends at the expense of a run. I answer emails at 2:00am to get positive feedback from a client.

I like how you reflect, construct an approach and communicate. Solid steps.

I often miss the communicate step. I feel fearful, scared and terrified that someone will have a negative reaction. I avoid entirely instead of engaging.

The fear I feel is one of the great falicies of life. People in general don’t care about you and stay up all night thinking about you, Nearly as much as you think they do.

In the few times I have reached out and explained my situation people have been extremely interested in helping me.

It’s funny, not asking for help is one of the most detrimental things humans do to themselves.

Most people want to lend a hand. They’re eager to connect with another human.

Just ask.

2. Acceptance of Suffering

Acceptance is essential. I have heard this process also articulated as awareness, acceptance, action.

I often skip to action. My awareness is 50% at best (which means I usually misunderstand the issue at its heart). Acceptance is no where to be seen.

We all suffer. This will never change. After we feel our suffering however its our decision how to take action, how to deal with it.

I need to start at first base. My awareness can be so off sometimes that I don’t even recognize that I am going through intense pain. This leads to bad things.

This is water. This is water. This is water.

As our man DFW says, I wish us both “way more than luck”

3. Voluntary Simplicity

80% and 5 minutes. Both solid bahavioral changes.

Consistency is the biggest hurdle for me on this topic (/life).

Simplicity has not been a theme for me recently. Maybe it should be.

4. Mindful Habit

Mindful energies. Great section. For years I though my own mindful energies were my conscious choices. They’re not.

Without reflection it’s impossible to see your mindful energies. You can literally walk through live and never know that your default setting are making decisions for you of how to feel, how to interpret, how to deduce and what to do next.

I have done some good work in this area over the last few months. I look forward to doing more.

Brief side note – I have a strong inclination to be a pleaser. I write thank you notes like it my job. This year I’ve decided to write myself a thank you note. I want to share the same affection I give to others with me Al Frankin.

Now that I’m all the way down here I finally feel that I’m in the ‘flow’ of actually writing half decently. The irony.

Overall I commented on your sections in reverse just to mess with you . Another thing that struck me is the time you took to come to these insights. It took you a year. It’s a good reminder for me that while I can conceptually understand a great deal, but my emotional journey to accept them and act upon them can take weeks, months or years.

My best to you sir.

Looking forward to trying it out and sharing this post of fb

Andrew

Most often – nothing. Nothing bad at all would happen.

@Austen – In situations where I’m at a loss for words I try and just practice deep listening and asking questions. I trust that simply offering presence can sometimes be enough.

@ Grace – I am finding that writings detailing specific growth elements encourage me to cut through the mental commentary towards deeper truths. In general I feel I’m trending away from offering too many conclusions, in favor of presenting observations as articulately as I’m able to.

On a sidenote, I am grateful for the posts you draft detailing your own growth and journey – I find that I am working more on my personal development as I grow older and it is always a comfort and inspiration to see your outlook and new perspectives for they influence mine.

I would modify the question sightly to “Who is being nourished by this activity?”

This expands the evaluation from being primarily a measure of quantity. It also allows for one to ask oneself, “Am I being nourished by this activity?” A question that may be lost as we (as Lama Surya Das once put it:) “struggle forward on the treadmill of our to-do list, on the momentum of our conditioning.”

If being productive and useful is subsumed under dharma, then perhaps a broad interpretation of sangha can be the context of relationships in which we operate. The very notions of priority and productivity then cease to be individual (as implied in the notion of self-help) and can be thought of as arising dependently on the web of relationships.

“Too busy?” is perhaps only part of the question and a fuller inquiry would ask “Too busy for what?” and “Too busy for whom?”, questions which can respectively bring our current understanding of Dharma and Sangha into sharp focus.