Jeff Warren

Let’s Help Regulate Each Other 

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Self-regulation requires continual effort and prioritization. I’ve often resented this. I’d have prefered to just be born and coast. But mental health doesn’t work like that any more than physical health does. Due diligence and care are required. Also awareness about what will help keep you stable and functional, and about what dysregulation looks like for you. What are your early warning signs? They’re a bit different for everyone, and they change over our lifetime. Often we end up ignoring them, and then all of a sudden our demons are piling into us like a Jackie Chan fight scene.
That’s what happened to me. Sometimes it takes a crisis to wake us up. Then we have no choice but to get help.

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Eden

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The most honest line I’ve heard to describe how meditation changes people, or at least how meditation has changed me, is: “Hurt more, suffer less.” Things go through more quickly, because there’s less blocking and protecting. But they also hurt more, because … there’s less blocking and protecting. That’s what happens when you let life in.
Fortunately, a similar dynamic applies to the sweetness of everyday pleasures. 

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FUCK it: Kwong’s in Control

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It’s December, our favourite CEC theme: “Fuck it”.
Yes. Rescue me please from my precious pieties and grown-up self-regard.
And all the hand-wringing about “getting it right.” The tut-tutting on meditation postures and the microschools of thought on which subcontinental strand of Buddhism is most pure.
Truly: Fuck it.

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How to Roll with Our Breakdowns

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Coming back into our bodies is the medicine. That of course is the real direction of meditation, when it’s working the way it’s supposed to. We notice what’s really going on, notice the habit pattern that wants to take over, notice our urgency or our anxiety, our frozen-ness or our outrage. We notice and we float – for just a moment – above this behavior that wants so badly to repeat itself, to stay unconscious, to stay automatic.

And then, as time resumes, we exercise our dignity and our freedom by deliberately choosing whether we want to keep that particular response going. Not a glamorous practice, but a necessary one.
Where’s the rest? Real rest – deep rest – is there in every moment.

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Freedom from Freedom

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I think then: this freedom is better. Freedom from freedom. Freedom from myself, freedom from the dizziness of a million choices. Parenting is very clarifying. I know my job: keep Eden and Sarah alive. There’s only one thing to do and it is not about me.

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