consciousness explorers club

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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Embracing this new story, imagining I could believe it and hold it as tightly as the previous one, I tasted a new freedom emerging, exciting and inspiring. Coming out of that retreat, the barrier of fear I’d long held between me and my loved ones began to melt away.

Because stories can be generative too. Healing. There’a whole school of therapy dedicated to reclaiming and rewriting one’s narrative. My inner narrator has always been busy, constantly describing what I’m doing, making sense of what I’m seeing, telling tales (mostly cautionary!) about my past and my future. One of the great gifts that insight meditation has given me is the ability to turn my attention towards this narrative voice, recognize when it’s offering a limiting perspective based on fear and trauma, and then gently guide it in a more generous direction.

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Becoming Trees

By Jude Star

I looked at trees and was struck by their openness and patience.  I thought about how impatient I was with my own process. I wanted to change and grow, and I wanted it quickly.  I wanted to escape my suffering ASAP.
Appreciating how a tree grows, I saw myself in a new light.  You can’t make a tree grow any faster than it naturally does.  You can’t yank on a branch or a leaf to try to speed it up. If you want a tree to grow at its fastest rate, all you can do it give it the proper conditions for it to thrive.  Good soil, sun, water, and air.
So what were the conditions I needed to grow?

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Living Nonduality – Panel

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I hosted this panel at the 2013 Science and Nonduality conference in Holland. At least two of of the participants – Lisa Cairns and Gary Weber – claimed to be in a permanent state of nondual consciousness. For those who don’t speak the lingo, they are what some Buddhist might call “enlightened” – i.e., their sense of being a separate self has collapsed, and they now apparently reside in a state of open unfixed “oneness” – whatever you take that to mean. Actually, what the hell that actually means is the subject of this panel.

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Why Meditate – Talk

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Maybe meditation is something you want to pursue, maybe it isn’t. In this ten minute mp3 I lay out my own reasons for practice, and discuss an experience I had on retreat that brought the whole thing home to me.

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