The Craziness of Automatic Respect

Automatically respecting someone for their credentials or title or office, according to Doyle, is "like accepting an unfaithful wife.  It's crazy to do that!"

The benefits of losing respect, by contrast, is serenity and the ability to communicate with really healthy people.  That's how I see it.

Losing respect for the familiar can be very scary, though.   We have to find healthy people to replace the ones  for whom we've lost respect.  That takes time and patience.  It takes faith to believe that you are going to find them, while you sit in the void that's created by loss of respect.

New Definition of Prayer
Topic: spirituality

You may not agree.  Or you may think that this is only partially true. 

Tom Doyle, however, suggests that prayer is sitting still and quiwetly until the negative goes away. 

However you see prayer, if you use that definition, it's an exercise we dare not neglect.

Learning to Embrace Many Dissenters in our World
Topic: Making Changes

In the free world, we like to think that we welcome new ideas and challenges.  To the extent that we do, there is a better chance of progress.  Not that all new ideas are good ideas--many are not.

Thinking people do not immediately throw out new ideas.  Neither are healthy people are not threatened by new ideas.  

Thinking people are also more willing to pay the price of being a dissenter.  Standing up to evil when it's obvious that evil exists. 

Not through jaded ideas that make us see everything that's different or odd as evil.  And not through seeing everything that's "normal" or ordinarily expected as good.  That would be black and white thinking. 

Thinking people act in good timing.  Taking time to examine new ideas, but not too much time.  Taking time to decide when being a dissenter is a good idea and when it is not.  And going through that process EVERY time a new idea is encountered.

It's work!!  Work worth doing.

Worshipping Other Images
Topic: spirituality

The depth of Thomas Doyle's address just continues to unfold as I meditate on what he said in a few moments in the final address at SNAP.  One expansion to my thinking about "worshipping graven images" came when he suggested that we fail to arrive at a place of liberation when we worship someone else's image of God rather than our own.

In man-made religions, that's exactly what happens.  We give our allegiance to others' images of God, we fail to develop our own ability to discern who God is on our own--something that I believe any mature person is capable of doing by filtering out what obviously doesn't contribute to spiritual health.  Obvious to those with common sense, anyway.

Advocates Must Sort Out Feelings to be Effective
Topic: Making Changes

Guilt, depression, and anger aren't just stuff for emotionally unstable persons.  Yet the "Christian" way of seeing these feelings often leads us to view them as bad.

Doyle reminded us at this year's SNAP conference that guilt, depression, and anger are a part of the journey of an advocate, too.  Feelings he's experienced many times as he's been a trail  blazer in the Catholic Church.

While the system may want us to see that being docile and obedient, not challenging the aristocracy, keeping the rules are all qualities to be regarded highly, people who transcend the system look at it differently. 

Transcendence allows us to sort out the mandates of the system and to examine our own rules that may be formed because of the system.  Or perhaps formed because of our own emotional instability.  Either way, the sorting out allows us to develop a healthy sense of guilt, to be temporarily depressed over things as we are sorting them out (without developing a clinical depression) and to get angry at a level that is appropriate to the situation at hand. 

When we bring the negative feelings into check, the impact of the changes that follow can be profound.  Not just the impact on others.  Mostly, the impact on ourselves.

Seeing our Failures as Gifts
Topic: music

Sometimes I have piano students who are really uptight about their errors.  I can be that way, when the errors are just noise--the errors that turn the word "piano" into "pain-o!" as I want to reach for my ears.

Yet a lot of errors I see as beautiful and try to monopolize on them.  When I make an error in public, I've become very skilled at turning many of them into gifts that enhance the music.  Right on the spot!  So I end up fooling my audience if I'm needing to impress more than to just clown around.  Even in clowning around, the errors can be fun.

The trick is to smooth over the errors so we turn them into blessings, even if they aren't what we intended to do.  Or maybe not the ideal way of making music.

Students who "beat themselves up" in the middle of playing a piece have to learn that a lot of errors aren't really errors at all--just variations from the way the writer intended for the piece to be played.  Theoretically, they are errors.  Musically, they may fit right into the chord or make a slightly different rhythm that doesn't effect the pleasant sound of the piece. 

When a student makes an error like that, I often point out the problem in retrospect.  I call it an error that can be turned into a beautiful mistake.  Much like a cook varies a recipe, by accident, and improves on it.  Or finds ways to learn from it. 

Sometimes the student discovers an even better way of playing the piece.  Or at least one that is more preferred to that student's ear than the way the writer wrote the piece to be played! 

That's when they are truly making music, not just playing it.

Same goes for life.  We have fun figuring out new ways of seeing things that may be unique, even as they change the music of our lives and smooth out the rough places.

Liberation from a Wounded Spirit
Since waking up from spiritual assault is painful, the cure for the wounded spirit is to find ways to think about the injury so that the pain is all but annihilated.  That means finding new ways to think about self, too.

Spiritual Assault
Topic: spirituality
"Waking up is painful," Tom Doyle tells us.  "Being fully awake is liberating."  Especially when one is recovering from what he calls a "spiritual assault."

Forgiving Ourselves
Topic: coping

Tom Doyle says that the person he's found hardest to forgive is himself.  For keeping his own pain alive.

That raises the questions:  "How do I kill the pain that comes to all, from not living in 'paradise' or from, psychologically, 'living in the paradise of denial' without medicating it or acting compulsively?"

"How do I accept pain as a part of life and realize that it doesn't really have to be totally annihilated?"

"How do I learn to use the pain as a warning sign?"

"How do I not allow dysfunctional pain--which physiologically comes from an old injury that really makes the pain useless and senseless today--to take over my life?"  Perhaps that means finding a way to "cut the nerve," which is a method used by neurologists in some situation.  The problem is that cutting a nerve leaves some section numb, so that it cannot feel some pleasant sensations, as well. 

I think the answers to these questions are as many as the people in this world.  We do not stop pain until we no longer are drawing oxygen into our lungs.  We learn to manage it.  In a world where everyone we meet is struggling with invisible pain over some issue. 

When I look at it like that, I realize just how complicated "bearing one another's burdens" can be.  As complicated as bearing our own!

No Longer Blind
Topic: music

Yesterday afternoon I taught a second-grade boy to play "Amazing Grace."  Not in the way he had it in his head exactly, from growing up hearing it at church.  For often, with familiar tunes, we've heard them butchered in everyday life to the point that we memorize slightly impaired rhythms.  This hymn, like so many songs, only comes alive, musically, when the musician looks at the music on paper and really studies it.  For those of you who are musicians, you'll understand why I told Adam that I want to hear those "nice, crisp eighth notes."  In just a few minutes, we were both smiling at the beauty produced by this little child.

If we are half asleep--and that's what religion often does when it teaches us to "trust" what we "know" without questioning--we automatically assume that people who act inappropriately or say inappropriate things, yet wear a title (or a collar), deserve our awe and respect automatically.

In a world where children do not stay close to the home fires for as long as they did in previous generations, they must learn very early the lessons of not trusting automatically.  I wish it were as easy as it is with piano, to know that we have succeeded in teaching them all of the important rules.  So they can enjoy the music of life with the confidence that they are precisely making the right decisions, at just the right time.

Music is complicated, when analyzed.  So is life, though the latter is a lot trickier and filled with more dangers than messing up the music.  We don't want to over-analyze either music nor life, however--even when we feel that our failure to do so at some point has taken us to places, psychologically and spiritually, that we did not intend to go. 

Perhaps the trick is learning that it's okay to sometimes risk going places we did not intend to be.  While forgiving ourselves for the "wrong notes" we've played.  After all, isn't that where little children often learn best?