{"id":29,"date":"2012-08-23T16:05:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T20:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2012-08-23T16:05:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T20:05:00","slug":"what-have-i-ever-lost-by-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/?p=29","title":{"rendered":"What Have I Ever Lost By Dying"},"content":{"rendered":"
I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a mineral,<\/span><\/p>\n

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And then I died and was reborn as a plant.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a plant,<\/span><\/p>\n

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And then I died and was reborn as an animal.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as an animal,<\/span><\/p>\n

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And then I died and was reborn as a human being.<\/span><\/p>\n

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What have I ever lost by dying.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Rumi, as translated by Robert Bly<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Not a pitch for reincarnation — but then who am I to pronounce on that one? Rather a reminder of how a compulsion to cling to the status quo<\/i> informs and directs our lives at so very many turns. What’s the expression — better the devil we know, than the one we don’t<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/span>The presumption, I suppose is that, in most cases, change will, at best, be a (scary) unknown; at worst, for the worst. So better to entrench right here. . . as a rock, a tree, or a mole. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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I had a conversation this week with a farmer — not a wholly difficult thing to do in Perth County. We happened to be passing fields nearing what ought to be the apex of their growing season; and, with them, talk of the annual ups and downs of crop yields, weather, drought, deluge — good years and bad. He shared a story of a fellow farmer, an emigrant from Europe many years ago, who had prospered in his adopted country; having arrived with next to nothing as a young boy with his parents. Each year of this man’s farming cycle is . . . well, what it is. He is described as applying best practices; then allowing things to unfold. In particular, I was struck by this man’s apparent sangfroid around the possibility of having built and built — only to have it undone by the vagaries of market prices or weather or some other uncontrollable element in the equation that is agriculture. The ever-present risk of returning to his ‘roots’ (as it were) and being penniless once again. My friend characterized him as having a very ‘balanced’ attitude around this possibility: he would simply begin again. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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It put me in mind of the villainy wrought by the alternative — that would be remaining attached<\/i><\/b> to what is, fearful and avoiding<\/i><\/b> of the unknown, of change. Two other conversations this week: one that had seen a man dig a progressively deeper financial hole in a (failed) attempt to maintain a standard to which his family had become accustomed — and his equally vain effort to keep it all a secret; and a second, which saw a man stay in a job that was ‘secure’, but soul-destroying, again because the alternative would be seen (and perhaps experienced) as irresponsible, risky, self-indulgent. In both cases, fear-based decisions to maintain the status quo fostered relationship unhappiness, bordering on disaster, anxiety and depression.\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, in Wherever You Go, There You Are<\/i>, his little book of thoughts on mindfulness practice, talks of ‘letting go’ in very similar terms:<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Letting go means just what it says. It’s an invitation to cease clinging to anything — whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding, to let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in\u00a0 <\/span>exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction<\/b> to or rejection<\/b> of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking<\/span><\/i>. (p. 53)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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And one final word on change. Our tendency to see impermanent things as permanent, is, in a mindfulness framework, the very antithesis of a healthy meditative practice.\u00a0 <\/span>The underlying tenet of such a practice is that change is inevitable and constant. To attempt to artificially hold to stasis, the ongoing state of sameness (no matter how desirable that state might be; or no matter how fearsome the alternative is expected to be) is to work against the universe. One writer, in fact, describes mindfulness as the awareness of change as it unfolds. Not a bad working definition. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a mineral, And then I died and was reborn as a plant. I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a plant, And then I died and was reborn as an animal. I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as an animal, And then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidhowardpsychologist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}