Thoughts on a Monday

The problem is that i have not written in a long time and there are some things I wanted to note in this blog. So, I think I will just list them and then hopefully I will become more disciplined and write more frequently.

1. I will start there - discipline. I really want to be more disiplined and there is something about Mondays - my day off that encourages me to believe that I can and I will! So, I made my bed today, exercised and so far have not eaten like a pig. That's a start. But what I know is that if I look at journals I wrote 35 years ago - there was still this desire to be more discipline. Starting there - some things never change.

2. With my Wellstreams Peer Group I listened to a CD of Richard Rohr last week on "Emotional Sobriety" which is where the 12 steps always lead. He believes that we need to detach from our emotions which feel like truth but make us over responsible.
Here is some of what he said:
"You are not your feelings, you have feelings."
"Feelings are seductive - there is something nice about replaying and justifying them"
"Feellngs are the ego in the dance of attachment."
Ken Keyes wrote: "So much more suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people giving offense."

So, the answer to this is detachment or rewiring our brains and the way we do that is through contemplative prayer There is much. much more about this - but I continue to learn that I need to pray more and not allow my obsessive thinking and feeling to lead me into the paths of numbness. I am hoping this is making sense as I write it. I was going to do a whole blog on but...

3. Last Saturday I went to a workshop on the Bowen Family Systems Theory. I learned again that it is helpful to see the patterns that have been passed down generation to generation. It is about the way we see and encounter the world. We each made a diagram of our own families and it was interesting to me. Here is a quote from that: the luckiest child in the family is the least focussed. Hmmm.
Anyway, there are 8 concepts that he touched on in the presentation, each of which helps affects us: differentation of self, triangles, nuclear family emotional process, sibling position, multigenerational transmission process, family projection process, emotional cutoff and societal emotional process.

There is so much to learn here - and I felt like we dipped our foot in the pond.
It did ultimately relate to the information from Richard Rohr in that he talked about the human brain and our maturity which comes - again in detachment.There are three brains - reptile, mamalian and neocortex. And the mamalian and reptilian brains react quickly and can easily get us into trouble. The more reactive we are the more we maintain anxiety in the system.

and so we need to become imaginative and problem solving and able to differentiate ourselves. And again at the end of the day I learned that contemplative practice makes us a less anxious and therefore more differentiate and mature presence.

And I think I will stop here because I find myself back at where I started - talking about discipline. I am trying to spend more time in contemplation - because I know intellectually and experientially - that the more contemplative I am, the more at peace I am.

The prayer room is cleaned up - I think I will go and pray.