Week #2 - Reminders, Practices and More

Reminders:

• Discover how being focused in awareness with equanimity enables the ‘seeing’ of conditioned thought systems and patterns that are usually unnoticed (as when we’re ‘running on automatic’).
• Experience the difference between awareness followed by self-judgment, and awareness followed by self-acceptance.
• Explore/Experience how self-judgment acts as the glue that holds “unconscious” habit patterns in place, and how equanimity acts as a solvent.
• Discover that we are capable of experiencing our emotions with equanimity. Jill Bolte Taylor's '90 second rule.' (see blog archives, 2009, Week #6). Also, a short statement of the 90 second rule: http://www.squidoo.com/stroke-of-insight#module52542601.
• Approaching the discovery of thought systems with curiosity and compassion.

Practice:

• Search for the word “equanimity” in the blog archives from 2009 and 2010; read the resulting entries.
• Read about the 90 second rule in blog archives (see above).
• Practice the allowing, accepting, spaciousness of equanimity during mental and emotional turmoil. Practice not resisting upset and disruption with strategies; instead, allow what is with equanimity. If possible, see the thoughts that arise to support or combat emotional states.
• Practice shifting from judgment to breath in equanimity.

More:

When you're running on automatic you're not focusing on breath, and you're in the past or the future... i.e., in thought. focusing on just this breath with equanimity brings you into 'the present' where thought and feeling can be allowed without 'having to' do something with them. Then, spontaneity arises instead of running on automatic.