Middle Season #33

 

What's mentionable is manageable

 Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. — Fred Rogers

 Ferdinand Hodler - Cherry Tree in Bloom, 1905

Write a book in December

The Paris Review published a short and playful article titled “The Six Books We Could and Should All Write” that provides examples of six historic books that fit five different TYPES of books.

What types? “One should compose (1) a book about oneself, (2) a book about others, (3) an anthology of favorites, (4) a book about words, and (5) a book of lists.”

After having written some 433 blog posts, and as I'm coming to the end of the year (when I've tried to do some kind of year review of song and journal review) I've been thinking about ways I can do something with the stuff I've written or copied or recorded.  I came up with this list yesterday:

1. A year of growth, like tree rings
2. 10 moments that are important (like Philip Zimbardo... events, significance, how does it make you change your life) 10?
3. 100 top things I'm grateful for, annotated, 2021 (there should be about 1000 things (3x365) I wrote about this year!).  10x10 list (literally)
4. garden 'almanac' with all the garden and nature Middle Season notes I've made
5. Dave's ideas (10 of each?) for what you should do more of, do less of
6. Letter to self... (future self?) (current self?)
7. Letter to HDL...
8. 10 important concepts for Right Living (savoring, transitions, moving through)
9. 10 recipes, annotated with stories (Like Water for Chocolate...)
10. 10 decisions I made that, in retrospect, were important
11. 10 THINGS I made in 2021
12. 10 things J and I made together
13. 10 improvements to things 
14. 10 high points and 10 low points
15. 10 chapters of the year (chapter titles?)
16. 10 gifts I gave/ gifts I received

I'm thinking about the storylines of the year -- kid relationships, garden, interesting ideas I followed (or abandoned), grateful, the story of J and me.

This year, for some reason, there's seems to be a lot of material to write about... maybe b/c the blogging? maybe b/c the journal writing that increased while I've been blogging?

I'm thinking of images... the growth rings of a tree.... seen from the top... each quadrant a different story.  I'm thinking of temperature for the year charts...  bar graphs, line graphs...  

The beginning of something else

 

Odilon Redon, Butterflies, 1913

 Often when you are at the end of something, you are at the beginning of something else.  

-Fred Rogers

Document your backyard

From Rob Walker's Art of Noticing newsletter:

Document your own backyard — exploring and paying attention to what you love about it and the small details that make the space an important part of your home.

*backyard can mean anything within 300 meters of your home

Why do you feel good?

Under the "Feel anything else" you can scroll down and choose, for happy:

for bad: bored, tired, lonely, stressed, annoyed, disappointed, anxious, sad

 

Bettina Grossman

 

Bettina Grossman artwork in Chelsea Hotel.  NYT article after she dies.

For much of the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Grossman worked as an artist in Europe. But after a series of career disappointments, she isolated herself as a permanent resident at the Chelsea for a half-century, fiercely guarding both her privacy and the trove of art she had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.

In “Girl With Black Balloons” (2010), a documentary directed by Corinne van der Borch, a Dutch filmmaker living in Brooklyn, Ms. Grossman said that after the fire had “destroyed my life” she redoubled her commitment to her art, which, she said, precluded her from marrying and having children or even taking time away from her work to promote it.

Ms. Grossman’s myriad frustrations often fueled new works. Once when gazing from her fifth-floor balcony and thinking of jumping, she said, she instead began taking pictures of pedestrians from above and compiled a photo series.

In making her neighborhood rounds, she pushed a shopping cart containing portfolios and samples of her work that she was loath to leave unguarded at home.

In 2007, Sam Bassett, an artist who was a hotel resident at the time, made a documentary about Ms. Grossman called “Bettina.”

“Really, she was suffocating in her own greatness,” he told The New York Times in 2008.

The growing trove of work began hindering her access to the bathroom and kitchen. With little space, she turned to photos and printmaking and slept in a space she cleared by her door.

from earlier article:

Mr. Bassett spent day after day sitting and talking with Ms. Grossman in the hallway outside her door. He was fascinated by her witty, piercing observations and her bold artwork: the huge, stark print of a dandelion leaf plucked from her father’s grave; the evocative series of leaves taken from a plant in the Chelsea neighborhood that was stunted, she said, by years of dog urine. Signs taped to her door declared the apartment “The Institute for Noumenological Research” and listed intellectual, artistic and philosophical principles. Other scrawlings — such as “Help Me, I’m Being Killed” — were more disturbing.

After two months, Mr. Bassett finally entered No. 503 to find that Ms. Grossman was, in fact, fiercely guarding an apartment nearly stuffed to the ceiling with hundreds of boxes, forcing her to live in her hallway and sleep on a deck chair. The boxes turned out to be jam-packed with a voluminous body of artwork, which Ms. Grossman had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.

“We were kindred spirits from the minute I met her,” said Mr. Bassett, who recently completed a documentary about his relationship with Ms. Grossman, which has a certain “Harold and Maude” feel. “I saw right away how brilliant she was, even though she had basically retracted into solitude for 30 years. She was living in her hallway, surrounded by all these boxes, but inside, hidden away, was this incredible body of work. Really, she was suffocating in her own greatness.”

Carl Rogers' 19 Propositions

From his 1951 book Client-Centered Therapy, the 19 propositions as "the group of statements which, together, constitute a person-centred theory of personality and behaviour."

They represent how:

• Consciousness is experienced from the first-person point of view.
• Behaviour is a product of self-belief.
• A safe emotional environment is necessary for psychological change to take place.

Rogers' Original List (later in post these are "translated" to everyday English) from this website

1. All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the center.

2. The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is “reality” for the individual.

3. The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.

4. The organism has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain and enhance the experiencing organism.

5. Behavior is basically the goal-directed attempt of the organism to satisfy its needs as experienced, in the field as perceived.

6. Emotion accompanies, and in general facilitates, such goal directed behavior, the kind of emotion being related to the perceived significance of the behavior for the maintenance and enhancement of the organism.

7. The best vantage point for understanding behavior is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.

8. A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.

9. As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed – an organized, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the “I” or the “me”, together with values attached to these concepts.

10. The values attached to experiences, and the values that are a part of the self-structure, in some instances, are values experienced directly by the organism, and in some instances are values introjected or taken over from others, but perceived in distorted fashion, as if they had been experienced directly.

11. As experiences occur in the life of the individual, they are either, a) symbolized, perceived and organized into some relation to the self, b) ignored because there is no perceived relationship to the self structure, c) denied symbolization or given distorted symbolization because the experience is inconsistent with the structure of the self.

12. Most of the ways of behaving that are adopted by the organism are those that are consistent with the concept of self.

13. In some instances, behavior may be brought about by organic experiences and needs which have not been symbolized.

14. Psychological maladjustment exists when the organism denies awareness of significant sensory and visceral experiences, which consequently are not symbolized and organized into the gestalt of the self structure. When this situation exists, there is a basic or potential psychological tension.

15. Psychological adjustment exists when the concept of the self is such that all the sensory and visceral experiences of the organism are, or may be, assimilated on a symbolic level into a consistent relationship with the concept of self.

16. Any experience which is inconsistent with the organization of the structure of the self may be perceived as a threat, and the more of these perceptions there are, the more rigidly the self structure is organized to maintain itself.

17. Under certain conditions, involving primarily complete absence of threat to the self structure, experiences which are inconsistent with it may be perceived and examined, and the structure of self revised to assimilate and include such experiences.

18. When the individual perceives and accepts into one consistent and integrated system all his sensory and visceral experiences, then he is necessarily more understanding of others and is more accepting of others as separate individuals.

19. As the individual perceives and accepts into his self structure more of his organic experiences, he finds that he is replacing his present value system – based extensively on introjections which have been distortedly symbolized – with a continuing organismic valuing process 

Name what you love

I took this photo of the moon in a Home Depot Parking Lot.  I didn't know the birds were there.

From Jeff Tweedy's Starship Casual newsletter.

I Love…

…the quick precise click of an almond cleaved into perfect halves between my upper and lower front teeth.

…all of the pure joy captured in this Parquet Courts video, not to mention the lyrical righteousness!

…knowing my sister will always think of me as her baby brother.

…the inexhaustible inspiration Ubuweb provides. Just staggering to think of all of the concepts, poetry, art, and information I’ve been exposed to through this incredible website. All in all, I’d say this site alone almost makes the tragedy that is the internet worthwhile.

 

What returns is not what went away

Pentti Sammallahti, Przevorsk, Poland, 2005

Louise Gluck poem "The Denial of Death."

Everything returns, but what returns is not what went away.

Middle Season #32

 

Leaves have mostly fallen from many trees, leaving birds nests, wasps nests, squirrel nests, berries; still big piles of leaves on lawns; I took lots of photos of pretty leaves on the ground; watched the moon a lot.  I like how this blurry one turned out.

Declare it Art

 From TAoN No. 91

Think of some regular walk or drive or ride you experience often, or even that you’re experiencing for the first time. Imagine yourself a curator. Decide what, among the things you notice, you might declare public works of art.

Listen and Sense what Matters to You

Gustav Klimt The Sunflower, 1907

From Tara Brach, Insight Timer, titled: "A Listening, Receptive Awareness"

Bring your attention to the natural movement of the breath your body.  Sense if you can feel the breath come in and out of your heart.  

With an inner listening, pose the question 'what really brings me to meditation practice right now? What's my deepest intention? Listen and sense what matters to you.  Listen and sense what feels most sincere in you.

Accepting those invitations you can discern

Link to Obvious State, which sells prints like this

From Chapter 93 ("The Power and Terror of Thought") of "Emerson: The Mind on Fire" by Robert Richardson, we find the core of Emerson's life:

At the center of Emerson's life and work is a core of these perceptions [Platonic ideas], bound together.  They are not arguments or hypotheses. They are certainly not elements of a system, but neither are they opinions.  When the storms of illusion clear, in the moments at the top of the mountain, these are the perceptions that Emerson retains:

1. The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
2. Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is.
3. Every day is the day of judgment.
4. The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment.
5. Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
6. The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
7. Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics or ethics, must at last be self-evident.
8. Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
9. Life is an ecstasy: Thoreau had it right when he says, "Surely joy is the condition of life."
10. Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at best, destructive at worst.  Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.

There is nothing in this list that Emerson had not learned firsthand. These are not abstractions but practical rules for everyday life. The public consequences of such convictions for Emerson were a politics of social liberation, abolitionism, women's suffrage, American Indian rights, opposition to the Mexican War, and civil disobedience when government was wrong. The personal consequence of such perceptions was an almost intolerable awareness that eery morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, and action taken.  Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clocks say six in the morning.  On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to being Hamlet and Fuller began her history of the Roman revolution of 1848.  Each of us has all the time there is: each accepts those invitations he can discern. By the same token, each evening brings a reckoning of infinite regret for the paths refused, openings not seen, and actions not taken.

Catalog of Concord’s 'Do-Nothing'

I love this catalog by Emerson- From Emerson's biography by Robert Richardson:

Emerson still enjoyed his walks with Ellery Channing.  Henry Thoreau could at times be wearisome, with his captious paradoxes and general contentiousness, but Ellery was entertaining, even though he was filled in his back teeth with crotchets.  Ellery was officially listed in a Concord census as a "do-nothing."  Of one landscape he complained that it had too many leaves, each one much like all the others and all of them "apt to be agitated by east wind." He had a dog named Professor who seemed to have a sense of humor and who certainly knew more about nature than his master: "The dog tastes, snuffs, rubs, feels, tries everything, everywhere, through miles of bush, brush, grass, water, mud lilies, mountain and sky."  Emerson, Channing, and Professor visited Conantum, a section of Concord, "where we found sassafras, bass, cornel, viburnum, ash, oak, and slippery elm in close vicinity."  They took a long walk out by Bedford, and in one of his endless schemes to funnel money with dignity to his friends Emerson proposed that Channing work up, out of his experiences and Emerson's journals, a book to be called Concord Walking. 

 

 

Emerson and Whitman

The most famous letter in American literary history, claims Robert Richardson in his Emerson biography, was Emerson's note to Whitman:

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of 'Leaves of Grass.'  I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that American has yet contributed...  I greet you at the beginning of a great career.

The normal story is about Whitman's rude/brash decision to publish a second edition with Emerson's quote and name on the spine without asking permission.

But there's more to the story.  

For years, Emerson was nearly alone in his admiration for Whitman.  He was for Emerson the poet who had grasped more clearly than anyone else the idea that the poet is representative.  Whitman was indeed the poet Emerson had called for in "The Poet," the person who claimed little to nothing for himself but got his material and his strength by acting as the conduit and spokesman -- the representative -- of everyone he had ever met or heard or read about.

In another letter, he writes (to Secretary of State Seward, "If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they show extraordinary power, and are more deeply American, democratic, and in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet."   Emerson suggested to Whitman to tone down some of the explicit references to sex in the "Children of Adam" section.  "He made it clear that his suggestions did not imply disapproval of the passages, the poems, or the poet but were made strictly with an eye to public acceptance."  In the end, he never changed the passages.

For his own part, Whitman claimed, "My ideas were simmering and simmering, and Emerson brought them to a boil."

Whitman considered Emerson "a man who with all his culture and refinement, superficial and intrinsic, was elemental and a born democrat." This judgment was in strong contrast to his assessment of Thoreau, whose great failing, said Whitman, was his "disdain, contempt for average human beings for the masses of men."

Emerson found in Whitman the great modern poet he was seeking. Whitman found in Emerson the justification for literature itself.

I often say of Emerson that the personality of the man -- the wonderful heart and soul of the man, present in all he writes, thinks, does, hopes -- goes far toward justifying the whole literary business -- the whole raft good and bad -- the whole system.  You see, I find nothing in literature that is valuable simply for its professional quality; literature is only valuable in the measure of the passion -- the blood and muscle -- with which it is invested -- which lies concealed and active in it. (my emphasis)

 

There's joy also in loneliness

Koitsu Tsuchiya

 Autumn evening -

there's joy also in loneliness

Buson Yosa

The Owl, Being an Owl

 

Koson Ohara

"The owl, being an owl, and I, being me, can't sleep"

Santoka

Fall leaves

 

Mondays are leaf pick up days in Western Springs.  City workers push the leaves into piles with an enormous basket and another piece of equipment (never seen) picks them off the street.  For the last two weeks, I have had to ride around increasingly large piles on my bike to work.

Trees are surrounded by "pools" of leaves.  This pool, across the street from the house, has "waves" or "tides" in it.  This was a tree that a week or two ago was gorgeously orange.

Some ginko trees (but not all) dump all of their leaves at the first freeze.  This image looks like something by Klimt.  

He slowed down for the most banal things

 From Bewilderment by Richard Powers

For his tenth birthday, the boy who once could not be roused in the morning without wailing like a howler monkey brought me breakfast in bed: fruit compote, toast, and peacan cheese, all artfully arranged on a platter accompanied by a painted bouquet of mums.

Get up, dude. I'm training today. And I have so much homework to do before we go. Thanks to you!

He wanted to walk to Currier's lab.  The lab was four miles from our house, a two-hour walk in each direction. I wasn't crazy about spending half a day on the adventure, but that was all the birthday present he wanted.

Maples blazed orange against the sky's deep blue.  Robbie took his smallest sketchbook.  He held it in the crook of his arm, scribbling into it as we walked.  He slowed down for the most banal things. An ant mound. A gray squirrel. An oak leaf on the sidewalk with veins as red as licorice.  He and his mother had left me far behind, Earthbound. 

This is at the moment of Robin's highpoint, his greatest integration with his (dead) mother whose brainwaves were recorded during her "ecstasy" ruminations.  

 This moment shows exactly what ecstasy means -- an openness to the beauty of the world.  Robin's trainings (the equivalent to the treatments in Flowers for Algernon) had heightened him.  There are sections in the book that suggest that the heightening is away from screens and news and social media and into an awareness of nature.  

The sentence "left me behind, Earthbound" is fascinating... it suggests that this ability to apprehend and appreciate is... a different place.  Two people can be in the same physical location, and in a different place.

* * *

Jennie and I talked about the book yesterday at Cafe Salsa.  She says that there are a couple unbelievable things -- how the dad is so focused on the social media exposure at the end and how the dad is so convinced that the wife had an affair with Currier.  Both parts seem unnecessary to the book.

* * *

Read this passage from Emerson biography:

For years now Emerson had looked upon the days as gods, each one bringing gifts according to our ability to receive.

With the context of Emerson's trust in Nature (capital N), it seems that Powers is in that same line of American thought.

Middle Season #31

 Middle Season #31

Mushrooms in the back garden, clematis blossom in yet another pretty manifestation, maple leaf carpet near HC, sea oats looking bedraggled

10/2

Momentary sky at 7:00 am. Gray clouds to west. Pale blue behind. 

Sugar maples red. Sparser locusts. 

10/5. Maple leaves on patio. Dozens of them. 

Groups of birds flocks. First time noticing. Fall site. 

Very light sprinkles of rain. 

10/6

Maple leaves begin collecting along driveway

10/7

Huge group, extremely loud grouping of birds (crows? Starlings?) in very tall trees on Ellington.  Hard to see them because trees still fully leafed.  Groups flying off to north.  Cacophony.  

10/8

Season of locust leaves coming into the house

Veeck park peen trees laden with pine cones

10/10 Leaves falling now. 

Pretty chinquapin oak leaf. Serrated edge

Small yellow pumpkin. Baseball sized. Hole torn through. Seeds dribbling out. 

Small Seasons

Shunso Hishida

Small seasons. https://smallseasons.guide/.  

Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn't use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena:

Season	Name		Meaning	Associations		Approx. Date
Spring	Risshun	立春	Start of spring	Ground thaws, fish appear under ice.		Feb 4
	Usui	雨水	Rain waters	Snow recedes, mist lingers in the air.		Feb 18
	Keichitsu	啓蟄	Going-out of the worms	Bugs surface from hibernation.		Mar 6
	Shunbun	春分	Vernal equinox	Sparrows start to nest, cherry blossoms bloom.		Mar 21
	Seimei	清明	Clear and bright	Geese fly north, the first rainbows of the year appear.		Apr 4
	Kokū	穀雨	Rain for harvests	Reeds sprout by rivers, rice seedlings grow.		Apr 21
Summer	Rikka	立夏	Start of summer	Birds and frogs start the songs of summer.		May 6
	Shōman	小満	Small blooming	Flowers and plants bloom, wheat ripens.		May 21
	Bōshu	芒種	Seeds and cereals	Praying mantises hatch, fireflies come out. Time to seed the soil.		Jun 5
	Geshi	夏至	Reaching summer	Longest days of the year, irises bloom.		Jun 21
	Shōsho	小暑	Small heat	Warm winds blow, young hawks learn to fly.		Jul 7
	Taisho	大暑	Big heat	Summer heat at its strongest, accompanied by great rains.		Jul 23
Autumn	Risshu	立秋	Start of autumn	Cooler winds blow, thick fogs roll through hills.		Aug 8
	Shosho	処暑	Lessening heat	Rice has ripened, the heat of summer, forgotten.		Aug 23
	Hakuro	白露	White dew	Drops of dew on grass.		Sep 7
	Shubun	秋分	Autumnal equinox	Day and night are of equal length.		Sep 23
	Kanro	寒露	Cold dew	Temperatures begin to drop, crickets stop chirping.		Oct 8
	Sōkō	霜降	Frosting	The first frosts, maple leaves turn yellow.		Oct 23
Winter	Ritto	立冬	Start of winter	The ground starts to freeze.	NOW	Nov 8
	Shōsetsu	小雪	Small snow	Light snow, the last leaves have fallen from trees.		Nov 23
	Taisetsu	大雪	Big snow	Cold sets in, bears hibernate.		Dec 8
	Tōji	冬至	Winter solstice	Shortest days of the year.		Dec 22
	Shōkan	小寒	Small cold	Temperatures quickly drop.		Jan 6
	Daikan	大寒	Big cold	Ice thickens on the streams, hens huddle together.		Jan 20

Default Mode Network and the Direct Experience Network

 

TED talk by Karolien Notebaert.  Hack your Own Brain (link)

Default Mode Network and Direct Experience Network.  Only one can be activated at once.

Notebeart asks audience to tap legs with hands, then "feel" (from inside) palms of hands.

The default mode becomes active when our brain assumes that not much is going on and automatically switches our attention to the internal narrative that runs through unfinished business, imaginings, difficulties, or memories that happen to be near the surface. These unintended thoughts are often about the past or future and can be driven by emotions. As soon as we enter one of these streams of thought, we’ve disconnected from the here-and-now reality of direct experience. Our body and senses may be in the present, but our attention is somewhere else.  For example, we could be walking on a beautiful coastal path, but rather than enjoying it, we find that our attention is drawn to a particular unresolved problem that distracts us from the walk.

The direct experience mode is the opposite of the default mode. When the direct experience network is activated in our brain, we are much more aware of our body and senses and experience a more direct connection with the world around us. We are no longer time-traveling in the internal narrative in our heads but connected into the here-and-now of the present moment.  

On the same coastal walk, we notice that our mind has been working through that problem, so switch our attention outwards to our body and senses; to the sound of the waves brushing the shore, the squawk of seagulls overhead, the beautiful, rugged coastline that dips into the sea, and the sun glinting across the water. We feel connected, peaceful and relaxed. The problem may not have gone away, but we feel in a calmer mood to sit down and properly explore a creative solution later that day.

One of the key steps in developing a more mindful approach is to begin noticing the difference between the indirect world of our thoughts and the reality of direct experience.

More scientifically:

The Default Mode Network

The DMN was originally described by Shulman et al. (1997) and subsequently Raichle et al. (2001), who observed that select brain regions experienced increased metabolic activity during rest and decreased activity when engaged in goal-directed (i.e., cognitively demanding) behavior. Several subsequent investigations support the notion that the DMN is normally engaged during internally focused tasks yet is reduced during cognitive demands. Brain regions activated within the DMN include the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortices (BA 24, 10m, 10r, 10p, 32a, 32c, 9), posterior cingulate/retrosplenial cortex (BA 29/30, 23/31), inferior parietal lobule (BA 39, 40), lateral temporal cortex (BA 21), and hippocampal formation.

Evidence suggests that the DMN contributes to the mental exploration of social and emotional content. DMN activity increases during perspective-taking of the desires, beliefs, and intentions of others (i.e., theory of mind), in remembering the past (e.g., autobiographical memory), and in planning the future (Buckner, Andrews-Hanna, & Schacter, 2008). These functions inherently involve the self as a reference point (e.g., one must imagine how events would impact oneself in order to take another's perspective). The self-referential properties of these functions suggest that the DMN may contribute to adaptive behavior by allowing scenarios to be constructed, replayed, and explored in the mind, both to ponder past events and to derive expectations about the future (Buckner et al., 2008). Reduction of activity in the DMN during effortful cognitive processing may reflect the need to reduce the brain's self-referential activity in order to focus on the (external) task at hand (Raichle, 2015).  

    and

The DMN continues to be active during sleep. DMN activity persists even during light anesthesia (Raichle, 2009). The supporting evidence for the DMN has now been sufficiently well replicated that it is a neuroscience fact.

The main point of interest for this section is that people are totally unaware of the massive amount of unconscious processing that is continuously done by the DMN. To mistake the activities of the DMN for rest demonstrates how far outside of consciousness it operates. No degree of introspection provides any access to the DMN. These findings alone provide sufficient reason to replace the contemporary conscious-centric approach to psychology with an unconscious-centric approach. 

Here's a Mindfulness Scale to test your mindfulness.

What I'm thinking is that the DMN can be turned off by attending to senses or to engaging the brain on a task.... mindfulness can be "non-self-directed engaged brain activity" or "attending to senses."  (These are roughly equivalent in my mind to Ellen Langer's Mindfulness and Buddhist Mindfulness.)

Amygdala... hijacked!

Van Gogh, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889

I remember reading this article about eating disorders and the amygdala by Charlotte's therapist Samantha. Zylstra.  I also recall talking to Zylstra about it.  The key idea is that the brain feels (a threat) first.  Then the pre-frontal cortex will make meaning of the fear.  It will "tell a story" about the feeling to rationalize it.  The story can be misaligned.  Here's the beginning of the article:

“Everyone in the waiting area is staring at me. They all know I’m so fat and ugly.”  Mary’s words choked out of her as she held back tears of embarrassment.  Mary sat down and spent the first ten minutes of her session focusing on her breathing.  I observed a noticeable calming in her body.  Once calm, Mary reported just before her session, she had come across a memory of the day she found out her family was going bankrupt and how embarrassed she had felt.  Mary was aware she had used the same word embarrassed to describe the waiting area and her family’s bankruptcy.  Using this awareness, Mary named that feeling fat was protecting her from thinking too much about the trauma of her past.

Kimberli McCallum would describe Mary’s experience as, “Out of balance circuits mis-assign meaning and generating false stories to explain shifts, attributing any disappointment, difficult emotion or pain to issues such as weight, shape or food.”  Mary’s brain was doing exactly what it is designed to do when perceiving an intense fear.  Her amygdala recognized a strong emotion and went into autopilot, working faster than her hypothalamus to pump adrenaline into her body and help her.  In that autopilot response, Mary had mis-assigned her intense embarrassment to everyone in the waiting area staring at her because she was fat and ugly

From Know Your Brain

the amygdala has become best known for its role in fear processing. When we are exposed to a fearful stimulus, information about that stimulus is immediately sent to the amygdala, which can then send signals to areas of the brain like the hypothalamus to trigger a "fight-or-flight" response (e.g. increased heart rate and respiration to prepare for action).

Interestingly, research suggests that information about potentially frightening things in the environment can reach the amygdala before we are even consciously aware that there’s anything to be afraid of. There is a pathway that runs from the thalamus to the amygdala, and sensory information about fearful stimuli may be sent along this pathway to the amygdala before it is consciously processed by the cerebral cortex. This allows for the initiation of a fear reaction before we even have time to think about what it is that’s so frightening.

This type of reflexive response can be useful if we really are in great danger. For example, if you are walking through the grass and a snake darts out at you, you don't want to have to spend a lot of time cognitively assessing the danger the snake might pose. Instead, you want your body to experience immediate fear and jump backward without having to consciously initiate this action. The direct pathway from the thalamus to the amygdala may be one way to achieve this type of response. 

In addition to its involvement in the initiation of a fear response, the amygdala also seems to be very important in forming memories that are associated with fear-inducing events. For example, if you take mice with intact amygdalae and play a tone right before you give them an uncomfortable foot shock, they will very quickly begin to associate the tone with the unpleasant shock. Thus, they will display a fear reaction (e.g. freezing in place) as soon as the tone is played, but before the shock is initiated. If you attempt this experiment in mice with lesions to the amygdalae, however, they display an impaired ability to "remember" that the tone preceded the foot shock. You can play the tone and they will continue about their business as if they have no bad memories associated with the noise.

Although the amygdala is well-known for its role in fear responses, there is now a great deal of evidence that suggests its contribution to behavior is much more complex. For example, the amygdala seems to be involved with the formation of positive memories, like earning a reward in an experiment. And damage to the amygdala can impair the ability to form these positive memories, just like it can affect the ability to form memories about negative events like the foot shock mentioned above.

Because of research like this, researchers have been forced to expand the role of the amygdala beyond that of just a threat detector/fear generator. One popular perspective suggests that the amygdala is involved with evaluating things in the environment to determine their importance—whether their value is positive or negative—and generating emotional responses to those stimuli that are considered important.

This is the moment for which you have been Created

My colleague Robin Vannoy with a sign she keeps on her desk.

 Perhaps this is the moment for which you have been created. Esther 4:14.  

Here are a variety of translations of this passage.  The context is a little less uplifting.  The quotation can be seen as being courageous... but it could be more general than that. It could be a recognition, at all times, to be awake and alive and courageous in experiencing life unafraid.

I also came across this To Kill a Mockingbird quote (Atticus to Jem)

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

Three Unwholesome Roots

 

The three poisons (Sanskrit: triviṣa; Tibetan: dug gsum) or the three unwholesome roots (Sanskrit: akuśala-mūla; Pāli: akusala-mūla), in Buddhism, refer to the three root kleshas: Moha (delusion, confusion), Raga (greed, sensual attachment), and Dvesha (aversion, hate).^[1][2] These three poisons are considered to be three afflictions or character flaws innate in a being, the root of Taṇhā (craving), and thus in part the cause of Dukkha (suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness) and rebirths.^[1][3]

The three poisons are symbolically drawn at the center of Buddhist Bhavachakra artwork, with rooster, snake and pig, representing greed, ill will and delusion respectively.

 

In the Buddhist teachings, the three poisons (of ignorance, attachment, and aversion) are the primary causes that keep sentient beings trapped in samsara.

 

The three wholesome mental factors that are identified as the opposites of the three poisons are:^[10][11]

• amoha (non-delusion) or prajna (wisdom)
• alobha (non-attachment) or dāna (generosity)
• adveṣa (non-hatred) or mettā (loving-kindness)