The Challenges of Unit 13 Practices

I have found Unit 13 to be an interesting journey. Observing the operations of my mind over the last few months, I have come to recognise that many of my thought patterns relate to “telling stories”. A large number of these seem to consist of “rehearsing” prior to action – how I would “justify” certain actions or thoughts to others, or “present” certain aspects of myself for approval. Like Peter, I trace these back to childhood, and the need to be ready to “justify” everything I did to my father should he demand it. Interestingly, as an adult, I now think that I allowed the large bureaucracy in which I worked to take over as that “father figure” to whom I had to justify myself and my actions. Now that my father has died, and I have retired from work, I have difficulty unravelling that need to justify, and to realise that it is OK to just “be”. I keep looking for an audience to justify myself to! Shifting from a work which required me to constantly project into, and plan for, the future to a freedom which allows living in the present is really challenging. I find myself still “stuck” in the story-telling mode, the perpetual narrator – can’t seem to move beyond it to the other kind of stories which Jack describes. I’d love to find the “unified openness” which David describes, but I’m too stuck currently to do so. 

TSK9 Participation as Observer…, I also found challenging. The embodied interaction of body, thought and emotion is one I have explored through my yoga practices for many years. However, while “opening up” seems relatively easy on a surface level of experience, it becomes increasingly difficult the deeper I go – there is still a strong holding on to views, outlooks, personal perspectives. Even when I manage to move to some degree away from these, there is a sense of “lost-ness” in the experience. Trying to let go of “I the experiencer” seems to create a kind of blob moving through the world in a series of actions and experiences which are essentially meaningless. I lose the wonders of diversity, which are brought about through the principle of individuation. I think this is something I still need to do a lot of work on. 

 Gaynor