A Meditation on Reconnection With Self

 A Meditation on Reconnection to Self

In this video Mate says that Jesus told us to bring “outside ourselves, what is inside ourselves”. This is what Mate means by reconnection to self.

 

Even when we say “I am a survivor” that defines me as an entity of the past and we are over identified with such experience.

 

“We are NOT our experiences”, Mate says.

 

But it is hard to maintain this position, he continues. Nevertheless, without it we are likely to live inside the “thinking mind” which is a “representation of addiction”.  Michael Braun said “It is difficult to think outside the box because the thinking IS the box.”

 

And that’s where the “yoga” work comes in, Mate says, because it gets us outside that thinking mind.

 

Eckhart Tolle says the nature of our structural mind…is wanting itself. What we want might change…but the wanting itself is structural.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525948023/divinejourney

 

Mate says that the “degree of wanting would relate to the level of emptiness that you experience and that in turn is related to what happened to you very early in life.” 

It does take vigilance, says Mate, to avoid being an addict in this society. The addict in us is always potential.  Any behavior associated with wanting, craving, temporary relief when accessed, and long term negative consequences when stopped…is addictive.

 

But our human experiences began early in life. In the “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying”, Sogyal Rimpoche says the “greatest achievement in this culture…is a brilliant selling of Samsara” (the Sanskrit word for suffering and its barren distractions).

http://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Book-Living-Dying-International/dp/0062508342

 

We live for a long time under its spell and mostly never know what we are missing, until we inevitably learn we are not in control.

 

Mate says that the false search for real truth and the real search for false truth…”denies there IS truth, makes it hard to live for, and discourages people from believing it exists.”

 

The very culture we live in really does deny there is a something called “the truth”, and this “makes people hungry, hurts people, leaves them isolated, leaves them empty, therefore craving outside satisfaction, leaving them addicted, and then finally develops the false products and cultural artifacts to fill the very emptiness it creates.” And then it says doing this is part of human nature.

 

Mate says further that every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain and that the “greater the pain the greater the addiction”.

http://drgabormate.com/article/embraced-by-the-needle/

 

Attachment in Buddhism is an overcharged craving and that is what creates suffering. But in the modern sense the word attachment is a positive concept. And to the extent we don’t get our healthy attachment needs met as children we will crave attachment to outside substances and habits from the outside.

 

At the heart of addiction is loss and pain. Eckhart Tolle says the origin of all addictions is a sense of loss of who we essentially are. And so the key to overcoming addiction is reconnection with ourself.

http://www.inner-growth.info/power_of_now_tolle/eckhart_tolle_chapter8.htm

 

We must encounter and embrace the pain of disconnection. We must accept our pain as it is and become vulnerable. We need to discover through spiritual practice what lies behind sorrow. The search must involve a deeper knowing and a contemplation of the interconnectedness of all things. The one contains the many & the many contains the one.

 

When we are able to be still, then that sense of connection we crave is not just an idea, it’s actually a reality way beyond the separation that the mind would otherwise impose.

http://drgabormate.com/

 

Mohadesa Najumi says, “Your initial pain may never go away, but learning to live with it is a form of healing. Ripping apart your wounds and allowing light to penetrate them is the surest way of curbing addictions, it is the best coping mechanism for your soul.

 

It will not be pleasant at first, but you will see that the closer you come to accepting your pain, the further away you move from all the mechanisms that you use to escape it.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohadesa-najumi/
Najumi, Mohadesa, Huffington Post 4/22/14

 

And so if you would like to work with a telephone quit-coach who has great respect for the idea of self-compassion while working at reconnecting to the self, please look up: Averayugen@mail.com