Puppy Kisses and Ego Trips

Puppy (Brady) laying a surprise wet one on yours truly.

I am in lovely Medina, Ohio this week with Kelly’s mother and awaiting Kel’s arrival on Friday for her wedding shower. In my time here I have worked on recuperating from London exhaustion and even the restlessness and ‘astral smog’ as our friend Raven describes it, of the DC area. One thing both Kelly and I have jumped into recently has been Oprah’s web classes with Eckhart Tolle based on his latest book, A New Earth. (more on that shortly)

Another key aspect of our healing, growing process has been trying to get into nature and simply doing fun things. Sometimes we lose sight of the importance of just having fun (sad as that is!). Pressures of life creep in and day-to-day existence becomes a mental pin-ball machine, bouncing chaotically around and always struggling to keep the ball in play.

Nature forces helps us to set aside the chaos of ‘life’ and to actually live. An interesting thought: which would you rather have: a good life, or to have lived well? As natural beings and as part of reality we are ever in motion, we are processes, ever changing, growing, moving, adapting. We live. As modern humans we have roles to play, assets to manage, duties to fulfill; that is, we have a life. We reduce ourselves, and are reduced to mere things – nouns. We lose the bounty and beauty of becoming – verbing.

Puppies can be just as helpful as nature. They bring us into the moment, free of labeling. I woke up grumpy the other morning, lost in thoughts -trying to figure out my life-, when Brady got it in his mind to go for a walk. Still half-asleep, I went into the bathroom to take a shower, but he came right in with me and blocked the way, pretty much pushing me back out. Good dog. After a bit more of his smiley, waggly insistence, I relented and got out the door with him. The walk, filled with grass and trees and birds and plenty of waggly-Brady, helped release the ‘me, me, me’ stuff that was going on my head: the stories, empty dialog, and so on. It didn’t fully subdue the words and concepts. It didn’t bring me to awakening. But it quieted things, which I needed. It allowed me to just watch the thoughts instead of identifying with them.

And that is very much the process and practice lined out in Tolle’s book: learning to catch thoughts, a product of the ego, and separate your Self/consciousness from them in a process of allowing rather than reacting. So much of life simply is an ego-trip, a life of concepts, desires, thoughts, and worries, a life spent in the past or future, but never in the now.

Nature and puppies bring us to the now. So too can people, extreme sports, and drugs 🙂 Everybody likes being in the now, but few people know of a sustainable way of doing it, professional sky-divers aside perhaps. The most important method developed in Tolle’s book is that developed by the Buddha and his predecessors over 2500 years ago: following the breath. This simple thing, the breath, is always available, always free of ego, and filled with wonders and joy.

No doubt there will be more to come on Tolle, ego, meditation, and life. ‘Till then, see what it feels like to just breathe a bit, okay?