Schizoaffective

 "To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space." I ended last week's blog post with this sentence. This week, I am going to explain it fully. We'll begin with the notion of "freedom." I was arguing that true freedom has less to do with ego-based choices than is often claimed. Instead, freedom is responding to all that is around me in a given moment in an attuned manner. What are free people attuned to? Paradoxically, they are attuned to fate. I am using the word "fate" in a manner that does allow for some choice. By "fate," I am thinking of all that impinges on a moment: history, current events, biology, biography, climate, and so on. Most all of this is well outside our conscious control, and even outside of our knowledge purview. There is no way to grasp all that goes into the possibility of a momen...

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

 When things are difficult for me, I can tend to get down on myself. I blame myself wholly for my predicament, thinking that I was completely and utterly responsible for it. As this happens, I try to remember what the 13th century Japanese monk Dogen counseled: treat yourself as you would a baby. By this he certainly didn't mean to infantilize yourself and act childish. Instead, he was suggesting we treat ourselves with tenderness, affection, and understanding. We don't judge babies. We respond to them according to the needs of the moment. Ideally, we always do that with tenderness, affection, and understanding. I need to remind myself of this because I, like a lot of people, assume I have more control over my life than I do. I judge and blame myself for feelings and actions that stem from circumstances I never formed. For instance, I could have anxious feelings because of my biology and genetics, my personal history, current events, and even my relation to the natural world. C...

by Jay Paul  While meditating, I, like most meditators, frequently find myself lost in thought, perhaps thinking about an old girlfriend or about all the chores I have to do later in the day or my fear that my mental health symptoms will reappear. As I catch myself thinking like this, I most often simultaneously notice my breath. I feel myself inhale and exhale, all the way in and all the way out. My profound sense when this happens is that breath is much more grounded and connected to experience than is thought. What follows are some observations on breath and thought based on this experience and sense. Breath is wiser than thought. Thought flits and flecks, comes and goes, rarely landing in a solid manner. Even the greatest of thoughts, such as Isaac Newton conceptualizing gravity when the apple hit him on the head, are superficial compared to a single breath. Respiration connects us humans to the rest of nature, to the way bats and rats and lions breathe. It connects us, in its ...