Lillooet February 5, 2022
Going forward, it is now the Year Of The Tiger again and here is a wish that it brings you great joy and good change, for change is surely in all our cards. In our house, my wife is well underway in a re-vaccination plan that will see her new immune system be re-built from the base up. It is exciting and humbling. I have embraced the iPhone as a medium of booking and logging all the myriad appointments for her and after an initial flush of wonderment, I have settled down. I am practising some movements that alleviate “tech neck” and other gadget woes. This iteration of my web presence is guided by a desire to share my stories, thoughts and learning as before but also now a continual healing growth without presuming to know what exactly may be useful to an unknown reader. As Bruce Cockburn states in his song, Pacing The Cage, "I never knew what you all wanted, so I gave you everything." It is much more efficient.
After a long (for me) hiatus of several months, I am again reading. Books on the topics of archaeology, anthropology, autism and civilization. After these are digested and I have my own homegrown cogitations on them, they will be shared via my own essays or review with my own thoughts in agreement with or contrary to the interesting bits. So far, I am finding that the most recent book of this pile, co-written by two professorial but freely forward thinking authors has agreed in its perspective and approach to the topic treated with my own inclinations.
I can state here that the body is key to taming the mind, in the sense of our processing of emotions. I learned this body/mind balance in martial arts but the Sifus and Senseis never mentioned the word emotion. I am learning the same lessons all over again but in an entirely new way. I am sparring with myself, with great respect and unquenchable determination. I was a good boy. I was a good husband. I was a good father. I was a good worker. My goal is to be an authentic, integrated Michael Anthony Hawes, who happens to be a grandfather.
~~~Now, the fourth set of Meditation Reflections~~~
Reflections on Guided Meditations or Bobcat Logic for Meditation Hesitancy (4)
Jan. 8, 2022
When has something unexpectedly come together for you?
All through my life since birth but most recently, I was just coming out of having had a Winter car accident in the Fraser Canyon. No one of the four of us passengers was hurt. I was, however, shortly after that crash, diagnosed with a blocked artery behind my knee.
As I began the process of walking through the pain of growing new collateral blood vessels, I saw an oil painting of a woman with a rabbit in a window on Main Street. It so happened that I had the same motif on the then current page of my wall calendar, IE., a woman with a rabbit. The woman was St. Melangell, an actual Irish princess who lived in a forest in Wales over a thousand years ago. Her teaching is about the gentle quality of true strength and the epic strength of true gentility. I am part Welsh and part Irish.
At this time, I had a lucid dream of an old stone church. I later found out that it was the church of St. Melangell in Pennant Melangell, Wales, a place I have never visited in the flesh. I discovered around this time, a Welsh triple harpist who’s music captivated me like no other music in my life. It turned out to have been recorded at the church I had dreamed of, where the harpist’s own teacher lies buried.
Soon after this, my wife got a high, persistent fever and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia. While she and I spent eight months away from our home in Lillooet, for her to get chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, we both found multiple four-leaf clovers. Over a dozen and our son also found one while walking with us.
I was sent home for a month during this ordeal and I passed through a large wildfire that destroyed our neighbouring town of Lytton on my way home only minutes after I drove through. I became consumed with tears that I could not staunch, day and night. I phoned my younger sister and in the course of our talk she suggested a doctor she knew who might be able to help me with a genetic problem that according to her research, runs in our paternal side that has to do with a serotonin shortfall.
While awaiting the doctor’s call, I mowed my long neglected grass. As I stood in the front yard, I brushed my hand over some mown clover near my front steps and no less than five four-leaf clovers popped up from where they had lain flat to avoid the blades. The phone rang and when I ran inside and answered it, the doctor turned out to be an Irish woman.
I returned to Vancouver and one evening, my wife and I were out for an evening walk and we stopped to see if we could ascertain the source of a long stream of water running down the gutter of Oak St. It proved to be a broken water main and the liquid was emerging from a minute crack in the concrete right under a parked car. When I peered into the window of the car, there was a young woman placidly petting a large rabbit in the front seat.
My first grand-daughter, Madison Hawes, was born at this time and my Irish doctor suggested that I try the Calm app to further help me cope with current events and to heal my emotional scars of childhood. I took her advice and later at a meeting, my wife’s head doctor told me that she also practises mindfulness and regularly uses Calm.
My youngest son met me one day after I had begun an SRI medication as well as my meditation practise. After telling him about my personal “No Doctors” about-face attitude change and subsequent decision to treat myself with a drug, my son told me that he had come to inform me that he had recently been diagnosed with OCD and had also started drug therapy and counselling. It turned out that he had reached out, independently of me, on the same day. This story is weaving its way through the present and I tremble in awe with joy at thoughts of the road ahead.
Jan. 8, 2022
What daily routines support your health and happiness?
Stretching in the morning, a bit of music, looking at the mountains outside the window, talking to my cat, taking nature walks when the weather is to my liking, eating foods I like, doing household chores, talking to my wife, talking to my family on video, having a nap with my cat, writing, working on my website, pondering things and doing guided meditations at night.
Jan. 9, 2022
What cravings arise when you feel discomfort? How can you take care?
Typically, a desire to lose myself in love-making. Natural aging is morphing this with the reduction in hormone levels. I can take care of this by learning to age gracefully and accept change. The SRI medication can aid me by reducing my perceived need for pleasure. Looking back to childhood and adolescence, I would note here that the all pervasive hyper-sexuality of the North American media culture acting on the “morality mosaic” that was a creation of Colonialism, immigration and religious diversity; counterpoised by the repression and shame of the major religions that I was exposed to while growing up, with the addition of childhood trauma, had severally colluded to give me a very kaleidoscopic experience of coming into sexual awareness and maturity.
My being a very late and self-diagnosed autist, has taught me that my way of processing information greatly exacerbated my difficulties in this arena of life; cultural and religious aspects aside. Early on I chose to avoid the social muddles that come with being an autist and to find a sort of peace in just appreciating the beautiful female form. I avoided dating due to the difficulties imposed by social cues that are invisible to me.
I married at twenty and have remained married all my life with brief interludes between partners. I am a loyal elderly husband to a wonderful elderly wife and I am very glad to be learning mindfulness techniques that can help me grow beyond seeking emotional refuge in sexuality, while still being fully appreciative of and beneficially strengthened by the powerful, magical, nurturing beauty of the universal female that I am so enchanted by and always shall be.
Jan. 11, 2022
How has failure transformed your life in a positive way?
Two failed marriages led me to Nisa, my wife of over thirty years.
Jan. 11, 2022
How can you create a healthier relationship with media?
By limiting consumption and increasing my digestion of the content. By being more discerning of the content taken on, as with one’s diet of food. Insisting on true quality.
Jan. 14, 2022
What parts of your body are you most grateful for? Why?
My mind, that I might ponder. My reproductive organs, that I might father offspring to love and to teach. My ambulatory parts, that I might know the road. My hands, that I might make things, write, make music and feel textures.
Jan.14, 2022
How do you make time for your meditation practice?
I usually meditate at night before going to sleep.
Jan. 15, 2022
What can you feel appreciation for in your life?
That my family has persisted through hardships, both in the distant past and in my lifetime. That my own spark of wonder was never extinguished and that the damage done me is largely repairable. I appreciate every single person who ever spoke truth to me and/or ever showed me kindness. I have made it a lifelong practise to attempt to recognize and to thank them personally and to pass their humanity onwards to others in my path. I appreciate my autist way of perception as it affords me an eventual long deep view of the big picture after a microscopic look at details and patterns; and all this without any hard-wired compulsion to control or to have advantage over others.
Jan. 16, 2022
What new chapters do you want to write into your life?
The Grandpa Years.
Jan. 18, 2022
How do you practise self-compassion?
I am only just now at sixty-five years old beginning to practise any self-compassion. In my baby-steps, I am admitting to myself and others when I do wrong but not remaining stuck on it. I simply correct myself. It is proving to be very exciting and encouraging.
Jan. 20, 2022
Which comforts serve your happiness and well-being?
Napping. Creating. Working to stay warm. (Chopping wood for the stove) Talking to people. Cohabiting with my wife. Being with my cat, Dusty. Writing my thoughts and observations to share. Listening to music and meditating. Literature, poetry, correspondence, retirement, Darjeeling tea, baby smiles and gumbo.
Jan. 22, 2022
What helps you embrace change more readily?
My innate independence. My adaptability, learned by circumstances. My understanding of the distinction between want and need, but not my mastery of this. My humility. My Faith in myself and my Maker. My backstory. Necessity. Nearness to things in nature that change on less perceptible time scales, like trees and rocks. Healthy, happy young people. Healthy, happy old folks. Honesty. The Universal Feminine manifested in all life.
Jan. 24, 2022
What insights have you discovered from turning inwards recently?
I have learned that my body always tells me what is going on but I was trained as a child to ignore it. I now know that this is erroneous. I have discovered that it is unreasonable for me to expect of others what was expected of me by my father, mother and grand-parents.
Jan. 26, 2022
Which unhelpful thought patterns would you like to release today?
Second guessing myself. Worrying over my imaginings of other people’s thoughts and intentions.
Jan. 27, 2022
How does it feel to evoke compassion for difficult people?
It feels balancing, nurturing and opening. It feels like breathing. It feels cleansing and humbling and prepares my perception for a truer rendering of reality.
Jan. 30, 2022
What are some qualities that are uniquely yours?
An openness to mystery, a spiritual patience, absence of desire to take advantage of my fellow creatures. But an unquenchable desire: to grow, to heal, to fertilize (spiritually, intellectually and culturally), to learn, to share, to make and to give. Humble in life, proud in heritage and a good neighbour.
Jan. 30, 2022
What physical activities bring you joy?
Chopping firewood. Walking in nature. Mountain climbing. Making love. Carpentry. Household chores. Gung fu. Aikido. Air guitar and air drums. Dancing when no one is watching and ice skating backwards on an empty rink.
Feb.1, 2022
As an experiment, what might you try to do differently today?
Spending an entire day without doing anything that is precipitated by the thought, “I SHOULD do this or that.”
Feb. 2, 2022
How will you be more mindful today?
I will practice labelling my emotions and observing them from a bit of distance.
Feb. 2, 2022
Which worry can you set aside today?
The worry about whether or not I help my neighbours not enough or too much.
Feb.2, 2022
Name your favourite soothing social activities.
Teaching and learning one on one. Listening to good music at a concert or orchestra venue. Discovering something or somewhere new in the company of another person or a very small group. Eating in a small group of new people. Talking to random new people.
Feb. 4, 2022
Who do you share your worries with? How does this create ease?
My wife. This creates ease because she has the ability to dissolve my worries by showing me the uselessness of my worries. It is uncanny.
Feb. 5, 2022
What is your favourite time of day to meditate? Why?
I like any time of day. I like the morning because it sets up the day in a special way. I like the middle of the day because it resets the day. I like the evening because it is a naturally reflective time.
Far from fin...