Welcome to The Art of Waking Up

Hello,

Sending warm wishes to you and yours as 2012 begins.

It is just a bit too late to say Happy New Year, but I hope this relatively warm winter is bringing you some new happiness, nonetheless.

This is the first entry of a blog that was inspired by many discussions and explorations that I've shared with my friends, colleagues, mentors and buddies over the years.

I'd like to use this blog to speak casually, impressionistically, and in direct language about what I've come to understand about how mindfulness and compassion can help us to come into a healthier relationship with our emotions, and to move in important and vital directions in our lives.

My first aim is to base all of these observations upon the state of the art of scientific research, and upon ancient meditative techniques that have been supported by such research.

My second aim is to pretty much abandon an academic or scientific style of writing, as much as I can. There are lots of avenues for psychologists to write in precise and cautious ways about our work. I'm aiming for something a bit broader here on this blog. I'd like to speak from the heart, and risk falling off a cliff in the process. That feels like a blog worth writing.

As a result, I may just write what I believe speaks to the questions at hand, and provide supporting references later, for the kind of folks who like supporting references. I'm one of that kind, so I get it. Go geeks!

I work as a psychologist, practicing forms of cognitive behavioral therapy that emphasize mindfulness, acceptance and compassion as key processes in human well-being. In time, we'll look closely at these processes together.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT as it's commonly known, is actually a family of therapies that share some common principles. In the past several years, advances in areas such as Compassion Focused Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Emotional Schema Therapy have led us in exciting directions that are as new as they are ancient.

Evolutionary principles, behavioral theories of language, and emotional neuroscience have begun to unearth the science behind centuries of esoteric thought. There has never been a time in our history, as far as we know, when so much information processing power, technology and wisdom has been brought to the question of human suffering. As I'm sort of addicted to scientific and spiritual inquiry, I'm pretty psyched about what has been going on.

In addition to my work as a psychotherapist, I've spent a fair bit of time studying contemplative disciplines and meditation methods from a range of sources, over the years.

As a result, I'm lucky enough to have some remarkable people in my life, who take the alleviation of our suffering very seriously. Although their methods have varied, all of the teachers that I've learned from directly, and all of the books and resources have pointed towards a central possibility for we humans, in some form of another.

They have all invited us to wake up.

What does that mean?

"Waking Up" is a central metaphor at the heart of thousands of years of wisdom traditions and a century of Western psychological research.

It refers to our tendency towards experiencing the stream of symbolic mental events that steadily flows through our awareness as though it was reality itself.

When we speak of waking up, we are suggesting that we can undermine the potential tyranny of our stories, of our words, of our internalized rules, and of our habits. The Art of Waking up involves the possibility that we can break through to something more "real" than repeatedly falling under the sway of our personal myths and limited, filtered perceptions. Maybe, through this art, through this creative act, something new can become possible . . .

A few years ago I wrote this in a journal on a retreat:

"Each morning, we think that we wake up,

but we don’t.

We are not awake.

when we ‘wake up’ . . .

we awaken into sleep, and into identification with streams of words and symbolic relations that we have absorbed.

We surrender to a ‘self’ that appears static.

We experience ourselves as something separate and infinitely cut off from the rest of the living universe.

In our 'sleep' we forget this living 'flow', to which we are intimately connected . . .

on the very finest of levels, as well as the most vast.

In doing so, we aren't experiencing what is real . . .

we are walking through a private dream world, and we may just hand our behavior, our very lives, over to where this dream takes us.

I prefer to wake up. May I begin by remembering myself."


"Waking up" is also the linguistic root of "Buddha", which means 'the one who woke up'.

So, now we have begun.

Namaste,

Dennis