CoachBri’s Blog

I am customizing my personal mental training program…
This is what I just wrote to start my rough copy:

20 minutes per day

Purpose:
To be fully prepared for the moment when it comes, so that when the moment comes, there is no reaction; there is only the natural response.
Mindful to always respond with awareness: to be fully in tune with the things around me.

Then I began to think of the moments that I’ve had with significant people in my life such as relationships, past and current teammates, and Brian O’Reilly.
Brian was my coach when I started to make a big transition in my life.  When I began to look at things through a different lens.
The rough copy of my mental training program above reflects this transition that began in 2004.

Brian and I have studied the brain and relationships, we’ve also done workshops and role-plays.  The most impactful thing that I’ve learned through all of our moments together is the value of being prepared.

When I am un-loving, I am not preparing.  If I am not constantly watching myself and my own behaviours (preparing), I will be mean to the people around me.  When I am mean to the people around me I am not realizing that my unpreparedness shows itself when the shit hits the fan.  When I am unloving (gossiping about, criticizing, judging) and that person calls me out on it, I look like a fool.  I look like a fool because the truth revealed itself and the truth is that the damage to the relationship is my doing.

When I live my life prepared, I am constantly watching myself.  I am constantly responding to situations.  For instance, if I see an injustice, I speak up and share my truth about it.  I am constantly doing this when I see the value of being prepared.  Then, when the shit hits the fan, the truth, once again, reveals itself.

This way of living is extremely rewarding.
I often fail to live this way because I think that living this way is draining.  To be prepared to address every drama and injustice in your life each and every moment seems like a heavy task.  It seems draining.  Yet, when you do it, when I do it, we notice how energizing it is.  How energizing and rewarding it is to constantly speak the truth!!  Yet I am lazy.  My preparedness falls away because I simply blame others for my unhappiness.
What does preparedness look like to me?  Committing each day to bring an expectation to speak the truth with love in every moment.

I’d like to share how this life training has impacted my daily life.
I am in teacher’s college.  In my Grade 6 practicum placement I decided to use the community circle as a teaching tool (a community circle is where you move the desks out of the way and make a circle with the students and my chair, I am just one of 28).  I use the circle most often when I sense that there is a shift in energy in the classroom and there is unhappiness in the group.  We get in the circle and we just talk.  I do my best to build an environment in which the kids feel safe to say whatever they want.  I do this with my demeanor and by being honest myself.  I talk about what I’ve noticed in the classroom (such as bullying), and then I share how I have been a bully to a particular person in the past week or that day and I share the story of what happened.  I share what I did wrong, why I did it, and how I wish I had handled it.  The presence of honesty is so natural and so relieving to the kids that it simply and naturally paves the way for incredibly honest conversations.  The kids open right up and share and share and share and it does incredible things to the level of trust in the classroom.

I couldn’t do this if I wasn’t prepared.  I couldn’t do this if, when students in my classroom are disruptive, I shut them down and used anger to deal with my ineffectiveness as a teacher (aren’t they being disruptive because the teacher is b-o-r-i-n-g?  When was the last time you sat through a conference or a workshop for your job that was boring and you chose to sit quietly and attentively?  We expect our kids to do that from 9:00 to 3:30 every day? I digress).  I couldn’t do this if I wasn’t aware and awake to the needs of all of my kids every day.  If I didn’t pay close attention to the mood of my students and the things they said to each other and the feelings of loneliness and pain that my students had.  I couldn’t do this if teaching was simply a means to tell the kids what they needed to hear to meet my curriculum expectations and get a paycheck.  Having these types of rewarding conversations with my students in the community circle began with having individual community circles with my students in the hallway, on the playground, while helping them with their work, while listening to why their homework isn’t done.  It began with being prepared – prepared every day to respond to situations and speak to injustices.

When I am effectively doing this what am I doing?  Choosing love over judgment in each moment.  This requires preparation.

Rich VanHuizen
Beach Volleyball
http://www.richvanhuizen.com

The unseen cord to your life is slowly detaching
You, a mother losing, a mother

Women dying with surrender is a process she knows
A secret shrine that moves life through her
She forgets the pain and lives the joy and agony of her children
The strength of mother if she is, with autonomy,
Putting her needs on hold for her children
without regret

A daughter losing a mother, a piece of her own womb
Once strong, now frail, the vitality of death releases the mother’s heart
to find its place in the daughter
The last lesson a mother passes to the daughter as life comes, moves,
departs into its own

Every great man comes through women
Every great atrocity is created by men

Woman eventually tire of man
Unless that man leaves his subjective mind
And finds in him his mother, the gift women offers
Unspoken, without intent, humanity embraced to hold peace
and well being to the needy

Coachbri

I enjoy driving in a light rain without using the windshield wiper because it remains me of Christmas or waking from a pleasant dream.

I enjoy long runs in the desert when I have to focus so intensely on the placement of my feet so that I forget I am running and my mind is so quiet.

I enjoy waking up holding hands with my wife, knowing that we found each other even in our dreams.

I enjoy the belly laughter of children when they are at play and not disturbed by the expectations of adults.

I enjoy sitting in a canoe on a quiet lake, watching the fish jump for insects that land on the top of the water.

I enjoy listening to music with long spaces between the notes and how each note has its own mood and charm just because it’s a note.

I enjoy watching people who are good at what they do and don’t know it. There seems to be a sense of purity in skill that is performed without intention, just response.

I enjoy the company of women and men who are not locked into their gender and feel their way through things and express freely their uncertainty about anything.

I enjoy long walks among flowers, trees, and rocks and the silence when all thought stops and I am alone in nothingness.

Coach bri

The fact is that most of us are not concerned about how we live. We are most involved in how to earn a living.  These are two different conditions, one of which is a pure brain activity. And the other is a brain activity with a far deeper, more sensitive and insightful existence. Part of this is the true activity of the mind which is universal, a deeper process that is connection with out effort. Because we are so concerned with making a living, we are cut off from the other because one cannot have one foot in peace and the other in war.

The animal kingdom is not at war amongst itself or its own species. We are the only creature on the planet doing that. The animals don’t strive to reach their potential – they live into it. They are all they can be! Humankind, on the other hand, live mostly in envy and therefore they are constantly consuming things to cover up their inner inadequacy. That is why death is viewed upon as the great inadequacy and feared more than anything else. Nothing in nature dies without beauty and grace – just human beings.

Filling our hearts with the things of the mind to cover up our impoverished state, we have lost the feeling for what it means to live. Living is a moment of joy and bliss. When in my daily activity I can be what I am fully, with a mind that is raptured in a state of attention, not in judgment or like and dislike. That attention has the quality of love. When one loves life one isn’t trying to be anything or become anything. What matters is living itself, freedom to explore life and be blown away by its beauty and ugliness.  When the brain and the mind are free from the false security of what thought has built, then living flowers because one is not concerned for oneself but the concern for the one and the many.

Death comes to all of us, as did living. What we learn here effects the next generation by either decreasing or increasing their burden, as the previous generations have imposed their burden on you. Living is short, death is eternal but most die having never lived. We are creative beings and that creativity is life itself, longing for itself and the source of all happiness. To make a living and forget how to live is like being creative with primitive tools that have no value to meet the present challenge. Living is meditation when one is in tune with an order not made by thought or knowledge. Living is a movement that embraces death with open arms, how difficult it is to live.

Coach bri

Most human beings today are bored to tears with their lives. They are sick and tired of all the crises on so many levels. We are fed a bill of goods from the very beginning and as we age we seem to assimilate every possible egocentric position in every stage of our development. Humankind has lived with so many psychological problems in every generation. At the root of these problems humankind has tried, since the dawn of time, to find some psychological security in something that he has created out of his fixation with matter and energy. We impose on our children the psychology that has been practiced on us by our parents called external control, or stimulus response, or cause and effect. Whatever name you give it, humankind, able to solve technological problems, has not solved any of his inner psychological problems. Resolving these problems is the only key to the kingdom of happiness.

Throughout the ages human beings have created, out of their internal problems, the society in which they live. The within always becomes the without. To put it another way: What you are inside becomes the environment you create on the outside. This has and will always be a truth or fact for all of humankind. We are all a collection of fear, greed, hatred, violence, prejudice, resentment, loneliness, and contradiction, with moments of compassion, love, and understanding, which are found scattered in each individual’s life.

We live as individuals in our presentation to others but actually we are not individuals at all. The word individual means all one, whole, and we are far from that and that is why history is always repeating itself. Yet every generation thinks it is going through this life as if these problems are unique and authentic. What a shock it is to find out that your ego-self is thousands of years old. (By this I don’t mean reincarnation, as that is just the Eastern world’s way of coping with the unknown, as heaven is to Christians.  This psychological need for security has been humankind’s main occupation.) Therefore we really have no authentic experience or self at all. Psychologically we are carbon copies of our ancestors, with different technology – that is all.

So the problems your great ancestors had are your problems and very few people are interested in psychological change. Just see the fact that whenever you are disturbed emotionally you practice external psychology on yourself or others because you refuse to put away your conflict with yourself or the other. Man has made conflict and struggle the purpose of living and most people never question it. If you want to have an amazing life, one must begin where one is. That is hard to face because everyone around you, from your parents and teachers, to your minister and shrinks, are telling you that you must become something, you must progress, struggle, and fight to find happiness. That definition of happiness is according to their and your conditioning, which you modify out of your own brutality and confusion. To find your way and be seen as successful in a world that is violent, competitive, and corrupt is not success at all.

Have you ever noticed that when you really want something and you get it, you eventually lose interest in that thing? If it is a person, you eventually will destroy them and they you, and you exist only through the images that thought creates in order to find your self-centered insecurity. Then all of the energy, passion, and compassion between you is gone. Sex runs your relationship in middle age and in the later years you will lead a life of frustration.  Where there is frustration in any relationship there is resentment and control.  Then we chase the next thing to distract us from own pain caused by our own disconnected state.  This growing dissatisfaction as you age is the state that most people are in and that is why as they grow old they lose all passion and vitality for life.

To have a great life is to be inspired and to learn about what is inside you and outside of you and your relationship to them. To study your own behaviour and see how your own egocentric activity will get in the way of relationship is the flowering of love and compassion. That is why in these matters of inner revolution, the journey of humankind, a person must have no authority of any kind. One cannot trust a psychiatrist, guru, minister, or priest. They are all products of conditioning.  They study some old knowledge of what others have said and choose what they agree with and then analyze you. Never has the world been in greater psychological danger than in this present age.

To find yourself in all of this madness and to lead an inspired life is to question the whole structure of one’s psyche and one’s place in society. A person must be willing to live a different kind of life that is free from all intentions of external control psychology and carve one’s own path. This means, however, that the person must be willing to stand alone. That aloneness is not loneliness.  Loneliness comes out of one’s own sense of being isolated. The process of isolation is created by the very separate nature of thought that created your ego-self and all its demands to be entertained. Just look around you and see how many people have to be drunk or stoned in order to cope with their painful lives of isolation. For most people the weekend is time to cut lose, get hammered, and get numb to the pain of life. How can such a person ever find inspiration through drink or drugs?

To wake up to this is to see that you are acting as the generation before you acted. This generation just starts all the vices at a younger age and because of that they think that is freedom. If one has children one wants to end all war for ever. One wants them to grow up and live a sober life with inspiration and love. A person who is crawling from pub to pub is not taking their life seriously.  To be serious means that one is meditating all the time. True meditation is not sitting quietly and becoming some fictional character of one’s own self making, or to get away from the world to get in touch with oneself. You don’t have to go away or practice anything, be it silence or chanting, which is a spirituality imposed by the self.

In front of you daily is the demand to be in relationship with people and material things. It is here and the external psychology that we practice must be set aside to end all conflict. We must question and hold these questions so that one is in a state of learning all the time. Not learning about how to earn a better living but how to live without any conflict within and without. This is the greatest crisis and challenge facing humankind.  This journey we share is at the root of our consciousness. To remove all external control is to come to a movement inside one’s self that is truly an internal movement. We have forgotten how to see and instead attach our self to a country, flag, religion, family, or club, which is identification with external psychology. This seems internal but it is not because it is imposed from the outside, as all images are.

To care about all this is to set aside all images of oneself and others and face what one is at all times without any judgment. The entity that judges one’s self or another is the heart of the deepest core of conflict. When one is greedy or hurt one is greed or hurt. Self tries to create the illusion that you, the self, is a different entity from the greed or the hurt but you are not.  To observe this movement of greed or hurt as it is happening and watch how it creates the division between the two is the act of meditation. Only then can the machinery of thought that started external psychology that is self is put to death. In the ashes of external psychology a new movement is born.  A truly internal movement is. The whole of nature is in that movement and to be touched by it brings meaning and purpose to one’s life and then one is inspiration itself.  Thought, with all its cunning movement, is put to death. That inspiration is love, intelligence, and compassion, and happy are those that it comes to.

Coachbri

Selfishness is pretty well known but not very well understood by most people.  We are so good at finding selfishness in others because we ourselves are full of selfishness, pretending or covering up what we are. We dislike people who have the same weaknesses or flaws that we do. We can criticize them so easily because any flaw a person has we recognize in ourselves, which is another level of self-ness.

Self-ness and selfishness are two different things.  Self-ness is a process of thought and conditioning that is our tendency in situations.  Selfishness is the meeting of one’s own needs regardless of how they affect others. In all situations it is putting one self first, taking the best because one knows it is the best or is the thing that most people want. Self is always rooted in envy, because to be envied is deeply gratifying to self. That is why one longs for fame because in fame one thinks fame will end one’s deep insecurity and inadequacy.  Selfishness is the art of getting one’s own way by so many means. It will take a variety of approaches or no approach, as it cunningly pays attention to the situation and the self-ness of the other. Selfishness is good at reading situations for one’s own self-interest or even promoting someone’s interest, if in the end it gets what one wants. This is often called good business and is how the world works.

In any relationship, self-interest or selfishness will always destroy the couple or team when it is not addressed or excused because a person has a gift or talent and is therefore tolerated. Tolerance in any form is hidden intolerance and eventually will act as a cancer and poison the environment and create deeper problems between the two or the many. Selfishness in our society is accepted and nourished in most aspects of living. Because it is external psychology (the psychology of disconnection) it is rampant and we resort to it whenever self cannot get its way. The habits of external psychology are then used to gain control of the situation or person we practice it on and deeper damage is done that divides human beings.

Human beings are the only animal on the planet that, out of selfishness, will kill every living creature so they can have what they want.  Out of selfishness we form beliefs, dogma, and ideologies and kill others who threaten them. Self is always trying to be something. Whatever it sees itself as being, it lives into and it will kill for on so many levels.

Is it not about time we start to see the importance of being nothing? That nothing is holding the whole world and universe together. To be empty of self means to cooperate without self trying to control and dominate. Self, which is a product of thought, is never without motive or seeking some sort of satisfaction. To love another without motive or payoff is to have a mind that is truly innocent. As long as self dominates and runs the show, the awakening to a different movement is impossible.  Self is always giving itself qualities that it doesn’t possess and therefore it cannot be innocent. Self is always seeking something – seeking after enlightenment or God or the perfect experience or the perfect man or women, all of which is to seek under one’s own prejudice.  That prejudice will in fact be projections of one’s own mind and therefore a creation of selfishness. What is selfish is exclusive and love and compassion are of a completely different quality and will be inclusive. Selfishness and virtue cannot exist together, for a virtuous person could never recognize their own virtue. If they did it would be an egoism.

To see all this is in itself, and to understand it, is to free the mind from selfishness. This is the journey humankind must take if we are to have a world that is orderly, responsible, and sane.  Very few people are interested in all this or even care about being free. Freedom has nothing to do with self. Self is in bondage and a slave to thought and all its habits. Love is not a habit that can be practiced.  It is the perfume that makes all things possible with self-interest is set aside. Love is not selective or personal. It is expressed by its own volition.  It is whole and depends on nothing. Selfishness is always dependent on thought and is always trying to be something.  Love is like the air we breathe, free for everyone regardless of skin, color, race, or heritage.  One can’t go to love – it finds you when you are not!

Coach bri

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