A couple of notes from the Ridhwan 2009 Summer Retreat:
The View of Totality is outside dual and non-dual, it includes both.
Mysterious Being is behind the evolution of the universe and life and consciousness and the soul.As it evolves our experience, it manifests as the enlightenment drive.
Our responsibility, viewed from the perspective of the individual self is to practice, the Fulcrum is the agency of Being.
As the living being practices through the individual, luminosity pervades the soul and reveals the depth of true nature to itself.
Every time we practice, it is the living being practicing. The appropriation of practice is an important thing to pay attention to. It is not the practice of the self.
It is not an individual self putting out the Diamond Approach. It is through the practice of the living being that the teaching arises.
Our relationships with family members and other relatives are one of the best barometers I know of to get clear unsolicited feedback on personal growth and integration. Those with whom we share long histories exert the most force on us to stay within established boundaries and relationship patterns. The primary one being – identity.
Have you ever noticed that people continue to relate to you like they know who you are? And quite often we continue to go along with them – like they’re right! We fall into agreement because we, too, feel we know who we area and we return the favor by knowing who they are. It’s a very interesting experience to observe how the “known” gets placed on the person appearing in front of you or in your thoughts. Mostly, it seems, we don’t question this, let alone spend time observing it in any significant way.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that people are much deeper and more mysterious than they appear. My awareness of this is expanding because I am continually discovering who I am. If who and what I am is constantly revealing itself in ways that surprise me, then extending that freedom to others seems natural and effortless.
Of course, it’s nice to have names to go with faces. And, history doesn’t disappear. But this does not mean that we have to stay within the containment field (a field of relativity?) of the past in our interactions with others. It appears that the only real way to open up the whole situation is through personal experience that challenges what we know about who we think we are.
A couple of days ago, I woke up from a dream full of conflict with my brother. It was one of those dreams where things were off just enough to give it a surreal feel from the imagery, but the intersubjective feelings generated were historically very familiar.
As I pondered the dream throughout the day, I became aware of a rapprochement conflict that was being exploited to establish a position of power. It was fascinating to see an unconscious intelligence preying on another’s unconscious material to establish a position of dominance over the other.
As I was driving home, the notion of negative merging entered my mind and I could immediately feel the connection – the intersubjective emotional field of the dream was permeated by that low-grade sense of frustration that is a hallmark of negative merging.
With the sense of negative merging more forefront in my awareness, I was able to tease out more of the rapprochement conflict which led to a sense of – forlorn – which these days is associated with being sad and lonely due to isolation or desertion. The word forlorn derives from Middle English associated with the word – lose.
This led my inquiry to a place of interest around loss and desertion. For sure, a sense of isolation is part of the mix – as in more ambivalence around moving toward or away from.
It has also been interesting to observe how the “moody” feelings activated by all of this heighten my susceptibility to move toward others carrying their own negative merged state closer to the surface.
Another area of interest piqued by all of this is the need for merged support in general – whether negative or positive. Why do so many of us need others to be in agreement with?
I am having a very interesting experience with food and eating. I am not dieting or trying to lose weight – which is what I thought I would be doing about now. Instead, I am discovering what my relationship with food and eating is.
There is a sense of strangeness, a curiosity to this. I’ve eaten a lot of food in my life – more than my fair share! But here I am not knowing much about my relationship to it – what I like, what my preferences are, when I should eat, what I should eat.
I feel like an explorer. Every day and every meal is a discovery. I eat at Lettuce in Walnut Creek, CA almost everyday. Most times I get the Cobb Salad without bacon. It’s a wonderful blend of flavors. I enjoy it. Sometimes I wonder if I should be tired or it or bored with it. What I discover is that I don’t know. My past experiences with that salad don’t seem to be around. I look at the menu with the ingredients and think – that sounds good – and it is!
The other day, I was thinking I should have something different to eat. I did not know what I wanted. I was thinking of this and that – pulling food out of my memory banks, but nothing seemed real or enticing. I was getting hungrier, but still had some things to do before I would have time to eat.
The hunger was interesting. It wasn’t demanding, but it was there. I was observing it like a dog with it’s head cocked and one ear raised – a real organic sense of curiosity. I could not come up with an answer about what to eat. In the end, food found me as I stopped by some friends’ home to pick something up and they were just heating up the leftovers they had taken home the other day from a dinner I had served them – my world famous veggie fajitas!
There was plenty enough for three and boy did I love and relish the blend of flavors in those fajitas.
The other day, I had some terrible Mexican food. What was curious was the sense of this being a stand alone experience not tied to the past or to the future. Very interesting to have that food in my mouth. No taste buds popping, no mouth-watering yummies. Just bland, dead substances.
In all these experiences, it’s not so much the food, but the sense of newness about my knowledge of food and my relationship to it. I know, but don’t know.
It is a most curious feeling of not knowing who I am at times.
At the beginning of June I decided it was time to explore my relationship with food, dieting and diabetes. My doctor had been telling me for several years that I was at risk for type II diabetes. Not surprising since I have 32 sweet tooths and a love of bread, pasta and other wonders of refined flour.
I had been noticing for about 6 months a sense of being more at risk and I was definitely becoming more and more uncomfortable every day with my weight and a closet full of clothes I wanted to wear again. So, I did what I usually do when something interests me – I Googled and Amazoned.
I wound up ordering 4 books – 2 on diabetes and insulin control dieting (these were not much help other than reminding me of the underlying issues and knowledge), The Gabriel Method and I Can Make You Thin. The latter two books, were a major break-through, a fundamental shift, an awakening – a moment of truth.
These two books pointed out a few fundamental truths that I had been overlooking. It was phenomenal to experience the radical shift that happened with me as the truth of this knowledge hit me.
Diets Don’t Work
Our Bodies Keep Us Fat to Keep Us Safe
Both books have 4 simple guidelines for eating like a thin person. What’s really interesting to me is how things changed over night for me. Reducing my intake of refined flour and sugars was hardly even a choice – it’s more like I lost interest in them, they no longer seemed to drag me toward them. So, this was a big plus for helping my system stop the insulin swing that has been problematic.
About the time I made this shift, I started frequenting Lettuce, a great Salad & Soup restaurant in Walnut Creek, that opened in March. I eat at Lettuce almost every day. The food is just awesome, Laura & Bahman, the owners, are wonderful and their staff is friendly beyond measure.
This whole process is opening up several interesting inquiries for me. Yesterday, I took the belt in another notch for the second time since all this began – whoohooo!
The weirdest thing about all of this is the lack of effort. As I was reflecting on this the other day, I realized that the knowledge gained is acting as a huge support, but more importantly – the shift has led to a huge sense of openness and freedom.
It’s another one of those experiences where I find myself wondering who I am – the familiar self and long-standing habits have taken a significant hit.
Our relationships with family members and other 
Dreaming & Inquiry Lead to the Forlorn
Everyday is an Adventure with Food & Eating
15 Pounds in a Month with NO Dieting!