EP358: Abstractions and Reality with Chris Niebauer

Beliefs, including spiritual beliefs, are helpful to a point. Then they become decidedly unhelpful.What happens at that point? You look beyond belief.We’ll look at what it means to go beyond belief and how that’s very different from continually clinging to “better” beliefs.***The (now) annual Summer Book Club is back! Beginning in late July, I’ll be leading The post EP364: Beyond belief appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

What does it mean for something to feel personal? Really, the question is: what is the sense of personal? Is anything truly personal? How could it be? What if the sense of something being personal is sort of like a scent that arises along with some objects (the body, memories, emotions) but it’s nothing special or different The post EP363: Personal appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

The title of this week’s episode is also the title of a book by Sailor Bob Adamson. This is the book we’ll be exploring in the Summer Book Club. In this episode, I share some quotes from the book that have stood out in my initial reading. As the author says, this book “is not about The post EP362: What’s wrong with right now?: If you don’t think about it appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

Let’s talk about the experience we call anticipation. It seems like we’re looking ahead to something that’s almost certain to happen. And it seems like it’s very likely to happen the way we’re imagining it. The way it’s likely to go feels like sound logic – of course it might not happen that way, but The post EP361: Anticipation is Imagination appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

Shortly after I recorded last week’s episode, The Biggest Irony, someone shared an experience on one of our forums that perfectly illustrated what I was trying to express. Today’s episode shares that illustration and expands on the idea that all of our teachings, pointers and understandings have a singular benefit – presence in and as The post EP360: The Biggest Irony – Part 2 appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

It seems that of our learning, understanding, talking, expressing and sharing are for one thing, and one thing only: to help relax into this. Not to help relax into some abstract emotion or to make things easier “someday”. And definitely not to have an insight or see something new. It’s all so that we can melt into, The post EP359:  The biggest irony appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

This episode is a portion of a recent community guest speaker call with Chris Niebauer. Chris came back to the community to discuss what I love to talk about – imagination versus reality. Chris talked about the complete made-up-ness of words. Words, especially ones like ownership and success, are massive abstractions that are not here in The post EP358: Abstractions and Reality with Chris Niebauer appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

Notice that the more attention is in abstraction, the harder things feel. More abstract, more problems. Really, all problems are abstractions. You can’t find a problem outside of abstraction.Me-and-my-life is the ultimate abstraction. When we live with attention there, as we so often do, life feels extremely hard. Even when it’s good, it’s not that The post EP357: More abstract, more suffering appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

In this episode, we’ll look at breaking down experience – seeing beyond abstract words, descriptions and meaning to touch into what’s really going on…or something closer to it, anyway.  I use the example of the feeling of needing to get up and do something productive. What is this experience? What’s it made of? What’s actually The post EP356: Breaking down the experience of needing to be productive appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.

Today’s episode offers a challenge: let everything be exactly what it is.  This is how life gets really simple. It’s what we’re all looking for, except we often have no idea this is what we’re looking for. We think we’re looking for something different. Better. Improved. So we live in abstracted ideas of how that might The post EP355:  A challenge: Let everything be exactly what it is.  appeared first on Dr. Amy Johnson.