calm – whiskybaker

Mindfulness day 2 part 3

For me one of the fun parts of trying to do something again is going back and re-reading what I did the last time. So in August 2021 I wrote this blog post about values. And you know what? It still stands. I’ve read and re-read it and I think now I couldn’t really add or say anything any better.

So there we go. I dreaded writing this for a while and after reading and reflecting, I’m done. Now where is that meme…

with thanks to the US National Park Service

Relationship with self series – Calm

I also listened to the first session on the calm app in a series called “Relationship with self.” There are 15 sessions in the series – about 10 minutes each.

The first is called “self-trust.” It is about the importance of trusting yourself and how that can seem so hard to do when all you see when you look back are the mistakes you’ve made over the years. So instead the idea is to to try to look at the good choices too. You’ve made it this far; you’ve avoided problems; you’ve started this journey etc.

So that’s my lesson for today. Sometimes it’s not enough to not focus on the bad, sometimes you need to search for the good.

Reflecting on a Daily Trip

I was listening to today’s Daily Trip (I love the name) on the calm app. The title is “To love the unlovable.” Jeff Warren is the “tour guide” of the trip I guess.

…“Daily Trip” meditations – short practices that attempt to communicate the exploratory joy and pleasure and richness of meditation, but also, in an honest way, some of the challenges…
Jeff Warren’s description of Daily Trip from his website

I’m quite fond of the Daily Trips – Jeff Warren is engaging and seems to care about the listener. All really reassuring actually.

So, back to today’s daily trip: about loving the unlovable. He clearly sets out that this is gonna be hard for some people; some people will feel pull back etc and just to feel it all and note it and see what happens.

Me, on the other hand, have no difficulty it seems in seeing the humanity in others, of being able to send out love to all. Then the trip moves to thinking about who you consider unlovable. All I get is those who don’t recognize the humanity in others – that whole I see the humanity in everyone so my mind goes to people who fail to recognize that trans women are women; or who seek to impose laws restricting a women’s ability to control her own body; or people running corporations single-mindedly focusing on increasing profits and caring nothing about the environment or their employees or customers etc

I can still love those people.

When I turned my mind to actual people who are in groups like those I described above, or who support those groups, I still felt love but even more so I felt a deep, almost devastating, disappointment. It took me a while to move past that feeling; in fact it’s already after 5:10 p.m. and I’m still a bit heart-broken in writing all this.

Mindfulness day 2 part 3

Relationship with self series – Calm