Recovery for me meant a never-ending self-improvement project and a continuous focus on my problems. So while my relationship with alcohol was destroying my life, the idea of recovery simply wasn't attractive enough to me. Then one day I asked myself the question. How would my life need to be for me to not want to use alcohol? The thing that initially attracted me to alcohol provided some vital clues. I realized that I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin, comfortable around other people, and for the world to appear full of wonder as it sometimes did when I first started drinking alcohol. I then knew that if I could get these things a better way, I wouldn't need alcohol anymore.
PatrickKavanagh teaches us that love, wonder, and joy are available in even the mostdifficult moments. He describes the passionate transitory that awaits us whenwe can see beyond claptrap.
.You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
Join me on a journey of nostalgia as we encounter the eternal objects of Alfred North Whitehead, the storehouse consciousness of Buddhist Yogācāra, and the liberation that can be achieved through the imagination.You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
Here we explore how a toddler's simple enquiry "why is the sky blue?" can reveal the limits of adult knowing. This question can be an invitation back to a non-ordinary world that is full of wonder. It can help us see how the ordinary way of seeing is just a veil we place upon the non-ordinary.
Wouldn't it be nice to transcend all of the complications of life? No more desires, no more messiness, no more concerns about anything. Here, I discuss why I gave up on this search for spiritual transcendence and found something much better.Check out my YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@paulgarrigan1
You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
Plentyof attention is given to escaping unwholesome desires and eliminating negativethinking patterns, but what about things we want there to be more of? Qualitiesthat would improve our life if we could increase them. In this video, I discusshow we might go about cultivating wholesome desire through the magic of ourattention.
You can also visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
Here I discuss how our memories can lead us to a different relationship with reality. They can help us begin to recognize how wonderful life can become when we stop resisting. You can find more about my musings at paulgarrigan.com
Every judgement I make about how I am doing is based on unprovable assumptions. Our ideas about who we are and how we are going generate resistance and rejection of what is here.
Life is baffling. That we experience anything at all is astounding. We use our knowledge of the world like a safety blanket in an attempt to navigate with the complexity of life. This fools us into believing that we know what this is and we know what we are. The world can appear less baffling because of this, but it also means we become a prisoner of our understanding.
When we discover stillness, there can be a desire to escape into it. This is a rejection of life. Eventually we realize that all is stillness, so there is no need to escape anything - it is always and already here.
The fullness of our experience can never be captured in any label. Problems occur when we reduce the fullness of the experience to particulars within that experience. This causes us to contract so that the particular has much greater influence over what we are experiencing.
Out of the sea of physical sensation that we experience, we focus on a miniscule amount, and we allow this to determine our perception. The sea of sensation that we experience can never be captured in any label, and we have to ignore this truth to create our limited interpretations. Appreciating physical sensation is the key to unlocking our perception.
Our biggest regret is often that we didn't appreciate things more. Yet, when we are asked about how we would actually go about doing this, we can be at a loss about how to go about it. What does it mean to appreciate?
The original video for this can be found on my YouTube channel https://youtu.be/AimVg32xNKc
Stillness is the support we are looking for. It is always available and completely unconditional. Stillness requires being at peace with what is here. When we are at peace with what is here, the world is able to shine. Here is a link to the post I mentioned in the video: https://paulgarrigan.com/finding-home/
Choosing what is here means being faithful to this moment. It is only by doing this that we can find the peace so many of us are desperately seeking. The only alternative to choosing what is here is craving, and this always moves us away from peace.
Life became an intense struggle because of the things I thought I knew. The solution was wonder, and the realization that my ideas and beliefs were not supported by the evidence. All of the questions that bothered me were based on unsupported assumptions about life. I did not need to answer these questions but just realize that they were built on fantasy.
http://paulgarrigan.com/
https://paulgarrigan.com/
There are ways of relating to the world that eliminate suffering and increase joy. Insight into emptiness provides the freedom we need to break free of our usual way of perceiving. This makes space for our imagination to come in and revolutionize our relationship with life.
If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, you can find out more here.
Visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
My YouTube channel is here.
Music in this episode is "Wallflowers" by Bad Snacks
The purpose of this guided meditation is for you to experience trust and to clearly see how craving pulls us out of the stream of experience. It is recommended that you listen to the previous podcast (or YouTube video) called 'Craving Is The Source Of Suffering And Trust Is The Antidote' to better understand what is going on in this meditation.
Our life is an everchanging stream of experiences. When we attempt to resist this stream, it causes us to suffer. This resistance is caused by craving. We can learn to just trust the stream of experiences, and when we do this, we are filled with peace and joy. This is not something for us to believe - it is something we need to see for ourselves.
If you are interested in doing some coaching with me, you can find out more here.
Visit my website at: paulgarrigan.com
My YouTube channel is here.
Music in this episode is "Wallflowers" by Bad Snacks