When we are aware of being aware of what is going on, be it brushing our teeth, making tea, walking to a place or listening, we are totally in the experience instead of planning for the next experience to take place. I love the analogy of the apple cider. When first pouring the glass, it is cloudy. When we allow the juice to relax, it clears, settles and quiets down. So it is with our thoughts. We allow them to settle, get quiet, and then we can be totally in the experience.

As we practice becoming balanced in living and being, we find we are more aware of feeling and being in the experience instead of wanting it to be over and get to the next experience. We can also locate within ourselves how we react to someone else who is living their experiences and find that place of contemplation or awareness so that we have the ability to respond instead of reacting.

I love putting a reference of vibration and wavelength on a person’s energy level and your relationship with them. It helps to know whether the wavelengths are long (the
extreme of experience) shorter, (disengaged in the experience), or middle (neutral to experience). It is interesting to feel the vibration of fast, medium or slow energy level during these experiences. Then you can have a way of regulating where you are in relationship to another’s energy and you can become more easily in tune with them, or not. If you cannot, it brings you to a place of disconnection, where am I on the scale and why am I uncomfortable? Again, contemplation and opening a space for me to be and become aware of knowing or not knowing.

All of our relationships are about awareness in the moment of feeling, doing and being. What are the internal dialogues going on in any situation? How am I involved in the experience and what is my part in the outcome? Does there need to be an outcome? Is the connection simply enough?

We created sentences, each person contributing a word, not knowing what the person before them was going to say. Wow, what an experience. We were connected. Every group that creates an experience, creates a company, wants to change the now, needs to connect on this level. What comes out is what Shaun calls the collective wisdom. We are all a part of the whole.

I lay down in shavasyna on my back, hands out stretched in the palms up position. I can again feel the earth under my back and ground supporting me like a stretcher ready to carry me off if needed. The earth is supportive and I can feel all of my energy grounded and in rest formation. I close my eyes and consciousness becomes calm. Thoughts disappear and feelings subside. I begin to sink further down, deeper into the sturdiness of the earth. The darkness swirls and my ears begin to wake up from their slumber. I can hear the gentle whisp of the wind, the slight moving of water in the canal behind me. Thoughts? No. Feelings? No. Breathe? Yes. I open my eyes and light streams back in rushing me back to the present. I sit up, experience shifts. Life awakens and speeds. I stand up and walk home.

Courtesy of Dailypainters.com

In this process, notions such as altruism and moral duty are left behind. It is tacitly based on the Latin term “ego” which has as its opposite the “alter.” Altruism implies that the ego sacrifices its interests in favor of the other, the alter. The motivation is primarily that of duty. It is said we ought to love others as strongly as we love our self. There are, however, very limited numbers among humanity capable of loving from mere duty or from moral exhortation.

Unfortunately, the extensive moralizing within the ecological movement has given the public the false impression that they are being asked to make a sacrifice—to show more responsibility, more concern, and a nicer moral standard. But all of that would flow naturally and easily if the self were widened and deepened so that the protection of nature was felt and perceived as protection of our very selves.

~Arne Naess

I believe this small statement is why your average person feels that it is so hard just to help others around them. They say to themselves, I can barely help myself, how should I be able to help others as well. When I can take care of myself then I will take care of others. Unfortunately because of the connection described above this is a failing argument. In fact it is like as if we were playing Tetris and everyday we got up and spent our day jumping from falling tile to falling tile. From an internal perspective we tell ourselves just a few more days of this rat race until I make it to the top and can stop feeling stressed about having to hop tiles. Unfortunately the harder I try to jump tiles, and the faster I jump; the faster the tiles seem to fall. I don’t want to just give up and hit the bottom because I think to myself what would I do without that car, those clothes, that special food, and the bigger house I just bought. And it is because of this philosophy that I feel I have to consider my “time as money” I could be making. Isn’t our most valuable commodity given to us for ourselves? Why don’t we spend it painting or sitting under a great big tree, or doing Tai Chi?

If in fact I become so ambitious that I figure out how to outsmart the Tetris tile system and I make it to the top, I realize that in fact I am no happier than when I started. Eventually I will see that I have enough of everything and that maybe now it is time to give back and help those around me. Maybe I will sell all of my material possessions and finally utilize my time to travel the world, or volunteer, or simply sit and talk with the homeless or elderly, thus paying attention to their perspectives and forgetting about my own. Regardless of how I choose to play the game I can bet that the beginning will lead me to back to the beginning and that esoterically there is in fact no end.

I think that maybe in fact working to help others is not separate from helping myself, because however you look at our connection; whether you see it through money, through speech, through religion, through the senses, through love, it is the same connection among everyone. If I choose to dump my  waste (verbal, physical, mental, emotional) in another person’s backyard, eventually they will notice it and have to find a way to reintegrate it back into our conscious life. That could be transferring it through connection via speech (venting), moving it somewhere else, or simply choosing to find alternative uses for the waste. That old coffee mug becomes my tooth-brush container, etc. Either way we are all participating in a living system and our motivation does not have to be tied to increasing our individuality. In fact if we try to help those around us, they will try to help us because perception is instantaneous. Instead of breaking down the system and looking for order, we can choose to build up the system and accept a little chaos, which might actually turn out to be more exciting than reaching the top of the Tetris tiles.

Capra says, every living organism must live far from equilibrium at the edge of chaos. If we lived in perfect equilibrium we would be physically dead. Cells cannot exist in a perfectly structured environment, they must exist in an autopoietic network which is a network pattern in which the function of each component is to participate in the production or transformation of other components in the network. The network continually makes itself. It is produced by its components and in turn produces those components. This structurally coupled living system is the basic building blocks of life, as far back as living organisms have existed. I choose to help others around me thereby helping myself in the direct process and evolving as a living system together.

Sabina wishes to expand her business by purchasing more supplies so that she can prepare more food; therefore, she believes it is advisable to request a loan of 2000 nuevos soles ($725) from Edpyme Alternativa (local lending institution).
Sabina has borrowed money from Edpyme Alternativa before and has made her payments in a timely manner.

We have loaned her $175

Bio:

Miguel owns a grocery store, which he manages with his wife. He has two minor children; they are students.

Miguel is also a builder and a bricklayer. He is a hard-working, self-sacrificing, and enterprising person. Through sacrifice, effort, and support from his family he has gotten ahead in business, been able to educate his children, and has achieved a good standard of living.

Miguel got the loan to invest in expanding his house. He personally will be in charge of the construction.

The client expresses his satisfaction and gratitude for the trust shown in working with the Fundación. He is also grateful for the help in the development and growth of his business and his family.

~Shaun

Diony, 47 years old, lives near Fortín de Guayaquil in a house that only has lights. Her husband is a security guard. They have 5 children, ages 19, 17, 15, 12, and 10.

Due to the lack of household income, some years ago she decided to apply the activity that her mother taught her since she was little, sewing clothes. With her savings, she bought a sewing machine and little by little, she began to have set clients.

Presently, she makes uniforms for companies in Guayaquil. At times, her husband helps sew the uniforms. They work from 8:00 am until 5:00 pm every day.

With the loan she wants to buy cloth, fasteners, and thread for her business. In the future she imagines herself to be a big cloth dealer, even becoming one of the major cloth distributors.

~Shaun

Heres to random events!

PS: If your interested in what I have been up to check out: W1sd0m.net

~Shaun