Dealing with a confrontation between communal/feelings mode and systems/roles responsibilities is an increasingly recurring theme in my coaching practice recently. Noticed a pattern over the last few months that people I’m coaching are struggling with feelings/systems clashes in their workplaces and relationships.

I’m enjoying reading @michael_nielsen notes on “Cosmos” over coffee this morning. Unexpectedly, many points he makes in passing sound like the way yidam practice works.

This, for example:

https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1494162617245437954

@michael_nielsen Talking about the experience of yidam, especially self-arising yidam, is tricky. It’s easy to interpret as a practice that “goes deep” into the unconscious or “true self” or something vile like that. In fact, it’s “deeply external” in flavor.

🧵This particular tension (" the fluid mode perspective makes it actively difficult to give yourself over") is hot for me right now as a teacher/guide in our young metasystematic community of Vajrayana practice, Evolving Ground.
@RyanKhurana @Meaningness @Conaw @sonyasupposedly

https://twitter.com/miltonwrites/status/1370460465315332096

Cynicism and openness are usually seen as a continuum, more of one, less of the other. I encourage a different attitude— more of both together, as "inquisitive cynicism and prudent openness."

🧵1.
I am co-hosting a session on the Stoa, “Vajrayana Now: Sutra to Tantra,” with @jaredjanes next Sunday morning, July 5th.

Sign up here:

zoom.us/meeting/regist… 🧵2.
Some aeons ago last year, @jaredjanes contacted me with reflections on his meditation experience and curiosities about the meditation practice of shi-ne. I had been writing about the difference between shi-ne and mainstream meditations.

vajrayananow.com/2019/06/01/jou…

Thread: difference between ‘outside’ and ‘meta’:

Recently I’m noticing systems shopping conflated with being meta to systems.

This is how I see the difference:

‘Systems shopping’ is my term for picking and choosing, mixing and matching, from different systems.
1/11 Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche coined the term ‘spiritual materialism’ for shopping around spiritual systems, pulling out the bits that appeal, adopting different parts from different systems into one’s repertoire; a limited approach in some ways, but useful and serves a function. 2/11