00:05:00 Reading time.
Last year I discovered "Dependent Origination", a Buddhist teaching. During my mindfulness enquiry I came across a podcast episode on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I highly recommend it. On it was Andrea Fella of the Insight Meditation Center, Redwood, California, USA.
Listening to her being interviewed I could have sworn that she was almost shouting, well at least talking at an elevated pitch to try and get the concept of Dependent Origination across. I was thinking, wow this person is quite aggressive, actually I'm not sure if I want to listen to this, but I persisted as she was talking about matters I had never heard of or understood, except to say that after a while I started listening so attentively that I needed to learn more and investigated Andrea further. She was obviously 'shouting' for a reason and that was for ME to pay attention!
Let me firstly share a very brief explanation of Dependent Origination:
"In the Buddha’s teachings, the second noble truth is not a theory about what happens to somebody else, but is a process which is going on over and over again in our own lives—through all our days, and countless times every single day. This process in Pali is called Pratītyasamutpāda, sometimes translated as “dependent origination” or “co-dependent origination” or “causal interdependence.”
The process of dependent origination is sometimes said to be the heart or the essence of all Buddhist teaching. What is described in the process is the way in which suffering can arise in our lives, and the way in which it can end."
Lifted from: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/dependent-origination
I am super interested in the process of the mind and everything that flows from it. After a mid-life crisis in 2003, I completely reinvented myself in 2004, I became a Reiki Practitioner, a Kinesiologist, a certified Wellness Coach using The Wellness Inventory and a certified teacher in Psychocalisthenics (Pcals). I treated patients with health issues, ran workshops privately and publicly, have spoken dozens of times publicly about the topic of wellness, but none of these I practice today. The main reason why I don't is due to my own limiting beliefs at the time and the first global financial crisis and recession. I have also attended many personal development workshops and programmes, including Anthony Robbins' UPW and his Leadership Mastery program. I am a Mindfulness student, practice Yoga regularly and aspire to be a full blown Minimalist (work in progress!). All of this to enable me to understand MY mind better.
I rarely share this information about myself, I decided to do this in a January post just because it is fitting with the start of a new year, people's resolutions, life changes and aspirations to better themselves. When I think about myself and my progress for the past almost 2 decades, I realise now that I have achieved a huge amount and I'm proud of that, but more about that later!
Back to Dependent Origination. After investigating Andrea Fella further, I came across a series of audio teachings, titled 'Thursday Evening Sit and Q&A'.
This series of teachings deal specifically with the topic of 'Dependent Origination' (DO). It was during listening to these teachings that I discovered how my (stupid) mind has been conditioned all my life by my parents, my teachers, the media (incl. social media), society, the adverts and of course most importantly by ME. It's my conditioned mind that draws conclusions, takes specific actions for better or for worse and shapes the way my whole life has and will continue to play out. Most of all I have come to realise that any time I react negatively to people, loved ones, media instances and towards myself, I appreciate it's my conditioned mind, noticing is part of the solution. I believe the largest part of our conditioning is our wish to see punishment take place for any wrongdoing in society and in others. Does it somehow link back to how we were punished when we were younger?The mind thinks so.
I took most of the recordings, the ones by Andrea Fella and published them in a handy playlist on MixCloud on the basis of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Follow this link if you wish to have a listen to them. There are 25 episodes each of about ½ hour long, so there's a fair few hours worth of listening, I highly recommend them. I suggest spreading it over a number of weeks and if you're anything like me, re-listen to them often in order for it to sink into your subconscious.
https://www.mixcloud.com/stayingaliveuk/playlists/dependent-origination/
That covers off the 'Conditioned' part in the post title and now I will cover 'The Gap'.
I recently interviewed the youngest ever guest on my Podcast, Lucy Abigail, the creator of the 'Finding Direction Journal'. During the interview I shared with her some of my challenges in following through on some recent training I am undertaking to learn 2D-Animation and that due to overwhelm of information during my learning, I had paused the training and felt I had failed big time. She pointed out that I was in The Gap and not in The Gain and suggested I should read a book with the same name The Gap and The Gain, by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy. I haven't finished it yet, but even reading a few pages in and coming across this very handy graphic below, it is makings perfect sense to me and I believe a very handy addendum to 'Dependent Origination'.
I believe that not only are we conditioned, we are conditioned to stay in The Gap.
We measure The Gap between our ideal and what we have achieved instead of measuring what we've achieved since we started.
When I review what I have achieved from the start of my 2D-Animation learning journey, I have realised I have achieved a huge amount which I can be proud of and grateful for. It has totally switched my mindset.
I leave you to ponder these two concepts for yourself and I hope that whatever habit you decide to break or start in 2022, you consider your conditioned mind and how most of us actually live in The Gap too. I am certainly embracing it for my changes in 2022. Success!