Vajra Blue

Mindfulness and Compassion. Understanding trauma in young people.


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Self compassion: put your own oxygen mask on first.

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Compassion is not just an emotion one might feel after reading something sad or heartbreaking. Our compassion is a source of energy and strength. It is the basis for our actions in the world.

From Zooburbia: Meditations on the Wild Animals Among Us, by Tai Moses

As a young child, I flew the Atlantic several times to spend school holidays with my parents in Quebec.

It always seemed odd to me that the air stewardesses (as they were called in those days) gave this instruction.

A diet of British films, featuring the incomparable British stiff upper lip, had always given me the idea that it should be “Women and children first”, not everyone look out for themselves. so it took a while to work it out.

I suspect that many of us feel uncomfortable putting ourselves first, thinking that this makes us selfish, bad people.

But this is not the case.

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Lemmings, the Internet and pornography.

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Nature usually finds a way to balance populations. When there is plenty of food populations grow. An increased population means that there are more mouths to feed. This results in a reduction in the available food supply which in turn brings about a fall in the population.

Lemmings are renowned for being suicidal and jumping off cliffs. However this is not what is really happening. When lemming population density reaches a certain point, the population is triggered to migrate, and sets off in search of pastures new. No matter what is in the way they travel until they have found somewhere where food is plentiful. So, if they come to a cliff, they will swarm straight over it and head out to sea, to find new land or drown.

This headlong rush results in either finding a fresh supply of food to support the larger population, or a significant reduction in population so that the available food resources can support it. The cycle repeats itself over the years. This headlong rush to their doom is innate to the lemmings’ mind. A similar foolhardy rush to try new things seems to be inherent to humans, like lemming we seem oblivious to the inherent dangers in what we do.

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Mindfulness: Right Here. Right Now

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”The brain secretes thoughts like the liver secretes bile”
Pierre Cabanis.

Where rumination is concerned this quote is doubly apposite. Not only do thoughts keep on coming but they also tend to be full of vitriol and bile against ourselves, against the way we have behaved in the past and might behave in the future, and to a lesser extent against other people.

Rumination is not about the present.

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Mindfulness: Rumination: a bad idea over and over and over…………..again.

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I recently had a discussion with my son about the ways in which animals get their energy from food.

In particular we were discussing the way cows extract maximum energy from cellulose in the vegetation that they eat, and the process of rumination or chewing the cud that this involves.

“Eeuuh, you mean they eat their own sick?” was his response.

In a way this is what the cognitive process of rumination is like.

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