My Wife's Death

On Sept 27, 2006 my wife Jane committed suicide. My world changed forever. I have tried to practice mindfulness using breath awareness for a number of years now. Jane killed herself by denying herself life sustaining breath.

I did not truly understand the pain that Jane suffered. I could not take her perspective on life without my own filter, a filter in which suicide does not exist as an option. But it sure did for her, although she kept that option a secret.

I have experienced a myriad of feelings since this tragic event; guilt, sadness, anger, regrets, longing, despair.

But mostly, I just really miss her.

My Favorite Sufi

I really like the writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. I consider him my favorite sufi. A lot of the little sayings I used in my transpersonal ads came from his writings.

(Mushtaq found this photo of him and posted it some time back)

I like his "The Art of Being and Becoming" the best.

STIME

I stumbled across the STIME site a while back and it made me think a little bit more about time and how we represent it. Seeing as I have a penchant for Enneagram layouts, the 24 hour day cycle presented me with some ideas about that. I figured three 8 hour segments in one day seemed good.

Where to start? midnight? daybreak? I finally decided that point 9 on the enneagram would represent the end of the day at the very moment I transition from the wake state to the sleep state.

About Breath

My attempts to “stay awake” by pausing to count out 10 breaths throughout the day have had limited success. The red entries still seem to outnumber the green entries. But I tend to keep an optimistic perspective on these things, and try to use the information to help develop strategies that might increase the frequency of those green 10x entry counts.

Mushtaq offered an interesting sufi-studies post on breath work a few years ago that he subsequently posted on his blog regarding the pathological types of breathing, drawing from the work of Scott Sonnon.

My mind map of the Scott Sonnon pathological breathing types:

(Click image to enlarge)

This gave me just what I needed to provide a shift in perspective on this activity. Instead of focusing on trying to just observe my breath, I started to focus on “how” I breathed. I started to realize that when I slipped into the “waking dream”, I could recall a breath pattern. Unfortunately, it seemed to happen before I could “think” about it. (Another clue dangling just beyond my reach).