Further thoughts on "cultivation" of mental states

What methods might be employed to cultivate certain qualities of mind? This may mean limiting one's exposure to influences which work against an internal orientation (ie shopping/consumption, media, etc.) and/or finding means to actively explore the mind; to cultivate certain qualities of mind. This is what eastern and western wisdom traditions have considered for many years. Psychotherapy is another potent means of exploring the inner landscape.

Both wisdom traditions and psychotherapy traditions bear witness to the capacity of exploration as a means of transforming one's relationship to one's self. That is to say that sometimes just seeing something more clearly leads to freedom. What helps to clearly see: Clear seeing or insight cannot be controlled or dictated, but rather is the result of looking. Different traditions provide different tools for this. Different meditation practices such as Zen Koan practice or vipassana's emphasis on choiceless awareness. Psychotherapists have developed a number of approaches toward similar ends. Traditional psychoanalysis uses such a careful throrough going manner of exploration that treatment costs are out of the reach of most. Narrative Therapy (also called Narrative Practices) attends to the missing aspects from the landscape, and playfully unearths the complexity of a narrative. From this perspective the trouble is that too many seedlings of one variety have taken root, like weeds and begun to choke out the native biodiversity. Through careful exploration of knowledges, skills, relationships, assumption and thoughts in past and present one's narrative shifts to encompass far more than the problem and a narrow sense of reality. Such "biodiversity" of identity, if you will, meets the future with great vitality and resiliency.

The mind is not a linear process, but a multistoried, multiplexed process consisting of sensory and narrative memory, present sensory experience and associated experiences, emotion, and relationship to emotion, identifications and feared identifications; cultural,community and family narratives.

Seeds get planted and grow. What seeds are we planting in the mind? The seeds we plant will eventually grow. What do we want to harvest?

Welcome

Welcome!

I'm creating this blog as an outlet for my ideas on a new concept in mental health: that of cultivation of mental states. Just as a forest or garden is impinged upon by a multitude of forces which interact with each other to cause a particular state of health or vibrancy to come about, so our minds are effected my many causes and conditions from in utero physical exposures to our habitual relationships to certain emotions to the impact of intimate relationships.

We all have the potential to work with our inner ecology to cultivate states of mind, just as we might weed and fertilize a garden. This is a potent metaphor for the kind of mental work that must be done to shift from habitual states of unhappiness created by mindlessly allowing our minds to follow media, advertising, dominant cultural ideas of the good life (e.g. being a good consumer, good provider, good person). These influences on the mind act to draw us away from our own knowledge of ourselves; our inner landscape. To cultivate happiness one must find ways to bring different forces to bear on the mind. This is the main thrust of my clinical interest and will be the main thrust of this blog.