Dr. James Hollis

That's why I said a person can meditate by a work of the hands.

or by walking, or something that pulls one out of the cycles that are running their little script over and over and over.

So there are many forms of meditating, and ancient traditions have revealed that too.

There was walking, meditation, and so forth.

And you mentioned music.

I think that's another example.

To listen to music, I think, takes one out of... Nietzsche said once, without music, life's a mistake.

And I think what he was getting at was there is a sense in which music has no purpose except being itself.

So when we're really present to the music, we were in the midst of being.

We're at spring right now, as you and I are talking, and it's beautiful in the neighborhood.

And so I've been watching the flowers emerge and so forth.

And simply being present to that means some of that other traffic is stilled.

And then I return and the traffic resumes.

But maybe I have a little more of a sense of who I am and from whence I'm responding, you see, as a result of that re-centering process.

The Zen folks talk about being no-minded.

I think it was their way of talking about being present to this moment, but not consumed by the demands of this moment.

And that's a difficult thing to manage, but it's essential.

Well, a shadow was Jung's metaphor for those parts of our own psyche.

and or our affiliation with groups, for example, whether it's a religious group, educational group, a national identity, that when brought to consciousness, we find troubling, perhaps contradictory to our values or inimical to our sense of self-worth or something like that.

For example,