Getting Over Their Self

I have been enjoying Jeni's ice cream and thinking about writing a post.  I was touched to find three comments on old posts sitting there, waiting for moderation, going back to July 11. I think notifications are going to my old email, and haven't figured out how to change that.  A couple of people have also told me they tried to comment and couldn't, so I want to get on the forums and see if other bloggers are having that problem.



One of the comments asked me to write on deprogramming from an alcoholic family, which is such an interesting term. Makes you think of what some people did to young people who were sucked into weird cults, I'm thinking back in the seventies.  A reversal of brainwashing. Then again, it's interesting to think of your conditioning as brainwashing. Here is the insight that has helped me recently:  the past does not exist.

Meanwhile, I've been watching the above video of a talk by Thich Nhat Hahn about The Art of Happiness.  Tom liked it a lot when his Zen group watched it, and I like it.  Thay (as he is often called by students, meaning Master) says we can learn how to "make good use of our suffering." Joko Beck called this "Suffer intelligently."  This is where Buddhist teachings are about human psychology, but older and better, and might lead me on in this topic of getting out of the sucky quicksand of the past.  Okay, enough for now.
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