Ponderances

What a year 1009 has been! I have been used to my life gradually speeding up as i have grown older but this year has stretched out to feel like at least three. Perhaps it is due to my lazer eye surgery i had last november. My whole experience of things has been changed through this, everthing seeming crisper and having new aspects i could not see before (on many levels). The sea was the thing that got me most if i have to single out something from this new mandala i live in. It sparkled in way it had never done before without the glass reflecting experience away and i was able to walk down to it without worrying about whether my glasses where safe while i was away, leaving clear vision behind and experiencing the seascape as a blur. No, i could walk down to the sea, watch the seagulls and the waves in their fullness, happy to glance at my children knowing they were safe in a moment. It made me more brave to enter the wild sea surrounding the devon coast this summer, even with its chilling promises ^^ Using meditation as a prompt from my shivering state i imagined it to be an ocean of wisdom, my lover and manifestation of blissfull mind and dived right in emerging to watch the cliffs and builders of sandcastles with unclouded eyes. To be able to view my children happy and safe on the beach whilst surrounded by the peaks and troughs of the playful sea made me laugh and cackle, the Kate Bush bird song which lines the bowl of my petit mal joining in with me.

Leaving the council has also made a difference to me, giving me more time to watch and work with my energy. Sharing my sparks of inspiration in Second Life as meditation and querky workshops i have been achieving much more with bodisattva mind work and am growing myself into a fuller beast :-p

A post on another forum finally prompted me to write here... so here is that piece too.. smiles xx

"The interesting aspect of male and female in Buddhism is a celebration of them in their different forms. The male is associated with the Method or Compassion path whereas the female is associated with the Wisdom path. Where lineage is concerned one tends to find mainly male spiritual guides but rather than an indication of them being above women it is more an indication of their propensity to compassion and method - i.e. writing down what teachings and inspirations they have received and establishing systems by which themselves and others should put them into practice. The women are all there in the 'background' delighting in their propensity to wisdom; their wisdom acknowledged as the root of the male translated systems. This also relates to the 'dakini' who dances the path of wisdom in the 'sky', an inspiration for male practitioners and lamas alike."

My resignation from the local council was in the paper - i post it here. I was pleased i think it communicated well and help to raise the profile of different types of epliepsy - although it got complex and partial the wrong way round but hey preaching to the unconverted here ^^

Illness forces Emily to quit town council

Tuesday, May 12, 2009, 07:00

TOTNES mother-of-two Emily Rogers has resigned her town council seat for the second time in four years as she faces a continual health battle with epilepsy.

The 30-year-old artist mum was the youngest person on the town council when she reluctantly handed in her resignation last week.

Faced with suffering daily seizures which left her exhausted, she decided she had no choice but to stand down.

Emily said: "It was a very difficult decision for me. I wanted to help the parents and children and disabled people, but it was so frustrating not being able to fit in with the timing of the council meetings.

"I am quite passionate about supporting people in the community and representing them and it became so frustrating not being able to do so."

Emily has suffered from epilepsy since she was 10 years old, but over the last two years the nature of her illness has changed — and drugs prescribed for her either left her 'hyper' and nervous or turned her into a depressive.

She said: "My epilepsy has changed. It never used to be like this. I used to have a few complex partial seizures a month. Sometimes now I am having three or four a week. I am having one or two simple partial seizures a day."

She said a simple partial seizure leave her staring into space for a few minutes while a complex partial seizure leaves her disorientated without a grasp on reality which can last for up to 30 minutes. All the seizures leave her exhausted.

Emily, who lives with her husband Steve and two children Misha, eight, and Poppy, four, in Culverdale, first won a seat on Totnes Town Council in November 2002.

But three years later she and husband Steve, who was also a town councillor, both resigned in protest over the way the council was being run.

Then two years later they both stood again in the 2007 May elections and Emily pipped her own husband at the post by just one vote to win back her seat.

Emily and Steve invented the board game Buddhawheel, a game based on the Buddhist wheel of life involving players working their way up the reincarnation ladder, which has sold around the country and abroad.

Emily is a Bhuddist and said her meditation has helped her cope with her epilepsy.

"I am not freaked out by what is happening where I used to be before I had experience with meditation," she said.

Totnes Town Council is now faced with advertising the vacant seat left by Emily's resignation.

If enough local electors demand there is a by-election the council will be forced to hold one.

If that does not happen the town councillors will have the option of co-opting a new councillor.

Creation of an Artist

Good days, plenty sun and gardening :-)

We have a redevelopment soon to happen near us - bungalows being knocked down for flats. We are saving the plants that have become established in the gardens there by rehousing them in ours. Shove up weeds ^^

Interesting thing about the music artist Prince and how his epilepsy transformed him into a flashy performer...

Prince reveals epilepsy

What prompted the flashy, eccentric persona that helped make Prince a king of the music world? The singer was compensating for a painful childhood struggle with epilepsy, he revealed this week. "I've never spoken about this before, but I was born epileptic," the reclusive 50-year-old pop star told PBS host Tavis Smiley in an interview. "I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it, but they did the best they could with what little they had." Prince also cited divine intervention in helping him cope with the disorder. "My mother told me that one day I walked in to her and said, 'Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore,' and she said, 'Why?' I said, 'Because an angel told me so.' " But his struggle didn't end there. He was often teased in school, he recalled. "And early in my career, I tried to compensate by being as flashy as I could and as noisy as I could."

I love to act from very early on for a lot of similar reasons. Lots of my peers enjoyed 'fame' but my character parts allowed me freedom to breath into being odd and feeling different. People who complimented me would get my reply 'its not me up there on stage' my disconnected epileptic ego getting some respite of the rush to be one of the 'ME's"

Empathising with Flaubert

Done more research about creativity, epilepsy and watching the mind and found detail about Flaubert's epilepsy and his writing about it:....

The onset of his epileptic attacks allowed Flaubert to abandon his education at law school and, in many ways, created a space for Flaubert to live a life of the imagination.

He was working away at studying for his law examinations, had taken a brief break from his studies and returned to Rouen to visit with his family. While home, his older brother Achille and he had gone on a trip to look into the possibility of buying a cottage. On that ride in the dark which is unimaginable to us now because we live in a world that is perpetually filled with light pollution, Flaubert had his first attack of epilepsy. His falling allowed him to return to a life of reverie and, although there were innumerable fees to be paid to the gods of modern day medicine, his time became his own.

But what had happened? What had transpired in his mind? Later, he would write to his lover, Louise Colet, in a letter the following:

"Each attack was like a hemorrhage of the nervous system. Seminal losses from the pictorial faculty of the brain, a hundred thousand images cavorting at once in a kind of fireworks. It was a snatching of the soul from the body, excruciating. (I am convinced I died several times.) But what constitutes the personality, the rational essence, was present throughout; had it not been, the suffering would have been for nothing, for I would have been purely passive, whereas I was always conscious even when I could no longer speak. Thus my soul was turned back entirely on itself, like a hedgehog wounding itself with its own quills."

The fireworks of the self caught in temporal agony. The space of the self becomes expansive and vast. I understand this particular possibility of the self because it resonates with what I've felt in the past. The agony of seeing past the limit. The limit of the agony past seeing. The seeing limit of the past agony. There is a space of consequent understanding here which belies any simple attempt to map the mind.

A lot i can empathise with here, now where is one of his books... :-)

Forum post about Epileptic Meditation

:-) Another post i wrote going back to other way - into a community of epileptics interested in meditation ...

hope you are all keeping well. So busy today didnt stop but managed to stay fairly chilled by not setting aside mad energy for later :-p....

I have have temporal lobe epliepsy since 10 yrs old and started meditating at 16. I have been a practicing buddhist for 14yrs now and am very interested in meeting others that apply mediataion to their seizures. I find that as opposed to being a healing exercise for my seizures, my meditiation helps me to understand and work with the subtle minds that surface during a seizure.

I have found mostly negative outlook on epilepsy from buddhist who dont know much about it or the mind, and also from epileptics whose main aim seems to stop seizure through many medication experiments. I have epliepsy that is hard to treat and as such my epileptic state has become part of my spiritual path. Someone on a Buddhist forum mentioned that Buddha for example cant have had epilepsy because he was a blessed being, well they miss the point of a Buddha entirely...

Buddhas start as normal human beings, and from that point (hindered by an as-sortment of the sorts of things humans have to deal with e.g. epilepsy) they work with their obstructions gaining a deeper and deeper knowledge of them so, knowing their true enemy of delusion, they can become released from it and therefore help others who are also 'drowning in samsara'.

A true Buddhist would see nothing as a complete dead end to their path, even in the most difficult conditions. My meditation smoothes my seizures, i think when i am most successful i become one with them and gain much insight.

Long time no speaky...

I have just resigned from my local council :( I have been trying to represent young mothers and disabled but i keep having seizures couple of hours before the meetings when i am all prepped and ready to go. I think the stress triggers them.

So maybe i post here more often now i dont get all that paper work. Thankless task being a councillor, no pay, lots of paperwork and everywhere you go in your town people stop to debate with you whatever else you happen to be doing. Also you get blamed for anything people dont like and label as inactive by people who dont bother to stand for local councils or maybe even turn up to vote ... what a world.

Anyway i posted this today about Epilepsy and Tantric Meditation ...

Hey everyone :) I have been on a rolling sea journey with my epilepsy recently. I use to have sharper attacks but now they are smoother and put me in a different space for a long time. I have been working with a mahamudra relationship to my seizures for a while now, there is no room for attachment at all once they start to hit and i think this has been a great gift to me to make to most of where my path is concerned. The mind is wilder or deeper now than it has been in the past, my absence and simple partial seizures rolling into each other. The only thing that feels like delusion when i am relaxed is a fear of drowning. Like if i ride on the ocean of the mind in epileptic state i can feel more closely the actual waves and motion of it, but that entails looking into the ocean which is deep. A cave looks like the best option :-p If i let go i am not sure if convention will prevail and i am a busy mother of young children on that level. So i guess although diving seems like the best option for my bodhisattva mind... it is scary in its formlessness and i am not sure if that is what this manifestation of reality right now is about. Anyone heard about epileptic tantrists? I think my epilepsy is very different from grand mal from what i have heard from those who suffer for it - they pretty much 'leave the building' when it happens. I am there to witness the process of mind, which has always set me out as a bit strange and interested in deep process. :-p Just chatting ^^