When I was growing up there was a movie called “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” This week I’ve watched conditioning create its incredible shrinking world.
In making a presentation at an event, I heard a word slip out of my mouth that shocked and amazed me. It was hurtful and divisive and not at all what I meant to say. I’ve made this kind of presentation many times over the past eight or ten years, and never used such a harsh term. It has provided a workshop, as conditioning seeks to reduce the world to the dimensions of that one word, to shrink my attention to that tiny dot. I breathe and step into a larger space, and then suddenly, in an instant, the lens goes from wide-angle to zoom. I see in this how that process happens all the time: out and in, in and out. Conditioning wants to draw us down into a speck – down into the size of itself. Life breathes, and smiles, and invites us into galaxies.
Gasshō,
Penny