"Dancing with Life" by Phillip Moffitt

Ona, I think you could be right about "stuck" being associated with a sense of dissatisfaction or frustration.

I think I see both practioners who are stuck and aware of it, and are thus frustrated/dissatisfied. And also, I see practitioners who have perhaps discovered a nice state or intermediate stage, cling to it, and suppress/clamp-down-on any feelings of lack that remain. It's the case of wanting to be "enlightened" so badly that you simply decide that you are, and that's that. As Chris has mentioned previously, these folks tend to sound rather convincing to those who are unable to see through it.

I guess one question is, where/how is it your/my/our responsibility to interact with that? On the one hand it seems the right thing to do sometimes, just as if you see someone letting their young child play in the surf where there is a riptide, and they seem unaware of the danger, it is probably nice to point out the potential danger. On the other hand each person has their own road to travel, and if they don't ask "why isn't this working" or "how should I be practicing" is it really any other person's role to say "hay, ur doin it rong!"

It seems there's a balance, which is maybe where compassion and skillfulness need to come in. Fact is, just as with the mother allowing her child in the surf (this actually happened a few days ago, when the sea here was insanely dangerous, and a tourist was snapping pictures of her 7 year old shoulder deep in frothing waves with cross currents and undertow!), she was clearly embarrassed and defensive at my pointer, and I felt a bit bad about that, but I was backed up a moment later when a lifeguard rode up on a 4-wheeler to tell her the same thing. Sometimes you tell people things they aren't open to hearing, and then they just get angry and shut down, and it didn't help did it? It's hard to know sometimes how to present "suggestions" without offending, or whether offending is just too damn bad.

Thoughts?

I generally wait until someone asks for assistance or vocalizes (posts) something about being "stuck" or frustrated.

-cmarti

Yes. And, there are also times when someone will post about their practice, revealing some kind of negatively evaluated side effect or experience, and also what they are doing to try and get rid of it. If I see that what the person is doing is probably causing the problem (not leading to the solution), I'll jump in and say something.

This happened a while back with an individual at KFDh who was trying to dissolve the sense of a center-point located in the middle of his head. He assumed that this center-point was causing a lot of suffering, so he was directing huge amounts of effort and attention to this sensation with the hopes of it dissolving; which, in turn (so he thought) would dissolve the suffering. I couldn't help but notice that the very acting of looking at/for this sensation with that degree of striving is what put it there in the first place. And, bring that kind of attention up into the head space, with that level of intensity, is going to give you a headache. I can't remember the advice I gave, and I'm sure it would be different now (I would probably suggest that he learn to "sink" the energy out of the head space, and see if that didn't remove whatever uncomfortable sensation or center-point-thing he was trying to obliterate with energy/attention).

I don't think he was asking for help, but I found it to be appropriate to chime in anyway. There's no set right or wrong answer, I guess. We learn through life circumstances just "how" and "when" to speak up.

-- and, maybe, as a practitioner wanting to help, I find that part of my practice involves suspecting that I've been wrong, being told I'm wrong, and discovering what is my best response to that. Which may be another cycle of being wrong!

I guess I mention this as a head's up to self that 'being wrong' [someone's opinion, or apparent fact] is the proverbial refiner's fire for me these days. What I know so far: backing off and sullenly or abashedly shutting up seems NOT to be 'the answer.'

See Ona's excellent example above of truly urgent good advice given and rejected: sometimes there's an overriding higher good that makes pleasant interractions irrelevant.