Change of Scenery

Birds lack the words to get tangled up in the whys.

Daron LarsonMay 12, 2017poetry, religion, spirituality, nature, freedom, liberation, language, changeComment

Who Would You Be?

"Isn't it funny how no baby is born racist, yet every baby cries when they hear the cries of another. No matter the gender, culture, or color — proving that, deep down, we were meant to connect and care for each other."

~ Prince Ea

Lost within the Space Between

"Finding the dickhead inside [lead to] actually finding quite a liberation."

~ Damien Rice

Daron LarsonSeptember 14, 2015Damien Rice, music, doubt, hate, conflict, love, power, shame, questions, thoughts, imagination, certainty, liberation Comment

Is This What Being Vulnerable Feels Like?

i’ll run the risk
of being intimate with brokenness.

~ Sleeping At Last

Beginning, EquanimityDaron LarsonAugust 19, 2015Sleeping At Last, music, musicians, self, memory, growing up, struggle, risk, intimacy, hope, vulnerability, equanimity, liberation, Martin KlimasComment

To Tell the Modes Apart

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

Beginning, Clarity, Myths & MisperceptionsDaron LarsonJuly 6, 2015narrative, attention, intimacy, self, self/other, freedom, liberation, practice, awarenessComment

Feel Your Feelings for a Few Seconds

Thinking your way through unpleasant emotions takes time while a single repetition of any mindfulness exercise only takes a few seconds. The skills of attention strengthened by mindfulness practice enhance both the resolving of unpleasant emotions and the acceptance of them.

Our Desire to Transcend Isolation

"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from."

Liberated from One's Own Subjectivity

"One of the first, knockout exercises that you can do with actors, which is used in lots of theater schools where they use masks, is putting a plain, blank, white mask on someone.The moment you take someone’s face away in that way, it’s the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself knowing that that thing one lives with, and which knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer there."

~ Peter Brook

Daron LarsonOctober 31, 2014Peter Brook, identity, secrecy, personality, shadow, self/other, acting, directors, performance, liberationComment

Liberation through Intimacy

Transcendence isn't an escape plan, but an engagement strategy: liberation through intimacy. Transcending the self and the world begins with deeply accepting the self and the world. It grows naturally out of countless direct experiences of life as it is being lived and an intimate familiarity with how its composition constantly fluctuates.

If We Didn't Try to Hold the Flux

“What both science and at least some philosophical and even religious traditions tell us is that the world is impermanent. Nothing in it stays the same. We don't stay the same. Our bodies don't stay the same. The people that we love and the things that we love don't stay the same. That's just the truth of the matter, that there's this constant impermanence, this constant flux. And some philosophers have argued over the years that we should just embrace that. We would be freer if we didn't try to hold that flux for a moment.”

Alison Gopnik

Daron LarsonJune 3, 2014Radiolab, children, emptiness, freedom, impermanence, liberation, love, parenting, philosophy, science, Alison GopnikComment

Changing the Plane of Focus

"Many longtime meditators seem completely unaware that these two planes of focus exist, and they spend their lives looking out the window, as it were."

~ Sam Harris