Four-Legged Neighbor

A few years ago one street female cat started living in the building where I've been living since I moved to Israel about 18 years ago. No tenant of the building keeps her in their apartment, but one tenant simply prepared a "house" for this four-legged neighbor on the staircase.

I don't like to keep four-legged animals at home, and those who have to do so even repel me. But I do like cats as long as they are not indoors. Anyway, our four-legged neighbor is quite special in her unguarded friendliness to two-legged animals. Since I caress her every time I see her outside our building or on its staircase, she has become especially friendly to me (and other tenants like me).

One "fatal mistake" I made recently has made her even more friendly to me. I used to try to share with her some of my favorite foods, but she refused all of them. Recently I finally found something to which she showed an enthusiastic reaction for the first time - Tilapia fillet. I started sharing with her a small portion of what I eat every weekday.

This is a good example of neuroplasticity (or conditioning) at work. When I saw her starting this week to wait for me every morning and mew in front of my apartment, wanting her breakfast from me, I realized that I made a "fatal mistake". Since then I've been telling myself that I should stop giving her food every day, but every time I see her waiting for me in the morning, I easily succumb to the temptation.

Somehow I can't talk to cats (and dogs) except in Russian. Though it's only my sixth language in terms of fluency, it's my most favorite language, especially when it comes to expressing endearments. Russian can't compete with any of the other five languages I speak more fluently because of its abundant diminutives for endearments.

It's so soothing to interact with cats in general and this one in particular, especially after I saw so clearly that most two-legged animals are deeply trapped in their mind-made prison, and constantly and unconsciously label not only their fellow two-legged animals but also everything else. I'm simply so tired of being labelled by others.

In this respect, the custom of giving personal names to animals seems so absurd, as if this matterd to them. This is a very subtle form of labelling that even borders on madness. When I still worked in academia, I was interested in onomastics, but since I realized the dark aspect of naming, I've completely lost my interest in onomastics, too.

When I talk to cats (and dogs) in Russian, I don't label them but am simply immersed in the emotions its sounds evoke to me.

Urgent Need to Learn Self-Defense against Negativity

Being an empath, I'm sensitive to negativity and prone to absorb it quite easily. I'm especially sensitive to collective negativity that dominates any group. When I was exposed to such collective negativity about a year ago for a few hours, I had to spend half a day the following day in bed to restore my positive energy.

Quite a few people, including some of my former coaching clients themselves, have asked me how I cope with the negativity of coaching clients in the first few sessions in which they are asked to share with me the problems they are facing and want to solve. To my surprise, I've never absorbed this specific negativity. I seem to have learned instinctively to be compassionate instead of remaining empathic.

Recently I experienced (again after a long while) a few incidents of the same type in which I absorbed the negativity of individuals, and in one case I had to spend several hours in bed to restore my positivity. Now I feel an urgent need to defend myself agaist the negativity of not only social collectives but also of individuals.

As far as the negativity of individuals is concerned, I started some time ago to distance myself from not only negative people but also narcissists and those who say stupid things. This has helped me keep my peace of mind, at least online.

The recent few incidents in which I absorbed individual negativity involved people I know who started an argument with me about controversial issues about which we have opposite views. I couldn't just walk away from them. I was dragged into the negative spiral of escalating arguments with them instead.

I've encountered and will encounter such people. One thing I know for sure is that I can't change them and their opinioins. So the biggest challenge I'm facing now for self-defense against this specific type of negativity is to learn to deal with people who have absolute (blind) faith in themselves and aren't open to other opinions. I can only change myself, or to be more precise, my thoughts and the way I respond to them (instead of reacting to them). I don't know yet how.

Strange Feeling of Wisdom Flowing from Somewhere Else

When I still worked in academia, the greatest torture was writing academic papers-shmapers. I had to wrack my brain for hours to squeeze a few sentences out of it. For this problem it took me as long as ten years to finish writing my PhD dissertation. This constant struggle was a kind of mental constipation (sorry for the expression).

Since I officilly left academia in September 2020, I've started to write about something totally different - life wisdom I've acquired from studying Hasidism and other teachings of non-duality as well as from direct life experiences. I've started to experience with growing intensity a strange feeling as if wisdom I try to share with others flew from somewhere else and I were serving as a mere channel.

In academic writing I seem to have felt that language limits me, while now in this totally new kind of writing I feel that I defy the limitations of language as what I try to do is to verbalize what transcends language. And in the former I think, while in the latter thinking thinks, as it were.

I can only guess why this happens, but the most important thing is that I experience neither torture nor mental constipation any more when i write! This may be an example of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience.

I've already experienced such "flow" in an area which has nothing to do with thinking and language (in its conventional sense) - dancing. When I start dancing, waves of my otherwise incessant thinking simply stop completely and my body starts flowing with no mental hindrance.

Based on this prior experience I used to think that "flow" involves transcendence of language, but to my surprise, the experience I've talked about here is closely related to language.