Let Go of Everything Completely

What should wash up on my shores of Stumbleupon this evening but a ten year old recording of the Venerable Sarah Thresher speaking in San Francisco on the topic of healing.

It sounded as though the organizers of the talk has set the topic out for her as "Healing the Pain" but she addressed the broadest ranges of individual and physical healing, all the way to healing suffering between nations. And she did so with an engaging series of stories and examples from her own life. I found her teaching style delightful and I commend the audio to you when you have time.

What I have always found compelling about Pema Chodron, Roshi Halifax and also Joko Beck is what I call their Great Grandmother Compassion. No, not that they are literally a great-gran anything, but that they pull no punches, don't sugar coat anything, and their stories are meant to help correct you. To help correct your mind. And however unpleasant it is to be corrected, it's because they love you. After hearing this talk, I now include Ven Thresher in that set of teachers as well.

So as much to get these concepts and practices more firmly in mind myself as to share them with you, here are a few of the approaches Ven Thresher raised during her talk:

Whatever is happening, I need to have happen. Whatever comes, let it come. Try to recognize exactly when we find ourselves saying "This shouldn't be happening to me!" And then say to yourself just: "Well, this is what's happening." When we find outselves thinking "This is outrageous!" then note that is resistence arising, and allow it to be. Because it is what is happening. The toughest part is that part where you say "...and I need this to happen." No I don't need this disease or car accident difficult job situation exactly, but I need to recognize where I am resisting this set of circumstances so I can let go of the resistence which is only increasing my suffering. So I need to work with it, with things as they are.

The only thing you can control is your response to what is happening. Keep asking the question: "Why don't I want to accept what is happening?" If we can recognize in moments of resistence or suffering that we don't actually have to need anything extra, we are complete. Wisdom mind says we don't have to create additional needs. Ask yourself, resisting: "What is it I think I need (that I'm not getting)?" If you can identify (correctly!) what it is you are holding on to that is causing suffering...you can begin to let go. "But that thing I'm holding onto gives me my identity!" What is it you think you are losing if you do let go? Pride. Self-importance? Sense of self? "If I let go of this, what's left?"

When I let go, things change. When I let go, what actully changes is me. Circumstances haven't changed. I have accepted them and therefore can more effectively adapt and respond to them.

View whatever arises as the teacher. Freedom is the mind that doesn't hold onto anything. Because really there is nothing to hold on to (groundlessness is reality). Once you are not trapped by the mind you can help yourself and others. "Let go of everything completely; there are no difficulties."

There is really not a lot I can add to that except to say these are things I really needed to hear right now, and hope you find them similarly compelling.

Dreams of Falling

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I started having dreams where I would fall from a tall building or crumbling cliff. The sensation was itself terrifying, flailing helplessly into blackness. Subjectively the fall would seem endless, always with the added fear of what would happen when I hit bottom. Objectively the sensation may not have lasted more than a few moments. I would apparently shout quite loudly and then wake up.

One of my parents suggested that, it being my dream, the next time it happened I should just dream up a soft landing. I scoffed. Sounded so simplistic, so like a parents advice when really they could not understand that if I had any control over my dreams I would not be falling in the first place!

And yet somehow in the subsequent weeks and months, when this dream would occur I recall thinking "wait, I can try and change this." Suddenly there was a small space, inside the dream, where I could look at it without being completely overwhelmed by that seemingly endless sensation of falling. It took some practice, but I vividly recall the first time I was able to conjure just a grey piece of solid ground underneath me. Such sweet unbelievable relief to be landed, resting, no longer in stark peril. After a few months the dreams stopped completely, and for years afterwards I gave it little thought.

By college, I had run into the concept of lucid dreaming and could occasionally 'wake up' inside my dreams, and perhaps affect their course or content. I mark this as the first way in which I ever understood that my mind was somehow multilayered...that myself and my mind were anything but unified and monolithic. That a technique applied with one part of the mind can affect how another part of the mind operates, functions or reacts.

I think this is why, when I encountered Buddhism, it made so much sense to me that hundreds of years of self observation, comparing notes, codifying over centuries could lead to a theory of mind not too far from our own neuroscience. And that everyday practices such as lovingkindness, tonglen, and Zen sitting, working with precepts, could help me or anyone else create the space to better respond to everyday struggles.

In extremis, the past week I have been losing stamina, feeling more and more dizzy. Over the weekend I crashed so hard while out with my children I had to lie down on the sidewalk. The cascade of panic about possible outcomes to the situation was very much a free fall. Even now, days later, I still get stuck in loops of what might have happened, how badly things might have turned out. And what might happen next.

So it was just last night lying in the dark in bed, I remembered about the dreams of falling. From a practical day to day standpoint, especially given my current challenges in recovery, I realized that the practice now must be to try to recognize when I am falling while awake, and instead of focusing on the terrifying heights or the fear of the crash, to try to work with crafting a soft landing place. May it serve all beings.

Fear not.

On Loving Stories

Zen Confessions time...I love stories.

Izzat so wrong?

While sitting, one approach to clearing the mind is to recognize when the monkey brain has bounded off in a new direction. Then simply name the line of thinking, and recenter on the counting. Usually I find myself spinning on some aspect if life, or how it "should" be but isn't, how it was and will never be again, or how I wish it hadn't been. Recognizing the drift, I name it "story" and come back to center.

As an English major and someone mad for narrative, I have noticed that if I have been reading any time close to the moment I get on the meditation cushion, there's even more sludge than usual to wade through before mind settles down. I have an extra layer of story, usually fiction, sometimes biography or research all fresh and interesting to contemplate instead of getting down to brass tacks.

Like swimming through a turbulent sargasso, I feel like I have to push these seaweed distractions to each side as I swim down to a more tranquil depth. At the same time I know it shouldn't matter whether the story is "my" story, or someone else's, as long as I am mindful of whatever comes up.

Does not stop me from reading, however.

When feeling ill, my old standby since the fifth grade was to stack the books high by the bed, and read, sleep, eat, repeat until I felt better.

Since I've been hammered with the adrenal burnout, I've spent weekends (and once almost two weeks) just reading, hoping that the down time will help me recover. What I am discovering is that in fact, anything too emotionally compelling is actually more of a strain than I should be putting myself through right now. Evidently, everyday life with two kids and two cats in the house plus work has enough stress without adding more.

So...spending a lot more time reading facts & research, learning about the body and nutrition, health topics, and in the evenings, Zen sources.

Reading one of those last night, Deshimaru's Way of True Zen (thanks Pigasus for the recommendation), I recognized that a great deal of how teaching is effectively transmitted is through metaphor, comparison, and quick narrative sketches. In other words, stories. In this case, stories to help us wake up, as opposed to those simply meant to entertain or distract.

But don't the best stories both engage us to the point we forget ourselves, and then plop us right down in the middle of significant recognition and resonance? The ones I love most, do.

From Cave to Corporation

Was introduced by a former colleague to an interesting person this week, named Gregory Burdulis. For eight years he was a practicing Theravadin Monk, but he has left his hermitage in Burma and returned to the USA to engage in work I find fascinating: attempting to insert mindfulness meditation into the modern corporation.

Specifically he was invited to work with ad firm CP+B. If you read CopyRanter, you know he calls his own colleagues "lying liars who lie." But I take it as an extremely good sign that one of the principals at the storied firm thought it might be important for their employees to actually live a more contemplative, centered and full life. Of course, the idea is that they will also be more creative. I'll take whatever reason works to get meditation into the modern corporate ethos and keep it there. Once there I have the strong suspicion it will do a lot more to shift the overall culture, stealthily and over time, than might otherwise be accomplished by "outside influence."

Going from a hermitage to an ad firm is kind of like visiting one of the suffering planes -- it's Bodhisattva work to be sure, but that had to be a shock to the system.

Here is Gregory's TEDxBoulder talk:

I love what he says here about sitting in the deep dark morning:

listening to the crickets sing
they were singing a love song...
it was an invitation

Aside from his monk-ness, his other significant street cred includes having done work on The Artist's Way with Julia Cameron, contemporary/ conceptual performance dance, and worked in Hospice care Chapliancy.

Something he says in his bio that I'll be practicing with especially when things get tough on this recovery path: "pain is inevitable but suffering is optional." [On edit: Please see this post by Mystic Meandering about suffering in fact also being real and inevitable, with the clarification that it is the "story" we might weave about the suffering that is optional...]

More of his work here, from the Wisdom 2.0 conference. Go to 51:32 for the start of his panel. [Also on edit: this session is about Mindfulness in the workplace, great panelists, and is also worth watching because you get to see Greg turn the tables on the moderator (twice).]

Waking up Grateful

This morning I had cause to wake up thinking about the commute-time of your average bumble bee.

What time would he have to fly out of the hive in order to arrive at the flowering bush outside our bedroom window by 6AM sharp? No weekend hours for the hard working bee, no sir. Nor did he care that I wanted to sleep at least a smidge longer on my Sunday morning...

It has been unseasonably hot the last two days, and since we have no air conditioning, we sleep with the window open. I've been reading Dogen's exhortations about continuous practice in the evenings.  So the stage was set when I awoke this morning to incessant buzzing for me to notice that my instinctual hindbrain would not believe that a screen between my head and the bee a half-foot or so away should allow me to safely continue sleeping.  Nope, instinctual hindbrain said: Bee = danger. Wake up! 

Meanwhile discursive brain immediately kicked into gear as I cracked my eyelid open just wide enough to check my watch. Great scott that bee is punctual, what time did he have to leave in order to get here and get busy this early...at exactly 6AM?

If this had happened on almost any other day, what would have come next is resentment, spinning about the lost sleep, the endocrine system cranking into gear so I could leap into action. As if there was anything I could do to keep that bee, and his brothers, from their appointed rounds.

But this morning, having been hearing about colony collapse and all the related theories about mites and/or pesticides, I was just glad to hear them doing their thing.

And it was only a small step from there to ask myself, in the spirit of continuous practice, could I transform my instinctual hindbrain alarm at hearing that buzzzzz so close to my head, the analytical brain, the take-action conditioning -- and just be grateful that these extraordinary motes, so essential to our ecosystem, were making those pollen connections in our little corner of Indra's net?

Kalu Rinpoche the elder wrote:

The Vajrayana path leaves nothing out, no matter what. Nothing can be rejected. We simply transmute our mind and its experiences by recognizing their actual nature... to practice and attain genuine realization even in our usual context. To that end, Vajrayana practitioners use "sacred vision" with which they recognize that this world is already fundamentally pure; it is already a pure land, a realm where all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are visible and the Dharma is understood. Likewise, they consider all beings fundamentally Buddhas and that there is no real distinction between samsara and nirvana, which are merely appearances. In the practice of this sacred vision the world is meditated on as a pure land and beings as aspects of Buddha; all forms are enlightened aspects, all sounds are mantra, and mind is pure mind.

I don't know if I'm committing a hopeless oversimplification, but Dogen's continuous practice and this description of the Vajrayana path seem quite resonant. It works for me.

Anger and Karma

As this was raised over on Aerial Pork, and what I wanted to say in response was really more than is polite to leave in someone's comment section, I want to write today about the precept on not being angry, and if I have time dip a little bit into karma.

When I was growing up, anger was one of those things I denied so strongly that for the first two decades of my life I claimed to friends that I didn't get angry. At all. Ever.

Mr. Placid, cool and unruffled. Even-keeled.

Anger was scary, I'd seen it enough to know "that's not me, no way" which of course meant I had driven it so deep underground that it came out in a leaky pressure cooker fashion, teeth grinding away... When you say someone is out of touch with their emotions, well in this case my Anger and I hadn't ever even talked.

By my mid-twenties, I did finally realize that my lack of awareness around anger was -- far from being an admirable quality -- actually gumming up my emotional works pretty badly.

As I started paying attention to anger, I measured my progress in the following fashion: I would say to my then new bride: "You remember that thing you said two weeks ago?"

"Yeah," she'd say. "What about it?"

"Well, that really made me angry."

"It took you two weeks to figure out that made you angry?"

"Yes." I'd say, studiously not getting angry at her reaction.

So I would actually keep track of how many days less than two weeks it took me to realize I was angry. And that meant progress. It became a running joke. After a while I was down to two days. Then it was only a few minutes. Now, thank goodness, I pretty much feel the anger as it arises. And I can work to transform it.

During that time when I was just beginning a daily practice, but still had no handle on anger, I had systematically renounced the majority of my usual coping strategies. Without those filters, barrierrs and crutches I began realizing that not only did I get angry, I was angry almost all the time. I was a constantly simmering cauldron of judgements, in true perfectionist fashion always dissatisfied with how little my own actions and those of the people around me -- and reality in general -- met my admittedly rediculous expectations.

What I found really helpful to do, because this recognition scared me, was to work with Pema Chodron's "meditate on whatever provokes resentment."

Tracing each resentment back to its source meant discovering everything from simple fatigue, to those myriad judgements, but also to fear, simple emotional needs, expectations, assumptions and my self-imposed silence about all of those. Recognizing how self-generated most of it is.

Raising our first infant child, we were cranky, bone-tired, cross-eyed and stupid with lack of sleep -- resentments and anger flared at the smallest things. This practice was essential during that time. And it might seem ludicrous, but as I would sit down at night on my cushion for just a few moments of peace, the cat would come around and I'd think "Oh great, how long is this going to take before he settles down? I'm trying to meditate here!!" I'd aim all the resentment of the entire day at this cat, who, being a cat, let it roll off completely. It was disarming. After a while I just let being present with the cat be the practice, until he settled down.

That's all nice and pat, but there's another level which I call Meeting your Inner Murderer. Buddhism isn't just about recognizing that everyone including you was once somebody's good little baby, it's also recognizing that everyone including you has also wanted to maim, murder and otherwise ruin the credit rating of your boss, your best friend, and that jerk who just cut you off in traffic.

Recognizing that every single person you walk by on the street is a great deal of the time also almost drowning in their own sea of anger and resentment, it sets you back. Helps build compassion for them. But even this didn't help me feel anything but resentment at my own anger and resentment. Anger was still Other and Unwanted. So whenever I recognized anger the plan was still transform it by god as quickly as possible into snowflakes or baby ducks or whatever it took so long as I wasn't angry any more. I was still missing the mark here.

And I'd like to say this all happened in sequence but the fact is after so long it is kind of mushy what the order was, but in the middle of grappling with the precepts and trying to get a handle on my anger I ran into this quote by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Treat your anger with the utmost respect and tenderness, for it is no other than yourself. Do not suppress it -- simply be aware of it. Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things they are transformed. When you are aware that you are angry, your anger is transformed. If you destroy your anger, you destroy the Buddha, for Buddha and Mara are of the same essence. Mindfully dealing with anger is like taking the hand of a little brother.

Oh snap. I really, really didn't want to make friends with my anger. Fine to process it like outgoing toxic waste, but to treat it like taking the hand of a little brother...but that's the practice. And I'm so glad to be reminded of it.

Getting back to meeting your Inner Murderer, TNH in his Old Path, White Clouds tells the story of Angulimala the serial killer who converts after meeting the Buddha. One of the things that has always given me great comfort when thinking about all my ancient twisted karma is that if this guy could just STOP, drop his old ways, and become an Arhant, then there has to be hope for any of us. Which is...probably the point of that parable. But nobody taught it to me like that, I just ran into it reading Old Path one day and it hit me like a thunderbolt.

Bodhidharma said: "Self-nature is inconceivably wondrous. In the Dharma of the No-Self, not postulating a self is called the precept of refraining from anger."

No self, no problem.

Open to all beings and myself

with unrealized anger

eyebrows contract, vision blurs

we strike out blindly.

With realized anger

our foreheads touch

and even with closed eyes we see.

Peace in Action

I recently signed up for Tricycle magazine's daily email.  It has only been a few weeks, but already several times I've found their wisdom snippets striking close to home.

This one was from a 1992 interview with Thailand's Sulak Sivaraksa. Just an excerpt:

In America and Europe, everyone is very active. But if you become too active, you lose the essence of Buddhism. You only have the Buddhist labels. One must cultivate peace to be compassionate. Without this, what you do, even as an 'engaged Buddhist' is just a lot of activity with no good purpose.

Ouch.

 For those of us who take right livelihood all the way over to the do-gooder extreme, it's hard not to take -- if not pride, at least solace -- in the feeling that no matter how badly one may be screwing up in any other realms of life, at least I got this part right.

And then this very difficult pill to swallow, that anything done to extremes is still life out of balance, and thus not really right livelihood. If it harms you, your family by extension, and those you seek to serve.

I read How Can I Help? by Ram Dass probably three times in my early career, trying to push the very separate circles in the Venn Diagram Of My Life into closer congruence.  A life of service called and who was I not to answer?

When I ran into Bernie Glassman's Instructions to the Cook, I had to sit down in the middle of the bookstore aisle, the sense of recognition and resonance was so strong. The Supreme Meal. Hungry Ghosts feeding each other. Social action, social enterprise, Bearing Witness, engaged Buddhism. Sign me up!

But that sneaky Protestant work ethic, "just do your best, honey" messages, and thorough training in perfectionism ... well what exactly is "our best" and what is the point past which it is actually unhealthy to throw energy even in an unassailably good direction?

What Sivaraksa points out is that if we don't embody peace then we may actually be doing damage as we seek to do good.

Upon reflection I see that after a few relatively solid years I reached the point where I approached my work as work. Fulfilling certainly, but I had dropped my practice more than a decade ago, and my efforts to lead a life of service eventually had no foundation.

Something to sit with.

And the cosmic ha ha here, having scanned the top bookshelf and opened the Ram Dass book again tonight, flipping through the sections I had dog-eared... the second to last chapter is titled: Burnout.  Guess I'll just be re-reading that one later tonight.

Dreams and Radical Creativity

A few years ago I had a dream that challenged my opinions about the human capacity for creativity.

Now, there is not much more offputting than listening to someone trying to recount their dream, but I ask you to bear with me as I share just this one scene:

I am visiting my old college art professor at his home studio, the one where I worked so many hot afternoons helping to prepare canvasses. As we catch up, I am casually flipping through his stack of recent artwork. Pausing briefly to reflect on each image, I comment on perhaps eight to ten paintings, lithographs and other prints. Overall I view perhaps twenty works, before he and I wander into another room, and the dream takes me elsewhere.

None of the works were ones I had seen before. All were done in his style. I was dreaming in full color, because I remember remarking on his use of color in several pieces.

None of the works actually existed, except as instantaneous, fully completed creations of my dreaming mind.

The reason I even recall this dream is that once I woke up, I was struck by the fact that for the most part when I would try to draw or paint I would get completely stuck. Before I even started, all these doubts and judgements would arise about the final product. And more often than not, no matter what I wound up creating, I was unsatisfied with the result.

So how did that square with a dream where I could and did create what to my own critical eye were complete and satisfying works, twenty in a row, in the space of a few moments? Whether I had the skill technically to create them by hand myself is immaterial. The vision was there.

What this dream -- and indeed the entire human facility of dreaming -- points to is that the human mind is capable of absolutely astounding creativity. And what stops us from accessing that creativity are mostly our own ideas, fears and stories about our limitations, and about what makes an acceptable final product. Ideas which also don't exist except in our minds.

For the purposes of this post, I am only talking about visual art. But I believe that everything stated above just as easily applies to any other type of human creativity, be it music, choreography, narrative or what have you.

Attempting to work with what I learned from that dream, I have tried to retrain myself when faced with a blank page to just dive in and start making marks. To just see what comes up. Sure, I will continue to draw an occasional still life. But I find it a lot more satisfying these days to start without any plan at all and see what happens.

Turns out this is a lot more fun, and more often than not, I am satisfied with the final product.

What is circular for me about all this is that "just dive in and see what happens" is a lot of what my college art professor was trying to teach us so long ago.

This sums it up, from ZenDot Studio:

“If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it’s trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.”

--John Daido Loori from "The Zen of Creativity"

Inner and Outer Weather

For several years I worked with the practice of pausing whenever I left a building, to just look up at the sky. To notice what was happening there. I would do this especially before entering or leaving the office.

Each morning and evening, look up. How is mind today? Mind has stars, moon and Milky Way. Mind has rising sun. Mind is cloudy. Mind is dark. Mind is clear blue. Mind is cooling into evening redness.

This was a great support for sitting practice, to consider the mind as the big open sky, always changing. To recognize more fully how both are always changing. That thoughts, like clouds -- if allowed to just be in that mind-sky -- would eventually move on or dissipate. That we have internal weather not unlike the outer weather in the sky. 

Just last night I made a new connection between internal and outer weather that caused me to recall my old practice of looking up.

Of course we may become wrapped up in our inner weather, and mediation can help us get perspective on that; to work with it. But consider that we also come into unavoidable contact with other weather systems in the form of family, friends, colleagues. And for those the outlook can be anywhere from calm, to stormy-gloomy, or even stormy-exuberant. For most of us, this is weather that cannot help but affect our own weather system.

The National and International climate may also affect our internal weather.  Earthquakes, floods, financial collapse -- hard not to be affected.

Cultivating a mind that sees clearly. This can be difficult especially if we are not conscious of the effects of outer weather on our inner weather. So we may need reminders to check the weather, to metaphorically look up, and see what is happening.

Like Joko Beck advises about the practice of specifically labeling our own thoughts, not just "thinking. thinking" or "worrying. worrying. worrying." but "having a thought about work." And through labeling, the thoughts become like the clouds and eventually dissipate. (For most of us, quickly replaced by new clouds!)

Over time as we practice labeling our inner weather, we may also find ourselves better able to label outer weather as we encounter it. Not just "Janine: So angry today!" but to be specific: "Janine is expressing her feelings of anger and frustration." Perhaps that way we can, depending on circumstances, either talk with Janine about, or simply ruminate silently on the roots of that frustration without being drawn into its cyclone.

This is just another way of saying, work with circumstances as they arise. Cultivating a mind that sees clearly.

Back to the practice of looking up at the sky. It has another benefit. After a time, this practice becomes just delightful in that you begin to sense down to your bones something normally reserved for dreams: endless, radical variety.  Even viewing the sky from the same vantage every morning and evening, it is never remotely the same twice.  Compare two consecutive grey and overcast days, and the quality of grey, the luminosity pushing through the fog...always new, always different.

I want to write about this and its relationship to creativity a some point soon.

Authentic Suffering and Health

In my family growing up there were two deep cultural traditions around the enumeration of suffering.

One of these came from what I have to assume was a South Eastern US pass-time of gossiping about the neighbors' hardships, with the obligatory hand-wringing, doleful noises, not so secret sense of superiority and relief that lightning hadn't struck closer to home. More than semi-pro, such sessions could go on quite a while in gruesome detail until our elder matriarch might state with finality, "Well let's not dwell on that, no we won't dwell on the negative. No." 

And our poor young psyches, still vibrating from what one of my siblings calls the "litany of horrors" were expected to switch gears and go on with a light and lively conversation. Pass the dinner rolls, dear, thank you. 

Alongside and intertwined with that was a Southern European tradition that I only became conscious of when watching the singularly depressing My Life as a Dog. Which is to say whenever we were confronted with suffering in our own lives, we engaged in a group exercise of pointing out that surely there were others who were suffering much more, and then go on to list a few examples in great detail. So while meant to make you feel better in comparison, such a verbal smoke-bomb instead reduced the value and integrity of whatever experience we might have been needing to work through.

While I think I've done a good job eschewing the gossip, damned if I can't break myself of the My Life as a Dog habit even now, facing my own recent health issues. "Our friends lost their son in a freak accident; so and so's child has cancer..." etc.

All of this is adding story on top of story, layering and spinning so that we aren't present with our own suffering. An attempt at self-insulation. My sense lately is we cannot find perfect health, even amongst infirmities, unless we can be present with the reality of our own suffering.

The Dalai Grandma offers us this translation of a Buddhist chant from Thich Nhat Hanh:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. 
There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My  actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences  of
my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Which I will begin working with, and for which I am grateful.

Dogen Zenji

 

Ariel Pork gives us a snippet from Dogen's Valley Sounds, Mountain  Colors:

Slipping out of your old skin, not  held back by past views, you manifest immediately what has been  dormant for boundless eons. As this very moment manifests, "I" don't  know, "Who" doesn't know, "You" have no expectations, and "the buddha eye" sees beyond seeing. This experience is beyond the realm of human  thinking.

Just this.

On Not Sleeping

So I'm doing it again, where resistance to being present with suffering includes storytelling about how someone always has it worse, really. One of our friends goes several days in a row without being able to sleep. I'm not dealing with anything like that.

When the adrenals are slagged, while they may not work at full power, they also don't really believe it is ok to take a rest. Having been in emergency response mode for the better part of a decade, it is hard to convince them that the crisis (most of which was manufactured) is really not immanent.

What is happening is the experience of being tired and dizzy all day, working with random symptoms and trying not to panic about those. Having cut out any screen time after 8pm, filling that time before sleep with drawing, quieting the mind. Then finding that sleep just won't come. Breathing through that, counting breaths, finally asleep and something in the flow of our house (a literal catfight under the bed, for instance) will wake me again and then it's 45 min or more of working through annoyance at waking, then spinning on all of the above, about not sleeping, finally returning to counting the breath, calming the mind, and again sleep. But it's not a deep restful sleep.

The predominant description I am finding for this state on the adrenal recovery sites is "wired & tired."

So it was with great thanks that I ran across the below this evening,  from ZenDotStudio:  

I was reminded of a Gil Fronsdal talk on insomnia where he suggested rather than fretting about lack of sleep a person could lie there and appreciate that they were safe and comfortable, resting in the present, rather than building a story around sleeplessness.

So simple a prescription, will just be giving that a try in a few hours.

Working with Fear

Working with fear, emerging from a fear-centered framework or set of circumstances, we notice a few things.

There is the fear itself, which if fed becomes a self-amplifying loop and can lead to complete overwhelm.

Then there is whatever it is that can sit and watch the fear arise, and which can also insert a needful brake: breathe, notice, breathe, notice, breathe...

There is the fear about present circumstances, and there is fear about possible outcomes or implications. Many different fear-flavors.

There is even a Book of Hours for fear, the fear of the early morning is not the same as the fear felt at mid-day or while trying to fall asleep at night.

Fear often seems tied to intense feelings of panicked attachment to or frantic avoidance of certain circumstances. Whatever it is we don't want to change might change. Or whatever it is that we don't want, will never change. Surprise! Thanks to impermanence, everything you don't want to change will always change, and nothing that you might fear will always stay the same.

Perhaps getting stuck in fear is because we forget about impermanence, even for a little while.

So can we make friends with impermanence as an ally to help us work with fear? To help us understand that no matter what we find at the root of our particular fears of the moment, it will not last?

 

Just This

I was all set to post this evening and then I read the latest on Dalai Grandma, called the Nirvana Fallacy.  Really so well put, what more is there to say?

And yet as Katagiri Roshi puts it "You have to say something!" 

One of the quotations she posted this evening points out that many of the lineages were practiced, codified and transmitted not by rarefied intellectuals, but by regular folk. Nobody closer to the absolutely unavoidable wrack and struggle of everyday existence, who better to practice with it and from that practice generate wisdom worth sharing?

Ikkyu says:

wife, daughters, friends this is for you satori 
is mistake after mistake

So very guilty of putting an intellectual distance between myself and something that called me. I studied Buddhism for years academically until one of my teachers required me to meditate in order to pass his course. That was the crack opening the door. Still kept it at an academic distance until I found Joko Beck. Her two books helped me understand among many other things, that being present with this absolutely pedestrian moment, that is the practice. Later Roshi Halifax and Pema Chodron further underscored that perspective.

In one of Pema's talks, a woman during Q&A says something along the lines of "Lately I just want to chuck all the day to day frustrations of my life and set sail on the great burning ship of the Dharma!"

"Oh honey..." says Ane Pema, with that grandmother compassion that does not spare as it cuts. "That everyday life you're talking about leaving, that IS the great burning ship of the Dharma."

Even knowing that, for several more years I felt that one couldn't truly practice unless one were to take vows and become a monk or a nun. And one day while I was very unattractively pining for such a life it took a young Tibetan monk, very politely, putting my nose in it for me to recognize, as he put it "My life, your life, no difference. Just the practice."

As a householder the last ten years with two children...many very full episodes. In my more wry moments I had to wonder if a lot of what the younger monks are put through is so they can get to recognitions that Householders get for free at 1:30am after a week of no sleep because the baby is still sick. More ego and story but it made me feel better at the time, joking to my wife "hey we're having our own sesshin."

On edit:

Become one with whatever you are doing. That is the way.

Isshiki ino bendo

To practice the way with wholeheartedness.

      --Dogen Zenji