Category Archives: 108 thoughts

don’t play with the code

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We’re live!  More accurately, we’re reincarnated!  A new website for the clinic with luscious pages in my favourite colour scheme – Facebook!  It’s fascinating what goes into designing and setting up a website.  Not quite like building a Bride of Frankenstein but similar to creating a seductive front to attract love interests.  I’m coming to terms with this balance of having a worklife that is inextricable from my lovelife.  I love what I do, the way I get to be in what I do.  And, I’ve finally opened my heart to the reality that I am doing what I love.  There’s nothing specific I can point to, no agenda or calendar item fully captures the “doing-ness.”  It just emerges from who I become in each moment, each encounter in the day.

I didn’t plan it this way.  In fact, if I had the foresight to plan my life as it is at this moment, I would have thrown in a few more Joomla K2 modules and extensions that auto-fed my brilliant ideas directly onto the blogs or ping-backed when there was chocolate nearby.

In seriousness, I also learned something really important about the “back-end” codes of greed, anger, and delusion embedded in the templates of corporations.  Some you can play with even if your last code writing was FORTRAN.  Some you are best to leave alone.  Practice has taught me through sufficient rounds of humility work that learning the difference between them is important to emotional longetivity.  

on the art of losing one’s head

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The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara while moving through the deep chaos of renovations saw that form is emptiness.  She lost her head over that insight.  I take it only as a comment on the profoundity of the teachings and not a reflection of the vast complication that is my life at the moment.  However, Avalokite presents an important consideration which is the point of our practice: how do we lose our heads skillfully?

IF you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

With apology to Rudyard Kipling who began his poem with the implication that success lies in keeping one’s head when all about are losing theirs, I am beginning to understand that the object of practice is very much the losing of one’s head. My head.  Lost, fallen, tumbled off its precarious perch atop a spindle of a spine.  Strangely, this is a good thing because as that unwieldy lump falls off, I am left with nothing to rely on but my intimate connection with who I am.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating…

I was blessed with a number of conversations over the last week with friends and colleagues who are good at holding my feet to the fire of trust, patience, transparency, and meeting aversion.  Perhaps the best teachings I received were to drop away from the anxiety that keeps me from speaking my truth.  The tendency when we fear loss is a natural gasp, an intake and holding of the breath which easily translates into a holding on.  When I see this as nothing more than a knee-jerk response fueled by thoughts of loss and not any loss that is real, my head falls off.  That frontal lobe dominance, that story-machine which churns out the miserable and the macabre – it withers and shrivels and drops off.  

This is a challenging practice.  It calls on us to hold our seat in the firestorm yet not be foolishly consumed, to be flexible in our commitments yet honour them, to hold true to our values yet find a path that is mutually nourishing.  It calls on us to lose our head and find our heart.

Avalokiteshvara lost her head one day.  And as I contemplated in the deep course of practice, I found the heart of what is true, intimate, and pure.

 

just reminding me

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A thought went up my mind to-day 
by Emily Dickinson

A thought went up my mind to-day 
That I have had before, 
But did not finish,–some way back, 
I could not fix the year, 

Nor where it went, nor why it came 
The second time to me, 
Nor definitely what it was, 
Have I the art to say. 

But somewhere in my soul, I know 
I’ve met the thing before; 
It just reminded me–’t was all– 
And came my way no more. 

bazinga

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I’ve been AWOL for a few days refining our new clinic website and dealing with various demons and dragons showing up on the doorstep.  One of the things about working with links and webby things are the rabbit holes I end up falling into.  Somehow a YouTube of the Muppets Movie lead me this one: An interview with Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper, a physicist, on the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

Sheldon Cooper, quirky and brilliant, is fascinating – an irritating, compelling portrait of rational over-drive welded to self-defined realities that are seemingly impervious to the salve of relationships.  In the interview, Parsons explains how the character works and its power as a lesson in modelling tolerance.  

What?  Irritating people as teachers?  

We should look in the mirror.  Bazinga!

Have a wonderful weekend!

did you know you’ve already been chosen?

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In response to yesterday’s post about hiding under a bushel and hoping to be chosen, my dear pal posted on the 108 Zen Books Facebook page, “perhaps you just haven’t realized that you have been chosen….”  I posted back a smart-ass comment but she’s right.  About the same time, I was reading a practice tip post by Ken McLeod about our reactions to adversity.  Some respond with gratitude and some with bitterness.  Why?, asked a reader.  McLeod’s response is here.  In essence he says it’s normal to react with “Why me?” which leads to all forms anxiety in the absence of a good enough answer.  In the end it comes down to accepting that you may never know why something happens to you.  Then he writes that through acceptance we find a way to be with the event with equanimity:

In the case of cruelty, you recognize that, however cruel and vicious your assailant, you understand, even though it makes no rational sense. Yet you have no sense of moral superiority or righteousness. 

The last sentence was a heart-opener.  I had shared with a colleague the frustration of seeing someone “get ahead” despite what I saw as all his shortcomings.  And digging into the raw truth I said, Why not me?  Somewhere along the back-and-forth of our conversation he used the word “jealous.”  While it didn’t feel right, it made me sit up and listen to my tone, examine my intention, and dig deeper.  Was I really jealous?  Was it about belonging in a place and space to which I was not entitled?  Was it greed?  Unearned assets?  I’m going to need a convoy of backhoes and bulldozers to get into this one!

When I tie in McLeod’s statement of being released from a sense of moral superiority and righteousness, I can get a glimmer of what might be happening.  True, I react strongly to injustice.  But is righteousness the appropriate response to injustice?  Is there even such a thing as a personal injustice or is that just a euphemism for self-centered?  Oh dear.  Pants down again!

Practice tells me that the path out of this is one of gratitude.  Accepting that there are many places I will never enter.  So being grateful for all the millions of hectares of space I can enter is important to see and practice seeing clearly.  I’ve already been chosen.  There is nothing more to add.  Nothing more to demand.  But it doesn’t stop there.  These friends, colleagues, and teaching moments are just ingredients for the meal.  They are wasted left in the fridge and no more nourishing than the poison of all hindrances.

Time to get cooking!