Category Archives: reflections

hearts that open

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At the end of a retreat conducted in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, retreatants are invited to take the Five Mindfulness Trainings.  These are the lay precepts cast in terms of positive engagement by Thich Nhat Hanh.  At one level that is so; at another, they continue to contain elements of the “do not” found in all calls for ethical behaviours.  While the terminology is not as directive, the commitment to not kill, not steal, not engage in sexual misconduct, not speak in anger or untruthfully, and not to use intoxicants is very much evident.  It’s unavoidable really.  The first step of any practice whose intention is well being begins with restraint.

This aspect of ethics is a touchy one for many of us.  We don’t like being told what to do; even more, we dislike being told what not to do.  And yet, in the liminal space between moving forward and holding back, there may be something valuable that can emerge.

So today, I’m watching the many ways in which I can act with restraint, hold back, pause.  Not as a process of denying myself or others but rather as a practice of awareness, of not obstructing the possibility of something different arising.

hearts that awaken

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I’m stretching my right brain a bit and trying out some abstracts. Thankfully, this is a low-risk proposal with few consequences to others and the world.  As with most of my spontaneous attempts at changing my mind’s stuck points, I started off on the wrong foot.  I thought I was splashing grays on the paper but in turned out to be sepia.  And yet… and yet… the tones seem quite at home and what was meant to be curtains of ethereal grays and blues ended up being something about earth and sky.

So it was with this past weekend.  Frank and I attended a retreat organized by the local sangha which practices in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition.  It was being held in a center that is the home of the Grey Nuns (now the Grey Sisters).  The building is a residence for the Grey Sisters, a retreat center, a community resource for counselling and activities, and a museum of the history of the Grey Nuns.  And what started out as a practice of being in the present became a journey into my past.

You can read about the founder of the Grey Nuns, Marguerite D’Youville, here; a fascinating story of one woman’s life in the New France of the 1700′s, surviving adversity, and transforming her suffering into a path of service.  Her work with the poor was so reviled by the culture of the mid-1700′s that she and her supporters were mocked with the name “Les Grises” – the “grey women” or the “drunken women.”  Yet, despite the enormous opposition, they grew as a community and persevered to found and fund numerous hospitals, shelters, and schools globally.

Where does my past fit in this?  Walking down the hall of history at the retreat center and reading of the various schools the Grey Nuns founded, I realized I had been taught by them and two in particular might well have watered the seeds of practice for me.  As a child in elementary school, I only knew them as The Nuns and Sr. Leger in particular as the woman who saw through my defensive posturing and deep into my potential.  I lost touch with them only to reconnect with them in the Grey Nuns retirement residence in Montreal about 10 years ago when I was there for another retreat (in TNH’s tradition again).  There are few specific memories however what I remember of our relationship is set deep in my bones.  I know this because when went to meet Sr. Leger, I stood up taller and shook the cobwebs out of my brain.  She was never one to be tolerant of my tendency to sloppiness – whether it was in body or mind.  And through her persistence, I realize now that she transmitted to me an unrelenting devotion to the spirit of practice.

The pictures in the hallways were interesting relics.  What penetrated me was the interconnections and the surfacing of the past in a new perspective and with new understanding.

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.

 

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!