Category Archives: Western Teachers

Teachers primarily of American and European cultures

did you know you’ve already been chosen?

by

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!

waltzing with the mind-body chatter

by

I’ve been contemplating the positive correlation between hiding one’s light under a bushel and wimpiness.  When I was a child, my father said, “Work hard.  Excel.  And you will be chosen.”  So I did.  And it has been a never-ending source of confusion to me that no one has yet anointed me the Chosen One.  I’m sure you are just as surprised.  About your own absence of anointment, I mean; because I’m quite sure you too have worked hard, excelled, and waited to be chosen.

Or perhaps, it’s not so much about being chosen but about being seen.  Perhaps it’s about being valued.  Appreciated? Or is it about being acknowledged, that briefest of nods our way that says: Well done.

Now, I’m not whining.  Truly.  I’m wondering about those moments when I’m caught between stepping out and showing my talents or stepping back and avoiding opportunity denied.  I always thought it would be terribly self-centered to do the former and yet could not bear the thought of the latter.  So I suspect over the years I’ve done this silly awkward dance, hauling that little light of mine out with one hand and having the bushel poised over it in the other.

End result: A wimpish waltz with fate.

What to do?  I’ve started reading a rather captivating book on Zen practice sent along for review* which has a few nuggets about this and that.  What caught me however, though the author himself doesn’t write of this relationship between busheled lights and the wimp factor, is the issue of self-centeredness.  He notes that zazen is the slowing down of this self-centered mind-body chattering we live out.

What?

Yes, you read it right.  It is the chattering that is self-centered.  Not the stepping out or the appropriate proclamation of one’s expertise, goodness, rightness, capability, and power.

The mind is self-centered.  Autogenic: it creates itself in the world it creates.  And, if we lack awareness, of the mind-body link, the body follows close at its heels.

That’s quite the revelation for me.  Now the real problem: what shall I do with all these bushels?

______________

*The review will be published sometime in June.

the center of everything

by

Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?

Don’t call this world adorable, or useful, that’s not it.

It’s frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.

But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn’t the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven’t the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?

Don’t call this world an explanation, or even an education.

When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,

 as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust? 

Mary Oliver, from Why I Wake Early (2004)

mind as an apparent multiplicity

by

This is from What is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger in the chapter The Arithmetical Paradox: The oneness of mind.  Schrödinger writes that the sense we are multiple minds is a creation of our perception and “in truth there is only one mind.”  He quotes Aziz Nasafi, a 13th century Islamic Persian mystic:

On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world, the body to the bodily world.  In this however only the bodies are subject to change.  The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window.  According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world.  The light itself however remains unchanged.

May the light shine through you and may we all remember that we are one.

Have a delightful weekend and thank you for practising!

soft power for introverts

by

Ben Howard, author of One Time, One Meeting, wrote this lovely piece on introverts and how to engage in a world that is driven, loud, and often self-promoting.  I particularly liked the ideas of “quiet persistence” and “soft power.”  Ben references a book about introverts by Susan Cain - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking – and then in his inimitable way takes it deep into the dharma, weaving together patience and diligence.

Watching the window installers, I was struck by the steady, unrelenting way they approached the task.  And it is a formidable task, this tearing out wood frames of a friable old farm-house without taking out chunks of the (wood) wall.  Hour by hour, window after window was pried away from almost a hundred years of clinging to the frame; the opening was cleared of debris and the new window inserted.  They cleaned the floor and outdoor surfaces of splinters and nails, methodically moving from section to section.  There wasn’t a moment of wasted or mis-directed energy; conversation was light yet never broke the rhythmic dance between deconstruction and reconstruction.

In a quiet moment’s conversation at the conference last week, a friend and I shared the frustrations we feel when we want immediate results and have them come in a particular form beyond what the situation can grant us.  We reflected on the years we’ve put into our work and eventually gazed astonished at what had emerged from our own quiet persistence.  I spoke with someone else of wanting a more “intimate relationship” between our organizations and later through a different interaction with her came to a painful realization of what that intimacy would cost.  I wondered what diligent persistence in that direction would bring me.  In another conversation with a friend, I garnered from her wisdom that the true circle of impact is much closer to the heart and it’s easy to disperse our energy when we get caught by the wanting-creatures.

Kabir’s warnings against the wanting-creature notwithstanding, it’s difficult to “stand firm in that which you are.”  This is especially so in a world that loudly proclaims it knows us better than we could know ourselves.  It’s easy to doubt our senses and to lose them.  It’s a short tumble into the rabbit hole of crippling grandiosity and inadequacy.  To persist with diligence requires reducing our reactivity to the voices that decry our strengths, our commitment, and our willingness to begin again moment after moment.  It means honestly appraising our deepest intentions, willingly acknowledging our deepest fears, and proceeding with attentive awareness of the impact of our actions.

I’m not sure if this is what is meant by “soft power” but it does seem softer than the sledgehammer and crowbar approach and more powerful than strong-arming a connection.