No mud

No lotus

I’ve been immersed in books lately.  More so than usual.  Unfortunately these are not books I’m reading but books that are arriving, arriving at the door.  Books to be reviewed, books to be read, books to be studied.  Chaplaincy books, poetry books, psychology books, Buddhist books – all clamouring for attention.  And dare I mention the pixelated books in my e-readers that are sending me subliminal messages via 3G?  I can skate by with some of these by scanning the text and getting a feel for the author’s message.  Others are denser woods to navigate through and I risk not seeing the forest through the trees.

In some genres more than others, seeing the trees without losing sight of the forest is important.  The specifics of the book are critical to understanding the teachings they impart.  They must be practiced to be embodied and only then does a reflection on them have legs.  In particular, every book about Buddhism is a book with which one practices.  I’ve yet to find a book of this genre that didn’t demand this singular, whole-hearted commitment from the reader.  So, I quiver in fear at the number of Buddhist-y books stacking up on my shelf – I cleared out a single shelf solely populated by Buddhism-books-to-be-reviewed – because there are not enough life-times to practice what is contained between the covers of these volumes.

Somewhat disheartened, I stumbled around the megalithic bookstore in town wishing every sheet of paper bound between glossy laminates would leap up and flap their way up through the vents in the ceiling.  I stared at volumes of books by the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh – two of the most prolific authors.  I rolled glassy-eyeballs over titles that proclaimed liberation and peace were possible.  And I bought one of them.

I can justify this!  Really.  It comes to me unburdened by any publishing company’s publicity agent.  In fact, Parallax Press is rather firm in ignoring my offers to review Thich Nhat Hanh’s books despite the sycophantic waving of my brown Order of Interbeing jacket.  So, blessed by such ignominy, I feel free to recommend this book, unhampered by any need to please anyone.

Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist sutras and commentaries initially looks like a compilation of Thấy’s various sutra commentary books.  It’s not.  It is 608 pages of revised translations and new commentaries on key sutras.  The Anapanasati, Satipatthana, Knowing a better way to live alone (my favourite and a life-changer), Better way to catch a snake, On the Middle Way, On Happiness, Eight Realizations of the Great Beings represent the Pali Canon.

The Heart and Diamond sutras bridge us into the Mahayana teachings.  Each sutra is given a clearer translation and deeper treatment in commentary than the previous single volumes.  This is followed with a series of sections focused solely on practice.  New and detailed exercises for the Awareness of Breathing and the Four Establishments of Mindfulness sutras are available in this voluminous text along with histories of and other texts related to the sutras.  The commentaries of the Diamond and Heart sutras are vastly expanded and directly connected to everyday life.

There’s a contemplative feel to the writing (though I admit often having trouble getting into Thấy’s style) and it promises to challenge anyone attempting a sutra study.  If ever there was a book that qualified being called a Buddhist Bible, this might be it.  I’m looking forward to practicing with it over my lifetime.

For some reason, the theme of dancing has been popping up in my writings.  Recently, I reviewed Mindfulness: an 8-week plan to find peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Dan Penman.  It’s a lovely book and as with any manual that guides us through our suffering, I approach it with a seriously critical stance.  Mark’s book makes it easier because of the chocolate meditation in the first chapter.  But letting that go, letting it dissolve, I am also aware that in my own struggles through anxiety and depression, I’ve never done well with the authoritarian, directive approach to healing.  I’m very much of the “let’s eat the pudding to see if it proves to be worthwhile.”  Yes, dear reader, the correct aphorism is that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”  In other words, like Zen, the words are devoid of teachings; the experience is the practice.

So with this book, I started with Chapter 1 and practiced each day to truly experience the cultivation of a different stance to my life as it is.  Here.  Now.  And yes, the chocolate helped.  But what helped more than anything is the connection with a lovely idea that our practice is one of learning to dance with life again.  I feel like I’m surfacing out of a heavy fog or maybe making land from a storm.  Whatever the metaphor of coming into ground from chaos, it feels like it is time to dance into my life.

Whole-heartedly.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

A thought went up my mind to-day 

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. 

The Dalai Lama came to town on Saturday and 7,000 people filled the stands at the Civic Center.  I had my typical and very individual response to seeing him; 6,999 others did too.  In sangha, I shared what my responses teach me when I feel a deep emotional surge to the presence of  people like the Dali Lama.  I’m grateful because it means I’m still human.  It means I haven’t fallen into a cynical, skeptical, hyper-rational dismissal of all that’s possible, a reaction easily triggered by the industry of the celebrity-teacher.  As we explored together this difficult edge of discerning the celebrity-teacher from the buddha-dharma, it seemed we all had a healthy resistance and fear of becoming celebrity-teacher groupies.

That being said, what is wrong with having celebrity-teachers in our spiritual universe?  At one level, it’s an entry point for those who need the magnetizing effect of a bright star to begin their practice.  And yes, there will always be those who need to position themselves as part of the constellation by their language: “I was trained by Thich Nhat Hanh” is one of my favourites.  Oh let’s be honest, I envy the hubris of such folks who not only speak it but can put these claims down on their websites and resumés.  But that’s a sidebar and different soap-box of mine.  Celebrity-teachers also bring awareness and galvanize support for important causes as does the Dalai Lama.  They offer hope for the possible end of suffering as does Thich Nhat Hanh.

So what’s the down side?  Well, we become disillusioned with our stars when they don’t meet our needs, when the time they require to forward their cause interrupts the time we want for our personal cause.  I will admit to feeling a bit put upon as the videos and calls for action went on and on at the show on Saturday.  As an opening act for the Dalai Lama, I would have preferred to have been called up to the stage to dance with Richard Gere.  Yes, it’s true; in the battle for self or others I am easily comprised by a pretty face.

Another downside is that we become needy; we want to be the one who is in that inner circle, protected from the danger of remaining one of the unwashed masses.  I will fully admit to pangs of jealousy when four people got their white scarves blessed by HHDL and I didn’t.  As we exited the arena, it struck me that I personally wasn’t selected for the neglect; there were 6,996 of us who were teeming out sans white scarf and looking quite radiant and joyful regardless.  In a less humorous vein, I’ve spent years coming to terms with the capricious nature of being part of an inner circle and am only too happy to be well-distanced from the cloying stickiness of that mess.

And, likely the most difficult of the downsides is the confusion we feel when we are taught that the dharma is based on the concept of no-self and we find ourselves caught in being defined by the celebrity-teacher-star with whom we are aligned. In this I am grateful that I haven’t run into anyone calling themselves a Dalai-Lamarian or a Thich-Nhat-Hanhian but I’ve certainly had to struggle with the “Do-you-know-so-and-so-ians?”  The question is rarely about sharing the wisdom of the celebrity-teacher as it is about the lift in status it gives to the person asking.

These are challenging dances yet compelling because the natural need to feel connected can mask the natural need to compete for safety, identity, and nourishment.   And they are made all the more painful and dangerous when the celebrity-teacher is more celebrity than teacher, reducing the system to drama and not Dharma.  That’s a far more complex discussion.

For now, how do we resolve this approach-avoidance we can feel about teachers like the Dalai Lama who occupy such a bright place and exert a powerful pull in our spiritual universe?

The unattainable celebrity-teacher is likely the best teacher we can have in this age of name-dropping and aura-clinging. The immense social light-years that stretch out between the giant star of such a teacher and my little social asteroid is important in understanding the ultimate truth of the dharma.  When they teach, they speak to the ultimate aspect of life, to the guiding North Star.  Practices of generosity, compassion, love, and so on are held up in a clear light which can be supportive.  We can see the template for cultivating our practice and feel encouraged to persist despite the never-ending re-visitations of old, painful habits.

At the same time, with our bent for doubt, we also can feel challenged by the lack of street creds in someone who may never have had to struggle with work, family, bills, and in-laws.  This too is a teaching; it is a litmus test of the celebrity-teacher’s capacity to span those light years between us and place a gentle, acknowledging hand on our struggle.  When the Dalai Lama answered a question about raising a compassionate child, his answer was text-book with a nod to the sensorimotor theorists.  Then, as would a speaker wise to Western skepticism, he said (I paraphrase): “What do I know?  Unless I stop being a monk, get married, and have children, I don’t know what to do with a child.”  To which I wanted to cry out, “Accomplishing the first two is still no guarantee!”

But in the end, I prefer that the celebrity-teacher, since we have them, stay unattainable, untainted by the mundane of our lives.  I prefer that they keep their eyes fixed on the luminous nature of the Dharma and trust its application to those of us grounded in the practice of living with ourselves.

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!