108zenbooks

Tag: Gail Sher

January 6, 2011

poison naming

The (inner) voice … poised to prey upon your insecurity and guilt…does not require answering.  Naming is enough.  The moment you hear this voice, you must identify precisely who it is – a voice that is dedicated to undermining your newly-achieved (and bravely fought for) commitment to write.

Gail Sher (pg 89), One Continuous Mistake

The external obstacles of practice may be numberless but the internal voices of the critic, the trickster, the false friend, the colluder, the enabler, the fearful are legion.  Some derive their power from their historical presence, some from an insidious compassion, and some from a voracious feeding off our fear, desire, and confusion.  We aren’t used to naming these because for the most part they are deep physiological sensations and also because the experience is a lightning flash with little time to fit words to it.

Sher uses the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood to illustrate her point of naming the disingenuous presence.  The wolf would not have got too far if Red Riding Hood had named it for who it was.  She doesn’t develop the metaphor much but it opened an area of inquiry for me in terms of my tendency to want things to be what I think they should be.  That particular delusional tendency slices both ways: I’d prefer wolfie was granny and I fear that granny is actually wolfie.  Sometimes I’m right – when my practice of discernment is strongly informed by my intuition that something is not quite right about the picture.  Sometimes I’m wrong because I can only see part of the picture and I’m fixated on protecting myself.

I like this quote from Parabola (Facebook):

“There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.”- Gustave Flaubert

This is a challenge – to name the poison and the panacea outside of memory.  In practice, it shows up in those moments when I can speak to what is holding me back or propelling me forward.  Yet in order to see the unknown in something as familiar yet ineffable as the un-named, I need a new lens.  In a different context, Sher uses the mantra “without memory, without desire, without understanding.”  This helps.

To approach practice without memory is to be released from the old stories of failure or success.  To be without desire is to let go of the need to influence the process.  Sher suggests that to go without understanding means there is the possibility of something new to arise.

For me, however, to go without understanding is to watch the arrogance and greed unable to take hold while service and gratitude arise.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

3 comments
January 5, 2011

fair to middling

What precisely is the middle way?… (To find it) you have to stay conscious.

One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher

This postcard has hung for years, pinned to the frame of the window in my study.  Each time I look at it, I feel a mix of fear and calm tumbling through my abdomen.  I wonder sometimes what she’s doing walking down the center line of highway.  At other times, I envy her courage and trust in herself – whatever rounds that bend, she will meet it with equanimity.

There’s a lot of weight place on equanimity in practice.  It is often seen as the lodestone in treading the Middle Path.  Conventionally, equanimity is explained as an even-handed presence to all things arising.  It is the practice of non-discrimination, non-preference, the absence of desire for things to be one way or the other.  I’ve never been much of a fan for equanimity although I do try to cultivate it, a bit like knowing a bowl of hot oatmeal will do good on a cold day but chocolate would be so much better.

Lately however, threaded through my readings for chaplaincy and just plain interest, is a nuanced understanding of the Middle Way.  I think I have taken (and perhaps it is unavoidable given the way it’s verbalized in teachings) the Middle Way as the Mean or Average of the extremes.  Living the Grand Mean, as some statisticians might put it!  Little wonder it has felt like pabulum and has contorted my sense of right and wrong, beneficial and harmful actions.

In Bhikkhu Bodhi’s mind-boggling anthology of the Buddha’s discourses (In the Buddha’s Words), the Potaliya Sutta addresses the pitfalls in sensual pleasures.  (No real meaning in picking that one; the book falls open at random.)  Potaliya asks the Blessed One how to “cut off (the business transactions, designation, speech, and intentions)” of a householder.  The sutta runs along several allegories of letting go, cutting off the attachments through right understanding of their nasty consequences.  Then the Buddha says,

Having seen this thus as it really is with proper wisdom, he avoids the equanimity that is diversified, based on diversity, and develops equanimity that is unified, based on unity.

Bhikkhu Bodhi’s notes explain that “diversity” means the five cords of sensual pleasure and “unity” means the fourth jhana or level of consciousness.  But that isn’t what struck me.  “Equanimity that is diversified” versus “equanimity that is unified” suggested that equanimity itself is not a singular concept.  Balanced practice or the Middle Path is not about “absence of equanimity” versus “presence of equanimity.”  It is the quality of the state of equanimity.  I’m struggling with this concept and attending to the way equanimity is diversified – scattered across all the pleasures, distractions, wanton ways (oh Yes!), equally loving all the things I hate.

Further along in my reading on pastoral ethics (and I so wish that had something to do with meadows and bodice-ripping), this point arose: the challenge of doing good and not doing harm does not lie in the absolute statements of “help… but at least do no harm.”  It is in the middle space between right and wrong.  In Gentle Shepherding: Pastoral Ethics and Leadership, Joseph Bush, Jr. writes:

(E)thics is not solely a matter of philosophical abstraction from life.  Rather, ethics makes contact with life itself, but it does so utilizing the philosophical and theological resources that are accessible to us “in the middle.”

In other words, we are challenged at points that are pivotal in our lives.  Joseph Bush suggests that the middle is where  we are trying to determine what to do, how to act, how to respond beyond the context of what is absolute good or bad, right or wrong.  To push the point a bit further, while we acknowledge the right thing to do, we struggle with what we should do.  Among the many models he discussed, one impacted my thinking most because it broadens the need for practice and deepens the intention.  It categorized actions that we are, as spiritual practitioners, obligated to cultivate:

Do no harm
Prevent harm
Remove (the potential for) harm
Do good

The two middle dimensions of practice he presents are the messy middle ground of being for me.  They call for a willingness to step forward and act with discernment and an inability to know the real outcome.

Sher talks about becoming Olympians of middle-way points.  And it’s not easy because equanimity is more quickly diversified than my mutual funds.

Before figuring it out you must want to figure it out.  After figuring it out you must demonstrate the courage to say “no” to the forces all around you that will tempt you away.  Universities, corporations, the media, spiritual authorities, even friends and family will push you to squelch the part of you that knows.  A tremendous amount of consciousness is required to stay with your hard-earned understanding. (Sher, pp.28)

Thank you for practising,

Genju

6 comments
January 4, 2011

practice compounding

A writer sifts his reading through his emotional, psychological, spiritual and aesthetic experience, transmuting into language that is his own.  This in itself is stabilizing.  Instead of floating around on effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts, he gradually becomes rooted in his own approach, his own vision, and imagination.  Even if he just writes a paragraph, he will “have” something from which he can build.  Money isn’t the only commodity subject to the “power of compounding.”

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., quoted in Gail Sher’s One Continuous Mistake

The art of practice is not different.  It slips through the openings of our experience and transforms into a lexicon, a syntax that is unique to who we continuously become.  If we trust it, it is stabilizing.  In my practice, I find myself tentative about trusting this ever-shifting process.  I realized when I read this passage that this sense of ungroundedness may be related to my focus on watching those “effervescent clouds of disappearing thoughts.”  It makes sense then – this feeling that I am continually sliding off to one side or the other of the path.  Or, in an effort to not let a single disappearing thought feel unwitnessed, I tend to cultivate a meta-ruminative approach which has me spiralling out in ever-widening arcs of watching the disappearing disappear.

As much as it seems blasphemous to aim for stabilizing, it is unavoidable if practice is to have a solid base.  (I think we’ve become to caught up in the literal language of practice anyway, rendering it into pseudo-dharma gobbledegook at best.)  It is interesting to bring attention to my language about practice.  Not just the verbal lexicon but also the physicality of how I communicate my concepts and understanding about practice are revealing.  We got a late start one morning and I noticed how my body moved as if sitting was no longer an option; the time had come and gone – as if once the clock hands moved past the appointed hour, intention too is spent.  I noticed the hugeness of the effort to break through the trance of “too late.”

It’s easy to reframe these moments as some type of noble truth.  Oh, notice that suffering.  Oh, isn’t it great that you noticed the noticing noticing.  Oh, do a metta practice of not-sitting.  This is the tyranny of the forebrain which loves to complicate to obfuscate.  How about we just sit?  How about we eat?  How about we write?  How about we pick up that brush?

I think this is the process of stabilization.  In doing what is intended, I build the core, the central mold around which I can layer on the materials of my life.  This is the “having” Richardson writes of in his biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Not the acquisitive, avaricious greed of materialistic or spiritualistic ownership but rather a confirming of true nature.

On the cedar chest is a wooden unicorn that once lived as a mold for making sculptures.  Some years ago, it broke in two around the girth and the right leg fell off.  I finally got a moment that was a repair opportunity and glued it back together.  The gouges in along the midline of the creature are a revelation of building that core of practice.  The channel marks where the material was cut to separate it from the wood carving.  I imagine the hundreds of sculptures it took to create the deep groove and in some places, where there isn’t a sufficient volume of wood, an eventual wearing away.

The strength in the core of the unicorn sculpture came from a long timeline of compounding that began in the walls of cellulose cells of the tree it once was.  Building that core in the art of practice means compounding the strength in the body, heart, mind cells so that it endures our efforts to sculpt it into a form at once unique and of service to all.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

3 comments
January 3, 2011

habit forming

A habit is the link between inspiration and self-realization.  Sometimes the hardest part of an undertaking is not when you start out (you have your initial enthusiasm) and not as you near the end (you have the anticipation of being almost finished) but the middle when your motivation dwindles and all that you seemingly have is your resolution.  That’s enough.  “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle said.  “Excellence…is not an act, but a habit.”

One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher (pg. 18)

The first day of each year is a starting block.  Like the ones used to position sprinters, I brace against it and breathe, waiting for that starter pistol.  The last two years, the block has been more of a chock block – the kind you use to keep a truck or airplane from wandering off on an adventure of its own sans chauffeur.  And certainly, there have been moments – no, lengthy time spans – in which the blocks got pulled out and I wondered who was driving this buggy.  When I would reflect, it seemed to boil down to practice.  What was my practice?  What was I practising? For all the dedication to formal and informal practice, it seemed there was an accumulating incongruity between areas of my life and between the inner and outer practitioner.

In the Fall, Frank and I made the tough decision to move sangha to our farm.  The decision has been two years in the making and yet it was likely the most painful decision I had to make.  (I say “I” had to make because Frank has been more reasoned in his process of letting go although I don’t think it was any less difficult.)  We shared our desire to make the move with sangha and, as is often the case, the heart-words were inexpressible.  What came out and what was heard was a litany of “can’t” – a can’ticle of rationales?  In end, we expressed it as this: our deepest aspiration is to create a sacred space in which the joys and suffering of all who visit can be cooked into a strong broth of well-being.

To do that we, as a couple and as community leaders, need to be in a space that encourages practice.  We need to approach the hour of formal practice steady and quiet in our being.  It seems selfish and self-serving but the alternative is an edge to our leadership that violates the Prime Directive of Practice: “…help… but at least do no harm.”  What we needed to create for our personal path was a space in which practice can become habit-forming.

So, on the first morning of the this new decade, the starter pistol fired and I set out to clear space.  The zendo, as you’ve seen is already set up.  But my personal practice space – for what Sher calls “invisible practice” – was a mess.  It reflected two years of surrendering to chaos.  Because the zabutons and zafus needed a home, they took up the shelves and nooks and crannies of my study.  Books, art materials, recycle bins stuffed themselves into whatever horizontal openings were left over. It is not possible to be authentic in my formal practice if the rest of my life qualifies for an episode of “Hoarders.”  When the principle guiding my life is one of disregard of well-being, then any truth I may speak is automatically a lie.

So I started with the art table:

Take all this...

organize it on this...

to look like this!

The order of the table is comforting, like the rituals of offering incense, bowing, and dedicating merit.  Sher quotes Issan Dorsey on cleaning: “You just go around and make things look like somebody paid attention to them.”  Paying attention to the spaces that feed me, interestingly, generates a readiness in me to be fed, to receive the feeding (paraphrasing Edward Espe Brown).

The zabutons and zafus found a new home as well.  I had long-resisted putting them in the zendo because I am childishly attached to wide, open, uncluttered spaces.  That is, I was until I realized it was an untruth to have an “uncluttered” zendo if it meant creating and hiding the mess behind closed doors.  The environment Sher speaks of that supports practice is not just external.  In fact, it is not so much the inner or outer practitioner that is important but the congruence between them.  So, the Z’s found a new home:

Notice the stack in front of the altar.  That’s our two Z’s for practice every morning.  No quarter given!

And look what happened in the study:

Thich Nhat Hanh warns that lone practitioners are like tigers who wander alone into a village and come to a hasty end.  Sher refers to this allegory and adds (in the context of writing but equally applicable to the practice of any art) that “(y)ou must use your heart and your will to create an inner environment of “prowling” intention and an outer environment that is harmonious with your goals and includes like-minded prowlers.”

Welcome!

Thank you for practising,

Genju

6 comments
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