108zenbooks

Tag: practice

February 8, 2012

practice is containing

Leakage.  It’s a term that describes the seepage from all the drippy ickiness stuffed away in the back of our emotional brain.  When reality isn’t what my ego anticipated, the resulting train wreck leaves leaking tankers of disappointment, resentment, frustration, and other toxic materials.  Lately, I’ve been preaching about the “Just World hypothesis.”    That’s when we hold a world view of deservingness: good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.  As Buddhists we are not supposed to have preferences for who wins a lottery or who gets gished in a traffic pileup.  We are supposed to practice a different world view: good things happen; bad things happen.  But I’m willing to bet that the level of seepage suggests we’re still holding onto the “good-bad” piece of the Just World hypothesis.

In my Just World, people who lie and fabricate information to get ahead end up languishing in obscurity with shrunken mouths and bloated bellies.  Apparently this doesn’t happen.  Learning that my hypothesis has scant data to back it leaves me feeling like bad things are happening to me.  And rationally, if “bad things happen to bad people” and I think bad things are happening to me, what the heck does that say about me!  Oh, I know what you’re thinking: Now she’s really gone off the deep end into the sewage!  And you’d be right.  That twisted thinking that I’m bad fires up my anxiety.  It puts me in a sticky place where resentment and impatience with the course of my life erodes the container of practice, leaking toxic drippings all over the path.

It’s not enough to practice being present to these sticky feelings.  It’s also important to strengthen the container so the toxic material can be held gently and handled with care.  This practice of containing the difficult and unwanted is not about suppression or dramatic indulgence (that’s what got us here in the first place).  It’s an act of generosity to ourselves and all those around us who would suffer deeply from the leakage.  When I acknowledge what I’m feeling, it’s like putting a tracking tag on a barrel of toxic waste.  Even if we can’t transform it just yet, we at least know where it is.

Practice is patience.  Practice is endurance.  Roll out those barrels and print off those labels.  There’s a load of work to be done on these tracks.

2 comments
February 7, 2012

practice is patience

As you can see, I didn’t have too much patience with this series of calligraphies.  The ink is barely dry and I was in a rush to get them scanned.  Oh let’s be honest; the wash was barely dry when I slapped on the kanji script and I cannot lie that I was aiming for a soft effect.

It happens with practice too.  Often, it’s easy to pretend that what I did had a noble intention; that’s the Ninth of the Eight-fold path – Right Whitewashing.  I stop the meditation to answer the phone – because I assessed the time and urgency of the ring tone to be a greater calling to compassionate action than the (boring) navel-gazing.   I skim over the technique section of an art book because I’m trying to “trust” my instincts.  I blunder through the 108 tai chi moves rather than stopping to review the accuracy of each set because… well, it just matters that I try not that I actually get it.

Just like painting, practice is waiting for these layers of delusion to lift away.  Practice is also about letting the new layers we put down breath by breath consolidate into the ground of our being.  Layer by layer.  And while some intermingling is necessary and even inevitable, the test of practice is to create it with intention.

6 comments
February 6, 2012

practice is endurance

Today’s calligraphy is “Patience.”  Actually, it’s “endurance” but a long time ago my sumi-e teacher gave it to me when I said, “I just need some patience!”  It may be that there is little difference between endurance and patience in matters of practice.  However, the truth is I don’t have much of the latter and rarely notice when I manifest the former.

I’m writing this after our all day mindfulness meditation session.  Forty practitioners, most who only started meditating about 4 weeks ago, sat, ate, walked, and moved together with careful intention, attention, and a compassionate attitude to the struggle of practice.  Graduates from our mindfulness program also attended as did Buddhist practitioners from various sanghas.  The consensus among all is that this thing called practice is a struggle, a surprise, a relief, a frustration, and a joy.

If we look closely, practice is simply and only endurance.  Over the years of holding these all day sessions, I’ve gone down wrong-headed paths trying to make it active and engaging, exciting and opportunistic for enlightenment.  What a laugh!  Session after session, I learned that these shenanigans were only to soothe my anxieties that the participants would get bored and walk out, thereby wounding my fragile ego and sending me screaming for a cave in the hills.  There, I likely would rant about the short-sightedness of the public in matters of my greatness, get bored myself and return to the marketplace just in time for the next all day session.  Even in my wrong-headedness, I can endure.

When we think of practice as endurance, we see it as the jaw-clenching, breath-snapping trudge up the mountain.  Yet when we look back at the history of our work, it’s been simply showing up.  Each morning, each afternoon, each evening.  Every sitting on the cushion, every step around the meditation hall, every bow and chant.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner and all the snack times in between.  We’ve simply shown up each and every time.  Just this moment, just this meeting of life as it is, just this appointment we make with each breath.

And that’s what forty-some of us did.  We showed up at the appointed time to breathe, sit, move, eat, walk and rejoice in our surprise that life is seamless.

1 comment
November 13, 2011

occupy letting go

Sometimes it’s all about letting go.  And letting go comes in various forms.

It can be a powerful draping backwards into a river.

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It can be a resolute stance of acceptance, a realization of being constructed by so many disparate experiences.

It can be as simple as noticing that something has turned a corner.  It can be as complex as convincing oneself that any consequence which follows an action can be borne with equanimity.

Letting go is an adventure in fear, trust, and inclusiveness.

You may not have noticed my practice of letting go last week.  Likely you might have noticed a gap in the posts.  Perhaps you thought, Oh she’s deep into the thesis!  Or, she’s probably off saving the world from Heffalumps.  Or you might even have thought, she’s won the Lotto 649 and abandoned the life of ne’er-read-well author/artiste.  I’m not to sure about the saving the world part and my bank account is pretty firm about the Lotto 649 part.  As for the depth of the thesis, I’m happy to report that the mind-numbing psychologese part is written and now I get to play with the “What Would Buddha Do” part.

But letting go.  That was pretty dominant in the two weeks past if only as a realization that I can be releasing my death grip on all manner of fixations, metaphors of Self, and craven desires and what is apparent to the eye or ear could be as simple as a “yes” or “no.”

I practiced this noticing on our (now) annual trip to NYC where we met up with friends, one of whom was running the NYC Marathon.  In the days before the race, we toured around the city and as Chaplains we felt it was important to head down to Occupy Wall Street to bear witness to the beginnings of this very powerful shift in societal awareness – as confusing as the process may seem at times.  Personally, I still don’t quite know what I feel about it all but I was intent on bringing myself to that place of discomfort and watch the “yes” and “no” surface over and over again.  Since the beginning of the Occupy movement, I’ve felt a huge level of discomfort, edging on the hyper-vigilance you might feel if you think you’re being blamed for enjoying unearned assets.  I’m beginning to hate those websites that tell you’re part of the 1% or the 99%.  (I’m neither unless you consider a global or restricted range as a measure of income.)  I dislike now feeling the need to justify what I have, what I bought, what I pictures I upload to Facebook, what trips I take, and what  my groceries cost.

I would like a sign I can hoist over my new car (the old one dates back to 1999 and has 290, 000 km on it):

Refugee kid made good
because she married a hard-working Southerner
who would sooner die from fatigue
than take a vacation.

So standing there on the edge of OWS taking pictures, I felt like a sleazy tourist and probably took on a 100% defensive posture.  I tried to strike up a conversation with two men who had a terrific sign but my request for permission to photograph the sign earned me a dismissive grunt – sleazy tourist.  For a moment, I thought of walking away, going around the corner where the unemployed grandmother sat knitting mitts and scarves for the residents of OWS, where the gas-masked, person-pillar draped in black performed eschatological street art, down towards the drumming that called out to all the hearts that beat.  But I didn’t.  I took the picture and thanked them.

In case you can’t read it, it says:

This is not a protest;
this is an AFFIRMATION
of the vitality and idealism
erupting underneath the present
American nightmare.

I told them I wanted to post this for all the Occupy sites because it captures the essence of this shift, this letting go of how we have lived our lives and how we want to continue to live our lives.  To do this, I have to climb out of the minds of those two people.  I have to let go, release what I think they thought of me and my digital camera.  I have to add myself to the % who don’t give a damn about being judged, appraised, counted in or counted out.

Letting go is an affirmation that we can occupy this moment, this self, this being completely, without hesitation or reservation.

12 comments
October 24, 2011

blind spot & a pilgrimage

The tricky thing about a blind spot is that we’re blind to it.  Tautology perhaps but true nevertheless.  In fact, there’s no way to actually see our own blind spot.  And – sometimes dangerously so – we need to rely on other people who have the privilege of a different vantage to point them out to us.  It occurred to me the other day that this raises all kind of questions about trust.  Not just trust in myself to believe there is a blind spot but also trust in the person I’m asking to point out my blind spot.  Goodness knows, we all have our agenda and that includes my Blind Spot Spotter.

The other thing that occurred to me is that we often ask for a sketch of the blind spot when in fact we really want confirmation that we don’t have a blind spot.

That’s what I mean about trust.  In myself and in my BSS.  No BS has to be the rule and that takes work.  It takes what William Blake calls a firm persuasion that can remove mountains.

I’ve been diving into a book by David Whyte.  If Rilke gets ladies to take off their bras, Whyte can well have us pole dancing.  But I digress.  The book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity, was recommended as a source of inspiration for those of us who never relent in our seeking to bring that firm persuasion into our work – life, spiritual, career.  Whyte writes:

There is no hiding from work in one form or another.  Under the great sky of our endeavors we live our lives, growing we hope, through its seasons toward some kind of greater perspective.  Any perspective is dearly won.  Maturity and energy in our work is not granted freely to human beings but must be adventured and discovered, cultivated and earned.  It is … a never-ending courageous conversation with ourselves, those with whom we work, and those whom we serve….  It is achieved through a lifelong pilgrimage.

Further on:

It is very hard to say no to work.  We may courageously resign, take a sabbatical, or retire to a simpler, more rustic existence, but then we are engaged in inner work, or working on ourselves, or just chopping wood.  Work means application, explication, expectation.  There is almost no life a human being can construct for themselves where they are not wrestling with something difficult, something that takes a modicum of work.  The only possibility seems to be the ability of human beings to choose good work.

And finally,

To view work as pilgrimage is to put our hearts’ desire to hazard, because by merely setting out, we have told ourselves that there is something bigger and better, or even smaller and better – above all, something more life giving – that awaits us in our work, and we are going to seek it.

So, we set out on that pilgrimage with firm persuasion that we have all we need and that, even if lacking in courage, our feet know exactly how to navigate the journey.  And our practice is that little dustless mirror in the corner showing us the blind spots.

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