Author Archives: Genju

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occupy letting go

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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.

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strands

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I attended a talk the other day, given by a hospital Chaplain who spoke about weaving the threads of body and spirit together.  This, he said, is the role of the Chaplain.  It struck me that when we do this we are joining together what “man tore asunder.”  Descartes, Spinoza, and all those heavy hitters of mind-body dualities are well beyond my capacity to weave together in this thread of thought but it is giving me a hint of the challenges about to face me in writing the next section of my thesis.

As I plod through the sections on burnout and spiritual well being, I feel very much like that spider in the picture.  Strands of knotted thoughts secrete out the tips of my fingers sometimes gluing them to the computer keyboard as I frantically try to keep the unrelenting winds of work and other demands from tearing it all apart.  Practice is helping.  Just this one word, just this one sentence.  It helps too that the old habits of academic writing are still lurking around the edges of my awareness.  One day, one hour, one word, one moment – and slowly I’ve come to the end of the dreaded, mind-parching “literature review.”

However, I’ve actually learned some things, acquired some insights to the nature of burnout and the corrosive action of being in organizations that cannot live their mission statements or manifest their values.  That, it turns out, is the realization that precipitates the exhaustion and cynicism we associate with burnout.  Interesting, isn’t it?  An incongruence in values that leads to a physical depletion and the arising of the judgmental mind. And yet, for so long we’ve focused on the physical nature of “work-related” depletion, missing the crucial role of the heart/mind which says, “This, this is not right.”

Is this what faced Siddhartha?  Raised in a life sheltered from the reality of poverty, illness, and death, a royal corporation that enjoyed an ease not available to those outside the palace walls, how did he meet the incongruence between his unquestioned values and what he witnessed on that fateful ride outside?  Was his disillusion and release from the trance of privilege a manifestation of this clash of values?  Did he Occupy Kapilavastu?  Methinks he did – and more!

The mythology of his intense emotional reaction after seeing illness, aging, and death suggests he felt the weariness of unrelenting hedonism and the cynicism of the worth of the path he tread.  I think he felt the rift in a place beyond the simple mind/body fracture point but it would be years before he would experience it.  It was only after determined rejection of the body which brought him to the brink of death that he wove together the threads of body and spirit, heart and mind.  It would take years and many teachers before he would know deep in his being that the most dangerous gap is between his wisdom and his choices.

If the Buddha’s life is an exemplar of ours, there are questions raised from his direct experience of incongruence that are worth asking.  Is this where you are – this place where the threads have been torn from your fingers, spun but not anchored?  Is this where you see most vividly the vastness of the canyon between what you believe in and what you are living?   Is this where you can feel the futility of continuing to feed the delusion that your victimhood is your privilege?

What now?