Tag Archives: practice

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what price my soul

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A little while ago I was asked to offer one of my projects as bait for a rather large fish.  Ah, you know the ending already.  I wasn’t distressed by the outcome really.  Well, I was briefly, but having had reservations about the whole thing, I was relieved that the fish spit out the bait (no idea if it took the hook).  What I am putting myself through the ringer over is the (eventual) willingness to be bait.  

In the process of deconstructing my decisions, I heard various explanations.  That’s what you get for wanting to be famous.  That’s what you get for wanting their approval.  That’s what you get for trying to prove you’re better than they are.  That’s what you get for (fill in the blank with some attribute that points to greed, anger, and ignorance).  Perhaps.  I don’t deny that these baser desires course through my nightmares and day dreams.  And yet, there is something else that wasn’t being offered.

We want things.  We work hard for recognition, acknowledgment, visibility.  But it can’t stop there if it is to be truly the work from the heart.  And my decision – ambivalent as I was about it – had at its heart the desire to create accessibility, to open doors.  And perhaps I wanted that too much, so much that I was willing to sell my soul for it.

On the funny side, one might say that as a Buddhist and hence not having a soul, I thought it was a pretty cheap trade.  My empty soul for a big fish.  On the sad side, it was another wake up call to not make assumptions about practice and communities of practitioners.  One friend emailed me saying he was sorry my project was “hindered by mundane superficialities.”  I liked that.  Hindered, not scuttled.  It puts it into perspective.  It reminded me of a dear friend who used to say, “That’s a non-problem.”

When we have aspirations, we are willing to do what we believe is necessary to achieve them.  In fact, wise diligence says we must be willing to do what is necessary to bring something to fruition, to make it real, to realize it.  Effort – it’s not just for the cushion.  Yet somehow, it’s easier with coming back to the breath than with finding solid ground in the light and shadow of human (and corporate) interactions.  

But practice is not about “easy.”  Practice is about discovering that edge where we’re entangled in desire and principle.

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even if there’s no buddha statue in the room…

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…there’s always a buddha statue in the room.

This I was heard to have said.

In a discussion late one evening about the aversion we have to religion icons and rituals, I made this comment as a parry to the arguments around the ridiculous ends we go to when we feel the need to deny the obvious.  I did however have to agree that Zen is particularly rife with these doubly-negating aphorisms.  In this case, it went something like this: The buddha statue in the room is not really a Buddha statue; it’s simply a mirror of all your assumptions and preconceptions of what it means to have a buddha statue in the room.

Now, I’ve drunk enough of the Kool-Aid that, in my sugar-addled stupor, I often believe this.  And I can, in my more sober moments, feel the embarrassment of the nonsensical statement – not to mention the bad grammar and syntax!  But it’s really not about the statue in the room as much as it is about our relationship to a pattern of thinking and a treasured set of schema.  So, I’ve taken a different tack to the problem of the ever-present buddha statue in the room.

There’s a statue in room.
It’s of the Buddha.

You may not like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another room.

You may like it for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay in the room.

Either way, there’s something you’re practicing.

You may not like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to find another practice.

You may like that practice for your own reasons.
If those reasons are important to you, you may want to stay with the practice. 

Either way, this is something.

In your room.