Tag Archives: practice

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brain freeze

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Leftover ink enso. 

My brain is frozen from spending the weekend and all day Monday in an office whose temperature hovered between 58°F and Hell Freezing over.  It seems the computer that controls the air conditioner of the building has gone into an infernal feedback loop and the a/c thermostat is trying to regulate itself to what it thinks is Hades outside.  It’s hard trying to sustain attention and muster up compassionate, appreciative inquiry when you’re hypothermic.  But I managed and the drive home in a hot car revived me somewhat.

I think my brain is also frozen in other ways.  Topics for the daily posts are eluding me.  There are flashes of insight and inspiration.  But they quickly evaporate and I find myself at a loss.  I wondered if it was because of my brief and rather sordid affair with G+.  Or perhaps because I’ve been immersed in left-brain activities like correlations, and sums of squares, and two-tailed tests of significance of paired samples.  Or – and most likely – I’m enthralled by the Food Network’s Top Chef – Just Desserts melodrama.  Will Seth be kicked off before someone frappé’s him in the quest for a dessert that is based on a water park theme!?

However, I didn’t know I was in trouble until I explained to someone that the difference between shamatha and vipassana meditation is one is up your nose and the other is under your belly button. 

To be kind to my poor over-fried and mis-firing neurons, I am probably trying too hard to perform two very different modes of writing.  On the one hand, I’m reading and assimilating stacks of papers and books to build and buttress a Buddhist theory of spiritual incongruence for my chaplaincy project.  On the other, I’m trying to find relevant material to put out on the blog that is, at once, useful and playful.  And tie it all together with an enso.

I fear I have to officially declare my brain is frozen and when the obvious is obvious, skillful means noticing.  So I will apologize in advance for languid posts and lapses in posting.  Nevertheless, I shall fly past you the mal-formed and likely warped thoughts on aspects of Dharma as they arise from this vast matrix array of work, family, ripening tomatoes, and one more round at Upaya coming up in three weeks.

At the very least there will be an enso each day.  Zen Rorschach!  Sometimes just going around in circles mindfully is all that is necessary!

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tent of thorns

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We can’t work for long in a competitive environment and not begin to feel the twinges of jealousy or find ourselves measuring our worth by external factors.  I should probably say, “I” though I suspect few of us escape the poisons of greed, resentment, and delusion/confusion on this count.

One of my patients calls it an “emotional brownout.”  We feel all those tight icky sensations in the pit of our stomach, vision is murky, and balance is wobbly.  It’s as if there isn’t enough juice in the veins to get ourselves out of a very familiar spiral into disappointment, self-criticism and even despair.  And as the years go by, I find it harder and harder not to feel that spiral tighten into a steeper slope when I’m confronted with “things not done” or “things not unfolding.”

All this came became more of a foreground discussion between Frank and myself after a class we taught on the bhrama viharas: equanimity and compassion, lovingkindness and resonant joy.  We divvy it up in pairs as a balance between healing practices and nourishing practices, respectively.  Lovingkindness and Resonant Joy are the nourishment in a relationship.  The keep us healthy and build strength, like vitamins.  Equanimity and Compassion play a role as relationships struggle with the typical strifes and sufferings of just being humans in full contact.  The four together form a health regimen that attends to building resilience and care giving.

In the class, we talked about the challenge of feeling joy in the achievements of life situations of others.  You have probably read this bhrama vihara as Sympathetic Joy or Altruistic Joy.  Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that may be too limited in its vision.  Feeling joy for another is not possible if we cannot feel joy ourselves.  He teaches that joy must include joy in ourselves as well and is only possible when we feel peace and contentment.  In other words, the joy we feel has to have some resonance with the other and that resonance is only possible when we feel a level of contentment in ourselves.

One of the obstacles to feeling a resonance in the joy of others arises out of our tendency to measure our worth and the worthiness of others by external means.  And in that mismeasure of our true nature, feelings of resentment rather than contentment arise.

I’ve been noticing what that lack of contentment feels like each time I’m faced with something I think I deserve but didn’t get or when someone has access to something that I feel they don’t deserve.  Judgments all, I know.  That’s my particular take on it; your storyline may vary a bit.  Nevertheless, when it is one of those autopilot stances to events, it’s like building a tent of thorny branches and taking refuge under them.  For a while that may work to keep the hurt out.  Build it thick enough (and I’d have to, given the huge number of events that happen in my day!) and it’s hard to find a way out from under the pile without getting even more scratched up.

This stack are the dead branches from the climbing roses.  It didn’t take long to accumulate.  In order to cut those branches, I had to reach deep into the bushes and lop them at the root.  My forearms look like they’ve been in a cat fight – and doesn’t that just sum it all up.  Resentments arise because, when the event happens, we reach deep into parts of ourselves that deliver irritation and hurt.  The parts that feel “less than,” personally affronted, or judgmental about our own capacities and accomplishments.  In other words, the only person we end up in a cat fight with is ourselves.

(Thanks to Adam Johnson, Mickie B., and Steven Hickman of UCSD’s Center of Mindfulness for offering great insights to this topic!)