Monday, December 5, 2011

Stillness Saves

Tolle writes that stillness will save the world. I don't know if that is true. But stillness is saving me. Every morning I wake up and stand, stillness grounds me. It builds a hub of awareness in me. If I make a conscious effort to pay attention to the silence and to the post of energy that holds me up, I feel the particular pleasure of stepping out of mental conditioning. If for whatever reason, I forget to do that and start getting lost in my thoughts, stillness is still there working its way through my body, working its way through my psyche. As long as I maintain a strong devotion to stillness, I will lose myself less and less in the things that are weakening me, consumer culture, ego driven careerism, entertainment overload. I will return again and again to that place in me that is a rest from all of that, and in time none of those things will have the power to drive me.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Timelessness

It happened this morning, this timelessness I've read about. I started standing at 6:30, and it was like the next minute I looked up and it was 7:15.

This has much to do with a decision I made yesterday to think of the real me a pure awareness and not this conditioned thinking. To not see meditation as an escape, but to see thought as the escape. This doesn't mean that to be myself I have to spend all day standing. It just means that I need throughout the day to regularly take the time to be still, so that my thoughts serve me rather than drive me.

When I really spent this meditation coming back to my true self, standing quiet, listening to the morning silence, deeply still, all the usual markers of time--boredom, the urges to get back to important thought using tasks--lessened. There was no need for time. There was just now.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

An exciting thought

"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning."

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's Stillness Speaks. Tolle believes that stillness will save the world. This is a hard thing for me, child of busy journalist/activist/professor types, to accept. That is might be inaction, not action that will create a better world. But what Tolle says, what he conveys about the excitement of stepping out of conditioning, speaks deeply to the heart of my practice. I have felt those moments, those thrilling moments of stepping out of the flow of habitual belief, routine, buzzing cravings and unhealthy worries. They are what keep me coming back to this again and again.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The day my anxiety died

A couple of years back I wrote a post about the night my depression died. I was standing, in the middle of the night, up because of some insomnia thing. Somewhere near the end of what had been an extremely relaxing, deeply calm stand, I suddenly felt this buzz of anxiety, and then the smokey despair of the chronic depression I'd been struggling with all my life. I felt it flare up, and then I pretty much felt it burn away, replaced by a deep sense of calm.

This isn't to say that after that day I never felt depression again. But I can say, that it's never driven me, or controlled me in exactly the same way since. I visit that murky path from time to time, but I know it's growing over more all the time.

Last week has been an extremely difficult one. My landlady gave me official notice that she's going to take back my apartment. Doesn't look, from what an experienced tenant's rights lawyer told me, that she has much chance of pulling it off. Still, I've been obsessively anxious about this for a week. It's been difficult to sleep, work, and very difficult to meditate. I've been in imaginary rental board hearings now for a week, and any actual rental board hearing is months away.
Today I stood. I heard my most compassionate voice reassuring me "you don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. You don't have to be driven by this obsessive anxiety. Obsessive anxiety helped you once. But it's not helpful to you anymore. You don't have to be controlled by this." Then I thought, who is this you that the voice keeps talking to. And I realized that I didn't want to think of myself anymore as the helpless person, who needs reassurance from a secondary voice. I thought "wait a minute. I'm the strong voice that's reassuring me. I'm not the child who needs reassuring anymore." So I started being this voice and I started hearing myself say: "I don't need to be driven by obsessive anxiety anymore." The voice got stronger and started to feel like more and more of a core part of my identity. Until it was.

For a while, just after that stand, I sat down. I started thinking about a time in my life when maybe that obsessive anxiety did help me. I thought of my childhood, always on attention. Always expecting my mother pounce any moment with some overblown irritation of some sort. I needed to be obsessively anxious, it felt like, to match her obsessive anxiety.

But she's not here anymore. This is my life. I'm not always doing something wrong. I'm often doing something right. Something healthy. Something smart. Something interesting. Something delicious. I don't need to be worried ALL the time. I don't need to be controlled by that worry.
This doesn't mean I'll never worry anymore. But I'm about to lose my home, one of the worst feelings in the world. And I'm up to it. I'm up to the fight of protecting myself and my son. And maybe, eventually I'll even feel secure enough to let my landlady have it. I'll see, once i'm more used to this knowledge.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

My Job

It's snowing. A very late Indian summer is officially over. Hanging out with my three willows, feeling the abundance of stillness, I suddenly felt the stab of guilt. Of course I should be working. I have debt to deal with. Private school fees to save for. All that.

But then I felt that sense of paradox that I so often do when I'm standing. Things were so good this morning in our home. Peaceful, playful, everything moving smoothly towards Ben getting off to school. I could feel the consequences of regularly tending to my peace of mind. So it hit me in the park. However rushed, however stressed I am--this is my job. It is my job to plant this field of peace at the beginning of my day. It is my job to nurture the inevitable creativity and physical, mental and spiritual energy this time supplies me with. It's my job to cultivate this and to pass on the skills of this cultivation to my son and to my readers. This is my job and I have deep faith in its rewards and its renumerations.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

worries

Last night I had a lovely stand. My body relaxed into that pure column of energy and I tasted timelessness. I was so sure that I was on a wide open path to peace. Then I watched the HBO show Enlightened. This is the story of a naive woman coming back from a retreat in Hawaii. She's stuck on the hamster wheel of work, and she can't get off because she's in debt.

Me. This morning all I can feel is a column of anxiety. Financial anxiety mostly. How, I wonder will standing help me with my debt? Will psychic and physical energy translate in financial success? Will I reverse this trend. Or am I just escaping?

I'd like to think that in standing I'm facing up to what my body is telling me. That there is entrenched worry in me that needs to be faced. But standing also tells me that this worry does not have to be the core of my identity. I'm feeling anxious this morning. Tonight, I may feel better. I don't want to duck my head in the sand, but without faith in some kind of energy in my life--a kind of energy that won't put in anymore debt than I am, since standing is free--I won't have the energy to face and deal with this problem. So I can't run away from this anxiety and escape into my other habits, food, T.V., etc. I need to stay with it.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

The paradox of no change

I started this blog as an investigation of how I would change after six months of daily practice. But today I wonder if the most profound change I could undergo might be to lose this craving for self-improvement.

Reading last night about the concept of maitri, self-acceptance in Buddhist talk. A large part of meditation is being able to accept the source energies beneath our proliferating negative thoughts. Can I stand with my boredom, my loneliness, my self-loathing and not seek to eradicate these things. Just be with them.

I tried this morning, and an interesting thing happened. I felt the paradox of accepting my self-hatred. I felt what it felt like to be unconditionally loved by myself, even when I didn't love myself. Eventually the pleasant magnetic energy of standing took over. But when distractions came back, as they inevitably do, I was more easily able to deal with them, when I followed them back to the painful energy beneath them, and just stood in it. Just felt them like knots in my bark. Just part of who I am. No big deal.

So much of self-improvement is self loathing. So much of that industry is an exploitation of self loathing. To just be with ourselves, just accepting this self-loathing as a part of us--for today, or for however long, may be the most liberating change that we can take.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Chi-back loop

Last night, instead of zoning out in front of mystery channel, I stood. I hit that bad spot, where all I could see in my life was emptiness and loneliness. And then, of course, it disappeared, as it pretty much always does into this sea of quiet, sustaining energy. All evening I had this wonderful feeling of deep security, feeling what it will be like to connect at least twice a day to this source of chi.

Now I'm up in the middle of the night, woken by this recurring flashback I couldn't seem to get out of my mind. When Ben was six, a few days after his father told him he would be moving, with his two younger brothers, to Israel, there was a very bad day. Non stop acting out. At the end of the day I walked into the kitchen and saw him scaling the outside of the backstairs fire escape, a huge drop beneath. I screamed. He got angry and said "mommy, when you screamed like that it startled me and I almost let go." Everytime I think of that moment, I get this deep terrified shudder of horror. I keep seeing him letting go and falling to his death. Again and again, before I feel asleep this image came back to me. It woke me up in the middle of the night, and then just proliferated into all my petty anxieties at the moment.

So I got up and stood. Soon enough I was feeling that nurturing, stabilizing chi. I remembered the way. My pain, my anxiety, my worst memories. All these things can be fuel for this positive nurturing energy, this connection with the most stabilizing, grounding, empowering elements of the universe. Contemplating that I feel this tremendous liberation and sense of purpose. Even my lame distracting little anxieties are food for this energy if I diligently loop back to it.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Escape

When I first started this blog, the fundamental question I was asking was whether I was using an exploration of consciousness as a healthy source of empowerment, or whether I was using it as escape. There is a danger with any pursuit that yields peak experiences that we are using it to avoid the mundane realities of a responsible life. So I couldn't go out and stand next to trees in the morning light while my son was still young. But I could do that later. And in doing that, I now have to choose whether I'm going to continue my t.v. addiction, or I'm going to start standing in the evening.

I know that fundamentally I am committed to health, not television. And now that I'm healthy I'm able to look at how this t.v. addiction started and what it's been doing in my life.

There was a time when t.v. actually protected me, or it felt like it was. When I was Ben's age, 11, my parents' already volatile and usually miserable marriage was at its worst. My father had just gotten a job at the CBC, and he was out drinking every night with French television journalists caught up in the drama of Quebec nationalism. My mother was a tenure track university professor, who came home after a day of teaching and university politics, and probably a couple of happy hour drinks at the faculty club, to an empty house, not knowing if or when her husband was coming home. Often he didn't.

It was about 10 oclock when it was clear my dad wouldn't be home, or he'd be home, late, drunk, hopefully not having killed himself or anyone else on the way back.

I'd lie in bed, anxious about homework I probably hadn't done, or had lost somewhere in my chaotic room. My mother, if she wasn't crying already, would probably be soon. I'd sneak into the t.v. room and watch Starsky and Hutch. I had a crush on David Soul because he looked like my dad. Come to think of it Paul Michael Glaser had the same curly brown hair as my mom. They had a partnership that nobody in my home had. Sure they sniped at each other, but deep down there was that working respect. Meanwhile I still can't remember which was Starsky and which was Hutch. But they distracted me from all the emptiness, and fear and heartbreak I wasn't emotionally equipped to bear.

Numbing myself out with t.v. was only something that started around the time I had my son. Before that were the years I was partying as hard as my dad was. Just a different kind of escape.

But now I'm here. A parent, with a child whose brain is going to be going through a quantum growth spurt in a few years. Standing in the middle of those memories night after night is probably going to be one of the most painful experiences of my life. I get PTSD tremors just thinking about it. I wonder if all these morning practices have just been a prelude to this heart of darkness practice that I'm about to set out on. And most of all I wonder what's going to be on the other side.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Distraction

Interesting article about the four paradoxes of Standing Meditation . I am struck particularly by Paradox 3, time flies when you're standing still. I am addicted to distraction. And the last time I let the practice go was because I got sucked into a t.v. criticism gig. Yes, my friends. I was a pusher.
But now I'm going to get past that. Six months of evening standing will dry up that distraction. Time will fly.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Hockey Stick Standing

Yesterday I saw a video made by master teacher Shinzen Young. He uses a hockey stick as a metaphor for exponential growth. In his experience, after you've practiced long enough you eventually hit an exponential growth curve that becomes such a powerful feedback loop, your practice changes you permanently.

I have come so close to that curve so many times in my practice, but something is stalling me. It just hit me what it is today. I have no end of the day standing practice. I'm great at beginning of the day. It's second nature to me now. But end of the day is still more often than not Jon Stewart. Nothing wrong with laughing yourself to sleep. But without the end of the day practice I don't have the feedback loop I need to snowball this practice.

So, starting tonight: six months of evening zhan zhuang.

My Addiction

So my plan to skip Prime Suspect didn't work. Not only that, but I ended up on some huge drama binge. Re-watch of Girl With the Dragon Tatoo, and then Law & Order Criminal Intent, up until 1 a.m. I didn't foresee the way the brain rears up when you try and change a deep routine. The anxiety of not sitting down to this ritual I've been doing since I met Ben's father, since I was sneaking out of bedtime to watch Starsky and Hutch--it felt like too much to bear. I need to find a way to reframe this hour so that I can use it to nurture my mind, not infeeble it.
This morning I went to my willow and thought about how powerful this journal has been for me. How it has been like a tree growing from the best of me. It's such a radical thing, in this urban civilization, to go stand next to a tree and not get down to whatever stressful job we have, first thing in the morning. I know I watch these dramas because they give me the stress of a workplace, which in some ways I miss. All the drama and gossip of a community of people. Turn that off and I feel like I'm staring into the void. But actually this is a great time for community on facebook, blogging, that community that I can take up at any time. A great time to send e-mails and be in touch with people. And to nurture my community in this home. Ben and I. My community of books. My community of thinkers, magazine writers, publishers. This is my community. I need it back.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

wind

I've decided to give up 10 p.m. television. The hardest part of this is the part of me that believes this hour to be the only exciting thing in my life. In a day in our urban world, spent inside, comfortable, vaccum packed rituals, this is true. 10 p.m drama does give our lives drama.
This morning I went back to my willow. I didn't think there was much point when I looked outside. It was a dull grey day, but warmer than I expected. I sat under the long, yellowing boughs, the last few leaves before winter. I huge wind began to roil. The boughs were whipping around me. There was such a deep sense of how powerful the atmosphere was. And it hit me. That my standing meditations have the potential to be so much more exciting than anything I see on t.v. That a life, well rested and alert is one with so much more real energy and passion than what is manufactured on film. But if I'm not living it, I can't know. So it's so easy to get trapped on this hamster wheel, for months, years, decades. A whole life passes never really knowing the wind. So tonight I skip Prime Suspect. I can watch it online, or on mystery channel or whatever. At nine oclock I put the control up on a top shelf somewhere. I take out a good book. A truly exciting book, and I climb on the wheel of awareness and wake up powerful