Self

Last week in my Joy of Living practice I meditated on my sense of self. I noticed how much it changed depending on what I was doing, how I was being.  How my sense of self felt strong and wise when I'm sitting with a belly full of chi. How I felt powerless and vulnerable after a fight with my son. How I felt competent  after completing a cleaning ritual.  How I felt protected by the routines I've established with Ben to get things back on track after an argument has signaled to us that something has unravelled.
  Each self feels like a different person almost.  Each self doesn't last, though these selves return like breath. Each self is a reminder that there is not unified permanent self that I can hate, or take pride in.
  I returned to a practice that I haven't done for a while, loving the self that keeps me on track. Taking time to thank that self that gets me out running, reminds me to do the things I don't always feel like doing, but that as a whole make me feel safe, well and strong for others.
  Next month I am meditating on time.  I remember from my course this summer that the combination of selflessness and timelessness will bring that transformative feeling of no agency.  That place where I am watching life as though it has the energy of a darting fish.  As I sit with this transformative energy, I have no idea what direction my life will take.  And I more often than not like that feeling. It's the adventure of being still.

Transformation

This week when I hear that persistent question what do I want more than anything in the world the answer is automatic: love.
  Maybe as a result of this answer I've been re-establishing connections with old, and important friends. By mistake I ended up at Maggie's place on Friday, thinking she had a party.  Ended up going out for Indian dinner, and now I'm back in the loop. Invited to Taco Tuesdays, which I can't afford right now.  But it's nice to know that I can go.
  Then yesterday I went to my first Tergar mini-retreat since JOY3.  It was lovely.  I feel clearer, stronger, and Minjur re-affirmed something I've been feeling for a while. This energy that I'm feeling in my navel is an energy of transformation.
  All of these communities, for me, are supports for love.  People I can love.  People who will love me.  I can build stability around this love.
 It's not that love is dependent on externals.  It's that love is interdependent, the play between the internal and the external.

Interdependence of Thought

This week in my meditation practice I've been exploring interdependence of thought. I'm still not entirely sure sometimes what is meant by the term "interdependence."  But this week I took it to mean the way my thoughts depend on different aspects of being, the way they depend on my body, on how strongly attached I am to concepts like the present, the past, the future, the self.
  I paid special attention to strong, recurring, persistent thoughts, what these were dependent upon, and how I might be able to loosen them.
  The first path that I started to explore is how dependent the quality and tone of my thought is on how embodied I am.  If I'm having an anxious or negative though, it's almost guaranteed that my limbs are stiff, my hands tense, my neck out of alignment, my breath shallow. If my thoughts are wandering it is absolutely guaranteed that my eyes are not focused on anything.  Formal meditation is a way of correcting this. Informal meditation is a way of re calibrating throughout the day. A way of stopping my thoughts from their habitual chaos.
  My thoughts by the way are quite dependent on my environment, and that seems to be changing. I'm a better housekeeper this month, in large part because I'm practising some habits of commitment. Making sure my life is driven by decisions, not impulses. I've been keeping with my housekeeping rituals and everyday I'm feeling a different energy in this home. It's still messy, but deep down it's cleaner, more organized, less overwhelming. As a result of sticking to these commitments, I'm cultivating self-trust.
  The two persistent thoughts I've been meditating, is this recurring mantra of "I hate myself" and "What do I want more than anything in the world."  The super ego and the id.  One way I've been dealing with the first is with tonglen, and a Pema Chodron trick I discovered.  I breathe in that hatred, feel a space for it in my body and in my belly.  Let it expand, let that blocked, stiff energy flow.  I need to be patient.  I was raised in an environment of chronic and constant hatred and hostility between my parents. These memories are deep in my body, in my nervous system.  They aren't about to evaporate in one breath or six.  But I can say at the end of this week that I do feel a little better. As though the space I'm creating in acknowledging and accepting this hatred, will one day be filled more easily with love.
  Which brings me to the second thought.  This week I sat silently with this question and waited patiently for an answer, instead of my usual tendency to want to rush in with a whole bunch of answers.  Finally it came to me, so obvious, so inevitable.  Love.  I want love. There is an answer to this question, and that is it.
  My body, my life, my son's life, so much dependent on that answer, that thought.
  What kind of persistent thoughts could arise if I knew better how to love.

Interdependence of Body

This week I've been investigating the various ways that my happiness, productivity, sense of self and sense of time is dependent on my body.
  The insight I come to again and again is how when my attention is brought down to my gut brain I immediately feel more present. In general being conscious of the body brings us immediately into the present moment. To be caught up in the tangled relationship between the present and future inevitably means a disconnect from the mind and the body.  And a disconnect from the mind and the body sends us evermore spinning into the invented world.
  As a result of this investigation I've been paying more attention to the seven points of meditation posture: The anchor, my hands, my spine, my shoulders, my neck, my mouth, and my eyes. Attention to all of these points grounds me and grounds my mind. Paying attention to the eyes has been an especially important investigation this week. I have developed the tendency of closing my eyes in meditation, which is pleasant, but it does allow me more room to get lost.  I'f I'm really committed to the present, I need to keep my eyes open.
  It all comes down to that, doesn't it? Commitment. Developing habits not because you feel like it, but because you've made a decision to become stronger, wiser, happier and you do what has to be done to re-direct your energy. The challenge lies in redirecting the energy incrementally so that you don't throw the whole system off balance.
  That means working as much on accepting your body and mind as you do trying to change it.

Deconstructing Stillness

What do I want more than anything else in the world?

Here's a persistent thought that keeps running through my brain like a kind of thought worm. For this thought to have meaning a few things have to be true.  That there's this stable "I" that is wanting something.  That there is this stable thing that is and always will be more desirable than anything else. That there is this knowable world that I have a complete enough knowledge of to be able to choose this stable thing.  When I look at this thought from this angle, it seems pernicious.  How can this though result in anything that a desperate wandering through the world trying to find this perfect thing for this stable I that will always be.

Or I can look at it from another angle.  Yes whatever "I" created as the stable "I" is a construct, but it can be a useful construct.  And I can't know everything in the world, but I can decide from what I do know the thing, the quality, the state of being that is the most important thing.  The thing that holds all other things together.  I can use this question to tease out my deepest and more abiding values.

This morning in meditation as I was deconstructing this thought, I settled into my Tan Tien, felt as I do more and more frequently these days, a kind of stillness.  A fluid, but stable energy that could be a source of thriving peace and joy.  A place that could be an engine/a feedback loop, a self propelling mechanism.

As I settled into the warmth I could feel it feed itself, it rose quietly and pleasantly up my body.  I could see the kind of life that I could have so clearly.  It would be a life where I chose this vitality, this joy, this peace as what I wanted more than anything, and the more I chose it, the more it would choose and nourish me.

We are not our abilities.  We are our choices. I believe that's a direct quote from Harry Potter.  But the magic is in the choices.

What this thought is telling me is that I need to choose.  If I'm going to have a path through the wilderness, for me and for Ben, I need to choose and I need to commit to that choice.  And I need to do that with peace and with joy.

Deconstructing Emotions

This week I start to deconstruct all the things that emotions are dependent upon.

Of course the tendency is to start with the unpleasant emtions, shame, anger, self-hatred, boredom, anxiety.

One of the things that has struck me so far is how much emotions are dependent on the interplay of stillness and motion. Shame and self hatred feel as still and solid of rocks in my body.  But they are of course dependent on the movement of unhappy memories and judgemental thoughts.  Whereas happiness feel fleeting, but it's dependent on cultivating that deep feeling of stillness and stability in the gut.

Or what I've come to start calling the nucleus.  I've been getting this feeling lately of expansion, with the growing energy in my tan tien as centre to all the power and energy in my body.

Tolle calls stillness a more advanced intelligence.  And that's certainly what it feel like.  As though if I could be dependent on this, instead of thoughts and emotions to drive me, I would be operating from a more sophisticated level.

Deconstructing The Senses

This week in my JOL3 practice, I'm deconstructing the senses.

Yesterday when I started this I wasn't quite sure what that meant.  I thought perhaps I was supposed to be deconstructing the sensations in my body.  So in my early morning meditation today, I did just that largely in my Tan Tien.  I felt this big block of numbness that I often felt and start to feel the different layers of anxiety keeping that numbness intact.

But later, when I did 30 minutes of standing meditation, I actually started deconstructing sound, hearing, and began to realize what an important practice this is.

Hearing is such a complex sense for me because I spend so much time listening to the sound of my own voice. I forget to listen to the sounds outside me,  I forget to listen to the sound of my breathing.  I forget to pay attention to the data that tells me that I'm alive.

And then there's the inner ear, the most important component of balance.  If I'm not listening then I'm not exercising the inner ear, and before I know it my life is off balance, everything goes off track.

Deconstructing the senses means looking at how there are so many levels to hearing, what I hear, how I hear, that there is no such thing really as a unified hearing or purpose to hearing. Yes i need to hear my inner voice, but I also need to hear the pauses between words, the length of my breath, the world outside.

"Are you listening to me."  This is an instruction I hear from myself again and again and again.

This week I use it as support for my practice.

Success

So, I have an agent.

Set a goal. Accomplished it.  Now the fun.  Or the undermining begins.

Yeah, you read that right.  I'm afraid.  I don't deal well with success.  Once I've achieved something, I find myself manic, overexcited, then anxious and convinced I'm going to fail or disappoint the person.  I find myself tangled up in expectations and before I know it I'm sitting with a bunch of crap at my feet.

How will this be any different?

I need to see the self-sabotaging persona as just that.  A persona that simply cannot be allowed to rule my life anymore.  That doesn't mean I kill her.  I just don't give her the control and power she once had.

The plan today is to use my calendar.  Stick to the tasks I've assigned myself. Particularly the cleaning tasks and my 30 minutes of zhan zhuang.  Be conscious of this persona that wants me to do what I feel like and not the task I assigned.

I will work on both deconstructing my body (because that's the JOL3 challenge for the week) and deconstructing the part of myself that is emotionally driven.

I do not have to be driven by anxiety, distorted beliefs and fear. That's what's undermining me.  But my wisdom will change the course I've been on.

Cognitive Body

Sometime around last summer, I started to notice an energy that seemed to be stabilizing in my heart area. Like a kind of ballbearing, but composed of clear moving energy. Now in the last few days after my retreat, I've felt this energy sinking down. Now it's stabilizing in my gut area.
  Everything for the next few months in my practice is going to be about stabilizing this gut energy because I believe this is the seat of wisdom.  This is the place from where wisdom shines.
  In the meantime I need to allow a lot of frozen energy to thaw. Okay it doesn't actually feel frozen as much as fossilized, or solidified to the point of carbonization. Yesterday I could feel a lifetime of self hatred in my gut and my body, and it seemed impossible for me to be anything but a big, block of self hatred.
 This is where The Mirror meditation is probably useful. The more I see the world around me as reflection and illusion, the easier it is to feel this about my inner life.
 I'm curious to see how my running practice affects this belly energy.  I know that I felt an increase of energy in my heart after six months of running, but I want to start working on my core strength so that I can get faster and run for longer periods and protect myself from injury. Will this translate into an actual feeling of wisdom, physically as well as spiritually?
  What I'm starting to feel the more I bring my Tergar and Zhan Zhuang practice together is a kind of "cognitive body."  This is a body that has been created from years of thought and emotion that have become habits, not always good, but often quite good. When all I see is the bad, it can feel pretty hopeless.  But the more I practice, the more I remember all the work I've done towards finding these feeling of peace and joy.

Self-directed Retreat Day 2

In my first hour of meditation today I had this insight.  Just as thought is impermanent, so is the consciousness and the life that is driven by thought. In my life, and I imagine in the history of humanity.  We are, right now, in a society wrapped up in the neocortex, as though this were the only part of the brain.  But the brain extends all throughout the body, and increasingly I believe that the most important part is the gut.

Certainly it's the most important part for physical health.  And wisdom, for me, begins with the decision to do what I can to stabilize my physical health.  So in hour two sitting with my Tan Tien was not the most comfortable feeling.  The neocortex feels like a safe abstract place.  But the gut is full of toxic, uncomfortable, sometimes weak feelings.  No wonder everyone wants to hang out in their brain.  Or at least that's where my habits bring me.

Hour three I decided to stand. But first I did a little reading from Bruce Frantzis Opening The Engergy Gates of Your Body. Somehow I seem to have skipped over the part where he recommends at least six months spent with an instructor, just on stabilizing the tan tien energies.  Longer if you're doing it alone!  Okay, well, I have spent about what now?  Twenty years?  I have made some progress.  But I've got some work to do to make it really stable.   I think this has something to do with the erratic parenting problem.  But I need to believe that I will get the stable love I didn't always get.   I stood for an hour and started to feel the hope that I can give myself this stable energy.

And then I can give it, to myself, to Ben, to my parents and my brother.  There are according to Mingyur Rinpoche four Buddah nature blockers, the first two being self-hatred and the second being hatred, or contempt towards others.  In hour two I started to feel the dissolution of my self-hatred, and finally in my belly joy.  A really nice joy that I reconized from the moment I learned I was pregnant.  This was a a creative, delightful joy, and if this is the kind of joy that tan tien generates than put me down for the next six month, or next twenty years.

Whatever, there is no time really. It's a fabrication, like sense of self.  And this is what I played with in hour five.  I love this freedom meditation that I learned in JOL3.   Letting go of self, and time, and with it agency. Once I let go of that I can feel the chi charting its own agency.  I got a big dose of self in the last 10 minutes, when I started to feel that familiar restlessness and craving.  But I decided to let the chi deal with that, and like a lovely, competent parent, it soon distracted me with a blissful warmth.  That is what will be driving me for the next twenty years, not my thoughts.

It's not that I won't have thoughts.   But I volunteer my life to the path that this energy will open up for me.

Self Directed retreat, day 1

I noticed in my JOL3 guidebook yesterday that I'm supposed to do a two day retreat at some point during my six months of practice.  Because I'm actually at midpoint--14 weeks into it--and because I'm not sure I'll have the time again in the next few months--or ever--I decided to do it now.

I'm supposed to do at least six hours a day, each day.   It's possible I've actually done that in my more enthusiastic stages.  But I've never done that much meditation formally before.  It's kind of like doing an ultra marathon of meditation. At first it felt incredibly daunting.

But I'm up to it.  I've just completed five hours of meditation.  I'll probably go out for a run, and then I'll do another hour tonight before bed.  To make it a retreat, I'm staying away from news, internet surfing television, even as much as possible, imaginary conversations.

So far it's been an interesting trip.  In the first hour, I felt a pleasant all over vitality that seemed to originate mostly in my brain and felt like what I would call, a sort of spirit molecule awakening, as though my body was heading into the either and was kind of connecting with all the awareness around me. Towards the end of this first hour though, I started to wonder if this was really happening, or this was just come kind of intellectual concept I was framing my experience in.

Hour two was more challenging. The excitement of starting a meditation retreat was starting to ebb, and I found myself sitting in boredom, restlessness, all the feelings I try as much as possible to avoid during a normal day.  Doubt starting setting in about this path, about this decision. Shouldn't I be doing something more important with my life.  It started to become clear to me how much I really do believe that happiness is a result of staying with the program, the job, the status, the security of a respectable life.  I doubt myself, deeply, because I feel I've permanently fallen off that track, that debt will weigh me down and money problems will win out, and that this is my due.

Hour three I found myself a little happier.  I felt a joy in my heart that I know has very little to do with money or status, and everything to do with my spiritual beliefs.  Nothing wrong with money, an important job, power, status, respectablity, any of those things.  But the joy in my heart that I've cultivated out of my spiritual practice is not something that can be bought, or given as a reward.  It's there because of many, many hours of faith in this energy.  So it felt good to get my faith, the ground of my practice and my power, back.

I broke for a light lunch and did a little reading of Rinpoche's book, and found myself drawn to a passage about Buddah nature as a nugget of gold hidden deep under a mountain of waste and mud. As I set into hour four, I had that story priming my mind, and I felt the energy move down from the joy of my heart to the discomfort of my gut.  As yes, my gut, the mountain of waste in I hide, ignore and forget my most powerful feelings, the most powerful seat of my practice, the dan tien.

Hour five was really about explore the literal, experiential truth of gut wisdom.  This insight is such a flickering fire fly, or so it feels like.  Man I hate resting in my gut.  But it's where the wisdom is, and if I don't accept that, I'm like a banana (or is it a cocoa) tree.  The fruit of my practice gets cut down once a year, and everything has to start again.  If I want my power to have staying power, even though I recognize that the fruits of that staying power will never be permanent, I need to really root myself back in my tan tien.

I need to keep working on that energy.

For mysef, and for everyone who might be open to this teaching.

Impermanence of Sensations

I'm midway now in the six month JOL3 program, where I'm trying to make these habits of wisdom intuitive.

This week I've been working on impermanence of body sensations.  But I'm admitting to myself at the end of the week that my practice on this has been somewhat impermanent itself.  There seems to be something in me that is quite resistant to this particular practice.  Probably because it starts with something that feels like pain.  But is merely discomfort.

The consquence of avoiding this practice though, is that I've missed out on a powerful lesson.  It's through these uncomfortable sensations that we reach a state of interesting, comfortable, buddah nature, or chi sensations.  Sensations of stability, stillness, lucid, clear energy running through us.  I guess I'll call them life force sensations.

I like to be in this energy, but one thing I've noticed more than usual this week is that I'm also uncomfortable with this energy.

What I realized this morning is that I'm uncomfortable with the impermanence of this more powerful energy. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that this energy is always in a state of flux.   But if I settle into that, if I watch this energy transform in the same way that I might watch television, suddenly my resistance begins to melt away.  I'm not so worried that I'm going to get sucked into some permanent loop because this energy is impermanent as well.

It's really just another layer of impermanence.

Power, Joy and Impermanence

Last week my answer to that what do I want more than anything in the world was power.  And yes, it's still power.  But also, I want joy.
  Joy's a little trickier though. Because joy is not a think you can have all the time, I think.  And neither is power really.  There is no power if you don't constantly confront your weaknesses.  There is no joy if you can't feel sadness, anger, despair, and its impermanence.
  What was it Tim Olmsted taught me back in the Joy of Living 3 course.  It was to feel the impermance within our painful emotions.
  Last week the focus of my meditation practice was impermanence of the body.  I logged a lot of minutes feeling the fact that this body, the health embodied in this body would not always be around.  My parents bodies are not permanent either.  Nothing is permanent and it hurts.
  But the hurt isn't permanent.
  Joy isn't a thing you can want and have.  It's an energy you feel when you realize that nothing you want is anything permanent that you can have.  What a waste of energy wanting can be it seems, since whatever you acquire will inevitably dissolve.
 But should we forsake joy because it will not always be ours?
 Joy is fleeting, but at the same time inexhaustible. We can drink from it again and again and again.
 That is the true root of power.

Nurturing Power

Yesterday I completed my second 10K race.  Big difference between this year and last year.  I felt good, I felt strong, mentally and physically.  I ran that race with ease and joy.  I ran that race with power.

Last year, I just ran/walked the race.  I had a good time.  I had a great moment.  But this year was a good moment from beginning to end. So, I've decided to sign up for the half marathon.  I think I'll sign Ben up too. A real adventure for both of us.

What can I do to maintain this power and nurture it so that we can share this great moment next year? Well first I can realize how much I want power.  What do I want more than anything else in the world?  I ask myself this question constantly throughout the day, and I feel like I will never stop asking it until I have the right answer.

The answer is power.  But not in the way that it is usually defined in my society.  When I mean power, I mean this moving energy that keeps me running with ease.  This mixture of body memory and thriving energy. The ability to make myself and help others to be really, truly happy.

This is what I want more than anything in the world.  Real power.  And this is what I want to nurture in myself and in Ben.

After the race I downloaded an app to help me with my training.  It suggested I choose an activity to cross train with.  I decided to make this an opportunity to renew my Zhan Zhuang practice.  I still meditate, but it's been a while since I stood. Really stood.  I'd like to bring standing back into my life and into my running practice.  So at least twice a week I'm going to stand for 40 minutes.  I may stand for shorter times on a daily basis.  Maybe get back to standing as part of my meditation practice.  But it's all about nurturing power.

I forget this again and again and again.  But there's only one way to remember it.  By being powerful. And then power becomes its own habit.

Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstadter has a theory that consciousness of "I" is a strange loop. What he means by this is that consciousness is a recursive process.  At a certain point the mind gets enough data and experience to create a story of "I" and maintain it as an ongoing narrative.  But if we actually break this loop down I is really a logically recursive loop, It's like the "I" has folded in on itself and now creates its own energy and momentum.
  But also its own suffering because there is something, after all, artificial about it.
  I have a theory now that meditation shifts us back into the strange loop of natural intelligence. In fact, more and more I can actually feel this loop as a physical energy.  In time we become adept at switching out the "I" loop and into a place of peace, beyond concepts, and those of us who become really adept at it eventually see that natural loop fold back in on itself. From there we can switch in and out of "I" and natural intelligence depending on what our life demands.
  When that happens we can re-take control of the now.  If the now of our life is constantly defined by technology, then yes it will become more and more difficult to imagine a future, and not being able to imagine a future is profoundly demotivating.  Imagining a future, though, that's just like the past merely repeats the problems of the past.
  That's why it's useful to have an idea of god, or a spirit, or a sense of a future that is bright, but fuzzy and not entirely under our control.  A good future, a future we can be grateful for, a future filled with compassion and joy.

I Will Be An Agent of Change

This week in my Tergar practice I am meditating of work, on its problems and its joys.

On Tuesday I sent a proposal to an agent, and all week I feel like I'm waiting in line at a rollercoaster. Will she take me on, will she pass, and will I have to keep waiting in line forever.  If she takes it, I go on a huge up and down experience of finishing and marketing a book.  I she passes, like the other agents have, I need to decide whether I keep waiting, or give up and try another ride.

The evening I sent in the proposal I went to the book launch of an acquaintance younger and now more successful than I.  She signed the book "to the first bookish person I ever knew."  I should be happy for her, and happy for whatever influence I've had on her.  But I'm envious.

So while I was meditating on work this week I sat plunk in the middle of that billious feeling.  It was a very instructive pond of toxic suffering.  It taught me that the miscerceptions that were holding me back in my work was and continues to be the idea that work is about me, this self that I've created.  And so because of this misperception I think that publication or success will add something to me, and that failure will take away something from me.

But those are just the highs of work.  The joys of work are found in being part of something, and believing your part of something that will liberate people from their suffering and help them find more happiness. Without that work is just an empty rollercoaster of thrills and long, punishing waits.

I need to wake up every morning and feel that I'm an agent of change.  An author, but an author that is part of something bigger and more important.

Shifting out of the self-driven path, I feel the joy. I feel the flow of energy that I want my work to be a part of.  I feel the hope.

I feel the possibility that I can be an agent of change.

Relationships

This week as part of my Tergar practice I meditated on problematic relationships in my life and on the misperceptions that are holding these problems in place.

The misperception that comes up again and again and again, is the tendency to see other people's identities as fixed. They do something, or have done something that upsets me, and then that's it, I have this expectation of the worst, from them, and from myself in the way that I relate to them.  I feel like I have to protect my vulnerable self from their worst qualities.

The Tergar meditation on this follows a process that is really helpful in releasing these misperceptions.  After relaxing my mind into open awareness, I focus for a while on my basic goodness, on my desire for happiness and for the best for myself and for others, on my steadily growing vital energy, on my ongoing motivation to stay reasonably organized and healthy.  Once I've done this I am ready to allow a problematic relationship to come up in my mind. As I begin to contemplate this relationship, I inevitably remember that this person has basic goodness as well, that this person wants to be happy, and believes what they are doing is towards this, even in those moments when they lapse. Even if they are someone who has lots of moments of lapsing.

The other misperception that has come up frequently in the last week is the difficulty that I have in letting go of relationships.  Especially bad relationships.  I ruminate them, I remember them, I hold on to them, even when those relationships need space, or maybe even termination.

I feel like I need to learn and re-learn the difference between giving up on a relationship and letting go of a relationship.  For instance, giving Ben room to make mistakes and live the consequences of unwise decisions is not "giving up" it's letting go, for his own growth.  Not letting go has ruinous consequences for both of us. Every time I try to take control, I cement the idea that I expect failure from him.  But mistakes are not failure. And failure can be rich ground for learning.  He has many more strengths than weaknesses and I need to start focussing on that and helping him to focus on that.

He's had enough success under his belt.  My job is to remind him that he's capable of maintaining that success. I've made the invisible stumbling blocks visible to him.  It's up to him now to surmount them.

And I need to start letting go of these relationships so that I can focus on my own growth. My own strengths. My own success. Nothing gives a child expectations of success like seeing a parent succeed. Nothing saddles a child with failure than a parent who sees themselves as a failure.

Acceptance

It's been almost a month since my birthday.  For the record my life is not being propelled effortlessly by the will of the cosmos liked I'd kind of hoped it would be by now.
  On the plus side, after the Joy of Living course, and six months of running, I am feeling it easier to access what feels like a higher frequency of energy in my life. It's clearer, more powerful, more solid. But it's far from the default mode of my brain. Default  mode continues to be concerns about career and money and economic health and a general mixture of resentment, compulsions, etc.  If anything, I'm feeling this power wane.
  Usually this happens when I'm about to make a career move. Getting close to success in some way. I let my formal meditation habit go. Enthusiasm becomes over excitement, and I burn up all the joy.  I think this might also be happening because I'm getting to the point of mastery in my Tergar course, and there's a strong force in me that wants to undermine that mastery.  I could be really internalizing this wisdom now. Instead I'm suddenly career focussed.

Maybe instead of making running my most important habit for September, I need to really keep to my formal meditation and look out for the subtle ways in which I may be undermining this fundamental habit in my life. I need to recognize that I'm not as enthusiastic as I was with all the peer support around me.  But that I need to do this with acceptance if it's going to become a core part of my life.

Birthday Run

It's my birthday today. I'm in Maine and this morning I received the best gift I could ever imagine.

I've been running a lot this summer, using the meditative techniques I've been cultivating in JOL3, and achieving states of mental, physical and psychic fitness beyond anything I've ever felt.  Often while I've been running, my sense of time, sense of self, and with those things,  all sense of suffering have disappeared.

Today for the first time I was able to run effortlessly, connected to a powerful energy that made me feel as though my body was somehow being propelled by some cosmic force.   This run was painless, and best of all intuitive and I was able to maintain it for almost the those six mile run.

It became clear to me that this could become an intuitive default mode with consistent practice. Like riding a bike.

And that's when it hit me that this was a wonderful, wonderful middle age gift.  Better than a bike.  Enlightenment, or something close enough to it, to keep me going for the rest of my life.

Thanks Universe. Very nice birthday gift, this healthy body and healthy mind and the happiness that comes with this.

The Source

Midway through my first week in Maine with my parents.  The honeymoon is over, and the tensions are already to starting to take shape.  My mother is disappointed that Ben doesn't want to spend time with other children on the beach. She feels frustrated, I guess, because she's done so much to try and cultivate this friendship this boy that Ben just doesn't seem to connect with.  I feel accused because Ben isn't socially confident. We had our first big fight over this.

I would love for this vacation to be an opportunity to work out some of my sense of powerlessness I have around my mother.  To see if the power I've been cultivating in my practice can really spill over into the most challenging part of my life.  But, I can't seem to avoid getting into a fight with her. And when I do the consequences are terrible.  It's one to two days of being ignored and judged and shamed. Last year this happened around my birthday, 50, a milestone and it was terrible. So empty and arid and painful.

If I could manage to get through this vacation with a feeling of genuine love and progress it would be such an accomplishment.  And it might help me to be more productive and happier next year.

But that might be too much to expect.

The one thing I need to accept is that I can't control my mother's behaviour, feelings or level of insight.  I can only modulate my reactions. I can for instance set a goal that I'm not going to get into an argument about Ben's interests, or what he should or should not do. I can do my best to respectfully listen to my mother's concerns and then I can let the conversation die a natural death. I'm not going to force Ben to do anything he doesn't want to do.

That said, I know my mother.  She is driven by something that tests the emotional will of everyone around her. There are never any easy answers to living comfortably with her.

All that remains now is the intention to use this as support for practice and compassion for my family and myself.

Breaking up with bliss before it breaks up with me

This has been a very intense month of meditation, study and reflection.

I've had some meditation experiences that have brought me to places where I've felt that my entire identity, personality, even body might dissolve.  A couple of days ago, I was thinking about some disturbing tragic news coming out of the middle east, children murdered in the antagonism between the two states.  I wondered if that deep, poisonous rancour would ever work itself out of their terrible feud.  Then I felt something shoot through my heart, and there was this space.  And emptiness, but not an arid emptiness.  A clear, lucid, emptiness full of potential.

I still feel it.  I could feel it even more if I wanted to intensify it.

But Rinpoche said something very interesting in this week's lesson.  In your meditation practice it's important, as a general principle, to break up with your positive experiences "before they break up with you."  He says this keeps your practice pure, and actually helps you in your next meditation.

I've been suffering this week with a bout of obsessive, bickering anger towards some people I've been working with.  It feels to me like part of the pattern that I grew up with. It feels so solid and unmanageable.  I feel like I'll never be able to work with people. That I'll bring my anger into every team I try and be a part of.

Then I feel like I'll end up wasting this grant and never get the writing I've dreamed of doing done.  My emotional blocks run so deep.

But when they're gone, I can't imagine writing.  It feels so foreign to me writing from a place of mild happiness.  It feels so strange.

I wonder if I could actually live and write this way, just taking dictation from the place in my brain that is able to be so full of potential.  So full of this joyful emptiness.  It's what we dream us, we writers, just taking dictation from this place.  But when we get there it doesn't feel quite right this effortless writing.

But it's what I'm going to do, so I might as well get used to it.

Ambivalence, My Best Imaginary Friend

Tergar's JOL3 course has been something of a thrill ride.

A few days ago I was laughing hysterically about life in my "skin pocket." Today it's raining, I'm arguing with my son, and sifting through some of the same old annoying professional problems I've had all my life. Suddenly my life is feeling a little more mundane.  But to be honest, I kind of like it here.

In one of the webinars our instructors suggested having a default practice.  A practice we go to whenever things feel like they are hopeless and slipping away, and we're feeling lost again.

I'm thinking mine might be something of a take on Mingyur Rinpoche's making friends with his panic.

It's been a long time since I've struggled with panic.  So, I wouldn't consider panic to be my best friend, or best teacher anymore.

The emotional situation that has haunted my life has been ambivalence.  I grew up in a family of constant fighters and bickerers and that numb, muddy, lava like energy has haunted me all my life.  In Robert Boyce's wonderful book on writing he identifies ambivalence as the most popular reason for why writers have a difficult time writing.  They have ambivalence towards their writing, and whether they realize it or not, this is just an expression of their ambivalence towards life.

Recognizing ambivalence as my greatest emotional challenge, making very good friends with it and seeing it as a wonderful teacher may be my best and surest path towards greater, more sustainable wisdom.

Today I did a writing meditation that used this ambivalence as support for meditation.  I started in open awareness, listening just to sounds and feeling the ground beneath my feet and bum.  Then I felt that familiar ball of numb, tangled emotions in my gut.

I tried as much as possible to drop the storyline. I just felt the feelings.  As it the habit of my practice, I moved from those feelings towards some compassion, towards the desire to be free of whatever in those feelings was causing me suffering.  In time this energy rose into my brain and then towards the crown, where I start to feel my no more familiar place of selfless, timeless, spacious awareness.  A place which offers not much for the ambivalence to grasp.  Without time, without self, negative emotions can't stabilize.  All that is left is relief, calm, warmth, intelligence and life.

If  I can regularly connect with this feeling and rejoice in it, then I will have joy.  And joy, mild productive joy, is the best place to write from.  It's the place that readers want to be.  They want to feel this kernel and current of joy in the book that they pick up.   And I want to be a vehicle for that.

This seems to as good a default practice as I can get.

Skin Pocket

Had a very interesting meditation experience today.

As per my JOL 3 curriculum I've been meditating on timeless awareness.  It's been pleasant, and trippy, but eventually I decided to just rest in open awareness.

Soon I felt my energy begin to expand.  Really expand.  Expand to the point where I started to feel like a kind of giant spiritual jellyfish with a very thin membrane separating me from the timelessness, limitless ether, that is really who "I" am.

It didn't burst. But my consciousness started to ponder.  "So, what am I going to do for the rest in my life in this skin pocket."

Suddenly I started laughing and laughing.  "Skin pocket," I found myself repeating and again and again, each time sending me into another wave of helpless laughter.   As I returned to ordinary awareness, which now felt like it would never be ordinary awareness again, I kept imagining myself going through the rest of my life referring to myself as my "skin pocket."

It was so true.

That's all I really am.  Just a skin pocket for this consciousness inside me and outside me.

Hahahahaha.

Wonder if I'll ever stop laughing at this.

Freedom Meditation

This morning, sitting at my kitchen table. There was a very heavy rain, the end of a three day heatwave. Usually I try and run in the rain, but we don't get a lot of monsoon type rain in Montreal, so I decided to cut myself some slack and postpone my run until later.

Instead I sat and slowly remembered the directions to the Freedom meditation I learned from Mingyur Rinpoche last week.

I sat in open awareness listening to the rain.  Then I relaxed my mind into mirror meditation, recognizing the fruit bowl I saw in front of me as the two dimensional image that is what my eyes really see. Anything else I see is just my brain projecting and filling in from what it knows about the fruit bowl from past experience. The fruit is over there being fruit. I'm here, just me and my two dimensional image that seems a lot like the bowl of fruit, but isn't actually a bowl of fruit.  I spend some time resting in this analysis, hoping to make this knowledge intuitive.

Once I've rested in this,  I apply this same de-constructive process to my self.  I realize that whatever conception of self I have is really just fragments and projection.  So for the duration of this meditation at least, I might as well just let my sense of self go. I focus on my body. Years of chi kung practice have made me reasonably adept at blurring the boundaries between body and space. The ideal in Tai Chi and Chi Kung is to feel no real separation from your inner and outer world, so as I begin to scan and analyze my body, I start to feel parts of my body "disappear".  With that goes much of my sense of self as a physical entity. This is something that I'm kind of used to, so I don't think of it as "altered" consciousness. It's fairly easy for me to relax into this feeling.  Once I'm there I feel a kind of magnetic energy holding me together.  A sort of helpful scaffolding my psyche keeps so that I don't get too disoriented without my usual sense of body. As I rest in this, it begins to loosen and dissolve as well.

Once I'm feeling this sense of spaciousness. I start the deconstructive process on time.  In fact, from what I know, there's a 200 millisecond lag between when something actually happens as when the brain registers it as happening (according to one famous study, our muscles register our intention to act before our brain does-- which is really freaky when you think about it.)  Knowing this I can accept that any sense I have of the present as illusory.  The present is already over by the time my brain has registered it. And if the past is already over and the future hasn't happened, and the present is impossible to register in the actual present, then there's not much point paying attention to time at all.  At least not for the duration for this meditation.

Once I've let go of the fruit bowl, myself, and time, the next to go is any sense of agency.

Certain familiar fears come up about what an entire of life without any sense of agency might feel like. But I've decided to just watch them and let them dissolve, at least for the duration of this meditation.

With my agency gone, I relax into bare awareness.

A clarity emerges, but it's a kind of fluid, moving clarity. Something closer to what I would call lucidity, which I define as clarity with movement and power.  It's another kind of magnetic feeling energy, but with a more dynamic aspect. I've surrendered myself to it, so it kind of works its way through my system on its own, releasing me from inner psychic tensions, first in my head, then in my heart. There's a tight feeling I now label as "grasping", but it's not so much "me" grasping as remnants of myself back when it was grasping things. The process feels like a slow, steady inner massage of tensions that aren't there because I'm stressed, but because I was once stressed.  It's like a working through of the past to make room for whatever will happen in the future.

At some point this energy dissolves and is replaced by this a warm, then almost uncomfortably hot energy that starts pouring through my crown down into my gut.  Once this is over,  I get a very small stream of wet energy kind of in my lower back and the back of my neck.

At this point I become concious of the fact that while I'm aware of all these interesting, mostly pleasant energies in my brain and body, I'm not really feeling much emotionally.  I become conscious of the words of the dedication we repeat before every meditation. "May we have joy and a world at peace."

I remember, "joy and peace, yes that's something I want for myself and everyone."  So I set about wanting it and waiting for it to happen. Then I start to feel this familiar impatience that I've been working with all week. Earlier the week I had been trying to "make" impatience impermanent, but on Tim's advice I've been simply focussing on its inherent quality of impermance. Just knowing this quality is enough to start the process of dissolving.   I become conscious of the desire to be patient.  Until I remember that "patience" is a time-type word.  If there's no time there's not much point in being "patient" because there's no future. Plus even if it did happen it would be over by the time I'd actually experienced it.

Then it hits me, oh yes, I remember now.  Joy and peace.  These aren't states of being so much as qualities within me. They just haven't manifested.  But it doesn't matter whether they manifest now, or later.  All that matters is that they're here. Somewhere. And will show up at some point.  And when that happens I'll be aware of them, even if they don't last.

I don't have any sense of agency over this.  I don't need any sense of agency over this.  I'm content with my agency being limited to my awareness of awareness and of the qualities that will manifest one way or another.

It's around this time a kind of helium type energy start rising in me from below. But it's not a light gas type helium.  It's like liquid helium,  It rises very slowly and as it gets to my heart it starts to expand, which is kind of exciting but uncomfortable, because it's always possible my heart might burst.  Fortunately that doesn't happen. The energy starts to condense and make a solid home for itself in my heart, and then send more energy up through my throat and into my head and brain.  I feel a kind of rising feeling in my whole body. Not a levitation, so much as a extreme straightening up, which is a really nice confidence building feeling

A joy starts to emerge, but it's a nice practical joy.  The kind of joy you feel from a feeling of competence. Like  "rejoice! I've set up the circumstances for this lovely meditation." Once I've enjoyed this feeling I start to sense this is a good time to start heading back to ordinary reality.

It is after all, about 8 a.m., and I have a day of responsibilities ahead that don't really leave a lot of space for transcendant revelations of life beyond our normal misconceptions.  Even if I did feel more joy and deeper peace, what would I do with that?  Run through the streets chanting "it's so OBVIOUS, joy and peace are WITHIN."  I'm not sure people really want to hear that on their way to work. So I might as well start the cool down process.

I call it that because I've had my fair share of what Mingyur Rinpoche so charmingly calls "nervous breakthroughs", and I find that If I don't take the time to consciously return to something closer to ordinary awareness then it's really easy to get derailed by overexcitement.  Better to come down slowly than crash or fall.

Gently I return to open awareness. In Chi Kung we make three circles with our arms that mimic a kind of pushing down of energy above our heads back into our gut for safe storage and later use. I do that and then follow it with Tergar's closing dedication.

I would say that's it, but I do notice that my ordinary awareness feels infused with the power of this experience. And throughout the day, when I do eventually find the time to run, and when I'm doing routine activites, I'm able to recall this different kind of intelligence and gently shift into it.

It used to be that I meditated for altered states of consciousness, but I find myself less and less interested in that.  I'm more interested in tnis different intelligence, connecting with it, and connecting with others who are connected to it.  Kind of like adding my voice to a choir and hope that in time that choir gets big enough and resonant enough that even the most unenlightened of us will feel helpless not to join it.

I know that sounds like a very simple, Who-ville, philosophy of life.  But for today that feels liberating enough.

More on Wisdom

Wisdom, according to what I'm learning in Tergar's Joy of Living 3, is our awareness of reality.  That includes our awareness of how reality can be distorted and shaped by our perceptions.  In JOL 1 the meditative practice focussed on thoughts and using our awareness to calm the mind.  JOL 2 focussed on compassion and lovingkindness and increasing the power of the heart.  JOL 3 is about bringing awareness fo our perceptual level.

Perceptions are different from thoughts in that they are beliefs about the world that we see, rather than just mental vocalizations, pictures and feeling.

I discovered a good example of the difference after doing a simple wisdom meditation that started first with a meditation on basic goodness.  There might be many thought that could arise on a meditation of basic goodness, but the perceptions are somewhat different.  For instance I might become aware of a perception that basic goodness doesn't feel good enough.

Yesterday after this meditation, I did the dishes and noticed that in relaxing and resting in my basic goodness, my perception of the mundane task transformed form something I resisted to something I could deeply enjoy and appreciate.

Last night I had a powerful meditative experience.  I woke up in the middle of the night gripped with my all too familiar financial anxiety. It seemed so solid, disaster seemed so inevitable.  Slowly after about twenty minutes these anxieties began to dissolve and I began to feel my chi ebbing its way into my being slowly dissolving all the suffering.  At that point I began to feel that my natural intelligence was far stronger than any of the misperceptions that had led me into these financial challenges.  I could go to sleep feeling comforted and assured in my ability to find a way out of that particular prison.

One of the central themes of this course is that whatever prison of suffering we have created, we have created it and thus we can un-create it.

The first step is understanding that this perceptual level exists.

Wisdom

This week I start Joy of Living 3, which is about cultivating wisdom.  I've been re-reading this year's old posts and notice a mistake that I made in writing that wisdom was having a conceptual awareness of how things work.  In fact it's the opposite.  Wisdom is going beyond a conceptual awareness of how things work. Wisdom is having an experiential awareness of power and powerlessness and knowing how to choose power.

Many years ago, in my late twenties I had a series of disturbing dreams that led me into psychotherapy.  I'd been experimenting with lucid dreaming, waking up in my dreams, cultivating the ability to fly.  But somehow this power started to grow out of control.  I started to feel it in my daily reality and it terrified me, this magnetic energy.  My psychotherapist asked me why I was giving so much power to a force outside of myself.  Gradually I stopped being aware of it, my neurotic symptoms abated, and discovered a gentler form of this magnetic feeling energy in tai chi.

But it hit me yesterday that this power was never outside of me.  This power was in me.  This was a concrete experience of how powerful my mind was. For some reason I wasn't ready to own that power.

I am now.  But when I say that there is a danger of it sounding narcissistic.  I don't mean by this that I alone have this tremendous power.  I believe this power is a sort of commons.  A shared power that is accessible to all and that anyone can harness as long as the rules are respected.  This power is both a place and a self that we all share, only too few people know of its existence.

Every day now I spend more and more of my time in this place, resting, drawing from the source and giving back by sharing this knowledge and bringing this energy into all I do, whether it's writing my book or keeping my home tidy and liveable.

In cultivating this power for myself I cultivate it for everyone.  And in cultivating it for everyone, I cultivate it for myself.

And it is an actual, real power, not a concept.  I can feel it, I can breathe it, I can taste it.

And I can make it last.

New Post

This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.

It started with what are now the basics.  A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone.  A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.

I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."

After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.

Suddenly I was angry.  But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.

I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience.  Not every moment had to be peace.  There could be authentic peace, even in anger.

And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.

The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.

I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.

I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt.  I was tired of this climb.

And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.

Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.

A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)

I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational.  So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.

But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

Power

This week has been big week in my spiritual journey.  I'm feeling a tremendous wakening of chi, kundalini, bochicitta, whatever it is.  It's more powerful in me than it's ever been.

It started about a week ago with a fluttering in my throat.  I'd been working on resting in the energy of my Tan Tien and then suddenly I started feeling this energy in my throat, like a trapped butterfly.  I started to do a little research into throat chakras, and decided that this must be energy that is moving up, unblocking my very tense vocal chords.  Resting in my vocal chords brings back a lot of childhood memories, not all good. So much fighting in my family, harsh words, abuse.  This was a good opportunity to work that through.

Once the energy in my throat was worked through, I discovered an effervescence, that I suspect is the "taste of purification" that Shinzen Young talks about. 

This is apparently a watershed moment in meditation, when you shift from meditating to have states of being, towards meditating as part of a process of purification.  In this state you are content to face your pain, your suffering, your circumstances because you realize that the way you are experiencing this pain will make every future moment of your life better.

There are blocks, I know, to my power an energy.  But I'm feeling more and more everyday that I'm working my way through them.  I'm running, I'm eating better, I'm feeling better.  I'm still feeling blocked in my writing, but I'm feeling confident that this can change.

There are perceptions and misconceptions that keep all this stagnation in place, and I know I probably don't see them yet.  But I will.

It's going to be an exciting six months. Looking forward to finding out what's on the other side.

Happiness as default mode

I've made the switch.

This month I prepare for level three of Tergar's Joy of Living program. As part of the preparation we do an insight meditation called The Mirror meditation.  After preliminary relaxing of the mind, we "see"  everything in the visual field as though it we were looking into a mirror, as though everything that seems solid is really just a reflection.

The more I practice this perceptual mode, of looking at the world as though it were not as solid and real as it seems, the more I start to feel, at an experiential level, how transient my suffering is.  It feels as solid as a chair, a building, a city. But really it's not.

In ordinary awareness, and often in meditative awareness, I conceive of life as heavy, overwhelming suffering with transient moments of happiness and lucidity. That is the narrative my brain spins without any direction. That unfortunately has been, as it is for many people, my default mode.

But this week I am reversing this. This energy, this vitality, this state of being, this happiness, this warmth, this effervescence in my soul,  this is the solid ground.  The boredom, the anxiety, the lethargy, the despair, these are what come and go.

What is keeping that suffering rooted is my subconscious belief that the suffering is immutable, inevitable.

My intention this week is to catch this belief in action. Gently correct it and then get back to the default mode that I want to have.  The default mode I know have.

Joy.

I've Had A Dream

Last night I dreamt that I'd turned a corner, both literally and allegorically.  I dreamt that I now had the power to be happy, that depression was permanently behind me, like a very bad life long cold. From now on I was just on a permanent path of emotional health, joy, the ability to love and be loved, work hard and thrive and everything that comes with that.

I also dreamed that there was a new invention. It was 3D goggles that children wore in the car that would make the scenery look more interesting.  Make it look like they were driving through the best, most interesting city in the world.  I could see the world through the eyes of a child wearing these goggles. But what she was seeing was Montreal, the city I now live in.

I realized that what other people can only have through technological innovation and re-creation, I have naturally.

All I need to do is live my great life and appreciate it.

It's interesting that I have this dream during a week where I've been very much seeing my consciousness practice is a way to see what goes on in my head during the day as dream like.  Meditation trains you to wake up regularly throughout the day from the dream like stream in your head.  It helps me to sit for a moment and remember what it is I'd like to do if I had the power to do it.  Just like I do in lucid dreaming.

To wake up and regain my sense of purpose.

Faith

As my energy sinks farther into my core, I am forming some different ideas about faith. I used to think of faith as more of a thought form. Something you believed, in your head, and you stuck to out as a matter of committed principle. More and more these days  faith feels like an energy in my body, like a power. People who have faith, in a path, in themselves, in the society around them, have a kind of psychic energy. We respond to that energy because we want that faith.  We need that faith.
  Over the years I've cultivated faith in this meditative practice. I seem to learn slowly, but how else can you learn faith? You can embrace it as a hypothesis, but deeply rooted faith only develops once it has been tested again and again. Cultivating energy in my core has paid off for me again and again. Resting in my faith feels natural, if I let myself do that.
  But I still struggle with my undermining doubts. Recently I've started using a technique recommended by Martha Beck. Sit with that doubt and feel it as false. Then sit with the faith and feel it as true.
  In meditation this morning I let that true feeling sink into my gut. I can root that feeling and make it such a core part of me that I will have to devote less and less energy into believing in myself.  That belief will be locked in. And as I use it to nurture belief in others, it will only grow.
 

Sinking into my gut

I've spent a long time, during this process of letting my energy sink, resting in my heart. There is so much numbness in there, so much work that still needs to be done,  that I haven't wanted to leave. Yesterday I had an emotional/physical insight into hatred.  I could feel a layer of hatred in my heart, and then underneath, in an actual physical place, I could feel the desire to be free of that hatred.  I could feel that desire to be free, my compassion, in a place deeper.  And that's when I knew that the hatred would never last.  Things sink, and one day that hatred would simply dissolve into my much deeper desire to be free of it. I would like to continue this project of mapping out the heart.  Locating feelings, especially the positive ones when I feel them. And perhaps I will.
  But I sense that my heart is telling me it's time to move on, and move down my body into my tan tien. Moving down into this place feels like a rooting process.  I'm allowing this energy of an open heart to now move down my body into the earth of my liver, of my lower body. That's where the blocks dissolve, that's wear the toxins get cleansed. I'm going to take my time.  I'm going to take it slow.  Resting in my Tan Tien is a very intense experience.  Alot of feelings will emerge.
  But here lies wisdom.

Writing from the heart

Feeling this new, growing energy in my heart, means I feel more compelled to live from my heart. I trust that if I sit with this energy in time I will feel a place of completion, joy, reverence.  A state of being.

But how do I write from this.  Last night I was watching a television show with that standard scene, which we've all pretty much seen a milliion times now.  A piano teacher tells a student that their playing is too perfect, too intellectual.  They need to feel the pain and play from that.

I've tried to do that in my writing, but it never seems to work. My heart feels numb and self-conscious when I do that.  But I suppose naming the numbness and the self-consciousness is a start. My own heart is so muddy and chaotic it feels like, and my environment continues to reflect that even if I know I've made a lot of progress.

Like it or not, there is squalor in my heart.  Light squalor, but squalor nonetheless.

In the television show, the character worries that he has no pain to draw from.  He lives with loving, politically correct, lesbian parents.  Meanwhile, he's forgotten that his father is an embarrassing, lonely alcoholic, who had has distanced himself from.

I sit with my heart  and feel years of numbness.  And I worry that I will never unfreeze all these blocks.

But that numbness is there because of pain.  A lot of pain.  I will never have to worry about not having pain. Pain is good.  Suffering is bad. The resistance to pain, the mechanisms by which we dull the pain.

I don't want to feel that numbness.

A few years back, I found places in the energy centre in my head  that were full of depression and anxiety. Now I'm feeling them in my heart.  Or not feeling them, but I know I'm working my way there.

Heart

I'm not sure exactly how I became more focussed on the energy in my heart this month, but that's where I am.  A combination of things I supposed.  Finishing Tergar's Joy of Living 2: opening the heart.  I actually, physically feel my heart more open. The calm energy that I used to feel more often in my head is now more solidly in my heart area.
  I've also been falling asleep to several lovingkindness guided meditations. So I'm more conscious of the energy and power of love.
  I remember in Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love her Indonesian teacher's life teaching, to see from the heart.
  In our science driven world we try not to see from the heart.  We try to look clearly at the facts. But as Mingyur Rinpoche says in The Joy of Living, compassion is a kind of technology. The mind is a tool, and the heart helps us to bind to people, to right practices, to nurturing values.
  I used to think that wisdom was something that would always change as we gained more experience.  In some ways I'm sure it does.  But there us something permanent about wisdom.  It's a conceptual understanding of something that has been drawn from experience.  And once you get that conceptual understanding, that doesn't change.
  I am as healthy, psychically, as the vitality in my heart.  My body may get sick and old, but my psyche can stay strong and vital as long as I tend this connecting energy, and tend the points in my body that connect me to this vitality. The heart is an amazing gateway.
  But it's more than a gateway.  It's a home.

The World

Today I did a two hour practice.  I've been falling a little behind on my one hour practices of late, but I went to retreat last Sunday, which has given me much food for meditation.

In one of his introductory lectures, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about the three levels of awareness: ordinary awareness, awareness of awareness, and pure awareness. When I first started meditating all I wanted, and all I aimed for was pure awareness. I wanted that wonderful, pristine, perfect free from all suffering bliss. I often got there our of sheer beginner fanaticism. Like many mediators in the first stages of practice I thought of ordinary awareness, and awareness of awareness as stages to surmounted until I reached the pure place free of all suffering forever and ever.

One of the biggest barriers to progress, I think, has been my contempt for the other kinds of awareness, as though they are "lower" stages of evolution. When I found myself being driven by ordinary awareness, I would get frustrated and angry with myself. Shouldn't I be past this by now? Shouldn't I be master of my awareness after all these years of practice.

More and more, though, I am building a certain affection for these states of being. The goal of practice in not necessarily pure awareness, so much as stability of awareness.  Simply being conscious of which state of awareness you are in lays the ground for more spontaneous arisings of pure awareness. If I catch myself in ordinary awareness, I don't get irritated or discouraged, I just notice that it's ordinary awareness. In the noticing I am immediately in stage too, awareness of awareness. The trick is to bring stage two into a place of self-awareness, not self-consciousness.  Most people, myself included, really hate this place where all we seem to be doing is noticing the thoughts, the tensions, the memories.  The suffering.

But freedom from suffering is not freedom from pain.  The Dalai Lama is free of much suffering, but when I saw him in Montreal a few years back, he'd just had an appendectomy. He obviously still felt pain, and took that pain seriously enough to have necessary surgery.  Suffering, as Shinzen Young has so brilliantly defined it, is resistance to pain.  Because of our ingrained resistance to pain, we are often resistance to the pure pleasures of existence that are available to us whenever we want.

In recent weeks I've been falling asleep to guided loving kindness meditations. For the next while I've decided that I will direct loving kindness mostly to different levels of myself. I will feel the natural love I feel for those parts of myself, which I like, my natural intelligence and openness. I will feel the more directed love I need to feel for the more neutral parts of myself that I often neglect to validate. The part of myself that does the dishes more often than not. The part of myself that shops for the basics and keeps my butt sitting in front of the computer so that I can generate some writing every day.  And I will take those more naturally arising feelings of love and gratitude and direct them towards the most difficult aspects of my personality. My messiness, my self-delusion, my tendency towards resentment and reactivity. The anger that I continue to feel towards my family, despite my best intentions.

And then, here's the hard part.  Once I've felt this recursive love towards myself, I will then direct this love towards the world. Towards all people who have, but don't recognize their natural kindness. Towards all people, and there are so many, whose minds are dragging them back into patterns of suffering that they feel powerless over.

We all want safety, happiness, health and ease. We all forget several thousand times a day that we have this wonderful permanent nature that is safe, happy, healthy and easily available every time we choose to recognize it. As safe and as permanent as a mountain, as happy, strong and  full as the ocean, and as easy and inevitable as gravity.

Sleep

I've been sleeping better. Going to bed listening to guided loving kindness meditations by Sharon Salzberg and Bodhipaksa. Now in the morning I have those voices in my head, alerting me to the energy in my heart.

Still.  I'm feeling restless. Maybe the anxiety of the waning moon.  I don't feel like writing this morning, sure Ben will be waking up any morning.  I do this more out of duty that a real passion for the truth.

I've been feeling that way recently about my practice.  I'm not doing the full hour.  I'm feeling the call of work and things that need to be thought about and worried about.  I don't want to lose my formal practice.  I know from this journal what happens once I let my practice go, whenever I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

I need the insight that practice gives me. Even if it's insight into my state of restlessness.

Ah Ben is up.

My addiction

So I didn't make it past Friday.

The excuse went this way.  It's too hard to wait to find out what's happening in the final episodes of this series I've been following (okay, it's Girls).  Maybe I can just make that the one thing that I watch. From that came the next episode of Episodes.  From that the end of Parenthood.  All good shows.  And that's what I keep telling myself.  These are all good shows. Shouldn't I be able to watch them?

To which I need to reply.  Yes these are all good shows, but shouldn't I be able to give them up?  These aren't real people and I'm encouraging my son to live a life comforted by entertainment, not comforted by friends and community.

Fresh start today.  I can't just abandon this.  So today I'm going to be on alert for the seductive reasons.

I'm going to go back to Pema Chodron's book on breaking old habits and I'm going to try again.

And I'm going to build new habits.  Primarily evening meditation sessions. How I spend my evenings impacts my day.  Deeply impacts my day. So I want to get back to evenings that are vital and rich with peace. Not drama.

Deep breath.  Once again.

Happy Tibetan New Year

Today is Tibetan New Year. I'll be heading out to the Tergar Centre to celebrate. But this morning I think of what I want for myself and for others this year.

Peace.  That profound thriving peace that I feel in the centre of my brain when I've been working steadily at my mediation practice. That palpable magnetic energy that is always available to me when I need it. That thing that I still use too rarely in my life.

All people have this. Few people are aware of it. In my current practice it is called Buddah Nature.

This is what I want for myself and everyone.

One of the ways I'm going to stay close to this over the next month, the first month of this year of The Horse, is to re acquaint myself with Lent.  My old Catholic practice of renunciation before re-birth.

Television.  That's what's going for the next forty days. Television.

No more courtroom dramas. No more Girls.  No more Netflix.

Just for this month my greatest entertainment is going to be this peace. Maybe some reading.  But this peace. This peace, if entered into playfully, can be a profound source of entertainment. The human body,and psyche is an endless roller coaster.  Like a video game with blocks and challenges that once met and dissolved bring you to the next level.

No sugar. No television.  Just peace.

Though it might not seem like one, this is another adventure.

Food Toxins

Around this time last year I started a cleanse.  I know this because I wrote about it.  And I know that after three weeks of de-tox I felt more stable.

The good habits from that de-tox didn't quite take.  Ben and I seem to have cultivated some bad habits over the last year. We're liberated from the worst ones.  We don't keep soft drinks or juice in the house.  But we do buy chips and eat out more often than we probably should.

I don't know if this has anything to do with my recent insight into emotional toxins, but in the last couple of days I've come across some information on sugar.  I like to think of myself as someone who doesn't overconsume sugar.  But there's been a habit in the last three months of hot chocolate.  And I let Ben eat sugared Cheerios, and white bread.  And then there's the fish sticks and frozen french fries, which are just starch that act like sugar.  And I've virtually abandoned whole wheat.

Okay, so I need to start getting back to good habits.  It's like meditation. I've had them before, but creating the stable ground for them to root  is going to demand some re-motivating.

It's all about hunger.  In the last few days, I've been asking myself about this hungry person who lives inside me.  Who is she? How did she evolve? What purpose does she serve in my life? What would my life be without her?

Every formal practice, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings, and I pray that we will be free of hunger and discord.   But I need to really want everyone, including myself--above all myself-- to be free of emotional hunger, because I can't help others if I'm not free of it.  Emotional hunger and physical hunger are intimately bound up.  There's healthy hunger and there's craving, low blood sugar, addictive cycles.

I need to sit with this healthy hunger.  But I'm going to skip the whole "jumpstart" this year. I'm just going to focus on the sugar and starches.  And I'm going to keep track of this journey, here in the place where I capture my insights and hope that they hold.

Toxic emotions

Okay, by this I mean shame.

This last week my practice has been derailed by my obsession with The Woody Allen case.  I'm not alone. It feels like everyone is weighing in on one side or the other.  But I can't seem to get it out of my head.  I don't want to get it out of my head.

This is probably because is churns up the darkest most difficult emotion that I've yet to really deal with in my meditation practice.  Shame.

I have many shames. Some deep. Some shallow.  I'm not alone in this, but it is the power of shame that we always feel alone. We always feel like we're the only person to do something wrong or dishonest or to let other people treat us poorly.  Grifters, abusers, molesters, bullies. These people all take advantage of our shame.  They take advantage of our shame because the way they are trying to rid themselves of shame is to offload it onto others.

That is the why we're all so mad at Woody Allen. Because for one day, or week we get to think about someone else's shame. For one week I get to feel righteous and strong. I get to feel compassionate towards the woman I believe was his victim.  And I get to visit my own shames and make them feel small in comparison.

Meanwhile this week I made a stupid mistake that ended up reflexively covering up for. Something that is going to cost me and others time and money. And I don't have the moral courage to own up to this.  So it's probably going to haunt me for a while.

I'm going to use this haunted time to examine the toxic effects of shame in my life.

This is a very, very difficult emotion to deal with. Nobody wants to sit with shame, know it, work with it. I certainly don't.

This might be a good time to practice tonglen.  Breathing in shame and breathing out compassion and courage to everyone dealing with shame in their lives.  Which is a lot of people.  It's the most human emotion.

Who is this self that I want happiness for?

This morning I did a mini-retreat at the Tergar Centre. In the second video Mingyur Rinpoche said something that hit me in a totally new way.  Who is this self that we want happiness for when we do lovingkindness meditation? When I think back to all the times I've done this meditation it seems to me that this self I wanted happiness for is usually a wounded, weak self that is very needy for a joy it hasn't had.  For the first time, however, I realized that this would be a much more effective practice if the self that I wanted happiness for was my natural, unconditioned, buddha nature self.
  Lovinkindness, especially for myself, too often feels like pity. Wanting happiness for an already complete self is less of a grasping process. And this already happy, good self, so clearly wants happiness for the self that is meditating. So it's a recursive activity. An activity that reinforces my best and deepest nature.
  When I'm only extending love to a "flawed" self, I'm actually reinforcing this perception of myself as incomplete, needing love.  When I'm extending love to a self that is already complete, I am reinforcing a sense of completion.
  I'm curious how a week, a month, of this kind of meditation will influence my motivation to act in my best interests.  Perhaps it's been hard to keep up the will to take responsible, nurturing action for a self I have to work so hard at loving.
  And if I were to start to see myself as this naturally good self, how will this affect the way I see others?

Why is mindfulness so hard!!!!

Ah, it was all going so well last Sunday. I managed to get my enthusiasm under control, but now I've lost that golden thread of peace that was holding things together. Obsession with problem at Ben's school.

There was a moment in formal practice today when I started to get the presence back. But it's gone now. Or maybe it's better if I just write that I've surrendered.

I don't want to surrender to suffering. I want to surrender to the reality of our natural awareness.

I need to find a way to make a fresh start.

Last night while I was up late, I found myself clinging to the first noble truth. There is suffering. There is some kind of pleasure to this obsessive mind wandering or we wouldn't do it. But I know it's not the good, healthy pleasure of mindfulness.

So I repeat to myself this morning. There is suffering. And once I'm sitting with my suffering for a bit, I remember the next truth, that there is a cause to this suffering. Then I remember that last night I went to my parents where there were baby back ribs and red wine, and then a drunken late night Twizzler and Dr. Pepper binge. And now I know that my digestion is probably not the best, and that I never quite got around to making yogourt during this busy week and that I need some bread and some fresh vegetables. Maybe the freshest start is with a big glass of water, and then a green smoothie, and then a mindful walk. And then a re-reading of Mingyur Rinpoche on the first noble truth.

As I cycle through the four noble truths I remember that there is a cure to this suffering, the sublime presence that I feel at the core of my brain and my soul.

Why am I so blessed to know this presence? Oh yeah because I'm human and we are all blessed, though some of us have the tremendous luck of realizing this blessing.

I remember that and then I look at the title of my post, and I remember that it's not mindfulness that's hard. It's suffering that's hard. Hard on us and hard on everyone around us. Mindfulness is soft and easy in the best way, and it protects our birthright, a life of abundance and joy.

I need to remember that by cultivating it, I'm protecting not just my birthright, but Ben's too.

Mindfulness Sundays

So last week I made a resolution that I would work on making the present my default mode.  I want to get out of the normal default network of mind trawling around in the future and the past, cultivating a buzzing host of anxieties about the future and a dark chaotic maze of resentments, shames and guilts from the past.  I want to keep my mind as much as reasonably possible in the fresh air and vitality of the present moment.
 This has been especially hard last week because I have taken advantage of an opportunity to do something I've been wanting to try out for a long time.  I'm going to be teaching coding to fifth grade students and their teachers and I'm going to be learning first hand about the challenges of bringing programming literacy into the classroom. My enthusiasm from this now has me constantly wrapped up in the future building expectations and anxieties about public speaking, how much time this will take from my book and other plans, etc.
  The house is a mess, I'm less focussed on Ben, and then I find myself anxious about that.
  So today I decided that I would try and make this Sunday and every Sunday  a day of presence. A day when I'm largely focussed on simple tasks and pleasure that can be done with the maximum amount of presence. My reading will be largely devoted to spiritual and contemplative texts. There will be many standing and breathing practices.
 If  I've committed myself to presence as the mode in which I do all of my activities on this day, then I will become naturally more conscious of Default Mode Network (DMN, or Damn DMN, which I've decided to now call it.) My hope is that this will carry forward into the next week.

The Year Ahead

It's a Saturday morning. I've just completed a two hour meditation. I feel connected to the magnetic energy of mild happiness. The now energy that is always available to me.  The energy I want to set as my new default mode.
My friend Jeff Warren wrote a fascinating article in Psychology Tomorrow about a man who after several decades of meditation discovered one day that his self-referential self had just disappeared.  Got up and just walked away.  He was no longer in the default mode that the vast majority of people live in, that place where our minds wander around bumping into the past and future, rarely settled in the present. He was now just present all the time.
 It was great.  Problems got solved effortlessly. He was free of all self created suffering. There seems to have really been a happily everafter.
 I've been accepting this all day. Revelling in it.  But the minute I write it down, skepticism sets in.  How can we be happily ever after. We can't. He didn't stop solving problems, which means he didn't stop having problems to solve.  But the problems weren't coming from him anymore. They weren't coming from this "self."  His whole "I" just disappeared.
I want to live that way.  I'm sick of the constant "I."  I love the energy of the now. I love the stillness of life without all this restless, anxious energy leading me around like a dog on a leash.
So, it's decided.  My year ahead is living from this energy.  This now energy, which I'm going to program into my life as my default state. When I don't know what to do, I just rest in this state of being.  Once I've decided on the next task, I do it from this place of quiet attention. My mind is no longer a self propelling machine.  It is my tool, and I use this tool to bring me to this place of being outside the mind. This place right at the cusp of awareness.