Monday, October 27, 2014

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.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

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.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

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.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

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.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

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.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

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.