Resolution

My resolution for this year is to meditate on emptiness every evening before I go to bed .

Last year, my focus was on abundance.  This year I move to the other side of the spectrum and familiarize myself with emptiness.

I'm nervous about this resolution, because I know that I'm fundamentally afraid of emptiness.  It's like the glass bridge I read about in Tsoknyi Rinpoche's book. I know that meditating on emptiness can't hurt me, but letting go of expectations, plans, thoughts, memories, feels like a loss of self.  And how do we live without this constant self-building?  If we stop for an hour or a day, will we have less of a self to be proud of and to make us feel powerful?

Meditating on emptiness is where I really test my belief. Conceptually I believe that selflessness is key to true happiness. Or I believe that I should believe that.  But experientially when I'm not working on the self, I feel at risk. If I'm not planning, hoping, worrying dreaming, what am I creating?

Yet, meditating on emptiness doesn't mean an empty life. I'm sure.  It's not about creating an empty head. Or a life empty of action. It's about creating space, and cultivating the power to let go of the things in life that don't really give us joy, or aren't truly useful.  A painting or picture that is too busy is not necessarily creative, it can be cluttered and complicated.

I've spent too much of my life holding on to things, people, situations, places, behaviours that haven't brought me real joy. This year is about discovering the source of true, stable, enduring joy.  Emptiness is potential, a fresh start. Yes it's a little frightening, but so is any change.

It's a risk I take for myself, and for the people I care about.  And for everyone I touch in my life.

Here goes.

Happy New Year.

Impact

What is the impact of my practice?

A year has passed and it's time to pay attention to what I've achieved, accomplished, learned.

I've maintained a longer morning practice, an hour in the morning ever since doing the silent retreat. I feel the impact of that practice on my energy level.  I feel a very concrete connection to pure awareness, much stronger and solid than I have in the past.

I have more willingness and courage to face emptiness. But it's still hard. Time and the self have their grip on me.

I've realized how strong my addiction to anger is, and how much it's an escape from sadness and anxiety. I'm very afraid of giving it up. But I also know that sadness is magic.  It's the sign that blocked energy is loosening up and it's the earth and moisture that joy grows in. So I will try to stay open to any sadness of grief that happens this year.

My book is getting better. My challenge this year will be to trust in that as my mission and to have faith that the funding I need will come.

I've decided next year, to make emptiness my mission, my word, my challenge.

My Gratitude

December 2012, three years ago, my life was in crisis.  I’d lost my job, I was out of savings, I had a twelve year old son to support, and I felt terrified and alone.

This, after decades of meditation, tai chi, a wide ranging curiosity about eastern philosophy and many, many hours of practice.  But I’d never really had a teacher.  I come from a highly intellectual, emotionally intense and chaotic Catholic family, and while I’d always been very interested in Buddhism, I had a deep resistance towards taking on a whole new complicated set of concepts and rituals. I did, however, benefit greatly from the sitting and mindfulness practices. Though not, apparently, to the point where I was immune from disaster.

In a moment of desperation I turned to someone who I don’t usually turn to, my younger brother.  As the older sister, I’m usually the one giving him advice, telling him how to live his life, and rarely, but occasionally, the one he turns to for wisdom in his own times of crisis.  My brother, while not an expert in how to live a perfect life, had much more experience with crisis. I noticed that he seemed happier and more relaxed than he’d been in a while. Maybe he had some kind of lifeline he could throw me?

He did.  He pointed me to Mingyur Rinpoche’s introduction to meditation video.  The moment I heard the “secret” to meditation, that listening to sound is closer to the true spirit of meditation than “meditating” on sound, I knew I’d found my teacher.

I’d never looked for a teacher because I didn’t feel like I needed someone to teach me more meditation.  I didn’t know that I needed someone to teach me less meditation, and how to slowly start letting go of the accumulated emotional and intellectual clutter of a very privileged and concept rich upbringing.

I needed a teacher who could give me a glimpse of beginner’s mind, so that I could take some refuge in that, and start re-building real clarity and peace.

I still have challenges in my life, but I also have place within me of refuge, that I now know is enduring and nurturing and there for me no matter what external circumstances arise.

So I thank you Rinpoche, for your books and videos, and for Tergar. For your light touch, and the tremendous courage you’ve shown in taking your wandering retreat.  You are living proof of the power and strength of your peace and joy. And even though I may never be or become a Buddhist, I know I will remain your student, however, wherever and forever.

Flame Out

I should know this rhythm by now.

I express an intention to be free of anger. I express a belief that I can be free of anger.  I have a vision so clear that I can be free of anger.

And then it hits. The backlash wave, the reaction to someone else's anger, the clarity that too much of the time is really ignorance or narrowness of vision.  Every time I think I'm free of this, I feel myself in a Tsunami.

This week at the non-profit start up where I'm a consultant and on the board of directors, I had a flame up with a long time friend and employee who I had recommended.  The intense mix of history, growing pains, success, anxiety and work stress just hit.

I haven't been running as much lately.  I haven't been working on my book.  I'm feeling carried by a wave and I don't feel like I have the power to swim out of it.

I consulted this journal to see what I did last time I started to feel the stress of success.

First, I re-established my commitment to Tergar.  I remembered the first "secret" to meditation I ever learned from Mingyur Rinpoche.  The secret of non-meditation.  Listen to sound.  Don't concentrate. Don't "meditate." Just listen.  That's meditation.

Next apply that to monkey mind.  Don't try and stop it. Just recognize it and then give the job of  recognizing the monkey to the monkey.

And now I am ready to rest in awareness and in the awareness that awareness is always aware of itself, whether the monkey is aware of that or not. Basic goodness, strong, steady, immeasurable and unchanging.

Be safe in this belief, and let it become knowledge.

And let this be my power. Not anger.

inflammation

Joy is the recognition that happiness and freedom from suffering are possible for oneself and for everyone. Immeasurable joy is when this energy manifests as something deeper than belief and becomes a knowledge as steady and intuitive as knowing that the sun is still there, has been for as long as we've existed and is unlikely to end in the lifespan of our species.We can be free of all the baggage of manufactured and constantly re-manufactured stress, fear, loneliness and anger.

But something in me recoils from this certainty. To be certain of this would mean giving up one of the great addictions of my life, anger. Slow burning, constantly flickering and bickering anger. This reactionary acid that destroyed my parents well being, and for much of my life, my own. Anger is like any bad addiction, smoking and drinking, we do a lot to justify its existence. We believe that it's healthy in small, constant doses. We even believe that it's necessary for survival.

Is it though? The more I know of joy and equanimity the more anger seems like such a puny weapon.  Like a baby's cry when most of the time, for so many of us, there's no real reason to cry.

To be liberated from anger still feels like such an impossibility for me. But it's not going to happen if I can't even imagine being free of anger.

This week I've been reading an article in the New Yorker about inflammation, and how it is an increasingly popular medical theory that inflammation, the state the body goes into when foreign toxins are present, is the root of most if not all of our diseases. This constant anger feels like inflammation. I hate it, but I don't hate it enough to get rid of it, or I don't have the courage to sit with it and let it go.

Still, I know I want to be liberated from my anger. The first step is cultivating the habit of feeling that want, and then the belief that this liberation if both possible and powerful. The next step is allowing it to become joy.

Squalor

Housekeeping has always been a challenge that I struggle and continue to struggle with. I'm not, and haven't been at the level that would put me on reality television. But in recent years i still veer between messiness and first degree squalor.
 
This has consequences on my well-being and my son's. The solution is simple. Routines kept to. Picking up after yourself.  Weekly sweeping and dusting.  Nightly wiping down. 15 minutes a day of detail cleaning. Emptying the fridge once a week.  But keeping to them...so hard for me.

Why is that? Is there some kind of deep insight that will finally free me of this. Because I have suffered so much as a result of this. Isolation, loneliness, remorse, shame. And I have caused suffering to others, and have raised a son who risks causing the same suffering to others. But still I can't find the peace and joy in cleaning.

Or, put it this way, I'm still numb to the peace and joy in cleaning. I could find the peace and joy if I were to maintain a sustained commitment to it, but I don't.

It is neglect and the consequences of neglect.  I know this, but how do I turn this around?

First, by realizing that "I" don't turn this around. The energy that I need to tap into is the only thing that can turn it around.  I know I keep saying this, but I need to make cleaning into a practice.  I need to become familiar with the peace of a solid cleaning algorithm maintained every day for the rest of my life.

I know I can do this, I've made a lot of progress over the years.

The key, I believe, is to keep the sink dry and shiny.  Morning and evening.

And to commit to the algorithm that includes that 15 minute cleaning in the morning.  If the algorithm takes 30 minutes to complete I can get a laundry done and hung in that 30 minutes. Clothes folded at the end of the day. In time "commitment" simply becomes the pleasant habit of peace and order.

Why is that such a challenge?

And yet for mysterious reasons it it.

Basic Goodness

It's been an intense week.

I'm trying to stay focused on the final draft of my proposal. My agent says I'm so, so close. I need to find that energy that will tether me to the goal of creating the best proposal I can.  But during the time when I wasn't sure where the rent was going to come from I took on a lot of responsibility at the non-profit I work for.  I needed to do this because I don't have any other source of income. I'm in a bit of a bind, which sometimes feels like deciding which way would I prefer to be poor, as a writer or a non-profit consultant.

And then Paris, the whole world, it feels, plunged into political chaos.

How do I find refuge from this today? This morning it was in returning and resting in the place of basic goodness. That pure awareness, the recognition of which is an amalgamation of calm and compassion. A loving awareness. My mind is jumpy, but I could let that core of basic awareness seep out into my immediate environment and feel that calming presence.

On the weekend I was talking with my friend Laura who is going through a tough time, trying to get off the medication she's been on for many years (under the guidance of a psychiatrist.) I remembered what Tim Olmsted had once counselled us about having a "default meditation."  The one we went to immediately when things are particularly difficult. The one we went to immediately when we didn't know what to do. The one we could go to immediately when the distracted monkey mind has reached the point, it seems, of no return. Basic goodness. Just feeling it and feeling grateful for it, this precious life, making this intuitive, seems to me the first step out of the cycle of intensity, not just for me, but for everyone.

Cleanse

I'm on day 4 of another cleanse.  This one is much easier since it's only been three months since the last one. I feel a little achey this morning, but nothing like the agony I usually find myself in.

I started the cleanse because I felt myself returning to old compulsions, deep cravings for chocolate bars, soft drinks and binge eating. The weight is creeping up again and it's not just the weight I'm concerned about, it's the emotional well being beneath it. I need to get this book deal and I'm not going if my mind is dull.

Still, it's hard. In some ways harder because I don't have the physical pain to distract me from the emotional pain that surfaces when I go on a cleanse. If I don't unpack these emotions though, I'm going to find myself back here again and again.

So I set my intention. To continue unhooking from these food and emotional compulsions. To continue the process of purification. To continue making this strong, clean energy a permanent part of the life I have left. To continue to pray that it will have an impact on other lives.

Devotion

"Our buddha nature remains unawake until we break the cycle of samsara; until then we remain like bees buzzing around in loops."

Mingyur Rinpoche is back!  Four years ago he set out on a wandering reatreat, left Tergar,  the thriving international non-profit that he had set up, left behind the proceeds of a bestselling book, grew his hair a beard and set out to spend at least three years as a wandering anonymous monk.  From what he's told us, he spent the first year ill with unexpected health problems, so what was supposed to be three years turned into four.
   We've been living off the videos he made before he left, but he's back.
   As it turns out, the morning that we were notified of his return, I had started re-reading the chapter in his new book about guru practice. As he explains it our devotion to our guru accelerates our practice because it engenders the kind of inspiration and longing that eventually becomes automatic. One we realize that we share the same buddha nature, student and guru, pure perception become spontaneous.
  It sounds so simple.  But supplication and surrender to spritual teachings are not easy things in a society that has conditioned us to supplication and surrender to material success.
  The way out of this cycle for me is the concrete experience of how well it works. This morning I did most of practice with the image of Rinpoche in my head. Civilized Rinpoche, shaved and shiney Rinpoche.  It was good, I felt the warmth of enlightement shining on my head and then becoming the liquid that starts to snake it's way down.  I began to taste the purification and everything from the neck upward seemed to melt away. I  was simply the space in and around me.
  For my next practice though I'm going to imagine wild Rinpoche, the way he is now with is hair and his beard, skinny from begging. And practices after that will use and recite the prayers that he wrote for us. Can I rest and submit to these?
  It's hard.
  But it's urgent.  I've passed the halfway point of my life. Liberation for myself, for Ben, my family, and everyone I currently share the planet with is an urgent concern.  Not a reason for panic, but certainly a reason to give this my all.

Who is this I?

Who is this I? It's a question that will never lose its power. I hear the voice in my head that says: Are you listening to me? What do I want more than anything in the world? I hate myself. I love myself.  When I ask "who is this I?" I follow the root of that voice to wherever it's coming from, to whatever complex of emotions and physical reactions and memories and aspirations that have sparked it.
 "What do I want more than anything in the world?" is a question that comes from my gut. It links me with that snakey energy that I'm so afraid of, but that is really just me beneath the skin that I'm shedding.  Or the quality of enlightenment that we share with all the gurus going back to the buddha, according to  Mingyur  Rinpoche.
  "Are you listening to me ?"comes from the head.  Comes from that I that can separate from the monkey mind, but can also see that the monkey mind is just another aspect of enlightenment, that part of us that refuses to sit still with habit, so that we can keep alive the freshness of perspective, the newness of being awake.
  And "I hate myself," which comes from the heart and is the twin of "I love myself." It is tangled up in ego and grasping and all the things that keep me from releasing my fears and bad habits. But it's also telling me where I'm vulnerable. In the same place that everyone is vulnerable.
  When I ask this question enough, inevitably I return to this place of pure hard, pole like energy. This is pure awareness, that is both me and not the me that I usually identify with. This is not me in the sense that it is something that we all share. Yet it is me in that if feels like it is a permanent quality of my existence. And it feels like an "I". When I return to this state, I want to be careful not to let this harden into some kind of ego state. But neither do I want to be afraid to claim my place in it. Because now, and always, and in the end, and since the beginning, it is our home.

Remorse

As I become more fully and regularly in touch with the basic goodness, the awareness of which arises and is strengthened by my hour a day morning practice, I'm confronted with other feelings.  Grief. Remorse. The need to forgive and be forgiven.
  I spent so much of my life just wandering around looking for help and healing. The path is clearer now, but now I'm processing the realization that the path was always there, but I chose differently.  I chose television, hopeless relationships, isolation, numbness and escape. Not always. I also chose books, made and maintained friendships, psychotherapy, Zhan Zhuang.  But sometimes I only see the confusion.
This may be because I've been wandering off the path of late. Looking for other teachers and not quite devoting myself to the Tergar program, as I kind of vowed to do.
  Kind of vowed.  That says it all.  I'm still not committing. Not committing to this, to my writing career, to the non-profit I'm starting, to Ben. To any one thing really.
  And I'm beating myself up about it.
  Let's look for this moment at the things that I am committed to.  An hour a day practice, which is no small thing. My Tergar retreats, which take time and money.  My running.  And I have been editing my book every morning.  It feels ready.
  There's a commitment there that arises automatically out of the energy that I build through these commitments. It steadies me, even when I wander off.
  This week, I will return to my level three practice routine.  Keep to the algorithm of the path I've been engaged in.  I'm not ready to commit to Ngondro. It's interesting, but I'm not there yet.  So I'm going to keep to the secular path for now. It's more sustainable in the life I'm living. If and when I feel grief and remore, I will recognize them as signs that I'm making progress, deepening my awareness, which included the recognition of where I went wrong and the consequences of those behaviours, and letting go, which always brings with it the sharpness of grief.  These are purifying emotions.  I can handle them.
  But for now I return.

Nectar

Last Sunday in retreat Minjur, my meditation teacher, led us through an exercise where we repeatedly ask "who is this I that is experiencing this meditation?", "where is the I that is experiencing this meditation?" The more I ask this question, the more I see how small and tight, imprisoned and in pain this "I" is. And the more that I see that it isn't even me.  It really is like waking up from a dream, where you've been identifying with a character who feels like you but never was.
  Here's the thing though.  The de-stabilizing and challenging realization is that the "I" you're waking up with isn't really an I either. It's like an infinite peeling back until you realize that the whole idea of a center is something of an illusion.
   So what's left?
   One option is think, "well if every "I" is imaginary, why not imagine a stable, happier, more powerful I. Might as well.  It won't last.  No I's do. But it's better than the alternative, terrified, chaotic I.  Or at least it feels better."
  That's what I've been doing this week.  Imagining myself in this cozy little palace, on top of some Tibetan type mountain, with a view that stretches out for a hundred miles.  Feeling all the light and nectar and joy that would be available to me if I had the same power as the gurus in the Tibetan lineage that Mingyur Rinpoche  is part of.  As I do this I begin to feel those tiny veins of warmth begin to flow.  And I imagine that they are no longer tiny, but a steady, strong flow of vitality. And then I am grateful for it as though I can already feel its full momentum.  And then I do my best to believe that this is as real as the table I'm writing on right now.
  And then the most important thing, I imagine that this enlightened energy is going out to everyone, Ben, my mother, my father, my brother and everyone.  Everyone.  And I am grateful for whatever way I am being a vehicle for this progression for all.

Grasping

This afternoon I head to a retreat that centers on the theme of grasping.

Grasping in Tibetan budhism is the cause of suffering. Grasping means our tendency to see things as existing. I'm still not entirely confident that I understand what that means. But for now I understand it better on a physical level. I feel a grasping tension throughout my body and my brain. The process of unlocking that I began last week is a way of letting go of this belief that keeps locking me back into suffering.

This morning, for a short time I returned to The Mirror exercise. I look at the objects in front of me and see them as simply reflections in a mirror. As I do this, I inevitably feel the tension in my brain begin to relax. Soon I begin to see and feel my body as merely a reflection of my feelings. If the tension were to completely disappear would "I" disappear? Letting go of these beliefs is a very de-stabilizing process. It's one thing to understand them conceptually. It's another to feel those beliefs in your psyche. And quite another to let them go. Beliefs are the skeleton of the soul. You don't just throw them out and expect to be able to walk. To some extent, I expect, you learn to live with them, but see them as just bones, not that which actually makes us alive.

unlocked

Tibetan Buddhism believes that the main cause of suffering is "grasping." It's a word that brings up a lot of associations, desire, tension, desperation. As I become more senstive to the inner workings of my mind and my body, I notice more the subtle pervasive grasping in my body, and part of my brain that feel like white knuckle. This feeling of deep and ingrained tension has become over the course of my life a normal way of being.

Last week the solution to this problem seemed so simple.  Lock in to those parts of my brain that bring relaxation, the pitutary gland that may be the "third eye," that place in my heart that wants freedom from suffering that may be the pump to a well of oxitocin, the place in my gut that keeps the serotonin dripping.

But this morning I began to feel in my meditation that this might just be another form of grasping. If I were going to put this in the language of programming, there needs to be a base case. We can't just live in an infinte loop of feel good. Can we? And would we want to, if we could.  Isn't that just the other side of the suffering habit. It's just habit.

it's so important to develop the skill of unlocking. Of just being with whatever shows up, the joy, the peace, the suffering, the tension. The fear of the worst that may or may not happen.

So this week, as I continue to practice compassion for a loved one, I will also practice unlocking everything, along with my heart.

Locked In

Today meditation seemed to pass so quickly.

And yet it was momentous. I've been listening at night to Myoshin Kelly's lectures on Bodhicitta and joy. They seem to be seeping into the skeleton of my practice. I am more conscious everyday of the presence slightly behind me to the left. The more I settle into a relatiionship with it, the more the thinking energy in my head seems to move to the left. The more conscious I become of the painful loop of energy that is usually iterating on the right.  If I watch the suffering I can see how my brain has simply developed the mechanical habit of rewarding it.  But if I sit with it, I can see how I can move that reward glue to the left.

This feels like it's going to take a lot of time. I'm still stuck in a mindset that wants to improve myself by moving the energy from the right to the left. Instead of simply feeling the permanence of this left side awareness and letting the rebalancing happen on its own. To just sit and feel grateful.

When I do that, the lovingkindness begins to build, to activate. I remember that there are people right now sitting in caves loving me because they love everything, wanting to reach out to me. I remember that I want to reach out to them.

It's here.  All the love that I need and will ever need it here.  It doesn't matter if I feel it or not. It's still here.

It's easier, perhaps, for me to see this when I'm feeling compassion towards Ben, wishing he could feel the love that's always here for him.

Either way though. In today's meditation I felt locked in.  I felt that feeling of just sitting in love and letting it do what it's going to do.

May I truly be locked in. And may we all.

vulnerability

I used to think that the goal of meditation was to control this mind that monkeys around chasing story lines like butterflies. But these days my practice is more like the interplay between pure awareness and monkey. The trick as always is to differentiate between natural suffering and the suffering that is created by attachment to suffering.

Today I started my meditation with a back to basics plan. First twenty minutes watching the breath, second twenty minutes delighting in basic goodness. Towards the half hour point a story line took root, some righteous anger I felt yesterday at a security guard at the metro who wouldn't let Ben and I pass after we lost our return tickets for the Montreal Marathon.  All runners are given free tickets on race day.  I discovered just as we were starting the 10K that we didn't have our tickets, but I figured they'd let us through with the other runners taking the metro home from the finish point.  They didn't. The security guard suggested we beg other runners for tickets or money.

I guess I didn't have the moral energy to face begging. In the end we ran home another 10k and turned it into a story about how we unofficially ran a half marathon.  But I felt compelled last night to write a letter of complaint.

At the root of this story is probably my financial concerns.  I'm going to have to beg my parents for money to make ends meet while I finish yet one more revision of my proposal. This situation with the security guard touches that part of me that know I don't have any emergency money for us in times of crisis.  I don't even have enough money for us for basic living.

At the same time I can't help noticing that my anxiety just doesn't seem to have the roots it used to.  I'd like to think it's because I'm healthier and not because I've become better at denial.   I certainly feel healthier.

Still, I'm conscious of how important it is to sit every evening with that vulnerability and shame, and detach from the temptation to numb it with television, avoid it with bickering, and distract it with pleasures.  These difficult emotions are the energy that creativity runs on.  Without their companionship, I'm unlikely to ever have a real habit of peace and joy.

Daemon Again

It's to the left, above my shoulder, this presence I feel after I've maintained an hour long practice for a significant chunk of time. It's to the soul, what the ego is to the self, or so I've read. This energy that feels like a self, but also something much stronger and purer.

It's the reason I do this, to have a sense of direction, power and connection. And now it's the reason I maintain this practice.

This morning I had such a strong sense of how regular, long meditation practice, at least an hour a day every morning makes of my body a kind of antenna.  I feel connected to this kind of frequency and it keeps me on the right path. All I have to do is rest in it and it penetrates my mind.

But then what?, says the inchworm when it reaches the top of the blade of grass.

To just be. To be the wisdom that shines from within. To help other recognize that wisdom in themselves. To allow ordinary bad habits dry up, and ordinary good habits to glow the extraordinary..

To be rich in this energy and power.

It's Over

This labour day weekend my mother invited Ben and I to Underhill House, a cottage owned by a wealthy friend. So called because it's a house built into a hill. The roof is grass, and light comes in through a series of skylight. Downhill from the house was a lovely man made pond. By far the most tranquil, private spot I've ever meditated in. No witnesses other than the occasional dragonfly.

I had a religious moment, sitting by the glass surface, pines reflecting the emptiness that I aspire to in meditation. I felt the larger witness to it all, that vast presence that is always there no matter how alone we are.

Alongside the feeling of vast presence, was the habit of returning to my petty squabbles with my mother, my anxieties, my feeling of helplessness over the distractions that continue to buzz through my mind.

When will it ever end?

And then in the next moment I recognized this as grasping.  It ended there in that moment.  Of course I want that "ending" to last. But all that has ended really is my awareness of it.  Presence never ends.

Looking for happiness in anything else is like trying to harness a dragonfly for thrills when really the most exciting experience is the pond.

This presence it seems, has followed me home, although the truth is it's always been here in my home, however small and however squalid.

I don't need to harness it's power.  I just need to keep remembering that it's here.

I need to let it harness me.

Ambition

One of the worries that I often have is that meditation will dampen my drive to write. I suppose if that were true I would have given up writing a long time ago, since I've been meditating in one form or another for at least twenty years.

And yet I maintain this persistent belief that it's interfering with my ability to achieve take off. I suppose that's because I believe that it's interfering with my ambition. But what if it's my ambition that actually interfering with the takeoff? What if it's all the anxiety that comes with my ambition that is really blocking me?

The envy I feel when I see someone younger than I having achieved more. The diminishment I feel when I see someone write more books. Maybe that's the root of my block, not my meditation practice.  Probably it's T.V. that is dampening my drive to write, not meditation.  It's dulling my brain, and then I think what's the point, writing isn't as important as it used to be etc, etc. It's ego that's probably blocking me, not my buddha nature.

Yeah, probably not probably. It's ego.

So for this week I make ambition and the anxiety associated with ambition the object of my meditation. This grasping for greatness.  If I could really see and feel my buddha nature I wouldn't have to grasp. I could just let this greatness sit comfortably in my open palm.

Refuge

I have made a religion of writing. And this, I suspect, is not a good practice. Editors, publishers, the book industry is not a refuge.

Or, not a wise refuge. And neither is the world of technology.

Take refuge in the things that have lasted, and will continue to last. The pith instructions of the great religions, love, surrender, be kind and compassionate and find, build and maintain communities dedicated to true peace and true wisdom.

This spot in Maine where I have vacationed with my family for 50 years has been both a refuge and a hell.  I have had my most mystical moments here, and my most violent.

I have treated every summer here in the last few years as my last, knowing that when I leave, I say goodbye to an intimate, healing relationship with the sea, the sky, the falling stars. But I also say goodbye to what still feels like a hopeless cycle of emotional discord.

This summer has been better than most. I've been less reactive and have been able, for the most part, to protect myself better than I ever have, which means that I've made progress in my emotional stability.

And I leave with a beautiful picture of the dawn.

But I now prepare to grieve this place.  Because nothing lasts. Nothing. Not beach houses, or books.  Not bodies, not the people we love most, or the people who love us most.

What I learned from the place though, the space, the grandeur, the smell that I will never forget. That will last deep in me to my last breath.  Because that is the awareness that is no different with breath. I am one with tis place until I am gone, and after.

The Pond

This week I have the most perfect meditation spot I may ever have in my life. Peter Pond is outside my bedroom deck, where I have a view of the sunrise over both the ocean and a placid, mirror still pond.

I need it.  My family situation is as always unstable, drinking, fighting, the usual.  But I've made progress since last year. The fights are more like sudden storms, than bitter weeks of winter. This may be because I've given up the evening cocktails and wine with dinner. I'm running more, eating better, physical energy translates into emotional energy.  It may also be because my meditation is longer.  And I suspect it's been because I've been rooting myself in compassion meditation.

What would it be like to have lived my life with no insight into my emotional suffering? Or into the suffering that I cause others? I still spend much of my life blindly chasing after distractions that I think will bring me happiness, but at best bring me temporary relief from suffering.  But at least I know this. So many people go through their lives with no idea. Just following the recipe society gives them with no questions. And then at the end of their lives, they are physically and emotionally tired and confused, unable to communicate with the people whose love they desperately need. Unable to feel real compassion for themselves and others.

I don't just have this pond.  I have the capacity to see the astonishing gift that this pond is.  I have the ability to find joy in this pond. I have all I need to be happy, no matter whatever happens in my life. I'm good.

The continuum

I'm reading Tim Parks' book Teach Us to Sit Still. He's in the middle of an intense meditation retreat and is considering giving up writing.  It's all so clear to him how language is the problem.  It's all so clear to him that books are not life.  That the writing life is not really the reality that one sees in meditation, a life.

I'm not ready to give up writing. I like my tools, I just don't want them to be in control of my mind and my soul.  I want to see beliefs as beliefs, thoughts as thoughts.  The goal of my life is not simplicity, it is the grace and skill to handle complexity.

I love Mingyur Rinpoche's story about the man who decided he was just going to stop saying "I".  As though somehow giving up language, or the concept was going to bring us closer to selflessness. No, says Rinpoche, that will just bring us closer to madness.  There will always be people who renounce technology in favour of maintaining the old skills. Artists who renounce the new techniques.  Portrait painters who would never paint from photographs.  And our society is richer for those people, because we need the old skills.  It's good to have some refuge from the stresses of constant change. But life's richness is also a function of change and complexity. We can't shy away from that.

The Future

I'm in the last week of my cleanse.  So it's time to start imagining the better future that I want to have as the result of unhooking from my compulsions.

I know I feel better when I'm eating simple nutritious vegetarian food.  I always have, I always will. So I need to start seeing myself make that shift.  I need to see myself reading the books that support that shift. I need to see myself as someone who has made that commitment.

I need to start seeing myself as part of the vegetarian community and imagine how much more stable and satisfying my life would be.

It's not a solution to all my problems. But it's certainly a important step towards the risk of obesity in my family. And it's an important step in becoming an activist for a kinder more compassionate world.

Loneliness

I read somewhere once that we should treat loneliness like a cold shower. A shock when we feel it, but energizing if we have the courage to really feel it and sit with it.

Now that I've had the courage to feel the hunger, I realize what's holding it in place. This loneliness. This loneliness that I've felt all my life.  And this loneliness that I may feel for the rest of my life simply because it's human. But it is loneliness and I need to sort out the natural loneliness that arises just from having this useful tool, the "self." And the self-created loneliness that is the result of my habit of withdrawal from life and people.

And I need to strengthen my belief that there is a way out.  I need to acknowledge that I need community and that there is a way to create it.

The problem with technology is that we can use it to do both.  We can use it to create genuine community, to find like minded, generous, active local people, to create refuges that support our humanity.  Or we can use it to numb loneliness and find escapes that make us feel even more lost.

It's really about intention.

I can use food to feed my loneliness and make it worse.  Or I can use food to create celebration and bring people together, and nurture my soul.

The Dream

In Ngondro practice we see all our self-created suffering as a dream that can be woken up from.

I know this theoretically, but how can I get beyond it as a concept? How can I wake up from the entrenched habit of comparing myself to others, resenting my parents, feeling like a failure because I've taken a different path from others? How do I make pure awareness my reality and move farther and farther from these ego driven delusions?

First, I have to see emptiness as reality. The pure timeless emptiness that I am getting better at accessing the more I keep up with my hour long practice. This is reality, not the herky jerky daydream that I am lost in too much of the time.

Today is my birthday and my birthday gift to myself this year is a clean gut, after a few weeks free of sugar, caffeine, dairy, alcohol, gluten, animal products. If I continue to reduce these things, next year, finally my gift to myself would be an optimally healthy body. Vitality. A thriving second adulthood.

What I would be waking up from is the desire for heavy food, for that mind numbing overconsumption. What I would be waking up from would be the delusion that my passivity and sense of powerlessness is permanent.  I know that over the years that feeling has been diminishing. But I wonder if I could ever wake up and feel it transformed.

I am deeply blessed with this life, with this awareness.  What I want to wake up to is that knowledge second nature, not something I have to keep reminding myself.

Hunger, my friend

I have it in me to heal this hunger.

Last night I spent 90 minutes in meditation doing the purification rituals of the Ngondro path. We imagine a guru with the power to purify and clarify our perception. The goal is not to purify the self, since in buddhism, the core self is already pure, we just don't see that with our muddy minds.  The goal is to wash away the mud that obscures our vision. Midway through we dissolve this imagined guru into ourself.  We project our best self onto the guru because it's still too much for us to believe that we have that same potential power.

Once I completed the rituals, I felt liberated and empty.  I sat in this strong sphere of equanimity.  I felt like my body would burst with it.  And then gradually it contracted into that core, or what feels like a core, of hunger, restlessness, desperation.  All the things that drive me to my chronic habits of escape. I sat with the hunger for a long time. This hunger for a life I've always wanted.  To be pretty and loved and accomplished and admired, and pure.  And young again.

This morning I went back to that hunger again. I felt remorse for all the bad habits I have that feel so entrenched in me. But I also realized the delusion of that. The "bad" in me is not as solid as I think.  It's just muddy perception. The dullness of that feeling is very grounding. If I could become more familiar with this hunger and cultivate the habit of seeking it out, being with it, instead of trying to make it go away. If it could become as welcome to me as a stiff muscle that I know I can work out with a little massage. If I could make friends with my hunger.  Make it a daily companion.  I could heal all the anxiety and addiction that surrounds it and keeps it in place.

Hunger

Today I'm very conscious of the hunger that lies beneath the hunger.  The excitement of having this clean energy is winding down, and now I have to deal with the emotional hunger that drives my overconsumption of food, information and entertainment.

Sitting with that raw emotional hunger is very difficult. I can do it, but I don't want to. It feels so insoluble. How do I cultivate the will to do this regularly?

I have to engender a deep, core motivation to feed it with what it really needs, this pure life force that is always available to it, than can never be overindulged.  I need to see and feel and experience this hunger dissolving into equanimity.  And I need to make that second nature.

Information Cleanse

My overconsumption of food goes hand in hand with my overconsumption of information. I eat while I read about the world. And this overload makes me lethargic and dull.

So this week I'm going to pay attention to this. What are the effects of too much screen time on my mind? Now that I have my food choices more under control.

My meditation time gives me a barometer of how sharp and vital my mind is. If I've overeaten, or over indulged in screen time, I know it in how distracted my mind feels when I wake up.

Meditation also gives me an alternative to screen time. It feeds the hunger that I think I'm going to solve with overconsumption.

The Way

Yesterday I re-read part of one of my favourite essays, Jonathan Franzen's Why Bother?  It's something of a manifesto about the writer's responsibility to protect the literary tradition of tragic realism.  It is not the writer's responsibility to weigh in on whether or not the world is doomed, simply to remind people that death, loss, poverty, destruction aren't going anywhere soon. We still have a lot of work to do.

So the writer spends a fair amount of time contemplating change.  Contemplating the difference between natural suffering and self-created suffering.  The writer spends most of her time in the first of the noble truths: there is suffering.

There's this other place, however, that is a little harder for the writer to stay in.  The belief that there is a way out of suffering. Maybe this  is where comic realism comes in.  Comic realism kicks us in the butt in a different way. It looks at our tragic lives and sees where we get stuck and helps us laugh at our vulnerabilities.

Last night I had a stroke of good fortune.  Aziz Ansari decided the Just For Laughs comedy festival would be a good place to try out some new material.  So he flew up from New York, and tweeted that in an hour he'd be at a children's theatre not too far from where I live.  I found out about this on FB, from a guy who I've had a bit of a thorny relationship with lately. I wanted to see the show, but I wasn't sure if it would be comfortable seeing it with him.

I risked it and it was great.  I saw a master comic from the middle of the third row. He was practically talking to me. It's interesting to see a comic in the draft stage of a routine. To see those moments of discomfort before he's got it seamless enough to charge $100 at Madison Square Garden.  To realize how much work goes into a good comedy routine. How it literally left him short at breath at one point because he wasn't in good enough shape for the physical comedy.

I need a lot of energy to do and be all the things I want to do and be. I can't muck around anymore getting stuck in these bad cycles. I need to learn how to manage my energy, so that I can turn it into the power that the world needs from me.

This next week coming up.  I set out on the way of accumulating that power.

Nectar of The Path

I'm now into my second week of this cleanse.

The plan this week is to start replacing my compulsions--food, and emotional--with Ngondro purification rituals.

Yes, this means chanting.

I am very, very self conscious about adopting spiritual rituals of any kind. Last night I was convinced that the Ngondro audio tape I was listening to was disturbing the neighbours, and of course if I chant they will hear me. Or will they? I'm not that loud.

But I imagine that they will than then what? They will think I'm a Buddhist. That's a very vulnerable feeling, because having a religion of any kind leaves you open for persecution.  It doesn't make me feel safe. The whole point of Ngondro practice is to find refuge.

And yet, the starting point of refuge is that feeling of vulnerability. Without acknowledging our vulnerability, there is no motivation to seek refuge.

Paradoxically, it's this vulnerability that prompts us to seek refuge, and the refuge that keeps us safe and, thus, less vulnerable.

So, perhaps the key is to take refuge in this feeling of vulnerability.  It keeps us open, it means we are learning, It keeps the compassion flowing. It keeps us strong. It is courage. And it takes courage to set out on this path.

But it's the way

From Anger to Anxiety

Cleanse day 7.

Physically I'm feeling much better. Lighter, cleaner, less compulsive.  Hungry, but in a good way. Emotionally things are a little shakier. Yesterday I was in a combative mood.  Today I'm feeling that layer of anxiety beneath the anger.

I feel it in my gut. Or do I. When I try to locate the anxiety in my gut, I actually encounter this kind of numb void. Like there's a black hole and the anxiety I experience manifests like shooting stars through my body. That metallic taste of terror in my mouth.

By the time I've actually found the anxiety deep in my belly, my energy has already started aligning itself though my heart, my breath is already starting to flow in to relieve.

Is this how anxiety is my friend?  That if I were really to find and listen and understand my anxiety as simply awareness. As awareness it ultimately leads me to the exact spot where pure awareness is rooted.

What if the very thing I don't want to feel and be with is really the straightest path to liberation?

Emotional Detox

Something I don't think I was conscious of the last time I did a cleanse. That once the physical side-effects have subsided, there's a new level: emotional side-effects.

Looking over my last journal, I see that as soon as I lived through the physical aches, I found myself confronted with the other addictions, but I'm not sure that I saw what the trigger for those addictions were. Anger, anxiety, remorse, all the things that rise up when I'm not using food to numb them.  If I'm not using food, television, computers, I'm going to have to sit with those feelings and feel them.  I'm going to have to live life. My own life.

So, what's the plan?

This time around it's this Ngondro practice.  I'm going to sit with these emotions, and all the the power that I have from my Tergar community.  And I'm going to feel and release those emotions for my benefit, and for the benefit of everyone my life touches.

But it's not going to be easy.  Because I have a lot of anger and combative energy to sit with. There's an awful lot to clean out.

I will try to remember that there is also a lot of power in this practice.  I have allies in this project.

Precious Life

Day 5 of this cleanse.  Some back pain last night, but I feel like I'm on the other side of the hump.  Feeling a strong appetite for fruits and vegetables.  Feeling a pervasive energy.  All the signs of renewed vitality.

So how do I make this last?  Or is that the right question?

My liver, my kidneys, my skin, these organs that manage all the toxins are such remarkable feats of engineering.  They will continue to clean me up, regardless of what I put in there. But I don't get to take advantage of their power when I'm overloading them with junk.  So the better question to ask is, how do I maintain my awareness of this energy that is always available to me so that I don't muck it up again?

Smile into the liver.  I read advice in Elizabeth Gilbert's book.

Today I take that to mean, take pride in this wonderful life. Take pride in the Buddha nature that is available to us all. Feel how precious this life and this energy is and treat it like the jewel that it is.

Gratitude is one of the most powerful forces there is in the psyche because it multiplies whatever you apply it to. This morning I feel really grateful for this energy and this body and this life.  I have taken steps to wipe the mud off this treasure, and I hope I have the will to keep it clean.

Pervasive Suffering

Day 3 of the cleanse and I'm feeling better. Two hot baths, about three hours of meditation, lots of water. And four Tylenol's to get me through this hump. And I think I'm pretty much through.  Bit of back pain this morning, and a tiny cold.  But I think this time around is a slight improvement on the last.

Now that the worst of the sludge is cleared out, it's time to start digging a little deeper.  It's time to start facing that pervasive, low grade suffering that I don't want to face and prefer to numb with food, Netflix, all the things that are available to us that allow this to build up.

There is, apparently, no scientific support for the theory that a dietary cleanse clears out "toxins."  But my body is telling a different story, that when I cut out addictive things, sugar, caffeine, animal products, gluten, there's a strong reaction. And my past experience tells me that after a while, I start to feel less compulsive in my eating. I feel a purer, cleaner energy supporting me and my wisest decisions.

I know that eating well is important to growth. But I haven't been living that knowledge for too long. Let this be a path that I return to regularly to find myself rooted in my best qualities.

Famous Last Words

What I said yesterday about getting through the first days of the cleanse better than last time.  Strike that. Last night I was hit with the full catastrophe of whatever it is I'm putting in my body that's not good.  I'm not really a sugar addict, so it must be caffeine and gluten. But something has been building up a lot of stuff and I felt it deeply in my joints. This morning I feel it in my stomach.

The strategy today. Drink as much water as I possibly can. Tai Chi, stretching anything to get the joints to loosen up.  Eat a lot of greens.

And be gentle with myself. Really be with this suffering. It may not feel like an opportunity to deepen my awareness and compassion, but it is.

Cleanse

It's been over two years since I've done a dietary cleanse. But already on day two, I notice how differently my body is responding to this detox than last time. My meditation practice is stronger and I'm running longer, so I'm feeling the positive effects much sooner and stronger.

I'm still feeling the muscle tension from giving up caffeine, and a bit of bile from whatever junk is down there being cleaned out.  But I'm also feeling, and tasting that particular pure energy that arises from a cleaner gut.

I am in such denial though, still, about the effect of crappy food on my life, on my mood, on my creativity and energy.  I wonder what I can do to make this insight more stable and permanent.

I need to reframe it, I think, as not a giving up of pleasures, but a gaining of deeper, purer more permanent joy. The sublime bliss that the Tibetan Buddhists talk about.

If I focus on the abundant energy that arises during a cleanse, that energy in turn will keep me on the path.

I also need to make a commitment to cleanses, the way I now make a commitment to retreat. At least three times a year.

I will not let another almost three years pass before I do this again.

Confusion

This week I continue to explore the path of refuge.  As I try to create a refuge that is healthy and sustainable, I become conscious of the habitual refuges that are not healthy and sustainable.

There are the obvious one: television and food.  But one thing I don't consider is how emotional states are used as refuge. Anger, irritation, petty bickering are a refuge for me.  Anger brings a sort of clarity, however illusory.  But confusion is a refuge as well.

Feeling confused and helpless is a refuge from taking action because if I don't know what to do I can't act. And then I avoid all the risks that come with acting. That I might fail, that my actions lead to a worse situation. But inaction is a refuge.

To have clarity in my life, I have to act. And I have to act in consistent ways. Routines, meditation, cleaning, shopping, preparing and eating healthy foods.  These bring clarity. Writing brings clarity. If I really want clarity I need to surrender to these.

Does this mean, I never have uncertainty?  No I don't think so, but I can't make it a refuge. I can't make it a comfortable place that supports inaction.  I have to feel that uncertainty and chaos deeply and learn its lessons and then move on.

Clarity

This morning I started my practice feeling confused, hungover, angry after a very painful and infuriating conversation with my mother last night.

There was little I could bring myself to do but sit in this pole of energy.  I had no will left, really.

Yet by the end of this meditation that passed quickly, almost effortlessly, there was a pervasive state of clarity in my body, in the room around my body.  Just clear, empty, lucid peace.

I saw that my mother just wants to be happy, and I saw how sad her confusion really was.  And I saw how fortunate I am to have this energy in my life.  This awareness of awareness.

This awareness that awareness is always aware of awareness. Like breathing.

As I focus on that, I kind of feel that pineal gland, or whatever it is that allows us to feel this pervasive, pure awareness.

I am running more.  My home is clean.  I am conscious of my desire for happiness, and for the effort that brings about happiness.

I feel closer to that place of liberation.  I feel solid in this place of refuge.

Choice

I have chosen refuge in my meditation practice.  And in doing so, I have chosen a different sense of "self."

Where my self was once the random generator of thoughts and beliefs that propelled me in ways of which I was only half conscious.  Now it's this quiet, powerful energy that is snaking itself throughout my whole body and brain.

Last night while I was meditating, I felt more profoundly safe than I've ever felt in my life. It didn't last, but it was a glimpse of the kind of safety I wish I'd felt more of as a child, and that I wish I could give to Ben.  It struck me this intense difference between refuge and escape.

Television, social media, dumb arguments in my mind, daydreams in which I am more important than I am in actual life, these are all escape. Refuge is a place to be safe and renew. It's a place that is genuinely empowering.

It also hit me last night, how desperate I am for approval. I pretend it's not important to me, but it haunts my ruminations constantly. Right now for instance I had a terror that I might not be able to write out of the new "self." Maybe my writing wouldn't be as good coming from this silent energy.  What I was really anxious about was whether or not my writing would be impressive. Elegant.  All the things that are about approval, and not really about love of language.

In fact the space that this other self creates between thoughts, between words, between insights, will inevitably make my writing better.

I know this. So I choose it.

Liberation

This week I've been feeling a shift in my practice. An awareness of awareness at an almost machine like level. When the spine is straight, energy flows naturally, the belly fills with oxygen like a reservoir and vitality thaws and then runs hot. It is the technology of the soul. It is the mechanism of liberation.

I understand it. I see it. Why is it so hard to make it permanent? Why can't I just be free. Free of suffering financial anxiety, loneliness, self-hatred. Why is that part still so hard?

Because I don't believe in it.  I don't believe it's possible.  Or because I feel I would have to give up something for that belief. To be truly free, I would have to renounce things. I would have to renounce the belief that lasting happiness is found in money, success, fame.

Another reason that it's hard is because that level of pure awareness takes commitment. I feel it because I've been practising for an hour in the morning and evening. To keep it up, I would have to maintain that level of practice and commitment.

What I want is effortless liberation, but to get there I have to expend the effort of commitment. Endure productive discomfort, make commitment the driving force in my life, not desire.

Without that commitment, awareness has no foundation. Motivation is always going to be fluctuating, and so will happiness.

The foundation to happiness and liberation is awareness, the profound, pervasive presence of awareness. And awareness I can feel. An awareness that has an energy and force and power of it's own.  An awareness that is committed to me, and that I can only perceive when I am committed to it.

Beyond Concept

A straight spine tells the mind, and the world that we are alert. Relaxed muscles, focussed eyes, solid base, I sit and within minutes I feel pure awareness begin to uncurl in me.

The challenge now is to just let it be, let it change, let it change me. The challenge now is to stop throughout the day, check my spine, my focus, my muscles and remember to stay alert and relaxed. Like waking up in a dream.

Last year during my JOYL3 course, it was recommended that we find a default practice that we go to when we notice we're suffering. For some people it's the mirror practice, where we pretend to stare in the mirror. For others  I don't really have one.  Or if I do I'm not aware of it. But maybe it's this, straight spine, relaxed muscles, alert, but open.

Last week I dove deep into shame and the buried feedback loop.  I think I made some progress in forgiving myself and others.  But this week I keep it simple.  Just be alert and open. And see what happens.

Shame

Last weekend retreat on the subject of pain has given me the courage to explore all kinds of things I don't often have the courage to feel. When we let go of our aversion to pain in the body, it's easier to let go of aversion to emotional pain. On Friday I spent the day meditating on the most subtle, but painful emotion of them all: shame.

There is so much power in shame because it is the deepest most negative feedback loop in our mind, in our heart and in our body. I feel it buried deep in my gut, hating this constructed self that grows stronger and more constructed the more I hate it. It's a feeling I am averse to, so I avoid it, mostly by looking for opportunities to shame others. And the more I do that, the more deeply it's reinforced. It's a unconscious practice, but the one that has the most power to destroy us.

As such, it also has the most power to liberate us. But here's the rub: only if we're prepared to feel and familiarize ourselves with the shame.  Or prepare to feel the numbness that we create around our shame.

I grew up in a family steeped in shame. My Catholic baby boomer parents caught between the sexual liberation movement and their own strict upbringings married as a result of pregnancy. Shame was the foundation of their marriage and my life. I chose liberation over Catholicism in the end. And here I am now a single mother. At least not in a marriage of shame.  But still alone and struggling and feeling bad about myself and the life I am trying to build for my son.

How might a week of meditating on shame change that?

Well first shame is a very grounding emotion. I feel it most strongly in the root areas of my body. Second it's a blocking emotion.  By feeling it I may be able to unblock a lot of frozen, numb energy that is stopping me from thriving in life, creatively, financially, socially.

What's important to keep in mind is that I'm not trying to get rid of shame. That may be possible, but that's not my goal here. My goal is to harness the power of a so called negative feeling so that I can be happier and suffer less. My goal is to turn poison into medicine.

My goal is not so much liberation as the path of liberation.

Pain

On this last retreat for the summer we explored pain meditation.

It wasn't a meditation that I would have chosen because I hate pain. I avoid it. I have never seen a purpose for it.  In that way I suppose I am normal. I'm also quite fortunate because I'm basically healthy and have never had to experience a lot of pain, or live with someone who is in pain.  And I live in a society that has an entire industry devoted to numbing, managing, getting rid of pain. So it would never occur to me, on my own, to find something positive in pain.

But as Mingyur Rinpoche points out, pain is energy and awareness. Pain brings us immediately into the present. Presence is effortless as long as we have pain, because the mind focusses easily on pain.

If we let it. But so much of our suffering is built on aversion to pain. So much of my suffering is built on aversion to pain. And that is a legacy that Ben is already learning.

On the way to the retreat I did a breathing meditation on the bus, just watching my breath and feeling it as awareness in itself.  And I had a moment where pure awareness was interrupting monkey mind. Minjur says that I'm on the cusp of higher awareness and what I should do when I feel that is to try to extend it. And also to notice the fear that takes me out of it.  Because in the same way that I avoid pain, I also avoid awakening, pure awareness and the loss of control.

Meditating on pain seems to me just the flip side of meditating in emptiness, bliss and timeless awareness. The better you get at one, the better you get at the other. Maybe I'm more able to face pain now that I'm finding it a little easier to feel a life free of suffering and pain.

Hatred is another kind of pain and at the end of this morning's meditation I felt that familiar self hatred, and remembered how much of my life has been spent steeped in hatred. If I am able to break down my resistance to feeling and letting go of pain, then I will be better prepared to feel and finally let go of all that hatred.

Non-meditation meditation

Having a month of intensive retreats as I get ready for summer.

Since the silent retreat I've been trying to meditate an hour before sleep and an hour on waking. When I get this intense I easily forget the most important teaching.  The one that brought me to Tergar in the first place. The importance of non-meditation.

The skill of simply resting in open awareness becomes the skill of simply resting in pure awareness. Being able to just be beyond concept, knowing that this pure awareness is capable of creating its own insight without my efforts. This is as Mingyur Rinpoche says "the best meditation."

That effortlessness is then something that I can bring in to everything that I do, running, cleaning, eating.  All the things that I want to be able to be present in.

All I need to do is become conscious when monkey mind is taking over. And then rest in monkey mind even. Because monkey mind is the best object of meditation.

Silent Retreat

This weekend I did my first silent retreat. With three other people, and the retreat director, I lived in silence for 20 hours, no eye contact, no words, beyond some talks by Mingyur Rinpoche. We went to sleep at 10 p.m. and woke to a 5 o'clock gong. Doing an hour and a half of meditation before breakfast.

The single most important insight I had this weekend was an instruction Rinpoche gave to us at the outset, pay attention to our motivation.  So many times I caught myself meditating because I wanted the cool experience, meditating because I wanted to see myself as an exceptional meditator. meditating because I wanted to be, or think of myself as enlightened.

But my motivation is to be happy and free and suffering, and to help Ben, my family and everyone that I can possibly help to have peace and joy as well.

I thought that as I go to deeper levels of meditation that I would be confronting my most painful memories or feelings. But I realized that the most "important" feelings in my life were really the trigger feelings: the irritation, the boredom, the dissatisfaction. The impatience.

The impatience to be enlightened, to be free.

That impatience is probably in many ways the biggest block.  It's why I don't want to face the dullness and pain that an hour every morning would bring. Because I would have to face that I'm not actually as far as I think I am.

And of course I would have to face that to really be liberated from dullness of mind and suffering, I'm going to have to do an hour of meditation every morning on rising.  Every day for the rest of my life.

Happiness and The Causes of Happiness

Last week I started working on compassion.  But I think this week I will focus on loving kindness. It's easier to be generous to yourself and to others when you're happy, than when you're feeling depleted and driven by suffering.

May I have happiness and the causes of happiness.

What are the causes of happiness?

One a firmly rooted aspiration to be happy.
A strong meditation practice.
The recognition of emptiness.

This week, I keep it simple.

Suffering and the Causes of Suffering

Yesterday I did a mini-retreat at Tergar.

We did more talking than meditating. But we flirted with the possibility of doing a silent retreat, a Friday overnight and all day Saturday until dinnertime.

In our last meditation session, we recited the compassion and loving kindness mantras:

May I be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. 

May I have happiness and the causes of happiness. 

I realized that while I was feeling the desire to be free of suffering, I was feeling a certain numbness when I thought of the causes of suffering. When I brought this up Minjur leapt on it. Breaking through to a clear understanding of the causes of suffering is a tipping point. Though she clearly stressed the mental causes, over the external causes.

Earlier in the day Johann gave us each a gift. A prayer Mala.

This week I will use it often, praying to be free of the causes of suffering. Praying to be conscious of them and free of them.

Cortisol

I'm having a harder time than usual keeping awareness stable.

A lot of cortisol flowing through my brain because of an Op-Ed that's been percolating.  Having a hard time even writing this because my mind is flying all over the place.

I remember Rinpoche's tips for dealing with overwhelming emotions.  Going back to basics. Still meditations like open awareness, or still objects.

Or even just take a break.

I'm thinking I may be a little more prone to this because I've let my running practice go of late.  So I'm going to lace up and get out there today.

We are born to run. I do believe that.

Time to download that 21K app and get out there.

Retreat--Tidy 2

It's day 2 of a spring self-directed retreat.  A retreat I decided I must need because my home has descended into a mild state of squalor.

The insight I had on the second day of my last retreat was about the importance of my physical health.  This one I'm meditating specifically on the importance of my environment and the tangled emotional relationship I have with housework.

Housework is tightly wound up in all the Buddha nature blockers. Faint heartedness because just looking at all this mess makes me want to crawl up into a ball. Judgement of others because I'm constantly living in reaction toward the people who I feel are imposing these cleanliness values on me. Seeing the untrue as true because the society I live in believes that your home and the state of your home tells everyone who you are, and I tend to accept this and have a low opinion of myself, no matter how much I am self asserting myself through rebellion. Seeing the true as untrue, because no matter how many insights I have about my precious self, when I look at my squalid home that insight gets flushed down the drain. And finally, self obsession. Without consistent cleaning rituals I am constantly being drawn into this recurring game of self-assessment.

I made a decision a long time ago that I was not simply going to accept my messiness. That I was going to work to develop better habits.  It would be great to find a way that meditation gets carried over  into that decision.

In the last two hours of meditation I found myself resting in timeless and boundless awareness, feeling that liberation from the conceptual.  I am not the sock, the dustbunny, the chip bag on the floor.  I'm not even really my body, so how can I be any of these things.

Cleaning meditation is such a nice, short way to liberate oneself from the obsessions and ruts of daily life. May I find a way to free myself and everyone from suffering, one dish, one folded shirt, one dustpan at a time.

Tidying

I heard someone on Oprah once say that the state of one's home is a reflection of the state of one's soul. Actually she said it was the state of a woman's home reflected her soul, which may have something to do with why I reacted so strongly against it. I'm very housework challenged, so it felt like a judgement and a slap in the face. Would she get away with saying that about a woman's body. So why does it seem okay to judge someone by the state of their home?

Disagreement aside, I did notice that after my two day retreat in October, I did suddenly start to develop a cleaning competence I haven't had for a while. So when I looked around at my chaotic surroundings it seemed a big clue that it was time for another retreat.  I don't want to live in spiritual or physical squalor. I want to care enough about myself to keep to good nurturing rituals. 

It's strange though that I have the discipline to sit on a cushion for five hours, which is what I did today.  But feel so overwhelmed by some clothes thrown on the floor. 

It was a lovely meditation today.  Many moments of timesless awareness and insight into what it would feel like to be free of suffering.  Relatively very few moment of discomfort, anger.  Some sadness, some irritation, some impatience. But I rode them. 

So what is this housework thing about? 

This afternoon I'm committed to an hour of cleaning meditation.  Tonight another hour of formal practice. 

Maybe some insight will come...

Easter

Life is a precious gift. Really, every day we should be waking up as though we won the lottery, when we consider the tremendous odds of being born at all. And to add to this gift, the fortune to be aware of life's full potential. And to be able to activate that potential.

How is it that I spend so much more time feeling overwhelmed by life's challenges than I am overwhelmed by its plenty? Because my beliefs limit me.

Whatever I know at an abstract level, I am still in the habit of believing in this singular, solid self, this collection of sad and angry memories, this financially and still emotionally struggling self. I still find myself locked in to angry obsessive loops of energy.

But there's an emerging energy in recent months, the same, yet different from that pure energy I've felt in my chi kung practice.  It's a free flowing almost fractal like, snakey, wavey energy that is in my gut. The difference is subtle, but important. It's the ease with which I can now activate it.  I rest my bare attention on it, recognize it as both precious and impermanent and then I just watch it go.

In time it rises up. Up through my heart, my mouth and eventually out the top of my head.

This is the result of my lent decision to sleep earlier, rise earlier, listen only to Tergar material to get to sleep.

This is my Easter gift to myself.

Resting in flow

The flow is getting a little stronger, pings in my navel, my neck, lower back.  All signs that I'm re-connecting with my natural vitality. In this morning's meditation I spent some time just resting in the growing warm wetness of my navel area.
  In the Tergar program there isn't any specific guidance on this, but I can still apply the method.  In the same way I rest bare awareness on thoughts, feelings, body sensations, I can simply rest on this warmth.  In the same way that sound and awareness of sound can become one.  This flow and the awareness of the flow can become one.
 That said, I don't want to overdo it.  I've lost this connection to flow so many times, and I wonder if part of the problem is that I plunge in too far and too fast.  Feel the pings, rest in them. But also don't be afraid to let go and rest in open awareness.  Alternating between this and grounded open awareness will do more to stabilize this than getting lost in some blissful state of altered consciousness.
 Navel gazing.  That's always been a label of shame in the western world.  The dangers of getting caught up in flow is not something to be ashamed of. But it is something to be aware of.

Flow

I've been feeling the pings of energy in my navel that I seem to often feel towards the three month mark when I've committed myself to any kind of energetic practice. From what I've been told, and from what I've read, this can mean two things: that I'm on the verge of transformation, and that I'm starting to store energy.
  The idea of transformation is interesting, because if I'm succeeding at my Tergar practice, my "transformation" is about recognizing what I've always been. Progress is really about how permanent that recognition is, and how it changes the way I see others.
  It's not permanent since I seem to barely be able to concentrate on writing this one entry. Monkey mind is pretty active this morning. Not sure exactly why since I had a pretty good meditation. Building on the "essence of love" meditation that Mingyur Rinpoche's brother, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, gave a while back, I drop into the nervous energy flowing through my body.  Just be with it and in time it naturally transforms into the love it takes to just be with this energy.  It's a lovely practice. So simple and so effective.
  This morning when I did it, I started to feel that familiar wetness in my navel, my chest, the back of my neck, the crown of my head. I recalled one of the foundational practices I'm learning in Rinpoche's new book, From Confusion to Clarity. In this practice we contemplate how precious and rare this human life is and how fortunate we are to even be born at all. To be born, to be in the process of awakening, to feel and know how spectacular and interesting the human body and mind is.  It's like winning the lottery. It is winning the lottery, no matter how much my monkey mind wants other markers of success.
  Of course I want to write a successful book that enriches other people's lives. But I want this book to come out of this recognition, and to enable those who are on the cusp of this awakening.
  To get the courage to continue, I need to know that those people exist.

 

Root Teacher

This week I decided to make Mingyur Rinpoche my root teacher. What this means, if I understand the term correctly, is that I will practice his method, and only his method, for an extended time to create a solid foundation for my practice.
  I've been meditating in some form or another for almost twenty years, so it does feel a little strange this declaration that I am only now building my foundation. But there is that island off Japan that I read about once, where they consider 50 years old as only the start of adulthood. I'm feeling the longing to commit to something, and there is something about Rinpoche's teachings that resonate with me in a way that no other teachings ever have. Maybe it's his light touch, his sense of humour, his simplicity that feels closer to the Taoism that I've always been attracted to. Whatever it is I'm ready to make his school of being my home.
  Which means I'm heading out on what I'm going to start thinking of now as a three year retreat. For the next three years I'm going to make him my my only meditation teacher.  When I'm feeling lost or overwhelmed I will turn to his books, his videos, his organization. When I feel lonely I will see his face.
  I need his steadying presence because I'm heading into a big transition in my life. My agent says there are a couple of New York editors keen on seeing my book proposal. I'm optimistic that this book will be published and I'm going to need grounding during a process where I know I'm going to be experiencing a lot of over excitement. I'm going to need all the emotional and spiritual mentorship I can find.  I may not have much time to be wandering around trying to find it. Having one teacher, one way, one practice will probably be the lifeboat I'm going to have to cling to as I get used to fulfilling my dreams.
  There's that.  There's the fact that in the next month both my parents turn 80.  This may be their last decade.  So the next ten years of my life are going to be filled I expect with elation and grief.
  I'm going to need solid ground, solid friendships, a solid community to get me through.  After almost ten years of travelling that I've been recording on this blog, this is where I finally put down roots.

Progress

How do I know I'm making progress? And what exactly is progress in timeless awareness? Progress is dependent on time and a sense of time, a self and a sense of self being better or getting worse. My mission is to increase the well-being, emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual and financial in my life. And in the lives of others. Accomplishing this mission depends on a sense and criteria for progress.

So by what markers do I know I'm making progress?  Is it how many times a day I hear messages of compassion over messages of self-loathing?  Is it how well I'm sleeping?  Is it how I feel, generally in my heart?  How much writing I'm getting done and how well my writing is going?  Is it how happy my son seems?  How well we're able to negotiate solutions to problems? The maturity and wisdom we bring to the problems we encounter? How do I know that I'm healing?

Is it just the quality of the energy I feel? How intentional my living feels?

I'm not going to answer this today.  Just mull over these questions this week.  And see if I can answer them next week.

Is it the taste of purification?

Is it joy?

Is it clarity?

Is it my ability to make a commitment?

Is it that I have more power?

Is it bliss and non-conceptual awareness?

Gratitude

I bought Ben an alarm clock yesterday.  I've decided to extend my morning meditation practice to an hour. Part of my mission. 

I did this a few years back. Standing first thing in the morning for an hour. Today maybe I'll take a look at my journals from that time.  Back then I wanted to see what would happen.  Now I know what will happen. My concentration, optimism, and self-esteem will increase.  I'll have a more fully developed ability to bring joy into my life and into the lives of others.  As far as I'm concerned, this is science.

There's an energy I feel, as one writer I've been reading recently puts it, this is a "thinking substance." I rest in this energy and I feel this clarity and lucidity that I know is a permanent quality in my life.

Unfortunately I still struggle with a lot of feeling that feel permanent when I'm feeling them, doubt, self-hatred, resentment, despair.  But I know that feeling of permanence is a delusion.  I don't try and fight these feelings, but I do try to become more conscious of their impermance.

The feeling that comes back to me again and again, which I consider one of the "technology" feelings like compassion, is gratitude.  Like loving kindness, these are feelings that have the power to iterate positive liberating feelings in the brain.  Gratitude is like a recursive feeling.  It reinforces the good in life, which in turn reinforces other goods, and before you know you're seeing patterns of good in the world. Before you know it, you have a solid foundation for abundance.

As always, it's important to rest and allow feeling like gratitude and compassion some assimilation time. Walking through life, blissed out and silly, isn't practical and will eventually lead to a reaction.  So small sips of joy, and gratitude, and hope are fine for now.

Self Compassion

One of the blocks to my mission to cultivate wellbeing, is that I doubt myself.  I am still, too often, plagued by the certainty that I can't take care of myself and my son. That one day reality will catch up with me and I will have to face the truth, that I'm a fraud and a fool.  All will be revealed.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Tergar mini-retreat and we explored the practice of self-compassion. I've been listening to a guided meditation that prompts me to aspire to safety, peace, kindness towards myself and acceptance of myself.

But one thing that I read in Joy of Living struck me as very true.  Compassion is a powerful practice.  And as a powerful practice, it can spark a powerful reaction.  Rinpoche recommends that when practicing compassion, it's always best to start small, a minute of two of compassion, alternated with a minute of open, effortless awareness.  This helps smooth the path, and dampen any tendency to reactivity.

This morning in my practice I reached a different perspective on my mission.  Yes "I" want to cultivate well-being.  But really the mission is also to let go and allow well-being to cultivate me.  Not comfort, but the energy that arises from a life well lived. The more of this energy in my life, the less "I" there is to doubt.  Self compassion is often compassion for the delusion that there is this isolated, vulnerable "I".

That's why it's very important that self-compassion isn't self pity. And important that self-compassion is layered with open awareness, so that we get that little break from self-cultivation.  So that the energy that we do believe in washes aways the doubt that keeps us in the self-looping cage.

The Problem

So reforming my evening ritual is proving to be much more challenging than I expected.

I'm still watching 9 o'clock television.  I'm half committed to having kitchen cleaned at 7 p.m., to meditating in the evening.  Last night, I was up until 2 p.m. with some new show I'd discovered.

This morning I'm able to do a compassion meditation. But it's rocky.

What is the one thing that I could do every evening that would prime me towards a more peaceful, restful evening and sleep?

Or the one thing I could do every morning. In one of my favourite self-help books, it is recommended that we review our personal mission statement every morning before we make our daily plan, so that this mission becomes active in us.

Earlier this year I wrote a mission statement that included generating well being through early bedtime and book writing.  This week I'm going to review that statement as part of my daily plan.

Let's see if that's enough to help me avoid the temptations of prime time TV.

The Plan

The first step towards real abundance in my life is transforming a lifetime of poor sleeping habits and poor evening rituals.

Falling asleep and keeping to an early bedtime has always been a struggle for me, going back to a painful childhood.  Evenings were when the fights broke out, the tears began, the deep, deep sadnesses and truths of my parents unhappy marriage emerged. I am, frankly, afraid of bedtime. It's nothing but painful memories and the consequences of those painful memories.

But my life, and Ben's life, and the rest of my life, depends on changing this. I really believe that transforming my sleeping habits is the single most important thing I can do to achieve lasting and stable happiness.

I need to be gentle with myself, though, because this is going to be hard.  Or maybe I don't want to discourage myself with the word  hard.  This is going to be challenging.

My plan for the next six months is to revisit my JOL 1 course.  Do very simple, basic, meditations every evening to calm my mind.  Make that commitment every evening for 20 minutes. Then maybe the decision to forego television will be easier.

Recognizing the deep calm that is available to me every evening may help me to let go of the stressful patterns that have driven me for too much of my life.

Mission

My mission is to cultivate emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical and financial wellbeing every day--for myself, for the people around me and for the world I live in.  

I do this knowing that I, like all humans, are fundamentally altruistic, not greedy. 

I do this with routines, lists, goals, commitments.  But I do these knowing  that these are all secondary to the joyful act of pure being.

I do this, this year, by committing to three foundational habits.

• early bedtime,
• meditation
• book writing. 

I do this every morning and every evening by facing painful realities, painful memories and painful fantasies with equanimity. 

I follow the formula:  pain * awareness =  purification.  

I do this with the knowledge that the taste of purification once developed will not be lost, that it will lead to abundance, and that this will be a stable, good place from which I can create an abudant life for myself and my family. 

I do this, knowing that gains made will never be lost.