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.