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.