I've been keeping to fifty minutes this week and hitting that sweet spot in my brain again. This morning there was a feeling that I recognized when I reach this point that I'm going to start referring to as home.
The home I grew up in was rife with tension, hostility, emotional and mental instability. I've carried that with me wherever I've gone in my life. I've carried that tension in my body, in my dreams, and carried it forward into my relationships. Now I risk passing it on to my son.
That quiet, restful place in my brain that I reach once the magnetic energy starts flowing is the only place I've ever felt relieved of this. It's why I keep coming back to it again and again.
I realized this morning that this is my home. This is my safe place. This has always been my safe place. In Maine, I would reach this safe place while walking on the beach. When I was living on deBullion, I would reach it by walking on the Mountain.
In the last seven years, I've been blessed to reach it here, in this kitchen and by the pond at Jarry. I remember a few years ago, when I got the first notice about having my apartment taken back, I had an insight that it didn't matter because I had a home. This stability is my home.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Stability
This morning I`ve managed to take it to fifty minutes. But there`s a lot of anxiety that needs to be confronted for me to do that. No. "Confronted" is the wrong word. Companioned. I have a different relationship with my emotions these days. Morning practice is a little bit like emotional grooming. I stand quietly and see what`s in there and slowly I let it wash away.
My main insights this morning are about the feeling of stability in practice. Standing provides a stable platform for me to feel what I normally feel, rather than run away to some distraction. On this platform I feel boredom, I feel fear, I feel the effects of a childhood and lifetime of emotional and mental instability. But if I don`t feel those things then I can`t change anything.
And this is something I deeply want to change. I want emotional and mental stability, and I`m willing to accept the boredom that is a side-effect of those things.
I write that sentence and my panicked mind drifts off. Boredom. What a distressing word. In my line of work, it is the worst thing you can be. Boring someone is the worst thing you can do. The worst. What if what I`m writing is boring. I might as well curl up and die.
I know that every time I open my mouth my mother is bored. And all I`ve ever wanted to be in my life is interesting. But what is interesting about my life?
And why exactly does my life need to be interesting. Can't I be interested by life?
A life writer's job is to clean away the dust, and the ordinary detrius of life to reveal what is brilliant and original and precious in every life. Because everybody's life is interesting. No one is an exception to that rule, even me.
But running away from boredom is not the way. Because running away from boredom is like running away from life. Some of the most life giving things are hidden by boredom. To many people a pond is boring. But to the enlightened it is a deep source of energy and vitality. People in the hills escape the excitement of the city and find misery and squalor. People from the city try to escape stress and exhaustion by spending time in the hills.
For the time being I will stay with what I have. This practice. And I risk boredom, hoping it will lead to something interesting.
My main insights this morning are about the feeling of stability in practice. Standing provides a stable platform for me to feel what I normally feel, rather than run away to some distraction. On this platform I feel boredom, I feel fear, I feel the effects of a childhood and lifetime of emotional and mental instability. But if I don`t feel those things then I can`t change anything.
And this is something I deeply want to change. I want emotional and mental stability, and I`m willing to accept the boredom that is a side-effect of those things.
I write that sentence and my panicked mind drifts off. Boredom. What a distressing word. In my line of work, it is the worst thing you can be. Boring someone is the worst thing you can do. The worst. What if what I`m writing is boring. I might as well curl up and die.
I know that every time I open my mouth my mother is bored. And all I`ve ever wanted to be in my life is interesting. But what is interesting about my life?
And why exactly does my life need to be interesting. Can't I be interested by life?
A life writer's job is to clean away the dust, and the ordinary detrius of life to reveal what is brilliant and original and precious in every life. Because everybody's life is interesting. No one is an exception to that rule, even me.
But running away from boredom is not the way. Because running away from boredom is like running away from life. Some of the most life giving things are hidden by boredom. To many people a pond is boring. But to the enlightened it is a deep source of energy and vitality. People in the hills escape the excitement of the city and find misery and squalor. People from the city try to escape stress and exhaustion by spending time in the hills.
For the time being I will stay with what I have. This practice. And I risk boredom, hoping it will lead to something interesting.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
A Walk In The Woods
I`m reading Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods in preparation for the book I'm going to write next year. It's funny, but only about half way through did I realize, at a deep level, that it was about trees. My mind this year has been so on technology that I've forgotten how important the natural processes of the world were to me. But technology works best when we understand what it already wonderful and powerful in the world. It also works best when we realize what is vulnerable
Consider the natural technology of the tree, from Bryson's book:
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue--the phloem, xylem and cambium--just beneath the bark, which together forma a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do it is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water--several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day--from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter f machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water.
This has been without contest, the most difficult, uncertain and painful year of my life. I have no doubt that there are many other uncertainties in my future. But this year was just profoundly stressful at my core. It is a really frightening thing to be poor, and I never want to be that bad again, and I would never want that for anybody.
But I survived and I have a year of writing ahead. For the next year I am doing the thing I have always wanted to do, the thing I have always dreamed of doing, writing a book. Writing a book with no pressing responsibilities, other than to write that book.
To do this I need a lucid mind, a strong core, faith in myself and my abilities. Faith in the value of my project.
To build these things, I will stand.
Consider the natural technology of the tree, from Bryson's book:
For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue--the phloem, xylem and cambium--just beneath the bark, which together forma a moist sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do it is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water--several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day--from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter f machinery, that would be needed for a fire department to raise a similar volume of water.
This has been without contest, the most difficult, uncertain and painful year of my life. I have no doubt that there are many other uncertainties in my future. But this year was just profoundly stressful at my core. It is a really frightening thing to be poor, and I never want to be that bad again, and I would never want that for anybody.
But I survived and I have a year of writing ahead. For the next year I am doing the thing I have always wanted to do, the thing I have always dreamed of doing, writing a book. Writing a book with no pressing responsibilities, other than to write that book.
To do this I need a lucid mind, a strong core, faith in myself and my abilities. Faith in the value of my project.
To build these things, I will stand.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Nervous Breakthrough
This has been, as far as I can remember, the most stressful year of my life. So much fell apart. The newspaper where I had a column for twenty years folded. With it about fifteen years of archives of my work.
I faced more professional rejection than I`ve ever had to face as a I tried to make the transition to long form journalism and sell a book proposal. In part to make ends meet, I took a deal to move out of my apartment at the end of my lease. But with no income coming in, I worried how I would find a landlord willing to rent to me.
With so much anxiety and stress blowing around in my mind, it was hard to meditate. I could feel my physical and mental health ebbing away as the stress proliferated.
But I made it through. A few days ago I got news that I'd received a grant. Enough money that I can spend the next year working on a book project. Enough money that for the next while, I can breathe.
During a period of deep crisis a few week back I reached out for consolation from my brother. A deeply sensitive person and a gifted actor, he has struggled all his life with low self esteem and obsessive compulsive disorder. It seemed to me in the last few months he's been able to pull himself out of a terrible rut and get his confidence back. I've always tried to be there for him, but this time I really needed his help. He turned me on to the work of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
I'm sure I'll be writing more about him in future blogs, but one of the he tells a story in the opening chapters of his book The Joy of Living about the anxiety and panic attacks he struggled with as a child. It must have been a stressful childhood, given that he's an incarnate, declared the reincarnation of a seventeenth century rinpoche. That's a lot of pressure for a kid. But towards the end of his teenage years, as he struggled with this chronic anxiety, he had a realization. This anxiety wasn't a deeply entrenched fact of his brain. It was more of a heightened awareness of the anxiety that most people live with. Many people have nervous breakdowns. As he worked through it, he began to think of it has his nervous breakthrough.
This has been a year of nervous breakthrough. I have questioned my path as a writer, over and over again. But I didn't fall apart. I kept writing. I kept standing even if I could stand it for more than twenty minutes. I know I watched too much television, but I made it through. And now I approach my fiftyeth year with more confidence and peace and money than I had last year at this time.
My one goal for next year is to write a book. To support that goal I plan to do a lot of standing, and do a lot of rebuilding of my sense of peace and equanimity.
Or let me tweak that. Do much rebuilding of my awareness of peace an tranquility. Because it has always been there for me. It is always there for me, and it will always be there for me.
I faced more professional rejection than I`ve ever had to face as a I tried to make the transition to long form journalism and sell a book proposal. In part to make ends meet, I took a deal to move out of my apartment at the end of my lease. But with no income coming in, I worried how I would find a landlord willing to rent to me.
With so much anxiety and stress blowing around in my mind, it was hard to meditate. I could feel my physical and mental health ebbing away as the stress proliferated.
But I made it through. A few days ago I got news that I'd received a grant. Enough money that I can spend the next year working on a book project. Enough money that for the next while, I can breathe.
During a period of deep crisis a few week back I reached out for consolation from my brother. A deeply sensitive person and a gifted actor, he has struggled all his life with low self esteem and obsessive compulsive disorder. It seemed to me in the last few months he's been able to pull himself out of a terrible rut and get his confidence back. I've always tried to be there for him, but this time I really needed his help. He turned me on to the work of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.
I'm sure I'll be writing more about him in future blogs, but one of the he tells a story in the opening chapters of his book The Joy of Living about the anxiety and panic attacks he struggled with as a child. It must have been a stressful childhood, given that he's an incarnate, declared the reincarnation of a seventeenth century rinpoche. That's a lot of pressure for a kid. But towards the end of his teenage years, as he struggled with this chronic anxiety, he had a realization. This anxiety wasn't a deeply entrenched fact of his brain. It was more of a heightened awareness of the anxiety that most people live with. Many people have nervous breakdowns. As he worked through it, he began to think of it has his nervous breakthrough.
This has been a year of nervous breakthrough. I have questioned my path as a writer, over and over again. But I didn't fall apart. I kept writing. I kept standing even if I could stand it for more than twenty minutes. I know I watched too much television, but I made it through. And now I approach my fiftyeth year with more confidence and peace and money than I had last year at this time.
My one goal for next year is to write a book. To support that goal I plan to do a lot of standing, and do a lot of rebuilding of my sense of peace and equanimity.
Or let me tweak that. Do much rebuilding of my awareness of peace an tranquility. Because it has always been there for me. It is always there for me, and it will always be there for me.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Standing or Writing
For the last many years now, I've struggling with a choice between two loves. Standing and writing. If I could only do one upon waking. If I should only do one upon waking, which should it be. And also, why do I think it's a choice. A do or die choice?
It's like my life has always been set up as a double bind choice. Which parent do I choose mother or father. Which path do I choose artistic, or economically satisfying. I've believed all my life I had to choose, but I did I?
In the end, I never really had to choose between my parents.
Do I have to choose between standing and writing? Can they be different forms of meditation that I use depending on what I'm cultivating at the moment. The core loop is meditation. Or rather the core loop is awareness, whether I achieve it through writing or standing isn't as important as keeping to the core loop.
All the rest is background.
It's like my life has always been set up as a double bind choice. Which parent do I choose mother or father. Which path do I choose artistic, or economically satisfying. I've believed all my life I had to choose, but I did I?
In the end, I never really had to choose between my parents.
Do I have to choose between standing and writing? Can they be different forms of meditation that I use depending on what I'm cultivating at the moment. The core loop is meditation. Or rather the core loop is awareness, whether I achieve it through writing or standing isn't as important as keeping to the core loop.
All the rest is background.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
The secret of meditation
My brother put me onto an interesting new teacher this week, Mingyu Rinpoche. He has some charming introduction to meditation videos over at Tergar.org, the online community that has built around his teachings.
To teach what he calls "the secret of meditation" he leads students through a simple experiment. First he asks them to spend a minute or so just listening to the sounds around them. Next he asks them to spend a minute or so "meditating on the sounds around them." The secret to meditation is that true meditation is really the listening.
One of the biggest blocks to meditation, and I'm still guilty of this, is the belief that meditation is an act of concentration. We think that we're supposed to be concentrating on the breath. And so we get frustrated with ourselves when we do it "wrong."
But meditation is really just awareness, and being conscious of the barest level of awareness. Concentration is not only unecessary, it's not even the goal. Concentration arises out of mediation. But the goal is really to engage in the simple act of being. In fact, in a certain sense it is to be without goal.
When we bring this way of awareness to the simple acts of life, then suddenly the act of living becomes much simpler.
Life becomes simpler, but it's a remarkably deep simplicity.
To teach what he calls "the secret of meditation" he leads students through a simple experiment. First he asks them to spend a minute or so just listening to the sounds around them. Next he asks them to spend a minute or so "meditating on the sounds around them." The secret to meditation is that true meditation is really the listening.
One of the biggest blocks to meditation, and I'm still guilty of this, is the belief that meditation is an act of concentration. We think that we're supposed to be concentrating on the breath. And so we get frustrated with ourselves when we do it "wrong."
But meditation is really just awareness, and being conscious of the barest level of awareness. Concentration is not only unecessary, it's not even the goal. Concentration arises out of mediation. But the goal is really to engage in the simple act of being. In fact, in a certain sense it is to be without goal.
When we bring this way of awareness to the simple acts of life, then suddenly the act of living becomes much simpler.
Life becomes simpler, but it's a remarkably deep simplicity.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Wisdom
I remember back in CEGEP taking an ethics class and being asked to prioritize my values. Most people chose happiness. I chose wisdom. My reasoning was that wisdom was all inclusive, that if you were wise in all likelyhood you would be happy, and you would have all that you really needed.
My path towards wisdom has been a meandering one. And wisdom, of course, is not a value that you achieve and then sit smuggly wise for the rest of your life. It's a value that needs constant replenishment and there is no wisdom without experience and knowledge of what is happening in the here and now.
One of the ways that I replenish it is through standing. It's like a checkpoint for me. If I find myself going off in a direction that's likely to bring me a whole lot of unhealthy stress, then I stand, and I remember. Oh yes, the wise advocate, the Adam Smith self who balances The Wealth of Nations. The ability I've cultivated to keep my mind wandering around the world like a stray puppy. I need to get back in touch with that.
And I will get back in touch with that. In fact I'm back in touch with that right now.
My path towards wisdom has been a meandering one. And wisdom, of course, is not a value that you achieve and then sit smuggly wise for the rest of your life. It's a value that needs constant replenishment and there is no wisdom without experience and knowledge of what is happening in the here and now.
One of the ways that I replenish it is through standing. It's like a checkpoint for me. If I find myself going off in a direction that's likely to bring me a whole lot of unhealthy stress, then I stand, and I remember. Oh yes, the wise advocate, the Adam Smith self who balances The Wealth of Nations. The ability I've cultivated to keep my mind wandering around the world like a stray puppy. I need to get back in touch with that.
And I will get back in touch with that. In fact I'm back in touch with that right now.
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