Lucid Joy

What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.

I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation.  I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.

In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom.  Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.

I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning.  But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important.  Joy.  I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama.  But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive.  Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.

Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.

May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.

Post Vipassana

Two weeks ago I finished my first 10-day Vipassana retreat.  I'm still writing it up.  I'm still processing it.

At the risk of reducing a complex adventure into bullet points, the most profound insights I had were the high level of stress, misery, and hatred I have been living with all my life, and the power of equanimity to reduce this suffering.

Post Vipassana, I'm realizing how deeply in grip I still am to the deep cravings I've lived with all my life.  I didn't experience much in the way of craving while I was in retreat, which is surprising given that I had to give up internet, reading, writing, and eating anything substantial after noon.  Very little of this bothered me,  perhaps because I was more than distracted enough by the habits of petty aversion and ruminative memories of anger.

I've given up meat. And for a good week when I came home, I didn't feel any strong need to watch Netflix, or binge eat.

Craving found it's way in through the Kavanaugh hearings.  Like many North Americans, particularly women, I was glued to the television, as though somehow the confirmation, or shaming of Brett Kavanaugh, will wash away all the shame I experienced as a lost teenager in the era of private Catholic schools.

By yesterday I was watching, non-stop, the last season of Nashville and inhaling a bucket of pasta in cream sauce.

This morning I woke up with a bloated stomach and a headache, feeling as though every thing I had learned had been washed away.  But I sat, and it suddenly hit me how intense the sense of peace and balance had become in my life as well. I was able to rest in equanimity, make a vow to correct, maybe by visiting the weekly sitting in my neighborhood, and giving up food this evening.

I've only got one episode of Nashville left.

What I learned at M.I.T

Last week I gave an "ignite" talk at a ed-tech conference at M.I.T.   Five years ago, I thought of myself as a writer. These days my job is closer to "thought leader." So I've been thinking about what kind of thoughts that I want to lead with.  I'm nailing together a sort of code for life.  In the spirit of five, I will keep this a five point list that helps keep me moving in the right direction.  So far it is this:

1. Delight in calm

Again and again I come back to a theory I heard about on the NPR show Invisibilia, that we really only have two emotions: calm and agitation. All of our "feelings" are how we interpret this data and over time those interpretations become the way we see the world. I can't say if this is true, but this very much appeals to me as a computational thinker, this idea that our feelings are essentially an endless improvisation on binary code, with the heart as a genius compiler.  The first goal of meditation is to get us back to the binary, to notice the calm again and decompose the endless dance of agitation to its tiniest bits. The next goal is to build a new emotional framework that will protect and nurture this interplay.  Delighting in calm means just that. Take as many minutes as you need in one chunk, or throughout the day, to observe that calm. Then take the next heartbeat to be happy about it.  Not over excited. And not overattached.  More like joyful tenderness you might feel towards a newborn baby who has found something to laugh about in the dark.  More like the joy you feel on from your best friend, who you would never then force to move in with you. The ultimate goal of meditation is how to make that calm available to others in such a way that they cannot help but connect with its profound power. According to this theory, compassion becomes the technology of feeling the agitation of others and doing what can be done to de-iterating it so that they can find their own peace.  Enlightenment, I think,  is the moment this compassion "technology" becomes  intuitive.  Or perhaps, the moment that we see that it always was and still is.

2. Walk, Run, Sit, Stand

The older I get, the harder this one is to keep, but the more essential it becomes  Carving out time to do what needs to be done to keep the sap flowing is a tough one.  But today I've been standing and again and I am amazed how powerful the flow of energy.  I think a life doing all these things as regularly and routinely as you can is the best way we can to express our appreciation for this wonderful body we were born with. Everyday we don't consciously connect to the physical vitality that is our birthright feels a  day wasted. The effort is always worth it.  So if I can't find the motivation to do this for myself, maybe I can find the urgency of doing it for others.  I dedicate all of these hours of exercise to the well being of everyone.


I have three more that I will discuss in future posts. So far:

3. Share something
4. Learn something
5. Believe in patience

The technology of joy

I'm back from four days travelling through Newfoundland, a bucket list experience. Such a beautiful, friendly, magic experience. One day I will go back.

I was there teaching computational thinking and again I am struck with how much of it is there in meditation. We decompose this massive, overwhelming mind into its tiny component actions, breathing, noticing, feeling.  We see and look for and create patterns.  We develop routines. We apply logic and conditions. Mingyur Rinpoche has said that compassion is like the technology with which we use the energy released by calming the mind.  In six weeks, I head off to 10 days of Vipassana. S.N. Goenka also believed that meditation was a technology, a tool, for optimizing the mind.

This week in my course on the paramitas, I am looking at joyful effort.  My practice is, of course, cleaning.

MR says that the essence of joyful effort is motivation, inspiration and meaning. But I have tried so often in my life to motivate myself to maintain a tidy, clean home.  What I've been trying in recent months is compassion, not just for myself, or Ben, but for anyone who is struggling to motivate themselves to do the routine work. I think of how trapped they feel in their shame, and faint hearedtness. I think of how overwhelmed they are and I dedicate a short period of cleaning to them. I don't know these people, but of course I know what they feel, because I feel it myself.  I know how hard it is for them to stay dedicated to this.

Once I've done some practice, I want to take the time to sit with it and assimilate it.  Be so happy that I am connected with basic goodness, know how precious this ability to motivate myself is.

Clean bot

Here is something that I wrote a few weeks ago, but didn't publish:

Don't meditate. Don't get lost.

These are the words that now ring through every practice. Whenever I find myself getting caught up in obsession, or even pleasure, the feeling of purification, and all the cool and new sensations that a renewed commitment to practice brings, I hear these words.  I want to surf, not get caught up in a wave.

I need to meditate on the desire for purification.  Wanting purification isn't enough. I need to be committed to it, and I'm not. I look around at the chaos and dirt in my house, and I know that whatever I've achieved after a decade of meditation, I'm not pure. Or I certainly don't feel pure.

And yet I want it so much.  I really want to feel the joy that others feel in putting effort into their environment. I want to feel that basic goodness that we connect to every time we wash a dish, or pick up clothes, put out the garbage, fold laundry.

This is meditation too.

Perhaps the place to start is compassion for anyone who is in the same situation, and to be ready to receive wisdom from anyone who has ever been there.  To look at my fellow slobs and fellow ex-slobs as my spiritual companions. To appreciate anyone who has ever helped to be clean or inspired me to be clean.

This week I am working with patience.  Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of patience is openesse, flexibility and resilience.  I have to learn to be patience with my impatience, with my poor habits, with the consequences of my poor habits.  These will not be unlearned in a day, maybe even my lifetime.

I'm going to meditate for 30 minutes on whatever energy it is I'm struggling with right now when I think of my environment.  I will sit with the question, what can I do to really change this situation that creates so much suffering in my life?  I will return with the best answer I can come up with.

30 minutes later.

I think the single most impactful habit I can cultivate is my bot vaccuming every evening at 8 p.m. 

First because I can automate the decision. If I leave it up to myself to trigger.  it's a little harder. But  today I can commit to cleaning the kitchen floor so that at 8 p.m. everything is ready for the robo cleaning. Then I'm likely to keep this going for the next few weeks.  I can add 15 minutes of joyful effort to it. The sound of the bot can be the thing that gets me started in the evening, and before long, the place will be cleaner. I'll experience the consequences of clean and want to maintain them.

I will treat my cleaning bot like a meditation gong.

Let's see what happens.

Knowing

Last weekend Mingyur Rinpoche came to Montreal.  I followed him around like a groupie. First for a six hour day of introductory lectures and guided meditation (I sat with my mother in the second row.) Then a talk at the brain imaging centre at the Montreal neuro (where my mother had recently had a brain shunt put in), and finally for a two hour White Tara empowerment ceremony.

This ceremony was very different from the low floor secularism that Mingyur Rinpoche has become famous for.  It was closer to the mass I have known all my life as a Catholic.  There was chanting. There was a high and elaborate ceremonial hat. There were white diaphanous scarves that were placed around our necks. There were offerings and communion food. But there was a lightness that made it substantially different.

"I wish you all had this hat," he joked in the middle of the ritual, in which we all imagined the "White Tara" the embodiment of the female buddha nature sitting above our head, and imagined feeling what she felt, and knowing what she knew.  The communion was a procession of nuts, fruits, and finally cheezies.  Yes, that's right, instead of the tasteless wafer I have known, so carefully designed to leave the mouth drier and hungrier after its dissolution, this white Tara ceremony ended with a puff of artificial cheese flavour, designed in its way to bring you to a bliss point that will also leave you wanting more.

But without the lovingly cultivated bliss of a strong and stable practice, whatever "more" we achieve it achingly transient.

We are enlightened, but not allowed to tell anyone, jokes my Rinpoche. It is believed in Tibetan Buddhism that everyone is fundamentally good and perfect. That we don't recognize our own enlightenment.  Through practice, we recognize it from time to time, and through extended, disciplined and authentically loving practice, we can make this recognition intuitive, which is the best definition of enlightenment I can offer right now.

Through this ceremony, I have taken the boddhisatva vow. I will practice every day, and work to increase my hours of practice in the hope that I can make this knowledge intuitive for all.

Practicing Generosity

I learned a new take on tonglen this week, the Tibetan practice of giving and taking. The way I've been doing it in the last few years, is to imagine myself taking in the suffering of others on an in- breath, and then imagining myself sending out liberation, comfort, just the feeling of release. But in this online Varajana course I'm taking, I've learned that we practice generosity by breathing out our virtues, our skills, our ability to love.

That is practicing generosity in meditation.

Practicing generosity in daily life is quite simple, being more gradually willing to let go of possessions, ideas of the self, resources.  Mingyur Rinpoche demonstrates it by shifting a coconut from one hand to the other.  It's not being attached to things, but also not to the fruits of our skills.

For me these days, generosity is practicing the letting go of my usual comforts to focus on cleaning, then dedicating any energy, skill, comfort I get from cleaning to anyone who is struggling to find the motivation and energy to take care of themselves. Yesterday and this morning, I gave up the twenty minutes of blissful meditation to pick up stuff.

This is an extension of last week's insight into the difference between anger and hatred.  Anger is the emotion that arises. Hatred is anger in practice.  To begin to untangle and de-iterate this habit of hatred,  one needs to look at how to iterate love.  Ther is love the spontaneous feeling, and love the practice. When I look around my chaotic home, I see the I am not practicing love in this domain. I see myself surrounded in learned helplessness. I think of everyone who feels helpless, I clean, and send any motivation I am accumulating through these increased minutes and hours of cleaning.

An interesting thing happened this weekend. I did a cleaning meditation that started with picking up all the paper, chip bags, light squalor from the floor, feeling the resistance, and sending out any good that might come of this.  And suddenly, in the middle of his online video game with a friend, my son turned to me and said, "is there anything I can do to help?"

The impact of generosity.