Okay For No Reason

Yesterday I attended a New Year's 3 hour retreat. We went through the Tergar framework, awareness, love & compassion, wisdom. I'd decided the evening before that I would be fasting. I set my aspiration for the year. I want to make financial anxiety my best friend.

This morning I had my post fast meditation, and it was perfect. Really. Dedication, bodhicitta, guru yoga with Dorje Drolo. I felt his magnetic, fearless presence. It dissolved into me and I sat with my mind as it was. In time I could feel the default mode network settle down into spacious, slow waves. And then I just went beyond. 

And that was it. Emptiness. Reality as it is. No more learning. 

Now I welcome my financial anxiety into this vast spacious room and feel the excitement that is part of it. I don't know where my income will come from, which means for the moment it's not coming from a source that makes me feel enslaved. That anxiety is also possibility. 

I sit still and allow it to self-liberate into okay for no reason. The best feeling that there is. 

The Year of Randrol Lhamo

This year I work on building an identity around my vajrayana refuge name, Rangdrol Lhamo.

In Tibetan this mean self-liberating goddess, and I want to try to incorporate this vision of myself in all that I do.

Self liberation means allowing suffering to liberate itself. In vajrayana we see all suffering as a manifestation of the same energy that drives samsara. If we let it run its course it becomes easier to recognize the Nirvana that it all emerges from and leads to. Thus we live in both samsara and nirvana at the same time. 

It is standard tantra practice to visualize yourself as a deity, but I haven't yet tried visualizing myself as the deity name I was fortunate enough to be given. 

Stay tuned for adventures in 2025!

Prayer of the New Saint

I evoke all those beings and sources of refuge who have ever loved me to come sit with me because it is now that I feel most alone. I evoke the Blessed Mother, the Sacred Father, the Spirits of Light, the essence of wisdom, my teachers and elders, the communities who have always caught me when I have fallen, the ancestors who have never stopped holding me, all the elements including the sacred earth who helped me to stand, and silence that wraps me in a space to be with my heart, and I call upon my own innate compassion.

To all those I have evoked, I offer my grief and what seems like my perpetual mourning in this body. I offer my fear, my numbness, and my inability to dream beyond shutting down. Most of all, I offer my fatigue. I am tired.

Today, precious earth, let me lie upon you and be reminded of my body and my heart. I want many things, but I need only one thing now: to give up to you what I cannot hold. I pray that I evolve past my belief that my pain is mine alone to carry. To my sources of refuge who have been evoked, you have taught me repeatedly that this is not the truth.

You have taught me that it is not my pain but our pain. You remind me that my worship of isolation is not conducive to my liberation. I want to be free, and so I offer to you what I struggle to hold right now knowing that you are only here to share this heaviness with me and to love me. . . .

Today, my precious sources of refuge, in your love, offer me rest. In your love, never abandon me. In your love, haunt all others who feel lonely and tired. Please continue to haunt me in this life, in death, and into all my lives to come until one day I become a source of refuge for other beings. Yet it is also my prayer to become a source of refuge for beings right now in this life. May I and all others in this realm and beyond be blessed forever. I dedicate this labor to my descendants who will one day lead me into my ancestorhood.

♦

Excerpted from The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors by Lama Rod Owens. October 2023; published by Sounds True.

Song of realization #1

First be okay

for no reason

let your heart loosen

and open naturally

just be in the river of love

let it flow

let it unfreeze the layers of

pain and sorrow that have permeated your being for so long

let it soften the hard parts

like crusty dough

let it feed

let it feed you

and just be

fed

Top 10 insights of 2023

1. "Trust the clarity"  from Song of Realization wrap up  .  I went on many meditation retreats this year. The fruit of these teachings has been a stronger understanding of what clarity is.  It's not illumination in itself,  but the recognition of illumination. But it's not something to strive for, anymore than we need to hold a flashlight to a candle. Just trust it and be in it.  

2. The practice of just going beyond.  That energy is not emptiness.  That we must keep going beyond and be vigilant for when we are conceptualizing.  Energy is important, but it's not the objective of meditation.  And it's easy to mistake energy for emptiness. 

3. Effortless is most easily achieved by staying with intention. This was from a Dharma Geek session with Cortland. He took us through breathing meditation and showed us how if we focussed less on breath and simply on the intention to be with breath, samatha was more more effortless.

4. Happy for no reason. I develop the truth body

5. Compassion is the antidote to empathy burnout, but also empathetic joy. I've been enjoying feeling empathetic joy to my guru and my yidam of late. 

6. Anytime Anywhere meditation is just about being with the default mind.  Being present with it. 

7. Vajra Dakini, I really feel the clarity behind my harmful emotions. 

8. After the new ice storm, I remembered that inspiration is easier to see in emptiness.

9. Because intense emotions are effortless we can leverage them to make awareness effortless.  Like waterskiing! 

10. No fundamental difference between sleep dreaming and awake dreaming.  When I see suffering in daily life, I can awaken into lucidity in the same way I would if I recognized it in a dream. 

The impact of emptiness

  

Eight years ago I started the new year with the decision to have a word of the year, "abundance." 2015 was a good year.  But 2016, I went the other way and chose "emptiness."Looking back the emptiness year was a year that truly changed my life. 

That's the paradox of life.  If you want a sense of abundance, emptiness is the value that will generate that effortlessly.  If you focus on stuff, you just end up with more stuff. 

But the mind resists. Do I have the courage to truly value emptiness?

Read an article yesterday that claimed a focus on defined values it what gets people to stay motivated when their instrinsic motivation fails.  By definining emptiness as my value, I wonder if this is a quicker way to recharge than abundance. 

If I were to value and focus on emptiness, where do I see my life five years from now?

I'm enlightened, self realized, equipped to help others know happiness.  

 

The secret and science of compassion

I've been meditating for a long time, but there were many years, when I kind of kept this a secret  Mostly because I dreaded the question, why? Even if I was asked with genuine open curiosity what my motivation was for putting time aside every day for sitting quietly doing nothing,  I didn't really know how to explain why. This was especially true of compassion meditation. I felt very shy about volunteering the fact that I trained in becoming a  a more loving, and concerned person. Would people think I wasn't loving enough, or would they think I was being boastful about my goodness? 

Then I read Mingyur Rinpoche's book Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness. And I came across a line that really helped me have a better understanding and explanation for what I was doing.  He wrote that calm abiding meditation (the kind of meditation we do when we are meditating on breath, on a stable object, or in a natural, open awareness,  is like charging your mental and emotional batteries.  Compassion meditation (focussing on our innate desire to be free of suffering)  is the mental and emotional "technology" that uses the recharged batteries in a proper way. 

There was something so practical about this explanation. The reason why I meditated was simple. It made my brain stronger and it gave me the emotional tools to use that stronger brain to have an impact on my life and on other lives. 

Science supports this

Over the last twenty years there is an increasing amount of science to explain the mechanics behind the "technology" of compassion. For one, brain scans of advanced meditators show that compassion meditation, more than any other type of meditation activates and strengthens the part of the brain that produces dopamine, a chemical that manages motivation, learning, and motor control. 

Dopamine is involved when we act, but also when we don't act. People with addictive or obsessive personalies often have very high levels of dopamine and suffer alot when those levels start to drop.  People who suffer from Parkinson's disease have crititically low levels of dopamine, and so are unable to control their motor movements. 

Dopamine is very powerful. We can leverage it for learning, or we can leverage it to stay on a hedonistic treadmill. But we can also leverage it to motivate ourselves to more pro social and constructive behaviour, that creates well being for ourselves and people around us.  That's where compassion meditation comes in. 

Compassion meditation is really about recognizing this desire to be free from suffering, which is arguably our natural regulation system.  In doing this we train in harnessing and strengtheing our motivation and directing it to the right objectives and behaviours.

The power of compassion meditation 

Compassion is very powerful, so a couple of caveats before you start bingeing on it.

First, it's important to distinguish between compassion, the desire to be free from suffering, and empathy, the tendency to feel other people's pain. Empathy actually engages a different neural network, and if we spend too much of our time feeling other people's pain we can develop something called empathy fatigue.  When we spend too much time feeling other peoples stress and suffering, our bodies can actually take on this stress and the suffering and become increasingly depleted and demotivated. Compassion is not about feeling others suffering as much as it is feeling the desire to relieve the suffering. 

Though it's less likely to cause burnout, like all dopamine activitating behaviours, it needs to be balanced, with time to re-charge you batteries with practices like open awareness, or meditating on the breath. 

So feel free to explore its motivation charging qualities, but also feel free to take it slow.  

I would also recommend exploring the ways that compassion motivation and its dopamine management powers can also motivates us to not act. To not say and do things that cause suffering. 

In training in not doing, we're re-charging those dopamine levels. This is not about being passive, but about training in letting go of our tendency to act impulsively. By balancing calm abiding with compassion, what we're aspiring to is more effective behaviours that in the long run increase our drive because the rewards are ultimately more meaningful, more skilled and more rewarding. 

An interesting that that science is revealing is that compassion will change your brain more quickly and more significantly than any other practice. 

So compassion really is the great secret of meditation. 

But don't feel like you have to keep it a secret.