My algorithm for self liberation

        Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash

My focus this year was self liberation.

This year I've played around with a few formulas for that. There is the formula that Shinzen Young once put forth: equanimity * pain = liberation from suffering.  This year I thought about the motivation equation. That motivation = expectation * value / impulsivity * delay.

As a Mahamudra practioner, I'm not a big fan of expectation. I prefer faith. The belief in something you know from repeated experience. If I value absolute wellbeing, and I know from experience that I feel better the more time I spend with that absolute wellbeing, then it's likely that I will feel more motivated to do that. The more it grows, the more impulsivity and delay are diminished. My motivation then becomes self propelling.

Is this fruition as the path?

For many people in my society the meditative experience is the delay. They value the fruits of relative reality, external sources of power. But from my perspective cultivating and mainting the relative fruits risks delaying the skills of thriving and living comfortably in the absolute. 

As we age and get closer to death, those skills become more necessary. So in 2026 I'm going to put my faith in that basket and watch that basket. 

Book

I believe it's time to write a book out of all of this.

I've been feeling a shift in my practice since I started in the Goenka sangha. This community is so strong, I know that I have such sustained support for my ongoing practice now that impossible for me to imagine it being de-railed.

The tree is strong and stable, nothing short of an ice storm will kill it.

Yesterday I had a self directed retreat.  No digital devices, just sitting in my growing sense of equanimity and non-duality.  Ended the day with the Sunday night weekly one hour sitting in my neighborhood.

Didn't do much writing, but scratched out a mind map in my Zap book journal.  Whenever I started to feel bored, I took the time to feel the anxious edgy emptiness beneath the craving for some new thought, some new idea.  If I sit with it for a bit, the anxiety passes and what I'm left with is that lake of equanimity that Mingyur Rinpoche talks about. Just quite, peaceful openness.  Just the raw joy of possibility.  What is on the horizon for me if I'm not longer locked into these loops of conditioned obsession and neediness?

At the end of the day, walking home from my meditation, that recurring belief and fear, that it I don't give into the craving, it will rear up stronger.  And yes it will, but then it will subside like a wave that's a little higher than the others, until it is low tide again.  I need to remember the other side of that cycle.  I need to remember it long enough, so that the cravings can start their path towards extinction.

This morning I woke up after that wholesome day with such a strong sense of this lake. It wasn't a perfectly still meditation, but there were some moments unlike any I've ever experienced.  I felt a clarity, but it was like the clarity of underwater sunlight emerging between two caverns.

Eventually it settled into visions of lakes and lotuses.  But it was different.

It felt like the beginning of a new adventure.

Happy Tibetan New Year

Today is Tibetan New Year. I'll be heading out to the Tergar Centre to celebrate. But this morning I think of what I want for myself and for others this year.

Peace.  That profound thriving peace that I feel in the centre of my brain when I've been working steadily at my mediation practice. That palpable magnetic energy that is always available to me when I need it. That thing that I still use too rarely in my life.

All people have this. Few people are aware of it. In my current practice it is called Buddah Nature.

This is what I want for myself and everyone.

One of the ways I'm going to stay close to this over the next month, the first month of this year of The Horse, is to re acquaint myself with Lent.  My old Catholic practice of renunciation before re-birth.

Television.  That's what's going for the next forty days. Television.

No more courtroom dramas. No more Girls.  No more Netflix.

Just for this month my greatest entertainment is going to be this peace. Maybe some reading.  But this peace. This peace, if entered into playfully, can be a profound source of entertainment. The human body,and psyche is an endless roller coaster.  Like a video game with blocks and challenges that once met and dissolved bring you to the next level.

No sugar. No television.  Just peace.

Though it might not seem like one, this is another adventure.