Laurie Anderson "Be Happy"

Feel the sadness, don't be the sadness

I can apply the consciousness practices to this. 

And I can be the happiness. 

Self directed retreat 2021

Today's my birthday, and the gift that I've given myself this year is a week of adapted retreat, ending in a three day virtual retreat on The Wisdom of Emotions, led by Mingyur Rinpoche. 

This was not the kind of deep meditation retreat I've been doing since I went to Dhamma Sutta in 2018. This year, I've had to adapt it to the realities of my father dying and be available for the support, emotional and other that my mother and my brother needed.

The most important thing I learned on this retreat is there is a sea of distance between believing in basic goodness at an intellectual level and believing in it truly and intuitively. This is the whole purpose of meditation, to know deeply in our heart, throughout our body and beyond, that we are good. Only when we do, will we intuitively see the good in others. 

In my retreat of 2019, I had peak experiences, but I'm not sure I really saw the way out of the prison.  And in the end I went back to many of my bad habits, although I did maintain my meditation practice. 

In retreat of 2020, I moved down to the heart, and learned more about non-duality, but I'm not really sure that I understood then, or truly developed an understanding of  what it was to live from the heart. 

In one sense what had been missing from all of them is this simple practice of open awareness, which I let go of when I took the time to explore Theravada.  But taking this time to experience concentrative meditation has had its learning benefits. I know have a felt understanding between the difference of object oriented and subject oriented meditation. And from that, I now have the felt experience of non-conceptual awareness, which I started to really feel and understand in the Mingyur Rinpoche  teaching. 

But it was in my exploration of my self-hatred, this thought and feeling that has been dogging me for as long as I remember that I feel like I finally found the key. No amount of concentration, or theory, is going to change the reality that I still believe, and thus feel that there is a fundamental badness in me. That needs to change if the bell of my "hate myself" mantra is going to decrease in number and intensity.

Rinpoche teaches there are three levels of mind, the emotional, the conceptual and the habitual. This lines up nicely with Lisa Barrett's theory of emotions.  At the first level we have affect, the basic sensations. The conceptual mind sorts these into pleasant and unpleasant sensations and makes guesses and applies concept, words, labels to explain these sensations. The habitual mind makes them automatic so that we don't have to keep repeating the process. 

If we want to change our habitual feelings from negative to positive, then we have to go down, find those bad guesses, and labels, and then make those positive emotions habitual. 

Easier said than done. But Rinpoche believes that every habitual emotion, even the negative ones, contain the key to their transformation. Every sensation is a desire to be happy, or cease suffering. Our basic impulse is towards this state of joy and equanimity. We don't have to go in and re-label and conceive every emotion. We need to make intuitive this basic truth, that we are basically good and have access to a powerful transformative energy. 

Meditation both formal and informal makes this transformation happen. 

If I go back to my top insights of 2021, I remember the first one is that in knowing we don't have to change, we change. 

Acceptance of our own mind, and of the powerful synergy of all minds together is the thing we need to make habitual, if we are to be liberated. 

Awareness, word of the year

This week I've looped back to my root practice, open awareness.

It is a practice much improved because my environment is more open, less cluttered and distracting. I'm able now to experience my mind as a clear and open space. Within this space the emotional intensity and chaos I grew up in is more visible, as is the pull of ordinary messy awareness. In a cleaner environment I can work to loosen the knots of that.

I sit. I listen to the sounds around me, the traffic, the occasional siren, the night before last, a violent fight between my upstairs neighbours. In that case disturbing memories surfaced, but they don't stick because I'm in a different place. My space is safe from violence and aggression, and I have created a place for  my child that is free of that, directly at least.  There may always be that in the world around him and in the world he's immersed himself in for now, the play violence of his video games. But I haven't inflicted it on him and for that I can feel some relief.

This is the focus of the week, relief. The reward of the habits that have spared me from a bad marriage, abject poverty, squalor, ignorance. That have made it possible for me to produce nurturing things, this journal, educational materials and opportunities for others, and a book that I hope will bring enjoyment, inspiration and knowledge to others.

This relief from intensity, from the feeling of being stuck, from the cumulative dullness of bad habits. This is the reward that moment by moment will change my life.

Looking over past posts on open awareness, I am reminded of a ritual I started a couple of years ago, picking a word for the year, the first time I did this it was abundance, the next year emptiness. This year I've decided to pick awareness. I dedicate this year to keeping this thread of awareness strong and present through all my habits, intentions, and achievements.

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.