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. 

The Way of The Bodhisattva

This month I started a year long course that I expect to be transformational. 

I will be reading and reflecting on Shantideva's Way of The Bodhisattva, guided by Mingyur Rinpoche. I was struck right away by Shantideva's statement that he has written this book for himself, to strengthen his practice and had no thought to whether it would benefit others. And yet it has, helping countless spiritual devotees and leaders cultivate bodhichitta, the aspiration and practice of enlightenment. 

It is so challenging to aspire to enlightenment, but if we can't do it for ourselves, then how can we truly believe that it is possible for others? It is in that tenderness, that actual physical and neurological tenderness around the longing for liberation that bochichitta is awakened. 

The more I can be there, the more I can relax into the pain, the more I can root my concentration there, the more I will thrive in every way.  And the more strength and wisdom I will be able to bring to the enlightenment of others.  

New Stage

With the commitment to bodhichitta, my practice has entered a new stage.  As I make more habitual a dedication to enlightenment for all, I feel a force field build and emanate from me.

Writing this feels grandiose. But living it doesn't feel grandiose.  Maybe it's wrong to write that it is emanating from me.  More accurately I am surrendering to a force that supports and emanates from anyone who is aware of it.  It's both me and not me at all.

As I enter my third day of retreat, I feel a deep thriving in my heart. Every hour I meditate is like a deep diving expedition.  I go down and find a sharp shell of self-hatred or despair.  I work at it until it unlodges and boom the energy lifts me up.  I feel an anchored and abiding motivation to do whatever needs to be done to make my life happier. Clean my home, exercise, eat more vegetables.

I feel more open.  My mind is naturally quiet. My job is now to get comfortable with it. Assimilate it as a trait, the way a superhero gets used to having power.

Bodhichitta

The best way to achieve emotional stability, freedom from hatred, self-hatred, craving, and all the suffering that controls us, is to deeply and truly desire these things for everyone.

Earlier this month I started a course in the six paramitas. These are qualities, like the four immeasurables (compassion, loving-kindness, joy and equanimity) that cultivated, over time, become bodhicitta, the spontaneous and natural love of all beings.

It's been such a busy year, which I can see by how little I've been writing. Once again success threatens to derail my spiritual development.  But it's certainly not the self-sabotage I've seen in the past.  I'm still managing to meditate every day.

This weekend, I've decided to retreat and log some hours.  I've signed up for Vipassana in the fall, a  10 day retreat. I want to be ready for that, but also I'm feeling the build up of work related emotional poisons.  A lot of envy, pettiness, need to control.  I don't want to add to the confusion that already exists.  I need a strong heart and clear vision. For myself, and for everyone that I work with.

Wanting for other people, the same things that I want, happiness, freedom from suffering adds power to my wanting.  It has a massive impact on my practice.

The first drips of bodhicitta

Earlier this week I had a night of insomnia.  Nothing I did could unclench my mind, it seemed. So somewhere around 2 a.m. I sat.

And I sat, and at some point, I had one of those transformative moments I seem to only have in these evenings of jittery desperation. It was as though my mind suddenly re-settled into my gut, and I found this forever loop of serotonin. I could feel the flow take center stage in my psyche.

Serotonin is known as the social neuromodulator.  It accounts for feelings of well-being, but also feelings of power.  Monkey studies show that alpha males have more of the stuff than beta males. Who knows whether serotonin makes you more powerful, or power unlocks the serotonin. But I know that in recent weeks I've become conscious that I have more of it in my belly. This may be the result of this month's intense retreat. It may be the increase in money and responsibility in my professional life. Or it may be the result of all the kombucha I've been drinking.  I can't say.  But I can feel a profound change.

This is I think, what might be meant by "Buddha  Nature."  That feeling that Mingyur Rinpoche describes as the feeling after a concerted effort. That feeling of competence, of success, or relief from whatever suffering was in the process of working.  It's not quite enlightenment. That I don't believe I've attained until I've come closer to absolute bodhicitta, the insight that everyone is not the jumble of relative qualities that we project. That everyone is as perfect in each moment as a newborn baby. We see each other differently because of conditioning, not because of any true immutable reality.

For now, I'm still on the path of relative bodhicitta, trying to simply like more people more, and take more action towards being and feeling like a better person. The intriguing truth of bodhicitta is that if I could see everyone as equal, I wouldn't have to worry about status.

Wouldn't that free a rather large node of working memory!

Shame

Last weekend retreat on the subject of pain has given me the courage to explore all kinds of things I don't often have the courage to feel. When we let go of our aversion to pain in the body, it's easier to let go of aversion to emotional pain. On Friday I spent the day meditating on the most subtle, but painful emotion of them all: shame.

There is so much power in shame because it is the deepest most negative feedback loop in our mind, in our heart and in our body. I feel it buried deep in my gut, hating this constructed self that grows stronger and more constructed the more I hate it. It's a feeling I am averse to, so I avoid it, mostly by looking for opportunities to shame others. And the more I do that, the more deeply it's reinforced. It's a unconscious practice, but the one that has the most power to destroy us.

As such, it also has the most power to liberate us. But here's the rub: only if we're prepared to feel and familiarize ourselves with the shame.  Or prepare to feel the numbness that we create around our shame.

I grew up in a family steeped in shame. My Catholic baby boomer parents caught between the sexual liberation movement and their own strict upbringings married as a result of pregnancy. Shame was the foundation of their marriage and my life. I chose liberation over Catholicism in the end. And here I am now a single mother. At least not in a marriage of shame.  But still alone and struggling and feeling bad about myself and the life I am trying to build for my son.

How might a week of meditating on shame change that?

Well first shame is a very grounding emotion. I feel it most strongly in the root areas of my body. Second it's a blocking emotion.  By feeling it I may be able to unblock a lot of frozen, numb energy that is stopping me from thriving in life, creatively, financially, socially.

What's important to keep in mind is that I'm not trying to get rid of shame. That may be possible, but that's not my goal here. My goal is to harness the power of a so called negative feeling so that I can be happier and suffer less. My goal is to turn poison into medicine.

My goal is not so much liberation as the path of liberation.

New Post

This morning was a watershed moment in my meditation practice.

It started with what are now the basics.  A dedication and focusing of my intentions to meditate for the well being of everyone.  A moment of open awareness where I rest my mind with the barest possible effort on the sounds that surround me.

I've been doing The Mirror meditation, which has resulted in a sense of being alone in a room, just me, the furniture, my bare awareness, of the furniture, and of my baseline discomfort--or as Mingyur Rinpoche calls it, "neuronal gossip."

After a minute or two, my awareness of sound began to sink into my throat, into an awareness of my vocal chords and how they have been shaped by the routine verbal abuse that surrounded me when I was young. How my voice in my head has so often mimicked and iterated that abuse, mostly towards myself, too often towards others. As the suffering of those body memories began to dissolve, I started to feel the natural compassion in my heart, the desire to be free of this conditioning and habits that have arisen as a result of that conditioning.

Suddenly I was angry.  But it was a good anger, a healthy anger, a self protective anger that did not have to be abuse, but could be a healthy assertion of my right to experience sustained love and joy. I could feel this strong, communicative anger rising into my throat. I could feel the promise and potential of this new confidence.

I could also feel myself shifting in my mediation practice from a desire to experience a state of being, a place of calm, an altered state of consciousness, to a desire to experience a process, a purification, or alchemization of my ordinary experience.  Not every moment had to be peace.  There could be authentic peace, even in anger.

And then it started. The noise. My landladies had picked this week to replace the fire escape. They are responsible, wonderful landladies, so the spiral staircase to be replaced was far from dangerous. It was, merely old and rusty, and noisy. My neighbours who are young use it often, especially in the middle of the night when they are coming home from parties, or bars. I can hear the vibrations of their half drunken ascents. It is a good thing that it is being replaced.

The workers had arrived with high power drills to bust up the cement to sink the posts of the new, shiny, solid black fire escape. Damn, I thought, for a moment, because my first instinct was to move, or end my mediation. I was having such a good meditation, really making progress. And then I didn't move.

I sat and listened to their Quebecois banter about the technical aspect of the project ahead. And sat some more, as the drilling started, and sat even longer as the drilling got louder and my entire apartment building shook from the vibrations.

I sat because it was so crystal clear to me what an amazing allegory this was for what was happening to me in this moment. There was the old cement like foundation of my mind, this way of seeing things that kept me in this endless recurring spiral going from one state to another, making progress, but never really getting anywhere, or so it felt.  I was tired of this climb.

And now there was this new more solid spiral staircase. On this new staircase I would be thinking less about where I was, what I was seeing, or what I was hearing, and be happier to simply experience where I was, what I was seeing, and what I was hearing.

Suddenly this sound and the feel of this drilling changed from a disruptive force that I would have once fled from without giving it a second thought, to a deeply therapeutic process. By the end of the day there would be a new foundation, and a shiny new escape route, or entry point. And it was all because of these wonderful workers with their loud, awesome drills. I could feel this process at the deepest levels of my soul.

A good meditation became a great mediation, maybe one of the most memorable meditations of my meditation journey, because of noise. Because of how I was perceiving this sound, it was like the best sound in the world. In fact so good that by the end of the meditation I found myself enthusiastically looking forward to a week of hammering and drilling and metal work. (They have to replace the balconies too!)

I'm often hesitant to declare a meditation experience foundational.  So many times I've written breathless accounts of states of being that I was sure meant that everything in my life would be better from now on in. And then I make another turn on the staircase and it feels like all I'm doing is looking back and not going anywhere.

But I'm yelling it from my balcony today. I've changed, and I will continue changing for the better, no matter how much every moment of the rest of my life may appear, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

Power

This week has been big week in my spiritual journey.  I'm feeling a tremendous wakening of chi, kundalini, bochicitta, whatever it is.  It's more powerful in me than it's ever been.

It started about a week ago with a fluttering in my throat.  I'd been working on resting in the energy of my Tan Tien and then suddenly I started feeling this energy in my throat, like a trapped butterfly.  I started to do a little research into throat chakras, and decided that this must be energy that is moving up, unblocking my very tense vocal chords.  Resting in my vocal chords brings back a lot of childhood memories, not all good. So much fighting in my family, harsh words, abuse.  This was a good opportunity to work that through.

Once the energy in my throat was worked through, I discovered an effervescence, that I suspect is the "taste of purification" that Shinzen Young talks about. 

This is apparently a watershed moment in meditation, when you shift from meditating to have states of being, towards meditating as part of a process of purification.  In this state you are content to face your pain, your suffering, your circumstances because you realize that the way you are experiencing this pain will make every future moment of your life better.

There are blocks, I know, to my power an energy.  But I'm feeling more and more everyday that I'm working my way through them.  I'm running, I'm eating better, I'm feeling better.  I'm still feeling blocked in my writing, but I'm feeling confident that this can change.

There are perceptions and misconceptions that keep all this stagnation in place, and I know I probably don't see them yet.  But I will.

It's going to be an exciting six months. Looking forward to finding out what's on the other side.

The World

Today I did a two hour practice.  I've been falling a little behind on my one hour practices of late, but I went to retreat last Sunday, which has given me much food for meditation.

In one of his introductory lectures, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about the three levels of awareness: ordinary awareness, awareness of awareness, and pure awareness. When I first started meditating all I wanted, and all I aimed for was pure awareness. I wanted that wonderful, pristine, perfect free from all suffering bliss. I often got there our of sheer beginner fanaticism. Like many mediators in the first stages of practice I thought of ordinary awareness, and awareness of awareness as stages to surmounted until I reached the pure place free of all suffering forever and ever.

One of the biggest barriers to progress, I think, has been my contempt for the other kinds of awareness, as though they are "lower" stages of evolution. When I found myself being driven by ordinary awareness, I would get frustrated and angry with myself. Shouldn't I be past this by now? Shouldn't I be master of my awareness after all these years of practice.

More and more, though, I am building a certain affection for these states of being. The goal of practice in not necessarily pure awareness, so much as stability of awareness.  Simply being conscious of which state of awareness you are in lays the ground for more spontaneous arisings of pure awareness. If I catch myself in ordinary awareness, I don't get irritated or discouraged, I just notice that it's ordinary awareness. In the noticing I am immediately in stage too, awareness of awareness. The trick is to bring stage two into a place of self-awareness, not self-consciousness.  Most people, myself included, really hate this place where all we seem to be doing is noticing the thoughts, the tensions, the memories.  The suffering.

But freedom from suffering is not freedom from pain.  The Dalai Lama is free of much suffering, but when I saw him in Montreal a few years back, he'd just had an appendectomy. He obviously still felt pain, and took that pain seriously enough to have necessary surgery.  Suffering, as Shinzen Young has so brilliantly defined it, is resistance to pain.  Because of our ingrained resistance to pain, we are often resistance to the pure pleasures of existence that are available to us whenever we want.

In recent weeks I've been falling asleep to guided loving kindness meditations. For the next while I've decided that I will direct loving kindness mostly to different levels of myself. I will feel the natural love I feel for those parts of myself, which I like, my natural intelligence and openness. I will feel the more directed love I need to feel for the more neutral parts of myself that I often neglect to validate. The part of myself that does the dishes more often than not. The part of myself that shops for the basics and keeps my butt sitting in front of the computer so that I can generate some writing every day.  And I will take those more naturally arising feelings of love and gratitude and direct them towards the most difficult aspects of my personality. My messiness, my self-delusion, my tendency towards resentment and reactivity. The anger that I continue to feel towards my family, despite my best intentions.

And then, here's the hard part.  Once I've felt this recursive love towards myself, I will then direct this love towards the world. Towards all people who have, but don't recognize their natural kindness. Towards all people, and there are so many, whose minds are dragging them back into patterns of suffering that they feel powerless over.

We all want safety, happiness, health and ease. We all forget several thousand times a day that we have this wonderful permanent nature that is safe, happy, healthy and easily available every time we choose to recognize it. As safe and as permanent as a mountain, as happy, strong and  full as the ocean, and as easy and inevitable as gravity.

The Silky Feeling

Day 3 of my cleanse. Yesterday I started with some stiff muscles and not much else. Slowly over the course of the morning, however, I began to feel glimmers of a natural energy. My friend Jeff Warren wrote a piece for the New York Times about an intensive retreat he did. He spoke of a day, after a particularly dark night of the soul, when he started to feel this "silky" energy all around him.  I've started to feel that.  But it's intermittent.
  I feel it for an hour or so, this feeling that I'm back in touch with my natural opiates, and then I get a headache, or fatigue sets in.  Yesterday I dealt with the fatigue by putting some chia seeds in a smoothy.  Today, as I drive my parents to the airport for their trip to Israel, my adrenaline will probably be coming from my lack of sleep. Woke up early this morning around 3 a.m.  Monkey mind crawling around.  So I meditated for about forty five minutes. Then read some Pema Chodron. It was a chapter about the in-between state.  The place that meditators have to live in for a long time until they grasp that the uncertainty is actually a stable resting point.
  I feel right now that this cleanse is something of an in-between state.  I feel ready to start giving up my addictions and facing my suffering.  As Chodron writes, pizza and videos are no match for suffering. So better to just face it and let it build the strength and wisdom it can nurture.
  Around 6 a.m. I went back to meditating.  It went better than yesterday.  I do feel a certain energy building, a sharp feeling in my gut that if both painful, but also a familiar starting point of natural pleasure.  And around me, the "silky feeling".
  It's the tender place that Chodron talks about. The place of bodhichitta  It's the place I want to protect and cultivate, for myself and for everyone in my life.