Top insights of 2020

1. "When you know you don't need to change, that's when you change"  Mingyur Rinpoche.

   This was from an interview on the podcast 10 per cent happier.  I realized after listening to this that I don't have to "stop" hating myself.  Being aware of that piece of coal in my heart is like knowing where the diamond is.  As with cravings, I just need to accept this aversion and let it transform itself. If that were my only meditation, I would have all that I need

2.  "To whatever degree we know deeply that we have what we need within ourselves, we will let go"  Narayan Helen Liebenson

   NHL meant this more about connecting with our sacred core, our place of enough. The more deeply and intuitively I am connected to my gut energy, however, the easier it is for me to let go of all the weakening habits I've accumulated.  

3.  Going home is the most treacherous and challenging part of the adventure.

   As I think about putting this book into book form, I remember that movie about the climbers coming back from ascending a glacier in Peru.  Going down is harder and more treacherous.  How we make it home and make it to a place of peace after a peak meditative experience is a much more challenging journey, than getting to the peak experience.  How do we live after we have awoken?

4. Who would I be if I didn't hate myself?

   A question posed while reading Byron Katie.  If I don't have a clear enough picture of that it's going to be hard for me to return home, because I don't even remember what home feels like.  

5. The 3 words of Dzogchen.  

   Recognize (the primordial state beyond concepts). Decide (to be  in this state). Know (that is is self-liberating.

6. The impact of informal practice on awakening

   I learned a lot from Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated, but the best take away was his assertion that awakening will always be stunted if our informal practice is weak.  The end of day review is something I want to bring into the new year 

7. Intermittent fasting is not a sustainable nutrition plan for me

   I've come back to fiber fueled eating, which meant going through a transition, and even some weight gain.  But I truly believe it's what's best for my body, and for the planet.  That said, I'm not eating unlimited fibre in front of the computer or TV.  I am building better intuition about what I really need to eat to feel happiest and liberate myself from cravings and self hatred.  

8. I can become a digital minimalist

   December I cut out streaming.  I'm trying to re-introduce it judiciously. Limiting the emotional thrillers to a couple of episodes a week.  Balancing different kinds of shows and trying to keep it to under an hour a day during the week.  

9. To make my cleaning algorithm intuitive, I need to truly focus on the cleaning habit I'm mastering

   Focus and attention is the foundation of learning. If I want these cleaning algorithms to take, I'm better off bringing my attention to a short practice many time a day for a while, like shining the sink, or 15 minutes, than doing binge cleaning while a watch an empty tv show.  This is how I learned to meditate.  It's how I'm going to learn to clean. 

10.  Attention is the foundational, core habit, of socio-emotional learning 

    I really got the importance of attention, which I may have been mixing up with concentration in the past.  This is partly from Culadasa, partly from my work with UNESCO.  But I'm beginning to understand how vital attention is learning.  Awakening, I am starting to believe, is the unity of attention and awarenes.  It's that simple.  And that difficult to master.  

Discarding

I have tried so many ways to free myself from the chaos and squalor of my living environment. I have tried the bit by bit, which I now think of as calories in, calories out.  I get to a certain point, but my psyche simply iterates me back to despair.

I tried the Kondo method once before, but I think I stopped at paper, and possibly misinterpreted it as something I was supposed to complete in a weekend.  I'm going to do a serious discarding and I'm going to do it all.  I'm going to give myself the same six months that I've given myself with my weight.  My weight is on track now.  I know that intermittent fasting is going to bring down my insulin levels and that I will never have a weight problem again.  I know that as deeply as I know that I will never smoke again.

It's a good time to make a permanent change in my environment. I have a lot of faith in the possibility of absolute change.

When I was envisioning the kind of home I wanted, what I saw was a home that supported absolute well-being.  It was simple and uncluttered.  There is a sense of spaciousness and peace. The possessions are few but meaningful.  There is peace, and love,  and a feeling of liberation from all the demands of modern life. It is a refuge.

To get there I need to discard.  I need to go into a deep period of discarding everything that I don't love. 

The Aversion Loop

In the last two months, I've made some very significant progress stepping out of my craving loop. I'm close to being at a healthy weight.  I find it easier not to escape into Netflix, or shallow web surfing.  I'm having an easier time turning off work obsessions and anxiety. I'm feeling more mastery over the present than I ever have.

Then there's my house. I know I made a conscious decision not to get too worried about that while I focussed on my weight.  But now I need to get serious about it.  I can't live like this anymore!  I don't want to live like this anymore.  I cannot think of a better indicator of my liberation, to know that I am no longer caged in chaos and squalor.

There I said it out loud. Squalor. Such a horrible word. It hits me in the most vulnerable part of my heart.

It dawned on me yesterday, as I was coming out of one day Vipassana, that my weight was the consequence of a craving loop, my environment is part of an aversion loop.  The goal of Vipassana, Goenka says is to liberate us from the loop of craving and aversion.  Through diligent body scan we make intuitive the knowledge that all sensations are the result of mind hitting matter, that all sensations are changing because they are a result of change.  Every sensation is a loop that is iterating or de-iterating.  The mind's illusion is that we can fix them in some way.  Make the nice sensations run forever. Make the bad sensations disappear.  Never going to happen, because we die.

These craving and aversion loops that we develop in our efforts to control sensations are the root of suffering.  Stop the reactivity and the weeds die first.

Yesterday I had one of the best mediation experiences.  Not because I felt wonderful sensation, though I did.  But because I had a profound insight about the nature of meditation and hormonal balance.  I realized that what I was doing, as a I brought more equanimity into my body scan, was activating and stabilizing my serotonin, much in the same way I have been stabilizing my insulin.

Much of my life I've been running on dopamine, the craving hormone.  It's also the learning hormone, but it's not the wisdom hormone.  In meditation we cultivate equanimity, the serotonin starts to pump from the gut, where we have the most serotonin receptors.  Combine this with metta, lovingkindness and compassion meditation and we get a nice cocktail with some oxytocin mixer. Know this, and you know joy. Wisdom comes from creating the circumstances to keep all these parts in the right balance.

One of the reasons I had a such a great meditation was that I really focussed in the morning, on the bus along Hochelaga,  on my intention.  To liberate myself and others. I felt that intention deep in my heart.Every time the mind wandered, I brought myself back to the why.

I can apply that to my environment. I can transcend this aversion loop and step out, forever. I made this prison.  I can walk out of it.

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.

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.

Squalor

Housekeeping has always been a challenge that I struggle and continue to struggle with. I'm not, and haven't been at the level that would put me on reality television. But in recent years i still veer between messiness and first degree squalor.
 
This has consequences on my well-being and my son's. The solution is simple. Routines kept to. Picking up after yourself.  Weekly sweeping and dusting.  Nightly wiping down. 15 minutes a day of detail cleaning. Emptying the fridge once a week.  But keeping to them...so hard for me.

Why is that? Is there some kind of deep insight that will finally free me of this. Because I have suffered so much as a result of this. Isolation, loneliness, remorse, shame. And I have caused suffering to others, and have raised a son who risks causing the same suffering to others. But still I can't find the peace and joy in cleaning.

Or, put it this way, I'm still numb to the peace and joy in cleaning. I could find the peace and joy if I were to maintain a sustained commitment to it, but I don't.

It is neglect and the consequences of neglect.  I know this, but how do I turn this around?

First, by realizing that "I" don't turn this around. The energy that I need to tap into is the only thing that can turn it around.  I know I keep saying this, but I need to make cleaning into a practice.  I need to become familiar with the peace of a solid cleaning algorithm maintained every day for the rest of my life.

I know I can do this, I've made a lot of progress over the years.

The key, I believe, is to keep the sink dry and shiny.  Morning and evening.

And to commit to the algorithm that includes that 15 minute cleaning in the morning.  If the algorithm takes 30 minutes to complete I can get a laundry done and hung in that 30 minutes. Clothes folded at the end of the day. In time "commitment" simply becomes the pleasant habit of peace and order.

Why is that such a challenge?

And yet for mysterious reasons it it.