Living with less prediction

If I want to be free from suffering, the most impactful thing I can do is to rest that part of my brain that is incessantly trying to predict what every shift in affect means.  Do this and let the equanimity build.

If I want to be happy I need to notice when an unpleasant affect is receiving a habitual prediction of gloom and doom. E.g.  when I'm running, I can notice how my mind has shifted to work problems.  Take a beat, notice that there are no actual work problem happening, this is my brain noticing the rise in intensity in my body from effort, and coming up with the habitual reason for this: work problems.  I did this yesterday and was easily able to shift from anxiety to excitement about the incrementum from returning to my running habit and the increase in healthy energy that this was going to bring me. 

Another good example is when I wake up in the morning, cortisol running through my body. Same, my brain starts hunting through the usual negative scenarios, all the things I'm angry or anxious about.  But I don't have to continue with those particular simulations. I can immediately ask, "what can I be excited about today?" I can start my day with an entirely different mindset. 

And then I can start the day with an hour of meditation that sets the default mode at being, instead of predicting. 

Nothing agains prediction.  It's very useful.  But it's also like trying to live on ground that is always shifting. The body, the brain and the mind needs stillness. 

If it's going to maintain balance, it needs to know what balance feels like  

My theory of equanimity

If joy is the prediction that positive transformation is happening and will continue, then what is equanimity?

It's the prediction that peace is abundant and available, now and in the future. Even forever. 

The universe is at peace. Space seems still and endless, and it looks like that's not going to be changing anytime soon. As I build a stronger and more resilient sense of this truth, the  intense, unpleasant affect that threatens to derail me has  less of a hold, and wisdom is in the driver's seat. 

Equanimity now

A self-directed mini-retreat yesterday. 

I spent a lot of time focussing on the sensations on my skin, keeping my attention to low arousal energy. I takes less effort to maintain, so brings me into calm more quickly. 

I listened to a long and short Goenka led meditation.  Keeping in mind the objective of equanimity, I found that place of balance in my brain, when I feel the truth of 360 peripheral understanding of how well supported we all are by the universe.  When we enter that zone and let go, being is effortless.

Remembering that place, remembering the core purpose and value of our brain, balance and equanimity, is the challenge. 

It's a huge challenge because it means devoting yourself to something that seems colourless, flavourless, affectless, but is in fact the light that brightens, sweetens and awakens all that is good. 

Why I love hatred

In meditation yesterday I hit a vein of hatred in my heart that revealed just how attached to it I really am. All that punk rock energy, all that anger, all that jouissance that was the intense, but ultimately unfulfilling consolation prize of growing up with parents who despised themselves and each other.

All that cre-hate-ivity of the 90s. All that contempt for vulnerability. All that need to be cool. How I with I could go back and truly see how crippled I was by it.  And how vulnerable I was to people who were driven by hatred, not love.

The way out, however, is not to hate the love that I have for hatred.  The only way out is to accept it. and accept however long it will take for that hatred to dissolve, a day, a decade, a lifetime. Not nearly that long if I can learn how to rest in that sea of equanimity.

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.

Mental Stability

Yesterday I went to a one day Vipassana retreat, a kind of booster shot for the 10 day course I took in September. Once again I was immersed in the power of equanimity.

Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities.  Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy?  But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.

Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.

For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing.  Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps.  It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.

Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.

Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.

Post Vipassana

Two weeks ago I finished my first 10-day Vipassana retreat.  I'm still writing it up.  I'm still processing it.

At the risk of reducing a complex adventure into bullet points, the most profound insights I had were the high level of stress, misery, and hatred I have been living with all my life, and the power of equanimity to reduce this suffering.

Post Vipassana, I'm realizing how deeply in grip I still am to the deep cravings I've lived with all my life.  I didn't experience much in the way of craving while I was in retreat, which is surprising given that I had to give up internet, reading, writing, and eating anything substantial after noon.  Very little of this bothered me,  perhaps because I was more than distracted enough by the habits of petty aversion and ruminative memories of anger.

I've given up meat. And for a good week when I came home, I didn't feel any strong need to watch Netflix, or binge eat.

Craving found it's way in through the Kavanaugh hearings.  Like many North Americans, particularly women, I was glued to the television, as though somehow the confirmation, or shaming of Brett Kavanaugh, will wash away all the shame I experienced as a lost teenager in the era of private Catholic schools.

By yesterday I was watching, non-stop, the last season of Nashville and inhaling a bucket of pasta in cream sauce.

This morning I woke up with a bloated stomach and a headache, feeling as though every thing I had learned had been washed away.  But I sat, and it suddenly hit me how intense the sense of peace and balance had become in my life as well. I was able to rest in equanimity, make a vow to correct, maybe by visiting the weekly sitting in my neighborhood, and giving up food this evening.

I've only got one episode of Nashville left.

Equanimity: the Radical Permission to Feel

A repost from from awakin.org

Equanimity: the Radical Permission to Feel

--by Shinzen Young (Jul 05, 2010)

Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept frequently misunderstood and easily confused with suppression of feeling, apathy or inexpressiveness. 

Equanimity comes from the Latin word aequus meaning balanced, and animus meaning spirit or internal state. As an initial step in understanding this concept, let's consider for a moment its opposite: what happens when a person loses internal balance.

In the physical world we say a person has lost balance if they fall to one side or another. In the same way a person loses internal balance if they fall into one or the other of the following contrasting reactions:

• Suppression –A state of though/feeling arises and we attempt to cope with it by stuffing it down, denying it, tightening around it, etc.
• Identification –A state of thought/feeling arises and we fixate it, hold onto it inappropriately, not letting it arise, spread and pass with its natural rhythm.

Between suppression on one side and identification on the other lies a third possibility, the balanced state of non-self-interference…equanimity. […]

Equanimity belies the adage that you cannot “have your cake and eat it too.”When you apply equanimity to unpleasant sensations, they flow more readily and as a result cause less suffering. When you apply equanimity to pleasant sensations, they also flow more readily and as a result deliver deeper fulfillment. The same skill positively affects both sides of the sensation picture. Hence the following equation:

Psycho-spiritual Purification = (Pain x Equanimity) + (Pleasure x Equanimity)

Furthermore, when feelings are experienced with equanimity, they assure their proper function as motivators and directors of behavior as opposed to driving and distorting behavior. Thus equanimity plays a critical role in changing negative behaviors such as substance and alcohol abuse, compulsive eating, anger, violence, and so forth.

Equanimity involves non-interference with the natural flow of subjective sensation. Apathy implies indifference to the controllable outcome of objective events. Thus, although seemingly similar, equanimity and apathy are actually opposites. Equanimity frees up internal energy for responding to external situations. By definition, equanimity involves radical permission to feel and as such is the opposite of suppression. As far as external expression of feeling is concerned, internal equanimity gives one the freedom to externally express or not, depending on what is appropriate to the situation.

Virtual Virtual Reality

I had an intriguing meditative experience this morning.

I've been experimenting with a tweak on The Mirror exercise that I learned a few summers ago in the advanced Tergar workshop. In that exercise you look at everything in front of you as though it were a mirror, and everything you see is really only reflection. While I was doing that workshop I had a dream that I was in a car and someone gave me a virtual reality headset to pass the time. Except that when I put it on, all I saw was a virtual reality representation of the same scene I would have seen without the head gear.

This week I was sent by CBC to write about a virtual reality exhibit. With a sense now of what this actually feels like, I decided to use this in my practice.  Sit as though everything I saw and felt was a construction that could be changed in the same way I could change it if I were a virtual reality director.

I rested first in some uncomfortable emotions, some anxiety I'm feeling about my writing career, my usual concerns about Ben as he makes his teenage decisions about life. Then the ease and comfort that I now normally feel when meditate began to flow. I rested in this for a while, but then continued to apply the construct frame to that as well, forcing myself to step back a little from the positive, blissful feelings.

Suddenly I was in this somewhat unfamiliar place. A place of no thought and no feeling.  And there like a real perceptual shift.  Like everything in front of me took on a 3D quality, as though I actually was seeing it in virtual reality.

Today, I'm going to try to bring this perception into my tasks.  See if it's a thread of presence I can maintain. It felt like a real and solid equanimity. A place in me that is there for whenever I need it, and that I absolutely want to return to.

Bias

Last week I got something wrong. I misunderstood idiot compassion as self-righteousness.  But really Idiot Compassion is the pity we feel for people who are abusing us, which we use to justify staying in the abusive relationship. What I was really struggling with is the aggressive bias that is the enemy of equanimity.

I can barely imagine my life without some kind of opinion that I am aggressively hunting for facts to back up. This impulse drives my life.  What would I be without it?

In Tibetan Buddhism, I would be the four immeasurables: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. 

This is the hardest attachment to break, the attachment to an aggressive defense of values. 

My concern is that the alternative to opinion feels like indifference, the near enemy of equanimity. Or it feels like boredom. Giving up my strong opinions will be a very big change for me.  The question I need to ask is: are they strong opinions, or merely aggressive opinions. Are the opinions about having a deeper more complex understanding about something, in a way that can bring about change?  Or are they just about perpetuating anger?

Basic goodness as basic income

Equanimity is the most precious resource that I have.

Even six months ago, I don't think I would have understood that. Equanimity has always seemed something neutral, dull, baseline.  It's only very recently that I've understood its true power.

To have sanity, the ability to care about ourselves and others, to feed ourselves enough, but not too much. To exercise our bodies when we'd rather sit on the couch and have our feelings mediated through the television, these are things that are essential riches, but it's rare that we see them that way.

Equanimity is the power that grows slowly and surely through attention to these basic things. It keeps the anger and obsessions in check.  It allows compassion to trump envy and it allows for sympathetic joy towards people I would normally feel alienated from.

I've had a very emotional weekend re-connecting with an old friend who is in a lot of pain. My hope is that I can build and use this equanimity that I've been cultivating to help both of us.

I had a good insight yesterday while I was running. I often think of energy as something inside me, something I might not have enough of to make it through a run.  But energy isn't inside us.  It's all around us.  We have the mechanism to convert that energy for ourselves and others.  What we build when we run, when we love, when we connect with our bodies and others and the world, is the capacity to use that energy.

Whether we're able to take advantage of that comes down to belief.

Belief and commitment to that belief.  That we have enough, that we will always have enough, food, housing, time, money to take care of ourselves and others.

This is how we generate a decent world for ourselves and everyone.

Hunger

Today I'm very conscious of the hunger that lies beneath the hunger.  The excitement of having this clean energy is winding down, and now I have to deal with the emotional hunger that drives my overconsumption of food, information and entertainment.

Sitting with that raw emotional hunger is very difficult. I can do it, but I don't want to. It feels so insoluble. How do I cultivate the will to do this regularly?

I have to engender a deep, core motivation to feed it with what it really needs, this pure life force that is always available to it, than can never be overindulged.  I need to see and feel and experience this hunger dissolving into equanimity.  And I need to make that second nature.

Equanimity

Part of the challenge of my new practice is that at a certain point I stopped aiming for the peak experiences that lured me into this.

I am content with equanimity.  More than that, I believe equanimity is the secret door to all kinds of amazing experiences.  But this can make it challenging to stay motivated.

Maybe the trick is to develop the habit of staying motivated by keeping what I have.  And keeping the memory of what I've accomplished with Zhang Zhuan fresh in my mind.

Not losing is a more powerful driving force than gaining. Conserving is a more powerful force than gaining.  The will to keep things as they are will always be more powerful in us than the will to change things.

But we can change things by keeping them as they are. Sometimes things can change back, to a better way, to a more interesting way.  We can move into the future by looking into the past.  By keeping the things to us that are truly valuable.

And anyways change is inevitable.