Happy Losar

Today marks the Tibetan New Year, which I celebrated with an online recitation of The Nectar of The Path.

I'm a Tibetan Buddhist now. Not something I expected to say 10 years ago, when I first started my journey with Mingyur Rinpoche.  I'd had enough of ritual with Catholicism. The appeal of Mingyur Rinpoche was his secularism. 

But there is reward in being locked in. Just as I've been acculumating savings ever since I signed up for a paycheck withdrawal RRSP, I believe that my mind will clarify, peace and love in my heart will grow more effortlessly from my commitment to a belief system that has proven its merit to me over and over again in the last decade. 

Next week I officialy take my Bodhisatva vow.  

I took it in my heart a few months ago.  Before that even, when I read the dedication chapter of the Way of the Bodhisatva to my father a few hours before he died. 

In April I hope to take the first course in The Path of Liberation, and receive pointing out instructions from Mingyur Rinpoche. 

I've received an amazing taste of these instructions from Michael Taft.

Despite all the deep sadness of events in the world right now, as war rages on, I feel ready to accept whatever comes this year of the water tiger. 

May the peace of the water element, from which I take my name, combine with the power of the tiger element to accelerate love and ease to everyone who is suffering now. May we all be liberated. May we all one day soon know joy. 

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. 

My theory of joy

 If emotions are guesses and predictions, then joy is the prediction that there will be good things, better things, transformation.

It's not everything is going to be okay, but it is everything will be good enough, better, worth being grateful for. 

It's all that we see in our lives and in the world that convinces us that we can always find a path to peace, equanimity, love. 

If I apply it within the four qualities, it goes like this.  The wish that everyone be happy and free, awakens the hope, possibility and prediction that this will be so.  What makes this feeling habitual is the equanimity that supports it, nurtures it and increases the circumstances and possibilities for joy. 

Is joy made or given?

I've been feeling more joy in my practices this week.

Not entirely sure why there's been a shift, but it seems to be easier to access and easier to sustain. What may make it a little easier is the shift I've made from seeing emotions, sensations, thoughts, and anything that arises as objects, to simply being in the awareness of whatever comes up.  I am moving towards a more intuitive feeling of non-duality.

In doing this joy becomes less of an object to be grasped, and more of a type of awareness to be experienced. It is a particular colour and feeling that wisdom takes on.

I see my sensations these days as a kind of x,y grid.  Calm and alert on the vertical y grid.  Pleasant and unpleasant running along the x grid.  Joy kind of runs along the pleasant side of x.  But not too pleasant that I have to worry about getting addicted to it. 

Buddhism believes that this joy is in everyone.  But what if it isn't.  What if it is just a construct like any other emotion.

Would it matter?

What matters I guess is whether there is a cost to spending too much time in joy.  Real joy, not manic over excitement or overly heightened expectation.  Is there a cost to resting in quiet the confidence that there is enough for myself and for everybody, that happiness is not only possible, but sustainable, and that joy can be the thread that binds us.   Is there an advantage to living in the sustained fantasy of deprivation and alienation, self hatred that we believe is natural?

Put this way it's so obvious, and yet we are pulled towards the bad dream again and again.

Hating Hatred

it's Easter Sunday. And I feel this morning like I have a whole new heart.

A few weeks back I had a meditation that was a tipping point away from the self-hatred that I've fallen victim to again and again in my life. This doesn't mean that hatred evaporated from my heart forever.  Far from it. In many ways it has merely been the start of truly being aware of the shape and texture of this hatred that has lived in my heart like so many years like a psychic tumour.

I've continued to struggle with the kind of petty obsessions, resentment and contempt that rises from heart that is locked into the habit of hatred. But I did figure out something interesting a couple of days ago.

Mattheu Ricard recommends one antidote to hatred, shifting the focus of our hatred away from people and ourselves, and toward the hatred itself.  Make hatred the object of our hatred.

When I do this here's what happens: My focus shifts away from the story that I'm telling to myself, or to the "other" person who I'm hating (who, let's face it, is often a stand in for myself), and towards the place in my heart that hatred comes from.

Hatred it turns out, it a de-iterative emotion.  Anxiety about anxiety increases anxiety.  But hatred of hatred, if you do it right, if you really wrap your hatred in itself, serves to dismantle itself.  In time the hatred disintegrates and what is left in the heart is equanimity.

Equanimity is still strange to me, and believing in the power of equanimity is still not a belief that is solid in my heart. Spend some time with this equanimity and soon enough, I'm feeling anxiety.

A trick I learned this week is that it's easier to turn anxiety into excitement than it is to turn it into calm. So when I've been playing around with feeling excited about peace.  What I feel when I do this, is very close to joy. I'm not sure yet why I hesitate to call it joy. Maybe because I want joy to be something that arises naturally in my heart, not simply a conceptual tweak.

But I know I'm close.  And it's easter.  So I will rejoice.

Immediate Joy

Meditation has changed my sense of self.  I wouldn't say yet that it has stabilized it, but I'm not as prone to accept this tiny self that seems to live in a prison somewhere in my frontal cortex.  There's this bigger, more fluid, more magnetic and powerful self that lives and travels throughout my entire nervous system. Pure awareness, not just a glimmer, but an increasingly present energy.

This week started out with a greater consciousness of the self-hatred that is beginning to break up in my heart, like that piece of ice from the Snow Queen. Now I find my self wanting to know what this more powerful self wants. What is this consciousness feeling in and through my heart?

One thing is wants is to run more. To feel that pure joy that comes after a long run.  I've put the picture of myself and Ben that I took at the end of the 10K, to remind myself throughout the day how important that vitality is to my life. It's spring, so the nice fresh weather helps.

My higher self, if that's what we want to call it, wants to feel healthy joy. The healthy joy that comes from creativity, exercise, and useful, meaningful work. The healthy joy that comes from having a lot of love in my life and in my home.

Not overexcitement or grandiosity.  Just that mild sustainable joy that comes from a life well lived.

absolute joy

This week I read an article in the New York Times about what the rich can learn from the poor about money management.  It sparked an important insight about joy.

The article looked at a mistake people often make when calculating whether or not saving money is worth the effort needed to take advantage of the savings. People were asked if they would travel half an hour to save 30% on a 45$ purchase. Then asked if they would travel the same distance to to save 5% on a 400$ purchase.  More people would make the trip to save 30% (10$) than they would to save 5%(20$), even though the 5% is actually more dollars saved. It's a wrong choice because more money has more spending power than less money. The actual dollar amount that you save is the absolute value, not the relative value.

This got me thinking about the goals of meditation. What is the point really, this constant work towards parsing absolute reality from relative reality? Absolute reality is like negative space. It's the background, it's the indivisible is-ness of things, it's the emptiness, it's the 0 on a time line.  It's not something that exists in comparison to something else. Relative reality is all that arises from this background.

In absolute reality there is more "absence" of self-created suffering, because suffering needs things, sensations, thoughts, images to compare to to other sensations, thoughts, images, to stay alive.

Absolute joy, in this conceptual map, is the joy that we feel when we are conscious, and able to sustain our consciousness of absolute reality. But it's not an abstract concept because it's where we make the leap, psychically, to that place. Or perhaps as close to that place as we are able to be in this feeling, thinking, imagining mind of ours.

To dwell, to make a real home, in this absolute reality is to have easy access to absolute joy. And that is, of course, the most precious resource that we can have.  People want money because they want joy.  But money is only a tool, it is not joy in itself. It is not absolute. Were the economy to explode in your country all those absolute dollars in your bank account would be cold comfort.

The economy can't do much about absolute reality.  And so it can't do much about absolute joy.

To achieve enlightenment it to not only see that, but to feel it, to feel it at the core of your being, to make it the ground up which your entire life is built.

It's to know that  happiness is the only absolute value that really counts. And it's to strive to have as much of it for yourself, and for others, as you can.

Sufficiency

"May we be free of hunger and discord,
 And have joy and a world at peace."

I quote the same lines as last week, because this week I want to focus on the second line. Last week I focussed on the hunger I feel, emotionally, spiritually as well as physically.  And I've learned a few things. Like, when I'm angry, it's usually because I'm feeling emotionally hungry and needy, and that if i stop for a moment, I can trace that feeling back to the trigger, calm myself down and then focus on what I really need, which is not usually to win a fight or argument.

If I weren't hungry any more.  If I had what I needed, and knew deep in my being that I will continue to have what I need until I leave this body, how might my life change? How might all our lives change if we knew that.

Or let's start a step back from that.  If I spend more time focussed on what I have, on the fact that I have enough to eat and a roof over my head, and this month at least enough money to pay the rent, how would my life change.

I can have joy and peace now.  Or at least many moments of profound joy and peace thanks to my meditation practice. I don't need to make that permanent for myself, and perhaps it's better that I don't if I want to spend a life in service towards a bigger goal of joy and peace for others. I want to feel the pain and anxieties and hungers of others. I want to feel it, so that I can understand it, and help others to understand it.

But I'm also most helpful as someone who can help others understand joy and peace, and how to get there. Being in that joy and peace, being someone who manifests that, maybe that's the best way for me to move people forward.

inflammation

Joy is the recognition that happiness and freedom from suffering are possible for oneself and for everyone. Immeasurable joy is when this energy manifests as something deeper than belief and becomes a knowledge as steady and intuitive as knowing that the sun is still there, has been for as long as we've existed and is unlikely to end in the lifespan of our species.We can be free of all the baggage of manufactured and constantly re-manufactured stress, fear, loneliness and anger.

But something in me recoils from this certainty. To be certain of this would mean giving up one of the great addictions of my life, anger. Slow burning, constantly flickering and bickering anger. This reactionary acid that destroyed my parents well being, and for much of my life, my own. Anger is like any bad addiction, smoking and drinking, we do a lot to justify its existence. We believe that it's healthy in small, constant doses. We even believe that it's necessary for survival.

Is it though? The more I know of joy and equanimity the more anger seems like such a puny weapon.  Like a baby's cry when most of the time, for so many of us, there's no real reason to cry.

To be liberated from anger still feels like such an impossibility for me. But it's not going to happen if I can't even imagine being free of anger.

This week I've been reading an article in the New Yorker about inflammation, and how it is an increasingly popular medical theory that inflammation, the state the body goes into when foreign toxins are present, is the root of most if not all of our diseases. This constant anger feels like inflammation. I hate it, but I don't hate it enough to get rid of it, or I don't have the courage to sit with it and let it go.

Still, I know I want to be liberated from my anger. The first step is cultivating the habit of feeling that want, and then the belief that this liberation if both possible and powerful. The next step is allowing it to become joy.

The Pond

This week I have the most perfect meditation spot I may ever have in my life. Peter Pond is outside my bedroom deck, where I have a view of the sunrise over both the ocean and a placid, mirror still pond.

I need it.  My family situation is as always unstable, drinking, fighting, the usual.  But I've made progress since last year. The fights are more like sudden storms, than bitter weeks of winter. This may be because I've given up the evening cocktails and wine with dinner. I'm running more, eating better, physical energy translates into emotional energy.  It may also be because my meditation is longer.  And I suspect it's been because I've been rooting myself in compassion meditation.

What would it be like to have lived my life with no insight into my emotional suffering? Or into the suffering that I cause others? I still spend much of my life blindly chasing after distractions that I think will bring me happiness, but at best bring me temporary relief from suffering.  But at least I know this. So many people go through their lives with no idea. Just following the recipe society gives them with no questions. And then at the end of their lives, they are physically and emotionally tired and confused, unable to communicate with the people whose love they desperately need. Unable to feel real compassion for themselves and others.

I don't just have this pond.  I have the capacity to see the astonishing gift that this pond is.  I have the ability to find joy in this pond. I have all I need to be happy, no matter whatever happens in my life. I'm good.

Precious Life

Day 5 of this cleanse.  Some back pain last night, but I feel like I'm on the other side of the hump.  Feeling a strong appetite for fruits and vegetables.  Feeling a pervasive energy.  All the signs of renewed vitality.

So how do I make this last?  Or is that the right question?

My liver, my kidneys, my skin, these organs that manage all the toxins are such remarkable feats of engineering.  They will continue to clean me up, regardless of what I put in there. But I don't get to take advantage of their power when I'm overloading them with junk.  So the better question to ask is, how do I maintain my awareness of this energy that is always available to me so that I don't muck it up again?

Smile into the liver.  I read advice in Elizabeth Gilbert's book.

Today I take that to mean, take pride in this wonderful life. Take pride in the Buddha nature that is available to us all. Feel how precious this life and this energy is and treat it like the jewel that it is.

Gratitude is one of the most powerful forces there is in the psyche because it multiplies whatever you apply it to. This morning I feel really grateful for this energy and this body and this life.  I have taken steps to wipe the mud off this treasure, and I hope I have the will to keep it clean.

Gratitude

I bought Ben an alarm clock yesterday.  I've decided to extend my morning meditation practice to an hour. Part of my mission. 

I did this a few years back. Standing first thing in the morning for an hour. Today maybe I'll take a look at my journals from that time.  Back then I wanted to see what would happen.  Now I know what will happen. My concentration, optimism, and self-esteem will increase.  I'll have a more fully developed ability to bring joy into my life and into the lives of others.  As far as I'm concerned, this is science.

There's an energy I feel, as one writer I've been reading recently puts it, this is a "thinking substance." I rest in this energy and I feel this clarity and lucidity that I know is a permanent quality in my life.

Unfortunately I still struggle with a lot of feeling that feel permanent when I'm feeling them, doubt, self-hatred, resentment, despair.  But I know that feeling of permanence is a delusion.  I don't try and fight these feelings, but I do try to become more conscious of their impermance.

The feeling that comes back to me again and again, which I consider one of the "technology" feelings like compassion, is gratitude.  Like loving kindness, these are feelings that have the power to iterate positive liberating feelings in the brain.  Gratitude is like a recursive feeling.  It reinforces the good in life, which in turn reinforces other goods, and before you know you're seeing patterns of good in the world. Before you know it, you have a solid foundation for abundance.

As always, it's important to rest and allow feeling like gratitude and compassion some assimilation time. Walking through life, blissed out and silly, isn't practical and will eventually lead to a reaction.  So small sips of joy, and gratitude, and hope are fine for now.

Mission

My mission is to cultivate emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical and financial wellbeing every day--for myself, for the people around me and for the world I live in.  

I do this knowing that I, like all humans, are fundamentally altruistic, not greedy. 

I do this with routines, lists, goals, commitments.  But I do these knowing  that these are all secondary to the joyful act of pure being.

I do this, this year, by committing to three foundational habits.

• early bedtime,
• meditation
• book writing. 

I do this every morning and every evening by facing painful realities, painful memories and painful fantasies with equanimity. 

I follow the formula:  pain * awareness =  purification.  

I do this with the knowledge that the taste of purification once developed will not be lost, that it will lead to abundance, and that this will be a stable, good place from which I can create an abudant life for myself and my family. 

I do this, knowing that gains made will never be lost. 

Deconstructing Stillness

What do I want more than anything else in the world?

Here's a persistent thought that keeps running through my brain like a kind of thought worm. For this thought to have meaning a few things have to be true.  That there's this stable "I" that is wanting something.  That there is this stable thing that is and always will be more desirable than anything else. That there is this knowable world that I have a complete enough knowledge of to be able to choose this stable thing.  When I look at this thought from this angle, it seems pernicious.  How can this though result in anything that a desperate wandering through the world trying to find this perfect thing for this stable I that will always be.

Or I can look at it from another angle.  Yes whatever "I" created as the stable "I" is a construct, but it can be a useful construct.  And I can't know everything in the world, but I can decide from what I do know the thing, the quality, the state of being that is the most important thing.  The thing that holds all other things together.  I can use this question to tease out my deepest and more abiding values.

This morning in meditation as I was deconstructing this thought, I settled into my Tan Tien, felt as I do more and more frequently these days, a kind of stillness.  A fluid, but stable energy that could be a source of thriving peace and joy.  A place that could be an engine/a feedback loop, a self propelling mechanism.

As I settled into the warmth I could feel it feed itself, it rose quietly and pleasantly up my body.  I could see the kind of life that I could have so clearly.  It would be a life where I chose this vitality, this joy, this peace as what I wanted more than anything, and the more I chose it, the more it would choose and nourish me.

We are not our abilities.  We are our choices. I believe that's a direct quote from Harry Potter.  But the magic is in the choices.

What this thought is telling me is that I need to choose.  If I'm going to have a path through the wilderness, for me and for Ben, I need to choose and I need to commit to that choice.  And I need to do that with peace and with joy.

Power, Joy and Impermanence

Last week my answer to that what do I want more than anything in the world was power.  And yes, it's still power.  But also, I want joy.
  Joy's a little trickier though. Because joy is not a think you can have all the time, I think.  And neither is power really.  There is no power if you don't constantly confront your weaknesses.  There is no joy if you can't feel sadness, anger, despair, and its impermanence.
  What was it Tim Olmsted taught me back in the Joy of Living 3 course.  It was to feel the impermance within our painful emotions.
  Last week the focus of my meditation practice was impermanence of the body.  I logged a lot of minutes feeling the fact that this body, the health embodied in this body would not always be around.  My parents bodies are not permanent either.  Nothing is permanent and it hurts.
  But the hurt isn't permanent.
  Joy isn't a thing you can want and have.  It's an energy you feel when you realize that nothing you want is anything permanent that you can have.  What a waste of energy wanting can be it seems, since whatever you acquire will inevitably dissolve.
 But should we forsake joy because it will not always be ours?
 Joy is fleeting, but at the same time inexhaustible. We can drink from it again and again and again.
 That is the true root of power.

I Will Be An Agent of Change

This week in my Tergar practice I am meditating of work, on its problems and its joys.

On Tuesday I sent a proposal to an agent, and all week I feel like I'm waiting in line at a rollercoaster. Will she take me on, will she pass, and will I have to keep waiting in line forever.  If she takes it, I go on a huge up and down experience of finishing and marketing a book.  I she passes, like the other agents have, I need to decide whether I keep waiting, or give up and try another ride.

The evening I sent in the proposal I went to the book launch of an acquaintance younger and now more successful than I.  She signed the book "to the first bookish person I ever knew."  I should be happy for her, and happy for whatever influence I've had on her.  But I'm envious.

So while I was meditating on work this week I sat plunk in the middle of that billious feeling.  It was a very instructive pond of toxic suffering.  It taught me that the miscerceptions that were holding me back in my work was and continues to be the idea that work is about me, this self that I've created.  And so because of this misperception I think that publication or success will add something to me, and that failure will take away something from me.

But those are just the highs of work.  The joys of work are found in being part of something, and believing your part of something that will liberate people from their suffering and help them find more happiness. Without that work is just an empty rollercoaster of thrills and long, punishing waits.

I need to wake up every morning and feel that I'm an agent of change.  An author, but an author that is part of something bigger and more important.

Shifting out of the self-driven path, I feel the joy. I feel the flow of energy that I want my work to be a part of.  I feel the hope.

I feel the possibility that I can be an agent of change.

Ambivalence, My Best Imaginary Friend

Tergar's JOL3 course has been something of a thrill ride.

A few days ago I was laughing hysterically about life in my "skin pocket." Today it's raining, I'm arguing with my son, and sifting through some of the same old annoying professional problems I've had all my life. Suddenly my life is feeling a little more mundane.  But to be honest, I kind of like it here.

In one of the webinars our instructors suggested having a default practice.  A practice we go to whenever things feel like they are hopeless and slipping away, and we're feeling lost again.

I'm thinking mine might be something of a take on Mingyur Rinpoche's making friends with his panic.

It's been a long time since I've struggled with panic.  So, I wouldn't consider panic to be my best friend, or best teacher anymore.

The emotional situation that has haunted my life has been ambivalence.  I grew up in a family of constant fighters and bickerers and that numb, muddy, lava like energy has haunted me all my life.  In Robert Boyce's wonderful book on writing he identifies ambivalence as the most popular reason for why writers have a difficult time writing.  They have ambivalence towards their writing, and whether they realize it or not, this is just an expression of their ambivalence towards life.

Recognizing ambivalence as my greatest emotional challenge, making very good friends with it and seeing it as a wonderful teacher may be my best and surest path towards greater, more sustainable wisdom.

Today I did a writing meditation that used this ambivalence as support for meditation.  I started in open awareness, listening just to sounds and feeling the ground beneath my feet and bum.  Then I felt that familiar ball of numb, tangled emotions in my gut.

I tried as much as possible to drop the storyline. I just felt the feelings.  As it the habit of my practice, I moved from those feelings towards some compassion, towards the desire to be free of whatever in those feelings was causing me suffering.  In time this energy rose into my brain and then towards the crown, where I start to feel my no more familiar place of selfless, timeless, spacious awareness.  A place which offers not much for the ambivalence to grasp.  Without time, without self, negative emotions can't stabilize.  All that is left is relief, calm, warmth, intelligence and life.

If  I can regularly connect with this feeling and rejoice in it, then I will have joy.  And joy, mild productive joy, is the best place to write from.  It's the place that readers want to be.  They want to feel this kernel and current of joy in the book that they pick up.   And I want to be a vehicle for that.

This seems to as good a default practice as I can get.

Happiness as default mode

I've made the switch.

This month I prepare for level three of Tergar's Joy of Living program. As part of the preparation we do an insight meditation called The Mirror meditation.  After preliminary relaxing of the mind, we "see"  everything in the visual field as though it we were looking into a mirror, as though everything that seems solid is really just a reflection.

The more I practice this perceptual mode, of looking at the world as though it were not as solid and real as it seems, the more I start to feel, at an experiential level, how transient my suffering is.  It feels as solid as a chair, a building, a city. But really it's not.

In ordinary awareness, and often in meditative awareness, I conceive of life as heavy, overwhelming suffering with transient moments of happiness and lucidity. That is the narrative my brain spins without any direction. That unfortunately has been, as it is for many people, my default mode.

But this week I am reversing this. This energy, this vitality, this state of being, this happiness, this warmth, this effervescence in my soul,  this is the solid ground.  The boredom, the anxiety, the lethargy, the despair, these are what come and go.

What is keeping that suffering rooted is my subconscious belief that the suffering is immutable, inevitable.

My intention this week is to catch this belief in action. Gently correct it and then get back to the default mode that I want to have.  The default mode I know have.

Joy.

I've Had A Dream

Last night I dreamt that I'd turned a corner, both literally and allegorically.  I dreamt that I now had the power to be happy, that depression was permanently behind me, like a very bad life long cold. From now on I was just on a permanent path of emotional health, joy, the ability to love and be loved, work hard and thrive and everything that comes with that.

I also dreamed that there was a new invention. It was 3D goggles that children wore in the car that would make the scenery look more interesting.  Make it look like they were driving through the best, most interesting city in the world.  I could see the world through the eyes of a child wearing these goggles. But what she was seeing was Montreal, the city I now live in.

I realized that what other people can only have through technological innovation and re-creation, I have naturally.

All I need to do is live my great life and appreciate it.

It's interesting that I have this dream during a week where I've been very much seeing my consciousness practice is a way to see what goes on in my head during the day as dream like.  Meditation trains you to wake up regularly throughout the day from the dream like stream in your head.  It helps me to sit for a moment and remember what it is I'd like to do if I had the power to do it.  Just like I do in lucid dreaming.

To wake up and regain my sense of purpose.

So, yeah, overexcitement

So yesterday I hit the international stage. Opinion piece in Sunday Review of New York Times, many retweets, some important followers. Pressure to make the most of this opportunity.

Now I want to hide because I know how vulnerable I am to overexcitement, the near enemy of joy, according to Pema Chodron.  The question is can I use overexcitement as a support for practice?  Can I train my mind, brain, heart to dial it down naturally? The answer to that is yes.  Now the question is how.

Well I am in this moment, as soon as I finish this statement, going to just be present with the overexcitement.

Did that for a few moments, shifted to open awareness.

But I'm back again relentlessly reviewing my success, every word in my article, all my dreams and plans for ego gratification.

Breathe.  Breathe. Breathe.

Listen to my Tulpa.

He says I need to spend fifteen minutes tidying my bedroom.  It's a mess.

So I'm going to go do that.