#1 motivation blocker

I've been thinking this week about the difference between impulsivity and inspiration.

I believe that my impulsivity arises from a need to find stimulation to escape the dullness of a mind trapped by learned helplessness.  According to Mingyur Rinpoche, "faint heartendness" is the #1 blocker of our true, buddah nature.  He tells an interesting story in Joy of Living, about a woman who, early in his vocation as an international teacher, told him about her self-hatred.  He didn't know what that meant. This speaks to the new theory of neuroscience that I'm learning, that all our emotions are culturally constructed. My own self-hatred is a prison constructed from my experience and my circumstances.  When I sit with it I feel its core as a low arousal unpleasantness.

The "stims" that I've lived with all my life, my hand flapping, my grievance collecting, the jumping, the angry daydreams, these are all ways of trying to kickstart my muddy heart. 

But I'm experimenting right now with a different way.  I am following Rinpoche's instruction in seeing life as a dream, and thus feeling this faint heartedness and sense of powerlessness as that.  Seeing it the same way I would if I were in a lucid dream and then allowing the mind to open up to all kinds of possibilities of power.  I'm also spending more time in my meditation in that hypnagogic state, between dreams and wakefulness.

It certainly opened my mind up to changing one pattern.  I imagined that my room was miraculously tidy, and every time I finished my meditation, I felt an overwhelming urge to clean.

I am sitting in this moment in the cleanest room I've had in years.

Narayan Helen Libenson speaks of "don't know" mind, and how practicing this attitude of knowing that we don't know liberates us from all the patterns and habits that we delude ourselves into believing are our identity.

Being comfortable with the feeling of not knowing is what allows life to remain fresh and inspired. It's a natural stimulation that comes from the natural way that life changes, rather than the constant chasing after sensations that comes from a life that has calcified into dull routine.

Word of the year, gratitude.

Read a very interesting article in the New York Times about the impact of gratitude on self-control.
More important than grit, gratitude helps us to avoid temptation.  It's easier to say no when you feel full.

I decided yesterday to make gratitude my word of the year.  It's tough because my monkey mind prefers to believe that the only way I can have love, respect and connection is if I have those things that will make people love me. I can only have them if I want them, and if I stop wanting, where will my drive come from?

Well it could come from motivation, and it could come commitment. 

Today I read these wonderful words from Tsoknyi Rinpoche. He is candid about tulkus. They are susceptible to temptation and delusion as well. But they have an advantage.

"We're trained from a very early age to do the best we can to help others break through whatever ideas they learn and lead them to discover the spark with which they are born.  We're trained to love every living creature until he or she can love themselves.  Until every person on earth ceases to view one another as a threat or an enemy; until every person, in every job, every relationship, every encounter, can see the wonder, the beauty, and the potential in everyone with whom they come in contact. Until we show people how to let go of their stores, then fill within themselves the sense of disconnectedness, our job is not done."

That's plenty to want right there.

Easter 2017

So as I ask this question, "what do I really want," here are the paths it is taking.

Money, which when the question is repeated leads to a wanting a sense of security and also wanting a sense of adventure.  Ask it again and I'm lead to that place in my tailbone, which is apparently where our sense of security is either weakest or strongest.  And then from the energy awakening that would happen as it grows, the sense of adventure.

"What do I really want" also seems to be leading to "where do I really want." Do I want my desires to come from my head, from my gut, from my backbone?  These are all interesting questions.  Right now I'm feeling backbone.

Silent Retreat

This weekend I did my first silent retreat. With three other people, and the retreat director, I lived in silence for 20 hours, no eye contact, no words, beyond some talks by Mingyur Rinpoche. We went to sleep at 10 p.m. and woke to a 5 o'clock gong. Doing an hour and a half of meditation before breakfast.

The single most important insight I had this weekend was an instruction Rinpoche gave to us at the outset, pay attention to our motivation.  So many times I caught myself meditating because I wanted the cool experience, meditating because I wanted to see myself as an exceptional meditator. meditating because I wanted to be, or think of myself as enlightened.

But my motivation is to be happy and free and suffering, and to help Ben, my family and everyone that I can possibly help to have peace and joy as well.

I thought that as I go to deeper levels of meditation that I would be confronting my most painful memories or feelings. But I realized that the most "important" feelings in my life were really the trigger feelings: the irritation, the boredom, the dissatisfaction. The impatience.

The impatience to be enlightened, to be free.

That impatience is probably in many ways the biggest block.  It's why I don't want to face the dullness and pain that an hour every morning would bring. Because I would have to face that I'm not actually as far as I think I am.

And of course I would have to face that to really be liberated from dullness of mind and suffering, I'm going to have to do an hour of meditation every morning on rising.  Every day for the rest of my life.

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.