The Year of Randrol Lhamo

This year I work on building an identity around my vajrayana refuge name, Rangdrol Lhamo.

In Tibetan this mean self-liberating goddess, and I want to try to incorporate this vision of myself in all that I do.

Self liberation means allowing suffering to liberate itself. In vajrayana we see all suffering as a manifestation of the same energy that drives samsara. If we let it run its course it becomes easier to recognize the Nirvana that it all emerges from and leads to. Thus we live in both samsara and nirvana at the same time. 

It is standard tantra practice to visualize yourself as a deity, but I haven't yet tried visualizing myself as the deity name I was fortunate enough to be given. 

Stay tuned for adventures in 2025!

Joy, Meaning, Connection

Slowly, but surely, I'm feeling a coherence in my life. 

The different practices connect, meditation, walking, eating well and mindfully, cleaning, writing, planning and mindful review.  Since I've stopped eating past 7 pm, I fall asleep and stay asleep more easily. Today I had a jhana meditation, in which I could feel the serotonin rising from my gut to nourish my heart and my brain. 

The habit I'm trying to build into my life right now is clarity. It is, according to a book I'm reading, the child of careful thought and mindful experimentation.  It starts with knowing yourself.  In his monthly teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche, talks of the three kind of ways we can sense the self,  unhealthy, healthy and luminous. Unhealthy sense sees the self as permanent, independent and singular.  The healthy sense of self self, sees it as impermanent, interdependent and multidimensional. And then there is the luminous. The self beyond the self that emerges from the unity of these two.  It is both impermanent and permanent, independent and interdependent, multidimensional and one. 

To achieve more clarity in my life, I have chosen three words to describe the self I want to sense and  as the future unfolds: joyful, meaningful and connected. 

May I sense more and more, everyday this luminous self. May it guide me.  May it guide me in how to guide others.

Vipassana 2

Yesterday I finished my second Vipassana at the Montebello Dhamma Suttama. Day 1 of the 10 day silent retreat was also my birthday, so I consider this experience something of a rebirthing process.

I feel stronger than I remember ever feeling. My dedication to the daily-ish 2 hour practice has really paid off. At a more experiential level, I understand that it's not about the sensations, or the peak meditative experiences, or the intellectual insights.  It's about the marriage of awareness and equanimity, and through that, nurturing the identification with that joyful, equanimous wisdom that is activated when we accept the impermanence of all things.

I will write a longer essay on this particular Vipassana, this weekend while I'm in Toronto with Ben for his birthday.  But the key experience I had was the recognition of how much misery is being caused by the automatic habit of self talk. I can feel this ball of craving and aversion in my throat, I can feel the connection to another ball at the level of visualization that connects the daydreams to the words.  I can feel how inactive the energy centres near my ears are, as I block out the input of data from the actual world, imprisoned as I am in my narrative world.

As I toggle between the consequences of a thought stream driven mostly by a constant pulse of longing and self hating, and the rewards of quiet and stable self observation, the choice to be made is obvious. Next Vipassana that challenge will definitely be to keep noble silence with myself.  To my daily practice I add the challenge of spending more time in the spacious non-narrative place, and with equanimity, building a more intuitive ease with that place.  In time, making it not just a refuge, but a home.

Self, no-self

This week I’ve been thinking and reading about the self and about the idea of no-self.

Enlightenment, according to Shinzen Young is the paradigm shift where we see the no-self and never go back to believing in self again. He compares the shift to going from a tribe that believes that there’s a monster that eats the moon, to one that understands the solar eclipse. Enlightenment doesn’t mean that there isn’t darkness, it’s the understanding of the causes of the darkness.

The cause of much of the darkness in our lives is this attachment to self. I write those words and I feel a sudden despair that I will ever be able to write about Buddhism in any way that doesn’t sound dry and intellectual. What I want to convey is the sense that it is really living from this “self” that dulls the mind. The self is a flickering fire that is kept alive on the kindling of time, the slow burning past, the dry twigs of the future. It burns up so much energy. To live with non-self is to be a surfer on vast and powerful waves of abundant calm and pleasure.

 That’s what my meditations on non-self have felt like this week. Like, I have a choice.  I can live in this puny little sense of self. Or I can tap into this awesome power that’s always there for me. But there’s this life, as a mother, as a non-profit executive that pulls me away from my true ambition: to coast on waves of bliss.

 The trick I suspect is to make intuitive that each of these paths is a manifestation of awareness.  I’m not sure I would have been able to sustain any of these insights without a basic understanding of feedback loops that I got from programming, and that is what I want kids to know from a very young age, that they can build things--toys, bridges, selves--and then take them apart. That they can decompose problems and emotions down to the component parts of calm and agitation, pleasure and displeasure. That they don’t have to be caught up in all these manifestations from the past.  

 I can do both. I can be an executive of a flourishing non-profit and I can surf on the waves. The trick is to not get attached to the theory that I have to be one of these things.

Easter Retreat 2

Any sense of agency I have is illusory.  There is a self that has been programmed by my biology, my culture, my family.  I am stepping outside of it from time to time, but it is still driven by that programming and the central drive of that programming is anger.

I can feed the peace, the happiness and joy.  The mind is telling a story, a series of events.  If I watch it, there's a possibility it will settle into a different rhythm. The Buddhist story is that these are the natural and essential qualities.  I can't attest to whether this is true, but it's certainly a more pleasant story that the one where we are essentially angry and discordant.

In the meantime though, my most normal patterns are towards anger. And this anger is ultimately very rewarding, or I wouldn't keep going back to it like a rat on a wheel.  It's my quickest and surest path to dopamine.

After going for an hour long walk, my meditations are focussing on that energy in the tailbone. I had a couple of interesting hours sitting in this energy, feeling bliss, feeling my anxiety and aversion to bliss, trying to hold it in equanimity by shifting between the bliss and open awareness.  I started to feel that liquid warmth, even some uncoiling.

Is this what we lost from our Sapien past. This wonderful feeling around out pelvic floor back when we used to be more of a squatting sitting around species?

It didn't last. Eventually I started to feel a restlessness, a boredom, an urge to get it all done with. But the insight that remains is that this self really doesn't have as much agency as I want to believe. There is this self that is mostly motivated by angry parents, a greedy, hierarchical culture.  I will never know if humans are basically good or basically bad, but I do know that when I feel good I am more generous and kinder to others.

In one meditation today, I thought about my family, and felt such anger towards them. That dissipated and for a while I felt good. When I though of each and everyone of them I had an entirely different feeling towards them. When I was a different person, they were different people, I was willing to cut them more slack. My perceptions of people are changed by how I feel about myself.

Nearing the end of day 2.  I've watched a teaching by Mingyur Rinpoche on finding  basic wisdom in "defilements."  It feels like the entire weekend has been leading to this.  There are five defilements, hatred, craving, ignorance, pride and envy.  His meditation technique is to ask "what do I really want."  It's possible that the answer to this will often be surface and related to these states of mind, states he believes have been created by culture.  But if we keep asking we will find our true nature, our deep, true essence, which is pure, pristine, beautiful.  Down there we want happiness, love, peace.  And if we ask long, enough and deep enough we will get there  Don't grasp at it, just get there and be there.

This is what the last two hours of my meditation will be.

And after that, the insight.

Yes my superficial, man, woman or parent-made desires, are strong. Maybe even stronger right now than the desires of my wisest level of self.  But I am extremely fortunate to know that, and even more fortunate to have a reasonably well-worn path back to wisdom. I can look at my messy home and remember that this is happening because I'm letting my cravings take over again. I can sit with them and I can sit with my peace and get the energy and wisdom back that I need.  I can look at the scale and realize that I need to spend an extra hour a day sitting with my healthiest drives.  I know this.

And I know I can do it.

Absolute Self

This week I move from cultivating my sense of absolute joy, that joy that is at the core of my awareness, undiluted and undiminished by all the cultural and family programming, to cultivating absolute self. This is the self that can pull back from all the monkey energy that I love even while it distracts me from the better life Ben and I could be having.

  I'm going to try and experiment this spring break. I'm going to treat Ben as though he is operating from absolute self, even though his monkey mind is strong. I'm going to continue bringing this absolute self into tasks, writing, work, even T.V. watching.  I'm definitely going to bring it into the dinner I'm having tonight with my parents. But I'm also going to look for and connect with the absolute self in others.

  I'm going to watch out for irritation, judgement, defensiveness. I'm going to use tonglen as a way of loosening the grip of my monkey energy.

  Above all, I'm going to keep watch on my monkey mind and monkey energy. Just keep watch. See it as my companion, my old friend, my child even.  But not myself. I am not monkey mind.  I am this strong, lucid, wise presence that gets stronger with every meditation.

Who is this I?

Who is this I? It's a question that will never lose its power. I hear the voice in my head that says: Are you listening to me? What do I want more than anything in the world? I hate myself. I love myself.  When I ask "who is this I?" I follow the root of that voice to wherever it's coming from, to whatever complex of emotions and physical reactions and memories and aspirations that have sparked it.
 "What do I want more than anything in the world?" is a question that comes from my gut. It links me with that snakey energy that I'm so afraid of, but that is really just me beneath the skin that I'm shedding.  Or the quality of enlightenment that we share with all the gurus going back to the buddha, according to  Mingyur  Rinpoche.
  "Are you listening to me ?"comes from the head.  Comes from that I that can separate from the monkey mind, but can also see that the monkey mind is just another aspect of enlightenment, that part of us that refuses to sit still with habit, so that we can keep alive the freshness of perspective, the newness of being awake.
  And "I hate myself," which comes from the heart and is the twin of "I love myself." It is tangled up in ego and grasping and all the things that keep me from releasing my fears and bad habits. But it's also telling me where I'm vulnerable. In the same place that everyone is vulnerable.
  When I ask this question enough, inevitably I return to this place of pure hard, pole like energy. This is pure awareness, that is both me and not the me that I usually identify with. This is not me in the sense that it is something that we all share. Yet it is me in that if feels like it is a permanent quality of my existence. And it feels like an "I". When I return to this state, I want to be careful not to let this harden into some kind of ego state. But neither do I want to be afraid to claim my place in it. Because now, and always, and in the end, and since the beginning, it is our home.

Self

Last week in my Joy of Living practice I meditated on my sense of self. I noticed how much it changed depending on what I was doing, how I was being.  How my sense of self felt strong and wise when I'm sitting with a belly full of chi. How I felt powerless and vulnerable after a fight with my son. How I felt competent  after completing a cleaning ritual.  How I felt protected by the routines I've established with Ben to get things back on track after an argument has signaled to us that something has unravelled.
  Each self feels like a different person almost.  Each self doesn't last, though these selves return like breath. Each self is a reminder that there is not unified permanent self that I can hate, or take pride in.
  I returned to a practice that I haven't done for a while, loving the self that keeps me on track. Taking time to thank that self that gets me out running, reminds me to do the things I don't always feel like doing, but that as a whole make me feel safe, well and strong for others.
  Next month I am meditating on time.  I remember from my course this summer that the combination of selflessness and timelessness will bring that transformative feeling of no agency.  That place where I am watching life as though it has the energy of a darting fish.  As I sit with this transformative energy, I have no idea what direction my life will take.  And I more often than not like that feeling. It's the adventure of being still.

Skin Pocket

Had a very interesting meditation experience today.

As per my JOL 3 curriculum I've been meditating on timeless awareness.  It's been pleasant, and trippy, but eventually I decided to just rest in open awareness.

Soon I felt my energy begin to expand.  Really expand.  Expand to the point where I started to feel like a kind of giant spiritual jellyfish with a very thin membrane separating me from the timelessness, limitless ether, that is really who "I" am.

It didn't burst. But my consciousness started to ponder.  "So, what am I going to do for the rest in my life in this skin pocket."

Suddenly I started laughing and laughing.  "Skin pocket," I found myself repeating and again and again, each time sending me into another wave of helpless laughter.   As I returned to ordinary awareness, which now felt like it would never be ordinary awareness again, I kept imagining myself going through the rest of my life referring to myself as my "skin pocket."

It was so true.

That's all I really am.  Just a skin pocket for this consciousness inside me and outside me.

Hahahahaha.

Wonder if I'll ever stop laughing at this.

Freedom Meditation

This morning, sitting at my kitchen table. There was a very heavy rain, the end of a three day heatwave. Usually I try and run in the rain, but we don't get a lot of monsoon type rain in Montreal, so I decided to cut myself some slack and postpone my run until later.

Instead I sat and slowly remembered the directions to the Freedom meditation I learned from Mingyur Rinpoche last week.

I sat in open awareness listening to the rain.  Then I relaxed my mind into mirror meditation, recognizing the fruit bowl I saw in front of me as the two dimensional image that is what my eyes really see. Anything else I see is just my brain projecting and filling in from what it knows about the fruit bowl from past experience. The fruit is over there being fruit. I'm here, just me and my two dimensional image that seems a lot like the bowl of fruit, but isn't actually a bowl of fruit.  I spend some time resting in this analysis, hoping to make this knowledge intuitive.

Once I've rested in this,  I apply this same de-constructive process to my self.  I realize that whatever conception of self I have is really just fragments and projection.  So for the duration of this meditation at least, I might as well just let my sense of self go. I focus on my body. Years of chi kung practice have made me reasonably adept at blurring the boundaries between body and space. The ideal in Tai Chi and Chi Kung is to feel no real separation from your inner and outer world, so as I begin to scan and analyze my body, I start to feel parts of my body "disappear".  With that goes much of my sense of self as a physical entity. This is something that I'm kind of used to, so I don't think of it as "altered" consciousness. It's fairly easy for me to relax into this feeling.  Once I'm there I feel a kind of magnetic energy holding me together.  A sort of helpful scaffolding my psyche keeps so that I don't get too disoriented without my usual sense of body. As I rest in this, it begins to loosen and dissolve as well.

Once I'm feeling this sense of spaciousness. I start the deconstructive process on time.  In fact, from what I know, there's a 200 millisecond lag between when something actually happens as when the brain registers it as happening (according to one famous study, our muscles register our intention to act before our brain does-- which is really freaky when you think about it.)  Knowing this I can accept that any sense I have of the present as illusory.  The present is already over by the time my brain has registered it. And if the past is already over and the future hasn't happened, and the present is impossible to register in the actual present, then there's not much point paying attention to time at all.  At least not for the duration for this meditation.

Once I've let go of the fruit bowl, myself, and time, the next to go is any sense of agency.

Certain familiar fears come up about what an entire of life without any sense of agency might feel like. But I've decided to just watch them and let them dissolve, at least for the duration of this meditation.

With my agency gone, I relax into bare awareness.

A clarity emerges, but it's a kind of fluid, moving clarity. Something closer to what I would call lucidity, which I define as clarity with movement and power.  It's another kind of magnetic feeling energy, but with a more dynamic aspect. I've surrendered myself to it, so it kind of works its way through my system on its own, releasing me from inner psychic tensions, first in my head, then in my heart. There's a tight feeling I now label as "grasping", but it's not so much "me" grasping as remnants of myself back when it was grasping things. The process feels like a slow, steady inner massage of tensions that aren't there because I'm stressed, but because I was once stressed.  It's like a working through of the past to make room for whatever will happen in the future.

At some point this energy dissolves and is replaced by this a warm, then almost uncomfortably hot energy that starts pouring through my crown down into my gut.  Once this is over,  I get a very small stream of wet energy kind of in my lower back and the back of my neck.

At this point I become concious of the fact that while I'm aware of all these interesting, mostly pleasant energies in my brain and body, I'm not really feeling much emotionally.  I become conscious of the words of the dedication we repeat before every meditation. "May we have joy and a world at peace."

I remember, "joy and peace, yes that's something I want for myself and everyone."  So I set about wanting it and waiting for it to happen. Then I start to feel this familiar impatience that I've been working with all week. Earlier the week I had been trying to "make" impatience impermanent, but on Tim's advice I've been simply focussing on its inherent quality of impermance. Just knowing this quality is enough to start the process of dissolving.   I become conscious of the desire to be patient.  Until I remember that "patience" is a time-type word.  If there's no time there's not much point in being "patient" because there's no future. Plus even if it did happen it would be over by the time I'd actually experienced it.

Then it hits me, oh yes, I remember now.  Joy and peace.  These aren't states of being so much as qualities within me. They just haven't manifested.  But it doesn't matter whether they manifest now, or later.  All that matters is that they're here. Somewhere. And will show up at some point.  And when that happens I'll be aware of them, even if they don't last.

I don't have any sense of agency over this.  I don't need any sense of agency over this.  I'm content with my agency being limited to my awareness of awareness and of the qualities that will manifest one way or another.

It's around this time a kind of helium type energy start rising in me from below. But it's not a light gas type helium.  It's like liquid helium,  It rises very slowly and as it gets to my heart it starts to expand, which is kind of exciting but uncomfortable, because it's always possible my heart might burst.  Fortunately that doesn't happen. The energy starts to condense and make a solid home for itself in my heart, and then send more energy up through my throat and into my head and brain.  I feel a kind of rising feeling in my whole body. Not a levitation, so much as a extreme straightening up, which is a really nice confidence building feeling

A joy starts to emerge, but it's a nice practical joy.  The kind of joy you feel from a feeling of competence. Like  "rejoice! I've set up the circumstances for this lovely meditation." Once I've enjoyed this feeling I start to sense this is a good time to start heading back to ordinary reality.

It is after all, about 8 a.m., and I have a day of responsibilities ahead that don't really leave a lot of space for transcendant revelations of life beyond our normal misconceptions.  Even if I did feel more joy and deeper peace, what would I do with that?  Run through the streets chanting "it's so OBVIOUS, joy and peace are WITHIN."  I'm not sure people really want to hear that on their way to work. So I might as well start the cool down process.

I call it that because I've had my fair share of what Mingyur Rinpoche so charmingly calls "nervous breakthroughs", and I find that If I don't take the time to consciously return to something closer to ordinary awareness then it's really easy to get derailed by overexcitement.  Better to come down slowly than crash or fall.

Gently I return to open awareness. In Chi Kung we make three circles with our arms that mimic a kind of pushing down of energy above our heads back into our gut for safe storage and later use. I do that and then follow it with Tergar's closing dedication.

I would say that's it, but I do notice that my ordinary awareness feels infused with the power of this experience. And throughout the day, when I do eventually find the time to run, and when I'm doing routine activites, I'm able to recall this different kind of intelligence and gently shift into it.

It used to be that I meditated for altered states of consciousness, but I find myself less and less interested in that.  I'm more interested in tnis different intelligence, connecting with it, and connecting with others who are connected to it.  Kind of like adding my voice to a choir and hope that in time that choir gets big enough and resonant enough that even the most unenlightened of us will feel helpless not to join it.

I know that sounds like a very simple, Who-ville, philosophy of life.  But for today that feels liberating enough.

Self control

I read something yesterday that hit me like a bolt of lightening. From The Power of Now. The single most important,vital thing we need to do to achieve enlightenment is to stop identifying Self with Mind. The mind is a tool. The self is awareness. What we talk about when we talk about self control is usually mental control. We struggle and we struggle to control the "self."  But the problem is that the thing we're trying to control isn't actually the self. It's the mind. The self is awareness.  If we give more power to awareness, awareness of the body, of the present moment, of the mechanics and habits of the mind--our most powerful tool-- the "control" falls into place. Because we've simply restored control to the self.  As long as the mind is in control, which is what happens when we fall into the delusion of seeing it as "self", we'll never have the control we need and crave. It's like we're trying to get a grip on a rope with which to pull ourself up with but it's not attached to anything solid. So we're tangled up uselessly tugging at this untethered rope and falling down again and again.  Awareness is the solid thing, the top of the rockface.
  Putting awareness back in control is the start and the end goal of meditation. It helps us clear up all the distracting habits of mind that keep us from cultivating true vitality. It helps us notice when the mind isn't really serving us and helps us reshape it so that it does.
  I've known this thing instinctively, and I've probably read it many,many times, but for some reason I forget it and it's only really sticking with me right now. Perhaps because the quality of my mind is not always great, so I fall prey to this delusion again and again.
  My goal this year is to really focus on improving my mind.  I'm a writer, it's my tool.  It needs rest.  It needs more reading and less television.It needs meditation woven into everything I do, writing, eating, exercise, reading. But at the same time, I need to recognize that it's not me. There may always be bugs in my mind, poor short term memory, the consequences of a lifetime of bickering and emotional squalor. Maybe I have a tool that will never be quite right.  But this tool is not my self.  My self is awareness and that is always there when I need it. Always working well.  I can always come back to that.
  I will always come back to that.  

Sense of self

Last night I had a good stand. Chi flowing, connection to the earth, all the things that I do this standing for. When that happens my entire sense of self changes.

Earlier in the day, I'd been gripped in self-hatred, feeling weak and vulnerable to all the things happening in my life right now. But standing I feel like a different being, someone healthy, vital and safe.

Maintaining a committment to Zhan Zhuang gives my life a simple sense of purpose. To just stand today and everyday in this energy. To aspire to health, and wholesome power.