What am I excited about? And who am I excited for?

Saw Elizabeth Gilbert a couple of months ago. 

She set a challenge to herself over her last book tour to ask everyone she met what they were excited about. The answers were funny, touching, but also insightful. Especially the answer from the cab driver in London, a stressed, angry despairing overworked father, who was insulted by the implication that everyone should be able or willing to answer that question. 

When she stopped asking that question regularly, she shut down. Stopped remembering events.  Stopped feeling present in life. 

I asked that question of myself that evening. It was my tantra practice, in particular White Tara. I want to make this my main practice. I want to see what impact that will have on my life.  I want to see what impact it will have on the lives around me. 

Other takeaways from that evening.  Write to one person.  And write for an hour every day, no less and no more. 

I'm trying to get my writing practice back.  So who would I be excited about writing for? 

Addicted to thought

I crave thinking. 

This week in meditation I felt that craving deeply, and when I did, a whole new path opened up. I guess I could call it a jhana.  But I felt the release that came from letting go of thinking and allowing all that is not thinking take over. 

Of course I've done this before, but I'm not sure I've ever really focussed as much as I did this week on the impulse to think.  

It was magical. 

I wonder how I can apply that to my writing.  This morning I saw my stack of old writing practice journals.  It's been so long since I tried to bypass thinking in my writing. I've been struggling with the BDW.  Maybe this would work. 

Three months

It's been three months since I posted on this blog.

What happened?

Well I started an essay on my Vipassana retreat that I hoped to finish in a weekend, and that I'm still writing.   Bliss is The New Black, frames my experience in the choice I made to binge watch the last season of Orange is The New Black, which had me taking it in on my phone up to the last minute.

I discovered on day 1 that I'd forgotten to hand in my moleskin notebook, and though I didn't write in it, I thought about writing, and I thought about narrative the whole retreat. Suffering is of course, a side effect of narrative, so there was a loopy satisfaction in considering all this.

But three months later I have a scrappy draft, but feel very far from finishing this essay, which feels more like a weight around my neck than a gift to myself or anyone else.

Begin again, in this journal, and at whatever I need to learn and let go of from this experience and this particular block.


I did, however, take this as an opportunity to re-read my blog from January:

Here's a quick list of greatest hits.

Both of my posts on one day Vipassana course

What I learned about high intensity low intensity emotions through How Emotions Are Made

My Habit House dream

In insight I had about serotonin and the right balance of hormone cocktails after reading The Obesity Code

That my struggle keeping my house clean is part of an Aversion Loop, as compared to my struggle with weight being part of a Craving Loop

Back Together

If my morning journals are anything to go by, I'm getting more clarity and wisdom in my life. But, there's one sentence I wrote that rings true.  My ego continues to leap up, like a beagle my family once had, desperately trying to grab food from the dinner table. There's still a compulsion in me and in one moment, so if feels like, it can sabotage everything.

At least that's what it feels like at work these day, where for whatever reason, valid or not, I'm not feeling safe.   I'm tired of my ego and its paranoid storylines.  I'm tired of how much energy it takes to have daydream arguments with everyone in the company.  I'm tired of how much television it takes to numb the misery that it has created for me. I'm tried of eating my pain.

I want to be who I really am, this calm and steady and clear awareness. I want to feel pulled into the drama of subtle changes in my psyche.  I want to feel a healthy detachment from the dramas that everyone else is living in.

I want to stay committed to awareness of breath, nostrils, sensation in the body. I want to keep writing from that place.

Yet, I feel like I'm breaking up with myself.  When instead I'm reuniting with myself . When instead I'm coming home after decades of war.  And the self I'm coming back to has been keeping things safe, and loving.

Awareness

Awareness allows me to see the impermanence of my thoughts and above all the impermanence of these stages where my thoughts are stuck in a chaotic jumble.  

Right now for instance, I am committed to becoming more aware of the effort that I need to put into my environment to keep the normal standards of cleanliness.  I am defining them now as a  few forever loops; keep the dishes washed and put away: keeping the kitchen floor swept once a day; wiping down the kitchen table and counters once a day; wiping the bathroom sink, swishing toilet, keeping an eye out for clutter; doing a five-minute room rescue.

There is a mathematics to cleaning.  If I keep those loops going forever I will be able to maintain a normal standard of cleanliness without too much effort.  And then my efforts will go into the deeper cleaning, rather than the restarting after everything has descended into chaos. I hope.  So that’s the method. But no method will keep the house clean.  Only cleaning will keep the house clean.  Only activity, not theory, will maintain the feeling of being nurtured and cared for.

I have had an easier time doing this with writing. Why am I keeping this forever loop of brief daily writings happening?  Because I want to make sure that my thoughts do not become a chaotic, frozen jumble, and that I am cognitively flexible. This is how I connect to awareness.  This forever loop of writing is and has always been the way that I connect to the awareness that is stable and unending that will be there as long as life is here. That life may and probably won’t be human life. We may very well be exterminated, or exterminate ourselves.  I don’t know. These are some morbid thoughts.  But I enjoy this kind of contemplative energy, even when it’s dark. This is how I keep my writing going. Keep on writing.  Just keep on writing.   

I don’t seem to be able to maintain the same daily commitment into cleaning. Or exercise.  Or into wholesome, healthy eating of greens and fiber.  And frankly, those things are more important to my happiness. Writing is not the cause of happiness. Awareness is the cause of happiness, not writing. Writing every day and being successful at writing is a secondary activity. It is not and will never be a prime cause of happiness. That is energy and power that results in sustainable happiness.  But a life of mild happiness with occasional, typically human, disruptions will produce creative writing. For mild happiness, I need a clean home.  I need a healthy body and mind.  So the primary forever loops need to be cleaning, eating healthy food, exercising and meditating, nurturing a sense of family and community.  The same old same old My secondary forever loops are writing, making an adequate living and political and cultural commitments.

And then there's the random stuff in between, and then there's the awakening to the awareness that is forever without my efforts or participation. I supposed we could call that the Tao.

Surrender

Achieving this state of pure awareness is getting easier as the days where I begin with one hour of mediation accumulate.  But living, writing, being from this state is a different challenge all together.

How do I write from a place that is empty of thought? Who is doing the writing when I've let go of self narrative?

Running from this place makes sense.  I just move my body. Cleaning house from this place makes sense, I just do the basic tasks.  But writing?  Writing is complex.

But is it?  Maybe the problem is that writing from the place of self-generated suffering is complicated.  And so I expect writing to be complicated. I resist the possibility that wisdom has something brilliant to say and that all I need to do really is listen.

I resist the possibility that this is enough.

Words are tools, my brain is a tool, my consciousness is a tool. Natural intelligence and creativity come through me and my brain and vocabulary and reasonable facility with language are the tool that it uses.

Letting go of this writing self is a process of familiarity.  Feeling the tightness, the anxiety, the bad habit energy that sabotages my progress. It's all part of writing practice.

It's all part of living practice.

Ambition

One of the worries that I often have is that meditation will dampen my drive to write. I suppose if that were true I would have given up writing a long time ago, since I've been meditating in one form or another for at least twenty years.

And yet I maintain this persistent belief that it's interfering with my ability to achieve take off. I suppose that's because I believe that it's interfering with my ambition. But what if it's my ambition that actually interfering with the takeoff? What if it's all the anxiety that comes with my ambition that is really blocking me?

The envy I feel when I see someone younger than I having achieved more. The diminishment I feel when I see someone write more books. Maybe that's the root of my block, not my meditation practice.  Probably it's T.V. that is dampening my drive to write, not meditation.  It's dulling my brain, and then I think what's the point, writing isn't as important as it used to be etc, etc. It's ego that's probably blocking me, not my buddha nature.

Yeah, probably not probably. It's ego.

So for this week I make ambition and the anxiety associated with ambition the object of my meditation. This grasping for greatness.  If I could really see and feel my buddha nature I wouldn't have to grasp. I could just let this greatness sit comfortably in my open palm.

The Way

Yesterday I re-read part of one of my favourite essays, Jonathan Franzen's Why Bother?  It's something of a manifesto about the writer's responsibility to protect the literary tradition of tragic realism.  It is not the writer's responsibility to weigh in on whether or not the world is doomed, simply to remind people that death, loss, poverty, destruction aren't going anywhere soon. We still have a lot of work to do.

So the writer spends a fair amount of time contemplating change.  Contemplating the difference between natural suffering and self-created suffering.  The writer spends most of her time in the first of the noble truths: there is suffering.

There's this other place, however, that is a little harder for the writer to stay in.  The belief that there is a way out of suffering. Maybe this  is where comic realism comes in.  Comic realism kicks us in the butt in a different way. It looks at our tragic lives and sees where we get stuck and helps us laugh at our vulnerabilities.

Last night I had a stroke of good fortune.  Aziz Ansari decided the Just For Laughs comedy festival would be a good place to try out some new material.  So he flew up from New York, and tweeted that in an hour he'd be at a children's theatre not too far from where I live.  I found out about this on FB, from a guy who I've had a bit of a thorny relationship with lately. I wanted to see the show, but I wasn't sure if it would be comfortable seeing it with him.

I risked it and it was great.  I saw a master comic from the middle of the third row. He was practically talking to me. It's interesting to see a comic in the draft stage of a routine. To see those moments of discomfort before he's got it seamless enough to charge $100 at Madison Square Garden.  To realize how much work goes into a good comedy routine. How it literally left him short at breath at one point because he wasn't in good enough shape for the physical comedy.

I need a lot of energy to do and be all the things I want to do and be. I can't muck around anymore getting stuck in these bad cycles. I need to learn how to manage my energy, so that I can turn it into the power that the world needs from me.

This next week coming up.  I set out on the way of accumulating that power.

If not a friend, then at least an interesting companion

It is five in the morning, the Sunday before Christmas.  The year is coming to a close. And I think I can safely say that I have grown.

I feel a different energy in me. Something more sustained and sustainable that I've ever had.  I sit quietly from time to time and just feel it, in my heart, in my gut, in my brain. Sometimes it's warm, sometimes it's magnetic, sometimes it is liquid and sometimes effervescent.

I hope to be in constant conversation with this energy all my life. Creativity I'm beginning to believe is a state of conversation.  Sometimes we go off and have this conversation with ourselves, taking great care to make sure that our contribution to the conversation of civilization is the best it can be.

Sometimes we just blurt it out. But what's important is that we show up, seeking to understand and be understood.

Today, I just want to rest in gratitude for this wonderful year.  Last year it ended with money.  This year with some stature.  An award and a great writing credit.

Next year, I have to score a book deal if I'm going to continue writing.

But that's just writing.  If I'm going to continue being happy, sustaining the mild happiness that is so essential to writing, I'm going to have to keep meditating.  I'm going to have to continue cultivating compassion.  I'm going to have to work on going to bed early in my tidy home.

Above all I'm going to have to continue believing that my happiness is of greater benefit to the world than my misery.

Standing or Writing

For the last many years now, I've struggling with a choice between two loves.  Standing and writing.  If I could only do one upon waking.  If I should only do one upon waking, which should it be.  And also, why do I think it's a choice. A do or die choice?
It's like my life has always been set up as a double bind choice.  Which parent do I choose mother or father.  Which path do I choose artistic, or economically satisfying.  I've believed all my life I had to choose, but I did I?
 In the end, I never really had to choose between my parents.
 Do I have to choose between standing and writing? Can they be different forms of meditation that I use depending on what I'm cultivating at the moment. The core loop is meditation. Or rather the core loop is awareness, whether I achieve it through writing or standing isn't as important as keeping to the core loop.
  All the rest is background.

Book

I'm going to get a book deal,

If I can stand for an hour a day, I can do that.  I can sit with my self-doubt and self sabotaging feelings and do what needs to be done, finish the outline, finish the overview.  Send it out. Write down the goals, schedule the time.  I know I can do that.

So now it's time to see what is stopping me.

Inner stress. Some kind of psychic stress that is awakened every time I try to make a career for myself.

Rather than try and solve this stress, I need to diffuse it a little.  Accept that writing and working is always going to be  a little painful for me.  But it's a good pain.  Like running.  Like standing.  It's a pain that's worth facing.  Because at the end of the day I have something that I can send out.  I have something that is going to connect me to the world.  And I have something that is going to bring me peace, because there is no peace than the peace of having valued, necessary and useful skills.

It's a pain that I want to avoid though.  A pain that I struggle to avoid.  A pain that I have developed avoidance habits around.  So I need to sit down and look at the obstacles that stand in the way of me sitting down to do that one hour of writing on my proposal every day.

These obstacles are:

Compulsive distractions.  My tendency to surf and avoid.

Not knowing the ending of my book. Makes it hard to complete outline.

Ah well.  I know the ending.  The book ends happily with my great book contract.

Sunday morning post

I've decided to commit from now on to a Sunday morning post.

Much of my standing practice involves writing. I committed to standing in large part because I believe that it helps me with my creativity. But standing has also become my spiritual practice. I believe in a very concrete way that I am connected to a vitality that empowers me to make the best decisions for myself and my son.

The more I stand. The more diligently I practice, the better our lives become. I no longer look at this as an escape from responsibility. Early morning practice is the most responsible action I can take for both of us. It gives me vitality, strength, and above all it gives me an internal locus of control. The more I stand, the more firmly I believe that my actions, habits and beliefs determine my destiny, and the destiny of my child.

I have seen the results of cumulative action in my standing practice, in my writing practice. Recently I've taken up a computer programming practice, and a productivity practice. It has always been too easy for me to fall into disorganization and despair. To lose the thread that reminds me of how much control I have over my life. Keeping these journals helps me to track my success and my failures. It can be humbling, but it liberates me from all the things that once held me back: confusion, chaos, lethargy and stress. I'm am so much more free now from the blocks and ruts that were once an inevitable part of my life. My life has structure and discipline, and this Sunday morning post is my testimony to that.

The answer to the question

So seven months ago more or less, I asked myself a scientific question. Would making consciousness the primary purpose in my life empower my secondary purpose, being a writer.
I got my answer seven months, rather than six months later. An editor at Penguin is enthusiastically interested in my book proposal. So now I believe that it works.
But of course, I'm tempted to make writing my primary purpose, because that's what society rewards us for. Making work my primary purpose has, in the past, derailed me from my practice. And then, ironically, when I get de-railed from that my work suffers.
So enough writing about standing. Time to go stand.

stand, sleep, write

So I'm more and more convinced that when my brain, gut-brain, heart brain, and whatever brains there are in my body are opening up that I'm getting a rush of oxytocin. And this oxytocin rush is helping me to learn new healthier behaviours. And more importantly, helping me to forget old ones.

I''m still struggling to find the best way to express this. I see a year, like Liz Gilbert, but without the advance. Doing the three things I need to do to make a good life for myself. One: stand. It's still a challenge and Ben is now developing the habit of getting up early. So my meditation hour is being disrupted. But fine, then, little one. You can go to bed a little earlier tonight to make up for that. No way though, that doesn't make sense that he would start a habit of rising that early.

The next thing is sleep. I look into the effects of getting to bed early, giving up the T.V. feeling the advantages of regular sleep. I felt the advantages of them last night. Woke up with some dumb grievance on my mind about a blog I had read. Decided to stand and tap into the oxytocin, did a bit of self-hypnosis to get myself tired again, and within about half an hour I was fast asleep again.

And the next stage would be to write. How does writing change our lives, our culture, our brain. How does writing change our brain. What is the current theory behind writing, according to that French guy and the global workspace theorists. How can we change our brain to make us better writers. How can good writing make us more empathetic and a better community?

My job is to explore that. But also, how can writing change our heart, our lives?

Is standing a technology?

I read something yesterday that hit me hard. Writing is after all just another technology.

uh oh...my son is up. Will have to stop writing for a bit.

Socrates was worried about the effects on memory that writing would have. Plato disregarded those fears by writing down his teachers conversations. Writing was to the Greeks in some way, what video games are to our era.

And in the same way that video changes the brain, so does writing. It can slow down our thought. It can help us remember. But it can also lie in a way that oral culture couldn't, or couldn't accomplish as successfully.

So, just for the sake playing with this idea. Is standing a technology? I mean I am cultivating energy and electricity, the same way any conductor does. Maybe it's an ancient technology that we've lost. It is a technology that brings power to our body and to our brain. It is a technology of consciousness.

We look to technology to bring us wellbeing. This is another way of bringing us that wellbeing. The question is also, perhaps, is it a better technology for bringing us what we really want? If what we really want is peace, well being, freedom, creativity, health, then this may very well be a more successful technology, than anything we've ever invented.