Enjoyment

In Eckhart Tolle's vision of a New Earth, enjoyment replaces wanting as the driving force. I want to be a part of that new world, so I'm trying these days to focus on what I enjoy, and to allow that to be the thing that organizes my decisions.

I enjoy the same things most people do, interesting experiences, conversations, travel, delicious food.  But if I had to answer the question what I enjoy more than anything, it really is the feeling I get when I'm meditating. Feeling that vitality in my gut, the warmth at the back of my neck and down my spine, that gravitational beam when I assume a natural posture that connects me with the universal force. Without that, all that I enjoy is merely craving and escape.

If I'm going to move forward in life, I have to give myself permission to enjoy this state of being as often and as fully as I want.

The crazy thing is that I often don't want it.  I often don't want to do this thing that I truly enjoy.

Maybe that's because I'm still in the state of wanting.  I keep thinking about all the things I don't have and want. To be a successful writer able to make a comfortable income. To be an influential teacher, able to inspire people towards a better way of living.  To be a better parent, able to raise a son who will want to contribute something to the world.

I won't be able to do any of that if I can't enjoy life.  If I can't enjoy the feeling of being alive.

To be motivated by enjoyment rather than want is a decision.  It's not a hedonistic decision, because I'm not being motivated by pleasure.  I'm being motivated by the joy that arises from being at peace in the world. And there's a lot of pain to be faced and worked through to get to that enjoyment.

But I'm going to do it.  The decision has been made.

Leaning in, Sinking down

Last night I had one of the best stands I've had in a long time. I'd just finished the first day of a two day conference (Montreal WordCamp) and I was feeling that emptiness I sometimes feel when I've been around a group of people. Maybe I'm an introvert who feels drained around other humans. I don't know. Though I want human company, I often feel this profound feeling of depletion and despair afterwards.

Too often in the past I've dealt with this problem with distraction. I come home feeling empty. Then I fill the emptiness with food and television,which just makes the emptiness worse. And then I go into these social situations, that I want, from a feeling of vulnerability.

Last night was different. I've been working with thoughts and feelings in my meditation practice, and last night I decided to divide and conquer. I did some standing with my loneliness (made a little sharper by the fact that my son left for two weeks with his father.) I alternated this with a feeling of open awareness. I did some standing and sitting with smaller feelings, my aversion to cleaning the kitchen that I left a mess this morning, my frustration that my son had pulled out all the cable, internet connectors in an attempt to take his Playstation, etc.

I stayed with this feelings and felt the thinking feeling in my forehead, as I do more and more. Later in the evening I found the motivation to really stand for well over an hour.

I felt the warmth of this universal energy that is always available to me. I felt a voice telling me that I didn't need to choose this energy anymore. The choice had been made. I am this energy and I have chosen myself. The feedback loop is now a core part of me. No decision. It's just maintenance.

As I stood, the warmth began to sink and grow. But towards the end of the stand I began to notice different kind of energy. There was, not so much a numbness in my forehead, but an energy close to a neutral sense of being. Not the usual tension I feel there. Or the sense of relief when i've stopped living in that part of my brain. Just an energy, a presence.

Later I wondered if maybe this was what it felt when thought was in the service of awareness/attention, and not the other way around.

This morning as I was standing, I found myself getting distracted and pulled into the stream of thought. I reminded myself, as I've been doing the last week or so, to lean into this energy and then alternate it with open awareness.  But this time it occurred to me to lean in and then do what I'd always been doing in Tai Chi, sink down. Or rather position myself to allow the energy to sink of its own accord.

Lean in, sink down. I realized that this could be a very effective mantra for bringing my attention back to deeper core awareness.

When I sink, or position for sinking, I start to feel all the deeper parts of my brain, all the other lobes below and beyond this frontal cortex. I know my brain is getting deeper and stronger. And I know I'm becoming deeper and stronger as a result of this practice.

As I continue this, I will feel this strong desire to bring this connection to other people.

And then, as the end of a day or a conference, I'll feel less and less drained. More and more energized.

The loop, once blocked, is now open.

Scattered Mind Insight

Earlier this week, I watched a talk given by Shinzen Young at Google. He said something that hit me as a writer.  Insight when you have a scattered mind tends to be superficial, personal, and psychological. With a focused mind insight has more depth and spiritual weight.

I've never really considered how important the quality of the mind is to get insight to stay.  That sounds crazy now, because it's so obvious.  But I've tended to think of meditation as something I do for me, not something I do to make my insight more transmittable to the world.

Of course, because my mind is so scattered, I haven't been able to focus on the problem of focus, so it's a kind of a recursive problem.

Add to this the problem that I grew up in a family of scatter brains and suddenly I feel like I'm in "mid-mountain" with this meditation project.

Mid-mountain is a term I learned yesterday reading Malcom Gladwell. It refers to a famous transportation project in nineteenth century Massachusetts that ended up in massive cost overrun because they thought that it would be a lot easier to blast through a mountain than it was.  they known how much it was going to cost, they never would have gone ahead.  But had they not gone ahead, Massachusetts would not have been able to ship its goods so easily to the expanding West, and would never have become as wealthy as it it.

If I'd known how long it would take to get my mind in shape, I'm not sure I would have started this meditation project. If I'd known what I was eventually going to realize about myself, how truly out of control my mind really is, I wouldn't have had the courage.

But I'm here now with this meditation practice that I've been cultivating for years.  And I know there is a lot of insight there ready to be shipped out.

One day I will look back and know that the cost was worth it.

Thought

This month in the Joy of Living program I'm working with thoughts. I'm glad I've taken the previous two months to work on sound and objects, because at their most basic level thoughts really are sound and objects internalized.
  Not that I seem to be able to remember this in meditation.  I'm constantly drawn into the content of my thoughts. And the content of my thoughts are usually problems.
  Thought is a technology.  We developed it to solve problems, to create shared memory.  Eventually we became ennamoured with the beauty of thought made manifest, and that became art. Thought is mostly about problem solving and if we let it run on its own without slowing it down, checking it, letting it rest, we are in constant problem solving mode. We'll find problems where they don't even really exists.
  Meditation slows this down so that we can shift our brain outside of problem solving mode for a while. So that we can just be.  So that we can fulfill our purpose.  We're not actually here to solve problems.  We're here to witness and feel and experience this beautiful world, and to love each other and make life an experience full of awe and wonder.
  So, for the next few weeks I want to be like the father of  information theory, and seminal cryptologist, Claude Shannon, and act as though the meaning of the content is irrelevant. I'm going to listen to the sound of my thoughts, I'm going to watch the images, and feel the sensations.  Just follow along.

Objects

I had a crucial insight this week.

In Tergar's Joy of Living program we're meditating on neutral objects.  Mingyur Rinpoche suggests something in the distance like a patch of color on a wall.  He also describes a process by which our sense of distinction between self and object dissolves after a while.

I wasn't sure what he meant until I experienced it myself. For one meditation I picked a boring white square pattern on the apartment building outside my window. I steeled myself for what I was sure would be the dullest meditation I'd ever experienced.  But in time something happened.  I began to see the contrasting bricks and then the bricks that were diagonal to it. In time, I saw that pattern as a symbol of myself.  Solid, negative space around me, brick upon brick, held in place by gravity but able to hold people up way above the ground. The next day I had a similar experience with the excess cord on a clothesline.  I saw myself in time as that piece of cord, suspended in the sky.  Not heavy enough to fall.  But strong enough to stay in place.  I saw the perfect tension of the clothesline as the tension I need to maintain in my practice.

If I  see myself in nondescript objects, then surely I must see myself in everyone I meet.  If I'm feeling vulnerable and stressed and angry and closed hearted, then I'm going to see everyone as that.  But if my mind is strengthened and renewed by compassion and gratitude, then I'm more likely to see everyone around me as compassionate and generous.

Now the dedication I do at the beginning of my meditation makes sense. This meditation really is work I do for all beings. I'm more likely to see the good in people as a result of this practice, and in seeing the good in them, I'm more likely to feel good.  It's a positive feedback loop that in time develops its own momentum.

One day I will not have to work so hard at this.  And when I say I work for the welfare of others I will mean that I "work," in the sense of I function mechanically how I'm supposed to.  Like the clothesline, like the bricks, which I rarely notice, but for which today I am deeply grateful.

An Adventure in Standing Always

Yesterday I read an article by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker about her new treadmill desk. It sounded a bit eccentric.  But she directed me to an interesting researcher at the Mayo Clinic, James Levine, who believes that much of the obesity epidemic is rooted in what he calls "sitting disease."

We live in a society in which we are cued to sit all the time.  We sit to work, to travel, to eat.   As a writer, who has very few meetings, I'm especially sedentary in my life.  As more and more people telecommute, as we use e-mail rather than face to face meetings, we quite simply move as little as possible. We are inactive, and our complex brains have less and less connection with gravity.

This research has hit meet like a lightening bolt.  So much of my life has been about standing. But while I can get up every morning and maintain a standing practice, I actually do very little standing throughout my day.  This makes it hard to maintain the energy I need to do the things I want to do: run a 10K with Ben, write a book, get our life into a place of financial stability.

So I've made a decision.  In the way that Buddhists weave formal and informal practice throughout their lives, I will weave formal and informal standing.  Standing is my mindfulness. Standing grounds me, gives me inner strength, vitality, clarity.  When I am standing I feel differently about myself.  I feel motivated and connected to the world.  So I will now begin a practice of increasing the amount of informal standing I do throughout my day.

I tried it yesterday.  Managed to spend most of the day standing, with a few exceptions for some sitting meditation.  By the time I stopped, around 8:30 p.m. I was exhausted.  It was like I'd run a marathon.  It seems like a small adjustment in life, but it's something that could have a major impact on my life, and on the lives of more people, if standing were to become a more habitual practice.

I don't see myself getting a treadmill desk.  But I do see myself writing while standing, or the very least thinking while standing.  I see myself eating breakfast and reading the new york times while standing.  I see myself doing my morning writing while standing, and maybe, eventually all my writing while standing.  I see myself reading book while slowly walking around my apartment.

There's something about standing that biases us towards action.  And something about sitting in a chair that biases, or can bias us towards inaction and isolation.  A decision to stand, is a decision to act. I'm not sure yet where those actions are going to take me.

I'm excited to find out.

This is my home

Last week I moved.

I remember back in June of 2011, I wrote a post on learning that my landlady was thinking about taking my apartment back.  I knew I was going to lose my lovely spot beneath the willow tree.  But I also knew that my home was not an apartment or a place, it was a space inside of me. A solid place of calm and wisdom that I had been cultivating over many years.

That said, it was still a traumatic experience losing my apartment.  And the move has been difficult too.  I procrastinated the packing and the decluttering, so it went on days beyond what it should have.  I'm still only half unpacked.

But I'm in a new home. And there are many things I like about my new place.  It's very bright, and for the first time I have a really open and inviting workspace. It's urban, which suits my style.  And visually it's very private.  In the mornings I have a balcony on which to stand that faces a brick wall. The morning sun rises above it.  I can look out onto a tree lined street. And passers by, if they looked up would see me.  But no one is in a position to stare at me doing this strange, still meditation that is still so unusual in our culture.  So I feel less self conscious.  I am outside now.

As the morning unfolds though, it does get a little noisy.  It's on a big busy street, and many of the tenants are young guys in their thirties.  So there is music sometimes, and pot smoking on the balcony.  But it's not party central.  Just guys dealing with the stresses of finding their way.

And I'm learning that moderate noise can be kind of stimulating. I've discovered some background noise apps that I'm experimenting with. It's a matter of feeling connected to the busy world again. I feel like I did back in the 90s, when I was living in The Plateau with all my hipster friends.  I'm starting over.

Regardless of where I live, however, I have another home.  This blog.  Here I have a record of peace and comfort that is a harbour during whatever storm I'm likely to face in my life. Here I generate calm and confidence, always available to me.

This blog is my ground. This blog is my tree.