Hockey Stick Moment

I've decided to stop.

In his introductory video to meditation, Mingyur Rinpoche tells the story of being thirteen years old and still gripped by the panic disorder that had been haunting him since childhood. After years of half-committed meditation, one day he asked himself a question. Do I want to stay this way?

The answer was obviously no. So he decided to take the disorder and use it as fuel for practice. He committed to three days of solitary meditation in his room, away from his practice community. After the three days the panic disorder was gone.

I overcame a panic disorder in my twenties. I worked through a nervous breakdown in my thirties. In my forties I turned the crisis of single motherhood into an opportunity for more self awareness. Now starting my fifties, I have a new challenge. I want to liberate myself from this chronic misery, and financial stress. I want to use my writing to bring something valuable to the world.

Because of the responsibilities of parenthood, I can't do a three day solitary retreat. But yesterday I made  decision to turn away from the tv, the internet and other distractions and sit as much as I possibly can with this fear.

Re-reading the JOL I came across something that for some reason had never made an impression on me before. It is a description of how we develop "the emotional body." When our thalamus perceives an object that causes us fear, a tiger, or even just a mental image of something that frightens us, it sends a red alert messages to the amygdala and the neo-cortex. The amygdala is closer, so it gets the message first. It tells our body to run or fight. And our body immediately responds with heightened heartbeat, and adrenalyzed muscles. The neo-cortex however, only receives the alert after out body has started responding.

If we don't run or fight, the neo-cortex assesses the situation, and sends the message back to all the body parts, that all is well.

This is what meditation, fundamentally is. The decision not to run or fight. The decision to retrain our responses, so that only the real threats, not the feedback delusions that we've been conditioned with, get through. The decision to tell our analytical brain that we are fine.

We are making the conscious decision, for ourselves, and for all that we are capable of influencing that the recursive cycle of fight and flight is over. That we want peace.  For ourselves and for everyone in the world.

Running and fighting, however, are no longer really fleeing from tigers, or entering armed battle. For the contemporary urban dweller it's more usually running towards a source of distraction, or bickering with family and people on facebook.

If I make the decision to stop for a day or two. If I make the decision to sit with whatever is gnawing at me, I send an important message to myself.

I am well.

No matter what happens in the next six months.  I am well.

This wellness, I hope, will allow me to open my mind and see the way out of my problems.

This wellness, I hope, becomes the ice that I skate on, on a frozen pond. From there I have that hockey stick, exponential graph, progress.

And then I'm out of this cycle.

Lovingkindness

I feel vulnerable writing about love.But I'm learning this week that it's that very vulnerability that is our greatest source of power.

Pema Chodron writes about locating that tender spot and using it as a crack to let the energy of bhodicitta enter. Earlier this week I listened to a talk by Edward Kelley on Tergar. When he asked Mingyur Rinpoche how it is his life seems to unfold so effortlessly, Rinpoche said "motivation." I know that the happiness of all beings is his point of motivation.

If I use this point of vulnerability as my motivation, and turn it into an omnipresent desire to build happiness for myself and everyone, then perhaps my life will unfold with more ease.

It all seems so simple, but we spend most of our lives running away from that vulnerable point.The trick is to find a way to lock in to the fear, loneliness and alienation in a way that the lovingkindness becomes second nature. Becomes something that our brain produces without thought.

I will approach this slowly, like open awareness. Rest in lovingkindness for moments throughout the day.

This is a good day to start this practice. My son's thirteenth birthday. My desire for him to be happy is already naturally strong.

May this be the foundation for both our happy lives.

Where is it coming from?

Yesterday I went to a mini-retreat at the Tergar Centre.  It's the last small retreat before the Joy of Living -level 2 weekend retreat. It was sort of a free for all retreat. We went back over basic concepts, like open awareness. And watched a DVD on the concept of retreat, the outer, inner and secret. As we practiced on this inner retreat, Minyur our Tibetan meditation leader, encouraged us to start some light analysis of our practice.

The question she encouraged us to keep asking ourselves, as we accessed the deepening calm that grows with a diligent meditation practice, is "where is this coming from? Is it coming from inside me, outside me?"

I've been struggling the last day with fear. A job I thought I would have in September doesn't look like it's going to materialize, so I'm struggling with financial anxiety. During the retreat it seemed to be okay.  I sat quietly with my fear, even felt a little energized by my ability to just sit with it. But last night I felt like I was in its iron grip.

This morning I seem to be able to access my calm again. It's like the fear, which I know comes from my desire to be happy, is a sort of nucleus, and the calm awareness is this protective outer layer. When I ask where it's coming from I remember that I sense this awareness that is both in me and outside of me.

Physically I can feel it in my middle forehead. I've always been able to do that. But I've never labelled it in quite the same way I do now.

Where does this come from? From now I'm going to call it storage. The storage of all the goodness in me and in the world. I forget, but I have access to this storage when I need it.

And when I want it.

One of the the most challenging aspects of this meditation practice is to stay close to my desire for happiness. It's so easy to get caught up in the other desires. But if I stay close to this, I will cultivate the habit of calm awareness that is the foundation of happiness, of love, and of strength.

Shining Wisdom

After five months following level one of the Tergar program I'm starting to feel the fruits of my practice. I've weathered a challenging week with a difficult person, and managed to come out of it with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises.
  The pond outside my bedroom shines with morning sunrise, and I recognize this as the wisdom that we all have access to if we can only cultivate the skill of being.
  Last night, I happened to flip to my favourite clip from the Karate Kid 2010, the one where they see the nun mirroring the snake. She controls the snake because her mind is still, and as Jackie Chan explains "there is a big difference between doing nothing and being still."
  One of the most profound insights I've had this week is that all the irritation and controlled rage I feel when I'm around my mother is really just my desire to be happy. These are strong feeling because my mind is so strong. But that same strong mind that has these uncomfortable feelings is the mind that is capable of happiness and wisdom, of profound and sustainable peace. This deep and joyful comfort and wisdom that I have moments, minutes, sometimes hours of, is really just the flip side of all the pain and discomfort.
  Yesterday morning I saw a beautiful painting by the 19th century America painter William Homer.

When I first saw it, I believed it was sunset. But this was painted at Prout's Neck, not far from where I am right now, so I know it must be sunrise. Beneath all that turbulence and the signs of an upcoming storm, beneath the blood red beginnings of the morning light, there is a calm. 

There is a beautiful day on the horizon. 

The Perfect Pond

I'm in Maine this week, at a cottage my parents have rented. The place is so idyllic it's almost a cliche. Outside my bedroom is a pond with lily pads under old arching trees.  In the distance on the other side of a very thin peninsula is the ocean.

This morning I meditated at sunrise. You'd think it would be easy to achieve that blissful connection in such a setting. But what I find the more beautiful and perfect the setting, the more I feel that stress inducing urge to grasp at it. To start thinking, how can a now, knowing such a beautiful place, be happy in my old place of meditation with its morning traffic and beeping street light for the visually impaired.

The first trick  is to get to the twenty minute mark, the point at which the silt of our normal stress begins to settle. I know I've reached it when I have that familiar restlessness, and boredom, an almost psychic itching that makes me want to leap up and out of this pose.

Then I do what Shinzen Young calls recycling the emotion. Take the restlessness, be with it and wait for it to pass. It's basically a recursive function applied to emotion.

Eventually I reached the insight that there is no point grasping to keep this place. The best way I could use it to deepen my meditation, was to rest my awareness with the same lightness as I would on any other day, in any other normal place.

Once I did that, the whole space opened up.

I am here this week to realize that I do have power in dealing with the emotional complications of my family. Part of that power is realizing where I am powerless, and where I should probably remain powerless.  I cannot stop my parents from fighting.  I cannot make them more loving with each other. They don't want my mediation.  I  only have the power to decide whether or not I want to trigger a fight, or step away from a fight that I have become involved in.  I do not want to start any fights. I do not want to continue any fights this week. Nothing,absolutely nothing, is worth fighting over in the beautiful place.  So if my mother acts irrationally, or unfairly, I don't have to protect myself.  I don't have to play the vulnerability card. I'm simply not as vulnerable as all that. I am more than this little node of selfness that lives in my brain. I am also everything that I'm connected to.

I will step away from all fights this week. I will not be drawn into them.  I will not add to them.  I will not involve myself in the fights of others.

The decision has been made.

Joyful Wisdom

This month I'm practicing specifically with feelings.

I start a formal practice in open awareness then I shift into being aware of whatever feeling comes up.  I try and notice the story lines and the images. If a feeling is really overwhelming I see if I can drop some of these story lines, images, and thoughts associated with it, so that I can be, in compassionate abiding, with the root feeling. No matter how difficult, eventually it passes.

But it's hard. Very hard for me, because I grew up in such an emotionally complicated family, so I become very easily lost in my feelings and memories. One thing I've been trying is from an old book I've had around for a long time, The Power of Mind. I try to remember the first time I ever had that feeling. I find this really helpful in locating the emotion in the body. It doesn't necessarily lead me to some cathartic feeling where I let go of that feeling forever. But it gives me some space to see the feeling more objectively, and to see the feeling as an object that I am creating, and diminishing.

Yesterday, I felt like I had some kind of flu. It was vague, I kind of knew the feeling before from doing a food detox.  I was feeling heightened irritation, impatience depression, and a heightened sense of the resistance I feel to these uncomfortable feelings. At times I felt just the resistance, which I guess I could describe as the kind of icky feeling I've sometimes experienced when doing mushrooms, or any kind of psychedelic. It's a feeling of poison entering, or sometimes exiting your body.

It's an uncomfortable feeling, but I've come to greet it with anticipation because I know that it usually means I'm on the cusp of letting go of some suffering, and experiencing some kind of deeper more sustaining joy.

Today when I did my meditation, for the first time in a while, I felt that deep joy. I guess I'm going to call it joyful wisdom. It's the feeling I have when I have connected with a universal energy, but now that there is more than just this moment of connection.  I feel the pleasure and the awe and the gratitude.  But I also feel the decision I have made to experience this feeling regularly and often throughout my life. At some point I made a decision to cultivate this practice. At some point I made a decision to deepen this practice. I did it.  And now there is no going back.  It is the joyful reward I feel at the commitment I made and kept and will always keep.

All that remains is to build and work the technology that increases this joyful wisdom for myself and brings this lasting happiness to others.  This "technology" is lovingkindness and the wish to continue cultivating this feeling for myself, for my loved ones, for my neighbors, and even for my enemies. For all. The more I wish this, the greater my JW grows.

It has just hit me that these are my initials.

And that's the thing. We think that we are just our crappy, imprisoning feelings. We base our selves and our sense of self on those feelings and on the repression and eradication of those negative feelings. But we aren't those feelings.  We are actually this infinite, huge, always available, fundamentally joyful wisdom. That is what we really are. Not the prison part.

Recognizing this should be easy. But we're used to the prison. It's our home. We're very attached to it.  Sometimes the only way we get out of it is when something burns it down.  But that's probably not the best way. The best way is to make the decision to leave, and then slowly and surely we move more and more stuff out into the better world.

Into the light. Which is our real home.

Alternating

This month I'm working on my feelings as objects of meditation. In this practice the idea is to alternate from the intensity of a feeling to the release of open awareness. Almost like a toggle. As I practice this, eventually the feeling begins to diminish on its own.

One of the things I have a tendency to forget when I'm doing this is to alternate. I'm good at staying with the feeling.  I stay with it until the feeling passes on its own accord, or something distracts me.

This is okay with small feelings.  But bigger feelings--angers, anxieties in times of crisis, deep sadnesses I've been avoiding--still seem to have a lot of power over me, and it's easy to end up back on the ratwheel of bad habit that I've developed to deal with them.

So this month I want to work on divide and conquer.  When I'm feeling the big emotions this month (and life is really good at presenting you with big situations for this practice, which I won't go into now) I'm going to do formal practice.  Open awareness.  Feeling. Open awareness. Diminished feeling. Open Awareness. Whisp of a feeling.

And then move on to some constructive action or work that is improving my world and the world around me.