The technology of joy

I'm back from four days travelling through Newfoundland, a bucket list experience. Such a beautiful, friendly, magic experience. One day I will go back.

I was there teaching computational thinking and again I am struck with how much of it is there in meditation. We decompose this massive, overwhelming mind into its tiny component actions, breathing, noticing, feeling.  We see and look for and create patterns.  We develop routines. We apply logic and conditions. Mingyur Rinpoche has said that compassion is like the technology with which we use the energy released by calming the mind.  In six weeks, I head off to 10 days of Vipassana. S.N. Goenka also believed that meditation was a technology, a tool, for optimizing the mind.

This week in my course on the paramitas, I am looking at joyful effort.  My practice is, of course, cleaning.

MR says that the essence of joyful effort is motivation, inspiration and meaning. But I have tried so often in my life to motivate myself to maintain a tidy, clean home.  What I've been trying in recent months is compassion, not just for myself, or Ben, but for anyone who is struggling to motivate themselves to do the routine work. I think of how trapped they feel in their shame, and faint hearedtness. I think of how overwhelmed they are and I dedicate a short period of cleaning to them. I don't know these people, but of course I know what they feel, because I feel it myself.  I know how hard it is for them to stay dedicated to this.

Once I've done some practice, I want to take the time to sit with it and assimilate it.  Be so happy that I am connected with basic goodness, know how precious this ability to motivate myself is.

Clean bot

Here is something that I wrote a few weeks ago, but didn't publish:

Don't meditate. Don't get lost.

These are the words that now ring through every practice. Whenever I find myself getting caught up in obsession, or even pleasure, the feeling of purification, and all the cool and new sensations that a renewed commitment to practice brings, I hear these words.  I want to surf, not get caught up in a wave.

I need to meditate on the desire for purification.  Wanting purification isn't enough. I need to be committed to it, and I'm not. I look around at the chaos and dirt in my house, and I know that whatever I've achieved after a decade of meditation, I'm not pure. Or I certainly don't feel pure.

And yet I want it so much.  I really want to feel the joy that others feel in putting effort into their environment. I want to feel that basic goodness that we connect to every time we wash a dish, or pick up clothes, put out the garbage, fold laundry.

This is meditation too.

Perhaps the place to start is compassion for anyone who is in the same situation, and to be ready to receive wisdom from anyone who has ever been there.  To look at my fellow slobs and fellow ex-slobs as my spiritual companions. To appreciate anyone who has ever helped to be clean or inspired me to be clean.

This week I am working with patience.  Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of patience is openesse, flexibility and resilience.  I have to learn to be patience with my impatience, with my poor habits, with the consequences of my poor habits.  These will not be unlearned in a day, maybe even my lifetime.

I'm going to meditate for 30 minutes on whatever energy it is I'm struggling with right now when I think of my environment.  I will sit with the question, what can I do to really change this situation that creates so much suffering in my life?  I will return with the best answer I can come up with.

30 minutes later.

I think the single most impactful habit I can cultivate is my bot vaccuming every evening at 8 p.m. 

First because I can automate the decision. If I leave it up to myself to trigger.  it's a little harder. But  today I can commit to cleaning the kitchen floor so that at 8 p.m. everything is ready for the robo cleaning. Then I'm likely to keep this going for the next few weeks.  I can add 15 minutes of joyful effort to it. The sound of the bot can be the thing that gets me started in the evening, and before long, the place will be cleaner. I'll experience the consequences of clean and want to maintain them.

I will treat my cleaning bot like a meditation gong.

Let's see what happens.

Knowing

Last weekend Mingyur Rinpoche came to Montreal.  I followed him around like a groupie. First for a six hour day of introductory lectures and guided meditation (I sat with my mother in the second row.) Then a talk at the brain imaging centre at the Montreal neuro (where my mother had recently had a brain shunt put in), and finally for a two hour White Tara empowerment ceremony.

This ceremony was very different from the low floor secularism that Mingyur Rinpoche has become famous for.  It was closer to the mass I have known all my life as a Catholic.  There was chanting. There was a high and elaborate ceremonial hat. There were white diaphanous scarves that were placed around our necks. There were offerings and communion food. But there was a lightness that made it substantially different.

"I wish you all had this hat," he joked in the middle of the ritual, in which we all imagined the "White Tara" the embodiment of the female buddha nature sitting above our head, and imagined feeling what she felt, and knowing what she knew.  The communion was a procession of nuts, fruits, and finally cheezies.  Yes, that's right, instead of the tasteless wafer I have known, so carefully designed to leave the mouth drier and hungrier after its dissolution, this white Tara ceremony ended with a puff of artificial cheese flavour, designed in its way to bring you to a bliss point that will also leave you wanting more.

But without the lovingly cultivated bliss of a strong and stable practice, whatever "more" we achieve it achingly transient.

We are enlightened, but not allowed to tell anyone, jokes my Rinpoche. It is believed in Tibetan Buddhism that everyone is fundamentally good and perfect. That we don't recognize our own enlightenment.  Through practice, we recognize it from time to time, and through extended, disciplined and authentically loving practice, we can make this recognition intuitive, which is the best definition of enlightenment I can offer right now.

Through this ceremony, I have taken the boddhisatva vow. I will practice every day, and work to increase my hours of practice in the hope that I can make this knowledge intuitive for all.

Practicing Generosity

I learned a new take on tonglen this week, the Tibetan practice of giving and taking. The way I've been doing it in the last few years, is to imagine myself taking in the suffering of others on an in- breath, and then imagining myself sending out liberation, comfort, just the feeling of release. But in this online Varajana course I'm taking, I've learned that we practice generosity by breathing out our virtues, our skills, our ability to love.

That is practicing generosity in meditation.

Practicing generosity in daily life is quite simple, being more gradually willing to let go of possessions, ideas of the self, resources.  Mingyur Rinpoche demonstrates it by shifting a coconut from one hand to the other.  It's not being attached to things, but also not to the fruits of our skills.

For me these days, generosity is practicing the letting go of my usual comforts to focus on cleaning, then dedicating any energy, skill, comfort I get from cleaning to anyone who is struggling to find the motivation and energy to take care of themselves. Yesterday and this morning, I gave up the twenty minutes of blissful meditation to pick up stuff.

This is an extension of last week's insight into the difference between anger and hatred.  Anger is the emotion that arises. Hatred is anger in practice.  To begin to untangle and de-iterate this habit of hatred,  one needs to look at how to iterate love.  Ther is love the spontaneous feeling, and love the practice. When I look around my chaotic home, I see the I am not practicing love in this domain. I see myself surrounded in learned helplessness. I think of everyone who feels helpless, I clean, and send any motivation I am accumulating through these increased minutes and hours of cleaning.

An interesting thing happened this weekend. I did a cleaning meditation that started with picking up all the paper, chip bags, light squalor from the floor, feeling the resistance, and sending out any good that might come of this.  And suddenly, in the middle of his online video game with a friend, my son turned to me and said, "is there anything I can do to help?"

The impact of generosity.

Generosity

Mingyur Rinpoche says that the essence of generosity is letting go.  We tend to think of it as giving, but to give that which a bodhisattva most deeply wants to give, enlightenment, we have to let go of all that muddies this joyful wisdom that is our birthright.

Anger, resentment, envy, I continue to struggle with these everyday, as do most people living in the world. The best way to let them go is to be with them until they dissolve, but this is hard work, and that is where the generosity comes in.

I need to let go of the cravings that burn up the time I could be putting into letting my anger, resentment and envy go.  So this week I devote time to letting go.  Letting go of bad food.  Letting go of bad habits.  Letting go of lethargy and binge watching.  Letting go of fatigue and poor health.

Later:

2 hrs of meditation later.

I started a meditation on anger, but I realized later that really the emotion I need to let go of if I'm going to be generous is hatred.  Similar, but different.  Anger is the emotion that arises, hatred is that emotion applied to an object, now seen as the source of the anger.

Hatred is what makes the anger seem solid and material.  So to become more generous, I'm going to take some time today, and this week to recognize and release the hating habit.

Re-reading some of my past posts on hatred, I found some forgotten insight:

First, this one on the recursive power of hatred.  If you apply just the right amount of hatred to hatred, it becomes like a de-iterating loop, ceasing at the point of equanimity.

And just before that, a night when I started to move away from self-hatred. Clearly, I've been down this path before, and there's a wonderful place at the end of it, that I can find my way back to.

New Stage

With the commitment to bodhichitta, my practice has entered a new stage.  As I make more habitual a dedication to enlightenment for all, I feel a force field build and emanate from me.

Writing this feels grandiose. But living it doesn't feel grandiose.  Maybe it's wrong to write that it is emanating from me.  More accurately I am surrendering to a force that supports and emanates from anyone who is aware of it.  It's both me and not me at all.

As I enter my third day of retreat, I feel a deep thriving in my heart. Every hour I meditate is like a deep diving expedition.  I go down and find a sharp shell of self-hatred or despair.  I work at it until it unlodges and boom the energy lifts me up.  I feel an anchored and abiding motivation to do whatever needs to be done to make my life happier. Clean my home, exercise, eat more vegetables.

I feel more open.  My mind is naturally quiet. My job is now to get comfortable with it. Assimilate it as a trait, the way a superhero gets used to having power.

Bodhichitta

The best way to achieve emotional stability, freedom from hatred, self-hatred, craving, and all the suffering that controls us, is to deeply and truly desire these things for everyone.

Earlier this month I started a course in the six paramitas. These are qualities, like the four immeasurables (compassion, loving-kindness, joy and equanimity) that cultivated, over time, become bodhicitta, the spontaneous and natural love of all beings.

It's been such a busy year, which I can see by how little I've been writing. Once again success threatens to derail my spiritual development.  But it's certainly not the self-sabotage I've seen in the past.  I'm still managing to meditate every day.

This weekend, I've decided to retreat and log some hours.  I've signed up for Vipassana in the fall, a  10 day retreat. I want to be ready for that, but also I'm feeling the build up of work related emotional poisons.  A lot of envy, pettiness, need to control.  I don't want to add to the confusion that already exists.  I need a strong heart and clear vision. For myself, and for everyone that I work with.

Wanting for other people, the same things that I want, happiness, freedom from suffering adds power to my wanting.  It has a massive impact on my practice.