It hurts to admit this to myself, here in this blog, a little over eleven years after it started it: I have abandoned standing.
Slowly I let sitting meditation become my core practice, and I'm not entirely sorry I did that. But I have paid the price physically. I have much in the way of spiritual, emotional and intellectual discipline, but I am sapped of that core vitality. I barely have the discipline to go for a walk. I weigh more than I've ever weighed in my life. I am officially obese!
And I look old. I am middle aged, but I know I've aged tremendously in the last year.
I know this has something to do with a very stressful, successful, but all encompassing year at work. I know I've been eating poorly because I have the money to order in. And of course, television.
But I know that getting back to standing will reverse this. Or do I?
I believe that getting back to standing will reverse this.
Yesterday, I had the idea that it was time to turn this blog into a book. It had occurred to me to change the name to disguise the fact that I was no longer standing. Okay maybe not disguise, but acknowledge. But how can I write a book that ends with me feeling looking sapped?
Fine, I turned to sitting. It's been amazing. I've learned tons and broadened my study and of awareness. But standing keeps me happy and healthy. It's my root practice and without it I'm vulnerable.
Also, I'm not sure Ben will ever embrace sitting meditation. He's not in great shape these days either. But maybe I could inspire him to stand. He's so strong. I know it would make him feel more powerful.
So this is it. Research for the last chapter.
Returning home.
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Monday, December 31, 2018
Book
I believe it's time to write a book out of all of this.
I've been feeling a shift in my practice since I started in the Goenka sangha. This community is so strong, I know that I have such sustained support for my ongoing practice now that impossible for me to imagine it being de-railed.
The tree is strong and stable, nothing short of an ice storm will kill it.
Yesterday I had a self directed retreat. No digital devices, just sitting in my growing sense of equanimity and non-duality. Ended the day with the Sunday night weekly one hour sitting in my neighborhood.
Didn't do much writing, but scratched out a mind map in my Zap book journal. Whenever I started to feel bored, I took the time to feel the anxious edgy emptiness beneath the craving for some new thought, some new idea. If I sit with it for a bit, the anxiety passes and what I'm left with is that lake of equanimity that Mingyur Rinpoche talks about. Just quite, peaceful openness. Just the raw joy of possibility. What is on the horizon for me if I'm not longer locked into these loops of conditioned obsession and neediness?
At the end of the day, walking home from my meditation, that recurring belief and fear, that it I don't give into the craving, it will rear up stronger. And yes it will, but then it will subside like a wave that's a little higher than the others, until it is low tide again. I need to remember the other side of that cycle. I need to remember it long enough, so that the cravings can start their path towards extinction.
This morning I woke up after that wholesome day with such a strong sense of this lake. It wasn't a perfectly still meditation, but there were some moments unlike any I've ever experienced. I felt a clarity, but it was like the clarity of underwater sunlight emerging between two caverns.
Eventually it settled into visions of lakes and lotuses. But it was different.
It felt like the beginning of a new adventure.
I've been feeling a shift in my practice since I started in the Goenka sangha. This community is so strong, I know that I have such sustained support for my ongoing practice now that impossible for me to imagine it being de-railed.
The tree is strong and stable, nothing short of an ice storm will kill it.
Yesterday I had a self directed retreat. No digital devices, just sitting in my growing sense of equanimity and non-duality. Ended the day with the Sunday night weekly one hour sitting in my neighborhood.
Didn't do much writing, but scratched out a mind map in my Zap book journal. Whenever I started to feel bored, I took the time to feel the anxious edgy emptiness beneath the craving for some new thought, some new idea. If I sit with it for a bit, the anxiety passes and what I'm left with is that lake of equanimity that Mingyur Rinpoche talks about. Just quite, peaceful openness. Just the raw joy of possibility. What is on the horizon for me if I'm not longer locked into these loops of conditioned obsession and neediness?
At the end of the day, walking home from my meditation, that recurring belief and fear, that it I don't give into the craving, it will rear up stronger. And yes it will, but then it will subside like a wave that's a little higher than the others, until it is low tide again. I need to remember the other side of that cycle. I need to remember it long enough, so that the cravings can start their path towards extinction.
This morning I woke up after that wholesome day with such a strong sense of this lake. It wasn't a perfectly still meditation, but there were some moments unlike any I've ever experienced. I felt a clarity, but it was like the clarity of underwater sunlight emerging between two caverns.
Eventually it settled into visions of lakes and lotuses. But it was different.
It felt like the beginning of a new adventure.
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Mental Stability
Yesterday I went to a one day Vipassana retreat, a kind of booster shot for the 10 day course I took in September. Once again I was immersed in the power of equanimity.
Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities. Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy? But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.
Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.
For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing. Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps. It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.
Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.
Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.
Equanimity used to seem to me the dullest of the four qualities. Intellectually I could accept that it was important, but who chooses equanimity over the more visceral sounding immeasurables like compassion, lovingkindness, and joy? But more and more every year I see how none of those qualities can thrive without the underlying force field of mental stability.
Throughout this journey, from my first experiments with standing, to my sustained weeks of sitting, everything has been about testing and believing in the power of stability, stillness, unflinching balance.
For a long time I thought that balance meant never losing your footing, but I'm coming to understand that it means building and maintaining the ability to regain your footing. Equanimity isn't just sitting still, although sitting still certainly helps. It's also about being able to surf the waves of intensity, it's about the emotional and mental agility of non-duality, of liberating the mind from its constant self consciousness.
Above all it's about the strength and courage to sit with the hostility, the cravings, the inner habits from another time that risk de-stabilizing us.
Protect the dharma, says Goenka, and the dharma will protect you.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Waking up
This morning I felt the thing I've been wanting to feel most in the eleven years since I've been writing this blog. I felt the lucidity of being awake interrupt the blah, blah story (as Gary Webber calls it) on its own. I didn't have to consciously notice I was storifying.
I believe that enlightenment it the process of making this lucidity intuitive, a place that is not only easy to get to, but a place that the brain goes to almost immediately the minute it starts to feel the agitation and dis satisfaction that leads to suffering.
Programmed properly this dynamic will happen so fast we're not even conscious of the spark of suffering that would trigger it.
But you can't rush it. Decomposing suffering is a gradual process, and I think Webber is right that even if we invented a machine that could immediately shift us out of that part of the brain that keeps us in the grip of suffering, most people might not have the supporting skills, or live in a culture that could sustain the peace. For many people it might feel more like dark night of the soul, than a liberation.
As I've learned this year. I have a bot that will clean my floors, but there is something still strong in me that doesn't want to use it. I have the technology, but it doesn't matter if the belief that I need and deserve a clean and pleasant home isn't strong in me.
I wonder, even if we had the power to implant something in our brains that would give us emotional intelligence and stability, would we have the ability to adapt to it? Would our society want to actually pay for this in a culture than cannot imagine an economy based on anything other than craving and manipulation of craving?
It's a good question, one we may even be facing in this lifetime. But I will take Yuval Noah Hariri's advice, and continue to cultivate the two most important skills of the 21st century: emotional intelligence and mental stability.
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Lucid Joy
What I'm feeling these days as I intensify my practice is close to what is felt when you wake up from a dull or distressing dream. A gratitude for my sanity, strength, grip on reality.
I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation. I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.
In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom. Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.
I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning. But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important. Joy. I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama. But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive. Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.
Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.
May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.
I'm keeping up my commitment to 2 hours of daily meditation. I'm spending weekends mostly in self-directed retreat. I'm also following Mingyur Rinpoche's course on reality and reading a great book on the stages on emptiness.
In recent weeks I've been contemplating and meditating on how suffering cannot co-exist with wisdom. Resting in the knowledge that there is a mind that is outside concepts of time and self, is deeply liberating. Lucidity grows every moment I stay in that place.
I love the intensity of Goenka's Vipassana technique, the constant and determined body scanning. But I realized yesterday that I was missing something important. Joy. I'm still falling too easily to intense cravings for food and drama. But gratitude added to equanimity makes hard for cravings to thrive. Joy tells the mind and the body that we have enough. I think that cravings are a sign that life has become joyless, so the distorted pit of dis satisfaction grows.
Joyful wisdom is truly the antidote to most of what has plagued in my life.
May I not forget that. May I find a way to share that insight with others, especially Ben.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Post Vipassana
Two weeks ago I finished my first 10-day Vipassana retreat. I'm still writing it up. I'm still processing it.
At the risk of reducing a complex adventure into bullet points, the most profound insights I had were the high level of stress, misery, and hatred I have been living with all my life, and the power of equanimity to reduce this suffering.
Post Vipassana, I'm realizing how deeply in grip I still am to the deep cravings I've lived with all my life. I didn't experience much in the way of craving while I was in retreat, which is surprising given that I had to give up internet, reading, writing, and eating anything substantial after noon. Very little of this bothered me, perhaps because I was more than distracted enough by the habits of petty aversion and ruminative memories of anger.
I've given up meat. And for a good week when I came home, I didn't feel any strong need to watch Netflix, or binge eat.
Craving found it's way in through the Kavanaugh hearings. Like many North Americans, particularly women, I was glued to the television, as though somehow the confirmation, or shaming of Brett Kavanaugh, will wash away all the shame I experienced as a lost teenager in the era of private Catholic schools.
By yesterday I was watching, non-stop, the last season of Nashville and inhaling a bucket of pasta in cream sauce.
This morning I woke up with a bloated stomach and a headache, feeling as though every thing I had learned had been washed away. But I sat, and it suddenly hit me how intense the sense of peace and balance had become in my life as well. I was able to rest in equanimity, make a vow to correct, maybe by visiting the weekly sitting in my neighborhood, and giving up food this evening.
I've only got one episode of Nashville left.
At the risk of reducing a complex adventure into bullet points, the most profound insights I had were the high level of stress, misery, and hatred I have been living with all my life, and the power of equanimity to reduce this suffering.
Post Vipassana, I'm realizing how deeply in grip I still am to the deep cravings I've lived with all my life. I didn't experience much in the way of craving while I was in retreat, which is surprising given that I had to give up internet, reading, writing, and eating anything substantial after noon. Very little of this bothered me, perhaps because I was more than distracted enough by the habits of petty aversion and ruminative memories of anger.
I've given up meat. And for a good week when I came home, I didn't feel any strong need to watch Netflix, or binge eat.
Craving found it's way in through the Kavanaugh hearings. Like many North Americans, particularly women, I was glued to the television, as though somehow the confirmation, or shaming of Brett Kavanaugh, will wash away all the shame I experienced as a lost teenager in the era of private Catholic schools.
By yesterday I was watching, non-stop, the last season of Nashville and inhaling a bucket of pasta in cream sauce.
This morning I woke up with a bloated stomach and a headache, feeling as though every thing I had learned had been washed away. But I sat, and it suddenly hit me how intense the sense of peace and balance had become in my life as well. I was able to rest in equanimity, make a vow to correct, maybe by visiting the weekly sitting in my neighborhood, and giving up food this evening.
I've only got one episode of Nashville left.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
What I learned at M.I.T
Last week I gave an "ignite" talk at a ed-tech conference at M.I.T. Five years ago, I thought of myself as a writer. These days my job is closer to "thought leader." So I've been thinking about what kind of thoughts that I want to lead with. I'm nailing together a sort of code for life. In the spirit of five, I will keep this a five point list that helps keep me moving in the right direction. So far it is this:
1. Delight in calm
Again and again I come back to a theory I heard about on the NPR show Invisibilia, that we really only have two emotions: calm and agitation. All of our "feelings" are how we interpret this data and over time those interpretations become the way we see the world. I can't say if this is true, but this very much appeals to me as a computational thinker, this idea that our feelings are essentially an endless improvisation on binary code, with the heart as a genius compiler. The first goal of meditation is to get us back to the binary, to notice the calm again and decompose the endless dance of agitation to its tiniest bits. The next goal is to build a new emotional framework that will protect and nurture this interplay. Delighting in calm means just that. Take as many minutes as you need in one chunk, or throughout the day, to observe that calm. Then take the next heartbeat to be happy about it. Not over excited. And not overattached. More like joyful tenderness you might feel towards a newborn baby who has found something to laugh about in the dark. More like the joy you feel on from your best friend, who you would never then force to move in with you. The ultimate goal of meditation is how to make that calm available to others in such a way that they cannot help but connect with its profound power. According to this theory, compassion becomes the technology of feeling the agitation of others and doing what can be done to de-iterating it so that they can find their own peace. Enlightenment, I think, is the moment this compassion "technology" becomes intuitive. Or perhaps, the moment that we see that it always was and still is.
2. Walk, Run, Sit, Stand
The older I get, the harder this one is to keep, but the more essential it becomes Carving out time to do what needs to be done to keep the sap flowing is a tough one. But today I've been standing and again and I am amazed how powerful the flow of energy. I think a life doing all these things as regularly and routinely as you can is the best way we can to express our appreciation for this wonderful body we were born with. Everyday we don't consciously connect to the physical vitality that is our birthright feels a day wasted. The effort is always worth it. So if I can't find the motivation to do this for myself, maybe I can find the urgency of doing it for others. I dedicate all of these hours of exercise to the well being of everyone.
I have three more that I will discuss in future posts. So far:
3. Share something
4. Learn something
5. Believe in patience
1. Delight in calm
Again and again I come back to a theory I heard about on the NPR show Invisibilia, that we really only have two emotions: calm and agitation. All of our "feelings" are how we interpret this data and over time those interpretations become the way we see the world. I can't say if this is true, but this very much appeals to me as a computational thinker, this idea that our feelings are essentially an endless improvisation on binary code, with the heart as a genius compiler. The first goal of meditation is to get us back to the binary, to notice the calm again and decompose the endless dance of agitation to its tiniest bits. The next goal is to build a new emotional framework that will protect and nurture this interplay. Delighting in calm means just that. Take as many minutes as you need in one chunk, or throughout the day, to observe that calm. Then take the next heartbeat to be happy about it. Not over excited. And not overattached. More like joyful tenderness you might feel towards a newborn baby who has found something to laugh about in the dark. More like the joy you feel on from your best friend, who you would never then force to move in with you. The ultimate goal of meditation is how to make that calm available to others in such a way that they cannot help but connect with its profound power. According to this theory, compassion becomes the technology of feeling the agitation of others and doing what can be done to de-iterating it so that they can find their own peace. Enlightenment, I think, is the moment this compassion "technology" becomes intuitive. Or perhaps, the moment that we see that it always was and still is.
2. Walk, Run, Sit, Stand
The older I get, the harder this one is to keep, but the more essential it becomes Carving out time to do what needs to be done to keep the sap flowing is a tough one. But today I've been standing and again and I am amazed how powerful the flow of energy. I think a life doing all these things as regularly and routinely as you can is the best way we can to express our appreciation for this wonderful body we were born with. Everyday we don't consciously connect to the physical vitality that is our birthright feels a day wasted. The effort is always worth it. So if I can't find the motivation to do this for myself, maybe I can find the urgency of doing it for others. I dedicate all of these hours of exercise to the well being of everyone.
I have three more that I will discuss in future posts. So far:
3. Share something
4. Learn something
5. Believe in patience
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