Joy, Meaning, Connection

Slowly, but surely, I'm feeling a coherence in my life. 

The different practices connect, meditation, walking, eating well and mindfully, cleaning, writing, planning and mindful review.  Since I've stopped eating past 7 pm, I fall asleep and stay asleep more easily. Today I had a jhana meditation, in which I could feel the serotonin rising from my gut to nourish my heart and my brain. 

The habit I'm trying to build into my life right now is clarity. It is, according to a book I'm reading, the child of careful thought and mindful experimentation.  It starts with knowing yourself.  In his monthly teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche, talks of the three kind of ways we can sense the self,  unhealthy, healthy and luminous. Unhealthy sense sees the self as permanent, independent and singular.  The healthy sense of self self, sees it as impermanent, interdependent and multidimensional. And then there is the luminous. The self beyond the self that emerges from the unity of these two.  It is both impermanent and permanent, independent and interdependent, multidimensional and one. 

To achieve more clarity in my life, I have chosen three words to describe the self I want to sense and  as the future unfolds: joyful, meaningful and connected. 

May I sense more and more, everyday this luminous self. May it guide me.  May it guide me in how to guide others.

Top insights of 2020

1. "When you know you don't need to change, that's when you change"  Mingyur Rinpoche.

   This was from an interview on the podcast 10 per cent happier.  I realized after listening to this that I don't have to "stop" hating myself.  Being aware of that piece of coal in my heart is like knowing where the diamond is.  As with cravings, I just need to accept this aversion and let it transform itself. If that were my only meditation, I would have all that I need

2.  "To whatever degree we know deeply that we have what we need within ourselves, we will let go"  Narayan Helen Liebenson

   NHL meant this more about connecting with our sacred core, our place of enough. The more deeply and intuitively I am connected to my gut energy, however, the easier it is for me to let go of all the weakening habits I've accumulated.  

3.  Going home is the most treacherous and challenging part of the adventure.

   As I think about putting this book into book form, I remember that movie about the climbers coming back from ascending a glacier in Peru.  Going down is harder and more treacherous.  How we make it home and make it to a place of peace after a peak meditative experience is a much more challenging journey, than getting to the peak experience.  How do we live after we have awoken?

4. Who would I be if I didn't hate myself?

   A question posed while reading Byron Katie.  If I don't have a clear enough picture of that it's going to be hard for me to return home, because I don't even remember what home feels like.  

5. The 3 words of Dzogchen.  

   Recognize (the primordial state beyond concepts). Decide (to be  in this state). Know (that is is self-liberating.

6. The impact of informal practice on awakening

   I learned a lot from Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated, but the best take away was his assertion that awakening will always be stunted if our informal practice is weak.  The end of day review is something I want to bring into the new year 

7. Intermittent fasting is not a sustainable nutrition plan for me

   I've come back to fiber fueled eating, which meant going through a transition, and even some weight gain.  But I truly believe it's what's best for my body, and for the planet.  That said, I'm not eating unlimited fibre in front of the computer or TV.  I am building better intuition about what I really need to eat to feel happiest and liberate myself from cravings and self hatred.  

8. I can become a digital minimalist

   December I cut out streaming.  I'm trying to re-introduce it judiciously. Limiting the emotional thrillers to a couple of episodes a week.  Balancing different kinds of shows and trying to keep it to under an hour a day during the week.  

9. To make my cleaning algorithm intuitive, I need to truly focus on the cleaning habit I'm mastering

   Focus and attention is the foundation of learning. If I want these cleaning algorithms to take, I'm better off bringing my attention to a short practice many time a day for a while, like shining the sink, or 15 minutes, than doing binge cleaning while a watch an empty tv show.  This is how I learned to meditate.  It's how I'm going to learn to clean. 

10.  Attention is the foundational, core habit, of socio-emotional learning 

    I really got the importance of attention, which I may have been mixing up with concentration in the past.  This is partly from Culadasa, partly from my work with UNESCO.  But I'm beginning to understand how vital attention is learning.  Awakening, I am starting to believe, is the unity of attention and awarenes.  It's that simple.  And that difficult to master.  

December of Digital Declutter

  I end my year with a digital de-clutter. 

This is largely about un-hooking from streaming. I'm tired of all that video content pinballing around in my head. I'm tired of my head. What would it feel like to be happy? More and more I see it as the ability to just rest in wellbeing.  Stop the constant search for drama. 

Once I unhook, I will have to be with my aversion. That tight cable of tension that runs through my heart, my forehead, down to my belly. What would it be like to let go?

I sit here on day 1.  The only news of the day, the tightness that holds me to the past. 

The Mind Illuminated

 I set out on a path that is both new and familiar.

I accidentally bought both a physical and digital version of Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated.  So I'm taking this as a sign that this is a new teacher, and this for the next while is my new bible. 

He seems to be the right teacher for me right now, with his synthesis of Theravada and Tibetan, but the determination to keep things secular.  And it is very helpful to have these stages set out.  Browsing it though, I think I am being honest in assessing myself as a meditator somewhere between skilled and adept. That I can sit comfortably enough for a couple of hours is a strong indicator.  

A few techniques that are already useful are the habit of recognizing and developing introspective awareness, and his decision to distinguish between attention and awareness. 

But what strikes me most is his assertion that without a strong informal practice, progress in formal practice is likely to be slow and stunted, and that moment of total awakening will remain elusive. 

I would say that is true in my case. However strong my meditation. It's impossible to sustain peace and joy if the atmosphere, and if my daily life is chaotic, squalid, impulsive and insecure. 

So alongside the deepening of my formal practice, it is my intention to deepen and strengthen my informal practices, cleaning, eating and exercising mindfully.

Stories

Can I detach from the storytelling that causes me so much suffering, but still tell stories?

I'm having some wonderful meditations lately because I've detached from the idea of having to identify with this vast state of mind that is too big to conceptualize, awareness. It is a state of being that pre-dates my birth and will continue on without me. Realizing this I feel less of a need to identify with a "self," with my body, with whatever idea people have of me. 

If I want others to share in this peace, and joy,  that I'm increasingly sure I can cultivate, I need to be able to tell a story about giving up stories. I need to tell the story of how I found happiness.  How I got out of prison.  But first I actually have to get out of prison. Get off the story telling wheel. Make this state a trait.

Or at least that is the story. 

What if I don't. What if I can start now, as though the only thing that matters is knowing that this state exists, and that I can access it.  What if I don't worry about embodying it?

That was my insight at my last Vipassana, the suffering caused by the narrator, but to get people there I have to be a narrator. 

Maybe it's a question of how we use narration as a tool, not a master. 

I hate myself

This week Dan Harris interviewed Mingyur Rinpoche on 10% happier.  At the end of the interview Rinpoche led a guided meditation in just being what you are. "When you know you don't need to change. That's when you change." 

I put a lot of energy into trying to stop hating myself, but it occurs to me this morning, that maybe I don't need to change this part of my mind. Self-hatred can be that lump of coal in my heart that is really a diamond.  It bring me right to the source of my vulnerability. 

What would happen if I truly believed that I didn't need to change this?

And what if my meditation going forward was truly about accepting what was, the conceptual mind, the confusion, the striving, despite all my effort a non-striving? 

I had a vision of myself this morning, like if I were one of those people so rich that they just have a bank account that builds wealth without work.

Could I get to the point where I saw many times, everyday, that I am this rich? That I will be until my last breath.  

When I can greet this statement "I hate myself" like a lifetime loving companion, with the love I would feel to  a long lost friend who just walked through the door, I will know I am here.

The Secret to the Direct Approach

I'm already doing it. 

I've always been doing it. 

Trying to practice the three vital points, and reading a book by Byron Katie, about her experience living in non-dual awareness, and definitely having some good meditations. 

I came across a book this morning that seemed appropriate to my journey "Standing As Awareness" by Greg Goode.  Published the same year that I started this blog, his approach is to simply make intuitive the belief that Awareness is always aware of itself, with or without our striving.  We need to gradually fall in love with that expansive awareness and feel it as an expanded self that is too big to ever be an object of awareness. In this approach there is no need for "self" improvement, because the self is the totality of everything, the thinking, not the thinker. Just be what is. 

I've also been reading Byron Katie's "A Mind At Home With Itself," her version of the Diamond Sutra (the oldest book in the world).  I've been practicing Katie's The Work to see if it can bring my closer to the non-dual awareness that she lives in.  And I've been applying Dzogchen to my most pernicious thought "I hate myself."  Katie suggest questioning this thought. "Is it true?" and then pondering what it would feel like if I didn't believe it.  The closer I am to believing that I am actually this bigger process of awareness, rather than this abstract object of awareness (my self), the harder is to belief this thought "I hate myself."  It doesn't make sense because if I am Awareness, not the object, or even the witness, just the big expansive process of consciousness, then there can't be an "I" to hate with this other "I."   

And if I'm not an I that can hate myself, then others can't be objects of my hatred.