Heart

I'm not sure exactly how I became more focussed on the energy in my heart this month, but that's where I am.  A combination of things I supposed.  Finishing Tergar's Joy of Living 2: opening the heart.  I actually, physically feel my heart more open. The calm energy that I used to feel more often in my head is now more solidly in my heart area.
  I've also been falling asleep to several lovingkindness guided meditations. So I'm more conscious of the energy and power of love.
  I remember in Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love her Indonesian teacher's life teaching, to see from the heart.
  In our science driven world we try not to see from the heart.  We try to look clearly at the facts. But as Mingyur Rinpoche says in The Joy of Living, compassion is a kind of technology. The mind is a tool, and the heart helps us to bind to people, to right practices, to nurturing values.
  I used to think that wisdom was something that would always change as we gained more experience.  In some ways I'm sure it does.  But there us something permanent about wisdom.  It's a conceptual understanding of something that has been drawn from experience.  And once you get that conceptual understanding, that doesn't change.
  I am as healthy, psychically, as the vitality in my heart.  My body may get sick and old, but my psyche can stay strong and vital as long as I tend this connecting energy, and tend the points in my body that connect me to this vitality. The heart is an amazing gateway.
  But it's more than a gateway.  It's a home.

The World

Today I did a two hour practice.  I've been falling a little behind on my one hour practices of late, but I went to retreat last Sunday, which has given me much food for meditation.

In one of his introductory lectures, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about the three levels of awareness: ordinary awareness, awareness of awareness, and pure awareness. When I first started meditating all I wanted, and all I aimed for was pure awareness. I wanted that wonderful, pristine, perfect free from all suffering bliss. I often got there our of sheer beginner fanaticism. Like many mediators in the first stages of practice I thought of ordinary awareness, and awareness of awareness as stages to surmounted until I reached the pure place free of all suffering forever and ever.

One of the biggest barriers to progress, I think, has been my contempt for the other kinds of awareness, as though they are "lower" stages of evolution. When I found myself being driven by ordinary awareness, I would get frustrated and angry with myself. Shouldn't I be past this by now? Shouldn't I be master of my awareness after all these years of practice.

More and more, though, I am building a certain affection for these states of being. The goal of practice in not necessarily pure awareness, so much as stability of awareness.  Simply being conscious of which state of awareness you are in lays the ground for more spontaneous arisings of pure awareness. If I catch myself in ordinary awareness, I don't get irritated or discouraged, I just notice that it's ordinary awareness. In the noticing I am immediately in stage too, awareness of awareness. The trick is to bring stage two into a place of self-awareness, not self-consciousness.  Most people, myself included, really hate this place where all we seem to be doing is noticing the thoughts, the tensions, the memories.  The suffering.

But freedom from suffering is not freedom from pain.  The Dalai Lama is free of much suffering, but when I saw him in Montreal a few years back, he'd just had an appendectomy. He obviously still felt pain, and took that pain seriously enough to have necessary surgery.  Suffering, as Shinzen Young has so brilliantly defined it, is resistance to pain.  Because of our ingrained resistance to pain, we are often resistance to the pure pleasures of existence that are available to us whenever we want.

In recent weeks I've been falling asleep to guided loving kindness meditations. For the next while I've decided that I will direct loving kindness mostly to different levels of myself. I will feel the natural love I feel for those parts of myself, which I like, my natural intelligence and openness. I will feel the more directed love I need to feel for the more neutral parts of myself that I often neglect to validate. The part of myself that does the dishes more often than not. The part of myself that shops for the basics and keeps my butt sitting in front of the computer so that I can generate some writing every day.  And I will take those more naturally arising feelings of love and gratitude and direct them towards the most difficult aspects of my personality. My messiness, my self-delusion, my tendency towards resentment and reactivity. The anger that I continue to feel towards my family, despite my best intentions.

And then, here's the hard part.  Once I've felt this recursive love towards myself, I will then direct this love towards the world. Towards all people who have, but don't recognize their natural kindness. Towards all people, and there are so many, whose minds are dragging them back into patterns of suffering that they feel powerless over.

We all want safety, happiness, health and ease. We all forget several thousand times a day that we have this wonderful permanent nature that is safe, happy, healthy and easily available every time we choose to recognize it. As safe and as permanent as a mountain, as happy, strong and  full as the ocean, and as easy and inevitable as gravity.

Sleep

I've been sleeping better. Going to bed listening to guided loving kindness meditations by Sharon Salzberg and Bodhipaksa. Now in the morning I have those voices in my head, alerting me to the energy in my heart.

Still.  I'm feeling restless. Maybe the anxiety of the waning moon.  I don't feel like writing this morning, sure Ben will be waking up any morning.  I do this more out of duty that a real passion for the truth.

I've been feeling that way recently about my practice.  I'm not doing the full hour.  I'm feeling the call of work and things that need to be thought about and worried about.  I don't want to lose my formal practice.  I know from this journal what happens once I let my practice go, whenever I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

I need the insight that practice gives me. Even if it's insight into my state of restlessness.

Ah Ben is up.

My addiction

So I didn't make it past Friday.

The excuse went this way.  It's too hard to wait to find out what's happening in the final episodes of this series I've been following (okay, it's Girls).  Maybe I can just make that the one thing that I watch. From that came the next episode of Episodes.  From that the end of Parenthood.  All good shows.  And that's what I keep telling myself.  These are all good shows. Shouldn't I be able to watch them?

To which I need to reply.  Yes these are all good shows, but shouldn't I be able to give them up?  These aren't real people and I'm encouraging my son to live a life comforted by entertainment, not comforted by friends and community.

Fresh start today.  I can't just abandon this.  So today I'm going to be on alert for the seductive reasons.

I'm going to go back to Pema Chodron's book on breaking old habits and I'm going to try again.

And I'm going to build new habits.  Primarily evening meditation sessions. How I spend my evenings impacts my day.  Deeply impacts my day. So I want to get back to evenings that are vital and rich with peace. Not drama.

Deep breath.  Once again.

Happy Tibetan New Year

Today is Tibetan New Year. I'll be heading out to the Tergar Centre to celebrate. But this morning I think of what I want for myself and for others this year.

Peace.  That profound thriving peace that I feel in the centre of my brain when I've been working steadily at my mediation practice. That palpable magnetic energy that is always available to me when I need it. That thing that I still use too rarely in my life.

All people have this. Few people are aware of it. In my current practice it is called Buddah Nature.

This is what I want for myself and everyone.

One of the ways I'm going to stay close to this over the next month, the first month of this year of The Horse, is to re acquaint myself with Lent.  My old Catholic practice of renunciation before re-birth.

Television.  That's what's going for the next forty days. Television.

No more courtroom dramas. No more Girls.  No more Netflix.

Just for this month my greatest entertainment is going to be this peace. Maybe some reading.  But this peace. This peace, if entered into playfully, can be a profound source of entertainment. The human body,and psyche is an endless roller coaster.  Like a video game with blocks and challenges that once met and dissolved bring you to the next level.

No sugar. No television.  Just peace.

Though it might not seem like one, this is another adventure.

Food Toxins

Around this time last year I started a cleanse.  I know this because I wrote about it.  And I know that after three weeks of de-tox I felt more stable.

The good habits from that de-tox didn't quite take.  Ben and I seem to have cultivated some bad habits over the last year. We're liberated from the worst ones.  We don't keep soft drinks or juice in the house.  But we do buy chips and eat out more often than we probably should.

I don't know if this has anything to do with my recent insight into emotional toxins, but in the last couple of days I've come across some information on sugar.  I like to think of myself as someone who doesn't overconsume sugar.  But there's been a habit in the last three months of hot chocolate.  And I let Ben eat sugared Cheerios, and white bread.  And then there's the fish sticks and frozen french fries, which are just starch that act like sugar.  And I've virtually abandoned whole wheat.

Okay, so I need to start getting back to good habits.  It's like meditation. I've had them before, but creating the stable ground for them to root  is going to demand some re-motivating.

It's all about hunger.  In the last few days, I've been asking myself about this hungry person who lives inside me.  Who is she? How did she evolve? What purpose does she serve in my life? What would my life be without her?

Every formal practice, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings, and I pray that we will be free of hunger and discord.   But I need to really want everyone, including myself--above all myself-- to be free of emotional hunger, because I can't help others if I'm not free of it.  Emotional hunger and physical hunger are intimately bound up.  There's healthy hunger and there's craving, low blood sugar, addictive cycles.

I need to sit with this healthy hunger.  But I'm going to skip the whole "jumpstart" this year. I'm just going to focus on the sugar and starches.  And I'm going to keep track of this journey, here in the place where I capture my insights and hope that they hold.

Toxic emotions

Okay, by this I mean shame.

This last week my practice has been derailed by my obsession with The Woody Allen case.  I'm not alone. It feels like everyone is weighing in on one side or the other.  But I can't seem to get it out of my head.  I don't want to get it out of my head.

This is probably because is churns up the darkest most difficult emotion that I've yet to really deal with in my meditation practice.  Shame.

I have many shames. Some deep. Some shallow.  I'm not alone in this, but it is the power of shame that we always feel alone. We always feel like we're the only person to do something wrong or dishonest or to let other people treat us poorly.  Grifters, abusers, molesters, bullies. These people all take advantage of our shame.  They take advantage of our shame because the way they are trying to rid themselves of shame is to offload it onto others.

That is the why we're all so mad at Woody Allen. Because for one day, or week we get to think about someone else's shame. For one week I get to feel righteous and strong. I get to feel compassionate towards the woman I believe was his victim.  And I get to visit my own shames and make them feel small in comparison.

Meanwhile this week I made a stupid mistake that ended up reflexively covering up for. Something that is going to cost me and others time and money. And I don't have the moral courage to own up to this.  So it's probably going to haunt me for a while.

I'm going to use this haunted time to examine the toxic effects of shame in my life.

This is a very, very difficult emotion to deal with. Nobody wants to sit with shame, know it, work with it. I certainly don't.

This might be a good time to practice tonglen.  Breathing in shame and breathing out compassion and courage to everyone dealing with shame in their lives.  Which is a lot of people.  It's the most human emotion.