paper.ink.pen

Curiosity

2012-02-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

So, I've recently become addicted to the show Friday Night Lights. Friends of mine have been recommending this show for ages but not being a huge fan of tv, Texas or high school football, I didn't consider it. When Netflix recommended it to me based on my interest in Mad Men, I was curious enough to watch the first episode. What could those two shows possibly have in common?

Turns out - they do have something in common. Character development.

I'm a big fan of character development. Being more of a reader than a tv viewer, when I think of character development, I think of reading War and Peace and making judgments about the characters only to have those judgments be completely reversed by the end of the book. I loved that because it made the characters seem real. People are more than who we see in the moment. They change and reveal different facets of themselves when they're put in different situations.

Curiosity is a founding principle in Buddhism. The ego judges because it wants to believe it understands a situation and can protect itself. So it creates a judgment that it understands. Something concrete to react to. These judgments are like walls. They make us feel safe and secure, but they obscure the larger picture, they block the path to further exploration. When we allow ourselves to be curious we have the opportunity to learn more. But to learn more we have to let our judgments be loose so they can change and adapt. We have to be willing to go beyond the judgments to see what else is there.

Curiosity is what originally led me to Buddhism. A Zen Master was giving a lecture at Penn Hospital and I was invited to attend. Not looking for a spiritual practice at the time, I went because I was curious. What did a Zen Master look like? What would he talk about? At the lecture I found myself agreeing with much of the Dharma Talk given that night. Where many religions focus on faith, Buddhism focuses on curiosity. Why do we behave the way we do? Why do we tend to suffer in the same ways repeatedly? How exactly does my ego work? What sets it off? How does it react?

These questions allow us to develop our own character. We understand why we react the way we do to certain people, certain situations. Curiosity allows us to let go of the judgments we have about ourselves. The ones that make us feel safe. 'I'm a weak person. That's just how I am.' or 'I'm always the responsible one.' The more tightly we hold onto these judgements we have about ourselves or others, the harder it is to see the other aspects.

By questioning what we 'know' or what we assume, we have the chance to really understand someone deeply. To understand ourselves deeply.

And that's when the story gets interesting.

fear

2011-12-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

My teacher has a theory about fear. He believes that every person struggles consciously with one of three main fears - rejection, abandonment or worthlessness. We all fear these three on different levels but it is the conscious fear that most dictates the way we interact with others.

This theory can be an interesting way of seeing our ego. It may seem oversimplified, but having a simple structure to work from can be helpful sometimes.

Someone who is most afraid of rejection wants others to see them completely, as they are, and accept them. Yet because the fear of being rejected is consciously experienced, they might hide from others and be afraid to show their true self. Or they might reject others as a defense mechanism.

Someone who is consciously afraid of abandonment wants to be connected to those around them, to feel in control of the connection so they won't feel alone. Yet because this fear of being abandoned is consciously experienced, they never really trust the connection and take any difference of feeling or any loss of control as a personal threat.

Someone who is consciously afraid of being worthless wants to feel valued by the people around them. They want to feel that they have something to offer - information, a gift or some function they can perform that others will appreciate. Yet because they focus on what they do or what they bring to a situation, they rarely feel that they as an individual are worthy just as they are.

During zen workshops, people identified with one of these three fears and split into groups. It was really funny and interesting to see the way we each saw or labeled our own conscious fear and those of others. The rejection fear group were often labeled as loners or abrasive jerks. The abandonment fear group were dubbed control freaks or manipulative. The worthless fear group were seen as know-it-alls or workaholics.

Which brings me of course, to Jean-Paul Sarte. In his play, No Exit, three characters are confined to share a room for eternity. Each of them triggers the ego of another person in the room, causing the famous line - 'hell is other people'.

I don't remember if I attended a workshop on the three fears or read this play first. They are completely enmeshed in my memory. I am laughing as I write this because I'm sure it seems like an odd reference to make regarding a zen workshop. Yet divided into three groups, each spoke of their conscious fear quite openly and the others reacted quite obviously from theirs.

The abandonment group talked about just wanting to be close to people, yet the way they expressed it completely terrified or annoyed the rejection group who experienced the abandonment group's need for control over a connection or a shared way of being/experiencing/feeling to be a rejection of their individual self/experience.

In turn, the abandonment group felt disconnected and confused by the rejection group's need for space and autonomy.

Meanwhile, the worthless fear group were trying to understand the whole situation so they could offer some valuable insight or figure out what action could be performed to set things to rights. The rejection group tended to make them feel worthless by judging or rejecting their ideas/functions/offerings and the abandonment group made them feel like they had to constantly offer proof of connection, and wanting to have a clear task set for them so they could complete it perfectly, they grew frustrated by the vague concept the abandonment group seem to have about what they needed.

On the other side, the abandonment group was frustrated by the worthless group's way of offering functions or information instead of feelings and the rejection group felt that what the worthless group offered wasn't individual or personal because they put so much emphasis on what was correct or perfect or wanted by others.

This Sarte-like zen workshop is a great example of the idea of shared reality I wrote about in my last post. Each of the characters in No Exit, like each of the groups in the workshop, had their own ego fear which in large part created their individual reality. When we are locked in this reality and experiencing our conscious fear, hell truly can be other people. We see them as threats to this fear or as people to banish this fear FOR us. We interact in ways that will protect us or make us feel accepted, connected or worthy. And since the people we are interacting with have their own egos and their own realities, we can become slaves in a sense to these fears.

Luckily the zen workshop ended better than the Sarte play. After the initial ego bouts of each fear, we reached a point where we were compassionate enough with and aware enough of our own fear to recognize that the way others acted really had nothing to do with us but with their own fear. And once we stopped taking their actions/perceptions personally, we were able to see their fear with compassion.

At this point, the zen workshop again resembled what you might think a buddhist gathering might look like. There was a shared reality where everyone was saying what they were experiencing and it was accepted by the others, who were sharing what they were experiencing. It seemed like the key point in creating this shared reality was recognizing that our egos could go on for eternity trying to be sated by or protected from other people. But they never would be.

But that the shared reality offered a different kind of connection than the ones we had been striving for from a place of fear. Yet in order to participate in the shared reality, we had to take ownership of our conscious fear and try to understand and heal it ourselves instead of wearing it like broken limb for others to bandage or re-injure.

shared reality

2011-11-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

I was in Paris last week and besides being beautiful and inspiring, as always, it illuminated a question I've been living for a few years now. It's funny, looking back at my older posts, that I referenced the Rilke quote about living questions until some day you might find yourself living the answer. I posted that right before I left for Paris the last time, in June.

Paris is the one place where I'm not content to be an idle traveler. The first time I visited, nearly 6 years ago, I had only scheduled one night. I thought - what a cliche, how great can it be? What I didn't expect was how much it would resonate with me and inspire me. Sometimes there are reasons for cliches :) When I returned home after that first trip, I began to study French. I wanted to interact with the city the next time I returned. I wanted to understand and be understood.

Six years and four visits later, the city still has that effect on me. Yet though I've been learning French for awhile now, I found myself having difficulty actually using it while I'm in France. It's not necessarily because I don't understand the accents or the language. There was some other block happening.

Which brings me to the question I've been living for a few years now. In Buddhism, we believe that everyone has their own perception of reality. The circumstances and experiences that I've had lead me to perceive the world and my interactions in a certain way. And each individual's reality is created by this accumulation of experiences. There's not one reality that is the 'real' one. Because there's not one universal accumulation of experiences had by everyone.

My friend Ellen and I often talk about 'shared reality' - where one person's reality comes up against another. Not just a person - we see it happening with the protests around the country, in everyday relationships, in families. In the best scenario, we find the common ground between each of our realities and we make the 'shared reality' work. In the worst scenario, we see only our own reality and refuse to accept the legitimacy of another's.

This is where the ego (fear) comes in. When our reality is affirmed by those around us, we feel secure and safe. We express ourselves freely and feel confident that our actions and expressions are valid because the shared reality mirrors them in some way. When our reality is different from those around us, we can feel threatened and insecure, afraid to act and express ourselves for fear of having our reality negated or rejected by the shared reality.

There are two extreme ways of interacting within the shared reality - to push our individual reality on others or to reject our own reality and try to blend in with the external reality. My personal habit is to reject my own reality and kind of coast within the shared reality, keeping my own expression to myself. Yet when something is very important to me, I reach a point where I must express myself.

This happened recently with the protests. My political feelings were mirrored by the occupy wall street movement and I felt moved to go beyond my comfortable actions - petition signing, writing to congress representives and senators - and join marches and carry signs. This was kinda traumatic for me. It felt almost vulgar to be expressing my political opinion so publicly. It felt like the other extreme - forcing my individual reality on the shared reality. But I had reached a point, long ago actually, where I felt like I could no longer be silent in my feelings about certain practices in our government. At that point, the fear of feeling rejected by the shared reality was less urgent than my conviction about my own belief. As the protests became more combative across the country, I wondered where the middle ground was in this situation.

In Paris, I've been pushed to express myself in the shared reality from a different emotion. Not dissatisfaction with the shared environment, but rather a feeling of resonance with it. Since my first trip there, I've wanted to dig deeper and find out what it is about Paris that feels so comfortable to me. I've wanted to express myself and be part of the environment, no longer content to be an idle spectator. Yet I find myself with a different struggle. A language barrier that goes beyond irregular verbs and the correct placement of pronouns in a sentence. I find that when faced with an opportunity to interact with Paris, through individuals or a situation, I fall back on the trusty old 'Je ne parle pas francais.'

I understand a bit and I could actually express myself if I felt I had time, but in the pressure of the moment I find myself unclear on the shared reality and also a bit unclear on my individual reality. And in these moments it's easy to lose the feeling of resonance -to feel instead the confusion and fear of being an outsider.

What I realized during this trip, is that I don't ever say 'I do speak a little french, but I'm having trouble understanding. Could you speak more slowly please?'. I go straight to 'I have no idea what the hell is going on.' The middle ground in the shared reality is when one person expresses their reality and is open to the expressions of others, recognizing that both are valid and that one doesn't have to take over the whole space. In the middle ground, there are differences and similarities. We can choose to focus on all the similarities or focus on all the differences. Or we can try to figure out how our reality works within the shared reality and let it change and grow as a result of that interaction. And let the shared reality change and grow as a result of our unique expression.

For some people it's tough to acknowledge the validity of another's reality, for some it's more difficult to accept the validity of their own. But for a true interaction to happen, a significant 'shared' reality - more than one reality has to be present.

From a Buddhist perspective, compassion once again is a crucial element. We have to be compassionate to our reality - that we have a right to feel the way we do, and to express ourselves. And we have to be compassionate to others and their right to feel the way they do and express themselves. And beyond this specific use of compassion is the underlying lesson - that the similarities between us all are greater, deeper and stronger than the differences. That we are all connected through our very existence and any fear that arises, any imbalance of the shared reality, is the work of ego.

It's interesting the strength that compassion can offer, the groundedness. When we are rooted in our connection to our environment, to others - it becomes much simpler to express our individual reality and to accept the differing realities of others.

I'm sure I'll be living this question for some time. Hopefully the next time I'm in Paris I'll make some progress in moving toward the answer.

four elements

2011-09-10T08:35:00.001-07:00

Often when I'm feeling unbalanced in my life I use the four element system to see where the imbalance lies. The four elements are air, water, fire and earth. Each element refers to a quality within us -

Air - thought, mental action
Water - emotions, intuition
Fire - passion, inspiration, daring
Earth - practicality, physical manifestation, grounding

Most people are just naturally inclined to have more of one element than another. Alternative medicine techniques like Ayurveda and acupuncture/Traditional Chinese Medicine recognize the natural leanings we have toward one element over the others and heal through balancing.

Even astrology and tarot use the elements as guidelines. The twelve signs of the zodiac are broken down into air signs (gemini, aquarius, libra), water signs (pisces, cancer, scorpio), fire signs (aries, leo, sagittarius) and earth signs (capricorn, taurus, virgo). The four suits in the tarot deck are swords (air), cups (water), pentacles (earth) and wands (fire).

Each of these elements has an individual strength and weakness associated to them. Our tendency can be to rely on the strengths of the elements we're most comfortable with...sometimes to the detriment of the others.

For example.

I'm a thinking person. I've got a lot of air and water happening. The element I find myself rejecting more than others is Earth. It bores the hell out of me. People who are naturally 'earthy' tend to be more comfortable dealing with the little details that make things work - to do lists, the mechanics of things, the process of building something and watching it grow. They recognize the strength of 'earth' - the power these practical actions have in the world. I recognize it too, I'm just not inclined toward that. The other day, I got an email receipt that stated 'keep this copy for your records' and I thought... "What records?" but at the same time I recognized that I should be keeping more records. Not necessarily receipts for donuts or books from Amazon, but other more practical things. The weakness of earth is when we get too wrapped up in the little things and don't see the larger picture. Or when we're too patient and afraid to change things that aren't working.

Last month when there were riots in London, my first thought was 'there is a lot of fire energy going on over there.' It was also in America, where everyone was pissed at Congress and Senate about the budget cuts and in Philadelphia, where random groups of kids were forming flash mobs and beating up total strangers. Fire is the necessary element for change. It's the spark that comes up in us and tells us that we don't like the way things are. It can also provide the fuel to move us toward what we want. But if it's not balanced with the other elements, it can be destructive.

It's interesting that certain elements can strengthen each other (air + fire) or weaken each other (water + fire) or just create a mess (water + earth) if there is an excess of one or both and not a healthy balance between them all.

Water is my favorite symbol for emotion. Often in dreams, bodies of water are though to represent the emotions or the unconscious mind. It has an interesting power - depth and fluidity. Currents and tides...these are often easy parallels to make regarding our emotional makeup. But like all the elements, when it's out of balance and unchecked by the equal presence of the others we can end up with tidal waves, flooding or in the personal sense - depression or existing too deeply in our emotional/intuitive self and not connecting to our emotion in a way that can be manifested externally in a productive way.

The same can be said about Air. I could go on about the power of Air. There is much to be said for understanding situations and oneself. Cleverness, flight and agility of thought...I'm a big fan. But I also recognize that unchecked, the energy of air can keep you moving from one thought to another, one interest to another, one place to another. Without the grounding of Earth, the intuition and emotion of water, the passion of fire...air can be too hollow and weightless and then our minds can be like tornadoes or hurricanes and we can be like a lost balloon.

Aside from this apparent local weather recap I've written here, it can be a helpful spiritual exercise to look at our tendencies and recognize which elements we allow to run rampant within us, and which we reject or limit excessively. And from a buddhist perspective it's always interesting to ask ourselves why we limit certain elements. What don't we like about them? What about them scares us? When we answer questions like this, it can be easier to see our ego.

wisdom

2011-06-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

'Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.'
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Years ago I wrote this quote on my bedroom wall. There was something I loved about it and something I didn't. This morning, it was the first post I noticed on facebook. My friends are usually witty but a few of them have a habit of posting poems or quotes that strike me at just the right moment.

Lately I've been thinking about wisdom and knowledge. From a Buddhist perspective, knowledge is what we learn from others - from their experiences whether told to us directly or read in books. A teacher can tell us what books are useful for gaining knowledge. They can help our minds decipher the lesson.

Wisdom is what we learn from our own experience. The lessons we live...and in Rilke's quote, the questions we live. When we live a question and come to its answer, that answer is alive deep within us just as the question was.

I think what I love about this quote, apart from the language, is that I prefer to figure things out for myself, to experience them, to investigate, to wander a foreign city until I define how it feels to me.

What I didn't (don't?) love about this quote is that living a question is sometimes terrifying. Often the things we need most to experience ourselves are the questions we are afraid to live. The ones our egos want answers to before we take a single step forward. For those questions we want scientific data, a road map, an agenda, a weather report, a contingency plan and probability reports regarding the outcome.

I could live just what I know - just the answers. Or i could try to live the questions and trust what I already know on some level... that when it comes to my existence and my questions regarding it, I'm the only possible teacher since I'm the only one who will experience it. And the only way to teach myself about my existence is to live it.

It makes me think of part of a poem I love -

'Drawn by the song of our keel,
who are we but horizons coming true?'
To All my Mariners in One - Samuel Hazo

Guilt and Spirituality

2011-06-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

In Integrated Energy Therapy, which is the primary modality in my energywork practice, the negative emotion of guilt is believed to block the crown chakra, which connects us to 'god' or our higher spiritual self.

When we believe that we have done something wrong or that something about us is wrong, we can cut off from our spiritual nature. We create a black and white, absolute approach. "If I've done something wrong than I AM bad. And if I'm bad, then my higher, spiritual nature is no longer part of me...maybe never was." We can steep in this feeling of guilt, believing there is nothing to do but hide from 'goodness' lest we be seen as 'bad' in comparison.

Guilt is so prevalent and yet so unproductive!

Sometimes we give value to the feeling of guilt as a barometer of morality. When we feel guilty we recognize that we've done something that isn't in resonance with our idea of how we should be and what we should do. But often, we assume others' ideas of how we should be and what we should do. It's important to be clear on where the guilt is coming from. Have we really acted against our own self expectations, or are we feeling guilty because we feel we haven't met someone else's expectations of us?

If we find that we are truly responsible for having acted in a way that is in conflict with our own standards, then we can act to rectify our mistake. But if we cling to the idea that we are guilty and don't forgive ourselves and believe in our higher selves...if we don't accept that we are capable of both good and bad, it becomes difficult to resolve our guilt and move on into the present moment.

If we feel guilty about not living up to an outside expectation that we don't share, that guilt isn't really our own moral discomfort and we are left with a feeling of responsibility for a discordance we don't deeply understand because it is not within. Often in family dynamics, people confuse love with guilt. If I take responsibility for you - for your feelings and your idea of how I should be, then I am showing you that I love you. If I fail to be responsible for your feelings and live up to your idea of how I should be, then I'm not showing you that I love you.

When we fall into this habit, we can become motivated by guilt - by the avoidance of it. And instead of acting on our own truth, we try to act to avoid blame by others.

When we are so caught up in guilt, in our idea that we are guilty, in our fear of doing something that will incur blame...we are not in the present moment. Instead we are reliving past mistakes or trying to avoid future ones. We aren't present in ourselves - the fullness of ourselves.

It can be hard to open up to spirituality when we are so focused on what we perceive as its opposite. Love and connection to the universe may seem completely unreal, distant and impossible. We can become jaded and hardened in our negative idea of self. Because that's what feels real. We might think we have to burn off bad karma or suffer until our wrongs are somehow righted. Yet just by recognizing and being open to our own spiritual self, we can do the most good for ourselves and others.

I speak from experience when I say that it can be difficult to believe this and even harder to alter a pattern of thought that has become ingrained throughout life. But it's also been my experience that it's possible to do this, even if just for a little while. And that's what a practice is - spiritual, energetic or otherwise...training ourselves to do something we believe will be beneficial.

Holding onto guilt isn't beneficial...trying to let go of it can be.

karma

2011-03-05T17:23:00.000-08:00

It's interesting how the word karma has been adopted by american culture and used sometimes as an alternative word for luck - good or bad. I once saw a perfume named Karma and thought "jesus, no thanks! I've got enough of my own, I don't need to spray myself with manufactured karma."

Essentially karma is the law of cause and effect. Our actions affect the world around us. And since in Buddhism we believe we are all connected, the effects of those actions will come back to us eventually... like an echo or the return of a boomerang.

We might try to curb our behavior to act in a way that will create good karma. But I've been thinking lately about something my teacher once said - that karma is created by the intention, or energy with which we act rather than the actual action or the result of the action. If I give someone a present because I want them to approve of me, or because I want something in return...the intention of my action isn't generosity, it's almost the opposite. So the karma created from that action won't be positive. It might not be negative, but I shouldn't be waiting to win the lottery or anything as a result.

I think of this aspect of karma when it comes to killing bugs. Before I even start on this subject, let me say that my path is my own and I have no judgement or loss of respect for people that kill bugs. Some of them really creep me out.

But when I come across a bug in my house I notice my reaction. Fear and aversion are the big ones. Sometimes a sense of invasion, that something is in my space and I want to have control over it. These reactions make sense. But I get to choose the action that follows. If I act from fear and aversion and squash them, the karma created from that action would be negative. Not just because of killing a living thing, but because the intention or energy with which I was acting was fear and in a sense, ignorance. So the echo that comes back from that is fear and ignorance. Not great karma.

If I capture the little dudes in a box and let them go outside, it's an action that might be positive or might be neutral - acting out of compassion for the bug's right to live and my right to not be incredibly creeped out in my home.

As further proof that instant karma is not always the case - it has sometimes been my experience that upon letting the insect out of the box in the backyard, it will fly or scurry back toward me, creeping me out even further. Or in the case of the praying mantis that tried to live in my closet (yeah, they're awesome and peaceful but their faces look like aliens and I find that disquieting) , JUMP into my face when I let it out of the box.

And I could get all "you're welcome, praying mantis. Enjoy your natural habitat in south philly" disgruntled at it. Or I could recognize that he's dealing with his own little bug karma and was probably scared about being in that box and pissed about being taken away from my nice comfy wool sweater and I don't need to react and create more karma of my own.

This can be hard to do sometimes. When someone is angry and does or says something rude (their action, their karma) and then we react angrily (now our action, our karma). We can get into the habit of acting and reacting from energy or intention that wasn't ours to begin with.

It can be hard to catch ourselves. Our mind reacts, we have instincts, feelings get involved and actions result. But if we are mindful before we act...create a little space between impulse and action, we have the chance to choose the way we impact our environment and through our connection to it, ourselves.

Mindfulness is another word that is sometimes recognized as a buddhist term. And this is what it's about - being aware of our energy (the emotional or mental force that motivates our actions) and choosing actions that will impact our environment in a way we'd like to have echoed back to us.

Impermanence

2011-02-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

I was in a yoga class the other night and the teacher read part of this poem:

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death
Perhaps the world can teach us
as when everything seems dead
but later proves to be alive.
-PABLO NERUDA, Extravagaria

It always amazes me when I catch myself being doubtful. How easy it is to forget the impermanence of everything.

Of course there's a spring on the other side of this winter.

connection

2011-01-12T05:29:00.001-08:00

So my laptop caught on fire a little bit the other day and now it doesn't work. The crazy thing is, I wasn't really surprised. Every year around this time my cell phone and laptop usually freak out in some way. One year I dropped a phone down the elevator shaft at Daffy's Department Store. Last year I fell on the snow and my phone shattered on the ice and most of the big pieces were lost in snow piles. So yeah, laptop on fire...it's about that time of year.

After my initial attempts to revive it, I saw the bigger picture - the annual accidental winter hiatus from electronic communication. In the hours of the evening without access to email, wikipedia, itunes, dvd player etc. I began to think about the imbalance between the connection to the electronic media vs the physical world around me.

Some friends and me were talking about this a month or so ago. In certain communities there is still the barbershop or the diner or bar that is the hub of social interaction and community connection in a neighborhood. But for the most part, we've moved beyond that to an expanded connection with the world and a weakened connection from the space that physically surrounds us.

I can't even say that it's a stronger connection with the world. We may know more about other cultures. We have the ability to fact check or read a blog written in Ghana or buy a bag directly from a woman in Thailand via Etsy (it's a very pretty bag)...but the connection remains distant and cerebral.

In November I planted trees in Bella Vista with a local group. My reasons for being part of the group are a) I like trees b) I want to see more trees in my neighborhood. I didn't really think of it beyond these two points. Yet after planting a tree at 8th and Christian, I realized that I felt connected to that tree every time I walked by it. As if a part of me was grounded along with it's roots.

In the stillness offered by my burntout laptop and the snow outside, I thought about that tree. It's small tangle of roots that matched it's thin crown of branches. The branches of trees will only reach out as far as the roots go. This gives the tree balance. It is as grounded as it is spread out to the sky.

We don't really have that safeguard. We can reach out as far as we want. Spread our energy out into the world, our thoughts - keep it all out in this high speed information pool. But if we're not grounded in our physical body, our physical environment, our neighborhood...we are unbalanced. And then, what good is all that accessability? If we can't bring it down to earth - ground it in ourselves, or our community....what's the benefit?

From an energy perspective mental energy (thought power) is a higher frequency than physical energy (the power to move, to create physical change). When I think of the chakras, the energy vortexes in the body, I think of them as similar to a tree. The top chakras are about connecting our energy to the universe. The energy in these chakras is fast. The lower chakras are about connecting the physical world and our physical selves. This energy moves slower.

No matter how open our higher chakras are - how connected we are to the universe, if our lower chakras are weak and unhealthy and we don't feel connected physically, all of that high chakra energy cannot be grounded, cannot be brought into the physical world.

It's an amazing thing, the power we have to reach out and connect to vast parts of the world but it's equally amazing that we have the ability to take that energy and ground it in the physical world.

Maybe next winter I won't need a burnt out laptop to remind me to spread my roots as far as my branches. But until then, I'll try to respect the lesson. :)

ego

2011-01-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

Sitting in a coffee shop this morning I noticed "across the universe" was playing. The phrase "nothing's going to change my world" struck me. Sounds peaceful...especially when Lennon sings it but I had another song lyric in my mind too "it's no better to be safe than sorry" (A-ha). Maybe because my mind was at odds, these lyrics seemed at odds too.

For starters, everyone has their own reality...their own world. And if we are in control of our minds, we are in control of our world. If we can calm the mind, we can create calm in our world. This can be incredibly difficult when the worlds of others are conflicting with our own. The nature of the mind is to react. And the nature of the ego is to fight against anything that doesn't support it or make it feel secure. If I want to be calm but there is chaos in this coffee shop, babies crying, dogs barking, coffee grinding etc. my mind's reaction will be to jump from distraction to distraction. My ego's reaction will be to reject everything that is not how I want it to be. "Why isn't someone picking up that baby? Aren't there laws against dogs in coffeeshops? How much coffee can you possibly need!?"

In Buddhism, the ego is like a kind of mechanism that protects our idea of 'self'. Because the idea of nonself is so scary, the ego tries to support our separateness and importance. One way the ego functions is by trying to feel bigger. When I imagine the ego, I think of this game . Cracks me up every time I see that. Another way is to control the environment. If the environment reflects our wants, feelings, needs or preferences in an affirming way, we feel safe and important. If more chaos breaks out in the coffee shop our ego feels threatened, small and powerless.

Sometimes, our ego chooses to protect itself by limiting interaction with others. We make a nice little controlled space and don't let anyone mess with it, don't let anyone in. I guess it's in response to this idea that my mind offered "It's no better to be safe than sorry".

And the true peace from the phrase "nothing's gonna change my world" doesn't come from isolation, control or being the biggest katamari on your block. It comes from knowing our own feelings, wants, needs, thoughts and not needing them to be reflected back at us from the outside. It comes from knowing that despite the constant triggers and actions that happen all around us, we have a choice about what we react to, what becomes part of our reality.

If we really know this, we don't have to reject outside influences, we don't have to try to control them and we don't have to try to find a way to fit in to the outside world. Because the outside world is constantly changing. It is made up of uncountable influences, diverse realities and unknowable factors. If we are always trying to react to the outside world or make the outside world react to us, we won't be at peace.

And before my sisters get all snarky on me, I admit I am the first person to freak out about static electricity's winter war against me, mall air and math jazz. I'm talking to myself over here. I'm figuring it out as I go :)

the christmas season

2010-12-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine said recently that they experience the 'christmas mood' most through popular culture, especially tv shows, taking them back to their childhood. This whole season is rife with nostalgia and there are so many sensory memories associated with it. The scent of scotch tape brings me back to wrapping presents with my mom on Christmas Eve. Any Nat King Cole christmas song takes me back to one of my very first memories - listening to christmas albums with my dad at age 3.

I enjoy going back to those times and remembering the feeling of Christmas as a kid. But I started wondering recently what is the core of the feeling I had as a kid. When we say "it doesn't feel like christmas this year." or "I can't seem to get into the spirit this year." what do we mean?

As a kid, the thing I loved best about the christmas season was that the adults around me became children. My parents shelved their daily stresses and became downright impish as they decorated/shopped/baked. They were open to joy in a way that we as kids were naturally.

Which makes me think of the heart chakra. As young children, our hearts are open and it is as natural as breathing for us to give and receive love. When we grow older and experience pain, trauma or heartbreak, our hearts become more closed and we are wary of giving and receiving love. It feels vulnerable. We can be mistrustful. We might fear rejection. We think of our heart as something fragile that needs to be protected. And we protect it by closing it up and keeping it guarded. In truth, our hearts are incredibly strong when they are not restricted by our fear.

During a season like christmas if we participate fully in the spirit of giving, our hearts just open. They can't help but to open. Giving is their function. We become joyful, impish like children. And by giving (and thereby opening our hearts) our hearts are open to receive the love that is around us.

Reading "the Grinch that stole christmas" to a four year old or walking down the street, delighting myself with random memorized lines from "It's a Wonderful Life", the main theme that strikes me is the point where each of them - the Grinch and George Bailey, open their hearts the grinch by giving, George Bailey by receiving but both by opening their hearts and feeling connected to the love around them.

Open hearts aren't just for children. They're not just for the Christmas season. They're not just for a specific time of year when the focus is on giving gifts.

Thich Nhat Hahn says "If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence."

That's what the Whos down in whoville were singing about. That's zuzu's petals.

acceptance

2010-12-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

A while ago, my sister was stuck in traffic. She turned to her four year old daughter and said "I am not a fan of this traffic. Not a fan." To which my niece replied "But there is traffic, Mom. There is traffic on the road."

Back seat zen is so much cooler than back seat driving. Yet it's always easier to see what other people need to accept or let go of. I'm sure it was easier for the four year old to accept traffic than her naptime.

This same sister, an athiest/agnostic, used to find it very annoying when I used the phrase "let go and let god." To be honest, I used that phrase jokingly the first time and teasingly every other time after. I have just as tough a time with that idea as she does. I am also not a fan of traffic.

To truly accept something we have to understand our capacity to impact a situation and accept that we can do nothing beyond that point. There is a peace that can come with that, if we let it. But it can be hard to accept our capacity, to accept the limitations of our power over our environment. We want to believe that we have the power to get what we want. To arrive at destinations on time. To create a situation that makes us happy. And very often, we're able to do this. There are shortcuts and back roads and traffic reports. But there are also three hundred million people with free will in this country. Every situation, every moment is made up of countless other situations and moments. They are constantly changing, elements coming together and dissipating. There is a limit to our control.

When we talk about accepting things, we're not talking about surrendering completely to fate. Laying down and saying "I just have to accept it. That's just the way it is." Because then you're only accepting the power of the world around you - all the other factors. You're not accepting your own power, your own ability to impact your environment.

And true strength is in the middle. We exhaust ourselves when we make ourselves responsible for things that are truly beyond our capacity. And we create victims of ourselves when we don't accept the power we DO have in a situation.

It can be hard to recognize our capacity, especially when we're so used to overreaching it or not testing it. But when we find it and settle into it, the feeling is much more stable. It makes it a bit easier to sit in traffic and say "I'm not a fan of this, but it's there...there is traffic on the road." Instead of railing against it futily or waiting for divine intervention to clear the way.

meditation for beginners

2010-11-26T11:35:00.000-08:00

For T and anyone else who's interested in trying meditation:

Set aside about ten or fifteen minutes and find a comfortable place to sit.

How to sit -
You can sit indian style, lotus or in a chair. Whatever is most comfortable for you. You want to be relaxed but have pretty good posture so your breathing isn't impaired by slumping shoulders. If you're sitting on the floor, try to make sure that you are grounded with you butt on a cushion and both knees touching the floor.
Another thing to note when you're preparing to meditate is the position of your head. Try to keep your chin level. If you nod too much forward, you might become drowsy. Too far back (besides being kinda uncomfortable) your mind will be more inclined to race around.

The goal -
As a beginner, you really just want to practice calming your mind. There is a tendency to believe that we are our mind and if we stop thinking we will cease to 'be' in a way. When we take a few minutes to calm the mind down, we can pull back a little and see what it's doing. See where our thoughts take us. Instead of being 'in' our mind, we can pull back a little and observe it.
When we try to NOT think, we become aware of how busy our minds are and how little control we have over them. We can choose for the most part what we want it to focus on, but when we ask it to stop for a few minutes and be still, we can see how active it is without our choice.
The important thing to remember is not to get hung up on clearing your mind completely. That will happen after a while of practice (so I've heard :) For now, you want to see what your mind is doing, accept the thoughts that come up but don't follow them. Don't investigate or let them bloom in your mind. Just acknowledge them and let them pass.

Tips-
If you have a super busy mind, giving it something to focus on can allow the rest of you and it to relax. Focusing on your breath is a great one. Just feel the breath coming in your nose and going out your nose. This is a great way to calm the body as well. Often our mind races ahead of us and we become a little ungrounded. Meditating on the breath bridges the mind and the body and can help you feel more centered.

Too stressed to sit down? -
If you get frustrated with sitting meditation, you might try walking meditation. This is the one type of meditation that always calms me down when I'm stressed out. Just choose a path, around a room or between two and walk very slowly. Pay attention to each foot as you lift it and place it back on the floor. Having your mind pay attention to your body and the sensation of your feet on the ground can really help bring you out of your thoughts and into your body.

You can create a ritual and specific place to meditate, or you can do it whenever you are sitting with nothing to do. A friend of mine sometimes meditates on the train during her daily commute. I've meditated during terrible movies.

The main point is to calm the mind. You want to limit distractions as much as you can, but remember that when you do get distracted, just bring your attention back to your breath.

Hope that helps!

Habit Pattern

2010-11-24T08:24:00.000-08:00

"According to Buddhist teachings, the worst plague a human being can suffer is one that s/he cannot identify, or does not even know exists. Similarly, aversions (and cravings) that lie below the level of conscious awareness fuel habit patterns of the mind that inevitably lead to suffering. "
http://info.med.yale.edu/psych/3s/metta.html

The quote above really touches on the core of Buddhism. It's about understanding our fears and motivations and concepts, seeing ourselves clearly so we are not just moving in the same patterns blindly and recreating a cycle of suffering.

The circular path I wrote about yesterday is one way I envision the habit pattern. In workshops, people usually find it easy to spot their habit pattern. It's the sequence of events that happens in your life that always brings you to a feeling or end that makes you unhappy. But it's a familiar unhappiness. People often say "Why does this always happen to me?" or "No matter what I do, it always ends up like this!" And there is sometimes a kind of comfort in that, the feeling that we KNOW how things will be. Even if we want them to be different.

It's like a self fulfilling prophecy. But we have the power to end this cycle if we can see how our feelings, fears and concepts influence the habit pattern and create the end we expect.

Seeing the pattern is the first step. One of my habit patterns goes like this:
1 - Spend a lot of time alone - reading, writing, meditating, etc
2 - feel a little disconnected
3 - spend a lot of time/interact with someone I'm close to
4 - pay attention to what they think, feel, want, need
5 - feel overwhelmed
6 - Disconnect
7 - Spend a lot of time alone...

This pattern makes me feel like a jerk sometimes. I love people, especially the people I love...so I end up feeling guilty at the disconnect part and I'm often pretty blunt and stressed by that time, so I don't always get across the love so much as the "need to get the hell away from here" vibe.

Now, even though I've been aware of this pattern for a few years now...I still do this.
Because the habit pattern is fueled by aversion or attachment to a feeling. In my case it's a feeling of powerlessness that I'm avoiding. I feel powerless to strike a balance between myself and my needs and those of people I care about. So I go back and forth - all you or all me.

The next step is where I'm at now - paying attention to the feeling I'm avoiding. Seeing where it came from, understanding my concepts and misconceptions about my power. About power in general. And hoping that by experiencing, accepting and understanding the feeling I'm avoiding, it will lose it's power to fuel this habit pattern.

Like all habit patterns, mine does not end in a confrontation of the feeling I'm avoiding. It ends in the familiar unhappiness.

My teacher once said that Zen Buddhism is about confronting your fear, which is in essence confronting the ego. It's uncomfortable and unsettling and some days (like all of last week), I end up feeling like I'm fighting dragons or something instead of engaging in a peaceful philosophy. But it's been my experience that we hurt ourselves and each other more out of fear than anything else. So it's a worthy battle.

Moving On

2010-11-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

So the bardo is over. I am officially moved in to my new place. But I find it really strange the effect that the two week intermission has had on me. In my first week in my new house, I really feel as if I've come home from traveling. As if I've been immersed in a foreign country for a little while and the habits and objects and feelings I used to move through adeptly, have become strange and awkward - cumbersome in the new lack of familiarity.

When I was a kid I remember feeling like this when we came home after a vacation. The stillness of the house and the temporary unfamiliarity of a familiar environment used to entrance me for that first day back. As an adult, the feeling of disconnection upon return became stronger as I traveled to more foreign destinations and stayed away for months at a time.

When I travel I take my habits and experiences with me, but it's not always obvious how I fit in. How my habits and experiences fit in. So I tend to observe more.... to notice things...to recognize and learn things about myself based on my reactions to new experiences. But really it's the absence of the everyday routine that allows the time and space for insight.

When I come home I often resist the pull of the everyday routine. I resist the familiarity and the grooves in my environment where my habits fit perfectly. I know very well how my habits and experiences fit when I'm home. But they don't always mesh with the insight and perspective I gain when I'm detached.

There's a friction there. The clarity of insight coming up against the pull of familiarity, of habit.

I sometimes think "I know...but I don't know HOW." I understand what I'm doing that I want to change, but I can't understand how or what to do differently.

Essentially, karma and habit are the same thing. When we walk across a field, we choose a path. and the more we walk on it, the clearer the path is defined. The easier it is to recognize. The more comfortable it becomes. "I know where this leads, I know this one is safe."

But safe doesn't always get us where we want to go, it just keeps us from unfamiliar experiences. When we take a moment to look at the field from a new perspective we might see that our path is going in a circle. We repeat the same experiences over and over. We interact with people in the same way. We encounter the same problems, arguments and heartache.

From a different perspective it can be easy to see "I just need to stop walking in that circle."
But then, when we're in that field...the path is so clear, it's so familiar...it's a habit to walk on it. It's 'safe'. Even if the result is pain, it's familiar pain.

We walk the same path and expect a different outcome. Thinking change will come from outside or maybe we did it wrong the last time, but this time it'll work out. Or maybe if I walk in this circle long enough it will become a straight line.

But habit doesn't work that way, and neither does karma. If we want to change, we have to change our habits. We have to walk a new path.

self compassion

2010-11-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

Buddhism is sometimes called the middle path, meaning the moderation between indulgence and self mortification. This applies to compassion as well. If we are only compassionate to others or only compassionate to ourselves we are out of balance.

I once worked as a receptionist for a doctor who specialized in chronic pain. One day a new patient came to him and she was very stoic, all business. After looking at her medical history he said to her compassionately "You must be in so much pain." Her stoicism broke completely and she started crying. Through his compassion, she was able to experience her own pain.

This is kind of backwards, yet it seems to happen often to myself or people I know. We ignore our limits and are blind to our suffering and push on until someone else says "Wow. You must be exhausted." or "That is so sad, I'm so sorry for you." and then we take a minute to reevaluate. Wait a minute...I AM exhausted! or "Yeah, now that you say that, I suddenly feel like crying."

Sometimes we're not compassionate to ourselves because of a self concept. If our idea of our self is enmeshed in what we do for others - being strong, dependable, nurturing, giving, etc. - we may find it hard to turn that attention inward. Being compassionate to ourselves might feel like being selfish. I know so many people who cringe at the idea of spending time for themselves. Again, because of the idea that it's absolute.

Sometimes we're not compassionate to ourselves because we're afraid of coming in contact with our suffering. It's important to remember that compassion isn't just about experiencing pain and suffering, it's also about understanding it - recognizing and accepting the causes and trying to find a way to end the suffering that came from them. With patience and kindness.

One of the benefits of compassion is its ability to help us realize that we are all connected. If we are truly to feel that, we need to allow ourselves to be part of the equation. If we are truly to feel that God is in everyone, we must remember that we are part of 'everyone' too.

Compassion

2010-11-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
- spoken by Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Oh, Atticus. Can you have a crush on someone based entirely on their principles? If so, I've been crushing on Atticus since 7th grade.

Walking around in someone else's skin is a great way to describe feeling compassion for them.
Literally translated, compassion means "co-suffering".
The buddhist definition is "wanting others to be free from suffering."

Which is kind of the same thing. When we walk around in someone else's skin and feel their suffering, minor or major...we want their suffering to end because we are feeling it as if it was our own. There is no separation between their suffering and ours.

The focus on compassion is one of the first things that drew me to buddhism. Where many religions focus on our interactions with others as either a boon or a detriment to our relationship with God, the buddhist point of view is that our relationship with others IS our relationship to God and it is our relationship to ourselves.

There's no middle man.

Which I like. Not a fan of bureaucracy over here, especially with my spirituality.

Technically there is no God in buddhism. In my mind, the nun Tenzin Palmo explained it best "We think we are clouds, but really we're the sky."

In this quote I identify sky as spirit/light/love or however you define God or the particles you think God is made of....and ourselves as clouds - part of the sky with temporary shapes that we cling to and say "See...I'm different than the sky...I am fluffy...I look nothing like the sky." or "I'm different from that cloud over there - he is shaped like a bunny. I am totally shaped like a wave."

We each have an idea of how we are different from others. We layer it on - ethnicity, gender, fashion style, age, personality type, zip code, tax bracket. When we take a minute to walk around in someone else's skin, to share their experience for a moment...we get an idea of the ways we are all alike.

And when we realize how we are alike and the superficiality and impermanence of the differences between each cloud, we have the opportunity to recognize the superficiality and impermanence of the differences between the clouds and the sky.

(note - apparently i have a lot to say about compassion and God. When I started writing, I thought my topic was going to be self compassion. I'm gonna have to compartmentalize my compassion posts for the sake of brevity!)

"How am I not myself?"

2010-11-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

We all have a concept of ourselves - how we are. It's important to look fully at that concept and recognize the limitations it can bring. There's a poem I've always loved that illuminated for me the polarizing effect our concepts can have on us.

In Mind - Denise Levertov

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears
a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she
is kind and very clean without
ostentation-
but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.

How much of our concept of 'self' has been edited til the final draft is acceptable to others? Much like my dream about the two dimensional moon, our concept of ourselves can be an obstacle. We need to acknowledge our full self to fully interact in the world.

I have the worst time acknowledging the fact that I can be stubborn. I once stubbornly refused to admit that I was stubborn during a zen workshop exercise intended to bring to light our self concepts. I even realized what I was doing and thought it was pretty funny, yet I couldn't say the words "I am stubborn."

What's so bad about being stubborn? The problem wasn't exactly the word or the concept of the word. It's the idea I had that it was an absolute. If I admit to being stubborn then that means I am always stubborn. Which I knew wasn't true. Sometimes, very often actually, I'm really flexible.

But our concepts about ourselves, good or bad, are limiting because we tend to make them absolutes. If we believe we are a 'nice' or 'generous' person, we might feel we always have to be nice or generous to be ourselves. Then what happens when we feel that we honestly don't have time or attention or things to share? Who are we then?

Often we will make ourselves uncomfortable and unhappy to live up to our idea of how/who we are. We limit our full experience and interaction with our environment so that it fits with our two dimensional, absolute concept.

It's comfortable to have an absolute concept and to feel like we know how we are. But is it worth the discomfort it causes living up to it?

sentimentality and self understanding

2010-11-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

Self understanding is a key point in Buddhism. When we question why we react to situations and why our feelings are triggered by certain outside influences, we get a better understanding of the way our ego works. Hopefully with this understanding we can lessen the hold the ego has on us and begin acting and reacting from a place of love and compassion rather than fear.

I have this habit of putting a lot of weight on the ways I express my care for other people. If I am baking banana bread for my friends and it comes out wrong, I get WAY more upset about it than seems reasonable...even to me. Recognizing that my reaction seems out of proportion to reality (I mean, seriously...it's just banana bread) I try to understand what meaning I'm putting into it that makes it so life or death.

Which brings me to Ireland...

In the summer of 2005 I visited Inis Mor, an island off the coast of Galway. I was going to be traveling through Europe alone for the next three months but my mother and sisters had joined me for the first week in Ireland. The day before my mother and sisters were leaving the island, my mother and I got into an argument. We rarely argued and I'm sad to say I was the one who really started it. Without resolving the conflict we parted ways -in dramatic fashion my sister Meg joined me on a walk on the high road across the island while my other sister Mary went with my mother across the low road. (True story, there are only two roads on the island and they are appropriately named.)

When we met up later in Kilronan, my mother handed me a scarf as a peace offering. It was a scarf that said she knew me - blue (naturally), knit and longer than I am tall. But more than that, it was a scarf that said "somehow we lost sight of the fact that we love each other for a minute, but here is a physical object to remind us".

The next morning I saw them off at the ferry and waved til their boat was out of the bay, then turned to walk across some untraveled part of the island with the blue scarf wrapped several times around me. I wandered along the cliffside of the island (the picture on this blog was taken from the cliff on Inis Mor) and met a farmer who broke my heart with various sentimental stories that the Irish tell so well.

As the day went on, it grew warmer and I wrapped the scarf around my bag and started to walk back toward Kilronan. When I got there, I realized the scarf was no longer on my bag. Panicked, I walked back across the island, searching for it. No dice. By the time I returned to Kilronan the second time I was in a bit of a state. I stopped in a store I had been in before I noticed the scarf was missing, to see if I had dropped it there. When I asked the clerk she said "No, dear, no one has turned in a scarf. You should go to the police."

I nearly laughed at this, but thought maybe the sight of my face two seconds away from crying over this scarf had led her to believe it was like... a Hermes scarf signed by God or something. So I assured her that it was actually just a blue knit scarf, garden variety. She nodded. "mm hmm, go to the police."

Then I thought maybe this lady isn't quite sane. So I went to a little cafe where I had bought a water around the same time and asked them if they had found a scarf. Their answer "you should go to the police."

They even gave me directions - the police station was on the low road.

Screw it, I thought. I was still really upset about the scarf and I was leaving the island tomorrow so why not go to the police? When I got to the police station, one policeman was sitting behind a desk in the middle of a pleasant phone conversation. He waved me to a chair in front of the desk and I sat in it, wondering how I was going to phrase this.

When he hung up the phone he smiled at me. "How can I help you?"
"um..this is kind of weird, but...I lost my scarf."
He nodded, pulled out a pad of paper and said "What does it look like?"
When I had given him all the particulars of the situation and where I had last remembered seeing the scarf, he took down my name and the hostel I was staying at and said he'd call after he did his nightly drive across the island and let me know if anything turned up.

Back at the hostel, I told the story to some acquaintances, young Americans who were working there. I thought they'd be incredulous about the police intervention instead they said "You LOST the scarf your mom gave you!!!?!"

Thanks, guys.

The police never found the scarf and I left Ireland the next day. This is the example I come back to when I question why I get so stressed out about banana bread. Why does this object gain such significance? Why does the scarf carry my mother's love? Why does the banana bread carry mine?

I'm sure everyone has their idea of how they show love. But when I get stressed about a baked good or upset to the point that I will go to the police over a scarf, I have to question my point of view. And try to remind myself that love is much bigger than the gestures and sentiments that we use as physical representations of it. Because, really, such a tiny, tiny piece of my mother's love for me is still in Ireland, while the rest is much closer.

two dimensional obstructions

2010-11-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

My sleeping mind offered up an interesting dream the other night. In the dream, I was driving a car up a mountain. It was night and the road was windy, with sharp turns. In typical dream strangeness, or perhaps to add some levity, Dwight Schrute from The Office was sitting in the passenger seat. Halfway up the mountain, I noticed the moon to my right - a huge, white full moon. It was beautiful and I pointed it out to Dwight, who was not impressed. Then I became aware that I couldn't see the road anymore.

And I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my vision. I saw the inside of the car and I saw the moon, but had completely lost sight of the road. I was still trying to drive though...probably not the best idea.

When I woke up, I understood what was wrong with my vision in the dream. When I lost sight of the road and only saw the moon... it was two dimensional. It was a picture - as if a poster was applied to the windshield of the car. There was no depth to it, no other elements to the landscape, only the moon.

In our lives we have concepts that we carry with us like two dimensional posters. They blind us from a true experience with the world around us. We do this with people, with events, with institutions. There is something about our initial experience that strikes us and it blooms into something bigger - whether we have an attachment to it or an aversion, and like shorthand or lopping off one dimension, we see only that something.

Obviously, concepts are necessary. For example, our concept of fire keeps us from directly experiencing it because that would be painful. And as zen as I'd like to be, I don't want to have a direct experience with everything around me right now. That sounds exhausting and I've got a day job.

But there are times when I recognize the limitations of a concept and I want to move beyond it. The first step is to see my concept as self created and to stop believing it is the absolute reality. If I had stopped in the middle of the road, my concept of the moon wouldn't have been a problem. But I wanted to drive forward and to do that, I had to see clearly. I had to see the full three dimensional landscape and react to all of it not to one piece of it that struck me.

Sometimes our concepts cause feelings to arise - anger, fear, sadness. That can make it even harder to move past the concept and experience reality. My teacher, Thich Thien Son, often said "check your concept against reality". Just this action of looking at your two dimensional poster and thinking, "maybe this is not the complete picture" can be very helpful if you want to change the way you interact with your environment.

In my dream, I ended up driving off the mountain feeling more confused than scared. Which, honestly, is probably where I'm at right now in real life. There are concepts I'm trying to shake but they're quite entrenched. And as I write this, I remind myself that while my concepts create MY reality, my reality is not the only reality. If I want to move forward, I have to be willing to truly see what's around me, not just what I think is there.

Bardo

2010-11-02T12:01:00.001-07:00

I find myself in a space between two homes. Having moved out of my previous home under stressful and dramatic circumstances, I am now waiting through a two week period before my new lease starts. At first, this seemed like a total drag to me. Moving all my stuff to storage, crashing on someone's couch and living out of a bag are all things I'd rather do if I'm going to be living in a foreign country for awhile. As it is, a two week layover between one south philly house and another seemed to me like all the worst parts of travel and none of the good ones.

And then the idea of a bardo came back to me. Bardo is a tibetan buddhist term - so it's not inherent to my practice (zen buddhism), but I see a parallel here that I can learn from.

A bardo is an "intermediate state", traditionally the term is used to describe the experience in between two incarnations, when one is no longer attached to the previous physical body and not yet born into the new one. During this time, when not in a physical body, the consciousness has the opportunity to directly experience reality or conversely, to be plagued by delusion.

Once I started thinking of this layover in terms of the bardo, I realized how many opportunities there are in life for little bardos. Little times in life when we have the chance to stop after something is completed and try to learn from the experience before running on to the next one. A chance to really clear the slate. Yet we tend to be impatient for the next thing to start immediately and we try to avoid this intermediate place.

It's uncomfortable to be without physical groundedness. I want keys to my own place. I want mail and all my belongings around me. I want to layer myself and protect myself with all the trappings of domesticity. I want to knit, read books, bake cookies and make soup.

Yet in this discomfort, where the objects around me are not echoing 'me', I could take the opportunity to step away from 'me' and focus on something larger.

Here's hoping I come out on the other side wiser and not addled with delusion and fear :)

Applied Buddhism

2010-11-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

"Applied buddhism" has a wonderful ring to it. It's what I find myself attempting to do in my life. Not just by meditating or being a vegetarian or trying very hard not to kill that mosquito or freakishly large spider, but by actually applying the philosophy of Buddhism to my thoughts and actions.

Some buddhist teachings can come off as esoteric or nihilistic or like a riddle that can only be understood by those who choose to devote their whole lives and focus to enlightenment. I have to be honest - when I read books on buddhism, it tends to feel very lifeless to me. Yet in the past 7 years, I have been fortunate enough to receive some wonderful teachings that have moved me profoundly through their simplicity and clarity. They've taught me to draw lines connecting vast concepts to their immediate example in the present moment. In this blog I hope to share my attempts with you all. Please feel free to comment and question :)