Sangha

When I was growing up, my older brother and I had to go to mass every Sunday. The rest of our family didn't go - the younger siblings being too small to attend without our parents who didn't want to go to Mass. For some reason, my Dad seemed to think that my brother's and my attendance was crucial to our moral and spiritual development.

This mandated attendance usually involved both of us standing in the very back of the church, as far back as we could get while technically being 'in church'. I would look out over the congregation the way people look at those optical illusion illustrations, where if you soften your gaze enough, some other picture becomes clear. I could do that for 45 minutes. Lost in my thoughts, appreciating the stained glass windows, willfully disregarding all the memorized-into-nonsense prayers.

My brother, being two years older and far more openly rebellious, would stand with arms crossed, sulking or glaring. The very skate punk insignia that covered his mostly black clothing was an all encompassing thumbed nose at all he surveyed.

One Sunday, Father Brennan walked into the back of the church and stopped next to Pat. Conversationally, he said 'They love you in there too, you know.'

Having been raised to be especially respectful to priests and nuns, my brother shrugged and mumbled. Meanwhile, I was drawn out of my reveries by that interaction. I felt embarassment for the priest who spoke so earnestly but had completely misread the situation and mostly - uncontrollable hilarity. I willed myself not to laugh. I refused to look at my brother even after Father Brennan walked away because I knew that when I did, I would lose my shit laughing at him.

We left at the earliest possible time we could while still saying we had been to mass. Outside I immediately started in 'Dude. All this time, you've been hating going to mass. But it's cool now. Problem solved. They love you in there too.'

Being teenagers, we were especially mistrustful of institutions and viewed them and their congregants with a Holden Caulfield-ish hypersensitivity to phoniness and hypocrisy. And to our skeptical eyes, there was a whole lot of phoniness going on there. Not to mention a pretty big disconnect between the idea of the grand scope of Jesus' love and the little insignificant rituals of sitting, standing, kneeling and repeating prayers. From the back of that church, the ritual of mass looked like a collection of small, pixelated images that were obscuring the larger image I wanted to connect to.

More than ten years later, after a few years of working on my individual Buddhist practice, I decided to move to a monastery in Germany for three months to find some kind of structure and support for my practice. The 'official' ceremony for becoming a Buddhist is called 'taking refuge'. The idea is that you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha offers refuge/support in his example of embodying Buddha Nature or the god in all of us. The Dharma offers refuge as a philosophy or lesson. Sangha means 'a community with a common goal, vision or purpose.' And the support it gives is in the day to day efforts to apply Dharma and to recognize our Buddha Nature.

Here again was this idea of a collection of individuals as a support and kind of conduit to spirituality. Yet it was easier for me to feel the validity of that idea within the sanghas in Philadelphia and Germany. Inside these groups, I didn't see them as phony or hypocritical, I saw them as I saw myself - people who aspired to connect with love and spirituality yet who were naturally and humanly flawed and lible to act in ways that weren't quite in keeping with their highest aspirations. Those very flaws, that very humanity was what allowed me to feel connected to them in a way that I didn't feel connected to Buddha or Dharma. There seemed to be a lot of perfection going on there.Whereas our sangha was quite imperfect.

The funny thing about my time in that monastery is that half the time, someone in the sangha was freaking out or acting in a way that was so ego based it seemed the opposite of everything Buddhist. And the structured/organized religion of Buddhism is not completely without monks or nuns who abuse power and act in ways that are hypocritical.

As a 14 year old, standing in the back of the Buddha Hall, I would have disregarded the people as little pixelated images, totally insignificant and unrelated to the concept of Buddhism. I wouldn't have cared if a monk had come up to me and said 'They love you in there too.' Who wants to be loved by hypocritical, crazy people? And what does that have to do with God? I would have softened my gaze, disconnected from the group and tried to see the bigger picture that was separate and better than the group of individuals and their seemingly unrelated actions.

Honestly, sometimes I still do. But then I'm reminded that I am one of those little pixelated images that makes up the bigger picture. And the times that I've felt most connected to the bigger picture, it's because I opened myself up to the humanness of myself and the humanness of others.

From the back of the church, outside looking in, I might see a group of crazy people, or I might see a bigger, seemingly more important image. But inside, among the group, I can feel it. And in the mixture of imperfections and repeated efforts to let go of fear and identify with love and compassion, I can feel the point where the human experience meets the spiritual experience.

And it's in experience that we gain wisdom, which is a deeper knowledge than any we could gain from staying detached and trying to critically and conceptually understand.

Curiosity

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

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

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

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

'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

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.