Meyers Briggs and the middle path

A basic point in Buddhism is the idea of avoiding extremes and seeking a middle path. Our natural tendency is to lean toward things, people and experiences that make us feel comfortable and happy and to avoid ones that make us uncomfortable and unhappy.  The problem with this is that avoiding an unpleasant experience doesn't make it disappear. It still exists and by not accepting it and trying to find a balance with it, we are not fully present. Not in harmony.

Carl Jung had a similar theory about our individual psychology. He believed that we all have parts of ourselves that we use to excess and parts that we repress and try to distance ourselves from. To Jung, this not only created imbalance, but also created a situation where the repressed parts of ourselves were influencing our lives from an unconscious place. It was from this point of view that he said,

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” 

His theory of Individuation involves becoming aware of the unconscious and repressed parts of ourselves and finding a way to integrate them in a healthy way. 

I discovered Carl Jung a decade before I discovered Buddhism. I was an avid reader in high school, consuming classic literature and books on metaphysics and mysticism with equal fervor. When I stumbled onto some article of Jung's regarding the shadow self, I became enthralled. I'm sure many of us in high school were very aware of having a version of ourselves that we didn't share with society. The idea that we all try to amputate parts of our personality that don't fit in with the outside world - it resonated. His perspective, that it was necessary to revive and integrate those parts, gave me a sense of freedom and hope. 

A few years later, in further reading, I came across the Meyers Briggs test. (If you're curious about your type - this test is pretty quick.) The Meyers Briggs was created by students of Jung to try to map the psyche and see what ways of functioning we prefer and which functions we avoid. I took the test, read the description, agreed and then went about my life. 

 Years later, when a Buddhist teacher gave a dharma talk about becoming self aware to limit the power of the ego over our lives, I heard echoes of Carl Jung in the teaching. There is an element of self- acceptance in both that I find incredibly powerful. Each promotes the non-judgemental space to truly look at ourselves and accept what's there, while recognizing the possibility of growth. 

In the next decade, I discovered Buddhism and energy work, traveled internationally, became more self aware, and far more extraverted.A few years ago, I decided to take the Meyers Briggs test again. I felt like I had changed so much in the past ten years and it would be interesting to see how that might have changed the way my psyche functions. Interestingly, my results were exactly the same as they were ten years ago. I had to laugh at myself. Because growth doesn't mean changing who we are, it means integrating all the parts of who we are and trying to find balance. 

Here's a simple breakdown of the way Meyers Briggs works. There are four main functions that we may rely on heavily or avoid. There is a spectrum for each and different ways that the functions interact with each other so these are used as a basic guideline with tons of room for variations.  I bolded the letters by which each is referenced. 

Introverted or Extraverted - This shows whether we prefer our inner world or the outer world and where we get our energy. An extravert will feel revived after spending lots of time with a crowd and may begin to feel depleted after spending long periods of time alone. An introvert will feel drained after spending long periods of time with others and will feel refreshed after a significant amount of time alone. 

Example - I am an introvert but I love hanging out with my good friends. I love meeting new people and hearing new perspectives. I love live music and concerts. I truly enjoy sharing experiences with others. But I reach a point where I will feel completely drained and cranky if I don't have a decent amount of time to myself. My extravert friends are all over the spectrum of E. There are some who feel uncomfortable being alone and there are those who are ok with it. The common point they all share is that when they are around others, they feel energized and more lively. 

From a Buddhist perspective, we need to acknowledge and accept the world we're most comfortable inhabiting and how we recharge our internal batteries. But we need to try to strike a balance between our individual self and our community so that we are comfortable alone and with others. 

INtuitive or  Sensing - This shows how we prefer to take in information. Someone with more dominant N relies on their instinct, interpretation and reading between the lines whereas a more dominant S will interact based on practical, tangible facts and the physical information at hand. The intuitive might take the physical experience of the moment and layer it with impressions, imagined possibilities and assumptions based on nuances. The sensor would really interact with the present moment from a physical perspective, taking in information via the five senses. 

Example -  One of the most uncomfortable experiences for me as an N type is if someone is talking to me about something mundane and unemotional but their vibe, body language and general impression is of emotional pain. They might be talking about a grocery list, but if they seem like they're upset - that's all I hear, and they haven't even said it, that information hasn't been relayed through the five senses. Someone who is more Sensing relies more on what their five senses tell them about a situation. They might miss undertones and nuances but they truly experience the present moment from a physical standpoint. I have gone whole days lost in daydreams, plans for the future or a good novels and completely forgotten to eat. My S friends cannot even comprehend how that could happen. Eating is not only a practical part of life, it's also something they enjoy with their senses. 

From a Buddhist perspective, we need to acknowledge and accept our individual preference for the way we receive information. We also need to try to strike a balance between the two so that we are not floating in the ether of the invisible cosmos and disconnected from the world around us or conversely, limited by or consumed by the five senses and daily details of life. 

Feeling or Thinking - Okay, obviously we all have feelings and we all have thoughts. This category is about which of the two influences our decision making and our daily lives. Someone with dominant T will act mind over emotions most of the time, preferring clear rational thinking to emotional motivation. Someone with dominant F will focus more on their own and others feelings when acting. 

Example - One of my best friends is T and I am F. We have been friends for a really long time and always have great conversations. She's a very caring and loyal friend, as am I, so that creates a foundation where our conversations can really highlight our different ways of approaching issues. Personally, I am motivated by emotional connection. If there is a feeling present there is a motivation for me to act. Recently I had a political conversation with this friend and I could really see how different we approached the situation. She pointed out impacts of policy that I had never even thought about and maintained a level, thoughtful approach while discussing even the most upsetting aspects of our country's political system. I know that she understands and cares about the people who are negatively affected by flawed politics, and yet her approach to the topic was completely analytical. Listening to her I recognized that she was able to use this intellectual approach to reach conclusions and possible solutions that might never have occurred to me, steeped as I was in my revolutionary passion. 

From a Buddhist perspective, we need to accept and acknowledge our preference and motivation to act on feeling or thoughts. From there, we can try to strike a balance so that we're neither irrationally following our feelings wherever they lead us or conversely, acting only on rational thinking and divorcing emotion from the situation at hand. 

Perceiving or Judgement - This one is often misunderstood. It's not about being perceptive or judgemental, it's about how we prefer to deal with structure in our lives. Someone who leans toward P prefers to  remain open to possible events and not commit to one thing. They enjoy the freedom of taking things as they come and 'going with the flow'. Someone who leans toward J prefers to make a decision and follow it through to it's natural end. The J prefers to use organization and order to structure their lives.

Example - oh, so many examples here :) I have a lot of P friends who like to leave plans open to change or not make plans until the last minute, based on what's going on and how they feel in the moment. This for them is freedom. Being a J type, I prefer to have plans made and put them in my calendar. When new possibilities come up, I schedule around that set plan. This feels like freedom to me because something important has a set action attached to it, so I'm free to interact with other events as they come up. The downside of each -  a P type might have so many options they can't decide what to do or they leave things open until the last minute and miss chances for things they really did want to do. The J type might schedule themselves into a corner so they're not free to do something that pops up at the last minute or they might get so hung up on how they 'planned' for things to happen that they can't appreciate a happy accident. 

From a Buddhist perspective, we need to accept and acknowledge how we react to structure. Do we overuse structure or avoid it like the plague?  From there we can strive to find a balance by finding ways that we can use structure in a balanced way that feels supportive to us, but not confining. In a previous post I wrote about acceptance. From a buddhist perspective, acceptance doesn't mean just accepting everything that happens to us. It means recognizing all of the elements involved, acting on the elements that we have power to affect and going with the flow with the elements that are beyond our control. 

The keys to the Buddhist middle path and Jung's Individuation are self awareness and integration. Neither Buddha nor Jung asks us to change who we are - they both ask us to expand our concept of who we are and include those parts of ourselves that we avoid because we feel they weaken us. Both tell us that in ignoring these aspects of ourselves, we become unbalanced and therefore weaker.

Another aspect of Meyers Briggs that I've found helpful from a buddhist perspective is increasing understanding. I've had friends that don't like making decisions and prefer not to make set plans and because that's not in my personality, it always confounded me. Looking at it from a place of Perceiving function, it makes sense to me. In the past few years I've become very aware of how much work I need to do on integrating the Sensing part of myself. Remembering to eat food is a good start. I can't always live on coffee. My friends who lean toward Sensing also help me get out of my daydreams and be present with them in the moment. My extravert friends remind me that sometimes it's fun to be in a crowd (sometimes). My thinking friends show me sides of an issue my emotion may have blinded me to. All of these experiences help me creep a little closer to a middle path.

Rejection Fear and Five Elements Acupuncture

I wrote in the past about my old teacher’s theory that we are all consciously avoiding one of three fears - rejection, worthlessness or abandonment. In that post I mentioned that some people have trouble distinguishing their conscious fear because all three are valid fears that they’ve experienced at one time in their life or another. The key to locating your conscious fear is recognizing the habit pattern you play out repeatedly to avoid one of those three feelings. For myself, i had zero problem diagnosing myself as rejection fear.

The feeling of being ousted or unwelcome by a person, place or situation where I had once felt welcomed, loved and supported is just the worst feeling for me. I will do Olympic level feats of mind, emotion and body to avoid experiencing this feeling.

The first time I came back to Paris after having lived here as my home for three months, I cringed at every single experience of feeling more like a tourist than a resident. Needing to stay at a hostel for a few days instead of an apartment just felt like I was living in a cardboard box outside my home. And the more I saw it this way, the more I steeped myself in this feeling. Eventually, circumstances worked me out of the feeling. But I never really learned how to work myself out of the feeling.

A few weeks ago, back in Philly, I met an acupuncturist (Doren Day) at a healers networking event and she talked a little bit about her specific type of acupuncture - five elements. This type focuses on the main element that the person seems to be unbalanced in and treats that, rather than the symptoms. The idea was really interesting to me and after more conversation we set up a trade.

Doren suggested doing Medical Qi Gong on me with a little bit of Zero Balancing. I had a good sense of her intuition and skill as a healer, so I was all for whatever modality she wanted to use. In the session, she located a block between the heart and the spleen. This block is exactly in the place that I have felt energy stuck for a really long time. She said that it was in part due to a repeated emotional trauma in childhood and in part due to the perception that was created in that trauma. Which is very much in line with the Buddhist idea of how habit patterns are created. There is an initial trauma and then the ego/mind perpetuates it in a kind of ham-fisted effort to ‘fix’ that initial trauma. ‘Fix it’ by repeating it over and over and over again.

Awesome. Thanks, ego/mind.

I left the session feeling really clear and grounded energetically. But I also knew that I had homework to do beyond the qi gong exercises that can keep this meridian channel clear. I had to work on the mental perception that paired up with this energy and played ping pong back and forth in the space between my heart and solar plexus.

I knew, in part, that this repeated emotional trauma had to do with my experience of being one of six kids. One of six kids of parents who were young and incredibly stressed out and overburdened by regular life and paying bills. During my early childhood, their individual thresholds for any kind of emotional disturbance was incredibly low. Being human, they were often impatient with the problems and emotional hurts I brought to them for attention and healing. Being incredibly overwhelmed, I was sometimes answered with irritation when I came to them and expressed a need or source of pain.

That is the energetic imprint that was blocking the heart and spleen. The mental one is what my ego/mind did with their response. My little four year old self decided that it was my needs and pains that were the problem and so I had to deal with them myself - hide them almost. And so I developed a habit very early on of being hurt and adapting that old ‘mind over matter’, ‘stiff upper lip’ ‘don’t rock the boat’ mentality.

It was the way my ego decided to avoid the feeling of rejection that came when I brought a pain or need to a loved one and felt that I was wrong for doing so, wrong for needing help or comfort, wrong for expressing myself.

The ego will tell me that this is how to avoid suffering. In Paris three years ago, it told me to avoid coming back here and not put myself in the position of wanting to be at home in a place that didn’t seem to allow my need for a reliable internet signal, a bedroom of my own and a key to a place where I could leave all my stuff instead of bungling through the metro like a pack-mule.

A few weeks ago, when I was getting ready to come back to Paris for three months and I couldn’t find an affordable sublet, my ego told me the same thing. Nepal is nice, why not go to Nepal? You’ve never felt at home there so you can’t feel rejected! I caved for a moment, planned weeks in Spain and Marseilles, but there is that part of me that will always want to feel at home in Paris. And eventually Paris won out, or won two thirds of the three months. But here I am, in Paris for four days before heading to Spain. Here I am at a hostel with bags that weigh more than I’d like to carry around with me, searching for a wifi signal.

I decided to do some research on the spleen. I get the heart part of this blockage, but what’s the deal with the spleen? I had already read that it supports the heart in the cycle of chi through the body. But what does it do individually?

Turns out its ‘element’ in five elements acupuncture is Earth, which is about nurturing. The kind of nurturing that comes from paying attention to your body’s needs but also your emotional needs. It can become unbalanced if this nurturing isn’t felt in childhood. And the mental perception that we don’t deserve nurturing keeps it unbalanced. The emotion associated with the Spleen is sympathy and understanding. In my case, this information was really interesting. I tend to be pretty good at understanding other people and sympathizing/empathizing with them.
And then I kept reading -

'As well as the ability to express sympathy toward others, however, we must be able to receive it, too. It is necessary that others understand how and when we hurt, that others know what we are going through. When a child is in pain, it calls immediately for its mother, the source for sympathy and understanding. But with an Earth imbalance, the need for sympathy can become excessive and insatiable; or, in its opposite manifestation, sympathy may be completely absent. We all know people from whom we can expect no compassion, regardless of circumstance. And there are also those who cannot receive sympathy or help at all - the sort who say, "No, I can do it myself.” '

Ahh, that last sentence is me, especially as a child. I thought that if needing understanding and compassion was the problem, then NOT needing it must be a good thing! If I can take care of myself completely, then I won’t be rejected.

The problem is, especially then, but even now, I can’t take care of myself completely. I need others to understand me and be compassionate toward me. I’ve kinda dug myself into a hole though, because in the years of trying to not need any help, I often have difficulty recognizing when I need nurturing. I am notorious for forgetting to eat. I never drink enough water. When my feelings are hurt I tend to withdrawal rather than express that pain. And when I come out of my cocoon, the hurt is not healed and soothed, it’s just quieter.

This afternoon, while I was writing about this in my journal trying to form some kind of coherent point, I sat down on the curb of a Parisian street to tackle the issue at hand. It had become a little chilly, but in typical fashion, I hadn’t really noticed. I just focused on the writing.

Suddenly a man called to me ‘Mademoiselle!’ I turned and saw that he was the owner of the kebab shop behind me. He asked me why I was sitting there. I stood up and apologized. My mind was interpreting his french rather quickly but my ego was interpreting it quicker. ‘He wants you to stop loitering like a freaking vagabond in front of his shop!’ Then the translation came through of what he was actually saying. He was pointing to the only table in front of his shop. ‘Why don’t you sit here? It’s better than the curb, right?’
‘Yes,’ I smiled ‘Thank you, it’s much better than the curb.’ He nodded and went back into his shop. I sat and wrote some more. Then suddenly a small steaming cup of hot fragrant tea was placed in front of me. I looked up and the kebob shop owner nodded. I smiled and thanked him again and he went back into his shop.

And then I realized that I was pretty cold and the tea was very good but more than anything, in this moment, I needed that experience of hospitality, nourishment and kindness. I needed that experiential lesson of how I should be treating myself and what I should allow others to give me.

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words and energy

Mindfulness

People talk about yoga being a moving meditation. It helps us be present in the moment, helps us connect to our bodies, emotions, thoughts and experiences. I feel great after every yoga class I take, and yet,,,when I'm going through difficult times in my life I avoid yoga like the plague. 

Being present is the last thing I want to do when I'm feeling sad or upset. I want to focus on things that will get me out of my sad state of feeling instead of settling down into it to really 'experience' it. 

1) because I'm not a masochist

2) because my inherent nature is to be delighted by the world and people around me and gravitate toward optimism, humor, hope and positivity. 

3) because my ego keeps intentionally forgetting what buddhism has taught me - that true freedom and peace are found in the middle ground between extremes. As JD Salinger put it 'I can't be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.'

So despite my reluctance to be present with myself this winter, I went to yoga at least once a week. I made some existential discoveries via  handstands . I started going to a class with a teacher who occasional curses and consistently plays music by The Cure. 

Last Friday in this class, while Morissey was singing 'Love Cats' I put my mat against a wall and got ready to fight with handstands. With my palms flat on the mat, I watched my feet walk towards my hands then struggle to kick up into the handstand. This fight against gravity and physics and my concept of my capabilities went on for a few minutes. Then  I  remembered a teacher at some point in the past year  telling me that I was supposed to look at my hands - look down at my mat. So I tried it and to my astonishment my legs kicked up into a handstand like there was no fight at all, like gravity was on their side. It felt light, natural and easy. 

I flipped out of the handstand and thought for a moment. It worked once, but maybe that wasn't the only thing that was different. So I tried again, palms on mat, eyes on mat, bam- feet in the air. 

It's now four days later and I've been testing this method every day in lots of different places. My kitchen, the living room, at work... each time it's the same. If I look down at my hands, my upper spine is stacked in a way that gives the legs a stable foundation. In handstands, like in life, my gaze was always on where I was going- movement, the future, hope. The idea that there was something to be gained by looking down at where I was in the moment felt counter intuitive. It felt limiting. And yet, as I learned in yoga - there is stability, strength and lightness in being present. 

Which brings me to Kung Fu Panda. 

And how much I love Master Oogway. The sweet old tortoise zen master tells his student 'The past is history, the future's a mystery but today is a gift, that's why it's called 'the present.' 

Not being enlightened, like Oogway, into a beautiful shower of cherry blossom petals, I must point out that while there is wisdom in this quote, it has also been my experience that sometimes the present moment sucks. Sometimes it feels like quicksand and if I hang out too long, I will just get stuck in that experience forever.

The wisdom of that quote, from a buddhist perspective, is that the past consists of millions of present moments and so does the future. In the present moment, we have the ability to experience not just pain but also healing. We have the ability to apply something we learned months ago to the present moment and witness how it alters the physical experience as well as the mental experience.

This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness is 'the intentional, nonjudgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment.' Throughout the winter, I felt too overwelmed by my sadness to allow myself to be mindful of it outside of designated moments - in meditation or yoga classes. I struggled with the 'nonjudgmental' part of the definition.

My struggle, my resistance to my sadness was in part because I felt like if I was present in the sadness, I would lose perspective. That by being present in the present moment, I would be overcome by sadness and lose sight of the positive aspects in life that I knew were all around me.

I was always afraid to focus too much on the present moment because I thought I'd miss the big picture. If I just focused on today, I would feel trapped. But at the same time, if I just focus on tomorrow, it's ungrounded and I miss the chances the present moment offers for change.

If I were an enlightened tortoise, perhaps I'd be able to recognize in the present moment how my experience was created by the past and how what I choose to do in this moment will help shape my future experience. For now, I will keep doing handstands to build up muscle memory. And more importantly - the ego memory, that despite the strong energy of my habitual tendencies, it is possible to be grounded, balanced and upside down all because of a small change in perspective.

And I will remind myself that the present moment may include feelings of sadness, but it also includes experiences of growth, it also includes 'Love Cats', it also includes hope.

handstands

 I had coffee on sunday with one of my closest friends, who was also my first buddhist teacher. Over the years our friendship has become a kind of sangha of two. We've shared our deepest struggles and trusted each other to offer wisdom and compassion. Our conversations have the tendency to start with very simple topics and end in very deep revelations. But over the past few months, something has been off. She's been going through a lot of pain in her life and I often felt unable to offer her anything of value. 

After a few minutes of ordinary catching-up, I mentioned that a mutual friend of ours had felt like I was being short with him lately. I told Ellen that I recognized myself being impatient with him, but that there was no real reason for it, certainly nothing that he'd done and so I had apologized. 

Ellen was silent for a moment and then she said 'I've felt the same thing, like you're different in the past few months.' 

I thought back to the past few months and pointed out a few instances where I had recognized that something was off in myself. In the summer, during a yoga class, my teacher had pointed out that I'm pretty fearless with inversions. I don't have any trouble popping up into a bridge or leaping face down into a handstand. She suggested I try to go into a handstand from downward facing dog, instead of leaping into it like a gymnast. That way, the handstand would be grounded from the strength of my core instead of relying on momentum. And I had spent the next couple months thinking about that. My habit has always been to leap into things and not be afraid, but when it comes to things that require stability and groundedness, I find myself floundering. Talking to friends of mine who do yoga and have trouble going into inversions, I realized that the idea of flipping upside down was the antithesis of security to them. But to me, perhaps I didn't feel grounded enough when I was upright to really feel the insecurity of being upside down. 

I began to consider the root chakra. In the fall, I visited friends in Europe and on the flight into Paris I felt the city pull to me as strongly as it ever had, perhaps more so. But as much as my heart rejoiced in that feeling of homecoming, my mind worried over my struggle to find a way to make Paris my home more permanently. In the weeks after that trip, I found myself becoming dizzy and feel disconnected to my life in Philly. I felt powerless to create the massive change I wanted to make in my life. So in the span of a few months, prompted by my efforts to do a handstand from a position of power and stability - I began to open up the energy blockages in my root chakra (groundedness, stability), sacral chakra (trust in emotional nourishment, acceptance of change)  and solar plexus chakra (personal power)  that were impeding me from finding a way to act. 

I shared some of this with Ellen, explaining that I've felt disconnected for a while and just kind of overwhelmed. She listened and then, explaining her experience talking to me in the past few months, said 'A lot of the time, when we were talking, I would share something and your response felt like you hadn't really heard me. Which never happened with you before. You always used to hear what was between the lines and respond to what I was really saying, even if I wasn't able to articulate it.' 

And that's when I realized that my heart was clogged up. 'I know what you mean. My responses missed the mark because I was listening to you with just my mind, not my heart.' 

As I said it I recognized the truth of it, all of this energy swirling around in the first three chakras, all these fears about not being powerful enough, connected enough, supported enough had reached the fourth chakra - the heart.  And instead of letting the heart be compassionate toward my fears, I shut it down and tried to find a solution with my mind. 

My teacher once equated each of the first four chakras with a natural element. The root chakra is earth, the sacral- water, the solar plexus - air and the heart chakra - fire. He reminded us that the heart chakra is the biggest of all the chakras and he equated it to a furnace or the sun. It is more powerful than we ever give it credit for. It has the power to clear blockages in the other chakras - through compassion. 

My friends were the helpful mirror who showed me that my heart wasn't open to them, which made me realize that my heart wasn't open to myself, either. So all the handstands I tried, all the analysis used to solve my struggles with the first three chakras - they wouldn't work unless my heart was open. 

Because as the Little Prince told us, 'It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.' 

engaged buddhism and political activism

On my way to New York yesterday for the People's climate march I fell into a very productive facebook hole that led me to an article someone had posted about Thich Nhat Hanh's perspective on climate change 


'The 86-year-old Vietnamese monk, who has hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, believes the reason most people are not responding to the threat of global warming, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, is that they are unable to save themselves from their own personal suffering, never mind worry about the plight of Mother Earth.'

The timing was perfect.  I was going to the march because I believe that we need to change the way we live on this planet, to protect our trees, our air and our water. Yet I had become a little jaded about the effect of protests and petitions against the seemingly all-powerful corporate monoliths who continue to treat the planet with a disrespect and disregard that I can't comprehend. And honestly, I had become increasingly frustrated and angry with the corporate and political structures that continued to operate in ways that harm the planet or obstruct efforts to protect it. 

This article helped me recognize that my compassion for the planet, my feeling of connection to it, was causing me to take a side in a way that was actually NOT compassionate because it fostered an 'us versus them' attitude. My compassion was very focused, to the point where it lost sight of the basic principle of compassion - that we are all connected. And if we are all connected, then we are all connected to the people who are harming the planet. 

There are many elements of Buddhist philosophy to study and meditate on but I always come back to compassion. It is a mirror and a teacher in so many ways. 
It's a struggle to feel compassion for someone who we feel is acting violently against us and those we feel connected to. 



In the past six months or so, I had begun to feel very overwhelmed by violence in the world. Violence on a global level, violence against the planet, as well as violence at home.
On a local level, two gay men were savagely beaten in Philadelphia while walking to get pizza. The people who beat them up, a group of young men and women, did so simply because they were gay. In the week after the attack, the city's citizens used social media as an outlet for their anger against this group of attackers as well as a means to help the police identify them. In the midst of facebook posts calling for these people to be locked up forever,tarred and feathered, etc., my roommate and I sat in our kitchen and talked about it. As a gay man, he had personally never experienced anything like this attack and he struggled to understand the mindset of these people who would do such a thing. Yet neither of us felt this sense of violence in response to the attackers that was peppering our facebook feeds, just a profound confusion and sadness.

With these events weighing heavily on my heart and a growing uncertainty about how my buddhist perspective could be acted upon in these situations, this reminder about compassion again comes in handy. It also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Bob Dylan. When offered a peace prize in the 60s, his acceptance speech was met with boos and later, a request that he return the award. The reason for this was that he tried to express a sentiment that was very unpopular with the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee who had given him the award. In a poetic sorry/not sorry letter, he explained his point of view -

"yes  if there's violence in the times then
there must be violence in me
I am not a perfect mute.
I hear the thunder an I cant avoid hearin it
once this is straight between us, it's then an
only then that we can say "we" an really mean
it... an go on from there t do something about
it"
-Bob Dylan

This is the tricky thing to remember. That if there's violence in the times, there's violence in me. And only if my 'we' includes everyone, can something really change. Only if my 'we' includes everyone am I really acting from compassion. 

What makes me hopeful about the planet is that 400,000 people marched in New York yesterday and did so with an affirmative sense of connection to the earth and to those around them and to everyone on the planet who would be affected by climate change. 

What makes me hopeful about Philadelphia is that so many people of all sexual orientations spoke out in defense of those two men. Local politicians are making efforts to change the state law to categorize attacks like this as a hate crime and a rally is scheduled this week that is titled 'love over hate.' 

From a buddhist point of view, I see these events overall as being steps toward connection over disconnection. We can only do violence to something or someone that we are disconnected from. When we see the planet and others as connected to ourselves, we  act with compassion.  Their problems are our problems, their suffering our suffering. 

The struggle is to keep expanding who we include in our 'we' - Which leads me again to a piece of writing by Thich Nhat Hanh -

Call Me by My True Names
Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.
I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.
I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.
Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh

Presence

'If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence.'
-Thich Nhat Hanh

A few months ago I heard about Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the MOMA, called 'The Artist Is Present'. For three months, she sat in a chair in the museum and wordlessly kept eye contact with anyone who sat down in the chair across from her. Many people had intense reactions to this experience, sometimes even crying. When I heard about these reactions, it seemed quite natural to me that people would respond so strongly to the profound experience of simply sitting and looking at someone who was simply sitting and looking at them.

When you think about our daily interactions, even with those who are close to us, they are usually filled with conversation, activity, individual thoughts about the past or plans for the future, not to mention the endless checking-in with social media. It is incredibly difficult to do what Abramovic did - just be present.

There is a such a strong impulse to fill the space between ourselves and others. And it can be an incredibly vulnerable experience when there is nothing to distract us.

And an incredibly powerful experience.

Metta meditation

Of all the different types of meditation practices, Metta meditation is my favorite.

"The Pali word metta is a multi-significant term meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, benevolence, fellowship, amity, concord, inoffensiveness and non-violence. The Pali commentators define metta as the strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others (parahita-parasukha-kamana). Essentially metta is an altruistic attitude of love and friendliness as distinguished from mere amiability based on self-interest."
-Metta, the philosophy and practice of universal love


While this concept of Metta is lovely, it may seem hard to access on a daily basis when we are caught up in our daily stresses and worries. The method of Metta meditation is very simple and I've always found it incredibly effective. Even at my most selfish, ego-ridden and closed-hearted moments, when I take fifteen minutes to practice this meditation, I am always struck at how I am able to open my heart and how much more comfortable and happy I am when I do. It begins by offering Metta to ourselves, then a loved one, then a person we feel neutrally about, then someone we feel hostile toward, then all sentient beings.

The method is simple. Begin in a comfortable position and breathe calmly for a few minutes, letting the mind rest and thoughts come and go. When you feel settled, bring your awareness to your heart center.  (I imagine that I am breathing through my heart chakra, that each inhale brings energy into my heart and each exhale releases energy from my heart.)
When you are ready offer yourself metta by saying the following:
May I be happy
May I be peaceful
May I live with ease of heart

When you feel ready to move on, bring to mind someone you love and offer them metta:
May you be happy
May you be peaceful
May you live with ease of heart.

Now move on to someone you feel neutrally about and offer them metta:
May you be happy
May you be peaceful
May you live with ease of heart.

At this point in the meditation, we imagine someone that we have had some difficulty with. At first, it doesn't have to be someone who has hurt you very deeply, it can be someone you find irritating or someone with whom you've had hostile interactions or arguments with in the past. Building from the metta you have offered to yourself, a loved one, and a stranger, bring this 'difficult' person to mind and offer them metta.
May you be happy
May you be peaceful
May you live with ease of heart

Now imagine the entire world and all sentient beings. (I always find that it's incredibly easy to offer metta to the whole world after facing the hurdle of offering it to someone I find difficult :)
Offer them metta:
May all sentient beings be happy
May all sentient beings be peaceful
May all sentient beings live with ease of heart

Remain in this stage until you feel ready to end your meditation. 

When I'm finished with this meditation I always find it refreshing and it grounds me in the nature of the heart, which says 'Of course I wish all sentient beings are happy, peaceful and live with ease of heart.' It costs me absolutely nothing to wish it and yet the nature of the ego and our daily fears and stresses can make it seem like a concession to wish well for others.

the common language

I found my cafe the first week I was here. It just happened to be around the corner from the grocery store so I sat down. The waiter was really friendly and corrected my french in the best possible way - laughingly. Now that I'm a regular, I don’t even have to practice the french necessary to order the coffee. I sit down and two minutes later - a cafe creme appears on my table. Yet, I seem to understand and speak more French at this cafe than any other place in the city.
I write a little while and watch the people walk by.
The cafe is across from L’hotel de Sully and bike tours drive by and stop occasionally. The other day the tour guide said something in English to the group while pointing to the building and a man walked by and yelled ‘C’est pas vrai!’ (It’s not true!) and chuckled to himself mischievously.
One guy is my favorite. His job appears to be taking free newspapers and handing them out like they’re Christmas presents. The first time I noticed him he strode out of the cafe and shouted to a woman pushing a toddler in a stroller. ‘Salut! Ma petite copine!’ A tiny hand shot out of the stroller and he handed the little girl a paper. She clutched it like a prize on her lap and as she was pushed away, she turned to him and piped out ‘Salut!’
This morning at the cafe, I practiced my French with the waiter. Topics included the holiday (Toussaint), a particularly charming dog at the table next to mine, and our respective moods. The newspaper guy walked into the cafe and was given a rousing standing ovation. I couldn’t hear what they were applauding him for but I agreed. Well done, sir.

Absolutes and the shared reality

I arrived in Paris a few days ago and will be staying for a few months. I've written before about my experiences in France, especially in regard to language and trying to find a balanced way to share a reality.

My experience so far has been different from the one I described in my last post. This is probably partially because I have been jetlagged like crazy. I'm walking around the city and my main reaction is that it is comfortable and accessible and natural. I may get lost and not know the best route to get where I'm going, but that's not a big deal.

I'm also speaking French for the smaller exchanges - buying a coffee, baguette or groceries. In these exchanges, I try to answer questions instead of just caving and saying I don't understand. Like the day I arrived. I had slept 2 hours when I first arrived in Paris, then I woke up with a completely unwanted second wind that was entirely related to daylight and had nothing to do with my mind or body being ready to interact with the world, let alone in a different language.

But I went out anyway. Because the weather was nice and I had missed Paris since my last visit. I stopped in a coffeeshop to get a coffee and asked for an iced cafe latte, adding 'it's possible?' because ice is not common over here. The barista assured me it was possible and then asked if I wanted ______ in my latte. I don't like any extra stuff in my latte so I said no. And he looked at me, very curiously and kindly. Eventually, he appeared to make an executive decision and began making my coffee. It was very good. Only later did it occur to me that he may have been asking me what kind of milk I wanted in my latte.

The difference between this time and the last couple times I've been here, is I feel like I have time to figure things out. Time to learn. Time to figure out how and what I want to say. Time to figure out what is being said around me.

The thing that always caused me stress was when I felt like I was supposed to speak perfectly right away. I was supposed to be able to understand everything that was said to me. And this pressure that I put on myself made it so that I felt I couldn't say anything, couldn't understand anything. If I was dealing with absolutes of language, I was definitely leaning toward the lower end of the scale.

That's the problem with absolutes. If we are thinking in this way, we feel we have to identify with one absolute or another, when our reality is actually somewhere in the middle. When I recognize my capacity in speaking and understanding, I can start from there and work at getting better. If I fall into absolute thinking, I have to ascribe to 'understanding nothing' and I will just rely on what has always worked for me in the past (English) and not try to find a different way to interact.

And beyond the absolute thinking that I need to speak fluent French to be understood, there was the absolute thinking that language was the only way to be connected. I was actually thinking this way despite many experiences where I felt very connected to people who don't speak my language. Connected through feeling, humor or shared experiences.

The other night I was at a small party, the only native english speaker in a room full of French people. I laughed harder than I have in a long time. It is possible that I spoke only five or six french words all night. It is also possible that they were all curse words.

Bravery

In 2007, I was traveling in Europe and planned to meet the German Sangha in Hamburg for a week-long teaching by the Dalai Lama. I spent a week at an organic farm in Normandy and then went to Paris for a night before taking the train to Hamburg.

When I arrived in Hamburg I wandered around the city for a few hours before figuring out how to get to the school where the sangha was staying. I had researched the location a little bit before leaving the states and I had a pretty good map of Hamburg so I found it without difficulty. When I got to the school it was empty, everyone was at the public teaching. So I dropped my bags off and wandered around Hamburg some more. When I was walking back to the school, I met the Sangha on the street, walking to the subway to go to a dharma talk at a University. I joined them and talked with some of my American friends, who are monks. On the subway platform, I met my teacher and spoke to him for a little while. He asked where I had come from. This was a reasonable question, considering I am an American and I just kind of appeared on a subway platform in Hamburg. I told him about my travels and how I had gotten to Hamburg. A woman in the sangha that I had met a few times before overheard me and exclaimed "You did all this traveling by yourself!? You are so brave!"
In typical zen master fashion, my teacher smiled silently at me and I laughed. 'No, Anna, that part wasn't brave. This part here, this is me being brave.'

But I understood where she was coming from. To her it was natural to be grounded in a community, to feel comforted, safe and supported by a group. So the idea of traveling alone seemed brave to her. Yet I am the opposite so my independent traveling isn't brave, it's my nature - what comes naturally to me. What is difficult for me is to balance my natural state of autonomy within a group dynamic.

Thinking about this exchange made me look up the definition of bravery, which led to the definition of courage - "the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear"

In the above definition of courage (by way of bravery), I don't know that absence of fear is always accurate. It's natural to be afraid of a situation we see as potentially difficult. Yet when we recognize the value of going through that experience and choose to put ourselves in a potentially uncomfortable situation to experience a perceived benefit, perhaps the fear is overcome.

It strikes me that we don't always know when someone is being brave. Unless we know someone well, we can't know what situations they might interpret as potentially difficult, dangerous or painful. Like Anna, we might see them doing something that we find daring, yet sometimes it's the subtler bravery that isn't apparent. Staying with a large group of people for a week, I not only had to face my habits of autonomy and introversion, I also had to face my perception that I am powerless to navigate the emotional currents in a group dynamic. I often feel overpowered by them and tangled up. To someone like Anna, my discomfort might seem completely ridiculous and so it would never occur to her that bravery might be necessary for me to spend a lot of time with a group of people I care about.

The thing is, when I think about traveling, I don't think of it as being difficult or dangerous. Navigating a foreign city is thrilling to me because there are no emotional stakes, which are the ones I worry about the most. The worst that could happen is I get lost. And I have a lot of confidence in my ability to figure that out. When traveling alone there is no need to temper my autonomy, in fact - that autonomy is a strength!

During that week I was able to strike a balance between myself and others. There were times when I felt overwhelmed by the group or overwhelmed by being in a crowd of 20,000 people listening to the Dalai Lama. The trick I found was to be compassionate to my fear yet try not to lose sight of the benefit of facing it. To find a middle ground that was comfortable to me.

Because the teaching was in Tibetan, almost everyone was given a personal radio with different channels for each translated language. When I felt like I needed a little space, I would go out to the area around the stadium and lay on the grass, under a tree, listening to the teaching on the headset. At the lunchbreak, I often joined some of my friends in the sangha for an ice cream cone at a nearby shop. Having recognized my fear and faced it compassionately, I was able to experience the benefit of the group dynamic that I usually perceive as difficult.

And this is the benefit of bravery - to experience something new, something that answers fear with another possible reality.

Faith

When I was ten or eleven years old, while driving in his car, I had a conversation with my dad that had a big impact on my spiritual curiosity. I had been thinking a lot about death and more importantly, what happens after we die. In Catholic School we had been taught about heaven, hell and purgatory but they seemed so abstract. I asked him what he thought happened after we died. He said something along the lines of 'I don't know. Either there's a heaven and we go there or else there's nothing and that's it - that's the end.' This answer blew my mind. Not because it was something I hadn't already considered, but because he was saying it instead of just handing me the usual Catholic rhetoric that we both had been raised by. This lack of certainty was jarring at first. I said 'But isn't that scary, that we could die and just stop existing?' he said, with typical levity I attribute to his Irish ancestry, 'If we don't exist anymore, we won't be there to be bothered by that.'
(It strikes me as I remember this that some of the best conversations I've had with my dad have occurred while driving somewhere.)
After the initial shock of this statement wore off, I found his answer kind of liberating. Not in the idea that I would have have a reprieve from existential questions when I no longer existed, but that there wasn't one fixed idea I was supposed to comply with. I felt freed to question and consider other possibilities than those offered by the Catholic faith. Which was good, because it had always been my natural tendency. The summer before, I had stayed awake at night, literally giving myself vertigo trying to understand the concept of infinity.

Recently I encountered the work of a poet I was immediately struck with, Arundhati Subramanium. While searching for her books online, I discovered that she had written a book about Buddha. Intrigued, I bought it and enjoyed her approach to the Buddha's life - a mixture of myths and history, her personal experience with Buddhism and an analysis of Buddhist philosophy. Then, I hit a passage that stopped me. She mentioned faith in connection to Buddhism. (I would quote the passage, but I can't seem to find it, even after skimming the book again twice.) My mind balked.

The word faith itself made me uncomfortable. In my mind, it was associated with a kind of lobotomy, a negation of the intellect, a naive submission to some invisible authority.  And that wasn't at all how I related to Buddhism. I took a break from the book for a bit. I wanted to swim around in my idea of faith - to feel what my concept of it was before I returned to her point of view.

I had always believed that Buddhism was the spiritual path that worked for me because it didn't demand faith. I've always looked at the spiritual side of my life as being a personal thing, like my favorite color or food preferences. When I meet people who don't consider themselves spiritual, that makes sense to me in the same way it does that I don't like pasta but most people do. We're just different. Different things work for us. I don't have any faith in the color blue. I just like it. It resonates with me so I'm comfortable when I'm wearing it.

I once had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an athiest. It was a really interesting conversation in that it gave us each the space to explain our point of view, our experiences and preferences without feeling we had to convince the other. He said that to him, we're all like toasters and when we're plugged in, we function. When we're unplugged/die, we don't work anymore. We're just a toaster. Having had this conversation in a different sense at the age of ten/eleven, I found that my own perspective had changed. I said 'I don't think we're the toaster, I think we're the electricity.'

This perspective came in part from the Buddhist philosophy but more directly, from experiences I've had throughout my life, especially receiving and giving energywork like Reiki or IET. Yet I understood that his point was valid as well. That my perspective was valid to me based on my experiences and interpretation of those experiences and he, not sharing those experiences/interpreting the same way, was perfectly reasonable to assume we are toasters.

Obviously, because I teach energywork I believe in its power. And because I participated in a refuge ceremony to become a Buddhist, I believe in that spiritual path. I don't do these things lightly or with an idea that they'll prove themselves later and I'll be rewarded for my faith in them. I do them because they resonate with me and feel valid on a deep level, on a personal level.

Still a bit rattled by the pairing of the words 'faith' and 'buddhism', I did some research.

Faith (saddha/sraddha) is an important Buddha's teaching element in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. The Sanskrit word sraddha is translated as faith; the original word has trust, perseverance, humility and steady effort connotations. In contrast to Western notions of faith, sraddha implies thorough reasoning and accumulated experience.

That last sentence eased my mind. Further:

saddhā , ( Pāli: “faith”: ) Sanskrit Śrāddha,  in Buddhism, the initial acceptance of the Buddha’s teachings, prior to the acquisition of right understanding and right thought. Buddhism does not rely on supernatural authority or the word of the Buddha but claims rather that its teachings can all be experientially verified. The act of entering onto the Eightfold Path (the Buddhist system of spiritual progress) involves, however, a provisional acceptance, through faith, of the Buddha and his teachings that is later confirmed by direct experience. 

Ok, this I could agree with. My concept of faith was as an ending point, a place where questioning is no longer possible or tolerated. This idea of faith being necessary as a 'provisional acceptance'...sure, I can get behind that.

Returning to 'The Book of Buddha' I found several passages which illustrated this definition.

The Buddha speaks to us because he tells us what we know intuitively to be true. At the same time he does not ask you to drown your rational mind either. There is nothing anti-intellectual about the buddha's stance. (.... )he does not ask for our unswerving obedience or any extravagant act of undying faith. He does not ask for blind faith in scripture, uncritical allegiance to tradition, or self-abnegating devotion to a master. He simply never stretches the limits of our credulity.
 
...Significantly Buddha does not sideline the role of the intellect or demand blind faith from the seeker. Buddhist thought describes three graded levels of understanding that broadly seem to correspond to the distinction between information, knowledge and wisdom. The first stage is the understanding that is the result of hearing, the second is understanding through cognition and the loftiest stage is wisdom through experience.(...)a complete internalization of the idea, when metaphysics has become part of the marrow, understanding a matter of the gut.

Reading this, I felt an echo of the liberation I felt as a kid in the car with my dad. My truth is that in many ways I am straddling the line between information and knowledge, in a few places I've made forays into wisdom. As much as I might have wanted some definitive answer as a kid, I would have still questioned and felt that curiosity threatened by a pressure to have faith, to believe someone else's definitive answer. I prefer this path - a provisional acceptance from which I attempt my own direct experience.

Duality

When I was 18, I got a tattoo on the inside of my ankle. It's a very simple design, two small flowers intertwined. Any tattoo gotten at age 18 might seem childish and regrettable 16 years later. And it's true that the design is definitely less sophisticated than one I might choose now. Yet the meaning of the design still resonates with me and I actually don't regret having gotten it.

Throughout my senior year of high school, I doodled that image on notebooks while I should have been paying attention to teachers. Instead, I was often in my own thoughts. I had been reading a lot of Carl Jung and was fascinated with his ideas about individuation - the anima, animus, the shadow self, these parts of ourselves that we separate and keep divided. This division was familiar to me and the idea of some internal union was fascinating.

Astrologically speaking, I'm prone to duality. Geminis are described as being able to see two sides of one situation, to accept the duality of a situation as a matter of course. They tend to be analytical and enjoy an intellectual understanding of things on a conscious level. This very blog is proof of that in myself.
Further, my moon and ascendant are in Pisces which tends to explore the more emotional, psychological and subconscious elements of existence. Symbology and intuition are the preferred methods of understanding. Perhaps because of this side of me, I was able to be open to energywork and to accept it based on feeling as easily as if it was intellectually proven.

While it's easy for me to acknowledge both of these 'sides' of me, the difficulty is sometimes in figuring out the balance between the two and hopefully, the place where they merge into a whole. Perhaps because I've been interested in this for 16 years, I see it in many things. In spirituality, the balance between the 'self' and the 'universe' - how is it possible to feel part of everything without denying the individual experience?

The closest I've come to an answer has been through artistic expression. In literature, I'm always impressed by books that blend everyday details and interactions with deeper, existential truths. In art, I am struck by artists who express themselves individually and yet the product is something that resonates beyond those individual details and hits a universal experience that others can share.

Despite my analytical nature, it's my habit to prefer the gestalt to the details, the feeling over the 'proof'. Only recently have I begun to recognize that the little, seemingly mundane details are not at odds with the whole. They don't disprove it. They offer a physically manifested expression of it. Without the artists' perspective and individual expression, the universal remains remote. Without the details about a characters physical surroundings and daily interactions, his existential struggles are disembodied, ghostly.

I once wrote a blog post about sentimentality - how I put so much worth in the banana bread I make for my friends, the scarf my mother gave me. I think it's from this place that I do that. There is a desire to have a physical proof of an intangible experience- a blending of the outer and inner world. And yet my mindset has been that they are separate - that there is no merging point. There is banana bread and there is love. So when the banana bread burns or the scarf gets lost, I feel divided, unable to latch on to the world around me.

The trick in all of this seems to be recognizing that the details, the small things...they don't have to be perfect, godlike, some total representation of an entire experience. And they are also not trivial, meaningless and shallow. When I put too much importance in them or too little, I fail to recognize them as a merging point - one out of infinite possible, simple expressions of something larger.

I sometimes forget about this tattoo. Usually until some toddler points it out and asks me if I drew on myself. (next inevitable question, 'if you can draw on yourself, why can't I draw on myself?') I don't think it's a perfect representation of the idea behind it. I don't think it's necessarily beautiful in and of itself. And yet, I've never regretted it. In itself, it's ink on skin. It's also the physical manifestation of a question, an intangible experience I've had for 16 years.

I don't mind it being permanent, because this question, this effort to find a merging point, is indelible in the deepest, invisible parts of me.

Trust

During the refuge ceremony I wrote about in yesterday's post, each person taking refuge was given a name. The first word of the name is considered the overall strength of the sangha's generation. For my generation the word is 'Hue' which means wisdom. The second word is the individual's greatest weakness which, if addressed, could become their greatest strength. Maybe conversely, it could be their greatest strength, which if not harnessed and used properly, could become their greatest weakness. Mine is 'Tin' which means 'trust'. When my teacher gave me this name, he said that I should trust with wisdom but also trust in my wisdom.

Who needs a koan when there's stuff like this to think about?

In the energywork I practice, mistrust is held in the third eye chakra, which governs perception. Often, people who experienced betrayal or trauma hold a lot of mistrust in this chakra and their perception of others and the world is colored by that mistrust. I think the more trusting we were when we were betrayed/traumatized, the more mistrust is created.

And it makes sense.

As a kid I went through traumatic experiences where someone I trusted acted in a way that was completely unexpected and dangerous to me. And especially because they were two totally unrelated experiences, my perception afterwards was that pretty much everyone can become batshit crazy and/or violent with no warning, for no known reason. This mistrust protected me from then on, in a sense. Slightly distant and independent became my standard way of interacting with people. Which sucked, because in general I like people and am curious about them and I like feeling close to them. It just didn't seem safe.

Because this mistrust is in the third eye, there can be a habit of trying to read people, intuit how and when they are going to act in a way that will be threatening. But it clouds the actual perception of people, of situations. We end up seeing what we're afraid of, whether it's there or not, so we have a reason to stay mistrustful and keep our guard up.

In 2005, two years before I was officially given my Dharma name, I went through an extended crash course in trust. I was traveling around Europe for two months, working on organic farms. For some reason, the idea of living with total strangers, 1000s of miles away from my home didn't faze me. I was confident in my ability to remain distant and independent, which in my mind meant safe.

And for the most part, it worked. But then I ended up at a place that had been completely misrepresented with a guy who had completely misrepresented himself. On top of that, he was actively antagonistic and creepy. So I left.

I walked for 6 hours through the French countryside, declining kind offers for rides to the train station. Each person who stopped along the road told me, first in french, then in english, that the train was very far. They were correct. But I was not about to let my guard down. I wasn't about to trust anyone, even for a ride to the train station.

When I eventually arrived at the train station, it was 11pm so there were no trains running. I stayed in a hotel and the next morning I took a train to Paris and from there, a train to Prague - the cheapest place I could think of to stay for two weeks. In Prague I kind of huddled into myself. I wrote, I meditated, I walked around and stared at statues. Met people at hostels, stayed distant yet interested. Then, it was time to go to my next scheduled stay - in Girona Spain. I was supposed to stay at an apartment there with a couple - Xavier and Alicia.

Back in Paris, considering the train to Barcelona, my nerves failed me. I called USairways and asked how much it would cost to change my flight home to earlier, like that day. Then, I decided to go to Spain anyway. Traveling south through France, my nerves got worse and worse and I began to get physically sick. My sinuses were a mess, my head ached. The more I worried, the worse I felt. The train ended in Montpellier, where I was supposed to transfer to another train to Barcelona. But somehow I had missed it and the next one wouldn't leave til morning. I was a full on mess at this point. Sick of carrying my bag with me, I left it on a bench while I went to talk to the ticket lady. The French soldiers who were patrolling the station weren't happy about that and asked me if it was my bag when I returned to it. Normally, I might be a little nervous about being questioned by guys with guns. Not then. All my nerves were shot to hell. I looked at them levelly. 'yep. that's my bag.' I didn't care if someone stole it. Didn't care if the police confiscated it. I was exhausted.

At this point two girls from Belgium came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go dancing with them. True story. I can't imagine what vibe I was giving off that said 'ready to party.' I explained that I was sick and stranded in Montpellier til morning, when I'd be going to Barcelona. I further explained that I was exhausted and sick of doing things like travel planning and therefore, I was just going to sit here, in the train station, until the train to Barcelona arrived.

They began to look at the situation differently. 'You can't do that! It's dangerous! You have to get a hotel room!'. Everything is dangerous, I thought. It's exhausting. I'm just going to sit here, on my bag, in the Montpellier train station.

They picked up my bag and ordered me to follow them out of the train station. I followed them to a street of hotels where they spoke to the desk clerk and arranged a discounted room price, since it was so late and they weren't going to fill their rooms anyway. I watched in wonder.
'Ok - you're set. So, now do you want to go dancing?'
I didn't. But I was extremely grateful and thanked them very much for their help.
And then I passed out.

The next morning, I got a bus to Barcelona. The radio was playing 'Should I stay or should I go' by the Clash. Even in my weariest moments, I am always a fan of an appropriate song for an occasion. The further south the bus went, the closer to some unfamiliar destination, the sicker I got. And then Barcelona. I couldn't find a map to save my life. I couldn't find anyone who spoke English. I was about to pull a Montpellier and sit on my bag until something else happened, when I turned around and realized I was standing in front of the 'English as a second language' school. They were very happy to give me directions in English.

But then, the train from Barcelona to Girona. The further north the train went, the sicker I got. What the hell was I doing? These people could be axe murders.

In the train station in Girona I met Xavier and his friend Nani. I was cautious at first, but they seemed normal. Well no, that's not true. They seemed interesting and comical, but harmless. We drove to Xavier and Alicia's apartment in the middle of Girona. Alicia was sweet and welcoming. The apartment was awesome and ancient. I was still sick and exhausted and nerve-riddled. Alicia insisted I go lay down before dinner. In the loft above the living room, I crashed on a bed and tried to sleep. Instead, I felt my nerves begin to unwind as I listened to Xavier and Alicia talk and make dinner. They were listening to the radio - Neil Young's Harvest Moon. It felt the opposite of dangerous.


When I'm thinking about the koan of my dharma name - this trip offers a lot of insight. My belief as a kid was that I had to make a judgement about people, who was safe and who wasn't. And I failed because I trusted people who were dangerous. So I never wanted to fail again and be put in that situation, I wanted to judge correctly - to recognize danger before it go too close. But that perception kept me in a state of distance and mistrust.

As an adult, I had to compassionately recognize that while there was a reason for this habitual mistrust, it wasn't an accurate perception of the world around me, the people around me. And I had to recognize that my definition of trust was too absolute. I trusted people based on the circumstance, their role in my life, their social position. To trust with wisdom, I had to trust based on experience. But to actually have an experience that was in the present moment, I had to let go of mistrust and see what was actually there. It may be that the experience or the prolonged experience of interacting with someone leads me to distrust them. Or it may be that the experience or prolonged experience of knowing someone leads me to trust them. But I'll never know unless I allow myself that experience. And I have to remember that trust is not faith, it's not blind. It's not all-in or all-out. There are degrees of trust.

Of all the people I met while I was in Europe that year, it's Xavier and Alicia that I am still friends with. I visit them everytime I go to Europe. I'm glad I was able to be open to the experience of getting to know them, despite the near nervous system failure I had on my way there.

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.