For Saturday’s  webinar we were asked to reflect on the question,  “Is the body great or small?”. I noticed the frustration I felt with the way the question was formulated and my internal resistance toward setting a label, defining the body in terms of it’s size. As soon as I said something about the size, it became reduced to that – size, something relative, a concept. The body itself did not seem to matter that much any more. It held no mystery.

Still, in our lives we do have to measure, to compare. “Is the practice  great or small?”. If I don’t measure it, how do I even know if I’ve moved at all or am still stuck on the same spot? How could I measure my practice? Not in hours spent on the cushion, or the number of Dharma books I read or retreats I attended. I guess ultimately it was about the question, What is it that I want from my practice?

The measurement I came up with for the moment is not quantitative and is about if and for how long I can stay intimate with life without contracting and shutting the world out. How long can I stay in direct experience (painful or frustrating as it can be) without resorting to my habitual ways to protect the self (by leaning on the familiar negative states for support)?  To see if I “progressed” I can compare how I handle the situation at hand with the way I habitually behave in similar circumstances. For the time being this measurement is good enough for me.

The way of love is not

a subtle argument.

The door there

is devastation.

Birds make great sky-circles

of their freedom.

How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,

they’re given wings.

- Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks

About a week ago I had a very emotional experience when I found myself in the bathroom of my friend’s apartment during a Halloween party, having a face-to-face conversation with the person I had come to the party with. A nightmare situation indeed! Not much was said but the few words he told me went straight into the heart. I felt the warmth spreading in the body, gathering into a nauseating lump somewhere in the stomach area and heard how the mind immediately started producing a story. There was this moment when I could both feel the sensations in the body, hear the beginning of the story – “How could be do that to me?” -  and watch it as if from the position of the observer. The observer asked the story-teller, “What has been done to me“? and that question brought my attention from the inside to the outside, to the person’s face and the texture of his voice, to the reddish lights of the bathroom.

At this point something interesting happened. The pain was still there, but did not feel as unbearable, the story stopped and now I could see that the person was suffering. As I was feeling that raw energy inside, it was transforming into  compassion for that other human being who was aching just as I was. In the middle of it all I somehow managed to not get consumed by the strong emotions by bringing the attention to what was real – the experience of my only feelings of hurt and anger and the perception of another person (the expression of his face, the sound of his voice). This was one of the most powerful and liberating moments I’ve shared with another person. I saw that it was possible to interrupt the story-line and stay with the experience of hurt and anger while remaining open and connected with another human being. By choosing to fall, I got the strength to engage the wings I did not know I have.

I received a few comments to my previous post, some of them not on this page. What they had in common was the idea that we need others because we love them and needing people was in fact not so bad. In short: we need to need people.  I believe that the idea that some degree of dependency in a relationship is OK aside from the cultural underpinning is also backed up by another strong belief: if we don’t need others we will end up being cold-hearted and detached people and that is not an attractive picture. Likewise, if others don’t need us, we will end up lonely and unappreciated.

Really?

What about the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela or other individuals who has shown enormous compassion to their fellow humans and do not strike me as cold, detached and non-caring? Nor do they appear(ed) to be lonley and unappreciated. It is easy to think that once we take away our dependency on others, there will be nothing left.

I don’t believe we can actually be independent from others. Quantum physics demonstrates how everything is interconnected and therefore interdependent. The problem is we don’t understand that. I know it on the cognitive level but as soon as somebody does something to me, I forget all that and suddenly there is me, you and others. The idea of a solid self and separation it creates between us and the rest of the world is at the root of our suffering. Yet it seems that having a healthy self is necessary for survival and I am interested in how we can combine those two, strike the balance. I am searching for a tool, a metaphor that would help me work with discovering the impermanence and fluidity of self so that I could apply it in everyday life. On the very down-to-earth level it would simply made it easier to not take things so personally. I might find it skillful to protect myself from the consequences of your actions or mood but I would not have to shut myself down from you as a way to protect myself or punish you. Actually I think I might have found one tool that rubs very well with me but am leaving it aside for now.

If I believe there a solid self I will be upset every time someone else leaves me; I will not really believe in change in myself or others and might even not notice it, walking around with the labels I gave myself and others; I will find it hard to change when I see this is what is needed and will be struggling, exercising violence against the self I think I am; I will find it impossible to love without hurting the relationships by trying to control the people I am in a relationship with. My life will be a constant struggle.

How will I even know I love someone? In my experience my likes and dislikes of someone can change dramatically within a short period of time. Think of  someone you loved and then fell out of love with. What happened? Did that person change? Or did your idea of that person change? I share the view that we are in love not with the people but with our representations of the people. When my mental image of that person changes we fall out of love with them. One illusion is being replaced by another. The person is still the same but our idea of the person changed based on how we experienced and interpreted them and their behaviour. It is much easier on my ego to blame the other person for them being this or that way than acknowledging I had the wrong idea about the person. (No idea about that other person can be right or wrong.)

Going back to the idea I-need-him-because-I-like-him.  This is a very convenient and well-spread view because it can be used as a justification for our actions.  “I love you and therefore I want you close to me”. One woman was telling me she didn’t want her son to leave home because she loved him and wanted him close to her. (At that point the son was 28 and was living with his parents. He didn’t know how to do laundy with a washing machine or make lunch and was terrified of making decisions outside the scope of his comfort zone. He was also one of the most gentlest men I met). The mother didn’t seem to grasp the idea that her son was not her property, a project for giving meaning to her life. She raised him in total dependency, making sure he would be needing her and feeling insecure when faced with life’s reality. Her son had difficulty saying no to her and other people and often would suffered from it consoling himself that he was doing that because he was a “nice guy”. It took us a couple of why-questions to get to the source of him being that “nice”: fear and dependency on others for their approval, very low self-esteem. I was tempted to ask the woman in question what her definition of love was. What I saw was “codependent helping”, as Jack Kornfield calls it in his book “A Path With Heart” and it didn’t do good to any of them since both were living in fear,  holding on to something impermanent.

At first I felt I was straying away from the topic of compassion with the last couple of posts but now see that they are all very related: the idea of self, needs, codependence, and compassion. Jack Kornfield  beautifully ties them all together in one of the chapters of “A Path with Heart”.

So what would a healthy relationship look like? One of my favourite stories is the one of the Buddha’s dialogue with the family of acrobats in which the acrobats discussed with the Buddha the best way to safeguard and care for each other.   It “points out, when we leave ourselves out of the sphere of compassion, a false security or unwise compassion is the result. All unhealthy or overly idealistic generosity arises from this error, when a deep respect for ourselves is left out of the equation. When our sense of self-worth is still low, we cannot set limits, make boundaries, or respect our needs. Our seemingly compassionate assistance becomes mixed with dependence, fear, and insecurity. Mature love and healthy compassion are not dependent but interdependent, born out of deep respect for ourselves and others. They can say yes and they can say no. Like a parent who raised a child wisely, they know when to set limits, when to say no.

… Setting boundaries and limits, shifting from a dependent and entangling love to one based on mutual respect, learning to give while honoring our own needs, all of these can entail a profound growth in self-esteem and self-awareness that parallels the healthy development of self.”

-Jack Kornfield, “A Path With Heart”

So how do I know when I run my own agenda of “codependent helping” and when my actions are driven by compassion?

Actually, Jack Kornfield addresses this issue in his book. One piece of advice comes from Buddha, the cool dude who never took things for granted and recommended that we looked for the motives behind our actions. “It’s too idealistic to expect that we will always just want to be good; we must listen to know when the heart is attached, to know when the heart is afraid, to know when the heart is dependent. By listening deeply we can begin to sort out our dependence from love.

Listening to distinguish wisdom from dependence can be aided by understanding our early history.We can reflect on how needs were met in our family, how limits were set, how insecurity was treated.”

-Jack Kornfield, “A Path With Heart”

I know it will keep me busy for a while, and I’ve already learnt a lot about my own reactive patterns looking back at how those issues were dealt with in the family. Also, becoming aware of my own reactivity made me see my family and each member in a new light. This is where compassion starts for me: I can relate to another person’s suffering because I’ve been there and all of us essentially are driven by the same desire – to be happy, however we define happiness.

This place is a dream.

Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn,

and you wake up laughing

at what you thought was a grief.

But there is a difference with this dream.

Everything cruel and unconsicous

done in the illusion of the presnt world,

all that does not fade away at the death-waking.

It stays,

and must be interpereted.

All the mean laughing,

all the quick, sexual wanting,

those torn coats of Joseph,

they change into powerful wolves

that you must face. …

….

From “The dream that must be interpreted”,  Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

If I had a prayer, it would be this:

“God, spare me from the desire

for love, approval, or appreciation”.

From “Loving What is”, by Byron Katie

Let me say from the start:  when it comes to romantic love, I was cultured into the whole you-complete-me belief  through films, books and some ideas that basically made it impossible to have a healthy relationship. I grew up in a culture where jealousy was (and still is) taken as a sign of loving someone and even encouraged (especially in men).  The idea that loving someone involves an emotional attachment pervades many cultures but what does it actually imply? It means I depend on another human being for happiness. I depend on you for my happiness. How does this sound for responsibility?

So what if I do? You might find it flattering for a while. But the next thing I will be doing is demanding you to contribute to my happiness. And it’s not you I like, it’s how you make me feel. You will become my drug, my fix, the way to get validation. Once I get the taste of it, I will start fearing of losing you. Then I will try to control you. I might even ask you to stop seeing some of your friends that threaten my power over you. You might agree, with a saddened heart but I will not see what it costs to you. “Love’s blind”, remember? Yes, because we are blinded by desire and attachment. Probably you too are afraid of being abandoned. And so we will go around, feeling contracted and closed, comforting ourselves, “This is what we do for love, we compromise”. Only this has nothing to do with love.

I will never get enough and will be needing more and more of you but at the same time I will never really get to know the real you.

“Love hurts?” Wrong! Needeness and clinging do.

I remember that a couple years ago a few lines from Anthony de Mello’s book  Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality struck me as they touched the core of my own needeness in relationships.

The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when you’re hell-bent on getting this or the other thing, you become ruthless, hard, and insensitive. How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them. If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free.

If I am not enough as I am, if I see myself as a “half”, I will need you to complete me to feel happy. 

See how that connects with another concept, that of self-confidence? Ever met a needy self-confident person? I haven’t. Self-confidence doesn’t imply we have to be lonely. It means we don’t need others’ love and appreciation to feel good about ourselves.

What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn’t harden itself to any person or thing.

About 15 years ago I was freshly in love and blind. I only saw my own object of attachment or rather the feelings I connected with him. The country was falling apart, old system was collapsing and there was a lot of instability and confusion in the society on all levels. Didn’t notice much of it in those months though, in love with my own idea of the person. When approached by another person, my teacher who I had great respect for, I did not recognise the depth of her suffering and the need for some of that love I thought I was feeling everywhere. I was fixated on that  guy to the exclusion of the person who was in despair… An attachment destroys our capacity to love. Can you see how? Can you remember how when chasing one attachment you were pulling away from the rest of the world?

I like the image of a soft, fluid heart rather than a hardened one, the one that easily breaks.  Do you believe that anyone can truly hurt you and break my heart? Who gave that person the power to do so? About half a year after she reached out to me and shortly after that killed herself,  I myself was considering suicide, cut off from the parents and friends, no longer knowing who and what I was: the guy turned out to be a manipulative person who had an issue with women and was trying to hurt each and every one he met. Best teacher I ever had but would never have the wisdom and the guts to ask for. Once again I was not in touch with reality: when the economy collapsed entirely, I was not so preoccupied with what and how I’d eat for dinner as I was busy collecting pieces of myself together. Did I not set myself up for all that  psychological violence through my own needeness and bad self-confidence?

I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people. When I die to the need of people, then I’m right in the desert. In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, you’ll suddenly discover that it’s not lonely at all. … But in the beginning giving up the drug can be tough, unless you have a very keen understanding or unless you have suffered enough. It’s a great thing to have suffered. Only then you can get sick of it. You can make use of suffering to end suffering. Most people simply go on suffering.

Why? Because we believe that this time it will be different. If I believe I can make a banana cake using carrots I am missing something, wouldn’t you say?

So the question is: can I love you so that I do not need you? Can I love you so that I do not hold you a prisoner of my needeness? Can I love you so that I can afford losing you because I’ve never made a claim on you to begin with?

If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. I enjoy it on the nonclinging basis. What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater tahn both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s greater repertoir and it never ceases to play.

Can you hear the melody?

How much is this moment worth to me? To get a sense of worth of something I need to compare it to something else, something on the same scale. I would probably value the moment I take a step into the emptiness of the open sky with a parachute on my back more than a quiet morning in the kitchen when I am waiting for my espresso to be ready. At least today when I feel I could use more action .

Most of our awake time I spend comparing stuff,  assigning value to things, events and experiences based on how I feel about them at a particular time. It is easy to forget that all of those also have absolute value, outside myself and my story. Every single experience, event or thing is unique and therefore comparing it to the next one does not make sense.

If  we remembered about the absolute value of everything, lots of anxiety in our lives would dissipate because at its root lies comparison, preferences and discrimination of one thing over another. When we take relative value of things for their absolute value, we end up chasing those things or experiences we value higher than others. This is not bad in itself, it just doesn’t work in the end.

How can I remind myself of the absolute value of things then? The idea of the impermanence and death in particular works as a good reminder for me, troubling as it may sound to some people. I haven’t done any contemplation practice on death which is one of the practices in Tibetan Buddhism but find that simply reminding myself of death is helpful for taking a larger perspective on my life.

Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, I haven’t touched you yet.’

- Carlos Castaneda, from Journey to Ixtlan

From Radiolab: Moments by Will Hoffman. The film celebrates life ans is inspired by David Eagleman’s book Sum.

Posted in Response Tagged: absolute value, death, life, moment, relative value ]]> http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/on-comparison-life-death-and-moments/feed/ 0 understandingcat http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/talking-about-compassion/ http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/talking-about-compassion/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:06:35 +0000 understandingcat http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/talking-about-compassion/ ]]>

I thought this month I would focus on exploring the notion of compassion: how do I define it, why bother with it, my own hang ups around it, the techniques for cultivating compassion (what works for me). This seems like a good place to start:

Returning to the earlier post on reactivity and pants. For starters, I believe it is never  really about them pants or whatever becomes a trigger for our reactivity, although in the situation when it actually occurs it can be very hard to see it.  We so much want to believe that the root of our discomfort lies outside ourselves that we start believing it and acting on it. For me the question is not whether to pick up the pants or not but rather what I can learn from my reactivity around it:  why and how matter more than what.  This is not to give myself yet another reason to beat myself up over something but to see what underlying beliefs run the weather of my emotional and mental landscape.

If you don’t realize the source,

you stumble in confusion and sorrow

Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

For starters I look at the questions like:

• What happened here?
• Why was it so important to me?
• Why did I get so angry?
• What is the belief I am holding on to?

And finally I want to know:

• What would my life look like without that belief?

NVC is not the only model that holds that expressing our needs and having them met is important for us. In one of the podcasts on Just for Women the guest was advocating direct communication and advised already on the first date  be open about one’s needs,  “These are my needs. What are yours?”.  I scratch your back if you scratch mine. Nothing wrong with the business-like exchange of this kind if both parties are aware that the relationship is based on this sort of transaction rather than on emotional connection where you like the person and not what they can do for you.

This is where I started wondering: how often do we actually like the person and not what they can do for us? How reasonable is it for me to assume that others will volunteer to help me satisfy my needs or will do it long enough to keep me happy? How does this belief influence my relationships?

Looking at the history of my own relationships (romantic as well as friendships) I realised that time after another I expected people to be a certain way (so my needs would be met?)  Needless to say it never was as I expected.  People did not want to, didn’t have capacity or didn’t know how to make me happy (and isn’t that the implication of having one’s needs met?) and I often would end up feeling let down and abandoned.  There was no understanding on my part that knowing and respecting my needs and making others responsible for meeting them would never make a ground for a healthy and sustainable relationship not to mention it had nothing to do with the unconditional love.

Do I know better now? I hope so! Still I can notice the contraction when a friend says no or when a lover asks for more space. I feel my ego cringe. What am I attached to here?  The whole issue of needs leads me – again! – to the subject of self and no self (or true self) and those masks (personas) we wear and identify with when we hold on to a particular belief. It all seems to be evolving around the same topic – identification, the me-ing.

Photo: Josef Verbok

It was one of the tough days that call for a treat. On that particular evening it was the bar of  rather expensive dark chocolate with cherry and chilli pepper that had the task of saving my evening. I had a gnawing headache that was so subtle it was hard to notice. When it was my turn to pay at the grocery store, I realised I didn’t have enough money on my bank account and Swiss chocolate had to go. (I have to explain here that I do not owe or use a credit card.) It was not such a big deal: I needed to get home to my PC and transfer some money from the electronic saving account to the one that was connected to my Visa card.

Wondering over how the money ended so soon and what caused the wretched headache, I picked up my stuff and started walking away from the grocery store. Suddenly I head someone calling for me and when I turned, there was a middle-aged man standing behind me with the chocolate bar in his hand and a grin over his face, “Here, this is yours”.  I sighed and prepared to explain to the enthusiastic stranger that in fact, he mistook himself and I haven’t paid for the chocolate, noticing how with every word the throbbing pain inside the skull was rolling from said to side. “I know”, he said smiling, “I have. Take it!”. Still wondering if there was some mistake, I glanced towards the counter and saw a 12-year-old girl watching me and her dad, a huge smile across her face, waiting for her dad to return. The headache was intense and I could hardly make an effort of smiling. All of a sudden I felt like crying.

Not that a similar act of kindness would be unheard of in this part of the world. Swedish people give to charities now, in the times of crises, more than ever. What moved me most was that those two paid enough attention to someone else to notice the person’s concerns and state of mind. (I must have looked miserable over there at the counter with that chocolate that I could not afford. They could not know the headache was killing me and I just wanted to get home. And it did not matter!)  I thanked them both, took the chocolate and walked out of the store with an attempt to a smile on my face, the chocolate bar pressed against my chest and a warm feeling inside: my evening was saved, chocolate or not, and the headache could go hang itself. The chocolate I was about to buy was supposed to console me, make me feel special (what else are we buying when we shop for luxury products, something we don’t really need?) and I got all that from a couple of total strangers who reached out and let me known I was not all by myself. Who could set a price tag on that?

I really appreciated the not so typical for the Swedish society act of reaching out to a stranger just like that, in the daylight, with no strings attached. I imagine quite a few people could think of acting the same way towards a person in line but most could be stopped by the fear of making a full of themselves,  attracting attention, or being suspected of having some agenda. Just doing something without consideration for oneself is a true act of generosity. In fact, we are offering ourselves, not the thing we do or give.

Now, what’s your chocolate story? How did you feel receiving somebody else’s offering?

Can we see reality as it is? Beau Lotto’s optical illusions point us in the direction that the brain did not evolve to see the world as it is but the way it was useful to see it in the past and the brain is constantly learning. There is no inherent meaning in information we receive from the world. Our brains create meanings based on the patterns they detect, comparing the new information to something we learned before and this is what matters in the end.

If anything, this can give some of us who are a bit too certain something to become uncertain about.

The brain does all this enormous work and I haven’t even asked for it! It’s like I move forward by relating to the past all the time. How do I learn anything new? Introducing some uncertainty, something that was not part of the past experience. Another question: how can I experience the world differently even when I see what appears to be the same thing or the same person? How do I not get stuck in the old interpretations of the world?

So back to Dosho’s question inspired by the passage from Genjōkoan on firewod and ashes:

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

My answer to the question is:  No.

When I sit today I just sit.  Now is the only reality that exists.

My answer to the question is: Yes.

I sit with me and the results of my actions and choices I made in the past and all my potential for the future. They are all on the same scale of time that is non-linear. Today, yesterday and tomorrow are  based on the human concept of time.  We break time in manageable units but it is a human concept just like star constellations  is not something that exists, it is a bunch of stars that we gathered together under the same name for convenience.

I feel something opening up in my chest and expanding when I think of this. My actions in the past were “necessary” to bring me into this moment and this moment is “necessary” for me to have done those actions in the past so I could “pull myself” to this moment, sort of like an acorn and the oak tree.

A few passages from Uchiyama’s book  “Opening the hand of thought” and my experience during the sesshin when time existed for me (and moved extremely slowly) only when I chose to stay with the thoughts of pain, helped me better understand the idea of time that is all inclusive: “All that there really is, is now.  As the scenery of the present, however, there is a past, present, and future. Let me say this again: within the present, there is a past, a present, and a future. The past and future are real and alive only in the present. This concept of time in Buddhist thought is very important. It is different from the notion in Western philosophy that time flows from the past, into the present, and onto the future in a linear way. According to Buddhist teachings it doesn’t quite work that way. The past, present, and future are all contained within the present. 

…What is most important is right now.

But again, within “now” we have past experiences. Within the present, we have past experiences and directions toward the future that we face. W have to vivify our past experiences and face toward the future – all within the present. Only f we master the realities of the past can they function vividly and smoothly in the present. Only if we have learned to  drive a car can we effectively use one to go somewhere. Doing exactly that is called genjō kōan, the koan of life becoming life. Genjō is the present becoming the present.“

“When we transcend time, or forget time, we actually meet the fresh reality of life. Time exists for us because we compare one moment with another, and in the welter of perception we feel time flowing swiftly. When we no longer compare, and just be that self which is nothing but self, then we are able to transcend this swiftness or comparison that we call time. “

Photo: Johan Bencker

Listened to the show with Alissa Kriteman on Just for Women, on which she shared about using the NVC model in daily communication because she now could make sure her meets were met. As an example Alissa gave a not entirely unusual situation in which the partner leaves his pants lying on the floor. She approaches him saying something in the line of , “Honey, would you be willing to put your pants in the laundry basket?”. As I understand, in the NVC model we are to express our feelings, voice a request but also say what need this request would meet and why it is so important to us. In the example above Alissa did not do those steps so in fact the request was formulated in the usual way, not following the NVC model. In the partner’s place I might simply ask her “Why would I want to do that?” and carry on.

Say I were in the same situation and actually used NVC. What kind of need would I expect to be met in this case? Possibly the need for the house to be tidy. For starters, can we really see that as a need? Secondly, what if I before turning to the parner with my obsession about keeping the place tidy, looked at this so called need of mine and asked myself, “Why is it so important for me that the place is tidy?”  I’d encourage myself to not accept any fluffy answers but really look into the “why” behind.  After all, I am interested in the truth. This is how the inquiry could go (easy to imagine as I used to obsess about things being “in the right places”):

- Why is it so important for me that the place is tidy?

- Hmmm… Because I feel very uneasy when I see things lying on the floor.

- What is about it that you experience as uneasy? (The reformulated why).

- Hmmm… I feel guilty about not looking after the place.

- Why? (Where does the guilt come from?)

- Because my mother used to tell me how that “nice girls” always had their homes tidy.

- Anything else?

- Because if one of my friends pops in, they might think I am sloppy! I don’t want my friends to think I am sloppy while it is T. who is creating the mess around here.

(Getting somewhere with but still there is some digging to do).

- Why is it important for you that your friends don’t think you are sloppy?

- Because I want them to like me and think of me as someone who can take care of their home!

This is really hard work, challenging myself to go deeper and see what I am really asking for: it is about me trying to live up to my mother’s expectations of me being a “nice girl” and about my own ego. Are these my values? Do I really believe my friends will stop liking me if they see a pair of pants on the floor? What if they do (stop liking me)?  For me the valuable piece of information in this internal inquiry is how my emotional well-being and a sense of self-worth is dependent on other people’s approval and actions: my friends’, my mother’s, my partner’s. I need to ask myself at this point if I really believe other people can give me self-worth and make me happy?

Also, can we really call this a need? To me it sounds more like a wish rather something that I need. If I do decide this is a need, is it really something I should push for being met? Maybe I can take this as an opportunity to instead of asking someone fix the situation for me,  look at my own reactivity and choose otherwise? Whatever the result of this investigation, it allows me to be more honest with myself and others. Even if I still find that these pants on the floor are bothering me, I can voice the request with more understanding about where it comes from,  “I have this neurosis about your pants lying on the floor in their place and I am working on it. Would you be willing to help me by picking them up and hanging them in the closet?” At the same time, I can see that just like I am acting out my habituated patterns so can my partner be acing out his and this is where I can feel more compassion for him, instead of simply being irritated and eager for him to take on my values (my mother’s values!). So the problem is not my partner being sloppy (they might as well be), but that these pants push my buttons and it’s helpful to know why.

Ok, enough with the pants. While I really appreciate the part of the model where we are to identify and express how we feel about things, I am ambivalent about the motives behind the whole structure: why do we want to become better at communicating in the first place? People often talk about having those needs met and how wonderful it is.  That is I want to communicate better in order that you get to know what it is I need and satisfy my need.  It is all about me and my needs. Is this truly a better communication? For whom?  How non-violent is it? Of course, the model itself is not violent, but I anticipate that in many situations it can result in a subtle form of verbal and emotional manipulation: by telling people why this need is important to me (“It is important that the place is tidy”) I make it more difficult for them to say no to my request and lift something that can be a result of a habituated pattern to the level of a need.

My point here is we should try to become aware of the motives behind our requests before turning to others to fix our problems. One of the greatest needs of all – us feeling fulfilled and happy – cannot be met by others changing their habits or liking us.

What are our experiences of NVC? In what situations using NVC really helped you to resolve the situation?

Natasha Mitchell of ABC Radio National and Radio Australia had another interesting guest on All in the mind show – German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinge spoke about his research of the self as well as the first hand accounts of out of body experiences and lucid dreaming. Metzinge published his conclusions in the book “The Ego tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” and needless to say I am quite eager to engage my brain cells with it. As I understood from the interview,  not only it brings the light on the mechanics of the process of selfing (right, Metzinger views the self as not a thing, something solid that exists somewhere – where? – but the ongoing process, the construct) but also discusses how and why it evolved. Why do I so badly need to believe into my self ?

Glad to hear more scientists are catching up on what Buddhism saw already two thousand years ago – there is no self, but rather a set of experiences and our memory that connects them. (Metzinger is actually a long time meditator himself).

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket science to see how hard it could be for us to survive if we didn’t think the self existed. When it’ s getting colder outside it might be a good idea to listen to this voice in my head saying I probably need a warmer jacket and get one. Yet when I am in the store facing those jackets, how will I be choosing? As a believer in the self, I’d probably make a choice taking into account my self-image and what I want to communicate to people by wearing this or that brand.  (Of course, people have different ways of conforming to a particular self-image.) If I don’t believe in the self, the brand (status) will not matter as the only consideration I have in mind now is that of protecting the integrity of the body, shielding it form cold, or?  On the other hand, I can also appreciate how at some point this information we tried to communicate to the others by wearing certain attributes of power was important as well. Only we seem to associate our selves very quickly with those attributes – clothes, jobs, careers and even ideas – and this is where our brilliant mind gets us into trouble. Emphasising the self shields us from the world (and the true self that is no-self or non-self! )  and leads to the idea of the other; it makes us all into strangers, it makes it easier to be indifferent to the suffering of others , to gossip, to steal, to kill… It makes it possible to have bad self-esteem – what is it if not a belief into the existance of a self that also is not enough something – and get depressed!

Also, if I believe into a self, I make my every day choices based on this assumption; I believe to what that perceived self is telling me at the moment.  Right now it is telling me to skip that extra sitting I planned on doing today and go get some sleep instead: after all sleep is very important for how we function and I deserve those extra 30 min after the crazy week I had. Very tempting! This self of mine certainly has a different take on the sitting commitment from the one it had yesterday night! Can it be that it is not the same self I am receiving right now?

I can see how the concept of the solid self plays into the hands of politicians and marketers: they want me to believe that “I are worth it” because it will sell more. In many cases we are not looking for ways to meet our needs, we are buying the self-image. Questioning the existence of  the self makes the whole notion of “worthiness” obsolete. Now, that is a tempting thought to explore but guess what… I am going to take my precious self that is no-self onto the cushion and sit an extra 30 min as planned. Zazen gives a wonderful opportunity to observe how the idea of the self is being created from moment to moment as well as the whole process of experiencing the world and relating to it through the process of selfing.

Was planning on going to the Zen Mountain Monastery for a month of art and meditation with John Daido Loori next summer when I got a Tweet that he was retiring.  A selfish thought popped up at once, “Could he not wait for another year? He cannot be that old!”. Then I read that he had a few days left to live and now an email (very glad I did not get that news as a Tweet!) from Dosho saying Daido Loori passed away.

I never knew him but in my heart of hearts he’s been one my teachers. I read “The Zen of Creativity” when I knew little of Zen and had a very solid idea of what art was about and that I was never in it.  Daido Loori showed me that art could be a doorway to serious and transformative spiritual practice, no matter whether we call ourselves an artist or not. It is not a level of technical skill or originality that matters but how intimate we become with the subject, like in his work The Tao of Water . In order to do that we have to learn to develop a new, dynamic seeing (with the whole body and mind) and become unhindered by our own ideas and attitudes.

I never knew Daido Loori personally but I am grateful I have come to know about him and his life. That alone had an impact on my seeing and perceiving.  Another thought that came was, “Well, what do I do now?”. I guess I will just keep practicing dynamic seeing and relaxing into the creative process moment after moment, day after day.

My heart goes to all those who knew John Daido Loori and whose lives he touched.

During the last Webinar we were looking into the following passage from Genjokoan:

Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off.

As part of the homework we are to read the passage before zazen and reflect on the question:

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

For starters, I came to appreciate reading the text before the sitting even though at first the words did not make much sense to me.  Soon I started noticing how doing that opened up my mind to the passage and to Dosho’s question in the activities of everyday life (living practice).  Now I did not have to remember the question itself;  it was following me everywhere. All of a sudden I would come up with the answer after I have dealt with the situation at hand.

Observing how my mind was dealing with the question turned out to be as fascinating and insightful as the question itself. I noticed that when a question was asked (any question for that matter) I immediately experienced a certain excitement in the system charging for coming up with the answer. However, in this case the question was too confusing for the mind and there were no answer at the moment.  Excitement gave way to some unnerving feeling as if the system perceived that something was off, some problem remained unsolved.  I chose to allow myself walking with the question in the midst of everything and seeing the question as something already carrying the answer. Now it was not necessary to verbalise that answer which removed some of the original pressure: I did not have to answer the question, I just had to keep asking it again and again. After a couple of days the question started sinking through the layers of the conditioned thinking and habitual patterns of problem solving.

What more have I learnt from actually dealing with a rather concrete question that I could not answer using the habitual ways of addressing a question?

First, accepting the state of not-knowing as part of the journey. I was under the illusion that once one knew the path everything became clear. Apparently, not always so and moreover, often quite on the contrary: wondering around with the question is part of the path itself.  So no shortcuts here! I was reminded once again that none of the masters knew all the answers at each moment:  Christ, Buddha, Mohammed. All of them had to do their share of wondering around and living with the tension of not-knowing.

Secondly, I noticed the tendency of both interpreting the question and wanting to answer it using the either/or dualistic approach. In this case I had the urge to choose between yes and no. Yet none of them rang true with me. It might be that I was favouring one or the other in my life,  but it doesn’t make it so.  So, once again

When doing one thing, is there anything else? (i.e., is today just today?)

Note from Irisha:

Many of the Leafers have started the preparatory study for the second online Jukai and put their sewing skills to test. Once again I did not think I was ready for taking Jukai this year for a number of reasons but asked Fugen (Torbjörn), one of the last year’s Jukai takers and a committed Leafer, to share about the ceremony itself and what Jukai meant to him. In this post he shares his Jukai experience.

What about you? Have you taken Jukai or whatever equivalent can be found in your tradition?  Did it influence your life? If so, how? What is your take on the formal commitment to the practice?

Fugen on Jukai experience

What is the meaning of “Jukai”?

According to the Buddhist Dictionary, Jukai literally means “to receive” or “to undertake the Precepts”.  It is the ceremony both of one’s formally committing to the Buddhist Sangha and to the practice of Zen Buddhism, and of one’s undertaking the Sixteen Mahayana Bodhisattva Precepts as guidelines for life.

Traditionally for Jukai, one receives from a teacher a rakusu, which represents the robe of the Buddha, a kechimyaku,  written lineage chart connecting the recipient to the Buddhas and Ancestors, and a Dharma name selected by the teacher and representing qualities of the recipient’s personality and practice. The Soto Sect’s Shumucho (Religious Affairs Office in Japan) wrote:

Though people approach it with different motivations, all participants must realize that in Jukai-e they inherit the life and quintessence of Buddhism as passed down correctly by generation after generation of Ancestors since the days of ancient India.

When do you take Jukai?

Nishijima Roshi wrote that one should take Jukai at the start of their study of Buddhism:

When a Buddhist seeks to commence upon the study of Buddhism, there is first a ceremony which should be undertaken: It is called ‘Jukai,’ the “Receipt of the Precepts”, the ceremony in which one receives and undertakes the Precepts as a disciple of the Buddha. … Master Dogen specifically left us a chapter entitled ‘Jukai,’ in which it is strongly emphasized that, when the Buddhist believer first sets out to commence Buddhist practice ….. be it monk, be it lay person, no matter ….. the initial needed steps include the holding of the ceremony of Jukai and the undertaking of the Precepts.

I took my first Jukai after being a Buddhist for more than 15 years. For me it was not a really big thing, it just happened to be an option so I took it. But ultimately I believe you can take it anytime and any number of times for that matter.

So how does it work? What do you do?

The Jukai ceremony itself wasn’t so impressive. It was just me, my wife and a computer as we we’re doing the ceremony online. We did some ceremonies , some bowing, some chanting and some zazen. It was more or less like anything you do in life – ordinary.

The thing about Jukai is not the ceremony itself, that’s just the “end of the beginning of the journey”. In my lineage we we’re supposed to sew our own rakusu and study the texts about the meaning of the Precepts. It’s not just to step up and take a ticket, it’s hard work. Sewing the rakusu is a tremendously arduous endeavour, but also a very good practice: the rakasu is made up of a lot of little pieces of cloth which have to be handsewn together in preordered fashion.

The precept study on the other hand was made up as a book club, taking you through the Precepts one at a time, with lots of great discussions on the way. This is a helpful way to approach the Precepts. By not confronting them all at once. Slowly and steadily considering them, putting them up against each other so to speak, you realize they are not that different either in manner or goal.

Precepts are at the core of  Jukai. In the chapter on Jukai in his work Shobogenzo Master Dogen pointed out that precepts  were central to our practice:

Unless we accept the Precepts, we are not yet a disciple of the Buddhas, nor are we an offspring of our Ancestral Masters, because they have considered one’s departing from error and resisting wrong to be synonymous with practicing meditation and inquiring of the Way. The words, “They have made the Precepts foremost” are already what the Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching is.

What does Jukai stand for?

The representation of Jukaj and the Precepts are about us trying, as much as we can, live in a manner unharmful, healthy and helpful to ourselves and others, knowing that ultimately there is no separation between us and others.  It is  also equally important to understand that the precepts are not commandments in the Judeo-Christian sense, they are more like guidelines for us along the way. You won’t go to hell if you break them, but you might encounter some hardships.

Secondly, the Jukai ceremony is a commitment to live by the Precepts, “do the Dharma” and be “Buddhists” in a sense. It represents a vow to seek to remain within the Precepts although our human nature might push us sideways. The ceremony does not make you into a Buddhist, you already are. You might say that it celebrates the fact.

Thirdly, the Jukai ceremony stands for a commitment to continue the practice, to the sangha and to the teacher, knowing that ultimately there is no separation.

Fourthly, it is a statement to yourself and others that you are trying to “draw your straw to the anthill”, “do your part”, and try to do “good things”.

As I see it the Jukai puts an emphasis on a number of things, the precepts, a sort of confession/commitment, a statement.

I learned more from the journey towards Jukai than I have leaned during the rest of my “life as a Buddhist”. The question is if it will change anything.

Now, I may anger some people by saying that taking Jukai isn’t such a big thing. It was not for me. It doesn’t involve earthchanging moments, no strikes of lighting to the head or anything dramatic like that. It just confirms what you already know and do. For me it’s not a big thing, but for some it might. Ultimately, the real significance of Jukai will be that which every recipient finds for him/herself.

It is a challenge to be working on Genjokoan and it’s inspiring to do that with the teacher that taggs on our sleeves to remind us to avoid the Zen snare of dry, conceptual understanding and encourages us to “have a keen and sensitive busshit detector to do this work “.

Once again – the koan in the Genjo Koan, with Mayu fanning himself and the bowing monk.

Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why then do you fan yourself?”

“Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent,” Mayu replied,” you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”

“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk again.

Mayu just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.

Dosho tosses us the question again and again:

What did the monk see that he expressed by bowing?

In one of the posts on his blog he writes:

“Now you might find yourself wanting to dismiss the question. “Bowing is just bowing.” This is one-sided, emphasizing not thinking, and so doesn’t have the power to cause a lineage to bloom (or to ripen the great earth’s goldenness). Watch out for the snare using Zen talk to not deal with this issue (or any other)!

What Dogen saw in the monks bow, and what the Genjokoan unpacks in rolling hopping along vividness, had such an enormous power that it caused our lineage to bloom for some hundreds of years with all the freedom that goes with it.

If we today dismiss the needle point of this question or are satisfied with thin explanations, we won’t have the strength of love to bring it forth in our daily life.“

Here’s my humble take on it. We have the preconditions for life: a body and oxygen we find in the air. Yet to realise life itself, to manifest the living, we have to bring oxygen into the body by inhaling the air and exhaling it, inhaling and exhaling… For as long as we live.

The same goes for practice. Practice equals the verb just like breathing is. We cannot breath just by simply understanding the mechanics of it, cognitively knowing how it works. Knowledge of what makes a practice is useless if it is separate from the activities of everyday life.  If we stop breathing our organs will not get enough oxygen and will stop functioning. Practice is dead without the realisation of it, the actual doing it. We cannot know the practice, we have to live it.

Have started listening to the  program “Meditations that can change your life” by Rick Hanson and Rick Mendius that they recorded for Sounds True. Both are interested in neurology and Buddism. It appears our brain is biologically biased towards negativity to ensure our survival and we tend to remember and overestimate the importance the negative experiences over the positive ones.  This brain of ours proved to be invaluable when we lived close to other species that could be a threat to us. We separated ourselves from nature and chose to live behind the walls so we would feel safer yet are we more relaxed today about our lives? The same incredibly smart and complex tool that served us now contributes to our suffering: while very seldom our physical survival is under threat the biological programming remains the same. We tend to react (overreact!) to many life situations and even just thoughts about them as if we are under threat which costs us a lot of energy, not to mention that it diverts our attention from experiencing life.

“Hope undermines efforts because it takes us away from the present. By coming back to what is right here in front of you right now, you see that meditation and internal transformative work are the best and most direct paths toward being present in life. Energy flows into practice because you see that you have no choice”.

- Ken McLeod, Wake Up To Your Life

As the initial enthusiasm fades after a couple of months of meditation (once again, the mind tends to bring to focus the things I have not yet accomplished rather than a noticeable and positive shift in attitude towards life experiences – also a result of biological conditioning), the question arises: “What is the point of all this?”. But as Ken points out, what choice have I got?

I’ve been run by those habituated patterns for most part of my life and missed a huge chunk of it fighting the monsters in my head so I am pretty determined to try a different path for a change like finally getting real about life. Being at war with myself and the world costs a lot of energy and never ever made things better anyway. Yet even if there are no assurances in the practice itself  I see no other choice but to keep going.  At the very least it will keep me busy for the rest of my life – am blessed with the enough internal material for a few lifetimes.

The door makes no promise

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note, by Adrienne Rich

In my short life as a meditator I’ve noticed that when the mind finally settles down it gets into a creative mode and generates insights. The temptation is then strong to allow myself to stay with those ideas for fear of forgetting or because they appear to be more exciting that just sitting. Wouldn’ that be a waste to let those ideas show up at the door and do nothing about it? What difference would it make if I did explore those ideas during meditaiton?

Ken McLeod in the chapter on cultivating attention in Wake up to Your Life explains how we can reaffirm the old habituated patterns by succumbing to those creative insights:

“Calm and peace in the mind allow you to see things more clearly. When you sit in meditation, insights into interactions with people, business affairs, or personal problems arise spontaneously. Creative ideas and images arise from nowhere. Thoughts and thinking don’t really disturb the quality of attention. Instead of only resting with the breath, you feel that you can use meditation to be more creative, to solve problems and generate insights, and that you can do all that without disrupting attention.
You are wrong.

This is a critical point in practice. If you are to continue cultivating attention, any engagement with thinking in formal sitting practice, even the most helpful insights or creative ideas, must be regarded as a distraction. The content is not the problem. The problem is the thinking process itself. You must let go of it.

If you pursue insights and creative ideas during meditation practice, attention stops developing. You may come up with an idea for a great painting, the next great novel, or a way to end world hunger, but you won’t develop attention or open to the mystery of being. The energy of practice flows from attention in to habituated patterns. In the absence of a practice of attention, habituated patterns become more fixed than they were originally.”

Ken usually suggests to his students to set up two practice sessions, one to cultivate attention and the other to explore the creative ideas that arise.

If you are a meditator, what ideas/thoughts/experiences are the most difficult for you to let go of?

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

-  Rumi

SU-EN Butoh Company had a world premier of their performance Luscious at Dansenshus in Stockholm last Thursday. They devoted the project to the 50th anniversary of Tatsumi Hijikata’s scandalous performance Kinjiki – forbidden colours in Tokyo.

It was the first time I saw a butoh performance. From the little I read about this moderm dance form with the roots in Japanese avantgarde I was intrigued by how the butoh performers worked with the body in space and in nature by deconstructing and challenging it in search for movement.

Nothing I knew about dance prepared me for this performance where I was taken out of  the busy reality and separation from the body and nature and ended up in a don’t-know-where land.  Like any other performance it is better experienced than described so I won’t even try.

Susanna Åkerlund (SU-EN) and her group have the priviledge and the burden of bringing butoh to the Swedish public. Not an altogether easy business in a country with Jantalagen -the unspoken law of not standing out from the crowd, trying to make oneself invisible and not special in any way. I am curious about the techniques used to work with the body and would love to meet the enthusiasts that all have to hold jobs outside to be able to do what they love but maybe got too optimistic signing up for their autumn camp in Almunge, here outside Uppsala. Tempting… Either way, I will look out for more of the group performances.

All photoes are reproduced with the permission of  Su-En Butoh Company. Photography: Gunnar Stening.

As my commuter train arrived to the Stockholm Central Station yesterday I got off the train and for a short moment did not exactly knew where I was. I thought we arrived to a different platform and I’d have to take a different way out. Turning my head around to get oriented I noticed that people were going in two directions: to the left, towards the station, the way I used to go and to the right, towards the stairs I never paid attention to before.

I was not in a hurry so I followed the people who went to the right wondering where I would end up. When I climbed the stairs to the street level I recognised the spot and understood that just taking a few steps in the opposite direction and a flight of stairs saved me at least five minutes of walking: I discovered a shortcut! Besides, I didn’t have to go through the building full of stressed people and did not have to rush myself. All because for a short moment I got disoriented and had to take in as much information as possible to make a decision about the route.  I was no longer operating on autopilot. This allowed me to look at the same situation with new eyes and notice more options.

Having a routine for something, creating mental maps is a survival strategy but it can also be an obstacle, something that holds us back as we no longer feel the need to see the world but deal with our interpretations of it (some very old).  Waking up to the situation at hand (even unintentionally as it happened to me in this case) gives us a unique opportunity to become active participants in our own lives.

This little happening reminded me of my precarious job situation.  One of the managers at my dayjob has set her mind on getting rid of me and there is little I can (or want to do) to change that. Instead of thinking of how unfair she is or going through her flaws as a manager that operates out of fear and therefore herself uses the fear strategy dealing with the employees I made a conscious decision to  stay in that place of uncertainty and see what I could find there.

I looked at the situation and asked myself

• What happened really?
• How do I feel right now?

Staying connected with my body, I noticed that there was a certain level of anxiety associated with financial insecurity but also that some of the reaction was an automated responses to the situation that in our society is perceived as negative – my strong emotional reaction was socially and culturally conditioned. I allowed myself not to feel something only because it could be considered by others as something terrible but to experience what I really felt.  This is when I discovered a strong feeling of relief and an expansion.  Deep inside I was glad and relieved! How could that be?

That I have been unhappy at that job was no surprise to me so what happened really? I am about to lose something I did not really care about but gave a lot of time and energy to. Was I satisfied with how I was selling my time, energy and creativity? Was that money buying me the life I wanted for myself? I knew what the answer was!  After all,  I started Creative Response about a year ago because I was suffocating without the opportunity for creative self-expression at my dayjob and wanted to be helping people by being who I am, not surpressing it.

• What opportunities does the situation allow for?

This last question energised me incredibly.   There was not much going with CR lately as I  got in the wait-and-see phase where I was trying to figure out in which direction I would like to go. So why not use this opportunity to start a new project that will both benefit people and that would allow me to creatively express myself? As it happens, I was sitting on a good idea that I felt passionate about so why not start with it right away? Not that I have a lot to lose much right now!

Not going with the emotions, just experiencing them and staying in the exploratory phase for some time allowed me to see the situation in a different light. I talked to the manager in a matter-of-fact way.  In the end nothing changed in the circumstances and… everything changed. Instead of choosing a disempowering role of a victim of a vicious boss I allowed myself to get disoriented and listen to how I really felt about it and see where it came from. I knew the answers once I stepped outside the mental box I convinced myself I was locked in.

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is

thirsty:

You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all

is inside your own house;

and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a

confused look!

* * *

Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to

Calcutta or Tibet;

if you can’t f ind where your soul is hidden,

for you the world will never be real!

* * *

- Rumi (translated by Robert Bly)

Before I start working my edge it would be helpful to find it first. What is my edge then? What is an edge in the context of a spiritual practice?  The idea of looking for one at the edge of the known resonates with me. The edge is where I no longer have a script or for a moment forget about it. Or – is it?

Dosho brought to my attention during our very first talk that:

• one probably has to go over the edge to find it;
• the edge moves with time;

One of my edges is being awake in relationships. At least sometimes. A hard task, one for the people who want to grow muscle of awakening by exercising it and not just thinking of it.

Relationships are hard or rather it is hard to be in relationships because this is where our buttons are pushed to the extremes and because we actually care. Maybe we care too much and maybe not so much about the relationship and not for the person we are in a relationship with as much as for ourselves and how they treat us?  One can be all peaceful and loving on the cushion but flies off the handle whenever the current partner or ex partner does or says something that doesn’t fit the script we drafted for how things would develop. Old reactivity patterns are triggered and take over the show. And we are always, always right! Shouldn’t that alone be a signal for us to start suspecting that not everything is as certain as we thought???

I believe it is a comforting lie that we can work on one thing and THEN have a look at how we relate with others, especially the ones we are emotionally involved with.  (“I have to focus on myself for now”, as if anything else is not about oneself.) This a psychology of a coward who wants a comfy enlightenment and wishes not hear of the work that has to be done, the aching and the breaking of the muscles as they get stronger (we never take that kind of pain personally, do we?) In the end, the underlying issue is the same in all our struggles (the delusion of separation).

All achy right now but feel very alive… This is how it feels to be human and alive.

I don’t know either.  Sometimes I get curious though and wonder what he is doing right now.

Picking up where I left talking on wine in the daily entry on my 100-day Ango page, a few words on bitter sweetness of not getting what we want. Abstaining for some time from what I used to enjoy surprisingly brought some… pleasure.

Exploring the phenomenon of pleasure as a biological process, Alexander Lowen holds that  “…a concept of pleasure that limits it to the discharge of tension or the satisfaction of needs, though obviously valid, is too narrow to comprehend human behaviour. People actually enjoy a certain amount and kind of tension. They find pleasure in challenging situations, such as competitive sports, because the tension increases the amount of excitation. The buildup of excitation is in itself a pleasurable sensation when it is associated with the prospect of its release… When however the prospect of release is missing or the satisfaction is unduly postponed, desire and need become painful states. Thus, both need and fulfillment are aspects of the experience of pleasure in the absence of conflict and disturbances.” (Alexander Lowen, “Pleasure:  A Creative Approach to Life”)

In other words, not getting what we want right away is a healthy thing (probably not the kind of information that would make marketers jump with enthusiasm).  Creating a gap between the desire and its fulfillment also creates some space for reflection on what it is I actually desire and ask for. It brings to the surface all the stories I construct about why I want or need something (do I?) and the underlying inner believes.

Right now I look forward to uncorking a bottle of delicious red after the 100-days are over.

Psychology of Wine: Truth and Beauty by the Glass

The 100-day Ango with virtual TreeLeaf sangha started yesterday. I set up a separate page here on Appropriate Response
with the idea of establishing some structure for jotting down my Ango experiences on a regular basis, as well as sharing it with other fellow-practitioners so we can (re)connect and support each other in our focused efforts to bring life into practice.  I believe loooking at those ups, downs and middlles in retrospect can also provide some insights. I will start the way it goes and will try to stay open as to the forms it can take.

On a personal and more progmatic level I would like to use this opportunity to bring the light of awareness into the areas of my life where I can sense being disconnected with the true self such as personal finances (mindfulness and money) and my relationship to food and eating (mindful and sustainable eating). I very much welcome Jundo’s decision to choose Dogen’s Tenzokyokin – “Instructions for the Zen Cook” – as a source to inspire us bring those perspectives into our family and work duties. How can we fully live out the buddhadharma where we are:  in the kitchen, in the office, with our loved ones, with the strangers we meet every day or even when we are by ourselves?

If you are one of those who commited to follow through these 100-day period, I’d love to hear from you. (By the way, as Jundo pointed out in his first talk on the blog, it is never too late to join in. Besides, Widlfox Zen with Dosho start two weeks from now). What exeriences would you like to share? What is the hardest thing for you?

Have you ever watched a kid playing?  There is something special about the way they can pick up a stick, shout “STICK!!” and run into the world causing havoc. There is nothing more in this moment than the kid, the stick and the world. I would like to call this special something ‘mindfulness’ or ‘presence’ if you will.

Master Dogen wrote on Time (in Being-Time, Uji):

See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time.
Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another. …
Each moment is all being, is the entire world.
Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.

Master Dogen wished to convey that each moment of time and being is not anything apart from you.  It is your existential time-and-being.  So, he wrote in Uji:

Because real existence is only this exact moment, all moments of Being-Time are the whole of Time, and all existent things and all existent phenomena are moments of Time …
If Time does not take the form of leaving and coming, [a task done in the past] is the present as Being-Time.

If Time does take the form of leaving and coming, you yet have this present moment of Being-Time, which is just Being-Time itself.

Mindfulness is a new catchphrase, a phenomenon not much older than 10 years or so, you might think. But this is not the case. There has been something like it in every culture, be it  modern western culture, Hawaiian native culture or, in this case, Buddhist culture.

There are several words in Pali and Sanskrit which are often translated into the English word mindfulness. However, these terms mean different things which is why confusion may often arise in discussions of mindfulness.

The Sanskrit word that is most often translated into mindfulness is Sati/Smriti, which means to remember (non-forgetfulness).  It simply means that if we decide for ourselves to attach the mind to our present experience, we will remember to hold it there, instead of letting it slip away.

Another word which also is commonly translated into mindfulness is Manisikara, which is the moment of pure perception just before the mind starts to separate, judge and value.  In the western interpretation of mindfulness (within psychology) a large amount of emphasis is put on this particular aspect. The Sanskrit term Appamada/Apramada means being thorough and calculated in your actions and not to act unskillfully or rashly.  This is also an aspect of mindfulness. A final term also taken to mean mindfulness is Sampajanna/Samprajana which means to see clearly, to separate (skillful from unskillful action).

The ability to stay with your experience, to see it clearly, to separate skillful and unskillful actions, and to act in a favourable way are all aspects of mindfulness. Maybe the most important of all the Buddhist scriptures concerning mindfulness is the Satipatthanasutta.  Satipatthana is the practice of sati, the maintaining a constant attention on the here and now and is a part of the eightfold path.  Patthana can be translatated as placement or attaching point.  Satipatthana can therefore be translated as to put the attention or the attaching point of attention.

You may well be asking yourself why am I writing this?  Well, for one, you have to have an solid foundation to stand on, and it is always good to have some knowledge of the definition of terms.

Mindfulness isn’t just this moment, it is all-permeating, it is everything, just as Dogen says.  You can’t just try doing it either.  I often quote another spiritual master, Yoda : “Do or do not… there is no try.”  This is a vital part of mindfulness practice to understand; if you are only trying you are not doing.

This brings us back to the child with the stick. He is not trying anything. He knows exactly what he is doing. He’s got a stick, and it’s him against the world.

A further point I would like to make about mindfulness and being mindful is that the way things are is just the way things are. You know what, it’s ok. It’s all OK!!  Shit happens, deal with it.  It is all about being at the razor’s edge, not falling to one side or the other, not being cut, not missing the point.

If this happens, do this.  If that happens, do that.  When life’s roller coaster goes up, go up. When heading down, head down.  Just ride the ride.  Sometimes it can be very hard.  Then let it be hard.  Your sympathy for me might feel great, but will it help?

I have to take me, and pick myself up, to get on with it, even when there is no me to pick myself up.  I am not saying it will be easy, just saying it is so.  And it’s ok! It’s all OK!!

Maybe that is enlightenment, to see that everything is ok!  It is just what it is.

Is that ok with you?

Torbjörn Andersson

The life of an individual is the life of his body… A person who doesn’t breath deeply reduces the life of his body… If he doesn’t feel fully he narrows the life of his body… In effect,  most people go through life on a limited budget of energy and feeling.

Alexander Lowen, Bioenergetics

One of the things I have noticed or rather felt in my formal practice was that it was missing the bodily aspect even though often times during a sitting I’d stay with pain, physcial discomfort or other sensations in the body.  If being human involves living in this human body would it not be more helpful to use it in meditation in a more direct way?  I took up the asana practice as a way of engaging both body and mind  into the practice in a more direct and dynamic way but was open to furhter explore movement as part of spiritual practice.

Photo: Ralph Weidne

When I first heard Hokai Sobol talk about  history and basic practices of Japanese Shingon on Buddhist Geeks I immediately responded to the idea of what to me sounded like a more embodied meditation practice than what I found zazen to be. I contacted Hokai and with his encouragement and support joined his group in downtown Rijeka for a week end of intensive Shingon practices in the last week of May. (The brief account of the experience will follow shortly.) Although it was hard to say what this experience would lead to in the future, I knew it was the beginning of a new journey. Shingon training helped me realise that spiritual life for me actually meant embodied spiritual life.

But even at this point I did not really know an embodied life meant. For starters, I kept on objectifying the body, thinking of it as a tool to be used and maintained rather than having a value of its own.  I also wrestled with the feeling of guilt and was ambivalent as to whether I should pick and choose practices and traditions as I went along or if  it would be more helpful to “take one seat” as Jack Kornfield advises in “A Path with Heart” and stick with it.  In a way I saw trying out new practices as an admittance of my own “failure” with zazen.

This job that I wanted so badly and did not get or the relationship that went into pieces, will these happenings have the lasting effect on my happiness? Not according to the research Dan Gilbert and his team have been conducting. It is known that thanks to the prefrontal cortex humans have a fantastic ability to imagine the effects of something that did not happen, sort of a built -in simulator. This simulator makes us believe that different outcomes yield different degree of satisfaction.  Dan Gilbert’s research shows that this simulator is not such a reliable tool after all: whether we imagine having our heart broken, winning a lottery or losing a limb, we tend to overestimate the results of the imagined events and often fail at foreseeing the effects on how we would experience our situation once there.

Our simulator fails us because when things don’t go as planned another internal mechanism gets activated and takes over  -  the “psychological immune system” that insures that we actually change our views of the world so that we feel better about our circumstances (some seem to be better at it than others). Although all of us have this system at our disposal and it is actually working, most of us are unaware of it and it is to our great disadvantage.  Why?

One of the implications of Gilbert’s research is that we keep chasing shadows: while we think that happiness is to be found (for example by fulfilling our desires and getting what we want) and sometimes make considerable financial and emotional investments in finding it, all of us have the inherent mechanism of synthesizing happiness that allows us to actually be as happy without whatever we have been pursuing.

Gilbert provides a number of examples from their research, both entertaining and insightful but probably bad news for the marketers who are trying to convince us that we can achieve happiness by getting yet another gadget, service or experience.

In this talk Dan Gilbert also claims our “psychological immune system” works best when we are stuck and have no choice. In fact, freedom (the ability to choose) is the friend of the so called natural happiness (when we get what we want) but is the enemy of the synthesized happiness.

Just a thought: as I understand  both concepts of happiness used by Dan Gilbert imply wanting. While in natural happiness we get what we want, in synthesized happiness we start wanting what we get. Yet for some people happiness is neither but rather the absence of wanting or craving.

Stephen Batchelor on the Art of imagining (from his talk in Amsterdam in 2008). How can we use artistic means to explore and express our understanding of Dharma?

“The world is immigrating into a global village, the question is how much do you want to belong.”

Vusi Mahlasel

Marc Jonson spent years travelling around the world, recording street musicians as part of what started as a project and then grew into a movement.  An amazing intitiative, “Playing for Change” unites people through music and inspiration, giving musicians that never met before opportunity to collaborate and create together. These videos made my morning and reminded me once again we are different but ultimately we all want the same thing.

One of my other favourites – “One Love”, featuring Bob Marley, Manu Chao, Bono and many musicians from the places around the world.

Marc talks about the project as a guest blogger on Bill Moyers Journal

What song(s) bring up in YOU the feeling of being part of the global community?

In the time of the Buddha many people came to seek his advice for mundane matters as well as spiritual. One of the stories of a lay person who sought out the Buddha that has survived over the centuries is the tale of Kisa Gotami.

Thus I have heard. One day a woman carrying a child came to the place where the Buddha was staying with his sangha (spiritual community) of monks, lay seekers and attendants. She was granted an audience with the Buddha and, clearly in considerable distress, told him how she needed medicine for her baby son who had fallen into a deep sleep and would not wake up.

The Buddha asked the woman, named Kisa Gotami, to pass the child to him so that he could see what he could do. The Buddha was no physician but was willing to do anything he could to relieve suffering in anyone, be they his friend, enemy or a complete stranger. Upon receiving the child into his arms, though, it was obvious to him that the child was dead and had been so for some days. It was also obvious that to break this news to Kisa Gotami would have a devastating effect on her mind.

The Buddha told Kisa that he could help to cure her child but that he would need for her to leave her son with him while she got a special ingredient which he needed to prepare medicine. Close followers of the Buddha were surprised at this, as they could see that the child was long beyond the help of even the most skilled medical men. However, the Buddha went on to explain to Kisa that she would need to get some mustard seed from one of the nearby houses and bring it to him. Kisa was expecting to be asked to find something very rare to use as medicine so was surprised and delighted that the Buddha had only requested that she obtain something as commonly used as mustard seeds which were part of everyone’s store cupboard.

This was, however, not all. The Buddha said that the mustard seeds must come from a very particular house, one that had never experienced death. Still, Kisa thought that this would not be such a hard task. Although many houses would have suffered the loss of a family member, surely many had been untouched by this. So, with a lighter heart, she set off to begin her quest for mustard seeds.

Kisa approached the first house in the town and knocked at the door – a woman answered. Kisa explained that she needed some mustard seed to help her sick son and, since mustard seeds were commonly used in home remedies in India at that time, the woman simply nodded and went into the kitchen to fetch some. Coming back with a small jar containing the seeds, Kisa suddenly remembered the second part of the Buddha’s request and asked the woman if anyone had died in her house. If this was a strange thing to ask the woman of the house did not let on but told Kisa that her elderly father had died upstairs over the last winter. Kisa was sad but took the seed anyway. Surely she would have better luck at the next house.

As you may have guessed, this was not to be the case. She went to every single house in the town but at each door was told the same story. No house had escaped the touch of death. Sometimes it was a child who had died, more often an elderly parent or aunt, occasionally a husband or wife taken unexpectedly in the night. Kisa grew more and more despondent as she continued her search and finally made her way back to the Buddha after the sun had set. The moon, however, was full, and reflected light allowed her to see the way to where the Buddha’s sangha were staying.

The Buddha was seated in meditation, still holding Kisa’s child and Kisa waited for him to finish, not wanting to interrupt his contemplation. He soon opened his eyes and looked at her.

“My son is dead, isn’t he?”, Kisa asked. “Yes”, the Buddha replied.

“Will you help me to bury him?”.

The Buddha assented and the two of them found a peaceful spot under the tree in which to inter Kisa’s child. She was upset but the knowledge that her son was dead and not merely sleeping but now at least could face the reality of her grief on her own terms. In the morning she asked the Buddha if she could become one of his followers and he agreed.

——————————————————————————————————–

This story can barely be described as a happy one, yet it amply demonstrates the compassion and wisdom of the Buddha. Rather than telling Kisa what she needed to hear straight out, he skillfully devises a way for her to come to her own realisation that death was commonplace and she was not alone in experiencing it. It seems that she already knew that her son was dead but was clutching at straws rather than face the reality. The death of one’s own chuld is never going to be an easy burden to bear but by gently bringing her to realise the truth, the Buddha reduced the length of her suffering.

In our own lives we do not see reality more often than we would care to admit. Many of us have issues which we need to face, but instead of doing the wise (and brave) thing by addressing them, instead we often engage in distracting activities such as shopping, drinking, eating high calorie foods or watching television. Like Kisa’s hopeless quest for a cure, this merely prolongs our suffering, although at the time it feels like an escape from the pain of the truth.

Buddhism teaches us that freedom is found through facing the uncomfortable parts of life and dealing with them head on rather than hiding from reality. Dharma teachings (the teachings of the Buddha and later Buddhist gurus) also explain how reality really is, rather than how we usually see it. Our own self-interest can often distort our objective view of how things are to our own disadvantage. I am sure we can all recall situations of how we thought that someone had badly wronged us only to realise later that we had over-reacted through anger or self-interest. This is what happened to Kisa Gotami – she would very likely have seen that the child of another woman was not alive, but her very normal attachment to her own child did not allow her to see this.

Facing up to uncomfortable truths about ourselves and the way the world is can be a painful journey but leads to a greater quality of life, as no experience is off limits and suffering can be seen as an inevitable part of life rather than something to be feared. Seeing things as they really are does not have to happen all at once (although there are cases of sudden awakening) and is more like a gradual opening to what is. Many modern day pain clinics advise gently exploring painful areas of the body with our mind to increase blood flow to those areas and decrease tension. In a world filled with so much mental stress and tension this is also very wise advise to do with the painful parts of our mind, and something that the Buddha realised 2 500 years ago.

Further Reading
Chödrön, Pema. 2004. The Places That Scare You.
Chödrön, Pema. 2008. Comfortable With Uncertainty.
Vessantara. 2000. Tales of Freedom.

Since I started doing sitting meditation one of my legs (or both) would inevitably fall asleep and for the most part the sitting would evolve around staying with those sensations in the body. I know it is not harmful for my health and would probably pass with time so I just accepted it as something I could sit with and even learnt to appreciate as those sensations in the body helped me stay connected to it and the breath.  With time those sensations built a background for my sitting, something I sort of knew would be there and I guess I started identify the sittings  with.

Doing some yoga practice right before the sitting has proved to be very successful in helping me get grounded in the body and those sensations in the legs suddenly disappeared altogether. Now the body feels alert yet relaxed and pleasantly warmed up. However, I soon discovered that when the body is more comfortable the mind is more likely to wonder away and engage in daydreaming and I have to apply more effort to sustain concentration.

I find myself wishing one condition away in preference of the other only to find out that the latter is not at all as I imagined it to be.

Friend, please tell me what I can do about this world
I hold to, and keep spinning out!

I gave up sewn clothes, and wore a robe,
but I noticed one day the cloth was well woven.

So I bought some burlup, but I still
throw it elegantly over my left shoulder.

I pulled back my sexual longings,
and now I discovere that I’m angry a lot.

I gave up rage, and now I notice
that I am greedy all day.

I worked har at dissolving the greed,
and now I am proud of myself.

When the mind wants to break its link with the world
it still holds on to one thing.

Kabir says: Listen my friend,
there are very few that find the path!

From Ecstatic poems by Kabir, versions by Robert Bly

I rather like this version for the metta meditation.

May we all be…

Mindfulness meditation is an excellent Buddhist practice but is only the first step to dealing with the negative states of mind which we all have.  How can we use this awareness to reduce the suffering we experience in life?

When we first start practising the cultivation of awareness it may appear that we are becoming more rather than less affected by our delusions such as desire (attachment) and anger(aversion).  What is usually happening is that we are actually noticing these emotions more rather than unconsciously acting and reacting to everything our mind puts out.  Just as we are unable to treat an illness until we are aware of its presence, though, so we cannot tackle the negative aspects of our mind until we have seen them with our own inner eye.

The Tibetan lorig teachings list 11 wholesome and 20 unwholesome mental factors and the state our mind is in will affect our actions and how we behave in the future.  As Nagarjuna put it:

“All actions of body speech and mind created with an attitude of greed, hatred and ignorance lead to suffering.  From all actions created with the opposite attitudes of love, compassion and wisdom, only happiness comes.”

A similar message can be found in the first two verses of the Pali Dhammapada:

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of mind.  If a man speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows him as the wheels of the cart follows the beast that draws the cart.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of mind.  If a man speaks or acts with a pure mind, joy follows him as his own shadow.”

By being mindful of our state of mind and aware of our reaction to strong emotions, we can greatly increase our ability to respond appropriately.  This will reduce the future suffering of both ourselves and those whom we come into contact with.  Anger and hatred can be averted and we can instead seek to act with a wholesome mental attitude.  Further, acting appropriately provides a model for others in how to handle human interaction and teaching by example rather than lecturing others can be a very powerful way to change behaviours.

I find that since I have begun meditating I am more aware both of my unwholesome mental states, and also of their consequences.  When I am with my children and they are misbehaving, acting out of anger or frustration rarely produces a good outcome.  Even if they do curb their behaviour, it is usually done resentfully.  With an attitude of compassion and love, I can often manage to get around them using humour (and occasional bribes of chocolate!) which both changes their behaviour and leaves us all happy with the situation.

The cultivation of mindfulness, and appropriate response based on that awareness, can enable us to treat both good and bad situations without attachment and aversion respectively, much as is alluded to in the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’ and advised by Geshe Potowa in his lojong teaching ‘Seven Verses for Thought Transformation‘:

“Endure whichever situation arises, good or bad“

If we are able to do this through practice, we can greatly reduce the degree of feeling generated through contact with sensory objects which will lead to reduced levels of attachment to worldly things.  In human existence it is an error to expect to always encounter favourable conditions and we would be wise to prepare for inevitable setbacks to our plans and personal loss of both possessions and people close to us.

Despite the many benefits which arise from being more mindful in our daily life, the downside of using mindfulness meditation to reduce our unwholesome mental factors is that we must always maintain our level of mental alertness to avoid falling prey to negative emotions.  This is hard even for the most committed Buddhist.  Even monks have off-days.

Dealing with each mental factor as it arises is akin to treating the symptoms of a disease without tending to its causes.  We can maintain our mindfulness throughout our life and thus reduce our negative reactions to a great degree but we will still remain in the cyclic existence which causes so much suffering.  Fortunately, Buddhism teaches a more permanent method to achieve lasting happiness.

The root of suffering is ignorance and unless we put an end to our ignorance of how things exist we are going to continue to experience suffering.  Primary to destroying ignorance is developing the understanding that the mind that grasps at the inherent existence of our own self is the cause of all that is unsatisfactory in our lives.  Once we have the firm and unmistaken view that our self is purely a label we place upon an ever-changing body and mind, events can be allowed to arise and fall away without attachment to them.  As anyone who has looked at this may know, however, destroying the attachment to self and ego is not an easy process.  Few worthwhile things in life are.

Meditation on emptiness is the means of destroying the demon of self-grasping and the Tibetan Lam Rim teachings set out exactly how this can be achieved.  Similar techniques for seeing reality are also found in instructions for zazen, insight meditation (vipassana) and mahamudra.  This is a central practice in all Buddhist paths, and with good reason.  By repeatedly contemplating the lack of inherent existence of all phenomena, in whatever way we choose, we can gradually become aware of the true nature of mind and the world around us.  This frees us from seeing what happens as anything other than clouds which move across the sky; they obscure the sun for a short while but soon pass by.  We can remain as still and impartial as a mountain as the winds of worldly concerns blow about us.  Notions of separation between our ’self’ and others are removed and everything is seen as it really is – the impermanent ebb and flow of energy and matter.

At a personal level I practice meditation on emptiness daily during the practice of Guru Yoga (a type of Tibetan puja which cultivates reverence for the guru as the transmitter of authentic dharma teachings).  This is slowly bringing the realisation that my body, speech and mind all have no inherent existence but are fundamentally dependent on numerous other people and things.  This enables me not to take so much offence when people insult or criticise me and to realise that my possessions, reputation, health and even existence is subject to impermanence as are all things.  That said I am clearly not enlightened yet, as anyone who knows me can readily testify!

Realisation of emptiness and the generation of a compassionate mind are the two parts of the path to enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism.  Mindfulness and equanimity are very good methods to transform our negative mental factors into more positive states of mind, but the true goal is to achieve the body, speech and mind of a Buddha.  This is what we need to work towards on the Buddhist path while not neglecting our present state of being and ensuring that our current, unenlightened, actions are working for the benefit of all.

Andy

In Asia there is a very clever trap for catching monkeys. People hollow out a coconut, put something sweet in it, and make a hole at the bottom of the coconut just big enough for the monkey to slide its open hand in, but not big enough for the monkey to withdraw its hand as a fist. They attach the coconut to the tree, and the monkey comes along and gets trapped. What keeps the monkey trapped? Only the force of desire, of clinging, of attachment. All the monkey has to do is let go of the sweet, open its hand, slip it out, and be free. But only a very rare monkey will do that.

~  Joseph Goldstein, Transforming the Mind, Healing the World

It is the attachment to the ideas about what that coconut can bring to us that keeps us trapped. My coconut can take a shape of an idea I have of what my life should be like that prevents me from seeing other opportunities, an image what my body should look like, what others should treat me like, that I should manage all the stuff on my to-do list no matter what… It takes a good amount of self-observation to catch oneself clinging to that coconut and some courage to let it go. But then – the sweetness of the liberation is all mine! Also, I cannot receive anything if I have my hands full all the time!

Today I practice the art of letting go of the coconuts and saying to myself “Släpp!” (SW: let go!).

Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

-Dorothy Parker

I don’t share Dorothy Parker’s pessimism when it comes to the matters of heart but have noticed that many times it is exactly following the heart that brought trouble onto my head. You know what I mean? In the beginning it all looks right and feels right (hopefully it even smells right ). Then how come one day you wake up and “right” is the last word that comes to mind when you think of that very person that used to be your own center of the universe? As Käbi Laretei asks in her recently published book,  “Vart tog all denna kärlek vägen?” /”Where did all this love go?” .  The acclaimed pianist shared ten years of her life with the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. The book is a collection of their correspondence.

Some try to answer the question by writing books while others draw the conclusion that the only way to avoid this endless circle of disappointments is to simply run for their life from any relationship that brings up those butterflies in the stomach – they are convinced there is no “right”, it just feels that way for a while and they think they can choose  choose safe over  sorry.

For starters I would like to understand what it is that makes my brain see someone as very attractive and therefore desirable,  leaving the where-did-it-go question for later. What happens when I am drawn to another human being and my heart starts beating faster at the very thought of his smile? How does love chemistry work?

So, once again: what’s happening in the brain when we feel high on love?

Biological anthropologist Helene Fisher, the founder of Chemistry.com and the author of the personality test that many dating sites presently use to help singles around the world find their ideal matches, was a guest speaker at TED not once but twice. Here Helene Fisher shares talks about the research she and her research team conducted using MRIs of people in love:

In her other lecture Helene Fisher talks about the evolution and the underlying biochemical foundations of love as well as its social implications. She also explains the biological mechanisms behind our desire to cheat on our partner.

Journalist Susan Kuchinskas, the author of  “The Chemistry of Connection” is also interested in the biology of attraction. In her interview on Love, Sen and Intimacy she makes a clear distinction between lust, romantic love and love. She also explains how our capacity to love and bond with others is determined by the level of oxytosin. Interestingly, we learn to release oxytosin through being nurtured as babies so dear parents please hug your offspring as often as possible!

What do these discoveries and the way they are interpreted mean for me? It seems that choices that appear attractive to me are to a large extend a product of chemical processes in the brain that is wired a certain way to ensure survival of the human race rather than my interests as an individual.

In episode 118  Buddhist Geeks interviewed Daniel Ingram on his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha that Daniel revised and made available online in PDF-format (Thanks, Daniel!)

Why all this excitement about yet another book on Dharma? Books we have plenty of but manuals packed with straightforward techniques – not so many.  Daniel describes it as   “… one of the more practical and technically detailed manuals for high-level insight and concentration practice available, and its maps of spiritual terrain and advice for navigating in unusual territory are world-class. “

I spent the rest of the evening in the arm chair hugging my overworked laptop, slowly going through the first pages of the book.  How do I move forward with sitting? What are the ways to enhance concentration? For the first time I was holding exact instructions as to how I could proceed and no longer worried that wanting to actually move forward with the help of the meditation techniques defined me as a doer and an achiever.

I started with Forward and Warning and then swiftly moved to the section on The Tree Characteristics where Daniel outlines how we can better understand the Three Characteristics (impermanence, suffering and no-self) while sitting.  I soon stumbled over a number of exercises that might be helpful in both increasing the concentration and better understanding impermanence. They keep the mind busy observing the sensations at a fast rate and therefore do not allow it to get lost in thoughts.

Needless to say I feel more motivated to sit now and whenever I can I do those exercises off the cushion, dismantling sensations and mental formations that arise. Nobody can do the work for me (the author is very clear about that) but at least I know what to do. 

Although not a mega meditator, with time I noticed some effects of meditation and got curious in what exactly happens in the brain when I sit on the cushion and watch my mind jumping around,  patiently learning to bring attention to the intention and stay with life itself instead of the virtual reality my mind entertains me with.  How do these changes in the brain influence how I relate to everything and everyone around, including myself?

I  am now more aware of what is going on inside my body and my head which means that a lot of junk that earlier went unnoticed gets caught in the net of awareness.  When catching a little thought that gets lots of attention  and suddenly swells up to the size of a huge mountain,  in this more awakened state of mind I can trace how it leads to a lower state and starts stinking. I find this little self-observation more valuable than all the years I spent in college as it opens the door to liberation from the years of  being a slave to the small, hungry and jealous mind.  There is little joy in noticing how easily the mental trash can start nesting inside the head but on the other side this is my chance to clean up the house and ensure I do not start unloading it on others.

Here come a few podcasts that answer some of the “hows” about the ways meditation rewires our brain and subsequently influences who we are.

Meditation and creativity

David Lynch has been diving into TM (Transcendental Meditation) for over 30 years and intends to bring meditation to those who are willing to give it it a try. The video includes a live demonstration of meditator’s brain waves.

Meditation and the brain

Doctor Campbell (a k a Docartemis)  interviewes Daniel Siegel on meditation and the brain on The Brain Science Podcast. Interestingly, Dr. Siegel wrote a book on mindful parenting not knowing anything about the mindfulness meditation (Vipassana).  On the base of scientific evidence and the first-person experience he gives an overview of how the mindfulness meditation changes the brain both in short-term and in long-term leading to structural changes, when the states we develop during meditaion become traits.

According to Dr. Siegel the following prefrontal functions  can be developed through meditation and become automated traits:

• regulating your body (improved blood pressure and immune system and its functioning);
• attuning to yourself and others in a deeper kind of way (compassion)
• the ability to better regulate your affect of states
• develop the ability to extinguish fear
• “response flexibility” or the capacity to pause before you act
• more insight into yourself
• more empathy for others
• more morality
• access to intuition

More brain and meditaion

Rick Hanson, PhD and Rick Mendius, MD, bring insights and tools from the fields of psychology, neuroscience and Buddhism, in their talk on Neurology of Awakening that can be streamed or donwloaded from Audiodharma’s site and the slides can be obtained from the Wisebrain site.

Have YOU noticed any of those or other tangible effects of meditation?

I always thought of myself  as a dog person till a cat with eyes the color of cinnamon moved in with me.

I would not hear of other places till I met him and we built home in a far land.

I spelled together as happy but felt lonely.

I was in love with Italian till I heard the German Zuckerschnecke.

…

The “I” I have known was a fantasy, a lie.  It is time to get to know me.

We are becoming more productive and more effecient, yet have never felt as lonely as some studies show.

What if is the answer is in slowing down and doing less?  Marc Lesser,  Zen teacher and CEO of ZBA Associates LLC, must be onto something if he can accomplish this by doing…less? He is also teaching the Google folks to search inside.