The older one was somewhat neurotic, jumpy and insecure.  I could never say what she had on her mind and often had a feeling she could see me for who I truly was. Looking into her eyes for a while was often like staring into the sky, provoking the effect of vertigo. She never demanded attention, but asked for it ever so gently. Truth be told in the past year or so she very seldom received it from me. Not surprising, I didn’t notice when she started the fading away business. I was not paying attention, busy getting all the things done. The younger – very verbal, outgoing and totally incapable of being moody or angry – used to miew her way into a hug.

 
It ended within a week. Worse things happen, I suppose. Every day somewhere in the world people die, hearts get broken. We had to move on. Only something doesn’t work. It is not just that we became one loving being short in the household, it is that one other being doesn’t seem to know how to exist in this world without her companion. Lisa, so quiet you hardly knew she was there, had a function in our triad, of which I was totally unaware. Her disappearing act shifted the invisible balance. The younger one I knew seems to have disappeared with the death of her companion and in the rear moments of silence at home, I catch myself thinking, “This is not the one I loved”.

Filed under: Response Tagged: cats, death, mourning ]]> http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/disappearing-acts/feed/ 0 understandingcat Lisa_bw_2 http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/are-you-helping-your-child-love-challenges/ http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/are-you-helping-your-child-love-challenges/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:35:07 +0000 Irina Almgren http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/?p=4178 ]]>

Parents and those who work with the kids (well, in fact, all of us), listen up!  Psychologist and the author of Mindset: The Psychology of Success  Carol S Dweck  spent years studying the ways children handled failure and found that those ways played a very important part in how they later in life would deal with challenges. She called those ways mindsets: the growth mindset (when children understand that failure is the only way to grow and that they can develop their abilities and intelligence) and the fixed mindset (the idea that you either have the ability or you don’t and everything you do is a test for how smart you are).  Not surprisingly, she found that children who are more likely to fall apart under  failure where the ones with the fixed mind set. 

For children it is essential to see failure as feedback, information because this is the only way they can develop the necessary skills. When toddlers make their first attempts to walk, they use failure to learn how to make the next attempt even better, to adjust the strategy. I believe we are all like this in the beginning. When we start getting conditioned by parents and the society, we change our attitude to learning and become more result-oriented, taking feedback as a sign of personal failure. Ever heard a grown up say, “I tried to do this but it was hard so I gave up”, be it about new dance moves or a relationship. I sure did! Ever heard your kid say this? If the answer is yes, you might want to rethink how you speak to her/him when you are giving your evaluation of their achievement. Some praise fosters a fixed mindset while other praise fosters a growth mindset. Praising your child’s intelligence backfires and creates a fixed mindset. The children do not want to make a mistake and avoid challenging tasks from which they can learn.

What to do? Instead praise the process, effort, strategy, persisting in the face of obstacles. Research that Carol S Dweck and her colleagues conducted showed that the way in which parents had praised their children age could predict how the same children would address challenges five years later. So next time your kid shows you the drawing she made, hold back your initial response, that might be “Oh, how talented you are!” or “What a beautiful drawing!”, but rather focus on praising the strategy, the use of colors or how the child solved a particular issue in the drawing or how she did not give up. That might help your child develop the growth mindset, teach her enjoy difficulty and keep on going when things get tough. That actually sounds like a good advice for self-evaluation as well!

I imagine it is not easy to rethink the praising and positive labeling strategy when talking to one’s child. After all we have been brain washed by self-confidence boosting strategies which teach us to praise children. However, real self-confidence is something children start cultivating on their own, when they are actually facing the challenges and figure out the ways of dealing with it.

As a parent/teacher/coach, what are your thoughts on the subjects and how have you been giving praise to your child?

Can you be a child of illusion?, can you see the magic in the world around you even in the most difficult times?

If you can, then how does it make you feel? If you cannot then why not? What is stopping you?

Where do I even start?  Although I would very much like to return to the magic world of the childhood, it does not strike me as a particularly informed one. Children are this way because they cannot be any other way (and how wonderful is that!) It reminds me of a judgement that can often be heard about the works of artists who choose to express their vision in a more abstract way, “But even a child could make a picture like that!” Exactly! Only this is the only way a child can make pictures, which is not the case with artists. Kids have to go through those pains of development, with the support of the parents and the tribe (some don’t go far but that is a different issue). They have to discover the world is not rotating around them (moving from the egocentric perspective to a wider, etnocentric and then to worldcentric), that parents are not perfect and that in life we inevitably encounter loss and suffering. At the same time they are being socialized and conditioned by the people they are very dependable on. This is a lot to take in! Honestly, I don’t envy children.

So when I take up questions like the ones outlined above, I have to remind myself to not idealize something and keep in mind the intention. The intention behind my practice is not to forget all the things I know about life of which loss and death are a part of, but to be aware of choices in life and make informed decisions. With this in mind, I move into exploring what it is that keeps me from experiencing the world through the eyes of a child. I supposed this is what in Zen traditions is called Zen mind. The qualities I associate with this state is gentle curiosity, openness and playfulness. Openness to whatever arises, good or bad.

What is this mystery of life we are talking about here?

“Perhaps the mystery makes itself felt as a moment of timeless presence, of being so completely here that you wonder where you’ve been all your life. The moment passes however, and a wall goes back up. You realize that you live behind that wall… You live with the isolation, but deep inside you wonder, “What is this wall?”

- Ken McLeod, “Wake up to your life”, p. 4.

What stops you from experiencing the mystery of life? What is this wall Ken writes about? When is it more likely to come up?

Loving

It’s been quite an adventure loving others but I had to admit to myself that I had yet a lot to learn about giving myself to love wholeheartedly. The love I was offering to my partners and close friends often have been tinted with the desire for them to be a certain way or do specific things, if only for a few minutes. While this was something I honestly believed in earlier, it was a shock for me to realise this has not been how I have been living the loving.

In “Everyday Zen” Joko Beck makes a radical statement: relationships don’t work. In fact, it is the very fact that we want something to work that makes relationships unsatisfactory. “We all want something from the people we are in relationship to. None of us can say that we don’t want something from those we are in relationship to. And even if we avoid relationships that’s another way of wanting something. So relationships just don’t work.”

The only thing that works, according to her, “(if we really practice) is a desire not to have something for myself but to support all life, including individual relationships.” When someone loves/supports someone, there is no book-keeping going on when we try to balance the sheet: I gave this much and now I want something back (be it about preparing meals, doing the dishes or giving emotional support and time). So what does it mean to love/support others on the moment-to-moment basis, choosing love again and again? Loving the person because I want to be with them and not because I want them to be someone else or do something else.

Joko Beck: “To truly support somebody means that you give them everything and expect nothing. You might give them your time, your work, your money, anything. “You need it. I’ll give it to you”. Love expects nothing.”

Quite a different perspective on love from the one we often see in films, books and definately not the one shared by the cultures I have been living in, which are driven by the concern that we cannot get enough of something. We cannot get enough of good food, trendy clothes and gadgets, wise books, cool hobbies, time. Love. We actually start believing someone actually can give us love while love can only exist within ourselves, this is something we feel.

For the moment it might seem like I am doubting my own feelings, often returning to the question,  ”Do I love him/her or do I want them to be someone else?” but this is the only way I know that can wake me up from the confusion. If I am not getting enough love, can it be that I am not feeling enough love, not choosing love but instead balancing the sheets too much?

One of the big names in psychology Philip G. Zimbaro was a guest on Skavlan, the popular talk show in Sweden. He talked about the Stanford Prison Experiment he was running in 1971 and what it revealed about the situations in which “good people are placed in bad circumstances. ” I had learnt about the famous prison simulation a few years ago from the German film “Das Experiment” (2001).  (It was not exactly something one learnt about growing up in the Soviet, the whole country being basically a prison cell.)

The experiment scheduled for two weeks was interrupted after six days as the situation started spiraling out of control. Watching the film today it is hard not to draw parallels with the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib by the American soldiers.

What astonished me in Dr Zimbaro’s account was that he acknowledged how in the matter of six days he totally identified with his role of the superintendent of the prison, stopped seeing the people and saw only “prisoners”, how the only thing he cared about was that the “guards” followed their routines, although he saw the escalation of the abuse by the “guards”. Could that be?

The site dedicated to the experiment takes us on a tour around it, “uncovering what it tells us about the human nature.”  I catch myself lingering over the Begin the Slide Show button. What am I about to see the proof of? That in difficult circumstances we forget about being human? (The roles of the prisoners and guards in the original experiment were assigned by chance, nobody actually wanted to be a “guard” from the beginning).

Another experiment comes to mind:  two groups of volunteers (novice meditators and what I would call mega meditators – those who had spent more than 10,000 hours in meditators, like Matthieu Ricard) submitted their brains for scrutiny by neuroscientists when practicing compassion meditation towards all beings.  The difference between the two groups was striking, the monks showing a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves that are said to underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators “showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature,” says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.”

So if we practice meditation for hours and hours, we can actually change the structure of the brain and become more compassionate? That if anything is a good reason enough to introduce meditation in schools and working places, right?

As I was writing this post a few evenings ago, I learnt about Genpo Merzel´s decision to disrope and read his official statement. I felt sadness and confusion and stayed with them for a while. Some of my emotional response was the reaction to what I read in those lines and to the realisation that there was a lot of pain that I could not know about behind and beyond those lines. Some was coming from the reaction I saw in the comments to the statement here and there. I do not know Genpo Merzel or the people around him who had been influenced by his conduct, but somehow it felt like a personal blow. Why? There was this kind of righteous indignation I recognised, the one I feel when I know someone who was not able to protect themselves was abused, a child, an animal or a grown up in a vulnerable state. Then there was another thing I saw, something I preferred would remain in the dark: it was about Genpo Merzel being a Zen teacher and is he not supposed to be immune to those temptations? If those folks cannot do it, where does it leave the little  me??? (This also brought some reflections on what it is I want from my practice, reconnecting with the intentions. Was it to become a perfect human being or a whole human being?)

Stuart Lachs, interviewed on Buddhist Geeks on the topic a while ago (Episodes 72 & 73), wrote a paper on the institute of Zen Roshi in the West in which he explores the myths of the perfected being in the person of the Zen master, analyzes the mechanisms of power and authority in Zen and among other things explores the motives “for “not seeing” the master as he really is, whether there be an absence of compassion or wisdom or the presence of sexual improprieties or alcoholism.”…

“Some of these qualities imputed to the Zen master are simplicity, innocence, and lack of self-interest or desire.  The master is said to be a person whose actions flow solely out of compassion for other sentient beings. He is imputed to possess a timeless and transcultural wisdom, the ability to see the truth behind appearances and to have the prerogative to speak expertly on all subjects. In fact, he is taken to be last in an unbroken chain of enlightened, unblemished masters reputedly going back 2500 years to the historical Sakyamuni Buddha. But, this portrait can only exist if we ignore the irritating complexity and contradictions of actual lives and real history.”

From Stuart Lachs’ paper, The Zen Master in America:  Dressing the Donkey with Bells and Scarves, 2006, p. 2.

If we gave up the idea that even Zen teachers are people and therefore not without self-interest, where would it leave us?

Here come a couple of my favourite lessons off the yoga mat (but then again all life is one if we do not try to compartmentalize it, right?)

Am I ready?

One of the most profound lessons that yoga has been teaching me about myself and life is that at every moment it can become more than a stretch just as falling for another always has a potential to be a much larger journey than the initial experience of falling in love.  Both can be truly transforming experiences. And as I’ve discovered, transformation is simply not possible without resistance and the underlying fear of change.

As I watch the yoga teacher suspending herself in the air in a beautiful arm-balance, my heart jumps with excitement and I feel the subtle shifting in my own muscles. The next second I catch the Controller in me go, “No-no-no, you could not possibly pull this one off without injuring yourself or destroying the apartment. You certainly should not consider venturing into it without a thorough preparation.”

What I forget is that every pose I ever tried have been preparing me for this next balance. Now whenever I think the pose is too much for me, I remind myself that I don’t need to do it in its entirety right away but can break it down into components to gently and patiently explore each of them. Likewise, in relationships, whenever something feels overwhelming, my beloved and I can break down the larger issue into smaller parts and see what each of them asks from us, one at a time. Suddenly I feel how my own tension subsides, see the face of my beloved relaxing, the first glimpse of smile showing in his eyes.

Throwing oneself into the fire

One of the first things we discover in yoga is the disproportionate restrictions in our body, those tight spots. So the physical aspect of yoga is about cultivating openness in those restricted areas by constantly playing the edge. In his wonderful book on yoga Erich Schiffmann defines playing the edge as “sensing where your edges are and learning to hold the body there with awareness, moving with its often subtle shifts.  Your skill in yoga has little to do with your degree of flexibility or where your edges happen to be. Rather, it is a function of how sensitively you play your edges, no matter where they are.”* I am reminded that there are no such thing as the ideal posture (or perfect relationship for that matter!) but rather each posture is ever-evolving, changing from moment to moment. Sensitivity for me is in the first place about listening for both the words and beyond the words, the ability to drop the agenda (this is how I am going to do this pose or what I am going to say) when I am listening to my own body or to what my beloved says. Even in relationships we can practice listening with the body, as we do in yoga. We can colibrate ourselves to become more sensitive and receive the waves we otherwise might miss.

“The process of sensitively flirting with your edges and achieving perfect energy flow is not merely the means to achieve the pose – it is the pose.”* The magic of it all is that the limits and the edges change as we go and so do we. I can certainly witness to my own being far more flexible in relationships  these days (at least in some aspects .

What about pain? While pain (reminder that we have gone too far) does not belong on the yoga mat,  we do meet with intensive sensations. I think the same principle can be applied to the domain of relationships: we cannot avoid pain as any relationship “cracks us open”, using the words of David Whyte. Yet we can feel where the healthy edge is and look into the roots of resistance, explore it, not leaving it ignored, not giving it a chance to turn into rejection.

I was reminded of this as something inside started aching the moment my beloved left town for a few days. I could not stand the thought of snowy days and dark nights away from him. As I was opening my heart to the pain of longing, I noticed that this was the “good hurt”, much like when I go deeper into a hip opener, patiently making my way through restrictions by breathing into them, settling into what initially is perceived as pain. In yoga, when I relax into the sensations, I notice that they border with pleasure and can even catch myself smiling. ”Resisted intensity becomes pain.” * On the mat, I learn to distinguish pain from intensity. Erich Schiffmann defines intensity as “more “energy” at any given moment, more feeling. “*. It allows us to feel more alive.  And how alive I feel when I experience the breath travelling through the body down from the crown of my head through the spine and into the heels as I drink the cobra pose.

A Sufi poet wrote, “Love is the fire and I am the wood”. Both in yoga and in love (in this one life) we should be ready to enter  this fire, to become consumed by it, each moment burning to the ashes.  Yoga and relationships have the capacity to bring us back to our life (the center of the fire), instead of dreaming about it, to show us the largeness of each moment, no matter how trivial.

I am so small I can barely be see.

How can this great love be inside me?

Look at your eyes. They are small,

but they see enormous things.

- Rumi, The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

What are your lessons from the yoga mat that you take with your into the domain of relationships, dear yogi?

* Erich Schiffmann “Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness”

** Many thanks to Johan Bencker for letting me use one of his photos.

I smile towards the white sky.

Fresh footprints outside my door.

- Fugen, do you remember when the idea of becoming a Zen priest first crossed your mind?

I had no thought of becoming a Zen priest, but I was asked by Jundo on December 22nd last year if I would consider it, and here we are. Now, for me, becoming a Zen priest is no big thing, I don’t really see me as any different or having become any different, and I didn’t seek any of honorifics some people sometimes seek and call themselves by. I’m really just me, being here, doing this.

That being said, for me, becoming this is a good practice and it enables me to help more people in the process.

- This particular ordination is unique in that it was conducted entirely online. I guess I want to ask you if it felt real?

First up, what is real? I am not a Zen teacher and only in training as a priest, and as such is not to be viewed as an authority of any sort in the matters of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism, but according to Buddhism the world you think is real isn’t really as you think…

Now, we might sidestep all this by saying something like ”virtual-real” (on-the-Internet) and ”real-virtual” (off-the-Internet), but to answer the question, yes it felt real… But at the same time some times it felt very much unreal, as you were floating on clouds and everything just happened around you, and you just floated along… And I don’t think what had actually happened hit me until I got on Skype afterwards and the people tried to get my attention…

Did it change the relationship between me and Treeleaf? Yes, it did. People at Treeleaf seem to regard me as something I’m not really. Now, that was more or less expected, and can be dealt with. I’m not any better than them, and i respectfully ask them to let those things go o those who seek such honorifics.

My involvement with Treeleaf  has somewhat deepened, although I’ve always regarded it as my sangha and Jundo and Taigu as my teachers. The depth has been shown by taking on more responsibility and new assignments, as for example for this Ango period I’m taking some charge in running the practice partner exercise for those who wanted to do that.

- What now in terms of continuing priest training?

Now the real practice begins. The training so far has been taking about 2-3 hours each evening, with a lot of reading, studying, talking and sewing (we have been sewing our own Kesa), and it will more or less continue in the same fashion. In addition to this, we are encouraged to seek out other Zen dojo’s and practice there and set up our own little sangha/sitting group.

– Can you say a few words about the ordination ceremony itself, its different bits? Anything you remember particularly well?

Shukke Tokudo is the ceremony of ordination marking the passage from layperson to what we call a monk, nun, or a priest (the Japanese term of is Unsui- cloud and water). Tokudo means ‘ceremony,’ and Shukke is ‘leaving home.’ So in a sense it’s a homeleaving ceremony, although there is no home to leave and it is more in the lines of coming home…

The ceremony is supposed to be composed of three parts, or so I’ve been told. One known by all, one known by the teacher and one ”unknown”. And it really was all of it. My brother came by train from Gothenburg early in the morning, and from there the circus was on.
Before long I had my head shaved, was interviewed by both radio and newspaper, got the outfit on and off a couple of times, standing barefoot before the computer, all clad in white and hearing the words ”the ordination ceremony…”

As for the ceremony settings, it was just me, my brother and a computer as we were doing the ceremony online. We did some ceremonies, some bowing, some chanting. It was more or less like anything you do in life – ordinary, simple. The ceremony itself wasn’t so impressive.
Or maybe it was. Maybe that was what made it so special. Because we deem it so special and important, made it special and important…

- What were your thoughts and feelings during the ceremony, if you remember them? Did you worry about something as earthly as Internet connection breaking up or anything at all?

The thing about Shukke Tokudo is not the ceremony itself, that’s just the “end of the beginning of the journey”. And it isn’t really about the ceremony, that’s just a ceremony. Even if I hadn’t done the ceremony, if the lightning had struck out my connection or whatever, i would still be here doing this, doing what I have always done and always will do.

- Is there a way for someone who is curious about Treeleaf to meet you and others in a more personal environment than via the forum?

I am also doing something called ”The Treeleaf teaparty”, a regular ceremony on Sunday nights (Swedish time), where anyone interested may join, where we do a meal chant and some sharing of insightful tips and other discussions in a sort of conference environment, most often via Skype.

- How can people get in touch with you in case they want to attend one of your tea parties?

They need to first e-mail me their Skype name so we can add them to the group. My email: awasedo[at]googlemail [dot]com.

-Do they have to be acquainted with the intricacies of the Japanese tea ceremony?

Not at all. It is a rather informal setting.

- Anything else you want to add/share?

Yes, I would thank everybody, especially the ordained at Treeleaf. It’s all good practice. Thank you for your practice.

- Thank you, Fugen! Congratulations on your Ordination. Look forward to connecting with you again and hearing where the wind takes you and the TreeLeafers.

Read more about the ceremony on Fugen’s blog.

My first thought was of a practical character: could the changed in the last few days weather conditions have effected the skin of the drums? Of course, it could be the combination of both: dry air and nervous energy. The last two practice sessions we were preparing for the upcoming workshop with the three renowned Maracatu teachers from Brazil. Our leader arranged for the workshop to happen in Uppsala and was keen on our group making the best of this master class with the masters of Maracatu. Maybe a little too keen. Maybe the pressure was too much and he brought in something extra into those rehearsals.

This made me think of the right effort that has always been a big question for me in many life situations. Strong willed and persistent as I am sometimes, I can keep pushing to only end up in the same place I started. I could have saved the efforts and time by stepping aside in the right moment, had I paid attention and not have become obsessed with the idea of how it should be. Most often I could make a good case for my persistence that in the end is more a sign of stubbornness.

In Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind Suzuki Roshi writes,  “Our effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to non-achievement… which means to be rid of the unnecessary and bad results of effort.” “If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra”. (p 59) Suzuki Roshi encourages us to get rid of this “special effort to achieve something”. This is not the same as getting rid of an effort because even doing nothing would require a certain effort! It is about the effort to achieve something extra, more than what we are doing in the moment. When I add something extra to my practice of playing Maracatu, there is a chance that the drum cracks open.

So the right effort for me is about the right amount of effort as well as it is about the right attitude to what I am doing. With the right attitude, I will find the right effort, effort without the flavour of desire and therefore dependency. This extra is the desire to be something beyond what I already am, which brings me back to the subject of  identities and roles that we strongly associate with: an excellent Maracatu player, a good leader, parent, spouse, etc. As I am writing this, my mind goes, “Hey, what’s wrong with aspiring to be “good” or “better” at something?” At the same time I realise that when we are good, we don’t need to engage our energy in trying to be that. We just do what it is we are doing the best way we know: writing a shopping list or a song, playing an instrument, attending to a sick relative, having sex with cool people. If I think about it, the times when I was really good, I was not trying to be good.

At the last Maracatu rehearsal we took turms playing gonguê (a type of metal cowbell), to beat the basic rhythm that the rest of the group listens to. When it was my turn, I took the instrument more than unreluctantly. Gonguê  was not cool enough for me! I wanted to practice playing alfaia.  When I felt the heaviness of gonguê in my hand, I realised how much I could learn about the rhythm with this seemingly simple instrument and started noticing how different instruments in the group were connected by the simple rhtytm I was playing on it. On a few occasions other members helped me find the rhythm whenever I lost it and lose it I did many times! I tell you, it was no easy matter, hitting this pile of metal with a piece of wood and keeping the tempo. When I let go of the cool drummer identity, I genuinely enjoyed playing and remembered what I liked about playing Maracatu and with this group in particular. Well, at least till the thought “Maybe I could learn to do cool improvisations Lukasz plays so well?” popped up at which point I started hitting the cowbell even harder. Those thoughts of becoming as good as someone we know or the perfected verison of ourselves in our heads are bound to come. For the moment the best thing I can do is notice them and … keep beating the rhythm.

For the next two weeks I decided to pay particular attention to situations when I find myself struggling with something and ask myself, “Where do I add this extra effort?” and “What/Who am I trying to be? How would I do it without trying to be that?” Last but mot least, “How does it affect other people/drum players?”

~ Fayan

About a week ago I had a disagreement with someone. For the first few days I was more puzzled than upset by the lack of willingness from the other party to clear the issue that to me seemed like a trivial matter. Then I got angry and tense. I wanted the world to make sense. I wanted grown up people to behave in a mature way rather than act out the dramas of five-year olds. I wanted to know.

In the days when I started relaxing around the fact that I might never know what drove the other person to end up our cooperation in such an abrupt manner, I started looking at the identities and roles that I hold on to in my life. It is not entirely impossible that the falling out would have happened anyway and had nothing to do with me but with the way I was fitting into the world view of another person. Yet I found the guided exercise on identities to be very helpful in reminding me where I was tensing too much, where I mistook the mask for the skin itself, where those identities were doing me and others disservice.

The exercise starts with identifying seven most powerful in my life identities/roles (negative as well as positive) and writing them down on separate sheets of paper. Then I take one of them at a time and feel what it is like to be this (no man’s woman, the one who wants to know, the one who knows, activist, artist, creative person, nice person, hard working student,  wise leader, professional, failure, poly, vampire, criminal, etc). Next I let the images and situations come up and reflect on the impact this identity has on my life using the following questions:

• how does quality/identity/role show up in my life?
• does it have certain gifts and benefits?
• what are its shadow aspects?
• how might others perceive me when I show up in this role?
• how does this role serve my life and others?
• are there any ways in which this role gets in the way of my life, my intimacy and connection with others?
• where does it serve?
• where does it not serve?
• does it have light to it or did I buy into it?
• how much awareness do I have around this identity functioning in my life?

All this time I am staying with it, feeling it, embodying it, allowing image after image to arise. When do I act from this place? How does it feel?

Then I crumble the piece of paper with the identity written on it and throw away. Gone, gone, never was.

What is left? If not this, who am I? Without this role/identity, how do I show up in the world? I am invited to stay with the radical absence of this quality and feel into it.  It does not take long to notice how it wants to sneak back in. There is a sense of safety to it as I know my part in the play. Yet for the few minutes that I stay outside of it, I experience an incredible relief and a feeling of being at home anywhere, relatedness to anything and everyone. How much energy it takes to hold on to those roles! I realise that radical absence of this role is nothing less than the radical presence and acceptance of everything else.

Today I was reminded of Philippe Petit’s incredible walk between the Twin Towers on a string of wire and wondered of the identities/roles he had to drop to be able to obtain this lightness and rootedness, to accept not knowing, at every step of this risky journey. Dharma on the edge is the only Dharma there is. Every step of this walk we have the choice of meeting our selves behind those masks we have to wear.

It’s a habit of yours to walk slowly.

You hold a grudge for years.

With such heaviness, how can you be modest?

With such attachments, do you expect to arrive anywhere?

Be wide as as the air to learn a secret.

Right now you’re equal portions clay

and water, thick mud…

Bismillah your old self

to find your real name.

- Rumi, Bismillah, translation by Coleman Barks

A trailer for the British documentary Man on Wire (2008) about Philippe Petit’s high-wire performance in NY in 1974. “There is no why”.

• a daily, formal spiritual practice period (meditation, prayer, yoga, chanting, etc)
• some form of spiritual study (anything from opening the book of nature to studying yourself to studying your relationships)
• inner growth work (therapy, men and women’s support groups, twelve step programs)
• working with teachers, elders, experts, and mentors
• group practice, being a part of a community
• some form of service, giving back

He also noted that most of the time we already are doing one or two of those and that could be enough for some period of time (parenting, being a good colleague and worker, being engaged in the community work, etc). What I particularly was glad to hear was the point about the inner work. It is my understanding that meditation alone is not enough to help us deal with the internal issues and as another guest at BGs mentioned some time earlier, it was not designed for it.  This inner growth work includes any kind of self-inquiry work that gives us insights about ourselves such as expressive arts, gardening, contemplation.

I have been exploring different forms of inner work, depending on what I have access to and what appeals to me at the moment. Moving to a greener part of town that would allow me to take walks in the fields and the forest at any time was a way to come closer to nature that always brings me back to center and is conducive to the contemplative moods as opposed to analytical thinking. I see the inner work as coming close to the unconscious part of ourselves by getting to know its language that uses symbols to communicate to us.

“To get a true sense of who we are, become more complete and integrated human beings, we must go to the unconscious and set communication with it. …It is only by approaching it that we have a chance to become conscious, complete, whole human beings… We begin to live in partnership with the unconscious rather than at its mercy or in constant warfare with it.”

Robert A. Johnson “Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth”

Once I start paying attention to the dreams, my dream life became richer and fuller and I could remember up to four or five dreams on some nights. Working with the dreams brings up a lot of internal material that I don’t have a chance to encounter otherwise.  As always, I looked for a structured and well-grounded way and found Robert Johnson’s four-step approach to be extremely helpful.

It is easy to slip into the usual for us methods of dealing with the dreams, taking them literally and starting with the overall interpretation right away. For example the night after a falling out with someone I dreamt that I was witnessing a brutal execution of a person. For all I knew he had not been proven guilty. I was shaken and repulsed by this whole scene. The person about to be executed seemed to be in a state of a shock himself and did not do anything to protest or protect himself from the terrible death. The most tempting way for me to interpret the dream would be to see the person I had a falling out with as a brutal executioner and myself as a victim, not proven guilty but punished anyway. Yet another dream that same night involved the huge frozen fish I had to deal with (stiff, inflexible, cold were the few association that came up for me). In the dream I tried to unfreeze in an oven of sorts but the energy device in the machine would not work. So I gave up and put the fish into the freezer box. Here, too, I could be tempted to see the fish as a symbol for the other person who would not listen, would not reason and was acting in a cold and detached way. This kind of interpretations however would not add anything to my understanding of the situation in the wake state. We can only get to the heart of the matter if we look at the dreams as the reflection of the unconscious dynamics within us rather than the reflection of what is going on in the outer world.

And

• even short, seemingly insignificant dreams try to tell us something we need to know
• every dream is a portrait of a dreamer: in our dreams the images should not be taken literally but as symbols, spokesmen for different parts of ourselves and the dynamics in our inner lives
• dreams often speak in extremes, compensating for our lack of awareness by extreme imagery

In our dream life we get to meet all the parts of ourselves that together make up our total self.  Exploring all the images in a dream, I can look for ways in which this particular characteristic or personality is manifested in my life right now. What part of me is that? Where have I seen it functioning in my life recently? Who is it inside me who feels like that or behave in this way? Where am I being judgemental (towards myself, others)? Where am I being emotionally detached, inflexible and stiff as a frozen fish? The dream work using this particular approach unfolds in layers and lets me get to know all sides of me. Everything that is brought to the right level, even the most negative and scary stuff, can be used.

Other tools for self-exploration  include anything from gazing at the flame of a candle as the night falls to using the means of expressive arts (doodling, painting one’s emotions, collaging, movement and painting, art journal etc.) Combining a few tools to the music in tune with my emotions works best for me. Sometimes I feel too constricted to start painting right away so I start with a collage and then take it from there.

It is important to not let the inner critic obstruct the creative flow and start thinking in terms of producing something, judging one’s work. When I feel this could be the case, I change the hand (I am right-handed so I use the left hand), use both hands at the same time or simply close my eyes and let the movement come from within.

I’d be interested to hear what kind of inner work you find contribute most to your practice? How does it enrich/empower/transform your life?

and knocked.

“Who is there?”

“It’s me”

The Friend answered, “Go away. There’s no place

for raw meat at this table.”

The individual went wandering for a year.

Nothing but the fire of separation

can change hypocisy and ego. The person returned

completely cooked,

walked up and down in front of the Friend’s house,

gently knocked.

“Who is it?”

“You.”

“Please come in, my self,

there’s no place in this house for two.

The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through

the eye of the needle…”

Rumi, from The Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks

Nathan’s post on fear of abandonment inspired me to revisit that old companion of mine since childhood. According to psychologists the two main fears that shape our reactions in childhood are fear of abandonment and fear of being overwhelmed by the large world. Already as children we develop defence mechanisms such as withdrawal, pleasing others and others in order to deal with them the best way we can. We have to. We are entirely dependent on our caregivers and have to make it in this world. Interestingly, most of us use the same mechanisms even in adulthood and do not take some time to reflect on how those reactions to the old fears shape our (unconscious) decisions and influence our relationships today.

Pretty much early in life it became clear to me that people and relationships were not there to stay and that nobody could ever truly get me. People were there to teach me something and our time together, however fleeting, was valuable. Some would teach me read in English, others taught me generosity, and others – what mattered to me when I felt those values were violated.  As a child, I was terrified to get lost, that my parents would forget me somewhere. When the waiting became unbearable, I’d convince myself that they did forget me and would start looking for them myself and – of course – got lost, wherever it was they had left me to play. I would finally make it home with the help of strangers, thankful for this opportunity to return and enriched by the experience.

I made my worst fears come true. I guess somehow it was preferable to the waiting to be abandoned. Now it seems funny and sad but I see how through those experiences I’ve learnt the art of getting lost and found and that I would not always need my parents or people I thought I depended upon. Those were pretty useful lessons to learn as a child. I did not become better with directions and often times I get lost in the fields and forest not far from my new home but now I look forward to those brief moments. And never for a second do I feel lost and lonely in a forest full of trees. Getting lost makes me more aware of the potential to be at home wherever I am and to establish connections with others.

I am also aware that as a grown up I can know better as to how to react to those fears. For quite a while I was the one who left relationships first so I would not be left, as a preventive measure of sorts. Now, wherever I feel the urge to turn away and leave in the middle of this relational conversation, I urge myself to stay and see what happens. Even if I later make the decision to leave, it gives me and the person I am with a chance for an authentic dialogue and influences how we part. I am still friends with some of those people. Leaving out of fear is one thing and leaving because your life takes you on a different journey is another. I am no longer a little girl dependent on a particular person for my survival, I have so much more freedom as to where to go and who to be with. I can become more engaged in the choices I make and although I don’t full myself that I can control my life (how boring would that be!), I know I am the one in charge of it. Not my fears and reactive patterns of a five-year old.

I have a few people who “left my life” (at least for now) and that I love dearly. I could get in touch with them and get more of them, only I don’t feel the need to. The love, the beauty of the connectedness we shared, the gifts of their presence and the transformative powers of these relationships have never left me. They became me in a way and I am still here  (or – am I? ). I guess I could say that I don’t believe in abandonment these days or in people leaving my life. They may leave but they don’t, not really. Even if they tried. This is the beauty of it. I cannot lose something I never had (the person). What I experienced or what I received from them can never leave me. When someone leaves unexpectedly, we might choose to see their back turned to us. We can also choose to see the picture in its entirety: that same person will be facing us if we meet them on the other side of the hill. We just need to zoom out a bit and take a wider perspective.

In Opening the Hand of Thought Uchiyama Roshi says the following to the person who comes to him, complaining about feeling lonely, “…This empty feeling of yours probably comes because you haven’t yet found this basis within the reality of your own true self. In other words, you feel a hollowness in your life because you have always lived only in relation to other people and things, and haven’t been living out your true self”. (p. 22).

Uchiyama then says, “Zazen puts it into actual practice” and quotes his own teacher who said, “Zazen is the self doing itself by itself”. This sounds Arabic to me until I start looking at it closer, remembering the feelings of unease that come up during zazen when there is nothing outside I  have to be living in relation to. There is only the self doing itself by itself. Uchiyama also quotes the Buddhist suttas on the subject of loneliness. In Suttanipata we read, “To depend on others is to be unstable” (in Uchiyama, p. 23) and the passage from Dhammapada goes, “The foundation of the self is only the self”.  Not other people, reputation, career, property, ambitions – our true self. So in each moment of zazen and our practice of life we have a chance to realise this true self, to become “unutterly ourselves” just as “all the birds and creatures of the world are” in David Whyte’s poem “Everything is waiting for you”.

Paradoxically, it seems that by realising my true self I come closer to everyone and everything else.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone.  As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions.  To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings…

…Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation.  The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last.  All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves.  Everything is waiting for you.

~ David Whyte ~

(Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul, p. XIV)

Some of you who occasionally stop by the site noticed that I haven’t been posting for a while and wrote me asking if I was alright. Wherever you are, please know my life would not be the same without you and for one thing you are the reason I pulled myself together to write this current entry for which I am very thankful. So – thank you!   I am alright although maybe not quite in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, there’s been quite a lot of sadness, grief, confusion, and other emotions and feelings of distress that normally would not be associated with an alright state of affairs. But who wants a normal life? Authentic is what makes me wake up in the morning with an anticipation of yet another day of this life, mess and all. If pressed, I would admit that I would not mind skipping some of those emotions but it doesn’t seem to work this way. Not if I want to live a fully expressed life of a three-dimensional human being.

When the dormant for the last 200 years volcano in south Iceland near glacier Eyjafjallajökull erupted this past summer, many of us were reminded that some forces in the universe are out of our control (surprise!). When something larger than our spilling over with entries filofax is on its way from the very core of existence, the only wise thing to do is sit and wait. Wait and wonder. In the overcrowded airports, in the company of our own distress, in the arms of a friend or a lover who cannot take away our troubles neither accompany us on our journey. This journey is to be undertaken by me and me alone, if I am to find my own voice.

Dark Night of the Soul

The phrase “the dark night of the soul” was chosen by the Spanish mystic and poet John of the Cross (1541-1597) as a title for one of his poems and is used by a monk, university professor, and psychotherapist  Thomas Moore in his book Dark Nights of the Soul in the meaning of a period of transformation.

I like the metaphor of the night as it is the natural part of the cycle of Life itself. The night is fluid and pregnant with the dawn of the next day. Only on a dark night, away from the distracting lights of the city when I pause to look up and pay attention, can I clearly see the light of the stars scattered over the cold velvety sky and find solace in the darkness. The night frames this beautiful mystery unfolding over my head of which I am a part and so are you.

Dark night is not the same as the day’s worry and it does not always have a happy ending. In one of my earlier posts I talk about my teacher and mentor who killed herself. The part of not knowing what will come out of this is the most difficult one for me but something undoubtedly will. Undoubtedly not what I anticipated. Different.

This time around

I’ve learnt a lot from my earlier experiences and am much better equipped this time around. One of my previous strategies was pretty much to keep it all to myself. There was a lot of guilt and shame associated with it. My cultural background did not give much space for healthy conversations about the state of one’s soul (psyche). It did not seem to make any sense either. What was I missing? How could I possibly complain now living a more protected life than I ever did before, the life that many people in the world dream about? How could I disappoint friends who were used to seeing me frolicking around?

With this approach I saw how easy it was to slip into the place of thick despair without noticing it, the dark closing in, becoming everything. The first time I realised I needed to talk to someone was when I came to the conclusion that the only rational solution to the situation was to take my own life. The memories of my own confusion after the death of my teacher made me question this conclusion yet I resisted the idea of carrying on only because one’s death would make some people sad. It just didn’t make sense to me. This was the first time I attempted to voice my distress to someone I trusted only to find out that I didn’t seem to have adequate vocabulary to express what I was going on through.

Talking about it

I am particularly thankful to Thomas Moore for addressing in his book the question of the special language we can use to talk about what is going on inside us as we journey through the dark night. He points out that the language used in popular psychology today is either heroic or sentimental (all this struggling, conquering, defeating or being defeated). Instead he encourages us to speak in stories and images of our own, resisting the temptation to explain and interpret.  When I want to describe the deeply felt experience, how often do I use clichés rather than strong, descriptive words that mean something to me? Words like depressed or depression strike me as flat and failing to express the complexity of human experience. They smell antidepressents and hopelessness. Thomas Moore sees the poetic mindset as a helpful companion on our journey through the dark sea, “…the truth of things can only be expressed aesthetically – in story, picture, film, dance, music. Only when ideas are poetic do they reach the depth and express the reality. ” (*, p. 9)

This process alone – developing the language that reflects my unique experience – is extremely empowering and insightful. What is the quality of the language I choose to express my personal truth?

Lots of practical guidelines in the book as to how to sift this time of “enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawl” for gold. The one that I found particularly helpful,

“… give yourself what you need at the deepest level. Care rather than cure. Organise your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange life accordingly Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don’t move against your process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends”. ( *, p. XX)

This is pretty much what I have arrived to intuitively and have been caring for rather than curing my soul, listening in for the messages from inside. It is not always a joyful time and resistance to change and grief as a reaction to something dying are the guests to be dealt with. The idea of transformation and being “born again and again further into our humanity” is closer to me more than that of growth and development, a sort of a vertical movement.

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all fires

that fence in the world,

for the fire makes

a circle of light for everyone,

and then no one outside learns of you.

… and it is possible a great energy

is moving near me.

I have faith in nights…

R. M. Rilke

* Dark Nights of the Soul by Thomas Moore

Resources:

• Podcast of Tami Simon interview with Thomas Moore about caring for the soul in difficult times
• Episode of  Speaking of Faith about Soul in Depression (poetry, reflections, interviews with Andrew Solomon and Parker Palmer
• “Sorrow” by The Nationals from their latest album  High Violet
• Selected poems of R. M. Rilke, A translation from German and commentary by Robert Bly.

Sitting started happening again, monkey mind and all. Sometimes my buddy Marian and I Skype-sit on different continents but when the time for us doesn’t work out, other company will do.

If you are in Europe and would like to join me for a morning sit once a week or so around 7 am CET, whatever kind of meditation you do, let me know!

While we should, I think, start a conversation as to why this happened, I agree with those who say freezing out the political party that many trusted would best represent their interests, would further the separation between us and them and would certainly not be a democratic way of dealing with the issue.  I notice how my perception of us and them shifts depending on what group I identify with in this unfolding story.

The way I see it, there is no difference in who we see as them: people who voted for SD, people coming to Sweden from other parts of the world or any other beings. I believe one of the explanations of the shocking for many election results lies in this very idea of separation: the agenda of the political debate in Sweden has been more concerned with keeping up the appearances of political correctness rather than with giving voice to the concerns of all the citizens, on equal terms. We are a tolerant society but we will not tolerate opinions that differ from our tolerant views. People who felt they had somewhat different from the prevailing in the society opinion on immigration were not given space to voice it outside their own circles. This made it impossible to establish a dialogue with them, get to know their concerns. We kept the lid on the cooker for two long, letting the pressure build under, oblivious of what was going on outside our own bubbles.

One other thing that many of us wake up to now is the same basic truth of impermanence only this time in respect to the values. We took democracy and solidarity for granted forgetting that agreeing on them once is not enough and they are to be realised in our own everyday choices, not the least in the way we think, talk and do. The sense of separation, often expressed through the means of language, leads to estrangement. Once we label it, we think we know what this is, we don’t want to listen, to see, to meet. We close up.

So, what do I do now, as a member of this community on a daily basis enjoying the benefits of its diversity in terms of ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, etc or rather what should I do differently?

During the improvisational anti-racism rally in Uppsala on Saturday, I was struck by the words of one of the speakers who encouraged  the so-called good ones to look at what believes we hold and operate from on a deeper level. They might not be racist but they often are based on the assumption that can become a ground for it: there is us and there is them. The most friendly Swede will more often than not ask the So-where-do-you-come-from question as soon as they hear their partner in the conversation speaks Swedish with an accent. I certainly got my share of the question earlier and each time wondered if the person realised of the subtle shift of energy created by the friendly and seemingly innocent question. No matter how well-meaning it is, it reminds the person they come from outside and from then on the conversation can take a new direction where the person is a representative of a certain culture and our perceptions about it.

Likewise, those of us who found their new home in Sweden, often turn to generalisations about the culture we find ourselves in. Coming from different parts of the world, we find comfort in complaining to one another about “the cold and hard to get to know Swedes”. While it might feel good for a while and create a sense of unity with other immigrants and expats, this reinforces the image of the Swedish culture, homogenous and well-defined, signalling that we are nothing like them. Wait a second!  How do we contribute to a warmer and more open society talking to one another about them? Are we not forgetting that we, too, are part of it now? Your olive-green eyes, dark skin and all the stories you carry about your experience of being a stranger in many countries, her vitality and feeling for rhythm that shows even in the way she walks, my “crazy Russian spontaneity”, his kinky bossa nova in the dark autumn night – they are now all part of the Swedish culture, even though we don’t know it yet. Everything changes with you being here. Details matter. We cannot be separate from something we enrich with our very being. It is time to start paying attention to what it is we are inspired by being part of this melting pot. Anything?  Ok, if you drop by for a cup of tea, I will start…

Dylan Thomas

As I watch my cats go around their day, I sometimes catch myself wondering what it means to be human. I know how it feels, at least when I allow myself to feel. I have no way of knowing what it is like to be a cat but I surely appreciate th spectre of human emotions and how at one and the same time we can feel a whole host of emotions. Just remembering the other evening when I was lucky to get hold of a ticket to the performance by Beijing Dance Theatre at the tiny local venue, I re-live some of those feelings again. I cried through the whole first part (Luminous) that was choreographed by the Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidberg to the music of Bach. It was not only sadness I was feeling but also joy, admiration and gratitude, all at the same time.  There is no way to squeeze that array of feelings into a single word. At some point I wondered whether I was that touched by the performance itself or by the intensity of my emotions and how vulnerable and human I felt. Was there a difference?

Whenever I experience strong emotions that I want to hide from, I tell myself,  “This is what being human feels like”. It helps me to stay open even for the most difficult emotions and approach them with gentle curiosity. It started as a little role play in which I  pretended to be an alien in a human body (yes!) who was sent on planet Earth to experience everything humans feel to later report to the others (I read about in some book and it immediately appealed to me). “So this is how pain of a loss feels like!”, and – open to feel with the whole being.

I believe the only way to become an integrated human being is through opening up to all emotions and accepting them as part of us.  Each of them carries a message for us and the question is whether we are ready to recieve it and make use of it in our lives. The tricky part is to open the heart to the emotion (instead of just dismissing it as we can do with thoughts) without getting totally owerwhelmed by it and at the same time disconnect it from the story line and blame. For example how do I feel the pain of being let down when this happens without slipping into a victim and/or blaming mode? This is where I find the little alien-exercise to be invaluable: I am experiencing the  emotion yet I also have the role of an observer that helps me not to identify with the emotion.

For a long while I thought of anger as a negative emotion but once I started seeing all emotions as messangers, I no longer needed the labels of “good” and “bad”. Today I heard someone say that we do not get rid of stuff, we simply learn to live with it. It might take a few lifetimes to heal the wounds I am carrying but they, too, are valuable aspects of myself and can help me connect with other people.

I find that we often are ashamed of feeling angery as if anger in itself is a sign of weakness, of not being able to control one’s emotions and control is something we’ve got to have to be on top of the world. Probably also because we believe that anger is necessarily connected to hatred which is not the case. I can think of many situations when I was angry with someone without actually hating them.

“Anger …  can be a natural response to opression. There is a wide spread confusion between anger and hatred. Hatred is an example of anger with the intent to hurt; it’s like a knife that’s intended to inflict a wound. Anger, on the other hand, can be an energetic reaction of unease that erupts spontaneously in certain circumstances.” (“The Great Heart Way”, p. 61).

I have already mentioned the following example from my life  in a comment to one of bookbird’s posts but thought I could share it here to show how anger actually helped me wake up to the important realisation about my life and the conflict inside me.

A few years ago my (then) husband and I were visiting his parents for Christmas and I noticed an inspirational note in my mother-in-law’s room with statistics on how many people, ideas and smiles were born in the world every minute. It was a very positive note (maybe this is what she needed to hear at the time) but I went ballistic about it. I saw it as the expression of their escapism and unwillingness to engage in the world of suffering. My mother-in-law realised that I was projecting and my anger had little to do with the note so instead of getting defensive, she looked at me and said, “Irina, you don’t have to save the world”.

I remember the moment when everything in my head got still. All of a sudden I clearly saw that it was myself I was angry with for living the life that did not truly reflect my values. Yet I had no clue where to start changing it and was afraid to take the first step. I was looking at my mother-in-law for a few moments, listening inside myself and then said with conviction, “But at least I want to give it a try”. I think I realised right then that it did not really matter where I would start. The important thing at that point in my life was to actually start doing anything about it. The anger disspated very quickly as I met no defensiveness from my mother-in-law, whose wise and compassionate reaction allowed me to connect with the inner self and look at the root of my anger.

My anger made me realise I had been surpressing the frustration about the way my life was unfolding for a while while its intensity showed me how important that issue was. Soon after that I went to Nigeria on a development internship, with my husband family’s support. A cliché step for someone aspiring to save the world, I think now. What I needed was to start retreiving my own soul and save myself for starters but as Reb Anderson says, we cannot do it on our own, only together. At the retreats he tells us that even though we think we go to the retreat to be helped, we will unavoidably be helping others as well so we might as well think, “I am going to the retreat to help others”.

Since that time I also learnt that the step that comes up first is never the first one but the third one at best; we never really want to start from the very bottom of it and get our hands dirty.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first thing close in,
the step you don’t want to take.
Start with the ground you know,
the pale ground beneath your feet,
your own way of starting the conversation.
Start with your own question,
give up on other people’s questions,
don’t let them smother something simple.

(From “Start Close In” by David Whyte)

Do you remember any situation in which anger helped you realise something important? What was it you learnt from it? How do you meet anger?

“When negative material arises, bring to mind the positive emotions and perspectives that will be it’s antidote.” -Dr. Rick Hanson

By negative material I guess are meant difficult thoughts and emotions like anger or jealousy but I could not be sure. I was somewhat surprised by the comment as I saw it as an encouragement to replace the negative states with the positive ones. But is this not like changing the black shades for the pink ones when none of them show us what reality is like?

Some people on Fb commented that the quote was too simplistic and probably taken out of the context which seemed to be the case. In the end Dr Hanson himself left a clarifying comment:

This is a very interesting thread, and really gets at the not-always-easy balance between Wise Mindfulness on the one hand, and Wise Effort on the other. Libby is right, the single sentence from my book that started this thread… needs to be understood in context.

I think there are three basic phases in personal growth, psychological healing, and spiritual practice: mindful presence with what arises, working with what arises, and replacing what arises. Or in six words: let be, let go, let in.

Often the first phase alone is enough. But sometimes it’s not, and the Buddha himself – a great proponent of the power of mindfulness! – encouraged people to be active in the mind to reduce the negative and increase the positive. The trick is to be active in these ways without falling into the pitfalls noted in several of your posts of aversion to “negative” states of mind or craving “positive ones.” That’s where insight, equanimity, and practice come in.

I was glad to find out that Dr Hanson was reading our comments and found the explanation helpful to some degree but Dr Hanson seems to see replacing what arises as an important step in the process (Dr Hanson also recorded for Sounds True “Meditations to change your brain “). He did not give a source of the quote so I could not verify it right away but from the way he used it in the English translation -” to be active in the mind to reduce the negative and increase the positive” – I can interpret it as “to be active in the mind so that it will lead to reducing the negative and increasing the positive” where being active in the mind – mindful – would by itself lead to the increase of the negative emotions as they would dissipate. I do not know whether the Buddha was actually advising us to replace emotions but from my own experience of being with emotions (negative as positive), if they are not fed by thoughts, they dissipate in the matter of half an hour. Of course, if I engage in the story connected to the anger I am feeling in the body, it will fuel new waves of anger or sadness or whatever it is I might feel averse to and bring more suffering.

But what if the same negative or difficult emotions will keep coming up for me on the cushion?

In in zazen we practice showing up in the world, moment after moment, whatever they can bring, including so-called negative material. We deal with feelings and emotions in the way we deal with thoughts: we watch them arise and pass without trying to either find a fix for them or judge them. I believe that whatever arises on the emotional level has a lot of valuable information to offer us and we can pay high price for shutting it out what our bodies try to communicate to us through emotions. If thoughts and stories we are playing in our mind are mental formations, feelings and emotions are quite real – my heart rate increases whenever I get angry and I feel a very tangible tension in different parts of the body like throat, chest, stomach.

Just sitting for days with a lot of internal material I bring onto the cushion and getting tenderized by zazen in itself is not going to help me deal with those internal issues that keep showing up and is to a large degree material of the unconscious. Zazen in and by itself does not help us heal our wounds and get us freed from the past that we unconsciously bring with us into present relationships with ourselves and others.

In episode 178 of Buddhist Geeks “Growing Up versus Waking Up” clinical psychologist and Buddhist practitioner John Welwood explains that meditation was designed for liberation and not for helping us work through our relational wounds. He offers a couple of examples from his practice in which his clients (long time meditators) benefited from turning towards their emotions and embodying them instead of simply trying to observe them or cultivating compassion to counteract hate and anger that kept coming up. (As I understand they did not do that on the cushion but rather on the sofa, that is in their therapy sessions using the material that came up during mediation as a starting point). Anger can be a natural response to opression. It might keep coming up until we confront it and as well as the fears and hurt behind it and meet them with an open heart. A few tools for dealing with emotions were developed by experienced practitioners Gerry Shishin Wick and Ilia Shinko Perez (I believe one of them or both were also interviewed by Vince on BGs).

The approach with opening the heart or as John Welwood puts it of us becoming more like the Buddhas and the Buddhas becoming more human and embodied, feeling - is far more appealing to me that actively re-wiring my brain so I can increase the positive. In an open heart the negative will have nothing to feed on.

When one particular area in the body was shouting for attention, I’d choose to breathe into it until it became more bearable and then include another one. And after a while yet another one. I would be then holding all of them in awareness at least for a while until something else hijacked the attention and I’d start the process again as if collecting the beads from a broken necklace back on the thread. This kept me quite busy most of the time.

In one of the chapters of “Touching Enlightenment” Reggie Ray describes how “we” comes to be as we encounter discomfort and deal with it by tensing, freezing our body against what we are feeling. He contends that the discomfort we experience in the body work can also be seen as a sign of our progress on the path. “We begin to understand that distress itself is an expression of the “wisdom of the body”. It is the body’s way of letting us know there is work to be done and life that needs to be lived – and our discomfort shows us the way in. Discomfort is always a message – that we are holding on too tightly to our sense of self – and an invitation for us to relax, open, and surrender to the fire of larger experience.” (Reggie Ray, “Touching Enlightenment”, p. 82-83)

Again and again I got reminded why I was actually sitting zazen, that looks so peaceful and relaxed on the outside yet the most radical and the most courage demanding activity that I have engaged in, so far with varying level of commitment. Why? Because in zazen I am asked to stop doing the one thing I am so good at – making conceptual maps of reality and instead practice and experience life .

Reb mentioned again and again the tenderising effect of zazen on body and mind. When this happens, when “meat” softens, some people can break out crying and as those tensions get released. Myself, I am amazed how this has to do with the opening up to whatever shows up at the doorstep, how at the point when I can no longer resist it, the body gets settled and I am left with nothing and… everything. The whole works.

Waiting at the highest point of tension not only became so tiring that the tension relaxed, but so agonising that I was constantly wrenched out of my self-immersion and had to direct my attention to discharging the shot. “Stop thinking about the shot!” the Master called out. “This way it is bound to fail.” “I can’t help it”, I answered, “the tension gets too painful”.

“You only feel it because you haven’t really let go of yourself. It is so simple. You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the point of highest tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed, it is when the tension is fulfilled, the shot must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it.”

E. Herrigel. “Zen in the art of archery”

In what ways do you deal with bodily discomfort in life? What discoveries have you made on your journey?

In the place of stillness the action and the actor (practitioner and practice) meet. The actor is the action. The action is the actor. When there is an actor in addition to the action, there is no stillness.

“…all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as “himself”. Only the spirit is present, a kind of awareness which shows no trace of egohood and for that reason ranges without limit through all distances and depths, with “ears that hear and eyes that see”.

(E. Herrigel, “Zen in the art of archery” )

I connect the notions of action and actor to those of giving and receiving. Reb reminds us again that we all are already giving, only we unaware of it. In the realm of stillness and quietness, when I am my authentic self, whatever I do I do as a gift to all sentient beings. Every stroke I take when swimming in this – oh so cold! – sea is for the welfare of all sentient beings. Every dish I wash or every bite I take during lunch time I can make a gift to all sentient beings.

What would my meal look and feel like if I was eating it as a gift to many many others?

Wait, should we be actually thinking about the Dharma and devoting every stroke to all sentient beings when taking a swim? Some confused swimming that would be! No, just be your (authentic) self, moment after moment and you will be giving a gift of your (authentic) swimming to all sentient beings. Many of us can relate to the action arising from the core of us before the centralised self gets activated. I can imagine that an act of generosity comes from that open and free space at the center. We are generous even prior to that but we have to act generously (and without attachment) to realise generosity.

I found it harder to embrace the idea of giving when it feels as if I was taking something from someone or when I know that for a fact. How can I express my anger as a gift to you and others? What am I giving when I am leaving someone, walking away? The question is, how can I walk away so my walking away is a gift to the people I am walking away from (although they might not see that at the moment)? If I think of a particular situation in which I acted from my deeper self but that still might be upsetting for someone, I can see that I felt sad about the way the other person was taking it rather than about the choice itself. The next step is to open and allow for the other person to react in the way that reflects their deeper self which might not always feel like a bed of roses for me (what might their response be to me walking away?) And so this dialogue, the endless process of giving and receiving goes on and on.

You ask me for something and I say no. I like doing things for you and I don’t like saying no to you but this time I say no. It hurts me to see that expression on your face that I know so well and that I signals of your disappointment, frustration, anger… I want to turn away from that face but I stay and I receive it as a gift, too. You did not get what you asked for and I stayed with the disappointed expression on your face and faced your disappointment. Together we have created something. The meeting took place.

A friend of mine that has to interview people in the line of her job confessed to me that sometimes she finds it hard to approach people because she is afraid to bother them and that worris that she will be taking their valuable time. She doesn’t think she is worthy of their time. In a similar situation Reb advised the person to not take people’s time (because nobody’s worthy of somebody’s time) but instead to give them the gift of their time.

If we approach talking to people in this way, how does that effect what and – more importantly- how you will say next?

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings…

David Whyte, Everything is waiting for you

The little experience of sitting sesshins I have come from this environment, with this teacher and basically this gang so in a way it was like going home. Meeting some of the people at the boat terminal on our way to the island was like seeing old friends again – it felt as if we never parted. Apparently, nothing brings people closer than sitting, surviving the contents of one’s mind, and working, walking, eating and sharing living space in silence for about a week.  Quite a few of the people have been to Green Gulch Farm where Reb’s been teaching and/or sat sesshins with him in other countries.

We have gathered here to practice being ourselves/realise enlightenment

The title for this sesshin was Being ready to be enlightened but once again the central message of Reb’s teaching evolved around compassion, the six bodhisattva virtues (giving, ethical study, patience, vigour, concentration and wisdom) and how by doing the six practices we are preparing for the enlightenment at as the same time as this is also what is going on in enlightenment. It has been my impression that with all this talk about emptiness and non-self in Zen traditions(s) it can be easy for a practitioner to get distanced from the matters of heart and compassion which seem to be paid much more attention to in Tibetan Buddhism. This is why hearing Reb talk about compassion resonated with me.  Another thing that I appreciated was that he addressed the issue of enlightenment head-on (many teachers in Zen simply avoid talking about it) and dismantled the myth of Enlightenment as something mystical, out there.

Buddhist traditions are rich in practices aiming at cultivating compassion but I never really felt attracted to them. I believe compassion is something we all already have and is something to be actualized from moment to moment. This weaves into the teaching of Reb on the topic of enlightenment that I could summarize in just a few sentences. Enlightenment is not something we have to do or rather we don’t have to do anything special to become enlightened. Actually, just the other way round – we need to do less and be still to realise enlightenment. Enlightenment is nothing more and nothing less than realising who we already are by helping others. In the story Reb told us the student asked his teacher what (business) was going on underneath that patched robe (the pattern for the robe that Buddha’s followers have been wearing to this day was taken from the pattern of the paddy fields). “Intimacy”, answered the teacher. “Appropriate response”, was the answer of another teacher in yet another story with a similar question. For me both answers point in the same direction – the place of stillness, where I meet my authentic, deeper self, and from which the response arises without the involvement of the ego mind.

Reb defines intimacy as being devoted to others and oneself without being attached. In intimacy there is no here and there. It is marked by stillness. “Don’t move. Don’t move on before you meet. Stop and meet”. To be intimate, to be yourself, is to be still, be quiet. How can we be doing stuff and be still?

Picking violets by the side of the road,

I forgot my bowl.

How sad you must be, my poor little bowl!

Ryokan

Here I could not agree more with Christopher when he points out that in our modern world defining a successful relationship as long-lasting, monogamous, heterosexual, etc is not helpful to us. I find that by putting a label on the relationship (many of which are simply too narrow for our modern lives) or deciding what it is supposed to be like we put an additional pressure on it which can lead to its premature ending, at least in its current form. I realise it is not the label per se that puts pressure on us but the expectations we associate with it and the static, Polaroid-like image in our head of what it should be like. It is then even more important to bring attention and exploration into these areas and observe the whole dynamics as the relationship unfolds.

The questions I ask myself about anything when I feel stuck, including all areas of the heart are

What is the most important thing for me in this area?

and

What does it ask from me on a daily basis?

If the answer to the first question is authenticity, then it asks from me to bring attention to being as authentic as I can with myself and my partner, be it a friend or a lover. Quite often it means dropping my expectations of myself and my partner and whole-heartedly dealing with what we have at hand. It can be manifested in allowing the form of the relationship shift and assisting the transformation rather than resisting it. My boyfriend and I have been exploring this in our relationship. We discovered that fear of loss could boost expectations and push the person into putting pressure on the partner which in turn could lead to that partner to want to withdraw: who likes to be suffocating in a loving relationship? When we came to the realisation that no matter what happens we still care for each other and have the capacity in our hearts to stay friends in the deepest meaning of the word, the form our relationship took was no longer as important and we could relax the grip on it.  I experience our relationship as something very alive and fluid and my two questions are of help to me in situations when I get reactive.

This is why I especially appreciated that Christopher spoke on the importance of handling the relationship at all its stages, even  when it comes to an end; how we can meet that transition from intimacy to friendship in a skillful way and keep “a real kindness ongoing, no matter what happens”.  I would like to hear more on it from other teachers and will certainly be taking the question with me to the yearly retreat with Reb Anderson starting tomorrow.

So here we were ten years later. For some reason the people taking care of trees in the city park cut off all her limbs. At first glance she looked naked and pretty much dead on the outside but new branches covered in soft green started shooting out towards the sky and proved otherwise.

The trunk now was definitely split in two, both parts leaning backwards and at the same time were rotated out as if to take a better look at each other and to see more of the world around.

One of the trunks could be used as a seat but to get support you had to lean back. This way your eyes would be gazing upward towards the top of the tree across the water and the piece of sky peeking through its branches.

Inside she was warm and dry and I felt safe and protected. Still I could not help thinking that she was dying. Was I not?

Standing in front of her, on the ground covered with the dry spill from her inside my head was emptying of thoughts. A strong gust of wind pushed me to the left and I felt my own trunk rotating and following the wind as far as the spine allowed. At the same time I noted the desire to hold my breath but continued to breathe consciously through the building tension. I think part of the tension was coming from holding back, from not willing to go all the way. The challenge then was not just in rotating the body and finding myself in a new situation. I had to keep breathing and expanding through it, filling in this new shape that I now was. From that place I could see more of the park and noticed that it was full of people walking, jogging, playing. I stayed like that for a while, listening in, acclimatizing to where I was.

Mobility is not necessarily about going anywhere.

Strength comes from standing firm in what I truly am.

The sense of stability comes from knowing I will be alright no matter how strong the wind blows and how many external layers are peeled off.

To change the perspective just turn around! What has changed?

Whatever happens keep breathing smoothly, deeply.

Twisting feels good!

I have believed that the existential tension had to be resolved, not carried around. Standing next to this magnificent tree, I suddenly realised that creative tension might as well be something I have to live with for the rest of my life, a condition rather than a flaw. Turning around offered new perspectives but to do that I needed to empty myself of all ideas of what it is I should be seeing right now and be ready to fearlessly inhibit this new shape, allowing it to stretch its new branches into the world, come what may. This brief visit to the old tree friend gave me something to think about so I thanked it and headed home. It happened so I was not quite done yet.

On my way home I stopped by the liquor store to get a bottle of red wine for dinner with a friend and while standing in line to pay for it thought that – who knows? – we still might have some warm days this summer and wouldn’t it be lovely with a bottle of refreshing and crispy white? While debating with myself I turned my head to the left and read the description of the wine at the eye level: “…taste of lemon, pear, yellow apple, and subtle hints of cinnamon spice.” That would do! I grabbed the last bottle left on the shelf without leaving the line and glanced at the label: it was Pinot Grigio from California and was called Twisted.

How twisted was that?

When I finally got home and checked my e-mail, one particularly drew my attention. It was the newsletter from yoga teacher Susi Hately at  Functional Synergy with special focus on asanas and anatomy. The topic for this particular send-out was “Twisting is Profoundly Delightful” and contained information on the benefits and mechanics of safe twists.  Another delightful twist in this story! Would you blame me for putting twists into focus these comings weeks, on and off the mat?

Where am I forcing too much causing myself misery? Where am I holding my breath again, holding back? How can I expand in this form and place, in this ongoing dialogue with reality?

All twists aside, I love these small syncronicities in life that illuminate something we already knew but were not aware of.

The quotes from Zen ancestors that Dosho offered in the presentation left me with no answers as to what made a community of practitioners and were more about unskillful ways to relate to others in the community (don’t-do-this-be-nice-and-drop-the-judgements). I think if we have a shared intention, we will figure out the ways to be around each other that would be in tune with that intention.

One of the teachers whose teachings and methods resonate with me, Ken McLeod, offers the following words on Sangha:

“…More generally, the Sangha consists of all individuals who practice the Dharma with the intention of waking up into the mystery of being. The Sangha is the community based on shared intention, not on a mutual dependence. Just as the term Buddhism incorrectly implies belief, so does the term Buddhist incorrectly implies believer. A person who practices the Dharma is, more accurately, a follower or traveler of a path, the path that Buddha Shakyamuni discovered.

The path is far from easy… Fellow travellers, companions on the path, provide us not only with support but also with the benefit of their own experience and understanding…” (Ken McLeod, “Wake Up to Your Life” p. 44-45)

Nathan’s word of caution on chasing harmony made me reflect on what harmony meant to me. Avoiding difficult situations because they carry potential for conflict has its price. I like the image Nathan chose for a sangha – “a stewing place”. It makes me think of stew or a soup where ingredients get mixed and sometimes we just don’t know what comes out.  At each stage the stew tastes slightly different. Besides, those flavours and textures of the individual ingredients together make a unique and wonderful mix that is richer than any one of the ingredients. How can we encourage and allow each ingredient to open up to their fullest potential? I think one of the conditions is finding the right temperature: not too cold and not too hot. And that we all agree on what it is we are co-creating (the shared vision or intention).

It occurred to me that it is easy to mix the intention and the methods for its realisation. We can be so keen on establishing the format that best serves the purpose (sometimes we bring it from the outside and adopt it without questioning or trying to change because it’s been tested and because it’s easier this way) that we can forget why we did it in the first place. I believe that working inside out offers more opportunities for growth. In fact, that this is the pre-condition for growth. We need to be ready to tinker with the form, to experiment. If not because the present form is not satisfying, then for the sake of rocking the boat. Not an easy thing to do as it often can bring a whole lot of resistance: just try to reshuffle the deck by taking somebody else’s seat in a class where there are no assigned seats but where people tend to take the same seats time after another. I did that a couple of times and was amazed at the confusion it caused. I see meditating in a circle and discussing Dharma topics not as a goal but as  a method to realising our purpose.

When I first joined the group a few months ago, I was very keen on not bringing my own agenda into it and decided for starters to show up whenever I could and contribute with whatever I could. I can see now that sometimes I held myself back because of the fear of promoting my agenda and not stirring stuff too much (or maybe because of me being aware of the propensity to do just that, stir too much?) Ken’s words remind me that if we all share the intention of “waking up into the mystery of being”, we will not fear to challenge our own ideas of what those methods should be like and will be open to polishing those edges that we will be unavoidably discovering when rubbing against each other.

This said, it seems  to me the middle way is the golden way but how do we find that in a sangha? Now more than ever I am convinced it is extremely difficult to work through those issues (starting with welcoming them rather than shutting them out and even rattling the cage intentionally) without a teacher.

and make it snug.

From the poem “Couplings” by Menna Elfyn, translated from Welsh by J. Clansy

This metaphor for life would explain why we often try to fix something that does not require fixing. I know a few people who believe life is a war or a battlefield. I wonder if they can put their guard down. Some of those metaphors we carry with us were not chosen by us, but for us and are worth revisiting. What happens if we allow for the new ones to emerge from deep within us?

The other day I was exploring my own metaphors for life, the ones that might be unconsciously influencing my choices and ended up trying new ones for size, the ones that ring true to me today. One of those that emerged quite organically was that of a garden. (The gardening season here has started but I did not know much about gardens or plants and hardly planted anything so let us say I was suprised by this image.)

Seeing life as a garden made me feel more connected with the gentle yet powerful energy that growing things carry, reminded me that I often turn to nature for healing and when I need to feel rooted and supported.

Playful exploration in watercolors lead to the line from Rumi’s poem, “The Gardener is coming”. Which means I am not the Gardener! This is not my garden to fix but I am invited in, like everybody else, to explore, to touch and be touched by Life. The garden that came up for me was nothing like an organised and structured English garden but rather a half-wild mixed garden with trees, bushes, flowers and grass, in all colors.

Just remain in the center,

watching, And then forget

that you are there.

Lao Tzu

Thinking of a garden brought up the theme of seasons in life just as seasons are an important aspect in a life of a garden, the seasonality of appearance and disappearance, acceptance of the old things dying as new are being borne.

So, what is life like for you?

For a while I was at a loss: should I encourage my sangha-friend to open up to this change and at least give this new way a try? I noticed how my thoughts went in different directions almost simultaneously: one side of me was concerned with my self-image (how will this influence how others see me?); another side was glad the person spoke up; yet another one wished he had said something in the line of  “I feel uncomfortable and disconnected from the sangha by splitting into groups for the discussion but I am willing to give it a try”. A friend and sangha-member helped me out by voicing the need she sensed coming from the person, that of connection, which I heard in the beginning but lost when it did not make sense to me (splitting into groups is not the same as splitting the sangha!)

Suddenly I felt the tiredness of the last few weeks coming down on me. I saw the person next to me, also quite tired and obviously very uncomfortable. I backed off, invited everyone to rejoin the circle and do it the way we used to do. I felt relieved as the peace in the room was restored and we could finally turn to the poem which,  incidentally, was about impermanence and not clinging to the solid picture of the world we carry with us.

During the discussion one person said that he thought we did not have to be shaped only by “some immense storm” but in fact could allow every little thing influence us. Back then that comment didn’t strike a chord with me but as I am writing this I can see how our everyday lives here in the West are not that stormy but still consist of countless situations in which we can allow ourselves to get softer, let go of holding on to the ways we are comfortable with for the moment. A sensitive soul can feel the touch of a breeze…

The other day I realised that I was not entirely done with the episode. In my mind I’d go back to that situation and wonder if as a sangha we are not supposed to help each other grow and encourage to stay with the discomfort of our ego not getting what it demands. During that week we received a new homework exercise from Dosho that included visualisation of my practice partner and invitation to reflect on what I could offer her, “How precisely could you serve the truth through this person or group?” The exercise, as Dosho explained to me, was meant “to soften the heart so that we can meet the people with an open heart rather than come from preconceptions”. The minute I read the exercise, I felt resistance rising inside like a tsunami wave, activating the internal chatter of the the Ms-know-it-all. “This is one strange exercise. Imagining the other person and their needs is creating a mental construct of them and my own concepts about their needs that might be entirely different from those needs. That sounds like second-guessing! Isn’t it more fruitful to visualise the sangha and my practice partner and send them loving-kindness and see what they need when I actually meet them in person?” And so it went on and on.

I guess I was not really willing to accept that my sangha-friend did not take an opportunity to challenge his ego as I sort of assumed that was a learning opportunity for him just as it was for me.  I now see that I should focus on me and learning my lessons, as those acrobats in the Buddha story. The other person will take care of their growth themselves. I still don’t like the suggested by Dosho exercise and pretty much am of the same opinion about it but I am ready to give it a try. I am also glad that I spoke up and let Dosho know I did not find that exercise appealing and had resistance towards it.

My sangha-friend told me the other day that for her sangha is first and foremost about harmony. I like this idea. When dropping an attachment to an opinion or belief  we often think we are losing something. I find that thinking in terms of gaining makes a defeat (in the conventional sense of the word) seem like a victory. Harmony in Dogen’s kitchen is achieved by placing things where they belong: things that naturally belong on a high place should go onto a high place and things that belong to a low place should go onto a low place. Sometimes I need to ask myself what thing belongs where and listen in. Where would it be more stable? Is my personal agenda, my idea of how things should be more important to me than sustaining harmony in the sangha?  Where in life do I put things that belong to a low place onto a high place and vice versa?

“Put those things that naturally go on a high place onto a high place, and those that would be most stable on a low place onto a low place; things that most naturally belong on a high place settle best on a high place, while those which belong on a low place find their greatest stability there.”

Dogen’s “Instructions for the Zen Cook” with commentary by Uchiyama Roshi, p. 5.

yesterday evening I facilitated the discussion at the gathering of my local meditation group. As a topic I chose a very rich in imagery and symbols poem by Rilke “The Man Watching”. I have been carrying it with me for about a month now, letting it incubate and listening in. There is still a lot in the poem that doesn’t make sense to me but there was a lot that struck a chord. Here’s how it starts:

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

……………

We had a very fruitful discussion that was deeply rooted in our personal experiences rather than trying to understand the meaning of all images. Or maybe we were trying out how the poem fit our personal experiences? Some of us initially reacted to the lines like “let ourselves be dominated” because we automatically translated it into “giving up”. After some reflection we came to the conclusion that it meant “surrender”  and not “giving up” and to us the poem was about surrendering to Life itself  based on trusting it and being willing to be shaped by the storms on our journey.

The following lines especially resonated with me:

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

I surely can recollect a number of times when winning left a bitter residue inside and did make me feel smaller. As one of the sangha-friends put it, “That was the win I did not want”. Often times these days when I find myself in an argument, I can notice the feverish drive of the ego towards winning, but then ask myself, “What is more important to me, to be right or to feel at peace (=to be free)?”  In the end, it doesn’t really matter if the other person or myself consider me winning the argument (which means the other person lost it). Most likely I value both my relationship with the person and my emotional balance more than the short-term satisfaction of the ego. Recently I started noticing a shift taking place: from trying to explain my point of view or convince the person to adopt it towards respectful curiosity about how they think and what makes them interested in the issue. But boy is it hard: sometimes being right or at least feeling that I am right feels almost like the only way to exist. Giving it up is like giving up skin, so identified I sometimes am with my ideas.

Interestingly, the facilitation experience itself proved to be as insightful as discussing the poem. I arrived to the meet up with a clear idea as to how to we would be discussing the poem. I thought this time instead of keeping the circle and giving the floor to one person at a time,  we would split into two groups and each person would have a chance to speak. I would keep an eye on the time and signal when it was time for the next person to talk. Very soon I discovered that one of the sangha-members had strong resistance to this form of discussion and voiced it loud and clear. He told me that he could not connect to the poem because he did not like the idea of the sangha being split. I asked him if he felt less connected to the sangha because we were no longer sitting in one circle and this seemed to be the case.

What to do? The format for the discussion did not really matter to me that much. This new for us format, I thought, would allow for a more interactive and intuitive exchange. I did not see splitting in groups for an hour as an expression of us no longer being connected. In fact, my other sangha, Ango-sangha for this period, is a digital one at the moment, in the sense that we are all in different countries and meet only online. Still I have a strong connection and know I can rely on my practice partner and the rest of the group to be there.  Obviously, my sangha-friend saw it differently. What I heard was, “This is the way we used to do and I like it this way. I have no desire at all to at least try to do it any other way”.

From my personal experience I know that sometimes I feel resistance to change and am not enthusiastic to try something I consider to be worse. I think I know it cannot be better than this and even if it were, I’d like things to stay as they are.

Filed under: Ango, Buddhism, lessons learned, Response Tagged: Ango, change, Dogen, impermanence, resistance, Rilke, sangha, storm, winning ]]> http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/high-and-low-large-and-small-1/feed/ 1 understandingcat http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/yes-to-mad-hatter-and-manjusri-above-the-pot/ http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/yes-to-mad-hatter-and-manjusri-above-the-pot/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:40:15 +0000 Irina Almgren http://appropriateresponse.wordpress.com/?p=3100 ]]> Uchiyama Roshi opens his comments to Dogen’s “Instructions for the Zen Cook” with a story of a tenzo who would not let any distractions stand in his way when cooking:

“One day Wuzhao was working as the tenzo at a monastery in Wutai Mountains. When the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī suddenly appeared above the pot he was cooking, Wuzhao beat him. Later he said, “Even if Shakyamuni were to appear above the pot, I would beat him, too”. (“How to cook your life”, p 23).

This story made an impression on Uchiyama Roshi when he was a tenzo himself. Wuzhao’s cool amazed and puzzled me: it is not every day that the Bodhisattva of compassion makes an appearance and if it happens when I am cooking, isn’t this yet another wonderful ingredient to add to the meal? Flexibility and going with a flow is something I could use more of in the kitchen (of life).

When I read the story of Wuzhao sending Mañjuśrī off, I could not help thinking of the guests I would actually be glad to get a company of while at the stove. Here’s what I came up with so far:

I’d be delighted to take a cup of tea with the charming Mad Hatter while waiting for the rice to cook

the giant and most bizarre looking sun fish (mola mola) because it is so cool and fascinating

Eddie Izzard because I could not afford going to his show when he was in Stockholm and because he looks so delicious delivering jokes in those leather pants and pumps

Jill Bolte Taylor (with the brain) because I would finally have a chance to see this most exciting organ so close

Kathryn Morris because she is so cute as emotionally distant but very persistent detective Lilly Rush

last but not least my friend Marian whose very presence has a relaxing effect on me and who proved to be a terrific help in the kitchen in both working and taking delight in chocolate and ice-cream

And I only started… It could get rather crowdy over the pot, but what a nice blend! Can I ever make an authentic holistic meal without putting the whole of me into it, including my inner child, the kind and courageous Mad Hatter, the clown, the wise fish, the insightful scientist,  the caring and supportive friend, the sharp and cute detective and the rest of the zoo – all of which I first notice in others? Wuzhao is Gordon Ramsey in his kitchen, I have to give him that, but I am certainly GR in mine and from where I stand the whole crazy town is welcome to show up over the pot. Buddha, don’t be a stranger you too!

Dogen, “Instructions for Zen Cook”

During the second webinar Dosho briefly went through the story which is about intimately studying the self. Dongshan asks Xuefeng, What is the essence of your practice? Do you throw away what you don’t want or focus on getting what you want? He considers practice to be a concrete expression of our life, not something conceptual, theoretical. Xuefeng’s answer is overdramatic: he turns the bucket over, spilling everything onto the floor. Dongshan is not questioning this response but suggests that Xuefeng with time find a teacher supportive of this more demonstrative style of practice.

As always with these stories, I had no idea where to go with it. So I just let it simmer for a while.

When listening to the interview with Jungian psychologist  Jerry Ruhl the other day, two intimately related issues jumped off for me and connected with the rice-and-sand story: handling the tension between our inner yearnings (our authentic self) and the cultured, more practical side and the differentiation Dr Ruhl makes between compromise and synthesis.

It occurred to me that although compromise is something seen in our Western culture as a necessary part of our existence, I’ve always felt some tension around the word. Maybe because what it essentially about is choosing one thing over the other and sometimes this goes against our authentic self which always costs us. According to Dr Ruhl compromise is also a product of the ego. When we compromise we do a little bit of that and a little bit of the other: for example I fulfill my cultural duties during the week (go to my day job that pays the bills) and chose to devote week-ends to what my heart yearns for. Sooner or later I start wondering how I can integrate my passion for the divine into my day-to-day life and how I can bring practicality to my inner yearnings.

What I hear Dr Ruhl say in this interview is that to have an undevided life we need to learn to create synthesis of the two sides rather than compromise. Synthesis appears  contradictory to the ego as it offers to hold the tension between two for the ego seemingly conflicting sides but those sides are actually complimentary. A new solution comes to us, as Dr Ruhl points out, from a different part of personality than ego. This is what I hear Dogen speaking about on these pages: choosing sythesis over compromise. I would think that this is easier to do for someone leading a monastic life where these sides are intimately integrated in one’s life through the very way one’s day is shaped. Or – are they?  In any case, how can we, the laypeople in this modern world, make sure all these ingredients  of our personality are acknowledged and welcomed in this kitchen of life at any point?

David Whyte explores our life-long commitments to Work, Self and Other, and concludes that each of these three marriages is nonnegotiable at its heart:

“People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is at play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way. These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes almost delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment.” (David Whyte, p. 9)

Somehow we have convinced ourselves that we should trade those parts of ourselves. Whyte suggests that on the contrary,  “we should give up the attempt to balance one marriage against another, of for instance, taking away from work to give more time to a partner, or vice versa, and start thinking of each marriage comversing with, questioning or emboldening the two” (D. W, p. 11) because they are not separate commitments, but “different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world”.

As for the story, I still don’t know where I have my rice and sand (or in my case it is more accurate to say rice and cat hair). It appears to be one fabulous giant mess. What I do know by now is that no matter how hard I try to get rid of cat hair, it always ends up in places where I least would like to see it: on a plate just when I am about to eat, inside the painting, in the space between the keys on a keyboard and – inside the socks.

Sometimes I find comfort in the idea that it could be worse and I could be living with a tiger! On rare occasions I wonder what the cats that live me with think of this human spreading her stuff all around their place: books on the kitchen table where they like sitting in the morning, books in the bathroom, books and paints all around the floor and – imagine that! – dipping socks in their hair.

Resources:

• Interview with  Jerry Ruhl on Shrink Rap Radio Psychology Podcast, # 229
• Dogen’s “Instructions for Zen Cook”
• Webinar 2 with Dosho Port ( on Sand and Rice)
• David Whyte, “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationsip“

I am interested in how something that starts like a romantic movie on the scale of “Titanic” turns into a low-budget drama with elements of nightmare. What is it in me that triggers and steers this process from the very start? Why longing for a working relationship, I set myself up for failure and sabotaged the few ones I had? What would it take from me to live together without hurting my beloved? I have been trying to remember a single morning when I woke up and said to myself, “How can I make sure I get hurt again and while I am at it, why not help another soul feel miserable?” Not that I remember. There seems to be a glitch in the system somewhere.

So I thought I’d take a good look at the dynamics of intimate relationships and try to see where my own judgement fails me.

Why this exploration? Because

a) those same patterns show up in all our relationships although not as powerfully

b) I strive to live a conscious life in this universe not of my choosing

c) let’s just say I finally bought Elisabeth Gilbert’s “Committed” and find myself warming up to the idea of giving myself a try at relationships

“Of all the ideologies that possess the contemporary soul, perhaps none is more powerful, more seductive, and possibly more delusory than the romantic fantasy that there is someone out there who is right for us, the long-sought soul mate, what I call “the magical other” , the one who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and, with a little luck, spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our needs”.

James Hollis, “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Your Life”, p 104

This fantasy of  the “magical other” who can complete us and finally make us feel happy is enthusiastically supported by the culture of the modern world.

Here comes Tina Turner:

I call you when I need you, my heart’s on fire
You come to me, come to me wild and wired
Mmm, you come to me
Give me everything I need
Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak a language of love like you know what it means
Mmm, it can’t be wrong
Take my heart and make it strong, baby

From “Simply the Best!

So I called the first phase  – Give me everything I need ! – phase

Hollis holds that   “all relationships begin with projections. In each new moment instead of reinventing ourselves again and again, we lean back on our past, on our most primal experience of relationships. We let each new moment, each situation, be coloured by the past and therefore cannot see the essential reality of the present moment. As projections is an unconscious mechanism, we do not realise that we are internalizing our internal experience onto the other person.” (p. 106)

In the screen shots below we have U and Schmoopy at the initial stage of their relationship, projecting onto each other in hope that once they are together, they will finally become whole, the problems of feeling guilt or unworthy, unsafe and lonely, will go away and they will live happily ever after. (Here the couple are of opposite sex but as I understand the same dynamics apply to same-sex partner relationships.)

Hollis: “We have a predisposition to project our childhood agendas, our infantile longing, and the burden of our assignment for personal growth onto the other” (p 116)

In other words, we don’t know what we are doing and project our agenda onto others.

Experience: A fifty-something-year old man I was dating for a very short period told me at the very outset of our relationship, “Change me, baby!”  What he wanted me to change in him was not where he should consider changing if he sincerely wanted to improve his relationships. The defense mechanisms he used was attempting to control the situation and people around him and complaining (something many of us employ in varying degrees). On one occasion he made a spectacular scene in the middle of a street (quite in the spirit of the film we just watched – “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”), right outside the movie theater. The whole situation felt very surreal to me at that moment, as if I woke up and saw us from above, wondering, “”How did it come down to this?”. I saw that angry aging child and me next to him,  his emotional keeper and punch bag; I saw passers-by throwing cautious looks at us, and it occurred to me up there that the girl on the ground was no longer a child and had the choice to leave.

I don’t know what shocked me most in this particular story: that I once again found myself in a destructive relationship as if I was my worst enemy or the fact that the man in question was practicing Tai Chi, daily meditation and went on retreats, was teaching philosophy at the university and wrote a book on the science of happiness. He did not give me an impression of  a particularly happy man and it certainly was not how I wanted a relationship to be like so I climbed on my bike and took off. But as I was biking, laughing at the absurdity of the situation, wondering if any of my friends would believe I let it go this far, I had a gnawing suspicion that the reason why I had agreed to become part of that relationship was not left behind. Maybe it was riding with me.

(to be continued)

Resources:

• insights from Jungian psychology from the chapter on the dynamics of  intimate relationships from James Hollis’ book “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Your Life”
• screenshots from the video episode of  podcast “A Crush Course in Miracles” with Philip Urso (used with Philip’s permission)
• lyrics from Tina Turner’s undying hit “Simply the Best”
• personal experience of heartbreaks and heartaches, history of an abusive relationship; history of a long-term marriage and a quick divorce (if words like “good ” could be applied to divorce as far as the involved parties’ treatment of each other under these painful circumstances and the relationship following the break-up , the word would be “excellent”)

“Hungry ghost” is a literal translation of the Japanese word gaki. Ga means to be famished or hungry, and ki means a demon or ghost. In the context of Zen Buddhism, gaki refers to that which arises which arises inside our us human beings, and which is never satisfied with what we are or what we have.” (p. 108)

Reading these lines and my own observation of being around the food made me think of the “hungry ghosts” that I’ve been having visits from. The days of food shortage are over (food coupons we had after the fall of the Soviet) but not the feeling of hunger, of not having enough of something. Staying with the issue of food alone, I can see how mindful eating (through engaging all sensory fields) can enrich my own experience of food.

In this post I’d like to share the exercise called “Who is hungry in there?” that I transcribed after the Tricycle magazine’s podcast episode called “Are you hungry inside?” . The instructions are about 7 min long but exercise itself can take longer.

Who is hungry in there?

In this exercise we access the seven different kinds of hunger.

Preparation: sit down with some food in front of you. The amount of food does not matter (it can be a whole meal, it could be one cracker). Start by doing it alone, so you don’t feel awkward. Do this exercise at least once a day until it become a second nature.

Each of the seven hungers is associated with different parts of the body. In ME (Mindful eating) before we eat or drink we look inward and we ask each of this body parts if they are hungry. If the answer is Yes then we ask that part how hungry it is on the scale of 0 (Not interested at all) to 10 (Famished). The parts of the body that we look at are the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the stomach, the body or the cells, the mind, and the heart.

Begin by sitting down with some food in front of you. Take a deep breath and relax a bit.

Before you begin eating we are going to access the seven types of hunger.

Eye hunger:

Take the food in with the eyes. Look at the colors and shapes of the food, notice surface textures, areas of light and dark. Now ask the eyes how hungry are they for this food. On the scale of 0 (Not interested) to 10 (I ma going to eat it right now) how would you rate your eyes’ hunger? Do you have a number?

Next you access Nose hunger:

Smell the fragrance of the food. You may have to lean down or pick up the plate. Don’t be embarrassed. Then move away to refresh your nose and then come back to the food to sniff it two or three times. Now access nose hunger on a scale 0 to 10. You have a number?

Mouth hunger:

Before you eat this food can you tell how hungry the mouth is to taste it? Put your awareness in the mouth and rate moth hunger from 0 (Not interested) to 10 (I’ll eat it right now).

Stomach hunger:

Try to put your awareness in the stomach and feel and rate how hungry your stomach is right now. Is it not interested (0) or is it telling you it is starving (10)?

Body hunger:

As you look at this food can you investigate how hungry the cells of your body are just now?

Bring your awareness in the whole of your body and rate the body’s hungry from 0 to 10.

Mind hunger:

Can you hear what the mind is telling you about this food or this meal? Remember that the mind often speaks in “Should it”/”Should not eat” phrases. Can you rate the mind’s hunger on the scale from 0 (Should not eat it) to 10 (Must eat it!)?

Heart hunger:

Ask your hunger how hungry it is to eat this food. Heart hunger is related to feelings. Rate heart hunger from 0 to 10. For example 10 might be (“I may not feel happy if I eat this. I might even feel anxious if I eat it”). And 10 might be “This food will make me feel comfortable and at ease”.

Before you start eating you also might investigate thirst. On a scale from 0 to 10 how thirsty are you right now?

Ok, now that you’ve assessed the seven hungers and thirst you are ready to begin eating and drinking. Half way through the meal stop again and do a quick assessment of the seven hungers and assess thirst again. When you finished the meal pause for a moment and do the assessment of the seven hungers again.

_ _ _

If some of the questions make no sense or if you don’t feel response when you ask about a certain hunger Don’t Worry! Just the questions and be open to any answers that might or might not arise. Once you learn to investigate who inside you is hungry and make it a regular routine to stop and ask the questions before you eat, then you can make a more informed decisions about whether to eat or not. Only food and drink will satisfy stomach and cellular hunger. However there are many alternatives to food for satisfying the other five types of hunger. If want to feel satisfied and eat the appropriate amount, we need to learn to take food in through all the sense doors, becoming awake to the color, the fragrance, the texture, the taste, the temperature, and even the sound of our food. And if we want to be content in this moment and to be nourished by whatever comes into our life, we also might find ways to feed not only our body but also our heart.

“You must not leave the washing of rice or preparation of vegetables to others, but must carry out this work with your own hands. Put your whole attention into the work, seeing just what the situation calls for”

Dogen, “Instructions for the Zen Cook”

Was Dogen talking about food? What I hear is the same question that keeps coming up:

What does it mean to take responsibility for my life?

But back to the kitchen… For most part, I cook my meals myself.  Not an easy thing to do if you commute and have all evenings booked for preferably some other activity than cooking.  Still, this is my choice.  I save time, ingredients and energy by cooking a few meals at a time. Also, it has to be simple, fast and fun!

Even with this somewhat unpredictable old electric stove there is a lot I can do. For example, I’ve learnt to boil rice without burning it of which I am quite proud. Dogen writes, “Nothing could be worse than to complain about too much or too little of something, or of the inferior quality”. He might have something to say about how choosy we are when buying ingredients at a market or in the grocery store. Can we only expect to get the best stuff and keep choosing away the bad? What do we do with those less than perfect carrots, apples and strawberries?

So, in the spirit of this Ango, wholeheartedly I rolled up the sleeves, pushed the cats away from the hot plates, took out the favourite kitchen knife and got down to the wonderful business of cutting, slicing, dicing and micing (it might mean something like “slicing the occasional mouse drifting through the kitchen”). Just kidding! No mice in the house but they did seem to bother tenzo in Dogen’s times:  “…Take special care, lest a mouse accidentally falls into it. Under no circumstances allow anyone who happens to be drifting through the kitchen to poke his fingers around or look into the pot”.

Washing my hands, preparing to handle food,

I cleanse my mind of same old thinking,

and offer to lend a hand,

freshly doing one task.

- Ed Brown, from The Tassajara Recipe Book

A few pictures documenting my play in the kitchen.

What have we here?

Hot sour-sweet bean stew and red quinoa in preparation

I love the sounds of food getting cooked, the sounds of may parts becoming into something new, when all those juices, colors and spices merge.

Going creative on the cutting board with the ingredients for the next dish:  an attempted portrait of a man trying to swallow a lemon.

The disassembled man is about to enter the preheated oven, in a tightly sealed envelope made of silver foil.

I am using a slice of remaining lemon to make a drink perfect for especially cold days (alternative to push-ups or Jumping Jacks): chop some ginger, put in a glass, add warm water, a few drops of honey and a slice of lemon. Voilá!

My lunch is ready  and … it takes only 10 minutes for me to eat it!  How does this compute with activating all the senses?

Though recipes abound, for soups and salads,

breads and entrees, for getting enlightened

and perfecting the moment, still

the unique flavour of Reality

appears in each breath, each bite,

each step, unbounded and undirected.

Each thing as it is,

What do you make of it?

- Ed Brown, from The Tassajara Recipe Book

What was the last meal you cooked in the kitchen?

Any lessons you learnt in the kitchen that you can apply in other areas of your life or the other way around? 

From Dogon’s “Instructions for the Zen Cook”

Many of us know from the kitchen experience that if we focus on one side of the meal we are preparing (for example, its aroma or color) and even temporarily forget the others, our checking out from the world into our heads can ruin the whole meal. It’s easy to get carried away and forget to add salt and spices or miss the critical point when we should remove it from the stove.

Burnt oats (not happy): Read my lips, “Eat this!”

I find the same to be true of  life: if I choose to focus only on one aspect of it, for example work, I can get signals from inside that something is missing, something is out of balance, that I left home. Still, this is what most of us have to deal with at different points in our lives when one side of it temporarily takes over. In the best case we are aware of what’s happening and can even tell others who might be affected that we will catch up with them once the project is done, the book is finished or we have solved the issue of poverty in the world. In the best case we can come back to the center in time before some damage is done (in yoga, on the physical level, the price of not being aligned is that we either collapse with our bodyweight on one particular part of the body and can get injured or have to resort to great muscular effort to sustain balance.) But even as we let our life on the everyday level come slightly off-balance, we don’t have to be out of balance with the experience of life, do we?  We don’t have to go to exotic places or eat exclusive meals in posh restaurants to experience the gift of life, to feel alive.

We convinced ourselves that what we have seen many times is ordinary. We have given it names and decided it holds no mystery. We could not be more wrong! Without engaging in thinking, try to experience what you think you already know inside-out – your body. Bringing attention to your right hand, can you experience the feeling state in it,  the many subtle sensations and activities? Can you feel the current of air coming in touch with the skin? If you keep listening in, you will discover all kinds of sensations and vibrations that you were not aware of. Can you feel the beat of your heart in the top of your fingers?

I started investigating the physical aspects of mindfulness on the cushion and in everyday life: standing in line, right before falling asleep, sitting on the commuter train or in a café. So

what does embodied mindfulness feel like?

Will Johnson suggests that embodied mindfulness is about bringing in alignment and balance not only the right and left sides of the body as well as the front and back of the body, but also all our sensory experiences.

“Balancing out in equal proportions the awareness of our different sensory fields ensures that no one field within that experience can become predominant to the detriment of another field…

By paying equal attention to all of our four sensory fields, our mind stays balanced, and the fulness and richness of this moment’s experience comes into clear and vibrant focus…

Through neglecting the awareness of any one of the primary sensory fields (vision, sound, sensations, and mind), we distort the richness and fulness that the present moment inherently possesses and have to settle instead for a more limited and muted version of what’s real”.

- Will Johnson, “Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfulness”

Boy, that sounds bleak, doesn’t it: “a limited and muted version of what’s real”? Why would we choose to experience life in black-and-white or without sound if we at any time can experience it in full color and with surround system sound?

With the help of the embodied practices like meditation, yoga and trance dance, I’ve learnt to come back to the body and experience the sensations inside each part but mostly when I am not talking to someone. As my fingers are  hitting the keys of the key-board as I am writing these lines, I feel the warm sensation in the palms of the hands, somewhat cooler on the outside of the hands and a very tangible throbbing and pulsing in all the fingers – the circulation of blood. Yet I am not aware of my toes and my knees until I remember having them and – now! – hello my toes and knees! But suddenly I am not hearing chirping of the birds outside that I could hear before – I include more of the bodily sensations to the exclusion of something else. Tricky!

An interesting thing happens once we bring our body into alignment and become aware of the sounds, sights, and sensations that we are taking in through the sensory fields of experience – the internal story line stops! Magic! The present moment can broadcast through us without unnecessary disturbances from our side. This is home!

I am going to check out the rest of Jonson’s book as I am interested in learning the techniques (application of relaxation and resilience) that will allow me to observe the workings of the mind without losing touch with the body and the world outside.

An Ordinary Day

To realise true nature, we

study the body and mind of Reality.

Will you have this body and mind?

these grains and beans?

Will you settle for this body and mind?

these vegetables and fruits?

This body!

This mind!

The body and mind of Reality

are not different than this

body and mind right now,

but to know it fully,

we must examine and investigate,

actualized it through and through.

What we really want

waits within

the ordinary.

Today, as our second weekly webinar was coming to an end, Dosho’s encouragement to actualize the spirit of zazen in everyday life caught my attention. How does this “actualizing it through and through” gets manifested when I cook and eat?

how can I cook/experience a meal employing all the senses?

First of all, I felt inspired by the energy of the group and the willingness to see how the words of Dogen could apply in our own lives. Having participated in a few webinars with Dosho by now, I noticed that it is the energy that I respond to and leave the rest simmer in the background for the rest of the week. If I try to rush myself into producing some meaningful insights, I just risk to burn the whole thing (those food metaphors for cooking our life are deliciousssss!)

First, …get the ingredients for the next day’s meals: rice, vegetables, and so on. Having received them, protect and be frugal with them, is if they were your own eyes.

- From Dogen’s “Instructions for the Cook”

The questions that I’ve been looking at these days (that came up as a response to Dogen’s words) are:

• What does being frugal mean to me?

• What are my ingredients for the day? and

• What is my eyeball right now?

(The image Dosho used in the presentation of a person holding an eyeball spooks me so instead I use the drawing I did when practicing eye-drawing)

Intuitively, the responses that come up for me has to do with the body and relationships.  This very moment, it is my spine that asks for attention. It has been locked into an uncomfortable position and longs to be liberated. I get up and stretch, do some gentle twists.

I can definitely take on the advice of handling relationships as “if they were my eyes”. Today on my way to work I stopped by the bakery, as I do every morning, to give my friend who works there a hug. She already expected me with a cup of warmed apple juice spiced with cinnamon, to go with a couple of fresh blueberry muffins that I in turn will share with my local sangha tonight. When I arrived to work, I ran into another colleague/friend making fresh coffee. He saw me rushing to my desk and signalled that he’d stop by with a cup of coffee for me, which he also did. It made me think that those are my ingredients for the day: the relationships I have and can both nurture and be nurtured by. Those people are friends, one could say, of course we want to treat them well and nurture those relationships. Dogen’s Cookbook has a passage about that, too:

“The tenzo should treat all food he receives with respect, as if it were to be used in a meal for the emperor. Cooked and uncooked food must be handled in the same manner”.

- From Dogen’s “Instructions for the Cook”

People I daily commute with and share the frustration of arriving to the train that is cancelled or get stuck in the middle of nowhere (due to the current disruptions in commuter traffic and all the chaos it results in) are technically not my friends (they are “uncooked food” rather than “cooked food”) but I have to treat them as if they were, according to chef Dogen. It is easy to forget that when one is tired and frozen as a potato in the basement. There is a lot I can do though: offering somebody my seat, letting them pass before me or just smiling at them can make a noticeable shift in the energy flow. We are all veggies in this soup of life!

Right this instant it is my eyes that I should be taking care of as if they were my… eyes! Time to take a break from my computer and maybe breath in some fresh winter air.

What is your eyeball right now?

So what’s the deal with the so-called “midlife” crisis and how come it seems I’ve been having one for years although I don’t have any conscious fear of aging?

Hollis posits that any crisis occurs when the maps we are carrying (conscious or unconscious ones we adopted from our culture or family of origins) do not match the terrain, when there is discrepancy between “what we sought, served, and accomplished, and what we feel in our private, honest moments”. This occurs when we experience the unavoidable conflict between the natural Self and the acquired “sense of self” (he calles it “the false self”) with “the values and strategies we have derived from internalizing the dynamics and messages of our family and our culture”*.  As children, we adopt certain defense mechanisms to ensure our survival and  we carry those with us into every decision we make as adults. Those unconscious mechanisms often guide our choices in directions quite different from those our soul desires. Most of us experience this identity crisis many times in the course of our lives and as any collision, it’s a painful experience.

As for “midlife” crisis, Hollis does not see it as “a momentary madness” , but an invitation from our soul to a more authentic existence, when something larger is wishing to emerge; an opportunity to radically examine one’s life. We have gathered enough internal material to actually address the critical question,

Am I living my life or somebody else’s?

I experienced a major  identity crisis ten years ago when I moved to Sweden and had to redefine my relationship with my family of origins, my cultural identity, and the new society that I did not know how to relate to. Suddenly I no longer knew who I was. I saw it as something to be endured and threw my creative energy into coming up with ways to keep the nose over the surface, ignoring those calls from the soul. I learnt to silence them down with distractions: another exciting trip, an intensive work out or a course that was way over my head and justified my feeling of the ongoing struggle.

Finally I arrived to the point where I no longer was interested in trying to live a life that I had thought I wanted for myself.   I kept hearing the voice saying a line from some film, “This is not what I wanted” (Could it be “Madam Bovary?”) and each time would wonder where it came from.” How could that be? Not this? What is it that I wouldn’t want to have?”  Still the price for this Ok-life that somehow did not feel ok at all was too high and I felt I needed to change something. The ok-marriage of ten years went first, the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. As the darkness was closing up on me, I learnt to take one day at a time and see what worked. I discovered that handcrafts or making art immediately made me feel better and so did exercise but the root of that distress remained unaddressed. Some days I had to call in sick to work because I needed space to just sit down and breath, and taking a few steps up the stairs took a lot of energy. In those moments of breathing other, larger questions started popping up in my head:

How did I end up like that? What was it that was missing in my otherwise seemingly so full life? If I decided to keep living, I had to make sure it felt like it – living - but what made me feel alive? What mattered to me most?

This is when the images of wood and darkness started coming up. I loved spending time leafing through the graphic novel by Pierre Buba & Brigitte Baumié (see the image above) that had almost no words and that drew me with its  powerful images of a soul in pain, on her solitary journey through the wood. At about the same time I started a few paintings, all involving a girl walking into the dark wood. None of them got to be finished, but they helped me recognise in those symbols the calling of my own soul . Deep down I felt like that girl whose worst unspoken fear was that of getting lost but who had to go through the dark wood to get to the other side of the story. The thing is nobody can ever tell us what the other side looks and feels like and if we ever will make it there.

I agree with those who don’t see aging in itself as a sign of maturity or wisdom. It’s not hard to age, you just keep living until you stop. What is much harder is to live a life of authenticity, the one that has its struggles and creative tensions, but in which we make ourselves at home by accepting the responsibility for what we make with it, by recognising that “this is our life, not somebody else’s, that after out thirtieth birthday we are responsible for how it turns out…”.*

It is not about beating ourselves up for those learned behaviours we adopted in childhood or by blaming others for letting us down but about being able to see those messages from the past and recognising where they show up in our lives at present. I see making ourselves accountable and doing the work as the only way out of the woods, towards a fuller life that feels true to us.

According to Hollis in every decisive moment of our life we choose between anxiety and depression. Taking risks in life as we move forward leads to anxiety. Not taking the next step on our journey and engaging in soul-denial results in depression. His advice is straightforward, “Faced with such choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.” *

Asking questions like “Where does this outcome come from within me?” is potentially liberating as we acknowledge that our lives unfold from within and through becoming conscious of our inner motives can align our internal lives with what manifests externally. Poet David Whyte said in one of his talks, “There are enormous consequences to paying attention to what is going on inside us”. These “enormous consequences” remind me of  the immense storm in Rilke’s poem “The Man Watching”, something that fights us so that “we would become strong too, and not need names”. When we are not paying attention, the consequences are bound to be disastrous. In my life, I want to pay attention – red pill for me please, Morphey!

PS  As I was writing this post a new episode of “To The Best of Our Knowledge Podcast” landed in iTunes, called “Aging: Dying Young as Late as Possible”. Hmmmm…

-  Rumi

I started “doing the rhythms” a while ago, at home, in the privacy of my almost furniture-free living room, inspired by Gabrielle Roth’s book and CDs, driven by the longing to “retrieve the soul through my body”. Recently I joined the local tribe of women and men of all ages and shapes and the Energizer bunny leader with long black hair and a wide smile for a class in grounding (the term used in Swedish), a dance form inspired by African dance but more accessible in terms of choreography, which is perfect for a drop-in like myself. I go to our gathering place – the gym in the local church – on Wednesday nights to give the fire of this longing manifestation that makes the whole of me feel vibrant and connected.  No conceptual thinking could bring me to the core of what mattered to me most the way the body does when I tune into it and allow it to flow.

We all have the potential to be a full-bodied Bordeaux, but sadly most of us are satisfied being Welche’s grape juice.

- Gabrielle Roth, Sweat Your Prayers

African rhythms do it for me, take me straight home, into this place of innocence, playfulness and vitality where I can be anything and anybody. As the rhythms on the CD change, I listen in and follow where my body leads me. My legs carry me into the circle, closer towards others – I seek connection. My spine twists for freedom, releasing all the blocks from the day in the office and letting the energy flow through it and into the rest of the body. It’s fluid and unpredictable, it’s alive and breathing. My chest strives forward – I feel courageous and ready to face what come may. The hips wake up and start telling their stories. So much shame and pain they have been carrying while all I’ve noticed and reacted to was the extra pounds that landed on them.

My neck sends the rest of me into the slow rotation, away from my tribe, in the direction of the big window and the snowy landscape behind it –I need to face the big world on my own, feeling the supportive presence of my tribe behind me. Finally I turn around again and start moving freely in this space, passing my sweaty fellow dancers, offering and receiving a smile here and there, waving, bowing, nodding – I am on the roll, and the world moves with me. Or – am I being moved by the world?

Movement practice gets all your creative juices flowing. It doesn’t just release your body, but it opens up your heart and empties out your mind, as well. Whatever you are feeling or obsessing over is integrated into your dance. You move away from your surface and get in touch with a deeper, wiser you, one that sense the unity that underlies everything. The rhythms take us back to that primordial soup, so that we can begin again, fresh and fertile, high on our existence.

- Gabrielle Roth, Sweat Your Prayers

The hour passes quickly and as we exchange good-byes, people I met here for the first time thank me for inspiring them through my dance. I thank them back and thank my body. Still there is something I could not let go of that night – the fear of making sounds in this world, sounds that express where I stand. I am afraid to let the voice come through the  body and enter the world.

Poet David Whyte sees voice as a way of meeting the world. It is in our voice we are tested against it. We resonate the air inside our body and then through our throat and out through the mouth into the air, until the shape of the air inside the body becomes the shape of the body outside. We literally become one with the world. But somewhere along the line we became ashamed of the sounds we make in the world.

So very true for me! This one will take time for me, I can sense that. It will take patience and compassion.  “Am in no hurry, have all the time in the world”, I remind myself, and stop in the middle of the road to look towards the dark sky and the slowly descending snowflakes. In this silence I can hear my heart beat in the sixth rhythm – that of my unfolding soul.

The Fire in the Song

The mouth opens and fills the air with its vibrant shape
Until the air and the mouth become one shape
And the first word
your own word
Spoken from that fire
Surprises burns
Grieves you now because you made that pact
With the dark presence in your life
He said, “If you only stop singing
I’ll make you safe”
And he repeated the line,
“I’ll make you safe”.
Knowing you would hear it as the comforting sound
Of a door closed on the fear at last

But his darkness slipped under your tongue and became the dim cave
Where you sheltered and grew in that small place
Too frightened to remember the songs of the world
Its impossible notes
And the sweet joy that flew out the door
Of your wild mouth as you spoke

- David Whyte

Resources and inspiration:

• Gabrielle Roth, “Sweat Your Prayers: The Five Rhythms of  the Soul”

• Gabrielle Roth, CDs with music for the five rhythms (also available on Spotify)

• Maureen Freehill’s Butoh-blog

• In Uppsala: Grounding & African Dance with Christina

Although the color of the flowers is beautiful, they do not bloom of themselves; they need the spring breeze to open. The conditions of the Way are also like this; although the Way is complete in everyone, the realization of the Way depends upon collective conditions. Although individuals may be clever, the practice of the Way is done by means of collective power. Therefore, now you should make your minds as one, set your aspiration in one direction and study thoroughly, seek and inquire.

- Dogen

We cannot bloom by ourselves and to become transformed we need to be exposed to all kinds of weather conditions, get proper nourishment and be tested.

Later the same evening it was time for the second call with the Integral Enlightenment teleclass. This time we were invited to try for size nothing less than the perspective of the Evolutionary Impulse (IE) and from that larger place look at our lives and the specific areas where we were struggling. What was possible from thar larger perspective, no matter how frightening it might seem to the smaller, personal self?

When we were  sharing in small groups what came up to us as a response to questions, I felt that very spring breeze that Dogen writes about, go through my living room and my heart. Our brief but full-hearted exchanges expanded my own understanding of what was possible for me and fuelled the internal fire when I was listening to the responses of others. At times I experienced it as one response voiced differently.

For the coming week we were offered the following questions to reflect on and explore on the daily basis how we could approach our lives from that larger perspective:

• What does the Evolutionary Impulse need from me?
• What are the values of the Evolutionary Impulse and how, if at all, do they differ from the values of the personal self?
• How can I stretch to more fully embody this Impulse?
• How does aligning with the Evolutionary Impulse impact my experience of myself?
• How does it impact my relationship to Life?
• How does it impact my behavior toward others?
• What does it reveal about my and our potential for radical evolution?

Having carried the questions around for three days and just listening to the responses that showed up, I noticed that my mind was getting seduced by the “How can I stretch …” question which was more on the doing side. It is the most familiar mode: identifying the problem (existance of the ego) and suggesting the solution (get rid of it NOW!). My mind loves tinkering with whatever shows up on the horizon and prescribing solutions. Who is talking? Yet another self-image: me, myself and Irene, the bettered – the ego-less – version. Ego-less who?

- Eckhart Tolle

Yesterday I lost my day job, was “fired for redundancy”. Truth be told, I’ve been feeling stuck and uninspired with it for months but for a number of practical (mainly financial) reasons quitting was not a viable option. What to do? I have been living with this question and the sensation of restlessness and longing for a different way to earn my living, the one that would allow me to be more self-expressed and would resonate with my values. My inner mantra for these past few weeks has been, ” I am ready to be  moved but don’t know how. Take my fire! Use my fire! Be my fire! I am yours! “  So when my boss came with the news of the unavoidable lay offs, I surprised her (and myself!) saying I was willing to go first. I have been asking to be moved, haven’t?  And if I want to be moved, I have to let go of the grip.

When I was a little girl, I liked to spend time peering  into a little tube with an exotic name – kaleidoscope. The tube was filled with coloured beads and pebbles and could magically bring them together into exciting patterns every time I turned it. It never ran out of imagination and tirelessly produced new, perfectly symmetrical designs. Whenever  life did not make sense, I could always count on the magic of  my kaleidoscope. When I first got the kaleidoscope, I was so fascinated with every pattern that I would not want to turn it, afraid of losing the unique pattern. Of course sooner than later I would lose it anyway. But I soon discovered that frozen images by themselves were quite boring and that by turning the tube I allowed the images to connect, to form sequences. I loved how they would float into one another, the previous one sort of pulling out the next one and then the next. To enjoy this never-ending dance I had to keep turning the tube:  the images were meant to be played as a sequence!

Playing with the kaleidoscope I learnt that there was always some new  design waiting for me, something I could not possibly anticipate and in that brief moment of turning it I trusted the pieces would come together in the best possible way. I could enjoy the new design for a while but knew I would have to start turning the tube again and let the images unfold in a sequence I had no control over. As a grown up, I’ve learnt to hold on to the old ways because I started identifying myself with things, feelings and ideas and losing the object of my identification gave me the feeling that I in fact was loosing my self. As grown ups we think we have more to lose because we have acquired more (“More is better” seems to be the belief we carry here in the West) but how can we lose something we never really were or owned? As grown ups, we become invested in our inflated self-images, our posessions or occupation, our feelings and opinions, and get the sense of identity from them. We can feel that I am the one disappearing, not my job or relationship.

It’s time to dust off the old ways and find new ones for making dreams come true. It’s time to reshuffle the deck, turn the kaleidoscope and see what we can make with what comes up. It’s time to ask, ” What are the creative opportunities here?  How can I use this for my growth?” How can we become as excited about the unknown as about something we already know and anticipate? I say, “I am dying to work with you”. I say, “I have no doubt this will be a rich experience”. I say, ” “You fascinate me”. I say, “You are so intriguing.”

I say,

LET US PLAY!

I burn away; laugh; my ashes are alive!

I die a thousand times;

My ashes dance back –

A thousand new faces.

- Rumi

One of them is that actually it is less important where we are on our journey than where we are in relationship to our edge. Craig pointed out the importance of allowing for the evolving edge by welcoming the discomfort and the growing pain of stretching instead of resisting or avoiding it.

“If we’re not uncomfortable, we’re probably not evolving.”

I find this to be very true for my path and maintaining a blog actually challenged me in ways I could not anticipate when I wrote my first post and which I came to appreciate.When comments starting coming in and when I started commenting on other people’s posts online, I saw how the way we listen to each other (or read) and respond to each other’s writing influences the energy between us and in itself can be used as way to deepen our practice.

The other day I posted a comment to a friend’s blog in which I shared what came up for me after reading the post but my comment deeply upset my friend. He felt that I misunderstood the point he was making in the post and thought I was lacking compassion when I replied to what other people wrote. That feedback made me reflect on my listening/reading/ skills as well as on what matters to me as someone who writes a blog (how important is it for me to be understood? ). I felt sad that my comment have created an emotional divide between us, wondering how I could have responded differently. From what place was I reading the post and what were my intentions when I was replying to it?

Before I rise to my defence,

Before I speak in hurt or fear,

Before I build that wall of words,

Tell me, did I really hear?

Words are windows, or they’re walls,

They sentence us, or set us free.

When I speak and when I hear,

Let the love light shine through me.

from  Words Are Windows (or They’re Walls) by Ruth Bebermeyer

When both the practice of listening and responding from a deeper place within ourselves (related to what in Buddhism is called skillful speech) were mentioned on the call by Craig, I perked up the ears. Those were the areas I’d need to focus on when engaging with other people.  This is how those principles are defined in the course.

Deeper Listening  (listening from the deepest part of yourself)

This means that when someone else is speaking, you strive to listen for the deeper chords in what they’re saying and respond only to those chords that ring with the greatest spiritual presence and power. When something profound touches us in what someone else has shared, we’re going to take the risk to reflect it back to them, or to share it with the group. By building a field of deeper listening, we are creating a powerful supportive container for each of us to step into when we speak.

Speaking from the Deepest, Most Authentic Parts of the Self

Each time you contribute to the group, seek to bring forward the deepest part of yourself. Take the risk to express the deepest truths you know, to be a representative of humanity’s highest potential. One of the most transformative activities we can engage in is speaking from the deeper parts of ourselves, because in doing so, we are coaxing them out of the depths and allowing them to infuse our personalities with their wisdom and Presence. And when we do this, that authentic wisdom and Presence infuses the group as well.

From the “Principles of Evolutionary Culture”

So how can we manifest those? I guess it is up to each of us to explore what those deepest parts of ourselves are and how we can engage them. I am looking forward to the practice periods in groups and to the stretching pains of growing beyond the ego.

How do you make sure you listen beyond your ego?

Do you have any insights to share about listening to others?

What is listening from a deeper place for you?

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?”

–Rumi

The winter practice of deeper listening:

in between polishing each other into dimonds we can catch a break and simply appreciate the sun

and each other’s company.

I am in a company of a friend. Having spent some time together during the day, we share a minute of comfortable silence in the car when he suddenly breaks it by turning his face towards  me, looking me in the eye and saying,  “You are a wonderful person with a big heart”.  The second I understand what it is he is saying anxiety takes a grip of my heart and starts spreading into my stomach.  My eyes start darting around, looking for something to save me. Then, as if pulled by some unstoppable force from inside, I start talking.  I feel I have a case to argue. I am on a roll! My friend is not letting me off the hook easily: his eyes encourage me to receive the gift of his appreciation. He is sitting  next to me, smiling, giving me the time to experience my own discomfort and get comfortable with it. I stop bubbling. I have no idea what I was saying a few moments ago. I must sound like a crazy person and am ready to burst out laughing at myself when I notice the twinkle in my friend’s eyes and immediately get defensive, “Is he laughing at me?“

It’s getting darker and harder to see my friend’s eyes but I cannot mistake the energy coming from him. I feel safe. I take a deep breath, tune into myself and let myself feel the fear. It is tight. It’s paralysing. It’s hot. On the inbreath I accept my friend’s appreciation and my own fragility. On the outbreath I let go of the past.

*At one point in my life I had a boyfriend (a textbook case of toxic relationship) who whenever someone gave me a compliment or said something positive about me was quick to remind me of that person’s insincere intentions and expectations of having something from me in return (obviously he was the only one who could be truly sincere with me). I did not think I believed that for a moment but it was around that time that I became sensitive towards compliments and was ready to run for the woods every time someone made an honest attempt at giving me one.*

Right, the car again. My friend and I remain silent for a while. The while that seems like ages to me.  Suddenly I notice a subtle shift inside and a sensation of expansion in the heart area. I see the beauty of the moment, the kindness of my friend and my goodness.  When I finally say, “Thank you” my friend knows I thank him not only for his appreciative words, but also for helping me through this difficult for me place, for patiently waiting for me on the other side, for his gentle humor, for not pushing me, for creating and keeping this safe space in which I could face my fear and open up to the gift of love coming from others instead of being dragged by my own conditioning and following the same old scenario.

Since that memorable time with my friend I’ve had at least a couple of situations where this awareness of my own reactivity helped me to emotionally connect to the person who cared to come up and say something warm to me. I am now at a stage where I still feel discomfort when someone says something positive about me to my eyes but move through those emotional phases much faster, skipping some of them. It also means that emotions are no longer as strong as they used to be, not as consuming. I no longer see only my fears but also the person in front of me.  The experience with my friend also helped me realise how the people that are closest to us see what we are not willing to see and how we can help each other grow.

Freedom is being able to choose whoever and whatever you want to being any moment in your life.
- Debbie Ford