No-Self, Karma, and Reincarnation

I was just talking with my friend Lydia about meditation, the “point” of meditation, and related a couple metaphors I’ve found useful in my thinking, and thought, hey, they’d make a decent post.

My understanding of these is very much incomplete, and is a process, and these are just metaphors I’ve come up with on my own. They’re not scripture. If the Buddha’s teachings were just a finger pointing at the moon, these are kind of a finger pointing at the finger pointing at the moon. You’ve been warned.

No-Self, Codependent Arising, and Neurosis

There’s a lot of subtlety to the related Buddhist concepts of no-self and codependent arising. A lot of it has to do with the confusing limitations of language and our word, “exist.” (An aside: the brilliant Karen Armstrong’s books, The Great Transformation and A Case for God, do great justice to this complexity.) But a lot of it is just, well, deep subtlety.

From this subtlety, questions: If there’s no self, if all phenomena are impermanent and ephemeral, why must we meditate? What is there to do? For that matter, who is meditating? And if enlightenment and nirvana are about ceasing, why does it feel so hard? Why can’t I just… stop?

I think of meditation as sitting with a huge length of rope, tied into a knotted mass. As I sit, I steadily loosen and untangle the knots. It can’t be a struggle – everyone knows if you get impatient with knots, you only make matters worse. Instead, I sit with the knotted rope in my lap and, eyes defocused, just feeling with my hands, gently loosen whatever section I’m holding, trusting that over time this slow work will release them, and as the knots fall away, the rope is laid out, smoothly.

Over time, as I’m sitting there untying the rope, I think to myself, what is a knot, really? On the one hand I must admit that knots exist, because here I sit, untying them. And at the same time, a knot is only a name I give to the rope when it is twisted in one way rather than another. I cannot say, give me only a knot, but no rope.

And if ever I finish untying the rope, I will look at it and say, what have I really done? When I started, I had rope, and now, I have rope. And the end product of all that steady work, that steady release, is the realization that there was nothing really to do in the first place.

But I cannot have that realization while the rope is knotted.

Karma and Reincarnation

I was talking with my friend Tynan about reincarnation as we drove to his grandparents’ house in Massachusetts a few weeks ago. When I casually mentioned my belief in reincarnation he was startled. “You really believe in reincarnation?”

There’s a lot of subtlety, too, to the Buddhist notions of karma and reincarnation. The most pedestrian view, the way we often use “karma” in daily conversation, is this notion that the universe keeps records and hands out pleasure and pain to make sure it all adds up. Like if you’re mean to someone, a potted plant is guaranteed to fall on your head within a week.

Reincarnation, too, is often understood in a similarly mystical way. If I’ve been good, and I die, I’ll come back as a human again. If I’ve been bad, I’ll come back as a mushroom. And not a good mushroom, like a truffle. A bad mushroom.

These views obviously don’t stand up to scrutiny. With karma, who’s keeping tabs? The Buddha never discussed the existence of any gods, dismissing it as irrelevant to the pursuit of liberation. With reincarnation, what’s reincarnating? The Buddha was also quite explicit about no-self, rejecting the notion of the atman, or soul, as something with intrinsic existence. What would it even mean to say that I “came back” as a mushroom, if there’s nothing there to come back?

So, another metaphor: We are all wading around in a giant lake. Our walking is our karma; karma literally translates simply as action. As we walk, we create ripples: our karmic momentum. The ripples vary in size. Sometimes we stumble and struggle to remain upright, and splash, creating larger waves.

The waves and ripples move through the lake, and when they reach others, they move them. To the extent that we’ve perfected our balance, the ripples of others may affect us more or less, but all of us are moved. When very large waves crash against us, even the steadiest of us are moved. And as we struggle to retain our own balance, we splash around and create more waves. And on we go, splashing around, adding our own waves to the ones already there.

The motion of the water, this disturbance, is upset, what Buddhism calls dukkha, the unavoidable unsatisfactoriness of life, and at times it can become very turbulent, frothy whitewater threatening to drown us entirely. Our own frantic struggles to remain upright are our suffering.

It’s not so tit-for-tat as the simplistic view. When a wave hits us, we can’t always say exactly where it came from. It may be the combined results of many people’s struggles. And even if we see who caused it, we can look and say, he did that because another wave hit him. We’re all in the same lake, splashing around together. But when the water is very choppy, we know for sure it’s because of our struggling, because left alone, the water would be still.

And so, on reincarnation, a story I’ve always liked:

“Master,” the student asked, “If there is no self, no eternal soul, what is it that reincarnates?”

“Neurosis,” the master answered, without hesitation.

And so reincarnation, as I understand it, isn’t mysticism. All it’s saying is this: let’s say you’ve been splashing around in that lake, and you’ve created massive waves. Then you die, and fall to the floor of the lake, unmoving. What happens to those waves?

They keep going, obviously. When you die, your karmic momentum doesn’t stop. If you wronged someone, the fact that you’re dead doesn’t erase that from their mind. Your death doesn’t obliterate the residue of your life. To me, it’s not so much a “reincarnation” as it is a “continuation.” When my body dies, I live on through my karmic momentum. “I” continue to exist as the waves in the lake, and when those waves hit others and they react, I exist still in their reactions. Whether my physical body is still moving around is unimportant.

It is said that when you realize enlightenment, you dwell in nirvana and will no longer reincarnate. What does that mean?

Enlightenment is said to be the state where we see so clearly that we can avoid creating any more karmic momentum. We have stopped, ceased. This often sounds pessimistic to people – nihilistic, even – but is actually deeply optimistic. In this metaphor, enlightenment is the ability to walk around the lake without creating any ripples at all. The process is gradual: As I develop the brahmaviharas, Buddhism’s “divine abodes” of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, I gain steadiness, over time, my ripples become smaller and fewer.

Loving kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy are my motivation. They create in me the desire to stop the waves. Equanimity is a bit different: it’s the actual skill of not creating the waves, the ability. Equanimity is the physical balance I need to sway in time with even the largest waves and stay upright without flailing, without splashing.

This state of ceasing, of nirvana, is then the perfection of these, and far from nihilism, is deepest joy. Freed from the stress of always watching the water, worrying about the next wave, I can enjoy the cool, refreshing lake, the company of everyone else wading around with me, and I can turn my face up towards the sky and enjoy the sunlight.

And at the moment I die, I leave the lake undisturbed, and so I truly cease to be.

A Bigger Container

I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit with some challenging emotions, and I’m reminded of back when I was first learning about Buddhism, and I heard a teacher say that the state of “wounded pride,” when we feel unfairly victimized, is very beneficial to sit with. At the time, it seemed insane to me, masochistic. Vulnerability was terrifying to me, and I couldn’t imagine embracing it as beneficial. Now, eight years later, I understand: a willingness to sit with the deepest pain is not masochism at all, but love.

Mark Epstein wrote in his book, Open to Desire, about a patient he worked with, a woman who struggled with crippling loneliness, only three years into a seemingly-happy marriage. She recounted the ways she worked so hard to be close to her husband, weaving herself into his space to make him happy. Epstein writes:

“You don’t want to feel second, yet you always put the other person first,” I pointed out.

Kyra admitted that she had never thought of it that way before and then had as close to a breakthrough as happens in psychotherapy.

“The loneliness is being close to myself,” she said softly, her eyes opening wide in trepidation.

I’ve long struggled with repression, my tendency to submerge unpleasant emotions, sometimes so deeply I am completely unaware of them. The core of repression is guilt, shame, or embarrassment, a sense that the emotion is wrong or bad. “I shouldn’t feel this,” or, “It’s silly to feel this,” or, “Others will judge me if they know I’m feeling this.” And so for years I’ve worked with repression by coaxing-out, trying to convince myself that, no, it’s quite alright to feel the full range of emotion whenever they arise.

There’s a certain absurdity to that tug-of-war, though, that I see when I’m able to let all the struggling subside: Arguing with myself about whether an emotion is good or bad to feel is like arguing about whether it’s good or bad that the sky is blue. Under all the self-judgment and wanting-it-to-be-different is simple fact. Whatever I’m feeling, I’m feeling, whether I like it or not. If there is pain, there is pain; if anger, anger. If I feel joy, I feel joy.

This was Kyra’s realization. Before, like her, I believed that emotion was only there if I consciously felt it, and struggling with the unpleasant ones, I thought I was freeing myself from pain. In truth I was doing the opposite. Western psychology and Buddhism agree: “What we resist, persists.” By resisting the pain, I prolonged it, buried it, ensured it would be there forever waiting to be felt. Once I realized that the emotions are there whether or not I choose to feel them consciously, it dawned on me: feeling pain isn’t masochistic at all. It’s the very heart of self-compassion – Tara Brach would say, “choosing to love what is.”

I entered into my meditation and therapy practices with my identity, the grab-bag of things I call “me,” and all the ways I wished the contents of that grab-bag were different. “I want to be less afraid of intimacy and vulnerability. I want to repress less. I want to be more in touch with my heart and not just my head.” And so on. I had the idea that over time, I’d change the contents of that grab-bag, pushing some things out and pulling others in until I was happy with who I was.

To my surprise, I found that the contents don’t change at all. The bag does. The fear remains, the repressive urges remain, the analytical tendencies remain, but what changes is my relationship to them. The Buddha confirmed this long ago: there is no fixed “self” that exists. Experiencing that truth first-hand as my identity shifts and dissolves has been strange, often unsettling, and very liberating.

One particularly profound example is the steady process of separating my identity from the emotions I feel. In the past, I identified very closely with my emotions. Feeling strong emotion for me was like being set on fire. There was no distance. These days, strong emotion can still certainly overwhelm me, but much more often I’m able to see it not as something I am, but something I have, like I’m just a container with all sorts of things going on inside at once. And this enables me to hold conflicting emotions simultaneously in a way that would have seemed paradoxical to me in the past. Previously, if I felt sympathy for someone, I couldn’t also be angry at him. The dissonance would make me feel horribly guilty. Whereas these days I’ll just note whatever’s floating around: “I feel deep compassion, and also sadness and longing, and also vehement anger.” All at once. And I’ll acknowledge it all with a slight smile.

I used to worry, as many people first learning of Buddhism do, that this distance would mute my feelings, would insulate me a bit from the full vibrancy of my experience. What I’ve found is the opposite: the emotions are no longer “who I am”, but I still experience them all up close and personal. Free from the struggling and self-recrimination, I actually feel life more intensely, no longer so distracted, able to focus my awareness on my experience and let it wash over me.

While I’m still in this state of “wounded pride,” I’ve been seizing it as an opportunity to meditate and really look deeply at what’s going on. My practice the past four days has been profound – it’s been very challenging, a rollercoaster of emotion, but the more I’m able to sit with even the most painful experience, the more I see the deeper, pervasive sense of richness and joy that exists always, simultaneously, alongside even the deepest despair.

If you’d told me eight years ago I’d see this pain as such an exciting opportunity, I would never have believed you.

Fear

In Tara Brach’s excellent talk, The Courage to Awaken, she quotes Stephen Levine, who asked, if you found out you had only 3 days to live, who would you call? What would you say? And why aren’t you doing that now?

Recently a very old friend of mine, maybe the earliest friend I remember, got back in touch with me over Facebook. It was strange: I hardly recognized him, I asked a mutual friend if he was who I thought. We’d fallen out of touch at age 6 when his family moved to another state, so it was jarring and evocative to remember my last memory of him as a child and then read about his life, 23 years later, on his blog.

He’s had an exciting life so far, and has spent a lot of time confronting fear in a variety of ways – he was a professional gambler, then a renowned pickup artist, and these days is vegan and lives in a tiny RV with few possessions, traveling as a nomad.

His life has been so different from mine and still so active that it’s given me a lot to reflect on – like the question above, I think, which of the things he’s done do I feel a longing to do? And why have I not done them?

The single most recurrent theme in my practice is fear, the basis of the separate self, the very physical contraction inside that distances. Tara Brach describes it evocatively as the “space-suit trance”, that state of feeling like we’re an astronaut, hanging onto the mothership by a thin tether, and the panic we feel at the possibility of being entirely disconnected, when the reality is the opposite: the vastness of space is only isolating and cold if we fight it. Surrendering, we can find it’s enveloping and complete, love itself.

All of my attempts to control are based in fear: I contract, inside, resisting one outcome, I try to cause another. Realizing I can’t control outer circumstances only builds that contraction up. Soon it’s the only state I know. Surrender, the release of that internal contraction, is alien, takes practice, even though it’s my natural state. Surrender is difficult, because it means viscerally experiencing the fear.

One of my significant fears is that others see me as unlikable or incompetent. It’s pervasive – in social situations I tend to be either quiet and introverted so as not to expose that soft spot inside, the tenderness of vulnerability, or else I act gregarious and extroverted, but it’s just an affectation, something I learned to do, another suit of armor.

I’ve been paying attention to ways I behave differently around others than I would in private (beyond basics, like, “I wouldn’t have any clothes on right now if these people weren’t here.”) There’s a litany of differences. If I didn’t have this fear, I noted today, I’d listen to music indiscriminately in my car, with my windows rolled down, and sing along. Even stuff that currently I find embarrassing.

Another: I noticed the other night at the climbing gym that when I fall off a bouldering problem, I have this habit of acting frustrated or angry. I’d never really thought about it before, but I remember it from childhood. I worry that people around me will see me climbing a V3, say, and think, “Oh, he can’t even climb a V3? He must be a loser.” If I act frustrated or shake my head with exasperation, I think, they’ll see that and instead think, “Oh, he must just be having a bad day. Look how incredulous he is that he fell. Obviously he’s a very good climber normally.”

In the same moment I realized how much that behavior effects my own mental state. I’m so used to acting so exasperated and frustrated with myself that I’ve internalized it. It’s not just on the outside – I really do feel dejected and uninspired a lot when I’m doing that. For the rest of the night I tried smiling every time I fell off a problem and saying, “That was great” to myself. It’s amazing the difference it made in my own mood.

For me, my whole practice can be distilled to this process:

1. With mindfulness, often spontaneous insight, I notice a behavior or habit of mine that has a negative effect, bothers me, or thwarts some longing I have.
2. I observe, in meditation: What fear is behind the behavior? What am I afraid of?
3. I invite myself to experience the fear, to feel that vulnerability, to sit with that tender spot underneath the armor of my behavior.
4. Slowly, over time, the fear loses its grip and the behavior loses its compulsion.

That makes it sound very workmanlike and easy, and while actually practice is workmanlike, the very definition of ”mundane”, it’s not easy at all – that process is often excruciating.

Social-based fear is one of the hardest, for me, because I find it much easier to work with fear in private. The fear of looking like a fool or being rejected or unloved is much harder for me to stay with than, say, the fear of falling while rock climbing.

That said, I think for a full and complete practice it’s important that I be working with everything I see. I try to strike a balance between self-aggression and complacency – I want to push myself out of my comfort zone, but fear doesn’t vanish overnight, so I have to do so with compassion and patience, too.

It’s interesting to me the way these things are related: Fear is the foundation of the (separate) self, we experience it as a very visceral contraction, it inspires us to try to control things and this resistance thwarts our own deepest longings. Fear, control, contraction, and longing.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion to this post, but I do recommend Tara Brach’s talks like the one I linked to at the top. For that matter I recommend all of Dharmaseed - it’s a great resource of excellent lectures and guided meditations by a huge variety of teachers.

Meditation ever-changing

It’s been a while since I posted, though I’ve thought of posting. Kind of like I think about sitting more than I actually sit.

Today I was walking to buy some deodorant and thought, “I should sit for a while when I get back” and then felt this aversion come up, wanting to do something else, something more exciting. Usually at this point I turn the whole thing into a conflict. Sit (“like I reallyshould“)? Or do something exciting (“like I really want to“)?

Today, for whatever reason, instead of immediately going to the struggling, I thought, “Am I willing to stay with my desire not to sit?” I felt a sense of relief and the struggling abated. Aware that I was, essentially, tricking myself into sitting, I nonetheless started being mindful and paying attention as I walked to the store and back, connecting to the ways I didn’t want to sit. It was interesting to see the way I make sitting a big deal, like it’s going to take a lot of time, like it’s going to be awful, or at least just boring, but especially how it is other than living, like it’s an either-or kind of thing. When I asked simply whether I was willing to look at my aversion to sitting, it melted that otherness, which is an illusion anyway. Living and meditating aren’t two different things. They’re one and the same.

My meditation has been shifting a lot lately. Sometimes my practice feels like very gradual change, imperceptibly slow, and sometimes it’s like a rush of change all at once. Lately it’s been more the latter. Maybe a month ago, I don’t even remember exactly how it first happened, I had the experience of a dam breaking, some wall coming down, and when I tried to be mindful, slow down, and be present, I felt a deep, intense energy, hard to name and even harder to experience. When I tried to sit with it I’d relax my stomach and chest and it would rush out. It felt like being thrust into icy-cold water and trying not to tense up, or like being electrocuted and trying to stay open to the experience. It was very physical. Every nerve in my body felt like it was firing, an electrical tingling rushing through me so intense I’d start spasming within a few seconds, my stomach starting to tense, my arms subtly twitching, my neck twitching. Finally, a few seconds in, I’d have to suppress it. I always could, though, just shut it down, push it back in, resume a state of calm. Problem was, once I could do that, I was always aware of it. Suppressing it and maintaining that state of calm involved resistance, of which I was previously unaware. Now that I could feel it, sitting became more challenging. Whether I was opening myself to that terrifying intensity or suppressing it, it felt like a struggle.

Lately that rush of energy has taught me a lot. I sit and I watch it and try to name things as they whoosh by. Profound restlessness. Anger. Terror. Joy. Still, a lot of it is just “intensity.” I also, the more I work with it, see how I subconsciously, habitually try to interfere with those experiences’ abilities to experience themselves. Sitting today, I understood the notion of “making room” for the experiences, backing away.

The metaphor that popped into my head is of the host of a party, self-conscious and concerned with making sure every guest enjoys himself. The host wanders the party compulsively meddling, interjecting, intruding. He notices the guests seem uptight and anxious and so he tries harder. He organizes games. He proposes toasts. Things only get more uncomfortable.

Then, at some point, he realizes that his guests would all be having a fine time, if only he’d stop trying so hard to control them. Backing away, he takes a glass of wine, sits down at a table in the corner of the room, and breathes a sigh of relief as he watches everyone visibly relax, mingle, and the party proceeds smoothly thereafter.

It’s hard for me to get out of my own way like this. In many cases, like this one with the feeling like I’m being electrocuted, it’s because I’m simply not consciously aware I’m doing it. When I am consciously aware of it, it’s challenging still. Like the party host, I’m afraid that if I don’t try to control things, they might go poorly, and the fear keeps me latched on and resisting. But also like the party host, I’m just as afraid that if I don’t try to control things, they might go well. And what would that say about me? Maybe nobody at the party would talk to me. Maybe I’d be unnecessary. Maybe I’d end up alone.

This fear-based assertion of the ego is a lot of what I feel I work with in meditation. And the more I am able to sit with it, the more I realize that I don’t need to control everything, that in fact things are smoother when I give them space to be, and that it’s quite alright to let my self-centered ego-cramp relax, and in fact I experience more joy and more peace when I let things experience themselves, and let things not be about me.

This leads to the abatement of self-judgment. I find that I am increasingly able to let my experiences be without taking them so personally. I can make space for intense anger, sadness, all manner of so-called “negative” emotion without thinking how awful it is, how bad a person I am that I am these things: angry, sad, petty, hateful, jealous. The more I sit, the more I just let myself be them and think: Oh, this is what it is to feel jealous, or hateful. How interesting.

Equanimity

A short post: I just got back from seeing the movie “The Watchmen”, which I very much enjoyed. On the way out, one of my coworkers (it was a company event) made noises clearly indicating he didn’t like it. I took the bait and asked, “What did you think?”

“God. It was awful,” he groaned.

I’ve had experiences like that, of having experiences and fixating on how much I didn’t enjoy them. Often it’s a movie, and I’ll make a big show of letting my friends who went with me know how much I didn’t like it. It’s interesting to me that in these cases, if I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t open to enjoying the movie; I’d already made up my mind, and in that sense I don’t regret that I didn’t enjoy it more.

On the one hand it’s easy to pay lip service to the idea that I envy the easily pleased, but the reality is that I value my discriminating taste and feel that sophistication enhances my appreciation of the truly good. But I think it’s important to acknowledge, when I don’t enjoy something, when I’m also choosing to enjoy my disdain, anger, or incredulity.

In this case my coworker wasn’t dismayed he didn’t like the movie more. If he were, he probably would have walked out quietly and if asked, shrugged and frowned a little and said, “I didn’t care much for it.” Instead, it was a showy thing, almost taking a masochistic delight in how unpleasant he found it all.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I aspire to acknowledge in those situations: “I’m taking pleasure in my experience of disgust.” And be OK with that. I think there’s an equanimity to it, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the ways I take pleasure in so-called negative emotion is what gives it the negative charge, makes it an unskillful habit.

Of course, while my coworker was making a show of disliking the movie, I noticed in my own head that I was taking a little pleasure in feeling disdain towards him for being so showy about it all. It’s like the old question, “Is it OK to hate those who hate?” Really, my equanimity is only about me – and in this case, I realized, even if he wasn’t practicing equanimity, I could still allow his negativity to wash over me without moving me. Or, in this case, since it moved me to critical negativity myself, I could be honest – I’m taking pleasure in judging him. Not the end of the world.

Self-Aggression & Self-Friendliness

In the physical practice of yoga, balance poses have always been among the most challenging to me. It’s not that I can relax into every other pose with ease. I’m not insanely flexible or strong, I struggle with many of the poses. But balance poses have been among the most frustrating to me because they feel like they should be easy – if only I could just stop falling over.

At one point, when working with balance, I noticed my mental process was something like this: “I’m here, and I need to be there. The weight needs to come more to the center of my heel. Right now it’s all at the outer edge, and I’m tipping over.” Implicit in that thinking is, “Until I get there, I cannot be balanced!”

At some point I realized that the pose became lighter and easier if I stopped thinking about it that way and started thinking, whatever state I was in, “Can I be balanced here?” I’d be standing in Tree pose looking horribly unbalanced with the weight all on the outermost edge of my foot, waving my arms around, and instead of thinking, “I need the weight to move back! I need to compensate, to fix!” I thought, “Could I stay like this forever? Can I be here and still not fall over?” It turns out I can stay upright in even the most awkward of contortions.

Yoga is an eight-limbed path, with asana, the physical practice, only one of its limbs. The very first limb are the yamas, the “restraints.” The very first yama is ahimsa, familiar to Buddhists as “nonviolence.” My very first yoga teacher made a point of emphasizing that nonviolence isn’t just about not harming others; it’s about avoiding self-aggression, too, being aggressive inwardly. This is significant in yoga because the temptation to self-abuse is easy in public settings where we’re all being asked to work with difficult challenges while others watch, and it’s very important to maintain loving-kindness for oneself through all of that and not give in to self-abuse. I’ve spent many hours in a room with other people capable of stretching or balancing or pushing in ways that my body cannot, and I’ve spent a good portion of that time angry at myself, frustrated, depressed, or disheartened about wanting to be more flexible, wanting to be stronger, wanting to have better balance, and experiencing shame and embarrassment when I’d spectacularly collapse out of a balance pose with a series of loud thuds.

Most of the time when that happened I’d laugh and put a good face on it, but even this is self-aggression: I don’t feel happy or light-hearted when those things happen, and my urge to “put a good face on it” is motivated by feeling critical of myself for being upset. “I would be a better person if I were easygoing about this.” Fundamentally, when I act on the desire to be how I am not, it’s self-aggression, and it manifests as frustration, self-loathing, insecurity, anger, despondency, and irritability.

Every morning when I shower, I practice Padangusthasana: standing on one foot with the other leg extended forward, or to the side, as I wash my legs. It’s just a habit I’ve gotten into over the years. It’s a good opportunity to notice that self-aggression arising, as I tip from side to side and get frustrated – “I’m just trying to wash my legs, why can’t I just stand still?” The other morning in such an occasion of irritability, I saw that self-aggression creates an artificial duality. It’s very concrete with physical balance: when I am being self-aggressive, I perceive two forces at odds: the motion “away from balance” and my often-frustrated efforts to move “towards balance.” In this way, I fight myself. And the reality is there are not two distinct motions happening, just the one.

When I’m doing this I can sometimes feel it as a frustrated tension, and when I feel that, I think to myself, “Am I fighting myself? Can I try to be friends with myself instead?” With that, I feel a strong sense of relief wash over me and then the swaying and dynamism of true balance is easier to feel, and my effort can be in confluence with that dynamism instead of a futile resistance. This “self-friendliness,” to coin the term, is incredibly important to my practice. Often the challenge is finding the right way to do it.

Self-friendliness is a balancing act all its own, for me. It’s a careful balance of discipline and compassion towards myself. On the one side, discipline turns into self-aggression, a near-enemy, and the equanimity is lost. On the other side, the compassion turns into indulgence, a bit of a near enemy, and the discipline is lost. Conveniently, physical balance provides a great hint when I sag into indulgence and lose discipline: I fall over. Not all practices give such clear hints, though, and so working to stay disciplined but compassionate is tricky for me in other realms.

I have a long-cultivated habit of daydreaming. I have some of the most spectacular daydreams, scenes out of the best superhero action movies or spy flicks or martial arts movies, where I’m generally the star and capable of amazing superhuman feats. For years, I’ve done this, and I’ll catch myself fantasizing in the middle of the work day about being able to set cars on fire with my mind, or about terrorists storming our building and me defeating them single-handedly with my telekinesis.

These are challenging to me because they’re entirely consuming: It’s hard to remain mindful for the duration of a daydream, because the nature of a daydream is to consume the attention entirely. I also have long suspected that my idle daydreaming is providing me with gratification for some unmet needs or assuaging some self-loathing, and so I’ve long wanted to understand them more, to see what’s behind them.

This is where the balance comes in: giving in and letting myself be absorbed fully into my daydreaming is not disciplined, it’s torpor, it’s just numbing me, but it’s been very difficult for me to work with them skillfully without falling towards self-aggression. It’s incredibly subtle, too; I can tell myself I’m just curious about my daydreams, but then feel that frustration that suggests non-acceptance. I’m not just curious about them, I’m wanting to change them. I see them as a problem. I wish I were different.

For a while, though, it hasn’t been clear to me how to find balance between those two. What’s the compassionate but disciplined approach to working with such powerful, consuming daydreams?

Last night I was walking home from sangha and listening to Sigur Ros and it was a beautiful, crisp night out and one of these daydreams came up. I tried to just be mindful and let it do its thing, imagining things being this way that they aren’t, and then instead of getting aggressive towards myself, trying immediately to dig in, I thought, how can I bring some self-friendliness to this? And in that moment instead of tensing and resisting I just smiled towards my daydreaming mind and thought, with compassion, “That would be great, wouldn’t it?” Not in a dismissive way, but with a sense of acknowledgment, some validation and affirmation for whatever need I was trying to meet with the daydream. And in doing that, I felt that same sense of lightness and relief, and the false duality I create with resistance started to melt, and I could glimpse some of the desires I resist that lead me to daydream.

It’s always been a bit of a paradox to me that in meditation we have to do a lot of work to realize that there’s no work to be done. Or, in this case, its corollary: In order to effect change, we cannot be trying to effect change. I only find positive change when I reach a place of acceptance, because positive change, for me, is always just a surrender, a doing less, resisting less.

Urban Zen?

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed an interesting-looking building in midtown, near the corner of Broadway and Alvernon.  It’s located in a relatively nondescript commercial area of town and appears to share some real estate with a cosmetic orthodontia clinic.  The building has no signage, no front door, and no visible business name.  It does, however, have a lovely illustration of the Buddha in its storefront window and a tranquil, gated rock garden that contains a devotional statue/fountain, some flowers, and what appears to be an offering bowl.  I pass the place every time I drive to or from work, and today I decided to stop and see if I could figure out just what it was they do there.  I pulled in to the parking lot in the back, observed the ominous “No Trespassing” sign and multiple plaques that threatened towing for unlawfully parked vehicles, and walked up to the back door.  All of the windows were covered, save the glass door, which led in to a small antechamber.  Inside that room, there was an “Open” sign hung on the wall.  Strangely, however, the back door was locked, and when I knocked, no one answered.

At this point, I got excited, because I figured the place was either A)some kind of unsurreptitious Buddhist temple or B)a clandestine cult/front organization for a nefarious Buddhist gang.  Unfortunately, when I whipped out the iPhone and googled the address, it turned out to be a beauty salon called “Zen.”  The company didn’t have a website, though, and there was no mention of it on anything other than directory pages that listed the address and phone number.  Odd.  I guess they don’t do much off-the-street business.

A vicious cycle

One of my favorite "dharma burgers," courtesy of http://www.theworsthorse.com

Well slap me silly, and color me incongruous.  I have developed desires and clinging for Buddhist accoutrements.  It all started innocently enough; I wanted a zafu, so I could maintain regular home practice.  A search for “meditation supplies” turned up the ludicrously titled Mats Mats Mats. I really just wanted something simple. Of course, the good people at M^3 (as those in the know call them) provide a staggering range of different cushion sizes, textures, thicknesses, etc. And so the absent-minded clicking began. I actually found myself sitting there, debating the merits of the Harmony Pro Mat vs. the Natural Fitness Elite mat. Before I could say “Dharma Burger”,I decided that I also needed to start building an altar for myself, and it all spun out from there.  Pretty soon, I felt as though I was in some kind of Zen fight club.  I was Tyler Durden’s alter (no pun intended) ego, asking myself if the Tingshas with 8 Auspicious Symbols appropriately represented who I am, or if the Golden Lotus Altar Cabinet was the ultimate expression of my path.  Eventually, I snapped back to reality and realized that my brain was acting at cross-purposes, so I closed the laptop and went out for a walk.  I’m just astounded, sometimes, that I can be at my most attached, grasping, and unmindful, at the precise moments when I try to be the opposite.

I’ll be here all week.

This is a spatula. Courtesy of That HP Chap's flickr stream, and his CC Attrib License.

Hello, everyone! This is Brian, James’s friend and new contributor to the blog. First things first: I bought this new spatula the other day, and am excited to tell you all about it.

*rimshot*

A little bit about me: I don’t really remember how I started meditating, but I first officially sat in meditation probably 5 years ago. But lest you think, “He’s been a meditator for 5 years,” that’s a bit of a stretch. I struggle with making it a habit, and so of that 5 years, maybe I’ve sat regularly for one and a half. I primarily sit with the Dharma Punx crew, formerly in Austin, now in Seattle where I’ve lived for the past 5 months.

I first learned of Dharma Punx through the SF Buddhist Center. I lived in San Francisco for a bit less than two years, and it took me almost a year to discover the beautiful SFBC building nestled in next to the industrial cleaning supply store on Bartlett, a back street, literally one block from my apartment. I took an introductory meditation course from them there, and then started attending their 7:30am weekday sits with some regularity. Padmatara, one of the nuns who lived there who ran the course, mentioned Noah’s mp3 talks up on the site and I started listening to them. That was maybe 3 years ago, now.

Then, while I lived in Austin, Noah came to speak at a yoga school nearby, and I went to see him, and was impressed especially by the community of younger practitioners there diligently paying attention to the talk and practice. I found the Dharma Punx group in Austin a few months later, and started sitting with them every week. Now I’m fortunate enough to have the Seattle crew, and it helps keep me in the habit. Except tonight, since I was watching the Superbowl, and then eating pizza and ice cream.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my practice as time goes on is that initially I was excited to talk to anyone who’d listen about it, but the longer I practice, the more it humbles me, and the humility makes me less excited to talk about it. I’ve reflected on this and I think my original intention for talking about it was to seem wise, to impress people, to get their affirmation to validate me. And now doing that feels awkward, to me; I’d like to think it’s because I rely on less external validation, but it’s also that the mindfulness makes me uncomfortably aware of my intentions.

I’ve also come to realize that there’s just not a lot of instruction about practice that really helps. Anything I’ve ever struggled with in practice boils down to one answer: keep watching; be mindful; pay attention. This addresses everything. Anything else is inevitably personal, hard to communicate. I recall Pema Chodron, in a recording of one of her talks, saying something to the effect that the realizations in the practice of mindfulness must be your own, that nobody can do the work for you, and in fact nobody can even explain what they are in any meaningful way.

Jack Kornfield writes in, I think it’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry about the Zen concept of “turning phrases”, phrases that simply cause the mind to open or suddenly realize something, but they don’t convey the realization through logic; it’s not a rational explanation. I’ve found this with some teachers: they’ll say something to me that is, distilled to its semantic essence, exactly what I’ve heard from other teachers many times before, but something in their wording will resonate with me and make something click. But I think that kind of thing is highly personal, too, and often just serendipitous.

I think, at this point, when I talk about my practice it’s best for me to just talk about my personal experience of it, with no pretense that what I say is applicable to anyone else, or has any real significance beyond my experience of it. That’s not really a strong sales pitch to the — undoubtedly — legion readers of this blog, but so maybe it’ll be entertaining, too. I can hope!

Recently, I’ve been struggling with anger, specifically holding it in compassion without indulging it. It’s like balancing on a thin rail, for me: one nudge to the left and I’ve repressed the anger entirely, gone numb, and it’s inaccessible, and one nudge to the right and I’m indulging it, fuming, snarling, ready to punch the nearest passerby.

I just finished listening to the excellent audio course, Elements of Jazz: From Cakewalks to Fusion, taught by the amazingly gifted Professor Bill Messenger, put together by the Teaching Company, and when he covered the Blues, Messenger noted that many Jazz singers of the era couldn’t transition over to the Blues because they had too much polish, that singing the Blues well required a certain raw emotional honesty to the voice, and that the most successful Blues singers had that, and you could feel it viscerally, that anyone trying to fake it felt immediately out of place.

He had, during that lecture, a short interview with and performance by Baltimore contemporary Blues singer Ursula Ricks, whose performance was raw and heartfelt and deeply moving.

Ever since listening to that piece, I catch myself singing improvised blues lyrics while I drive, to no particular tune save what’s in my head. The other day I found myself particularly agitated and struggling with the anger I felt, plus the whole raft of subtle experience that goes along with it: tension, self-doubt, helplessness, resignation, sadness, love. And I spontaneously started singing the blues, trying to put my anger into words. I felt pretty self-conscious about it, but what Prof. Messenger said about the authenticity is really absolutely true, and I noticed that even though singing the blues from my heart felt vulnerable and challenging, I felt much sillier singing the blues defensively, from my head. And so I sang, growling like B.B. King (but probably sounding more like Grover) and wailing, and I noticed that something about singing the blues let me really experience my anger, feel it like a ball of tension at the base of my sternum, let me experience its unbearable compulsion like the most commanding itch, impossible not to scratch, and somehow let me still sit there and not just give in and indulge it.

This is good evidence to me that while the goal of practice may be the same for us all, the path of practice is highly personal. I have yet to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama, or any Buddhist teacher, for that matter, counsel the singing of the Blues as a renowned and general strategy for witnessing and experiencing anger. And yet, for me, it’s my new favorite thing.

Even if the Blues doesn’t turn out to be your key to being mindful with your anger, it’s still beautiful, brilliant music. Messenger noted that through the various eras of Jazz, whenever musicians started to feel overly constrained by their freedom, they’d return to the comforting form and structure of the 12-bar Blues to bring order back to their universe. Perhaps your universe could use some order? Allow me to recommend my latest favorite, B.B. King’s most recent work, One Kind Favor, released in August of last year. Another source of humility for me: King’s voice and electric guitar on this album are dazzling, and at the time he recorded it, he was 83 years old.

Namaste.

Welcome aboard!

I just wanted to take a moment to welcome a new collaborator to the blog. My good friend, Brian, who I have known since my halcyon days at The Big Green, emailed me about working on this site together.  Basically, both of us would like to use the site as a “practice journal,” in order to reflect on and motivate our progress on the path.  I was delighted to receive his message and am now thrilled to welcome him aboard.  In short, Brian’s writing is elegant, thoughtful, and touching.  He could write about anything, from the vagaries of Buddhist practice to a description of a spatula he just purchased, and I would read with rapt attention and humility, due to his facility for expression.  Hopefully, he and I will be able to do some interesting cross-posting/pollinating, as time goes by.