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.

Ordering off the menu

A fantastically translated Chinese restaurant menu, courtesy of SauceSupreme's flickr stream (and a Creative Commons Attrib License)

I’ve heard the terms “Bookshelf Buddhist,” or “Saturday Buddhist” thrown around in a couple of dharma talks that I’ve listened to lately.  Basically, both refer to the same thing: a person who enjoys the dharma and might even immerse himself in written/audio Buddhist teachings, but who makes no outside effort to follow a Buddhist path beyond that.  At various points in my life, and even to an extent right now, those terms could have been used to describe me.  I enjoy reading about/listening to the teachings of the Buddha, and I can generally apply those ideas to my own life cognitively, but I really fall down on the job when it comes to consistent, everyday practice.

Yesterday afternoon was a prime example.  I recently finished listening to a series of talks Gil Fronsdal gave on mindful speech.  One of the areas that specifically struck home was his discussion of the need for silence. In essence, he says that we, as a people, tend to fill silence just for the sake of doing so, and that we often speak without mindfulness, in ways that are not beneficial.  He spends a decent amount of time talking about gossip, which he classifies, broadly, as any time one speaks about a third party whenever said party is not present.

I have recognized in myself a tendency to gossip.  I don’t do it in a malicious way, but talking about other people’s behaviors/comments/etc is, for whatever reason, a very easy pattern for me to fall in to.  By listening to Gil’s talk, I can see that even what one might consider to be positive or complimentary comments, can be non-beneficial (depending on the audience, the way the info is disseminated, the context in which it is heard, etc).  As such, I have been making a conscious effort to bite my tongue whenever those kinds of conversations arise.  I try to be mindful of my underlying motivation when I have the urge to engage.  Am I clinging to ego (I want to be the funny guy that people like/I want to improve my social standing)? Am I speaking out of insecurity?  Anyway, I’ve been trying to avoid those kinds of conversations and take the opportunity to remain silent.

God, I’m terrible at it.  In attempting to be mindful of my speech, I’ve started to realize just how unskillful I am. I mean, it’s a little bit difficult to not gossip when one is a teacher – I CONSTANTLY get emails from my principal, requesting information about student behavior, the teacher’s lounge is filled with discussion of class activities and student peccadilloes, and there is always a tendency for teachers to gripe about the way they are treated by the administration.  In short, it’s a culture in which everyone is always talking about SOMEBODY else.

Long story short (too late, I know), I found myself out for a beer yesterday with a few of my colleagues, and when asked what I thought about our school founder’s recent edict about upcoming, financially-motivated governance changes, I heard the Mindfulness Fairy tell me to stay cool and be politic about the whole thing, but I basically told it to fuck off.  Out came a relatively vituperative string of thoughts about where she can stick her governance changes. Now, I didn’t say anything inaccurate, per se, and I certainly didn’t say anything that wasn’t on everyone else’s mind, but man did I feel lousy afterward. I made comments that may have been entertaining, but which did not help bring resolution to an admittedly difficult situation, and which only added poison to an already heated discussion.  As a result, I caused myself to suffer and said things that were not really of benefit to anyone.  Gah.

Anyway, to bring this back around to my opening paragraph, I really need to get on the practice train and stop sitting in the proverbial depot.  My mother likes to tell me that the fact that I’m even considering issues of Buddhism, mindfulness, or lovingkindness is positive progress.  Frankly, though, thinking about it is only going to get me so far.  Gil Fronsdal (who I know I’ve been referencing quite a bit) puts forth an analogy of Buddhist practice and ordering off of a restaurant menu.  He says that one can stare at a menu for hours, considering all of the delightful dishes, imagining what they might taste like, and balancing hunger against the cost of the meal, but that at some point, one either needs to order off the menu or leave the restaurant.  I hope I’ll be ordering soon.

Finally, here is a link to an mp3 of Gil Fronsdal’s talk, entitled “Mindfulness of Speaking: The Value of Silence”, courtesy of Audio Dharma.

After the agony, the mindfulness?

It’s been a while since I posted (not that I’m operating under the delusion that people are actually reading this), so I just wanted to check in and post some thoughts about some meditating I did last night.

For some time now, I have been trying to find a good sangha here in Tucson, but the search has been slow going.  Nowhere seems to be an especially good fit.  I started out looking at the Tucson Shambhala Meditation Center, and the people seemed nice enough, but the few times I went I felt relatively talked down to, likely because I was the youngest person in the room by a couple of decades. Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Unfortunately, it seems like most of the alternatives are relatively dogmatic/doctrinal Mahayana temples, or more austere Soto Zen places. My issue with Soto Zen, incidentally, is not a fundamental disagreement with its teachings – it’s more that I am just not disciplined/practiced enough to get a lot out of it at this point. At this point, I can’t even make it through a half-hour zazen, let alone the 2+ hours that the places around here seem to practice.

I have been, however, enjoying some light kinhin practice, after having re-read The Miracle of Mindfulness.  I try to practice, when I walk the dog – especially at noontime, when her energy level is at an ebb, and she just kind of trots along beside me.  I really enjoy this kind of meditation, because following the breath during even light exercise is relatively easy.  Plus, the mild, springlike weather we’ve been having helps me relax and be in the moment. A gentle, desert breeze, the sound of lightly rustling mesquite branches, and the warming glow of the midday sun go a long way toward quieting the mind.

Anyway, last night, my friend Kate and I decided to try out a non-sectarian center that I had never before visited, called Tucson Community Meditation Center. We went for their weekly Monday evening mindfulness meditation and discussion.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the discussion but figured it was worth a shot.  I can’t say enough about how much I enjoy meditating with other people.  It might be considered grasping, and I’m not saying that I can’t do it alone, but there is something both empowering and calming about meditation as a shared experience.

The room was nicely configured – plenty of zafus and chairs to choose from.  I have not been practicing with a zafu at home and decided to try and abandon the chair for this meditation.  Obviously, my home practice posture has been less than ideal, because I was in agony for much of the sit.  I decided to trot out what I had learned from listening to Gil Fronsdal’s meditation class – aligned my spine, worked out the half-lotus “tripod,” rested my hands appropriately, and started to breathe.

At the beginning, all went well.  The facilitator, who seemed to be using a variation on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Stress-reduction and relaxation Mindfulness meditation, did a fantastic job.  His intonation, combined with the frequency with which he spoke made it very easy to ground myself, whenever monkey mind took over.  He also made a good distinction between what he called “think space” and “feel space,” which was useful for noticing bodily sensations and veering away from my train of thought.  I would say that, for the first 20 minutes or so, I was able to simply acknowledge the impressive amount of back pain that I felt (probably a combination of tension and the result of years of bad posture).  I would say to myself (silently), “OK, there’s pain…There’s muscle tightness…There’s my breath…There’s an itch on my face…There’s significant back pain…There’s my breath…etc.”  Occasionally, I would find myself getting almost frantic – like I had to break out of the room or something, but I just returned to the breath, observed my posture, and tried to cultivate an attitude of equanimity.

After about 30 minutes, I could feel my mind totally derailing.  It started harmlessly enough at first: I would lose my mindfulness long enough for a fidget to get through, then a full-on position shift.  I would return to the breath, and then, a few moments later, all I could do was pray for him to ring the bell.  I felt such unbelievable irritability and felt as though I was losing control.  All I wanted was for the damn bell to ring.  Of course, what followed was the inevitable self criticism that I “wasn’t meditating well enough,” or that I “was a failure.”  Luckily, these kinds of thoughts are ironic to the point that, if I have any shred of mindfulness left, they make me giggle to myself, and I’m usually able to re-center. For a few glorious moments, the pain seemed to disappear, my breath calmed down, and I felt completely at peace.  Then, the bell rang.

So yeah, I need to maintain consistent practice.  It is truly amazing to me just how taxing and difficult our attitudes can make something that is, at least on paper, so utterly simple. I have only been doing about 15-20 minute daily chair sits, so a 40-minute sit was a pretty big deal for me.  I think I actually manifested a degree of muscle tension because of worry I had, going in to the sit, about what such a long meditation would be like, what the people would be like, etc.  Also, I’d like to get myself a suitable zafu and set up some better home practice, but damn if Buddhist accoutrements aren’t expensive!  The good news is that Kate (who has never really meditated) really enjoyed herself, and we were able to process our experiences afterward, in the car.  She and I will go back next week, and, hopefully, by then I will have built up a bit more spiritual muscle.

Ozymandias

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said–”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on that pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I’m starting Frankenstein with my AP Lit kids today, and, as a preamble, Teresa suggested that we introduce them, quickly, to the poetry of Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first poem in the Shelley packet is “Ozymandias,” a piece I have not read since high school.  Now Shelley is a pretty interesting literary character – an ardent nonconformist, thrown out of Oxford for atheism, abandoned his first wife to elope with his second (out of a care for “morality”), developed a relatively jaded, Gothic view of the inherent cruelty and weakness of man.  At the same time, I never cared much for his poetry, when I was a high schooler.  Today, though, “Ozymandias” absolutely gave me chills.

There’s something relatively Buddhist to be learned from the poem.  Primarily, Shelley seems to address the suffering created by grasping and the impermanence of all things.  The poem tells the story of an arrogant king who, thinking himself omnipotent and everlasting, commissions a sculptor to read well “those passions [. . .] / that yet survive,” and to create a monument to his benefactor’s power and influence.  The ruler’s “frown / , And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command” evoke the image of a man fiercely driven to succeed, yet withered by his pursuit of lasting glory and material wealth.  Even his epitaph, which admonishes its readers to “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and dispair,” intimates that the great monarch clings to ego, even from beyond the grave.

Of course, Ozymandias’ quest is a fruitless one.  The once-grand monument to his own glory is now but “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” and a “shattered visage,” half buried in the sand.  To punctuate the king’s failure, we are also told that the statue stands watch not over a vast and sprawling kingdom, but rather a “boundless and bare” sea of sand, which is dotted with “lifeless things.”  Such is the fate of a mind that believes in the permanence of man’s baubles and achievements.  Glory diminishes, stone erodes, and lavish kingdoms are devoured by the earth.

Ultimately, what struck a chord with me was the prophetic double meaning of the epitaph – on one hand, it is the simple statement of a great king’s hubris, while on another it is an admonishment to those of us who would tread the same path of grasping and suffering as Ozymandias.  In the latter, the capitalization of “Works” is sadly ironic.  Despair indeed, ye mighty.

Patience and Perception

Monkey mind really bit me in the derriere yesterday.  Sometimes, apparently, acting like a jerk can lead to a teaching moment.

So here’s a brief anecdote.  I had a meeting with a parent scheduled for yesterday morning at 7:10.  I got up earlier than usual, walked the dog, and made sure I got to school in plenty of time.  The parent never showed.  I noticed, around 7:30, that her son made it to school early, but she, apparently, decided not to come in.  My knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to be annoyed, which, in turn, led to a degree of suffering that followed me throughout the day.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted.  It had been a difficult day with the kids, and none of my classes went precisely as I had planned.  Come 3:30, as I was preparing to leave, the parent in question arrived at the school, ready for our meeting.  I then informed her in a not unfriendly, yet relatively curt way, that our meeting was scheduled for early that morning and that I was on my way out.  She apologized profusely, and I tried to be magnanimous, all the while still feeling annoyed.

Now, the punch line.  When I returned home, I happened to look through my work email and discovered that she had arrived at the correct time for the meeting, and I was the one who had been mistaken.  It never occurred to me that I could be the one in the wrong.  I, of course, sent her an email, prostrating myself and putting myself at her disposal.  Still, let’s reflect on the day’s dukkha:

• Hours spent suffering because I was sure I had been stood up: ~8
• Hours spent suffering because I was unhappy with my verbal reaction to the parent: ~3
• Hours I would have spent suffering, had I been mindful of my mental processes: 0

The myriad ways I can create needless suffering for myself through unskillful shifts in perception/clinging/ego/etc never ceases to amaze me.  Hopefully, I will some day be skillful enough in my practice to not create problems for myself when none exist and to shed the degree of ego that allows me to feel self-righteous and slighted.