In Limine: on the threshold, at the beginning

Thoughts on a flight after a friend's funeral

2011-12-09T15:02:00.003-07:00

A dear friend died recently.

Sometimes I go to funerals for the sake of others – the survivors who will live with a hole in their lives for years to come. But this one was for me.

The hole is in my life.

Not gigantic – not the sort of hole that would be left without my wife or sons or brothers. But yes, a hole.

***********************
A Zen chant:

All things are impermanent.
They arise and they pass away.
Living in harmony with this teaching brings great happiness and joy.

***********************
In every moment, there is change.

Not so much a truism as a definition: there is no moment without something changing.

***********************
It took me several weeks of study, of knocking my head against the wall of my own mindset, to finally “get” special relativity. Conceptually, I could accept that the nearer one draws to the speed of light, the greater one’s mass.

I even thought I was ok with the idea that the greater one’s speed, the slower ran one’s clocks, relative to an identical clock at the point of origin. And I generally could work with the idea that the difference in clock time of the rocket and the earth was a calculable function of the velocity of the rocket.

But I made a mistake in my original conception.

I understood the idea that time would run more slowly for the astronauts in the rocket.

But the way I understood that was that those travelling in the rocket experienced those peculiar effects because they were in a peculiar situation that made their clocks move more slowly. *Real* time continued to click away right on schedule.

Eventually, I realized a mistake in my understanding: how did the clocks know how slowly to go? Which was the wrong question, but kind of right, nonetheless. Because the clocks don’t go more slowly. They measure each and every second, exactly as a second. It wasn’t just the clocks that went more slowly: the molecules and atoms and subatomic particles of the clocks moved more slowly, too.

*All of existence* that moves in that direction at that velocity moves at the same speed -- exists at the same speed.

For that to make any sense at all, *time itself* had to be defined by change.

From within a system, no change=no time.

******************************
It’s nighttime and moonlit. I’m walking barefoot on the concrete pavers of the courtyard. As a foot presses into the stone, the residual heat of the absent sun warms the skin of the sole. As each foot lifts, the warmth disappears and the sole feels the barest whisper of cool, night air. My gaze is soft, resting on an invisible spot in the air ten or twelve feet ahead of me. With each step, that spot never changes. But with each step, all of the visible world in the periphery flows and fluxes. Parallax motions work their changes with mathematical precision, responding to my step. If there were an I, it would be the center of the flow of space and time. But there isn’t. That sense is quiet. Missing, yet not missed. There is only the flowing. The changing. The arising. The passing.

******************************
Robyn was one of those people who was gently, insistently kind. When she’d walk in a room, she’d look for someone who needed attention. Who needed a hug. Who needed love. Her actions were modest. She wasn’t particularly interested in herself, but fascinated by the world. Committed to a particular way of living.

At the funeral, one of her daughters told a story. Shortly after they’d moved to Colorado, the daughter was walking home from elementary school. Some boys started to throw rocks in her direction. Then, bolder, they threw rocks at her. One hit her just below the eye. She ran home with an ugly welt, crying and scared. Robyn hugged her and comforted her and cleaned her up. Then Robyn got two chocolate suckers out, and led her daughter to the boys’ house, to share the sweets with them.

Love your enemies.

And teach your children how to love their enemies.

******************************
There’s lots about the meditation that I practice and teach that tends to be misunderstood. I suspect that the misunderstanding must have something to do with how I’m teaching it, but whatever. One of those misunderstandings is that there’s something to be thinking about – or that there’s nothing to be thinking about. But as far as my meditation practice is concerned, thoughts are just the sensations of the mind.

As I sit in this moment, I smell the dry, processed scent of airplane ventilation system. In the next moment, I see sunlight angled in on the seat-tray of the passenger next to me. I feel the pressure of the soles of my feet against my socks, shoes, and floor. A particular hair follicle on my left cheek. The blue of the computer screen background. The vibration of the airplane’s engines coming through my seat cushion. The sensation of the air I inhale as it crosses the edge of my right nostril. The pressure on the pad of my left ring finger against the keyboard. The taste of Diet Coke. A thought of my wife at home. Anticipation of New York City. Stomach. Thought. Sensation. Thought. Dit. Dit. Dit. Ditditditiditditditditditdit…………………………………………….

Each perception is a change relative to the prior state. The very definition of a moment.

One of the most important meditation instructions I ever received was this: “It doesn’t matter what arises in your experience; it only matters that you notice it."

“And then speed up your noticing.”

I considered the instruction, and thought, “ok, I’ll try it.”

Then I got the next part of the instruction: “With diligent practice, you can notice dozens of perceptions each second.”

Each second?!!? No way. Uh uh.

And in a way, I was right: it was impossible to do what I was doing dozens of times per second.

Eventually (and this took years), I began to realize several things. First, I realized that in a normal conversation, at normal talking rates, I was already perceiving, processing, and making use of at least a dozen inputs per second. Think about it. “Think” “about” “it”

“Th-“

“-i-“

“-n-“

“-k-“

“- -“

“a-“

“-b-“

“-ah-“

“-ooh-“

“-t”

“- -“

“i-“

“-t”

In a single second, a dozen sound changes, to say nothing of assembling the sounds into conceptual words, to say nothing of associating the words with meanings, to say nothing of understanding the meaning ,to say nothing of formulating intention with respect to the meaning, to say nothing of acting on the intention.

So I realized that in fact, a dozen is more than possible. I remembered that movies run at about 30 frames per second, giving even the fastest-noticing people the illusion of motion pictures.

*********************

So what was the meditation secret? Getting out of the way. Letting go. Why was I only able to notice two or three things per second? Because I was holding onto them. Sometimes only a split-second or two; sometimes longer. Long enough to recognize them, name them, assign some content-meaning to them, relate to them, attach to them or avert from them. Lost in thought.

*********************

So how am I getting in the way of Robyn’s death? Attachment. She was – she is still – interwoven in my experience. My mind formulates certain meanings with her role in my life assumed, steady, essential, permanent.

And yet, she is not.

If I simply notice that, there is a sense of change. If I try to argue with reality – the reality that does not include her – suffering arises. Disappointment.

*********************

All is unsettled. Anicca.

*********************

Even Robyn. Even “I.” Even even.

*********************

Anicca: impermanence

Ken McLeod: What is the one thing you know about every relationship you have? That it will end. So what should you do with every relationship? Savor it.

*********************

Several years ago, I worked at a company that was in the final stages of being sold to another company. Because there were a lot of government regulatory approvals that were required before the deal could close, there was a gap of about a year between the time the deal was announced and the time it was expected to be completed. As is usually the case with such events, many of us working there expected to lose our jobs within a few days of the deal closing.

Toward the end of the process, a group of us decided to have a celebration dinner at a nearby restaurant. We reserved a private room, and had some fun sharing food and stories and laughs from our time together. Toward the end of the evening, Tom – a lawyer I’d worked with for several years – asked for a moment to speak. We quieted down. He brought out a bottle of port, and said, “I like to collect bottles of port when I can, but it’s harder to find the right moment to open a old bottle of port than it is to find a really old bottle of port. When I learned that the company was being sold, I realized that this was the occasion and the group to share this with.” He then uncorked a bottle of 130 year old port. The room we were in was large enough for the 14 or 15 of us there that evening, but not much larger than that.

As soon as he pulled the cork, the entire room was filled with an incredible fragrance of pears and walnuts. We breathed it together. It lasted only a couple of moments, then disappeared.

And ten years later, I still remember it clearly.

*********************

When I think of savoring the impermanent I think of the brief scent of Tom’s 130 year old port, reconnecting with the outside world, blossoming briefly, then done.

***********************

A blessing – not a curse:

Every building ends in ruin.
Every meeting ends in parting.
Every aggregation ends in dispersion.
Every birth ends in death.

The Upside of Emptiness

2011-10-08T17:56:00.004-06:00

Usually, when we lose someone or something that has helped us defined much of our lives -- whether a lover or a belief, a job or a home, an ability or a skill -- we feel a sense of loss.

Sometimes, it's more than that.

Or rather, "less."

Sometimes rather than just feeling a void where previously there was a treasure, there is a sense of emptiness that reaches well beyond the contours and borders of the parts of life defined by what has been lost. That sense of emptiness affects all of our experience -- we discover through its sudden absence a now-missing sense of belonging and warmth, confidence and meaning. It seems that we see through new eyes, and they reveal everything to be artificial, a bit contrived. What used to be our sense of belonging and meaning, we now see as structures of a mind that we no longer occupy.

Sometimes there's just a hint of that seeing. But at other times, it's so strong that it's overwhelming.

But it's always disturbing.

* * *
The Heart Sutra, a core text of the Mahayana Buddhist scriptural canon, uses a four-part framing to express this experience:

Form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness. Emptiness is itself form.

* * *

We often associate the sudden, jarring sense of emptiness -- the sense that things and experiences and life itself are hollow or lacking an essential stability and solidity -- as a sense of loss of something we value profoundly, even if we didn't know it until it was gone. But that isn't the only way that most of us have experienced emptiness. All who've lived to adulthood have experienced a time, a moment in our teens or twenties when we just as suddenly had the sensation of seeing the life of grade school -- all the competitions and dramas and dilemmas and challenges and failures and misery -- of seeing all of that suddenly empty of meaning. For most of us, that discovery of emptiness was accompanied not so much by a sense of loss, though that can be a part of it, but rather more as a sense of freedom. And because it feels lightening to move beyond those structures of life, we might not have even paused to consider the discovery of emptiness where we'd previously found meaning and purpose and definition to be a loss of any sort. Giving that up felt good.

Similarly, many of us who've been through depression can remember a time when we realized that the downwardly-spiraling thoughts that were carrying all our life into the depths of misery were, themselves, empty. We remember realizing, "oh...those are just thoughts; that is the way my mind behaves in these circumstances." And rather than feeling that discovery of emptiness to be a loss, on the contrary, it felt like a glimmer of light in the darkness, like a place where we could stand while everything around us was unstable, like remembering in the middle of a horror movie, "oh...this is a movie."

* * *

So the experience of emptiness isn't always a bad thing; though experiencing it in connection with the loss of something we identified with, something we adored, something we depended on -- that experience of emptiness *does* feel like a wrenchingly bad thing.

When I've found myself in that kind of strange, uncomfortable, disquieted mind state, there are three basic ways that I've responded. Since it's an uncomfortable feeling, I've often sought to bring it to an end as fast as possible. One way is to instinctually return to the things that I'd valued previously. Reattach myself to what the momentary perception of emptiness has made seem hollow. I tried this approach the first time I experienced emptiness in connection with my believing and faithful worldview. And I repeated it again and again. But despite my efforts, I never quite forgot afterwards that I'd seen its emptiness. Another response I've tried was to instinctually turn away from what I'd seen as empty and replace it with something that seemed sturdier -- more solid and essential. From my spiritual life, I turned toward scientific materialism. Hard-headed facts that seemed much more trustworthy than my hollow religious beliefs. Seemed. But there came a day when I saw the emptiness of that, too -- when I saw the mind-contrivances that I was engaged in, that the science writers I followed were engaged in. And I saw that scientific materialism, too, was empty of something essential, of solid, irreducible bedrock. Which led me to a third way of responding to the perception of emptiness: rather than turning back to old attachments, and rather than turning toward new attachments, to turn instead toward the emptiness itself, and to allow my eyes to see emptiness in all things.

I had actually become aware of this potential response *long* before I ever attempted it. To my western-shaped mind, "turning toward emptiness" sounded frightfully like nihilism, frightfully like despair. And I wanted nothing more to do with those demons. But eventually I came to see that emptiness only looked like nihilism to an egoic mindshape. And so I ventured. But in the actual *doing* of turning toward emptiness, there was not the weight of judgment condemning existence as vacuous and void that I'd felt when I'd been nihilistic. Instead, there was a little hint of lightness. Of freedom.

But it was only freedom for so long as I was willing to allow the emptiness to be, while seeing all the forms that filled my sense perceptions and my mind.

* * *
bardo (bar-do) (noun)

(in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.

an indeterminate, transitional state: wandering adrift in a bardo of intense negativity, blame, disappointment, criticism and denial.

Despite the sense of liberation, it isn't easy to stay in that equipoise, seeing the Heart Sutra's form and emptiness equally in all of experience. It's like standing on a tightrope while the wind gusts at me and the sound of the neighborhood ice cream truck tantalizes off in the distance. I've given up that perception almost as many times as it has arisen in my life.

But I've come to consider those moments when I am able to stay with that sense of emptiness as powerful times. When I'm in -- and allow myself to remain in -- that sense of emptiness that sometimes arises, I find myself comfortably recogizing the death of one life, of a worldview that once was "me." But I've also come to recognize that I'll eventually enter another life. I know that I'll soon re-enter experiences that will seem solid and tangible and essential from which I'll build a new life, a new worldview. And even knowing that that will eventually happen, I can still stay in equipoise in the experience of emptiness while it is what is.

But after that's happened again and again, I've discovered that I enter the next life a little bit aware that it is both form-and-emptiness, emptiness-and-form. And I think maybe that background awareness lets me be a little bit less rigid in my thought patterns, in my certainty, in my waking dreams. I'm more aware of my own mind's contrivances, of my mind's own role in creating my experience of reality.

* * *

The discovery of emptiness is a kind of falling in love. There is a
vertigo in it: we step off the cliff of what we know and are certain
about. -- Zen Abbot John Tarrant

These insights aren't unique to Buddhism, though I found them while looking through the lens of Buddhist teachings and practices. After I found them there, I went looking for them elsewhere. I was surprised to find them in the teachings of the Catholic saints, Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross. I found them in the teachings of the Advaita school of Hinduism. I found them in the Sufi poetry of Hafiz and Rumi. And I even found them in the temple endowment ceremony of Mormonism.

* * *

In Mormon terms, the gist of it is this: the perception of emptiness can be profoundly disturbing to a mind that has become accustomed to attachment to a specific form of thought -- especially to a particular belief set that promises comfort and success by following a prescribed set of actions; but the very same emptiness is profoundly empowering when we do not resist it, because the very emptiness ("...there is space here...") empowers us to create meaning from the actions of our consciousness in the context of the experiences we have. It takes the endowment's "yonder is matter unorganized" and it brings the truth of that statement to the center of the heart of each individual.

Where there is emptiness, there is potential.

The experience of emptiness brings to our conscious minds the choice that we previously never knew that we had.

Haiku for departing summer

2011-09-12T10:59:00.002-06:00

Bird-pecked, black racemes
Of chokecherries gleam among
The not-yet-red leaves.

Offering

2011-01-02T13:13:00.004-07:00

At the end of a painful retreat (about which, click here), Laurie came to pick me up.

She brought Echo, a rambunctious Samoyed, who, she informed me, was disappointingly not named Moksha.

We walked the dog around the outer grounds of Spirit Rock. Up the hills, through the winter-brown weeds and grasses. She tugged and jumped and played. She started at a tall, white marble Buddha standing in a grove of trees, was only wary of a small seated Buddha halfway up the hill, and by the time we encountered another figurine at the foot of the hill, she was
unimpressed, sniffing along the fringes of the dirt footpath.

Coming off this retreat, my heart was a bit raw, but relievedly open.

* * *

The first several days had been a painful, pain-filled retreat for me. The only relief I found was in walking meditations – under the overhanging eaves during heavy rains, under the bay laurel and live oak forest when the rains lightened. On one of the most difficult days, I found a stretch of forest trail to serve as my walking path. Fifteen slow steps from a young fir tree to a huge, head-level oak branch, covered in bright green moss and grey lichens. Then back. Then back. Then back. Then back.

The deep sound of the far-off courtyard bell signaled the return to seated meditation and the pain I was unsuccessfully struggling to overcome. I paused at the overhanging oak limb. Pressed my face against the cold, rough, damp moss. Inhaled the scent of cold, wet life. I turned my head toward the trunk, pressing my cheek against the moss. Deep in the moss-lined niche where the limb joined the trunk, sat a two-inch statue. But unlike the blissful, peaceful icons of Buddha-nature that dot the grounds of Spirit Rock, this one is rendered inexpertly in clay. Its face is more of suggestion than a rendering – eye sockets and a closed mouth. The effect is a gaunt and troubling figure.

That isn’t the Buddha. It’s a starved yogi.

* * *

I heed the bell and return to the meditation hall, rotely bow to the standing Buddha at the front of the room to acknowledge my effectless resolve to seek liberation, and resume my pain-filled and increasingly desperate sitting.

* * *

The next time the rains lighten, I return to the bit of trail for walking meditation. At the end of the slow slow slow walking, I look again at the clay statute. It is still gaunt. It still seems to say more of warning than of enlightenment. I walk. The distant bell sounds. I approach the tree limb end to my path.

I turn to walk away. Then I feel a slight desire well up. In the quiet, the mind turns toward the desire, and I see a want to offer something. “No. Foolishness.” my mind says. I turn to follow the bell’s call back to the meditation hall. The same up-welling arises. I look to the forest floor and find a bit of oak branch with tiny, ungrown acorns barely emerging from scaled caps. I place it before the gaunt little statue.

* * *

On our walk, Laurie and Echo and I approach the last statue of the Buddha from behind. As we near, we see strands of weathered mala beads hanging from the statue’s neck. We round it and stand, looking. Someone has clipped a barrette to a strand of mala beads. Someone else has hung a pendant around the statue’s neck. In the statue’s mudra-nestled hands someone has put a piece of flint, several have put coins, another has placed a smooth, red stone. At the base of the statue are arrayed impromptu offerings – more coins, a house key, a cracked nerf football, stones, bracelets, a corroding piece of folded paper clipped with a wooden clothespin, an earring. I bow toward the statue, feeling this time in my raw, open heart, the acknowledgement of the path, of the pain I’ve stopped resisting. I let go of the form, and gratitude wells up. The bow offers my complete awareness.

* * *

Fetters of I, me, and mine fall away, veils of time and place pull open and the gratitude of the mala-bead offeror is present. The gratitude of the house-key offeror is present. The gratitude of the barrette offeror is present. The gratitude of the bead-purse-offeror, and rock-offerors, and the feather-offeror, and the coin-offerors, and the football offeror is present. And the gratitude of countless people who have bowed before the statue is present. And all of us in that moment without ourselves are realized in one offering, one gratitude, one bowing.

And as I’ve done countless times on this retreat, I weep.

Laurie unclips a tag from Echo’s collar and places it gently beside someone’s house key.

(Cross-posted at dovesandserpents.com, which has some of Laurie's pictures from that day)

Emergence

2010-12-29T21:55:00.008-07:00

I went to Spirit Rock a couple of weeks ago.

Sometimes I retreat out of curiosity – to see what can be seen from silence and intensive meditation practice.

Sometimes I retreat for community – to be with people who sit quietly, companionably, as another messily pounds away at an emotional barrier.

This time, though, I went out of need.

In recent months (and months) my meditation practice has led me to deep and wide pools of fear. Fear of loss. Fear of mistakes. Fear of inadequacy. Fear of failing my loved ones. Fear of not becoming what I most desire.

It’s hard to hold a fearful heart open. It’s hard to see clearly through filters of fear. It’s hard to love in the face of fear.

* * *

Snorkeling in shallow water over a tiny section of the Great Barrier Reef, I’m floating over a mosaic of colors and textures – whites, yellows, oranges, reds, purples, blues, greens. Anemones. Hard corals. Soft corals. Seaweeds. Fish. And giant clams (some of them not-so-big). The giant clams anchor the hinge of their shell deep in the reef, the sides of the shell extending upward, concealing all but the mantle’s edge.

Set like sparkling decorations, all along the fringed edges of the mantle are iridescent blue dots – light-sensitive patches that serve the clam as eyes. As I drift above a clam, my body obstructs the sun, my shadow darkening the clam’s day. Though it has grown far too large for the shell halves to close entirely, the two shells draw toward one another nonetheless, insufficient shielding contracting away from the threat of dark shadows in daylight.

* * *

So for the past months (and months), I’ve felt contracted. Agitated. Unable to open fully. Each time meditation takes me deep enough, I find the same fear pools. I practice. I work. I try to open to it, allow it. I find neither key nor door.

So retreat.

* * *

As I have come to expect, the first day is very hard. The mind jumps from one fragment of conversation, one shard of thought, to self-evaluation, back to the breath. From memory to analysis to reawareness and the breath. From physical pain to fear that it will worsen to despair to reawareness and the breath. From cramping muscles to planning ways to shift to alleviate the cramps to dismay at not holding still to how motion might affect those sitting on either side of me to reawareness and the breath. And so on.

As the first day moves into the second, I get up early. Very early. I make my way through the coastal mist and darkness of still-hours-away dawn to the meditation hall. I light the candles on the altar, and I sit. The body refreshed from sleep, the cramps and aches and pains are manageable. The mind is quieter. There are moments when there is more to the breath in and the breath out than I’ve ever imagined. But by the end of the first hour, the aches and pains crescendo. I struggle to keep the attention on the breath, finding both conscious and subconscious mind trying to problem-solve away the back pains. I concede and go outside for walking meditation. It is raining steadily. I find a sheltered space beneath the eaves. And I walk slowly slowly, sharing the attention of motion and balance with the breath. The fears of mind and body arise. I’m aware of the mist-laden darkness of night, unabated by stars or moon, yet not entirely imperceptible. I remember reports of cougars in the hills. I feel the pressure of body on the sole of my foot as I take another step. I pause at the edge of the eaves to turn. First I breathe the darkness, the mist. One curtain of mist shifts, only to disclose another behind it. I turn and walk.

I return to sit again. Same pains return, faster, sharper. I continue to struggle to find a solution to them, trying to dispel the pain. I change position. Wiggle. Make imperceptible shifts of breath and muscle engagement. The pain grows. I feel the right rhomboid muscle cramp solidly. The top of the right trapezius begins a burning sensation where it connects just below the occipital lobe of the skull. I weep. For the umpteenth time.

Sigh.

After a complete morning of this, unabated, I meet with Mary Grace Orr, one of the teachers leading the retreat. We talk about my current state, the continual arising of fears, home life, my current meditation practice. The frustration I feel. I tell her I’ve been stuck in this dark night for months. She asks some questions. I respond.

Mary Grace tells me she doesn’t think I’m stuck, just going through a hard transition. She recommends I moderate my vipassana practice by starting or ending with several minutes of metta – of lovingkindness meditation – directed exclusively toward myself. I groan, audibly, and remark that I’d rather do anything else. But the truth is, I’m willing to try anything. Even that.

So that evening, I start with metta, then sit in vipassana misery during the evening. But I notice an unexpected resistance inside myself to practicing metta. Resistance is interesting whenever it arises, because it signals that there’s something already trying to occupy that mind-space.

* * *

I dream that night. I'm working in an industrial harbor, and I'm assigned to go retrieve some equipment that is needed. I start off. It soon becomes clear that I'm going to have to go through the canals to get where the equipment is. I begin wading, chest-deep. The water is filthy.

I look to the banks of the canal, and I see raw sewage pumped into the water. My dreaming mind thinks, "Great. Shit. Just great." But the fact is, I'm a parent. I've dealt with fair quantities of it in my life. Not hardly pleasant, but no reason to stop. I press on.

The thought occurs to my dreaming mind, "At least there aren't any alligators here."

I swim-wade around a bend in the canal and see a very slightly cartoonish-looking alligator slide off the bank and into the dark waters.

"Shit and alligators," my dreaming mind says, "shit and alligators." And I push on.

* * *

Just then I awaken. It's 4:20 a.m.

I return to the meditation hall. I practice metta, then vipassana, sitting for most of an hour. When the pains begin to arise, I practice metta. Then in the spirit of metta, I give myself a break and walk slowly through the darkness down the hill to the dining hall, where I fix some herbal tea. Then I walk back to the meditation hall and resume practice. By mid-morning, my mind is a curious blend of quiet and muscle-pain-shouting. I repeat metta phrases. The pain continues.

I go to lunch, then return. The pain resumes, amplified.

So after metta, I allow the pain to become the center of the vipassana practice. I evaluate for a moment whether the neck or the back hurts more. I decide that it’s the neck. So I allow the sensations of the neck to become the focus of my attention. I watch them. Surprisingly, they are not constant, but rather pulse with my heart, with my breath. Sometimes they feel like burning, sometimes like aching, sometimes like tightness, sometimes like cramps. For a few moments, they dull, then brighten.

And after most of an hour, something happens. My conscious mind is aware of a kind of subconscious shift. I can’t tell you exactly what occurred subconsciously, but consciously I realize that I’ve stopped resisting the pain, and that something deep that had been anchored to there being a way to become free of the pain has released, and now accepts that the pain is a part of the constellation of experiences of this meditation practice. "Shit and alligators," my mind says. The pain is just shit and alligators. It is most surely is not gone. Still there, just as bright as ever. But suddenly I’m aware of all the other stars in the sky of awareness, as well. And I’m ok with that.

I’m not free from pain. I’m free in pain.

Never expected that.

More tears. This time, of relief from the excruciation of resisting what is.

Dawning body awareness

2010-09-30T04:17:00.003-06:00

A few weeks ago, I stood sun-lit on hard, wet sand in a deep redrock canyon, the edgewaters of Colorado River washing over my feet. I drew my body into Virabhadrasana 2: a deep lunge, right foot forward, the sole pressing into the sand, right knee at a right angle; left foot back, angled open and slightly forward, the leg straight from the hip, the outside edge of the left foot building a deep, still pressure wave of sand behind it. My shoulders were square over my hips, torso open, spine vertical; arms extended wide: right forward, left back. My head was turned forward, eyes focused upriver, just beyond the edge of the nail of my right, middle finger.

* * *

Yoga asana – the physical aspect of yoga – is the conscious forming of embodied patterns. Mind working with matter that responds to it, feeds it, becomes it. Is it.

There is an essential integrity of the mind, that sees everything outside itself as object, and body, that just feels and senses, sometimes feeling both sides of a touch sharply, sometimes less clearly, sometimes only one side, sometimes that, dimly.

But whatever objectifying lines the mind draws to cordon off the world like a crime scene, the senses nonetheless reach awareness. Emotions, too. Thoughts are not unique.

The classical yoga postures, and some of the newer ones too, are patterns, old trails traced in new bodies each generation. Yoga teachers familiarly tell fretful students that all they need do is practice and all else will come – mindfulness, peace, liberation, clarity. Just practice. But how, I’m asked and I wonder, can simply putting your body into shapes and holding them, breathing them, singing them, panting them, chanting them, gasping them, being them – how does that do anything except exercise (and that quite oddly) muscles to the point of trembling fatigue?

* * *

On the river trip, to cool off, to clean up, even just to play, I’d walk into the river. Almost everywhere we went, the river was the very definition of placid – flat, calm, slow, smooth. The river flows through most of Meander Canyon at about 2 miles per hour. Ankle-deep, it’s a gentle caress. Knee-deep, a swirl around my shins. But once I’m halfway in – waist deep, my body squared to face upstream, the river presses me downstream. I lean into it slightly. We oppose each other, we support each other. But in up to my waist, if I ignore the river’s slow push, I’ll lose my footing. As I work my way deeper, the slow, slow, slow press of river equals my own strength. To go deeper, I have to turn my body sideways to the stream – aligning myself to present a narrower profile to the current that then slips easily around me.

* * *

As I understand Albert Einstein's insights, matter is simply one manifestation of energy; time and space are two ends of the same stick; and – with the insights of general relativity – matter/energy shapes space/time. Every experience we have is a manifestation of energy transforming in, while simultaneously itself shaping, both space and time.

* * *

Yoga asana is about consciousness perceiving and responding to energy. And energy, as anyone who’s ever stubbed a toe against a rock (pretty dense and stable as far as forms of energy go) can attest, is not the same everywhere, all the time. It forms. It flows. It concentrates. It dissipates.

As I stand in Virabhadrasna 2, I feel three distinct axes of energy. A kind of dense, stable strength rises from the connection with the cold, wet sand at the soles of my feet. A kind of elevating verticality comes through the crown of my head, downward. And my heart expands outward in five directions at once; head, hands, and feet.

I’m not the first to find those energy channels. Virabhadrasana 2 was created by human awareness finding those channels – the pose is an expression of them.

That wasn’t obvious to me the first time I moved into the pose. That day, whenever it was, my attention wasn’t focused on the energy alignment of the pose, about which I knew and perceived nothing, but rather on assembling the verbal instructions into body language. And it wasn’t the second day I did the pose, either. But after a dozen, or maybe a dozen dozen dozen times, I began to become aware of those lines of energy. Noticed them not as lines of zappy, jittery electricity, but rather as a kind of energetic ease, fluid power. Prana. At first, I didn’t take any thought of them – just a random sensation in a body filled with random sensations. But going back to the pose again and again, resting in it’s trembling exertion, settling my jumpy mind, the energy lines became more distinct, like stars in a darkening sky.

Why’d it take me so long to notice?

* * *

The third day on the river, we paddled into the heat of midday, then beached the canoe on a mudflat. After slogging through the mud to dry land, we hiked a winding trail through the verge of willows and beetle-killed tamarisks. We made our way up a low cliff to some ruins – a couple of ancient granaries nestled under a high outcropping of sandstone. After a bit, I climbed out along the same shelf, looking for more. Dad stayed behind, sitting at the base of a pictograph of hand outlines in spattered white – an adult-sized right and left, and a child-sized right and left, the child’s right hand missing the fourth finger. I strayed upcanyon for longer than I’d planned, finding no other ruins in that direction, returned and then struck out around the other side of the promontory. Eventually, I worked my way back to the pictograph and my Dad. He’d been sitting quietly there, noticing. And in noticing, he’d found pottery shards, white flint chips – things I’d never seen.

* * *

Yoga was my first introduction to meditation.

Or rather my second, as I’d noticed the unusually clear and lucid mind-focus that arises in rock climbing years earlier. Though the word “meditation” carries so much baggage that it’s hard to believe anyone ever actually ventures to try it out, it really just starts with noticing. Yoga’s like that too, after you get started; not a thing to be completed – more of a practice. After you get the pose instructions more or less settled into your body, yoga’s first the intention, then the motion into a pose, the awareness and noticing while in the pose, the new intention, and the motion out of the pose into some other. Intention, body, motion, and awareness.

And awareness is subject to an awful lot of refining. The more you persist at it, the finer the details that become evident.

Like my Dad’s seeing the pottery shards and flint chips on the ground where I saw only gravel.

With time, through dozens of dozens of dozens of repetitions, those energy axes of Virabhadrasana 2 settled into my awareness.

And for kicks, I’ve tried variants of the pose that mess with those lines and aligns. And I got what I got – a sense of the absence of alignment, the tension of not being in that posture, that way, that Tao.

Like turning my body square to the flow of the river. Opposing energy directions, rather than aligning with them.

It isn’t a sin.

It’s just turning counter to the river’s flow – it’s being out of alignment. To my sense now, it feels incomplete, like an [url=http://guitar.ricmedia.com/Chords/Minor-seventh-sharp-five/audio/c-minor-seventh-sharp-five-chord-voicing-2.mp3]unresolved augmented seventh chord.[/url] Sometimes, the best part of a piece of music is the tension of that unresolved chord, the awareness of mind patterns and cravings that it apocalypses. Sometimes, it’s the whole: the engendering of tension in the quadriceps strength of a deeply lunged knee, or the evershifting balance of the grounded leg in dancer’s pose, or the just-this-side-of-painful ache of extended hamstrings in a seated forward bend, all resolving to stability: the lunged leg straightening, the balance calming as the second foot reaches the earth, the hamstrings releasing as the torso rises out of the forward bend.

Once we know where to find light and where to find dark, we can begin to draw.

Once we know the lines of energy in our skin and thoughts and muscle and intention and organs and bones and emotions and sinews, we can begin to practice yoga.

* * *

The assemblage of atoms and molecules and proteins and structures and energy of a human stands at the edge of the Colorado River, breathing quietly and seeing a slow-to-retire bat dancing on the ripples of air above the river that itself reflects the bat’s silhouette against a brightening sky and fading stars. The human feet press into the riverwet sand, connected to the grains by the plunging shape of gravity-carved space, twisting itself toward matter. The human feels simply a draw earthward, and shifts his weight slightly, realigning the sensed mass of his body to the vertical planes of femurs and spine, which changes, ever so slightly, the shape of space that he is.

Connected.

Tripping through prana

2010-06-25T08:34:00.002-06:00

I lie down in savasana, arrange my arms and legs. I adjust the position of my shoulderblades. Readjust my head to reduce the bend of my neck. Open my eyes once more, then close them, drawing the gaze inward to the space between my eyes.

Darren Main begins calling the breath instructions. Heidi, assisting him, moves through the room.

Five breaths in, I’m curious.

Five more, no change.

Five more, I feel a tendril of difference, of opening. I register the briefest sensation of aversion and fear. I choose to allow it.

Five more, and a sense of elation arises, lightness.

The breathing continues, but the opening moves to the foreground.

A slight tingling at the tip of my nose.

Nadis in the thumbs and forearms energize and brighten.

A sense of the separation of being high.

Darren calls for five deeper breaths, then, on the exhale, hold until the need for new breath.

At the fifth, breath enters deeply, then out. Then I move into the upward lift of navasana.

Everything ignites. Blazes upward.

St. Theresa.

* * *

Breath brings me back to earth.

Then draws the heart higher.

An image of matsyasana, fish pose, arises in my mind.

My heart lifts, spine arches.

Root bandha engages. Navel bandha locks.

The throat widens and prana moves out with each exhale. I draw the chin toward the chest.

* * *

Heidi presses her thumb into the center of my forehead.

The trembling in my arms and heart cohere into rapid pulsing.

The light coming through my eyelids flashes bright/dark, then pulses.

The sounds of Heidi’s breath penetrate my sensory rock concert.

Then I realize she’s reaching out to me with the sound of her breath. Suggesting.

My mind slowly thinks to match her breath, but there’s no purchase for the mind on the self-driving breath.

Heidi’s thumb slides up the forehead, toward the hairline.

All mind connects to her thumb, focus narrows to it, tendrils of mind, of wanting, wrap around the connection, wanting more. Wanting.

Trembling and pulsing grow to all.

Heidi releases and the mind hears her moving to a nearby person.

* * *

The connection gone, the grasping remains.

Darkness, disappointment, rejection, suffering, anguish all arise. Grasping at loss is all.

The body twists and contorts, spams.

Sobbing.

* * *

Heidi returns, now in first aid mode. Her touch channels the prana.

A dark phase of matsyasana emerges. Hands clenched. Resistance increases.

Heidi’s breathing re-enters my awareness.

Opposition.

She unpeels my fingers from my fist.

The mind sees her calm.

The body arches toward the ceiling.

Then entirely quiet.

Mind quiet.

Body moves into stillness.

* * *

New cycles of breath.

New openness.

Badda konasana. Mula bandha, Uddiyana bandha, Jalandhara bandha all lock.

Then release.

More savasana.

Quiet mind.

Gentle witnessing awareness emerges.

* * *
The first time I participated in a pranayama workshop with Darren Main, I felt like the experience was more than mildly dangerous.

From a flatlander’s perspective, it seemed to me to be simply hyperventilation and the disorientation and high associated with it, resulting in some laughter, some sobbing. And though I categorized it and labeled it so, how could that really be as dangerous as I felt it was? With time, I became more interested in the connection between breath and emotion and joy and sorrow that was apparent from the experience.

So by the time Darren came back a year later, I decided to try it again.

Second go-around, less dramatic, less worrisome. Similarly interesting. I was more curious.

Sometimes, three’s the charm.

* * *
Like the first two experiences with pranayama, in my third just last week, I again experienced the loosening of the grip of the conscious mind that results from hyperventilation. But rather than shifting into seemingly random emotional or mental states, this time there was enough mindfulness beneath the conscious mind to hold the order and openness.

The explosion of ignition that came first was elemental.

But what I find most interesting now is how clearly I felt then and remember even now the grasping for more of the fireworks, the reaching out, wanting, clinging to Heidi’s touch, and then the huge wave of darkness that followed the separation, the clinging with nothing to hold onto, the completeness of misery and unhappiness. Complete and utter dukkha.

So now – back to pranayama. I think I understand its potential a bit better than I did before. Yes, it involves changing the body’s chemistry. Yes, its effects can be rightly characterized as unstable. But at a finer level of granularity, for me this time, it reduced the energy usually drawn by the thinking mind, increased the energy channeled through the body, and increased the brightness of my feelings to Klieg lamp levels.

At that level of brightness – where feelings/sensations were all in all – I saw more clearly and sharply both the grasping of wanting more that impeded my experience of what was happening, as well as the inundating darkness and suffering that came from the grasping once the wave of experience subsided.

Not only is it clear that that Buddha guy knew what he was talking about when it came to that Second Noble Truth, it’s also clear that in the trippy altered mind state of that pranayama practice, what is see-able is not always as random as I’d guessed.

Nothing holy; all emptiness

2010-04-24T17:45:00.003-06:00

Have you ever had the sense when you walked through a doorway, or the space between two trees or, really, anywhere, when you just noticed that your body – maybe your eyes or your brain – were not exactly yours, but rather were a particular concentration of consciousness occupying a particular place, and as you walked through that place, that very location in the universe became more aware because it was occupied by the arrangement of matter comprising your mind/body, but really, you weren't different in kind from the molecules of air that your face nudged out of the way, but the fabric of the space that held first those oxygen molecules and nitrogen atoms and the rest also later held, just as gently, the protein chains and water-based solutions and calcium deposits of a conscious body/mind, just as gently letting go of them as they moved on, but before they did, for just that tiny moment, that place in space/time was aware of itself?

* * *

Buddhism is profoundly confusing.

Bodhidharma declared to Emperor Wu: “Nothing holy; all emptiness.”

The Diamond Sutra makes the same point, a bit more elaborately: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Form is not other than emptiness; emptiness is not other than form.”

When I first encountered each of these teachings a few years ago, I found them quite off-putting. How could emptiness be anything other than nihilism, a demon that had nearly done me in in prior years? I chewed on that for a time, and then I set it aside, unable to make heads or tails of it.

* * *

My next encounter with emptiness occurred during my first retreat. I was on a four-day yoga-
and-meditation retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center, a place in the Colorado high country run by Tibetan Buddhists in the Kagyü lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I wrote about it here. My memory now is that I found the sitting parts of the retreat very hard, with back pain and discomfort and a sense that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I recall thoroughly enjoying the yoga practice (an easy comfort zone for me then), but trying out the meditation nonetheless.

About halfway through the retreat, the meditation teacher, David Nichtern, taught us the Three Characteristics – the three basic insights that arise at the beginning of the meditation path – and not coincidentally, the three experiential doors that stand at the end of the meditation path, as well. Those three characteristics, he said, were suffering, impermanence, and no-self or, he said, “emptiness.” By then, I’d come to understand something about suffering, and my back pain during that retreat was more than enough reminder of it. I thought that I got the notion of impermanence reasonably well. But emptiness/no-self – that triggered my by-then usual aversive response: “Don’t understand it; don’t get it; I’m doing ok; things are getting better; best not to think about it.”

Yep. I’d replaced the nihilism demon with an aversion-to-nihilism demon.

In hindsight, I think that I wasn’t really whole-hearted on that retreat. There were half a dozen reasons for it, but that’s the gist of it.

The meditation hall at Shambhala is situated in a small valley between a range of high foothills that are, themselves, nestled up against the east side of the Rocky Mountains. As the place is run by Tibetan Buddhists, there are strings of sunburnt and faded, tattered prayer flags scattered about, wherever a breeze might re-embody their devotion. In particular, I could see in the distance, prayer flags stretching up the slopes of the nearest high crag. In a kind of escape, I rose early one morning and climbed through the ebbing darkness. I worked my way up to the base of the crag, first along a roadcut, then along a plainly-evident trail. This was classic, dry Ponderosa montane environment.

From the top of the low mountain, the rocky crag rose another 75 feet or so. I scrambled up, found a level spot on the east side of the crag, just below the top, and sat.

I’ve never been to the top of a Colorado mountain when there wasn’t a wind blowing. On this one, it was mild – a steady pre-dawn breeze. I looked east. I was high enough that I could see all the way out of the mountains to the high plains beyond Fort Collins – a long, flat horizon. The sky glowing.

Six or seven birds sailed through the space above the valley, suddenly turning that space, which I’d been looking through, but never seeing, into a specific place of dimensions, the birds, a passing thought carried on the breeze, disappearing behind the crag.

The breeze pressed against me, around me. I breathed, and it entered. Exhaled.

* * *

I wrote some time ago about my experience with lovingkindness meditation. I worked out my own formulation of the prayer: May I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be clear.

Clear is the word I use to remind me of the transparency I felt sitting on that crag – clear – the light of the rising sun shining through the transparent sky, through my body/mind. The breeze pressing on its way past me, through me. Not capturing, not converting, not insisting, not nothing, but no-thing.

* * *

Sitting on the crag was free and freeing. Liberation is nothing more than the simplest clarity.

Form and emptiness.

* * *

The yoga students start on their backs, shoulderblades drawn together and shifted down the spine toward the hips, holding firmly the space between their hearts and the earth. I call them through a slow and easy first series of sun salutations. We begin the second series with Warrior 2.

“Allow your vision to focus on the tip of the middle finger of your right hand.”

“Shift your vision from that fingertip to your right eye in the mirror in front of you.”

“Now back to the fingertip.”

“Holding that focal distance, allow your right hand to drop, and see the space your hand no longer occupies. See the space. Not through it, but just it.”

* * *

Years and years ago, I and a colleague walked through Central Park one morning. We were talking about consciousness, and as we walked we stepped onto some of the rubbed-smooth granite patches exposed above the lawns there. He remarked, “I think the rocks have an awareness of their own.” I disagreed, convinced that if it were so, it was a kind of consciousness inaccessible to me.

But now? As for me, I’m beginning to think that everywhere and everywhen is aware, just as aware as "my" body is. I just tend not to notice awareness much, except when it manifests in a form that interacts more or less readily with us. Rocks? Aware? Sure. Awareness is just aware. If it's awareness of a rock, it doesn't have much to communicate with, doesn't have much to remember with. What makes humans tick? We're evolutionarily complicated assemblages that have developed memories and communications and elaborate sensory devices. And we're aware. Not two different things, because everything has an inside to it – the aware part – and an outside to it – the part we can (in part) perceive through senses.

* * *

We do not walk upon the ground. We are as much the fabric of existence as the ground we walk upon, as the thoughts that fly through our minds like birds carried on the wind, as the water crashing down mountain riverbeds as spring run off, as the air we breathe, as the space through which we move.

Awareness, this exact instant, is all in all in all.

Disappearing and Reappearing

2010-04-11T08:24:00.002-06:00

It's been a bit since I posted.

As you might have noticed, if you've read much here in the past, my practice (my habit? my karma?) has been to write from a particular stance, a particular view from a particular position -- geographically, conceptually, all that.

A while ago, it became increasingly clear that writing from that stance was a reinforcement of ego. It was bolstering the I/Me/Mine of the writer. Nothing wrong with that, per se. But that practice was making it harder to see beyond the I/Me.

German scientists recently reported success with a cloaking technology -- they managed to create crystals that coated a bump on a bit of gold so that the bump couldn't be seen. A kind of cool ability, when you intend it to happen.

Maybe I've discovered that my writing had turned into a cloaking technology for my ego -- but not only did it conceal it, the very act of concealing it bolstered it.

So every time I started to write, it soon became apparent that I had actually been writing.

It was funny, in a way. Once awareness of my own ego-capture would arise, the smaller I would resume the essay, usually along a tangent, only to have the process repeat.

As you might imagine, the actual words that get generated in such a process are pretty awful.

Rather than argue, I practiced contentment.

* * *

Then, after going blog-silent for six months or so, the urge to write arose again. The dilemma that had sent me into silence was right there where it had been left, still needing attention. Maybe it was the time to be deliberate, maybe it was movement in other aspects of life, maybe it was just a thinning of karmic build-up, but now -- today -- it feels like there may be ways to write that are simultaneously conscious of the self who is speaking, the world spoken of, the inextricable unity of them both, and the beautiful emptiness of all three.

At any rate, it's time to try.

Thanks for being patient.

A moment

2009-06-17T21:17:00.000-06:00

The cherry is cold in my fingers. The stem comes off with a tug. I press the stem-hollow against a paring knife’s blade and the red-black skin and flesh part. The blade reaches the pit, and I turn the cherry. Knife akimbo, I twist the cherry halves and they part, one bearing at its center the convex pit, the other a glistening, concave hollow. My fingers stain with juice. I drop the finished half into a bowl and thumbnail the pit out of the other. Pit goes into the cup with stem, second half into the bowl with the first.

It is only when I start the next that I notice the wetness, the colors, the shine.

Tossed with the cherries, the yogurt pinkens.

An evening meditation, mental illness, and emptiness

2009-05-10T20:18:00.008-06:00

A recent Friday was busier than most days are for me. On Thursday, we’d had a heavy snowstorm that carried into the evening before tapering off. Since morning commutes are often ugly in the snow, I decided to forego a morning meditation and was on the road before six. Once I got to work, I managed a variety of matters, including a court hearing in the afternoon. I got in a yoga practice with a favorite teacher before getting home in the evening in time to run errands of various kinds. It wasn't until about 9:00 p.m. that I finally got around to meditation.

I sat peacefully for twenty minutes, watching breath, seeing thoughts, watching breath, seeing thoughts, focusing concentration, seeing thoughts, watching breath. The thoughts were random conjurations of links between memories and ideas and fantasies. As often happens, the meditative state crept in quietly, so quietly that I didn’t even notice it until I was drawn out of it by our dog coming to see if this oddly-timed sitting practice might yield food. Seeing no likely snack options, he went off to prod more likely providers. And I was left to finish my sitting slightly more aware of my own mind than I had been before the dog showed up. An evening meditation practice tends to end on an open, quiet note, while morning meditations end by launching me into my day.

So I went up to the bedroom and found my wife watching the second hour of A Beautiful Mind.

She asked whether I was willing to watch with her. If I’d not wanted to join her, she’d have ceded the bedroom to me and gone to watch the rest of the movie elsewhere. But there was more than a degree of courtesy in her question.

You see, mental illness runs in my blood. My sister was institutionalized for a time. She was, so far as I can tell, schizophrenic, though the shrinks she saw didn’t diagnose her that way. I think they hesitated in part because and she was, herself, a Ph.D. in clinical psych., and during the 1990s, a diagnosis of schizophrenia was a declaration of hopelessness for a debilitating, dimly understood, and largely untreatable condition. And that diagnosis didn’t really match Suzanne’s life. Did she hear voices of people who weren’t there? Yes. As she’d drive down the road, they’d scream in her ears to drive into the oncoming traffic on the other side of the road. But she also had an iron will. Did she show wild personality fluctuations, ranging from introspective and quiet to abrasive and antagonistic to unfocused and angry? Yes. But she also wrenched control of those personalities to impose on them her professional mask that allowed her to counsel and diagnose her own patients. And, as she acknowledged, sometimes it’s a bit easier to understand the mentally ill if you aren’t really mentally well yourself. So she Jekyll and Jekyll and Jekyll and Hyded her way through grad school in three years and into a professional counseling practice outside of Boston. Then, taking a break from practice, she spent several weeks in Utah, riding horses. One day she left to hike in a canyon, and didn’t return. Several days later, one of the several search parties found her cold body twisted and broken at the base of a cliff.

But it wasn’t only Suzanne who didn’t see only the things that were there.

* * *

I asked my wife whether the movie was past the scene where Nash is institutionalized, bound to a gurney, and overdosed on insulin to induce coma. She said, “yes,” so I figured I could deal with the rest ok. That had been the part of the movie that had made a mess of me when we saw it in the movie theater.

* * *

So the scene is Alicia, Nash’s wife, walking through the woods behind their house. She sees the door to an old standalone garage swinging open in the wind of a gathering storm. She goes to shut it, then glances inside. But instead of dusty old garage contents, she finds a paranoid’s collage of newspaper articles clipped and stuck to bulletin boards, bits and pieces underscored with markers, strings connecting one to another to another – an external representation of the bizarre, chaotic, pattern-making inside of a paranoid schizophrenic’s mind.

I see not only the movie’s story of Nash, and not only Alicia’s story-line realization that Nash is off his meds and can’t be trusted to bathe their infant daughter. What I see is the a visual depiction of a maelstrom of thoughts and ideas and concepts and assemblages that is troublingly like what I saw ten minutes earlier on the meditation cushion.

I turn away from the TV and see amassed in the bookcase at my bedside an ever-increasing collection of dharma books, philosophy, psychology. I see in my meditation practice, my yoga, a slightly frantic grasping. A bit of frightened aversion from depression. From the strange outside perspective of that moment, it all seems a little pathetic – even the grandiose notion that I’m pursuing enlightenment, rather than hiding in plain sight from imagined demons of the mind.

* * *

Me? Yeah. I’ve heard voices. Still do at different stages of meditation. Sometimes chaotic cacophony. Sometimes a thousand different voices all calling my name, some gently, some insistently, some annoyedly. You get the picture. But none really vindictive or destructive.

Seen things? Yeah, that too. Though what I’ve seen have been more like glimpses of a images from different dimensions. They didn’t strike me as “three-dimensional-world real.” More like overlays on 3-D real, making it simultaneously itself and something more. As real as anything I can sense is real. But not conventionally so.

Unconventionally? Yes, that.

* * *

So what about meditation?

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is curiosity indulged.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is spacious awareness.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is superstitious genuflection.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is momentary rest.

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is desperation embodied. And

Sometimes sitting on a block alone
is quietly empty.

* * *

What about seeing reality as it really is? I don’t know much about that.

* * *

In Arches National Park, there’s a gigantic boulder dramatically balanced on a thin fin of rock beneath it.

I remember the day it dawned on me that Balanced Rock was simply a result of largely disinterested mechanical processes that sometimes yield things that strike conscious minds as extraordinary.

* * *

One view of sanity is like that, too. An unexpectedly stable sort of awareness. One that lasts only as long as the substance undergirding it holds steady.

But that’s a bit too glib, too reductionist, too outside. Sanity is indeed a balance, and a precarious one, at that. But it’s one that can also shift, and jump, and dance from one stem of rock to another.

And sometimes to the ground.

* * *

As Neal Stephenson wrote in a recent novel, human minds are not only perceivers of sensory information, we’re nets that separate out some of the sensory input, and we’re lenses that concentrate it, and we’re communicants who distribute it. Awareness and community shape a cosmos awash in random data into form and order and beauty and balance.

I started meditating with the hope that I’d gain some clarity – that I’d better distinguish the real from the unreal. But instead of more certainty of the real, what I can lay claim to is seeing more clearly what there is to see from the inside of whatever it is that I’m inside of.

Is that the ground?

Wild Foods

2009-05-02T22:15:00.000-06:00

A short thought about life and living on others’ lives:

In sixth grade, we got to do an overnight field trip to a camp on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The days were programmed with various things that entailed us heading in groups from one set of outbuildings to another along trails through the woods. I loved it.

Uncharacteristically, though, as the co-cabined students I was a part of headed over to the dining hall one afternoon, I ducked out of the group and headed toward the wooded shore, down the hill and a couple of dozen yards away. The others faded from sight and sound, and I was alone on the shore of an estuary, at low tide. Sheets of tightly closed black mussel shells glistened iridescent blue in the sunlight. What possessed me, I have no idea, as I’d never eaten shellfish before, let alone a mussel, but I pulled three of them away from their bearded moorings, built a tiny campfire of twigs, and laid the mussels on the top. As the heat grew, the mussels opened to me, and I ate shellfish for the first time in my life. The mussels, unseasoned by anything other than their own liquor, were perfect.

In later school years, some of my favorite books were written by Euell Gibbons, generally on wild foods. It was from him, if I remember correctly, that I learned to identify what was for many years my favorite wild food: the Indian cucumber (Medeola virginiana). But that’s just an aside. I first discovered Euell Gibbons in a National Geographic article that tells of a couple of weeks he spent on an island off the coast of Maine. It was intended as a bit of an austere retreat, but I recall him describing it as a failure, as far as retreats go, since he spent so much time gathering and feasting on the bounty he found at the edge of the ocean.

For reasons I haven’t discerned, I’ve been thinking recently about visiting the coast of Maine. I’d like to spend a few days doing what I imagined Euell Gibbons doing there, though I’m not sure I’d ever be able to persuade my family to join me in such an endeavor. But even if I did, I wonder whether I can justify harvesting life from nature for my own benefit.

Have I become so hide-bound in a vegetarian lifestyle that I wouldn’t want to eat oysters and clams and mussels? I find seafood delicious, but I want to live in a world brimming with life. Is there an ethic for one of 6.7 billion persons other than vegetarianism? Is a world devoid of blue crabs any worse than one devoid of Indian cucumbers?

I have a lingering sense that I’m missing something as I think about this – that there’s a different way of being that would show this question in a different light. But I can’t seem to get to the right angle of light to see it.

Haiku along Earth's Sky-Path

2009-03-21T21:34:00.002-06:00

Fall’s day-stars now gleam
Through leafing willow twigs. Spent
Bud-shells crunch on Path.

Off the mat -- Taking what is not offered

2009-02-16T20:23:00.004-07:00

(Another in a series of dharma talks)

During a recent meditation retreat, the other participants and I each undertook to live by the five Buddhist training precepts during our time there. One of those precepts is this:

For the purposes of training, I will not take anything that is not offered to me.

This is a common sense rule for those who will live in close proximity to one another – no “borrowing” your roommate’s shampoo, no swiping someone else’s flip flops. It’s a basic principle that is embedded in social systems everywhere – in the yoga tradition as the niyama of asteya – non-stealing. God told Moses a version of the same thing.

It isn’t wildly surprising that the precept forms a basic part of so many different cultures: it’s a simple way to maintain cooperation and minimize friction among humans. The training precept articulates the Buddhist version of the rule: unless it’s yours, don’t touch it, and it’s only yours if it’s specifically offered to you.

So on the retreat, we didn’t need locks on the doors. We didn’t have to wonder what would happen to the shoes we left outside the meditation hall. We didn’t have to hide our stashes of candy bars. My stuff was my stuff. Others respected that boundary. Things stayed where I left them.

They were safe.

I was safe.

* * *

I get up early. It’s still dark. I move quietly to avoid waking my roommate. He rustles under his covers and resumes his quiet snoring. I make my way to the small open closet at the foot of my bed. By feel I find clean clothes, make my way out of the room, down the hall, into the bathroom. I shower, towel dry, and dress. My mind watches each action, notices its own intentions. I brush my teeth at the sink, gather my old clothes, and return silently to my dorm room. In the dark I trade out the toiletries and old clothes for clean socks and a hooded rain shell, and I make my way to the bench just outside the building where I left my shoes the night before. It’s freezing outside, and foggy, the damp wood planking chills my soles. My breath billows around my head as I slip into socks, then night-cold shoes. I pull the hood of my shell over my head, and I begin walking slowly the hundred yards or so to the meditation hall. My attention is on the sensations in my feet – lifting, moving, placing, weighting, lifting, moving, placing, weighting, lifting, moving…

None of that quiet concentration would be possible if I were fretting over a missing water bottle or a jacket that wasn’t where I left it.

* * *

On retreat, the word-silent lunch seems loud with chair scraping, silverware clinking, and washing noises coming from the kitchen, the gurgle of hot water into tea mugs. My chores are later in the evening, so I have 90 minutes before meditation resumes. I find a path that twists and turns and switches back-and-forth up the steep hills. It’s cool but not cold except when the wind picks up. After fifteen minutes of climbing, my heart is pumping loudly, my breathing is strong. I reach a level spot about halfway up. Old rocks protrude from the grasses beside a laurel tree. I catch a leaf and crush it, releasing its royal scent.

I finish the climb, pause to admire the view, and begin to descend on a different path, past other outcrops. As I pass one, a tiny, perfect rosette of glaucous leaves catches my eye – an Echeveria – Hen and Chicks, but a kind I’ve never seen before – growing from a crevice in the rock. I think of the perfect spot for it in my garden in Colorado. I tug gently, the more firmly and the root pulls free, breaking off at the tip. I zip the plant into a pocket and resume my descent.

Then it dawns on me: who offered me the plant I’ve taken?

I can’t replace it in the crevice where it grew, so I try to replant it in a different spot, suspecting that the transplant won’t take without close attending that I can’t provide.

I begin to see more clearly that the training precept not only affects how others treat my stuff, but how I relate to the world around me.

* * *

Back at the meditation center, the Buddhist training precept of not taking what is not offered renders unnecessary my “I must protect my stuff” instinct. That doesn’t make it go away, of course, but it does draw the impulse into awareness: “Oh, I guess I don’t need to hide my water bottle behind the pile of zabutons after all.” And discovering how much of life has been devoted to protecting my “stuff” is at once a surprise, and a relief to be free of the worry. But after the initial freedom from the compulsion subsides, what begins to arise in me is an awareness of my raw attachment to my things – and my desires to be attached to other people’s things. And the closer I look at those impulses, the more they seem to be efforts to reinforce me, the one wanting, the one defining stuff as mine or wishing it to be mine.

At the heart of ownership, at the heart of property, at the heart of possession is the one possessed of the thing. For something to be “mine” is to define it in terms of a self. And whenever something is defined in terms of a self, that relationship also defines the self.

* * *

A couple of weeks ago, I learned that a dear friend and favorite yoga teacher was moving away from Denver. She had enriched my life significantly, and I found I wanted to give her something to reflect my appreciation. For several days, I debated exactly what might work for the purpose. After inventing and discarding half a dozen ideas, I thought of the perfect gift – an old Tibetan singing bowl that had been given to me years earlier and that formed an important link in the story-chain that led me to discover, practice, and teach yoga. Once I settled on the gift, I began formulating exactly how to present the story to her so she’d understand it in context – so she’d appreciate it as a part of me and my story. I imagined in my mind how I’d see her before the last Sunday morning class she’d teach, how I’d present the gift, how she’d respond, and how we’d be connected by the gift.

Of course, the actual giving didn’t go anything like I’d imagined it. I did see her before the last Sunday class. She was rushed and harried, greeting not just me but dozens of others who were also there to practice one last time and to say goodbye. I quickly handed her the unwrapped and tarnished bowl and dented striker, and all I managed to say was “there’s a story behind this that I’ll tell you later.” The opportunity “later” never materialized, and I never got to tell my friend the story of the bowl. And she never asked for the story behind it.

So instead of the bowl connecting the two of us as I intended, it’s probably just one more thing that got packed and moved. If it’s being used at all, tarnished thing that it is, each time it’s rung, its vibration and pitch don’t tie anyone to my story.

And the more I realize how much that fact bothers me, the more it seems related to the Buddhist training principle I learned on the retreat.

Because, really, my little sense of offense has nothing to do with what I was giving, but rather with what I intended to take. Though my actions were giving a gift to my friend, some part of my thoughts were all about me. Instead of “I give this to you,” it was “I want something from you, and getting it involves me putting this into your hands.” When we give in order to be appreciated, we often are taking what is not offered.

* * *

Once I saw this clearly relative to the bowl, I started to see it everywhere – in my dealings with my children (I get unhappy when I give them my Saturday afternoons, but they don’t clean up the kitchen), with my co-workers (I resent covering for them when they had sick kids, if they don’t cover for me when I was out), with my friends (I make time for them, but they don’t reciprocate as I want them to) –everywhere. It became disturbingly clear how often I was interacting with the world not simply out of a sense of love and generosity (though there was some of that to it), but out of a desire to control things – to get what I wanted by being perceived as generous and loving. I’d attached my wanting to the objects and devised ways to give them in order to assure myself some benefit.

Have you ever given a gift to someone, and then been disappointed by some aspect of the person’s response? When you gave a check to a nephew who was struggling to pay his college tuition, perhaps he spent all the money on iTunes, loading up on Italian goth metal music. When you gave your daughter a pendant for her birthday that you received decades ago from your grandmother, perhaps she looked at it briefly, said, “eh,” and dropped it on the table behind flashier stuff. Have you ever said (or thought) to one of your children, “You should do X for me because I gave birth to you/put you through school/fed you/sheltered you/whatevered you?” I have. And I was trying to take something that was not offered, just because I’d offered something – in theory – “freely” at some point in the past.

* * *

The Buddha taught Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine, and Jesus warned against doing alms before men.

* * *

All of it, really, is simply a lack of letting go, a giving only half-completed. There is no giving without letting go. So long as I attach strings to the gift, there is neither giving nor gift.

So here’s my resolve: in giving, to give freely and to let go; in receiving, to receive only what is offered by family, friends, and existence.

* * *

…the world offers itself to your imagination.

-- Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

A quick note on going veg, three years in...

2009-02-07T14:42:00.004-07:00

In response to a couple of questions from a couple of friends recently, I’ve been reflecting on my experience as a vegetarian. I went back over the posts I’ve written here, and as I looked at them, I realized that my experience has been different than I anticipated. The reasons I stopped eating meat are not the reasons I do not eat meat today. The practice has, to borrow a phrase from pgk, “opened up possibilities” that I didn’t expect.

As I wrote here, I stopped because once I learned the details, on a visceral level I couldn’t participate, even indirectly, in industrial agriculture practices. At the same time, I realized on an intellectual level that I’d be treading more lightly on the earth if I ate the plants, rather than the plant-eaters. As I wrote here, about a year after I stopped, I began to consider the similarities of consciousness in animals and humans.

Since then, I’ve found something else – more about myself than about animals.

When I was eating animals, I did not allow myself (quite literally, albeit subconsciously) to consider them as beings.

There is something about the way my mind works when it is in acquisition mode – I’m easily prone to unconsciously pursuing my wants, and as I do, I tend to objectify whatever it is I’m seeking. Placing animals outside of the category of “object to fulfill hunger” didn’t exactly turn off the basic grasping impulse, but over time, I think it has diminished it a lot. I no longer think of pigs as pork, cows as beef, deer as venison, chickens as Popeye’s ingredients. That’s not to say that I necessarily feel particularly warm and fuzzy toward them – I tend to think of chickens as small, feathered reptiles and domestic cattle as genetically mutilated deer. I allow that I feel a fondness for pigs, but those who know me well would insist that’s because of a basic affinity for mud.

But even without any particular attachment to them, I find myself recognizing in them and their lives, a fellow-feeling, one that simultaneously blurs the definitions of consciousness, identity, and self, as it expands the universe of “you”s available for relationship.

Might it be possible to open to that possibility while eating meat? I don’t know. To my knowledge, there isn’t an official rule book that says “no awareness of animals as beings without vegetarianism.” But for me, it would be hard to get from where I was then to where I am now without the vegetarian boat to get me across the river.

So the reasons I stopped: to decrease, if only by one person’s diet, the appalling suffering caused by industrial agriculture and to lighten earth’s load a little bit.

What I didn’t expect, or even reasonably expect to expect: that I’d find my understanding of self and other, me and you, changing so deeply as a result.

Yeah – there’s other stuff, too: I have more energy, I get better nutrition, I found weight loss and management a lot easier than before. Those things were nice discoveries, particularly once I figured out how to get the protein I needed to stay active. But the life-changing part is seeing consciousness –seeing god – through the eyes of a German shepherd in the back of a pickup, in the ear-twitches of a doe and fawn shuffling through leaf litter beneath live oaks in search of acorns, in the jittery reptilian stare of a lizard pausing between zigs and zags on sun-hot rocks.

Book Blink -- In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915-1965 by Alan Watts

2009-02-02T21:25:00.004-07:00

Somewhere in my psyche, there is a sense that book reviews should be something substantive, something constructive, something profound.

Somewhere else in my psyche, there is a recognition that I'm never going to write such a thing.

So here in the blog part of my psyche, I'll try out something else: when I finish reading a book, I'll post a Book Blink. Nothing as substantive as a book review. More like a thought upon finishing a book.

So here's tonight's:

In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915-1965, Alan Watts, New World Library: Novato, CA; 1972. 384 pgs.

I picked up the book because I love Alan Watts' exquisite articulation of Buddhist experience that I've found and followed in podcast form during the past several months. It took unexpected effort, though, to finish the autobiography.

Reading it, I realized two things. First, Watts' exquisite descriptions of satori and karma and impermanence and discrimination and interconnectedness and identity are as much an artistic rendering as an oil painting of a sunset. While the painting can remind me of a memory of an experience of a sunset, I usually admire the painting less for what it depicts and more for its intrinsic existence and the mind to which it provides a face. And while I love verbal expression above almost any other art form, I usually don't mistake the art for the thing. But maybe I have done so with dharma books, which I consume in large quantities. Watts' words, a bit like sirens' songs, are beautiful enough that I'm almost willing to lay aside the journey and retire to the island of his descriptions, instead.

Which leads me to the second realization I had while reading In My Own Way: Watts seems to talk a lot about rejecting spiritual discipline. At a couple of different places in the autobiography, he speaks warmly of Jiddu Krishnamurti's "no path, no approach" approach.

Was I practicing yoga? If so, why? I replied that this was my problem: I could not do any systematic or formal meditation because I had pondered too long his own reiterations of the point that methodical spiritual disciplines are merely highbrow ways of exalting the ego. Aiming at unselfishness is the most insidious form of selfishness

Thereupon Krishnaji picked up two cushions from the couch and said, "Look. On the one hand there must be the understanding that there is nothing, nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing you can do to improve, transform, or better yourself. If you understand this completely you will realize that there is no such entity as 'you.'" He then moved his hands from the first cushion to the second, and went on, "Then, if you have totally abandoned this ambition, you will be in the state of true meditation which comes over you spontaneously in wave after wave after wave of amazing light and bliss."

p. 112

This, of course, is a path of "no path," which is definitely a path, albeit a pathless one.

Get it?

Throughout the book, Watts seems to acknowledge (but only tacitly) that discipline actually does matter -- not because it produces insight so much as because it prepares the disciple by eliminating all of the other obstacles to insight -- including the disciple's own belief in discipline as a path.

A criticism: the book might have benefited from a stronger editorial hand. Apart from the dharma aspects of this relatively non-dharma book, as a memoir, it seems a bit more self-indulgent than historical. It's a very fine line to walk, presenting the style of a life and the stories of a life from the hand of the one living it. But the reason I had to work to finish the read was to convince myself that there was value to plowing through a fair amount of Watts' self-congratulatory "I'm not like the poor run-of-the-mill fools out there" musings.

Apart from that, though, I found the content of the book valuable. First, it connected a number of dots that I'd picked up from odd podcasts with respect to Watts' extensive knowledge of not only Eastern philosophy, but also Christianity (turns out he was an ordained Episcopal priest for a time); his discussion of Christianity as an outsider (his letter resigning his ordination and separating himself from Christianity is included in the book, together with some poignant correspondence that resulted from that letter). Second, the book tells of his interactions with the apparently very small world of the first Western flowering of the dharma in the 1950s and early 60s in the US -- from Krishnamurti at Ojai to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard to Shunryu Suzuki and Aldous Huxley in California to the founding of Esalen near Big Sur. Learning enough to put them in order makes it easier to remember who fits where and how their ideas relate and differ.

So I'm glad I've read the book. With Watts' historical framework, I have a better sense of order and relationships from an era that ended shortly after I was born. With his account of his attempts to fit a traditional religion's model, I have a different perspective on my own related struggles. With his sirenic renderings of satori, I have a kind of beauty that I instinctively want, even if it is one that, like Odysseus, I both desire and resist, tied to the mast with unstopped ears.

* * *

He gets all of this, of course:

My own work, though it may seem at times to be a system of ideas, is basically an attempt to describe mystical experience – not of formal visions and supernatural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings. In this I set myself the same impossible task as the poet: to say what cannot be said.

p. 5

Ideas Welcome

2008-12-22T19:16:00.002-07:00

Two details regarding the Spirit Rock retreat last week that I haven’t figured out at all:

First, I experienced a lot of anticipation leading up to the retreat. I probably talked too much about it with colleagues and friends, but they were patient and indulgent with my unfocused animation. As a yoga teacher persuaded me a long time ago, it’s often best to set aside expectations before embarking on a new sort of experience. But I didn’t manage that overly well this time.

To get to Spirit Rock for the start of the retreat on Wednesday, December 10, I had to catch a flight from DEN to SFO. Nothing terribly unusual about that. I get to the airport in the morning, check through security, find the gate, login, and field last-minute office work by email. The gate attendant calls the boarding sequence. I board, find my seat, and settle in.

And sitting there on the airplane, my mind shifts a bit, and I see everything from an outsider’s perspective – to borrow Oliver Sack’s phrase, like an anthropologist from Mars.

No, wait. That’s too cold. More like the first-time-appreciation of Miranda’s “…brave, new world…” phrasing, before Huxley turned it dark and naïve.

The people walking down the center aisle of the plane are a varied lot, each remarkable, each strange, each new. That they are embodiments of consciousness is remarkable, strange, and new. That I can see them is remarkable, strange, and new.

After a time, the sense subsides, leaving new tracings in my mind.

How? Why? Exactly what?

Couldn’t tell you.

Second, as I mentioned in a previous post, three days into the retreat, I woke, showered, walked to the meditation hall and sat the pre-dawn meditation. When the bell rang gently, I got up, left the hall, put on my shoes, and began walking down the hill to the dining hall.

As I walked on a little dirt path down the hill, my sense of self turned suddenly transparent, and I saw from the perspective of something other than Sean. Not that there wasn’t a Sean – he was there, but he wasn’t the perspective I was seeing from. He was the perspective that something was seeing through. That perspective was filled with quiet, abiding joy – joy at the cold air, joy at the diminishing cramp in Sean’s neck, joy at the emptiness before eating, joy at the peace of the retreat, joy at Sean’s sore right knee, joy at the slanting sun, joy at the cloud of exhaled air.
The sense sustained itself for a time, then subsided.

It’s hard to find the right words for the completely natural sense of seeing through the self of that experience.

* * *

Ideas or references to others’ ideas about such experiences are welcome.

Red pill

2008-12-19T17:24:00.001-07:00

In reflecting on my few days at Spirit Rock last week, I have to allow that I spent most of the nine or so sitting sessions each day in various degrees of discomfort, generally increasing from the first day to the second, from the second to the third. And also generally increasing from early morning to late morning to afternoon to evening.

Recounting this fact to a friend elicited this question: “Why would you think positively about such an experience?”

In listening to a dharma talk recording this evening, I think I heard an approximation of an answer to that question: it’s possible to reach a point where you’re no longer afraid of being afraid. You’re not averse to feeling aversion.

* * *

During the retreat, one of the teachers, Mary Grace Orr, read the following poem, though I don’t remember who she said wrote it. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, it doesn’t lend itself to google searches:

What is is
Is what I want –
Just that,
But that.

Winter Haiku

2008-12-19T17:15:00.001-07:00

Frog creaks at sundown,
Dry-throated; brown grass, acorns
Await winter rains.

Word-less-ness: Being Silently

2008-12-17T20:46:00.000-07:00

Three days in to a five-day meditation retreat, this was my situation:

I’ve taken and lived a retreatant’s version of the Five Precepts: no harming any living being, no taking what is not offered, no speaking, no sex, no intoxicants.

At three days of silence, I’ve lived wordlessly for longer than I’ve ever done since I began talking at (my mother reports) six months of age.

The days are filled from before dawn to long after sundown with sitting and walking meditations, alternating. All in silence. After the first two hours on the first day, sitting meditation becomes progressively more uncomfortable – excruciating, if you listen to my ever-suffering mind. Briefly, the lotus blossom opens and transcendent clarity opens without notice, without words. It sustains and then subsides, its space and openness re-cloaked, re-filled with the muck of pain and suffering.

Late in the afternoon of the third day, I take a pen and write this note to my meditation teacher:

Howie,

I’m a bit frustrated with myself. I had one of those peak experiences this morning, and I spent the rest of the day in aches and pains and aversion and samsara.

Is this really the path? Does it get easier?

Sean

I fold the note and pin it to the section of the bulletin board for notes to Howie, and I go outside for a period of walking meditation.

The simple framing of my situation in words reignites my conceptual mind enough to allow me to see a space between the seeing and the suffering. My suddenly-word-re-enabled mind crafts responses from Howie to me:

Sean,

Yes, it’s the path. Easier? No.

Duh.

or

Sean,

Yup. Now go back to meditating.

I resolve to retrieve the note, as the very forming of the words has created the space I needed between the pain and the suffering. When the bell in the courtyard signals the end of the walking meditation, I return to the bulletin board and find that Howie has already collected the note. Ok. I return to silence and wordlessness.

The next morning, I find his response folded around my note, both pinned to the board. His note, of course, is much kinder than any I’d have written to myself:

Hi Sean,

Some days are dukkha days. Some days are sukkha days. Learning how to find our composure with both is the way… The by-product is more ease and consequently more pleasure. Hang in there. It is actually a sign of deepening when things get crazy.

Metta,

Howie

A most kind response to a problem that had resolved itself as soon as words were reintroduced into my mind.

* * *

I’m fascinated by the wordlessness of my time there. I became acutely aware several times of how much word-ing intervenes between experience and comprehension, how much dualistic word-ing shapes experience to fit dualistic models and understandings.

The longer I lived in silence – even for just the few days I was there – the quieter the word-ing part of my mind became. That was useful as it allowed me to see a bit more clearly what words would otherwise have obscured. But when the word-ing part of my mind subsided, I lacked the usual tool set that allows me to maintain a separation between my body’s pains and my mind’s suffering.

Makes me wonder what might be built with intention and awareness in such a space.

Buddha, Archetypes, and Coloring Books

2008-11-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:

Archetypes are, according to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behaviour.
…

The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to all humanity, upon the foundation of which each individual builds his own experience of life, developing a unique array of psychological characteristics. Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and more difficult to apprehend. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behaviour, images, art, myths, etc. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behaviour on interaction with the outside world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes (November 28, 2008)

* * *

In the religion I grew up with, trying to live in alignment with divine commandments is a pretty central feature. Commandment-style living starts with the assumption of a dictator-god, ideally, a benign and altruistic one. Mind you, I’m not saying that God is so, only that commandment-style living depends on the assumption. If we already hold that assumption, then as we interact with God we come away with commandments.

My experience with God, though, is that while I come to God with a coloring book and nicely drawn lines, God often enough colors outside the lines. When I’m paying attention, sometimes I see the coloring and I see the lines, and I say, “Oh – God has colored a bluebird.” True, when I look a little bit more clearly and honestly, I have to admit that the blue doesn’t stop at the edges of the bird lines on my paper. If I had different lines on my paper, it might look more like a flower. And, truth to tell, if I were to disregard the lines entirely, I’d probably conclude that the blue that God has colored looks a lot more like the sky than a bird. But I have a paper with bird lines on it, and they matter to me, and God has colored things blue, and I find a bluebird.

* * *

I sit in meditation. At home, I sit in a pretty sparse place. No altar, no incense, no statutes, no pictures.

My mind, as usual, flips and flops from one thing to another until jumps aboard a train of thoughts. It rides that rail for as long as it can hide from the “Hey! I see that!” part of my brain. When the mind-escape gets spotted, instantly, I’m off that particular train and back to the space between thoughts until off I go on another one.

Despite the spartan quality to my meditation space, I indulge myself one way: every now and again, when I’m having a particularly challenging time maintaining my focus, I allow myself to slip my mind into the Buddha – I let myself imagine that the “sean”-I drops away and the Buddha-I sees through my eyes. To write it out sounds artificial, and I suppose that it is from a perspective. To write it out sounds magical, and it really isn’t – at least it isn’t any more magical than identity itself.

But when I do this, I find a profoundly still and peacefulness that exists in every moment that I hold this mind-stance. Of course, that usually isn’t very long, as my monkey-mind starts scratching an itch, mentally or physically, until I’m lost once again on an ocean of thoughts.

* * *

Is the Buddha-sense and the stillness that comes from it just God-coloring in and on and over the Buddha-shaped lines of my coloring book? Is there a Buddha-archetypal built into my mind-culture? How does the form of the Buddha in my head make it easier for me to experience peace?

The story of the birthday of the world

2008-11-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

From

Speaking of Faith
Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the einsof, the source of life. And then in the course of history, in a moment of time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the holy darkness as a great ray of light.

Then there was an accident. And the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke, and the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousands fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. The whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again, and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world.

This task is called tikunolun in Hebrew. It’s the restoration of the world. This of course is a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, and all people yet to be born. We are all healers of the world.

This story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you. That’s where our power is. Many people feel powerless in today’s situation. It’s a different way of looking at our power.

I think that we all feel that we’re not enough to be able to fix it. That we need to be more, more wealthy, more educated, somehow different than the people that we are. But according to the story, we are exactly what is needed.

What if we were exactly what’s needed? What then? What if I were exactly what is needed to heal the world?

Bardo

2008-10-19T21:34:00.000-06:00

It seems I’m dying again.

* * *

This morning, before getting on the current flight to Charlotte NC, I had a few minutes between packing and the time I needed to leave for the airport. The dog wanted some company in the backyard, so we went out together. He sniffed his way around the usual scent paths. I wandered up to the tangle of blackberry canes at the back corner of the yard. The bird netting lay where we’d put it months ago to protect the ripening berries from the flocks of starlings and the endless appetites of squirrels, but instead of covering the tops of the canes, now it was embedded deeply in the thicket. Lots of canes had grown sunward, thin tendrils that easily grew through the netting, now branches several feet long and a couple thickened enough to tear through a strand or two of the net on their own. The netting did serve its purpose – I’d guess this year we picked about 70 lbs. of blackberries.

I began pulling the netting off the canes. I lifted, unsnagged, ripped, and generally hand-worked the netting away, one cane at a time. It’s a task I left too long one year, and when the sticky, wet snow of autumn came early, it stuck even to the fine netting that covered the canes, the weight of the snow flattening both netting and canes into a broken mess that took the canes a full year to recover from. So this warm, sunny morning halfway through October, I looked at my watch and settled into the task.

As I attended the canes and nets, I found two stems of berries that I’d missed before. They were overripe and sweet, fermented enough to be fragrant. They stained my fingers and tongue.

I resumed de-netting.

Pulling the last of the netting from the canes, I wondered whether it was too early to prune them. I usually wait until a warm day before or after Christmas. Sometimes I’ll weave a wreath from them. But this time, as I thought about them and the pumpkins that have begun to appear in doorways in our neighborhood, a vision/notion of a cane-man began to form. A scarecrow with tangled weavings of blackberry canes for a head, for hands. The tiniest tartness of the last berries still on the tongue.

The canes now free, I bundled the black netting, rolled it tighter, and took it to the trash cans in the garage.

Sunlight, Autumn, and Darkness

2008-10-17T05:27:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, the array of life labeled as sean shifted from one pattern to a different one. Each pattern is a familiar counterpoint of the other.

Sometimes, I love brightness and sunshine.

Let me amend that – sometimes the array that is sean responds most strongly to the sharp clarity, warmth and vibrancy of sunlight. I drink it in, elated, brimming, joy-filled at the seeing it enables.

But in my life, the inverse of loving sunshine is not loving darkness. It’s hating – hating darkness, being dissatisfied with sunshine, frustrated by my own incompetence, disappointed with what I get from loved ones, angry at opponents. If I loved darkness, I’d be set. But that isn’t the way my experience has worked.

But in the midst of hating darkness last week, I was blessed with a few minutes of clear sight. As so often happens, it was not my own sight, but my teacher’s.

* * *

Here’s the question she put to me: “Why is it I can be open and kind to yoga students who respond to my actions with defense mechanisms appropriate to their level of development and experience, while I respond to my family members with contraction and dissatisfaction when they respond to my actions with defense mechanisms appropriate to their level of development and experience?”

The question didn’t draw me out of depression – not immediately. My usual experience with depression is that it just takes a while. But her question did, suddenly – startlingly – turn the light of awareness onto my own responses.

I’ve mentioned this most recent experience of depression to several people now. Each has asked me, “Did you see what triggered it?” That’s good cause-and-effect, scientific thinking: find the cause, eliminate, avoid, or counteract the cause, and by so doing, change the effect. But here’s the thing: depression doesn’t come via an announcement. It doesn’t arrive via a physical manifestation, like a big zit appearing on my forehead, a piano falling from the sky. I don’t blame my friends for asking the question the way they did – talking about “depression” as if it were a thing separate from experience, from existence, actually encourages that sort of thinking. But for me, depression is an after-the-fact label that I apply to sift meaning from the perpetual swirl of thoughts. The labeling is an exercise in mindfulness. So there is no separation between experiencing the dimness of autumn’s lessened light and the lowered energy it engenders in my body-mind. They both, simultaneously, are. But depression is a useful mindfulness label nonetheless, because it allows me to perceive the texture of the mind behind the thoughts. And that influences both the sorts of experience/thoughts that can display on that canvas, as well as the mind-channel/ruts that are more likely to arise from such a matrix.

So what manifested this time? A kind of tired-of-it, no-ideas-left brittleness of mind arising as our family struggles to sort out how to take teenaged boys into their school studies in ways that are either beyond their capacity or their desire. A weariness with the constant need to interpolate my world view to my loved ones’. At its most fundamental level, it was “Damn it, I want something other than this!” Which, with a bit of perspective, translated into “Damn it, I want, and wanting sucks.”

As I said, the question my teacher framed didn’t dispel the depression immediately – it just enlightened the darkness a bit, providing a rudimentary ability to see what was going on as simply what was going on. Why do I readily accept my yoga student’s defensive responses, but not my family’s? Easy: because I’m not teaching yoga for what it will get me, but for what it may give them.

So when did I assign my family to the “get-me-what-I-want” category and remove them from the “give-them-what-they-need” category? Once the question is phrased right, it answers itself.

Bless you, my teacher.

* * *

It’s finally autumn here in Denver. The leaves are changing. The sky is clouded. Sun shines fewer hours. The air and the earth absorb less heat, and they emit less heat. My mind moves from expansion to contraction. My heart is inclined to follow my head until it is lent fire from another. Then it kindles, glows, warms.

Fires, like minds, need tending.

Earth Air Fire Water

2008-10-15T21:25:00.000-06:00

Mother earth lends me her body.

Father sky lends me his breath.

I’ll return them in a bit, no overdue notices, no late charges.

* * *
The garden is mostly past its prime.

The left-behind zucchini are fat, ignored, baseball bats. The tomatoes are fading, a few green ones still hang in the cool fall air, like people waiting for the last bus of the night, not knowing it’s already left.

The carrots, though – the carrots are big and sweet and crunchy. I pull one, leaves eighteen inches long, the orange root, about six. I brush off most of the dirt and bite into it.

I’m eating Colorado’s thinnish air and Colorado’s overbright sunshine and Colorado's last-winter's snowmelt and Colorado's dirt, all woven into carbohydrates and proteins as the genetic windings of a carrot seed instructed and as the sprouted plant could manage.

Two weeks ago, I picked the last of the blackberries. They, too, were woven from the same Colorado air and water and earth and the fires of a far-off sun, but on a different loom, a different warp, a different weft.

The tomatillos came back this year as volunteers from the ones we left for the birds last year. We got more this time than last.

I crunch the carrot. The bits get small enough, and I swallow. Swallowing raw carrot always feels like giving up – in my mouth, its roughness never feels quite done. I leave it to digestive fires to get what they can from it.

They’ll unweave the weavings, some. Unbuild the complex sugars into glucose that can oxidize with adenosine triphosphate to power muscles. Free the vitamin A from the cell walls where the carrot used it as a sunscreen; leach it into my bloodstream; bathe the cells, one and all, allowing those with vitamin-A-sized holes – the retinas have lots. They'll harvest the carotene, embed the molecules into particular proteins, and put them to work processing photons into electro-chemical signals that can trigger nerve fibers. Those, of course, run into a brain and a mind that has come to think certain orange-colored taproots are worth munching.

And so Colorado earth and air and water and fire come to see themselves.

Off the mat -- Dreaming up obstacles

2008-10-07T09:58:00.000-06:00

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali lists seven different practices that “settle” consciousness. One of them is reflecting on insights culled from sleep and dreaming. (I:33, 38)

I’d have to be pretty oblivious not to note the trend in my dreams the past couple of weeks:

Driving into the wilderness on a familiar road, I find the way getting unexpectedly steeper and steeper. Finally, I have to stop and retreat to keep the SUV from toppling backwards and down.
Practicing yoga, my poses are disrupted by some thing’s fingers and then hands pressing up, through the floor and the carpet, like weeds. As I continue, the weed-hands continue to emerge – arms, obstructing the poses, entangling my limbs.
Searching in the basement of a building for a way into the inner-most part. When I finally find the way, it is doll-house-sized, and absurdly smaller and more narrow than I could possibly fit. Nonetheless, I start trying to puzzle out how I can get in.

* * *

Yesterday, I read this, from a dharma talk by Adyashanti:

Ego is a movement. It’s a verb. It is not something static. It’s the after-the-fact movement of mind that’s always becoming. In other words, egos are always on the path. They are on the psychology path, the spiritual path, the path to get more money or a better car. That sense of “me” is always becoming, always moving, always achieving. Or else it is doing just the opposite – moving backward, rejecting, denying. So in order for this verb to keep going, there has to be movement. We have to be going forward or backward, toward or away from. … As soon as a verb stops, it’s not a verb anymore. As soon as you stop running, there is no such thing as running – it’s gone; nothing is happening. The ego sense has to keep moving because, as soon as it stops, it disappears, just like when your feet stop, running disappears.

When we really let it in and start to see that there is no ego, only egoing, then we start to see ego for what it really is. This produces a natural stopping of a pursuit toward or a running away from something. This stopping needs to happen gently and very naturally because, if we are trying to stop, then that is movement again. As long as we try to do what we think is the right spiritual thing by getting rid of ego, we perpetuate it. Seeing that this is more of the same egoing will allow stopping without trying.

Emptiness Dancing: Selected Dharma Talks of Adyashanti, Open Gate Publishing: Los Gatos, CA, 2004, p. 106

And last night I dreamt this: Driving through the red-rock deserts of western Colorado and eastern Utah, I’m trying to get to a destination, and my car breaks down at sunset. I decide to proceed on foot, but it’s moonless and dark. I go to store after store, looking for one that has flashlights for sale. I can’t find one. As I’m walking from one store to another, I catch sight of a man with a twisted, spastic body, lurching inch-by-inch across a parking lot on the knee of one leg, the heel of the other foot, the elbow of one arm, the hand of the other. He’s glistening with sweat. I don’t stop to help because, I think to myself, “he seems to be making decent progress.”

* * *

The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.
--Tao Te Ching

Bright Compassion

2008-09-23T20:23:00.000-06:00

For Jessa

I read this in Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology:

Living with compassion does not mean we have to give away all our possessions, take in every homeless person we meet, and fix every difficulty in our extended family and community. Compassion is not co-dependence. It does nto mean we lose our self-respect or sacrifice ourself blindly for others. In the West we are confused about this point. We mistakenly fear that if we become too compassionate we will be overwhelmed by the suffering of others. But this happens only when our compassion is one-sided. In Buddhist psychology compassion is a circle that encompasses all beings, including ourselves. Compassion blossoms only when we remember ourself and others, when the two sides are in harmony.
Compassion is not foolish. It doesn't just go along with what others want so they don't feel bad. There is a yes in compassion, and there is also a no, said with the same courage of heart. No to abuse, no to racism, no to violence, both personal and worldwide. The no is said not out of hate but out of an unwavering care. Buddhists call this the fierce sword of compassion. It is the powerful no of leaving a destructive family, the agonizing no of allowing an addict to experience the consequences of his acts.
Wherever it is practiced, compassion brings us back to life.

pp. 32-33 [boldfacing added]

Off the mat -- Why Practice Yoga

2008-09-19T17:48:00.000-06:00

A yoga teacher recently began a class I attended by saying that he’d run across an idea in his vocational rehabilitation study that he strongly disagreed with. He read:

Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventually. Most of us will live part of our lives with bodies that hurt, that move with difficulty or not at all, that deprive us of activities we once took for granted or that others take for granted, bodies that make daily life a physical struggle.

--Wendell, S., “Toward a feminist theory of disability,” Hypatia, 4, p. 104 (1989)

“That may be true of people outside of this studio, but it’s sure not true of people who practice yoga.”

He said this to a room of 30-35 people, most of them in their twenties. I wondered for a few moments whether he noticed the age distribution of his class. And, if he did, I wondered how he would have accounted for the fact that there were few people in their thirties, and only one or two of us in our forties there.

The teacher was, I’d guess and as you might well have imagined, in his mid-twenties.

* * *

Aversion, attachment, delusion.

The Buddha taught that these three actions of our minds create and perpetuate suffering. The Buddha’s excellence lay not in finding a remedy for a life-scarred, pain-ridden, capacity-constrained body, but in finding freedom inside such a body.

Is a right hip joint with limited rotation a cause of suffering?

Is not being able to fly?

Yoga is a blessing. Within the context of a declining physical capacity, within the context of a limited range of flexibility, of a diminishing amount of strength, of a decreasing stamina for endurance, yoga allows us to blossom. In degrees, it does reduce pain, increase strength, advance flexibility, improve endurance. But if that is all there is to the practice of yoga, it is a band-aid on a heart attack.

Despite faithful practice, bodies age and die. Krishnmacharya died. Paramahansa Yogananda died. Vivekananda died. Gandhi died. Their yoga, as profound and committed as it was, did not save them from aging, decrepitude and death.

* * *

Asana, which we translate into the word “pose,” in the Yoga Sutra actually means “seat.” Patanjali did not seem to intend asana practice to be much more than the physical preparation needed to enable the yogi to sit quietly in meditation. That’s not to say that we should only practice asana for the purpose of enabling us to sit quietly. Much has been discovered and developed about the practice of yoga since Patanjali’s times. But it does stand as a reminder that yoga is about much more than a perfect body or a pain-free life. Over the past few years, I’ve come to realize that my meditation practice seems to bleed off the meditation cushion (actually, I use a block) and into every part of my life. As that has happened, I’ve come to appreciate Patanjali’s formulation of asana practice more. Asana practice is precisely to prepare us for our meditation practice – which practice is all of life.

The very definition of an asana practice is moving and stilling a body in a context of space and gravity. That physical embodiment is entirely defined by limitations. What is Warrior 3 pose other than an expression in and through the limitations of a particular body’s strength, flexibility, and endurance? Absent the limits, the pose isn’t a pose. Utkatasana, like lots of other yoga poses, quickly saps us of strength, of endurance. Though we often get entranced by discovering a deeper reserve of strength, of prana, a deep enough pose will never last more than a few minutes.

When I was a runner, I loved increasing the distance that I’d run. It was always a bit of a balancing act, because my mind could outrun my body, and I often found myself injured to one degree or another. One day as a part of a physical check-up, I was put on a treadmill for a heart check. The nurse wired me up, and started me running at an easy pace – well within the tolerances of my running practice. Trying to be helpful, but tinged with obvious pride, I told her that to get me to the point of exhaustion at that speed would take at least a couple of hours. She looked up from her equipment and smiled slightly, saying that this would take no more than fifteen minutes. I mentally shrugged to myself and proceeded into my mind thinking that I’d prove her wrong. After a couple of minutes at that level of exertion, she didn’t increase the speed any, but she increased the angle of the treadmill by a few degrees. A couple of minutes later, she did the same again. And a couple of minutes after that, I couldn’t run any longer.

I’d been living so comfortably within the confines of my own capabilities that it had never occurred to me to that I’d identified those conditions with the entire potential of existence. Nor did I have any idea of how short a distance there was between my relative ease and comfort and completely impossible physical experience.

Asana practice puts us into situations at the edges of our capabilities. Doing that has the fortunate side effect of expanding those capabilities to a small degree, but really not much in the over all scheme of things. But that’s ok because it’s just the side-effect. The principal effect of putting ourselves into situations at the edges of our capabilities is to train the mind, to allow us to experience pain and to discover how our minds respond to pain. To allow us to experience fear and to discover how our minds respond to fear. To allow us to experience frustration and to discover how our minds respond to frustration. To allow us to experience joy and to discover how our minds respond to joy. And as we become aware of each of those experiences, we strengthen the basic practice of awareness itself.

And awareness itself prepares us for meditation.

Bless the young yoga teacher’s heart, he meant well when he promised us that our bodies would not experience pain, would not decrease in flexibility, would not lessen in strength, in endurance. He was obviously wrong, of course, but given the age composition of the class he was guiding, he wasn’t alone in his thinking. Where were all the forty and fifty and sixty and seventy-year-olds? Their bodies, I’m dead certain, knew much of pain and stiffness and weakness and misalignment. Perhaps they, too, thought that if yoga didn’t confer on them strength and flexibility and stamina and energy, they’d failed. Or perhaps yoga had failed them.

Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t yoga that failed them, but the unwise teaching that yoga, done right, was a panacea for ageing that failed them.

But eternal youth is not the promise of yoga. The promise of yoga is wisdom, and an end to suffering. Not an end to pain.

From a dharma talk by Pema Chodron:

The first thing the Buddha ever taught was there is suffering. It’s part of the human experience. It isn’t bad. No matter what you do, no matter how much money you spend, no matter how much physical exercise you get, no matter how many face lifts, or beautiful clothes, or the right diet, or whatever, you still have old age and death. And probably a lot of other things as well.

And so this whole attitude of the whole catastrophe living, you know, of actually opening your heart, softening around the whole thing, this is what I’m getting at here. … It’s all about learning to let go, loosen up, relax. And it’s never too late. I want to say that again and again. No matter how far you are into clutching and grasping and yelling and screaming and stamping your feet and throwing things, it’s never too late. You can never lose it. Because now is the moment. You just catch yourself right now.
-- The Pema Chodron Audio Collection, part 1.

More on Lucid Dreaming

2008-09-10T11:12:00.000-06:00

A passing and recurring thought about lucid dreaming: if your experience is like mine, lucid dreaming arises seemingly spontaneously at some point in your life, then it subsides for a long time – for me, it subsided for many years. Then perhaps you have an experience or engage in a mind practice that touches the connection between awareness and subconscious, and it arises again for a time. Then it subsides again. It seems binary – on or off. Mostly off.

For me at present, it’s currently off.

At least mostly.

Mostly? Yeah. I’m beginning to question the binary nature of it.

Recently, I’ve been getting up early more or less consistently to meditate – earlier than I have done for a long time. I still haven’t mastered the getting-to-bed-on-time part to make this an easy process. The net result is that at least part of the time I’m meditating, I experience sleepiness.

And that, itself, is kind of interesting. I find that even when my mind is sleepy, my awareness is just pure, undiluted awareness. Not sleepy, or anything else, so far as I can tell. Just awareness. Though I don’t stay steadily in the witnessing awareness in my meditations, my mind (me?) does stumble into the state more frequently than I/it used to do. Often on my mat. Sometimes in daily life.

What I’ve come to realize is this: that “witness” state? It’s always present. Always. It’s not only present whenever I’m awake and alert – it’s present when I’m drowsy and sleepy. It’s present in the dreaming mind the instant before I awaken in the morning, and it’s present the consciousness the instant after I awaken in the morning.

But most times, my mind is not, itself, aware of the awareness.

In this morning’s meditation, my mind switched back-and-forth between normal thoughts/ sensations and awareness. And as it switched, it occurred to me exactly how much that the shift from thoughts to awareness is like waking up, like seeing clearly the background that has always been there, is always there.

And in that moment, I realized that the experience of lucidity while dreaming isn’t any different than the experience of lucidity while “awake.”

Both conditions are pretty rare. Both seem to occur more frequently when I practice mindfulness and resting in the witnessing awareness. Both feel more than a little like a kind of curious freedom.

Retreating

2008-09-05T11:01:00.000-06:00

A week ago, I drove up to Shambhala Mountain Center for a tantra yoga-and-meditation retreat. Sally Kempton taught and led the tantra meditation sessions (of which there were lots), and Jeanie Manchester taught and led the Anusara yoga sessions (of which there were some, but not enough for my appetite).

I'll try to spend some time with my notes and write up some more in the next few days, but here are a few take-aways:

1. At this point in my life, retreats are good more for discovering obstacles and practicing techniques for engaging them than for getting some surpassing peace or whatever. Felt distinctly like hard work, and hard work of the sort that I typically avoid.

2. A wonderfully interesting question to ask whenever obstacles occur in daily life: "What would I be like without this particular thought?"

3. When breathing into the back body, we don't have to stop with the confines inside the rib cage. Breathing into the back of the heart, I find it possible to combine physical, mechanical breath with consciousness as I draw in and through the heart and into the back and beyond. Is that an approach toward deity?

4. When meditation ends by another's instruction or by a timer, rather than by my own top-of-the-ocean awareness re-arising, it can be important to take a few minutes to intentionally draw awareness and consciousness back into the body. (Yes, that sounds weird. Maybe I'll find something useful to say about it later.)

5. Mechanically, my knees sit with greater ease if I practice Half Pigeon pose on each side for a few minutes before sitting. Also, breathing into the back body and allowing the back rib cage to expand and the shoulder blades to separate on the in-breath seems to relieve the chronic rhomboid cramping that I've experienced for the past five years or so. Who knew?

6. It's easier to sit longer after the retreat than it was before, but things are more jumbled.

7. I'm still on the fence as to the utility of mantra practice for me at this stage. Sometimes it seems to help manage the meditation (when Sally led us in hum-sah meditation, I found it to be powerful and subtle) and other times it seems a distraction from the experience of Witness. Maybe I'm just not very good at it yet.

8. Tonglen meditation, especially when combined with breathing through the back of the heart, is powerful.

9. For walking relatively safe trails, star light is plenty.

In December, I've decided to spend five days at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, north of SF to see what I can see from there then.

summer haiku

2008-08-16T08:56:00.000-06:00

On blond-striped Hosta
Raindrop sparkles, slides, lets go.
Leaf lifts minutely.

Meditation Update

2008-08-08T17:30:00.001-06:00

Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it's very difficult to sense that we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance--which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is--to face ourselves. Meditation is not about some state, but about the meditator. It's not about some activity or about fixing something. It's about ourselves. If we don't simplify the situation the chance of taking a good look at ourselves is very small--because what we tend to look at isn't ourselves but everything else. If something goes wrong, what do we look at? We look at what's going wrong. We're looking out there all the time, and not at ourselves.

--Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

It’s a little more than a year since I went to my first meditation retreat – one at Shambhala Mountain Center, led by David Nichtern and Cyndi Lee – and a bit longer than that – call it 14 months – that I’ve been meditating daily.

I’ve noticed that I am often judgmental of my practice. Some mornings, sitting is peaceful. Some mornings, it’s fascinating. Some mornings, it’s jittery. Some mornings, it’s a constant battle between distractions and effort. The thing is, I (or at least what I think of as the “small-I,” the self that sometimes seems all-encompassing and sometimes seems merely an object within awareness) likes certain kinds of meditation experiences, and dislikes others. And it translates “I like this experience of meditation” into “This is a good meditation session,” and it translates “I dislike this experience of meditation” into “This is a bad meditation session.” When I get into such a mind-mode, I try to remind myself of what meditation teachers constantly say to beginners: “Ignore your particular experience in meditation. Notice, instead, the effect of the meditation on the rest of your life.”

So in that vein, here’s what I’ve noticed about “the rest of my life”: whether a particular day or week or month of meditation is pleasant or unpleasant, since I began meditating, I’ve become more patient, I seem to see things a bit more clearly than I used to, I’m happier in an equanimous kind of way. I seem to be depressed a lot less, and I’m less attached to my manic days. I am more aware of my thoughts and my actions. I’m less reactive.

While it happens less frequently, I still go through lots of “small-I” experiences – getting angry at other drivers on the road, taking offense when someone says something that pushes one of my buttons, that sort of thing. But in recent months, even those experiences have changed, and that’s what I wanted to talk about here.

I’ve begun to experience this: even when I find myself unhappy or angry or offended, or annoyed – even though I still experience all of those things – it’s like they’re thinner somehow than they used to be – less substantial, less weighty, less important, less complete. (As I write, I hunt through Hartranft’s translation of the Yoga Sutra, and find that he uses the term “transparency” in expressing a related idea (III:56) – it’s a good match for what I’m trying to express.) It’s like I can see through the experiences to one degree or another, even as they happen.

Oh, don’t get me wrong – seeing through and beyond doesn’t mean that the small-I doesn’t react. If you’d been with me a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled into a bunch of stinging nettles along a backcountry stretch of the Henry’s Fork, you’d still have heard me swear loudly at the nettles. (The nettles were more equanimous and said nothing in response within my hearing.) But the negativity of the experience was easily contained in and perceived as the experience itself, not spilling out into other parts of life or mind. As I felt the needle-sharp pain in my calves and thighs, as I felt my body pull back, I was aware that it was the small-I that was responding, and not my whole being. It was like I was existence, and existence included the pain and consequences of nettles stinging but wasn’t limited to that experience, if that makes any sense at all.

* * *

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali says that part of our experience of life includes an unconditional part – “pure awareness” (sometimes it gets translated as the “seer” or the “witness”) – and that it is not something that can be perceived directly. But he also tells us we can still perceive it indirectly, nonetheless, because pure awareness can color the mind itself, just as the phenomenal world does, also. IV:23 In other words, while the small-I can’t see the seer, it can notice when it’s obscuring the simple experience of pure awareness – like looking through a window and suddenly realizing that you can see not only the trees and sky outside, but also a reflection of your own eye, at the same time. I’ve had this experience occasionally in yoga, more frequently in meditation – the “small-I” settling down enough to see itself reflecting the pure awareness that is the awareness through and of the small-I mind, itself.

Mirrors, everywhere.

* * *

At any rate, perhaps what I’ve recently experienced as the “transparency” or ‘thinning’ of experience is simply the small-I mind becoming a bit quieter, less impressed with itself, more aware. It is truly hard to come up with the right words for this experience. But whatever the correct articulation may be (and, dear readers, feel free to suggest any ideas that you have along these lines), the small-I seems changed by the simple experience of daily meditation practices of concentration and mindfulness.

Freer, in a word.

Off the mat -- Sadhana

2008-08-04T17:53:00.002-06:00

Enough yoga people are refugees from overly structured jobs, overly organized religions, or just overly programmed existence that it's easy to think of yoga like we think of a massage or a soak in a hot tub -- something to be savored and treasured and absolutely free of all constraints. The relief it entails, alone, is worth the investment of time and money.

And when used in that fashion -- as a counterweight to the pressures and disciplines of the other parts of our lives -- there's lots of reason to resist allowing our yoga practice to turn into one more item on an ever-ugly "to do" list.

But if your experience is like mine and many of my friends' and students', there comes a time in your practice when the initial motivations start to transform and give way to others. If you started because you wanted to be a bit more fit, a bit less heavy, a bit more flexible, you might have been surprised to discover that your mind was responding to yoga as much as your body. And without necessarily losing interest in fitness, you might become more curious about how to live off the mat more in the "flow" state of mind you occasionally experience on the mat. If you started yoga because you wanted an escape from stresses and pressures of work or family, over time you might be surprised at the insights into those very stresses or pressures that occur to you in a particular pose, and you might find yourself wondering whether yoga might have more to offer your life than just an escape from it. If your interest hasn't transformed, don't sweat it -- there's really no point in arguing with a seed about when the right time to germinate might be.

But for those whose motivations have begun to transform, in yoga -- as in other parts of life -- if you keep doing what you've done, you'll keep getting what you've gotten. You reach a point where your current level of effort and action keep you where you are, but don't continue to carry you any farther. This shouldn't be a surprise to us. If we repeat the same poses again and again in exactly the same degree of extension, exactly the same degree of exertion, we won't increase strength or flexibility -- we'll maintain where we are, whether we're talking about Downward-facing dog, or Warrior 2 or Corpse. One of the cool aspects of yoga, though, is that while a particular stage of practice enables me to reach a particular point and become stable there, each stage also includes glimpses of the next. So "flow" states in my vinyasa practice start to persuade me that there's the potential for more grace in life off the mat. The peace and equanimity of my de-stressing yoga enable me to perceive the possibility of greater equanimity in life generally.

So as my perception of what is possible starts to shift, so too does my sadhana -- my spiritual practice -- start to change. I go from sweating happily on a yoga mat to discovering unexpected spiritual aspects to the practice to becoming curious about meditation. I go from being curious about meditation to sitting for a few minutes by myself. When I start sitting for a few minutes, I immediately discover how flitting and unsteady my attention is. But I also find a little bit more stability in my attention, a little bit greater concentration. As I reach the limits of what that practice level offers, I become more curious about what I might find with a more frequent and more sustained practice. So I go from sitting every now and again to sitting for ten minutes at a time, a couple of times a week. That lasts for months. I discover a greater awareness of my mind-chatter, of the potential for being aware of my thoughts. I begin to discover that I can perceive the experience of depression without pressing farther into depression. This is nothing short of a miracle, and I find my depression lessens in both duration as well as intensity. As I become stable in this level of practice, every now and again, I have glimpses of a much deeper perception -- of perceiving directly aspects of mind that I previously never noticed. And I change my practice, again, deepening the effort, increasing the discipline.

And so it goes.

But there's an easy-to-overlook risk to this kind of work. At each level of experience, there's a real risk that I'll attach to the practice itself, that even if I start simply going authentically where an experience leads, I'll derail at some point and pursue a practice because I "should" -- because conforming to my view of myself (or to my view of others' view of me) requires me to do certain things, to practice certain ways. Whenever we shift into that mode, we've moved into reinforcing an artificial sense of self, whether in my own eyes or in the eyes of others. Ego is a sneaky critter, and it's as content to hide behind spiritual practice as it is to parade around in more obvious forms. When we adopt a new sadhana for ourselves, when we change our current sadhana, when we continue a sadhana, it's always worth asking, "who wants this, and why?"

As plenty of Buddhists have discovered and taught, enlightenment happens as an accident -- it is absolutely not a product of yoga or meditation. So why practice at all? It seems that deep practices of yoga and meditation seem to make us accident-prone.

* * *

For myself, I haven't worked out exactly what the perfect relationship might be between structured discipline and letting go. Some days, it is clear that letting go is the answer. Others, that more discipline is the answer. I like to remember a comment from a Zen teacher -- I think it was Ajahn Chah -- to the effect that his students complained that his instructions were contradictory. He said that when his students were about to walk off the path to the left, he'd tell them to "go to the right" and when they were about to go off the path to the right, he'd tell them to "go to the left." The instructions only seemed contradictory to one who couldn't see the path or the students.

Some of the answer, I'm confident, is found in Krishna's instruction to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a person established within himself -- without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. (2:47-48)

This approach is, at once, both the practice and the objective of the practice -- it is a practice that enables us to let go of the insistence that the practice deliver us the objective of the practice. If that sounds contradictory, then I think you've got it.

Perhaps some of the answer can be found in the Heart Sutra's teaching that Form is not other than emptiness -- Emptiness is not other than Form. Discipline of any kind -- like embodiment itself -- involves imposing constraints on consciousness. Imposing those constraints is a wonderful way to enable perception and attention and focus. There's nothing like a hamstring at its fullest extension to enable us to feel clearly. Similarly, there's nothing like a long meditation to enable us to see how our minds twist their ways through attachment and aversion and delusion. Maybe what we need to remember in the middle of a disciplined effort is that as valuable as it may be, it's simultaneously emptiness -- nothing to attach to. If that's right, perhaps the other side is equally true -- whenever we find ourselves insisting on freedom and liberation, it may be worth reminding ourselves that it's found in and through all Form, including -- sometimes, at least -- highly structured and ascetic-looking practices that, in the end, are just being.

Nobodhi spoke to me

2008-07-19T21:26:00.000-06:00

As much as I benefit from reading them (thanks, Google Reader, for making me able to follow more blogs than I could possibly click on consistently) I don’t always remark on what I find in other people’s blogs, but today one of my favorite bloggers, Nobodhi of Nobodhis Yoga Journal posted something that seemed to speak to me not of my experience today, but rather something toward which my experience these days seems to be pointing.

Have you ever had the experience of noticing slight changes arising in some portion of your life, seeing them strengthen and grow, but rather than see them as steps along a path, you see them just as changes? But then, a bit of a sudden, you see what they portend, to what they point?

The last several months, I’ve noticed that my awareness has begun to reawaken in my asana practice. Now I know that sounds a bit strange, as yoga is supposed to be about mind as well as body, but for the past few years, my practice has been to press my mind so deeply into my body that my mind’s job has been only building and maintaining. At any rate, during the past few months, I seem to be seeing my practice from the outside of the inside, if that makes any sense. Some part of my mind finds itself no longer wrapped up (or in) the practice, but watches both my mind and my body working there. I suppose it would be accurate to say that I seem to be identifying with something other than the mind-body on the mat. And that seems most peculiar. I assumed that it was a function of my meditation practice, and perhaps it is. But rather than taking me away from the practice, it seems to have taken me into the minutiae of the practice – the feeling and distinguishing of sensation of finger bones and hand tendons pressing into the floor, the visual rhythm of my gaze swings in sun salutations, the stretching of individual muscle fibers tying vertebra to vertebra. I tried to say something about that experience in my last post on the solo practice in Santa Monica – something more about the same in my post about my photo session with barefoot bhakti. The perspective makes the practice fresh again in ways it hasn’t been for years. New. Enlivened. Freed.

I don’t want to overdo the experience of my practice these days – it’s often quite what it has been for the past few years – but it has been changing bits at a time, and I’ve been noticing the differences.

But this afternoon, as I read this post by Nobodhi, it was like wandering around comfortably in mist, and then when the mist clears briefly, you discover that you’ve actually been moving toward something.

Nobodhi – may you be healthy, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be clear.

And when you are, may you find new voice, if not for your-self, for us.

Soloing on a back porch

2008-07-16T20:51:00.000-06:00

Monday morning I found myself on my brother’s terra cotta tiled back porch in Santa Monica, CA. By the time I had finished with some early work, two of the household were out, two others still asleep. I cleared some patio furniture to the sides and began the sequence of sun salutations that I’ve repeated more than a few times. The temperature was pleasantly cool, heavy with ocean.

As the salutations progressed, I re-re-re-discovered mindfulness in solo practice. I love my daily practice in studios, my twice-a-week teaching, but I’m always surprised at how much more is available to be felt and seen by a quiet mind alone. Gazing across fingertips in Warrior poses, seeing the ground in Plank, feeling joints and tendons and muscles in my hands connected to the earth in Dog poses. Reopening energy pathways in lunges and backbends. Integrating mind and body in balances. And yet my self-hungry mind looked for glimpses of reflections in window panes, of sweat drops falling on mortar between the patio tiles.

When I finished the practice, I grabbed a patio chair cushion, arranged my legs and hands, and sat.

And saw.

And saw the seeing.

I bow in gratitude to all who cared and preserved and taught these things across the course of their centuries to mine.

Click-worthy

2008-07-05T16:04:00.000-06:00

anonymous julie wrote this:

I think it’s easier and more comfortable to continue to believe in one’s bondage than to take responsibility for one’s freedom.

here.

She nailed it, exactly.

Bhakti

2008-06-25T16:18:00.004-06:00

Few people are capable of wholehearted commitment, and that is why so few people experience a real transformation through their spiritual practice. It is a matter of giving up our own viewpoints, of letting go of opinions and preconceived ideas…. Although this sounds simple, in practice most people find it extremely difficult. Their ingrained viewpoints, based on deductions derived from cultural and social norms, are in the way.

…

If we have a relationship with another person, and we love the person but don't understand him or her, the relationship is incomplete; if we understand the person but don't love him or her, it is equally unfulfilling. How much more so on our spiritual path. We have to understand the meaning of the teaching and also love it. In the beginning our understanding will only be partial, so our love has to be even greater.

~ Ayya Khema, from When the Iron Eagle Flies

* * *

I’m holding a scissored and revolved version of what I think of as Crow Pose – an arm balance – in an asana room of Cosmic Dog Yoga, a Livermore California studio that’s under construction but nearly finished. Sunlight streams in from the west-facing windows.

“Come forward about three feet, and face this way.” She gestures. I come out of the pose, back to my feet, and move forward. I resume the pose. Now I can’t see her, but I hear.

“Extend your foot from the ankle.”

I adjust the foot.

“Now holding the foot-ankle extension, draw your toes back toward the shin.”

My peripheral vision notes that she’s lying on the floor nearby, propped on her elbows. She begins taking pictures.

The heels of my hands press into the floor. The right, unweighted, forearm begins to tremble.

“Lift the forward foot slightly, the light angle’s wrong.”

I shift. Another picture.

“Can you draw your spine and neck into alignment?”

I try lifting my neck into alignment. Maybe the neck moves a half inch, but no more.

* * *

In the world of yoga, the word bhakti is Sanksrit for devotion. It is a path toward liberation through devotion – encountering the divine as You. Not an impersonal third-person Independent Divine that we perceive as a Deist might the Kosmos. Not a first-person manifestation of Divinity as Walt Whitman conceived of Self. But rather second person – You – a relationship – a friend.

St. Teresa of Ávila wrote that her form of contemplative prayer, oración mental, “is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” This is also the essence of bhakti yoga – a relationship of worship. It is the path described in the Bhagavad Gita: “One can understand Me as I am, as the absolute, only by devotion. And when one is in full consciousness of Me by such devotion, he can enter into the kingdom of God. (B-Gita 18.55). It was Jesus’ message to his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends…”

* * *

Laurie climbs the construction scaffolding, and I hand up the cameras.

“Let’s see Triangle.”

I move through the eight or nine actions involved in building a Triangle Pose: ground back foot heel-to-toe, angle foot out 30˚; place front foot four feet ahead, align heel and toes to the front. Lift the arches of the feet, engaging the groin muscles. Extend torso and abdomen, draw front arm forward…

As I move, from above the camera clicks.

* * *

In the political circles I frequent, devotion isn’t at the top of the agenda. It does not affirm or fortify the independence of a soul, but rather the discovery of spirit in the utter interbeing of each with the other. It is not the clear, structured rationality of logic and formalism, but rather the discovery of freedom through submission, of liberation through discarding insistence on self, of coming to life by uprooting the individuality-hedgerows we’ve planted and watered and groomed. It does not bear the hallmarks of scientistic objectivity. It is, instead, a path into and through subjectivity. Not so much a “moving toward” as a self-surrender.

* * *

“Let’s try uttanasana.”

I stand, big toes touching, side by side, heels parted an inch or so. I raise my arms and gaze up to the ceiling, then bend at the waist, bringing my hands first to the floor, then to the backs of my calves, my face to my knees. I extend my spine. My face presses into my shins.

“Rotate slightly to your left.”

I shift to the left.

* * *

Part of the modern objection to self-surrender is rooted in historical recognition of Jim-Jones style cultism, “just-following-orders” war crimes, and perversely co-dependent pathologies. Those problems are painfully real, and I’m not entirely sure how to describe and contour my sense of how they differ from bhakti yoga. I suppose one could avoid those problems by confining the scope of one’s devotion to bounds set by rationality, but that very constraint seems inconsistent with the whole-hearted connection and liberation that characterizes bhaki. Perhaps there are more and less mature ways of engaging in bhakti, just as one can engage in a variety of non-rational ways of being, some pre-rational, unaware and dismissive of all that rationality has to offer, others post-rational, incorporating all that rationality offers, but wider and deeper than rationality, not confined by its limitations.

Or perhaps, though, bhakti is just stepping through a darkened doorway.

* * *

“Deepen the twist.”

“Now lift your head.”

“Draw your chin back a bit.”

I comply.

* * *

Bhakti is the part of yoga that most resembles religious practices. Consequently, it is the part that can make those devoted to a particular religious practice –and equally those opposed to religious practice altogether – distinctly uncomfortable.

In bhakti, I find joyful, whole-hearted connection. Some bhaktis love the embodiment of that connection in imagined images of divine. For me, I find it in the twisting wisps of smoke rising from a smoldering incense stick, in chanting.

Now in fairness to my specific-religion friends and to my specific-no-religion friends, if I chant Jaia Ganesha Jaia Jaia Ganesha Jaia intending to curry special favor with an invisible, portly-human-bodied, elephant-headed god named Ganesha who is particularly inclined to remove obstacles from human endeavors for those who worship him repeatedly, then yes, I’m engaged in a kind of pre-rational worship that may well conflict with a belief in a different deity that is appeased or approached through a different set of practices or with a “no-deity-no-way” policy. I get those ways of looking at the world. I lived versions of them myself for a long time. And I don’t criticize anyone who finds them useful or good or important. There is neither point nor good in rejecting what is.

But there’s a way of devotion, a tao, that is more immediate, that is neither petitioning of an independent Other, nor simply empty ritual, but that is intermeshed with consciousness in the very act of devotion itself, whatever form that devotion might take, whether burning incense or paying tithing or feeding the hungry or cleaning toilets or weaving flower garlands or painting the Sistine Chapel. And that tao dissolves everything but the devotion, both lover and beloved, both teacher and student, both subject and object.

* * *

“Navasana.”

I sit. Balance. Grasp my toes. Extend my legs. I lift my heart toward the ceiling.

“Hold it there.”

I hold.

* * *

My first experience with bhakti was singing. My earliest memory in life is sitting on my mother’s lap in a rocking chair, singing with her before bedtime. I was, I think, about 3 years old at the time. The memory remains, I’m sure, because it was the first time I recall singing dissolving into harmony – perfect fourths, if such a distant memory can be trusted. As I grew up, I sang in children’s choirs at funerals and church meetings. I sang in school choirs throughout grade school. I spent more hours singing in college than I spent in course work for either of my majors.

Singing – an activity made of breath, vibration, and mind – can be entirely self-focused concentration. But it can also be bhakti – devotion. It takes all kinds of forms, ranging from Protestant hymns in 4/4 time with rhyming lyrics sung in well-lit chapels, to textured drum-beating, tabla-droning, body-swaying kirtan chants in Sanskrit to Ganesha in a half-dark yoga studio, to Gregorian plainsong chants intoned in stone cathedrals, to OM continuously chanted in a circle of friends sitting on the floor of an office, converted for a time into a sacred space.

Or, as happens most mornings of my life, an invocation sung quietly to the field above my yoga mat before I step into that sacred space.

Really, we don’t sing to communicate information. We sing to embody feeling. We sing to embody ideas. We sing to vibrate in a harmonic dance with the universe.

When I sing, I open my heart, not to myself, not to I, but to You.

* * *

I’m in hurdle pose – balanced on my hands, arms bent at elbows, my left leg angled forward, resting on the back of my left tricep, right leg extended into the air behind me.

“Can you draw your left leg forward a bit?”

I press. Not sure whether anything moves or not.

“Engage your toes.”

“Now lift the left leg a bit.”

I lift.

* * *

As I said, for a variety of reasons –some pre-rational, some quite rational – not everyone finds the path of bhakti to be particularly appealing, so many yoga studios scale back the overtly bhakti aspects of the yoga they practice. The studios where I practice most of the time tend toward the austerity of postures, heat, and breath. But for a person inclined toward bhakti, the lack of a Shiva statute or a Buddha mural isn’t really an impediment. The basic elements of bhakti yoga are still always present: there’s the devotee, and there’s the teacher.

Exactly what it is about working with a gifted teacher, I truly don’t know. There isn’t much about the western practice of yoga asana, breath, and meditation that makes obvious the need for a teacher. Lots of people practice their yoga based on a few books, a video or two, in the solitude of their own homes. I have a home practice, myself. But nonetheless, many of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had have come through yoga, and almost always have come through teachers.

…love is the vehicle through which you can much more quickly learn the language of your own True Self. Precisely because this learning is driven by love, it happens more rapidly than sitting alone, in the corner, on your meditation mat, counting your breaths.

Ken Wilber, One Taste, pg. 209

* * *

“Do you have a standing backbend?”

I position my feet.

“Come closer to the scaffold.”

I move toward the platform.

“Face away from me, and bend back toward me.”

I turn 180˚, lift my arms to Mountain Pose, then widen the pelvis, rotating the femurs inward, creating space for the sacrum to descend. The tailbone rotates down and under, the pubic bone rotates up and forward, bringing a stretch to the quads. Spine lengthened, the shoulder girdle begins its motion up and back.

“Relax your arms – bring your hands to heart center, anjali mudra.”

I press my palms together, just above my heart. The back bend deepens. My eyes gaze upward, but now up is back. I breathe slowly, each exhale taking me more deeply back, the entire front of my body from knees to pelvis to ribcage to sternum to chin is bow-string taut, vibrating with fatigue.

“A bit more.”

I exhale again, the backbend deepens, my gaze travels across the ceiling and suddenly, I’m seeing into the inverted eyes of the photographer above and behind me in the air.

Looking into Laurie’s eyes, I feel the prana of devotion to the presence above me, and I see that the next stage of the backbend is constricted not by the limitations of muscle or sinew, but by fear and self-protection. I release them and trust the pose, the teacher, the photographer, the alignment of existence, the internal point of singleness, Shiva.

Ishvara pranidhana indeed.

The spine arches more deeply, the abdominal and diaphragm muscles release slightly, and my gaze moves from the photographer’s eyes, to what is beyond them.

* * *

Eye-to-eye, we connect: the unity, the dance, the connection, the not-two-ness of the experience – bhakti – a way of relaxing the attachment to self.

It is momentary freedom, beginning as one, discovering another, and each disappearing, leaving only the twining.

[For more pix, go here.]

James on Consciousness

2008-06-13T15:21:00.000-06:00

Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness…. There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

--William James

Arguing in circles

2008-05-21T20:13:00.000-06:00

A recurrent idea/sensation/feeling:

I look out the window of the plane I’m on and see the clouds, the still-light rim of horizon beyond the clouds, and then I see not only clouds and sky but the plane window framing them and the periphery.

And then the idea/feeling/sensation occurs: “I” am composed of the same stuff as everything around me – plane, air, light, body, mind – and “I” am not separated from what I see – “I” am the world seeing itself.

* * *

There is a phrase I learned in law school: “a distinction without a difference.” In our common law system, judges are supposed to decide like cases alike. So when considering a decision, a judge often looks to see how similar cases have been handled in the past. Your opponent proffers prior decisions in prior cases to the judge, arguing that they require a decision in her favor and against you. You scrutinize the cases for a meaningful distinction, an argument, a plausible way for the court to conclude that a decision in your favor is really consistent with the prior decisions on the same subject – they turned out the way they did because of some key aspect of them that is not present in your case. Sometimes you see and articulate the perfect argument that makes it clear that a particular case doesn’t compel a decision against you. That is called “distinguishing” your case from the prior case.

But sometimes you build your arguments as well as possible, finding all the ways in which your case is different from the cases argued by your opponent, and in the end, they just don’t distinguish your case from the prior cases. “Yes,” the judge tells you, “you have found a way in which your case is distinct from the prior case.”

“But your argument is really just a distinction without a difference”

* * *

The idea/feeling/sensation I get when I look out the plane’s window and see the clouds and dimming horizon-rim of light is that argument separating the seen and the seer is a distinction, but it’s a distinction without a difference.

Not “we” are one.

Rather: I am That.

Or as the Chandogya Upanishad tell it: Tat twam asi.

That thou art.

A letter to my teacher

2008-05-13T23:14:00.000-06:00

Dear [Teacher],

Thanks so much for yesterday’s practice.

I’m a little leery of binding the experience into the straitjacket of words, but I do want to capture a little bit of what happened and share it with you.

As we began by talking about prana and perception of it, there was a familiar feeling of basic honesty, of reality that I profoundly appreciate when I work with you. I think that that basic background makes a lot of perceptions possible that otherwise can’t happen.

One of those perceptions was this: I think I remember that in our discussion, even though I was the one who brought up the topic of the jump forward from down dog to standing forward bend, I didn’t feel as though it was my idea. And when you suggested the jump-forwards be the focus of yesterday’s practice, I felt a little resistance arise in me. It started as a “this is just the same-old, same-old” response. But the basic orientation I have toward bhakti readily overrode the initial resistance to the practice. The important part was that shortly after I felt the resistance arise, I noticed it.

As we worked on position and jump-forwards, you described the flow from feet to hands to feet to hands, comparing it to those wave toys that some people have on their desks. That visual connected to our discussions about the experience of perception of prana. And so with a jump, there came the awareness of energy from feet into legs into buttocks, and what felt like the “end” of the energy at the spine, below the back ribcage. The energy sequence-flow just seemed to stop at that point, and the legs came back down to the floor, the hips never reaching alignment with the shoulders or the hands, the energy never reaching the palms. Through that practice I perceived the energy stopping, and the place where it stopped. I had not seen that before, though I’m not particularly sure why not, as once it was seen, it seemed obvious.

For reasons I don’t understand, there is a resistance that arises there. As we talked about it, instead of the word “fear,” you suggested the word “trust,” which resonated deeply for me. Here’s why: when I admitted to myself that I no longer held my the belief set of my religious tradition, I lost a lot of the experience of trusting. There seemed so many things that were not trust-worthy. That led, quite directly, to a kind of existential despair, suspicion, separateness. I lived that way for years. But during teacher training a couple of years ago, some experiences began to draw together.

At the core of those experiences seemed to be this: the more I looked squarely at my preoccupations and my obsessions, and my insistences, and my attempts to control – the more I pulled them into the light of day – the less solid they looked. But as I began to see past them, through them, what I found was not nothing, but a surpassing warmth. Love. Describing it, I wrote to a friend, “I have come to trust existence.” I no longer felt the fear, the need to try to control, existence. So yesterday when you said, “trust,” what resonated with me was a sensation that now, hours later, I can describe as the discovery of a residue of distrust.

Something else you said also fit into a slot my mind had open: talking about the energy stopping point, you said something like “once you’re aware of it, it isn’t a block any longer.” That sounded like a familiar idea to me when you said it, but my mind twisted it a little bit into an external description of my mind seeing resistance in my body. And once I did that with the idea, while I superficially agreed with it, I simultaneously made it not true. Not that what you said was false – rather, I took a statement about unity and turned it into a statement about duality.

Last evening, I was reading from Ken Wilber’s book, No Boundaries, and he said the same thing you did:

What on the surface we fervently desire, in the depths we successfully prevent. And this resistance is our real difficulty. Thus, we won’t move toward unity consciousness, we will simply understand how we are always moving away from it. And that understanding itself might allow a glimpse of unity consciousness, for that which sees resistance is itself free of resistance.

p. 136.

And what I saw last evening is that your statement was right: a block seen is no longer a block, because the seer and the seen are not separate, and the understanding of the mind is not separate from the experience of the body. But then I constricted my perceptions from unity to duality, from a body/mind that dissolved a block by seeing clearly to a subject mind seeing an object body’s blockage. And once in that duality, the ego-stroked mind persuaded itself that it could “see” the body’s problem, as though it weren’t the ego’s own problem. And so it reinstated the block while deluding itself that it was superior to it.

What have I learned? I need to practice seeing the block while jumping forward. Drishti indeed.

[Teacher], thank you for guiding me. Sometimes it is easier for me to see clearly with your eyes than with mine.

Be well,

greenfrog

Who's breathing?

2008-05-03T21:13:00.001-06:00

For much of my life, breathing has come in two modes. The first is natural, guided by my autonomic nervous system, fluctuating with the oxygen requirements of my body, with my emotional state. The other is an act of pure, conscious will, structured, managed, controlled, like the long, slow breaths I would use to calm my mind even before I discovered the pranayama breath control practices of yoga -- or the formally structured six-count inhale to maximum capacity followed by six-count exhale evacuating all but the tidal capacities of my lungs.

Yesterday in meditation, I added a third mode – one that I don’t recall hearing about before. Usually in meditation, as my mind quiets, my breath becomes quieter and slower, just as it did yesterday.

But toward the end of my sitting time, the breath began to increase in depth and speed until it crested and held at a strong pranic pace and depth, drawing up along the back spine, circling down the front chakra sequence, up the back, down the front.

The breath itself wasn’t unusual – it was quite similar to a pranayama practice that I use periodically. What was unusual was that “I” didn’t breathe that particular breath.
It breathed me.

It arose at a time when my body manifested no obvious need for oxygen, no emotional state that linked to breath. It manifested a rather ornate structure, pace, and sequence.

And the will-powered self that thinks it’s in control of just about everything didn’t have anything to do with it. At that point in my meditation practice, as usual, that self was busy watching thoughts arise, sustain, and subside. When the breath arose, the self turned to watch it arise, watched it sustain, and watched it subside.

I’ve been breathed by a breath.

Kind of turns the entire notion of pranayama as a form of intentional breath control on its head.

Fascinating.

Off the mat -- Finding Prana

2008-04-21T23:10:00.000-06:00

(From the dharma talks to my students)

Often enough when I practice yoga, I find that I start from a low energy state. And by “low energy,” I’m talking less about the actual amount of energy available at a particular time and talking more about the way I feel and perceive that energy.

For many of us, the first time we start practicing yoga when we move into the first energetic pose – whether it’s Mountain or Downward facing Dog or Warrior 2 – as we first move into that pose, we are assembling it through will power. Some combination of our internal motivation or a teacher’s cajoling leads us to Warrior 2, raising our forward arm to shoulder height, and extending it forward from a vertical torso.

The energy that moves the arm into position comes almost mechanically and dully from our mind’s decision to position the arm.

That’s one experience of prana. And it’s not an unimportant one. In fact, it’s the one lots of people identify with, and it may be the only one that many perceive consistently, whether it’s used to get out of bed in the morning or to show up at work or to pick up the groceries or to feed the dog or to mow the lawn or to get up from the couch to go to bed at night.

But it’s not the only experience we can have of prana, by any means.

* * *

Think back to that first (or recent) practice session when moving into a pose was a mechanical exercise in willpower. Often enough, for me, the first one or two Sun A sequences of each practice feel this way.

But then something happens, though it happens gradually enough that I usually don’t notice it until it’s pretty far along: Instead of formulating the pose in my brain and then manipulating my various body parts into position, I find the pose begins to generate itself without the mechanistic effort of my brain’s control. I don’t mean to suggest that my mind is absent – it’s there and engaged and choosing poses and depth and alignment and the like – but the energy that creates the pose is no longer something applied, but rather something that begins to flow through the pose itself. It’s hard to find the right words for this.

The best way I can think of to describe it is that the energy and the pose aren’t really separated. Don’t get me wrong – it isn’t as though everything turns into energy and lightness and ease. Many yoga poses remain at or beyond the borders of my capabilities. Some are incredibly difficult, requiring all the strength and endurance and flexibility I can muster. But the energy of the pose is internal to it – not external.

I once had a teacher who gave very precise instructions for poses. One day I was working with her one-on-one and she provided the usual set of meticulously specific instructions for a pose, and I grinned and asked what would happen if I did the pose with my neck bent rather than straight. I was just teasing her a bit about being so precise, but she, quite seriously, responded, “Oh, you should try it that way.” So I did.

Now I’m not sure whether it was one of those “magic teacher” experiences or whether I was warmed up enough to be aware of things that I’m often not aware of or what, but changing the pose made a subtle but very perceptible difference in the way the pose felt energetically. It’s a practice worth trying, just to reinforce the sometimes otherwise unnoticed experiences we have with prana.

Once you’ve noticed the experience of “doing it wrong,” you can feel the difference. I put “doing it wrong” in quotation marks, because, of course, when it comes to yoga, the only “wrong” way is the “not paying attention” way. Anything that happens with full attention isn’t wrong. It may be counterproductive to a particular objective, but it will never be “wrong.” Anyway, once you come to notice the difference, you can start to move into alignment with those patterns of energy. Why would you care? As you align with the energies of your body, your moves become more fluid, your balance stabilizes, you allow prana to guide you more deeply into poses, strengthening and stretching. Once you become familiar with its flow, you can move with it, using it as a counterpoint to your own actions. A dance.

Prana in this form sometimes gets labeled shakti, sometimes as the flow, sometimes other things. But often enough in Sun A or Sun B sequences, as we move with the breath, we’ll discover not just a trickle of energy, but a river current that pulls us on an inhale to Warrior 2, presses an exhale into Chautranaga dandasana, that makes Upward facing dog not just a counterpose, but a fully expressed embodiment of the heart, shoulders, and head, energized, that draws the torso, shoulder girdle and head back into “reverse” Warrior, and from there to the grounded power of extended side angle.

* * *

Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth (nod to Laurie G. for telling me to go read it) writes that there are three basic mind sets with which we should engage in life: acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. His point is, I think, that any more negative or contracted mind sets will do us (or will lead us to do others) harm. But as I think about the three basic manifestations of prana on the mat, I wonder if Tolle’s point isn’t more fundamental than that.

Prana – energy – moves. We can accept it, enjoy it or embrace it, but if we resist it or seek to subjugate it to our wills, its flow is impeded. When that happens, often enough, I find myself completely lost in thoughts, oblivious to where I am, what I am doing. And when I do finally come back to myself, I can find energy knotted somewhere in my mind or body, the flow blocked, stuck. There are lots of mind-body sticking points.

Sometimes prana gets diverted into judgmental competitions, whether with another person in the room or with a notion of an ideal we hold in our heads. There is surely a kind of energy in such actions, but such efforts depend on a kind of cruel dualism – a separation of my Will from the prana itself, an effort to mechanize a river. When I indulge this urge, the river of prana soon reduces to a trickle, constricted around judgmental contraction. The more I separate myself from the experience of prana, the more I seek to subject it to my will, the less I find it available to me.

Yoga can be an exploration of and with prana. We can move into poses less with an attitude of conquest and accomplishment and willful ambition and more with a sense of exploration and discovery. At its best, yoga asana practice is a practice of bringing mindfulness to the experience of prana, and a pose sequence becomes an embodied dance of the experience of prana shaping the body’s position and motion and the body’s actions shaping the experience of prana.

* * *

So I tend to think of Tolle’s three mind sets as the three kinds of constructive prana experiences in practice: at the acceptance level is the mechanical application of energy to fulfill a mind-set objective. The self-aware energy experience of a pose itself is enjoyment – a kind of quiet, introspective, fun that leaves us calm, with heightened awareness, and peace. At the shakti level of experience is the free movement of prana through our bodies, drawing us from one pose to another, the movement becoming not “effortless” because there is no exhaustion, but rather “effortless” because there is no need to marshal energies to perform the pose – only efforts to channel the energies that flow, themselves, freely.

* * *

A river is not simply a channel through which water flows – it is the flowing water, itself.

We are not simply channels through which prana flows – we are the flowing prana.

We do not need to strive to gain or cling to hold prana any more than a river needs to cling to its water.

In your next practice, allow yourself to become quiet enough to perceive the prana. And then notice what you find.

What's Awake?

2008-03-19T20:47:00.000-06:00

This morning’s meditation was no more interesting than the instant the day began. I’d set my clock/radio to wake me at 5. When it turned on the very quiet radio, I went from complete, 100% immersion in the reality of a full-scale dream, all the sights and structures, concerns and interests of a dream reality to 100% immersion in the reality of full-scale waking, all the sights and structures, concerns and interests of waking reality. There was literally no intermediate state at all.

Just dream world.

Then waking world.

The only think that linked them was the consciousness looking through the mind.

Very strange.

Very interesting.

Marginalia: Love, pt. 1

2008-03-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

Blogging challenges my instinct to finish a thought before posting it, so I'm trying something new with a series of posts.

In recent months, I've been molding and modeling and wordsmithing bits a pieces of what feels like a larger thought about love. But I've not found the glue to hold the pieces together. I've been inspired by a few posts touching on aspects of love at Integral Options Cafe, She Lives Her Life In Widening Circles, musings of, Buddhist in Nebraska, ... By talks with Ed and Hampton hiking through squeaky December snows and in an odd little tavern outside Kripalu; by online conversations with many people in many places; by a yoga teacher who one day adjusted my head and neck while I lay in savasana, touched her forefinger to the center of my forehead, and whispered to me, "You are divine. I love you." But most of all, I've been inspired by my wife, who has found ways to continue to love me from a time when we shared the same visions of life and eternity along a long path into loneliness and darkness, only to have me emerge profoundly changed. Less abled in some ways, lacking beliefs that I had when we started together, much more alive in other ways.

I suppose that nothing that can be caught in a net of words will look like the ocean the net sweeps through.

So I've decided to share bits and pieces as they are, hoping for comments and community to help me understand how they relate, where they conflict, how I might explore them more deeply.

Part 1:

So recently, I was reading in Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, and in making a particular point, he tossed out the line that articulated so clearly my experience of the past several years:

"In most human beings, the heart does its work unattended. Even though its behavior governs the course of our lives, it is not understood. If at any given point in time the heart happens to open, we fall in love." p. 49.

For years, I’ve practiced yoga, and for almost as many years, I’ve found myself falling in love.

You’d expect there to be here some qualification – “not love like…” But I won’t give you any such qualification. The more I practice opening my heart, the more I find myself in love.

Sometimes it’s love of something as broad as existence itself. Sometimes it’s existence manifested in a particular person. Sometimes it’s intensely concentrated on a particular person. Sometimes it’s diffuse across a group. Many times, it’s been entirely oriented toward my wife. Sometimes, unexpectedly, I found it concentrating in men. Occasionally, it manifests itself with my dog.

But here’s the thing: it’s all love. And by love, I don’t mean only some abstract fondness. No. I mean the kind of experience you have when you let down your last defense because you realize that the other person is as completely important to you as yourself. Perhaps more.

Falling in love and acting for the benefit of all beings are not in the slightest inconsistent. I’m a living testament to the fact that it’s possible to fall in love with someone without pursuing intimacy – that it’s possible to be in love with someone without being intimate.

Love is what happens when we let down the defenses to our hearts, and when we push our mental barricades to one side.

For a long time, I didn't see the link Singer writes about. I had no idea that love could be so pervasive. But when I practiced yoga, my heart would open. Sometimes a little bit. Sometimes a lot. And I found myself feeling overwhelming love at various times. That discovery was disturbing. Didn't feeling such love require action? How I could stay married to one person and feel love so strongly for another? When I feel love, doesn't that mean I should seek to bind myself to that love, to grasp it, to preserve it, to perpetuate it, to cling to it?

With hindsight, I can see that once I started down that thought path, I began creating a world that fit the "love is exclusive" model: I began to close my heart when I was around the familiar ones. And once my heart began to close, even without me realizing it, I found that I felt less love toward those people.

But fortunately for me, those people were patient, and I wasn't in a hurry, either. I opted to wait and see, rather than act on my desires to possess new love. And I found that six months in, the infatuation would subside, and love would remain. Less a desire to control, to capture for myself; more a desire for the other's well being, empathy, sympathetic joy, and desire to extend compassion. As I wrote several months ago, learning and practicing a loving-kindness meditation radically changed my perceptions of how love worked. And finding Singer's articulation of exactly what I'd experienced provided a capstone to the realization:

When I allow my heart to open, I fall in love.

The more I let go of my insistence on being, I find not nihilism, not nothing, but a kind of love that seems woven into the fabric of consciousness, rather than embroidered on top of it.

Karma

2008-02-15T09:31:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, Kavita raised a question about karma, so I thought I'd post this to see if I can get a discussion started:

In simple terms, what does karma mean? It means that whatever we do, with our body, speech, or mind, will have a corresponding result. Each action, even the smallest, is pregnant with its consequences. It is said by the masters that even a little poison can cause death, and even a little seed can become a huge tree. And as Buddha said: "Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain." Similarly he said: "Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel." Karma does not decay like external things, or ever become inoperative. It cannot be destroyed "by time, fire, or water." Its power will never disappear, until it is ripened.

- Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

The Buddha identified karma as a volitional activity. That is, each volition in the mind is like a seed with tremendous potential. In the same way that the smallest acorn contains the potential of a great oak tree, so too each of our willed actions contains the seed of karmic results. The particular result depends on the qualities of mind associated with each volition. Greed, hatred, and delusion are unwholesome qualities that produce fruits of suffering; generosity, love, and wisdom are wholesome factors that bear fruits of happiness. The Buddha called the understanding of this law of karma, the law of action and result, the "light of the world," because it illuminates how life unfolds and why things are the way they are. The wisdom of this understanding allows us the freedom to make wise choices in our life.

- Joseph Goldstein, "Insight Meditation"; from Everyday Mind.

My view of karma: when a mind acts (by deciding, by refusing to decide, by choosing, by noticing, by ignoring, by fantasizing, whatever), it changes not only the body in which it is most immediately embedded, but the mind also changes itself. Most of the choosing that a mind does, it does without the choices ever reaching a conscious level, so it can be hard to track the operation of karma precisely. But by bringing more of our thought processes to the stage of awareness, where thoughts can be seen directly and evaluated explicitly begins to facilitate understanding of karma. Also, becoming aware of the "background noise" of a mind -- quieting enough to see directly the thoughts, memories, and etc., that seem to arise of their own accord -- allows us to begin to trace the occurrence of a particular thought or memory back to a mind-action that created the karma (causal situation) that brought that particular thought/memory to mind in the present.

As I think about all the possible thoughts, memories or etc. that could arise in this exact moment of mind, there is a reason that a particular memory occurred. Karma is the method of explaining that occurrence. Either those thoughts arise without a cause, in which case those thoughts and the world that is perceived as a function of those thoughts are inexplicable, or they arise due to a cause (or due to several causes).

Seeing karma is an exercise in interpreting the mind-events of the present by reference to prior actions. Living karma is creating future mind-events by the way we act in the present. At this point, it may be worth noting that while I refer to "mind-events," everything that we experience, we experience through a mind (though I use the term "mind" quite broadly, including all that we experience subjectively, whatever the mechanism or inclusion of others within that term).

From such a stance, it's easier for me to understand how various articulations of karma can seem (or can even be adopted by those who perceive it so) to be pre-rational magical thinking. Do I think that rain falls on my crops because I paid my tithing (or sacrificed my lamb, or gave water to the thirsty, or fasted, or chanted some mantra a thousand times)? No. I don't. But I'm confident that how I perceive the rain or lack of rain, and especially how I choose to respond to the rain or lack of rain will in the future affect my perceptions and thoughts about crops or drought. Also, I'm reasonably confident that I can trace my perceptions of and reactions to the crops or the drought by finding mind-events in the past that have conditioned those perceptions and reactions.

Finally, in this discussion, it may be helpful to make clear that my notion of "self" is not limited to the space inside my skin, especially when it comes to considering karma. An event inside my tiny little mind is as much an event of the Earth or the Cosmos as it is of the neural pathways in my brain. Modern science has done a wonderful job of helping us perceive some aspects of karma -- of how our actions affect the world around us and inside us -- but there are yet many ways that we affect the world that we haven't figured out, yet. So while I don't think it rains on my crops because I did something good previously, I'm interested in understanding more about how my actions -- even those we usually think of as "just mental actions" -- may affect the world outside my skin.

Thoughts?

Meditation Update

2008-02-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

My recent meditation practice has become consistent recently – not consistent as in “daily.” It was already that. Consistent as in the experience.

I go through a slightly-too-precious process of settling into my meditation seat.

I draw my attention to my breath.

Once I get focused on it and once I’ve drawn a lung-full of air, I begin to count breaths. Exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale. One. Inhale, inhale, inhale, inhale. One. Exhale, exhale, exhale, exhale. Two. Inhale, inhale….

After counting up to and then down again from ten, I allow the calisthenics of breath to settle into watching the mind.

I’ll get snagged on a thought or two, away for a time, then coming back to the posture, balancing my spine. Or to the breath, feeling it crossing the nostrils’ horizon.

And watching the mind, I’ll hear a voice I’ve not heard before say something I’ve not thought before. I’ll note “voice” and wonder for a moment whether it’s just an oddment of the sediment at the bottom of my mind's pool, swirling up, or whether a quieted mind, once the self relaxes, allows others in.

Or perhaps the mind will follow some other meander or two.

But then, eventually – consistently – I meet fear.

The fear I meet doesn't seem to appear in the body it wears in daily life. And for reasons I’ve not discerned, it never seems to present itself in the same attire twice.

One day it poses as a remembered dream.

One day a kabuki-styled painted dancer who suddenly turns his gaudy eyes toward me.

One day it seems a viscosity against moving deeper into mind.

Though I’ve not discerned the why, the what is getting clearer. The fear becomes a stopping place. A door that I don’t open. A place to resist and insist and exist.

Perhaps until the -isting itself relents?

Off the mat -- Pranayama

2008-02-03T19:06:00.000-07:00

Pranayama, aside from sounding cool when you pronounce it, holds a rather central place in the practice of Yoga, both on the mat and off.

If you look closely at the word, you’ll recognize the second half of it already: yama. We’ve just recently finished talking about the yamas as a group. While we used the term yama to mean ethical practices, the word means, variously, “discipline,” or “bridle,” or “control.” In the context of pranayama, it means control of prana – or energy.

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali promises pretty remarkable things to those who master the control of such energies, from spaciousness and subtle perceptions to lifting the “veil from the mind’s luminosity.” I can’t tell you a lot about the more esoteric parts of pranayama, but I have experienced enough to help you discover at least some of its magic. In fact, you’ve likely already experienced some of it for yourself. One of the things that first-time practitioners of yoga discover is that they feel different during and after a yoga practice than they do in normal life. That perception is one experience of prana. But there are lots of others.

I’m more than willing to discuss whatever aspects of your experience with prana and pranayama that you’d like, so feel free to respond with ideas, questions, comments and the like. It seems to me that even in advance of hearing your topics, in the next few Off the Mat notes, I’d like to explore at least the following discussions with you:

1. The various way we encounter prana practicing yoga, from the simplest breathing to the strongest exertion

2. The relationship of breath to yoga and breath to life in lots of its forms, from steady and still to crying to laughing

3. Basic starting breath practices to improve life off the mat, calming, energizing, focusing (think Lamaze for living)

4. Ways that we can refine our perceptions and experience and control of prana

Please let me know what you'd like to explore.

S

Off the mat -- Self-ness, the Yamas, and the Niyamas

2008-01-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

Off the mat – Self-ness, the Yamas and Niyamas

Once our minds have constructed the notion of "I," it becomes our central reference point. We attach to it and identify with it totally. We attempt to advance what appears to be its interests, to defend it against real or apparent threats and menaces. And we look for ego-affirmation at every turn: confirmation that we exist and are valued. The Gordian Knot of preoccupations arising from all this absorbs us exclusively, at times to the point of obsession. This is, however, a narrow and constricted way of being. Though we cannot see it when caught in the convolutions of ego, there is something in us that is larger and deeper: a wholly other way of being.(1)

***

We started our conversation about the eight limbs of the practice of Yoga with the discussion of the yamas, or ethical practices, first, and the niyamas, or self-discipline, second. Though they may seem pretty familiar to folk who have been taught to live ethical, responsible lives, deeply integrating them into our lives is a powerful way to begin maturing and developing both the discipline and the insight needed for liberation.

As a reminder, the yamas:

Ahimsa – non-harming
Satya – truthfulness
Asteya – non-stealing
Brahmacharya – avoiding sexual misconduct
Aparigraha – non-grasping

The niyamas:

Saucha – purity
Santosha – contentment
Tapas – intensity or fire
Svadhyaya – self-study
Ishvara pranidhana – alignment with existence

Before moving to the third limb of the path of Yoga – pranayama, or energy control – I wanted to pause to talk about a particular practice I’ve recently learned that provides an effective way of integrating the yamas and niyamas in daily life. I have a tendency to think of all kinds of instructions like them as “shoulds” or “oughts” or (worse) “have to”s. I was raised in a relatively strict religious tradition that entailed (with a lot of very important benefits) lots of emphasis on commandments. But when I start thinking of the yamas and niyamas as commandments, I fall back into my traditional understanding of myself separate and apart from the commandment-giver, and – further – separate and apart from the action itself.

Patanjali and others (the Buddha, in particular) help us to see that viewing the individual as separate from the actions of the is an artificial convention – not that it’s not useful in some regards – just that it’s no more “natural” or “right” or “complete” or accurate a picture than a variety of other ways of seeing and conceiving. The convention may be useful for some purposes, but mistaking the conventional perspective for something permanent and inalterable and “right” really limits our ability to see and understand clearly.

So if we don’t think of them as commandments of one sort or another, how should we approach the yamas and niyamas in life off the mat?

Here’s the practice – I first found it in The Diamond Cutter(2), a book by Geshe Michael Roach – and it comes in three steps, each one building on the previous one:

1. Close observation. Though the practice works with regard to any relationship, I found it easiest to start the practice by picking someone I interact with frequently. So the next time you interact with the person, make an effort to really observe the person closely. Notice what she says, what he is wearing, how she holds her body as she stands or sits, the ways he speaks and pauses, everything you can. After that interaction is done, take a minute or two to make some notes of your observations to help cement the perceptions in your mind. Approach the exercise as if you were going to become that person’s personal assistant, and wanted to know everything that you could to facilitate interacting with the person professionally and usefully going forward.

2. Go inside. The next part of the practice requires a bit more effort, a bit of laying aside your own thoughts, needs, wants, etc., but if your experience is like mine, it’s really interesting mental shift. After the first encounter with the person, and after the note-taking, the next time you interact with the person, try to imagine how that person is experiencing the interaction with you. Imagine what the interaction with you is like from her side; what he is expecting, thinking, needing, wanting, hoping for; how she perceives your words and actions; and what you can do to be of use to the person in that situation. For me, the first time I tried this, it was like pulling back a curtain and finding a window I had forgotten was there. I could suddenly see how much of my interaction with that person before then had been a stumbling combination of projecting my own wants and desires, thinking about my concerns, and unconsciously assuming that the other person was getting what I thought needed to be understood.

3. Expand your view of “me.” The third step is the natural extension of the second, though you don’t need to be in a hurry to finish with the second step. My experience is that practicing the second on different occasions with different people can reveal more than just a single insight or understanding. But once you’re ready to move along to the next step, here’s the exercise: Go through the second step again to get as clear a sense as you can of how the situation feels and what it looks like from the other person’s perspective, then imagine a bubble big enough to hold both you and the other person inside. And instead of thinking about “me” and the “other person,” think about each as a part of something composed of both of you.

From that expanded perspective, review your expectations, wants, needs, concerns, not as the limited you before the bubble occurred, but the expanded you. You now have two concentrations of matter and form, rather than just one. You now look out on the world through four eyes, rather than two. You now have two perspectives on every situation, rather than one. You now have two bodies to care for and protect, rather than one. In some ways, your connection to the new “part” of “you” isn’t as strong as your connections to the narrower self you started with before the exercise.

Those connections and interactions will take time to stabilize and deepen. Remember the first time that you tried Natarajasana (Dancer’s Pose)? The connection between your vision and the standing leg and the balancing sense took a while to “see” one another clearly enough to hold the pose comfortably. My experience with this third practice stage has taken a while to stabilize. In some ways, I still haven’t fulfilled my original expectations. But in other ways, I’ve discovered things that I never even guessed at.

Over time, you may find that for you, too, the connections between what you previously thought of as your self and the other person will strengthen. You may find yourself thinking of your skin as not the outer boundary of “your self,” but rather an interface – a sensing organ – that connects parts of you to other parts of you. And you may find that you interact more gracefully with the other parts of you than you did before.

But back to the original topic – with this practice, you’re likely to find that the more you live with this expanded understanding of “you,” living the yamas goes from a “should” or an “ought to” to something as practical as pulling your hand out of a flame. Living the niyamas will feel as normal as avoiding something you discover you’re allergic to.

One evening, my wife and I attended a reception with several friends and acquaintances. When we got to a buffet table, one friend turned to me and asked if a particular dish had shrimp in it. I’d tasted it already, and said, yes, it did. He looked carefully and seriously at it, then he shook his head sadly and said, “It just doesn’t look good enough.” I told him it was pretty good, and he went through the same actions, and said the same thing. Then after playing with me a little longer, he added with a grin, “I’m allergic. My doctor told me that if I ever ate shellfish again, I’d die, and that just doesn’t look good enough to be worth it.” He chuckled to himself and headed for the guacamole.

My friend's diet choice was a niyama – a recognition that his life would be better (or in his case, “possible”) only by choosing to forego something that might have looked just fine from the perspective of someone else. As you practice your yoga on and off the mat, you needn’t contrive to practice the yamas and niyamas. Life seems to have lots of ways to present us with opportunities to be contented or perturbed, to do harm or not, to be disciplined or lackadaisical, to speak truth or spin lies. When life gives you such a chance, just notice what happens. Notice what you do, notice how the expanded you responds. Notice everything. And then consider whether a different approach might yield even better outcomes.

What has been your experience with the various yamas and niyamas?
_________________
1John Snelling, Elements of Buddhism; from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.

2 Geshe Michael Roach, The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, Doubleday Books: NY, 2000, pp. 210-218.

Encountering another mind

2008-01-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my son and I went scuba diving off the coast of Kaua’i, which was pretty cool.

But what was better – holding a medium-sized octopus in my hands for a couple of moments. It flashed through four or five color changes in those moments, jetting water to press against my right palm that cupped its bulbous head, while a couple of tentacles suckered themselves to my left. Their velvety insistence seemed an unexpected counterpoint to the gentle effort its head made toward escape.

Perhaps humans are not the only ones whose bodies and heads seem to have minds of their own.

Solstice and darkness and shadows

2007-12-23T16:51:00.000-07:00

Meditation sometimes leads to the quiet still point of mind watching consciousness watching mind watching the waves and troughs of mind itself -- Patanajali calls this dhyana.

But not usually, and not recently. Recently, it’s been a cycling sequence of distraction and a strongly a coerced concentration I can muster. When the mind quiets, I release the straitjacket and off the mind goes, less like a puppy than a rhinoceros. And when it tires of rhino behavior, a persistent cramp in my right rhomboid creates enough affliction that I find myself corkscrewing my spine to stretch the cramp before I even perceive the intention to move. Once the Kripalu-experience-borne depth and peace subsided after my return, this has been my meditation practice.

The cramp, itself, has become something of a story, but one that is terribly bland and normal. The relevant point for this post – the acupuncturist I’ve had working on it has diagnosed me with a yin energy deficiency – yin being the female, dark, stable, solid counterpart to yang, which is the male, white, willful, airy energy. Without enough yin, he tells me, your muscles lack the energy to relax and release. Hence the relatively constant cramp.

Final piece to today’s experience – I’ve been conducting the choir and assembling the Christmas program for my congregation’s Christmas service, which we presented earlier today. What is conducting a choir? It is an exercise in maintaining energy, inspiring work, maintaining attention to black dots and lines on pages of music, being in front, in charge and on display.

Knowing that the program is set for the 9:00 a.m. service, I get up early this morning, just before 5:00 a.m., so I can meditate in peace. It’s pitch dark, and I re-remember that it’s still the longest night, not yet morning.

I’m tired enough of straitjacket dharana meditation work. And it occurs to me that perhaps its time to resume a loving-kindness meditation. I begin, as I learned, first for myself. Then I’ll get to a loved one, then a neutral one, then an adversary.

That’s the sequence. I’ve done this before. Sometimes just a repetition or two at each stage, sometimes a week’s worth of repetitions.

I practice the meditation for myself. Then I choose a loved one – a happy child of some friends who likes to be tossed up into the air. Then I choose a neutral one. Then I pause for a moment to allow my mind to draw up an adversary. My mind discards the usual suspects. They don’t seem right, less substantial this morning. Then my mind shifts a bit, consciousness shines in through a crack and I see the adversary.

I have an adversary. But it isn’t another person. It is me. Jung called it the shadow. The straitjacketing-front-and-center-choir-director part of my mind scoffs: You can’t do a lovingkindness meditation for yourself.

But, of course, I can – the meditation starts exactly that way.

I allow consciousness of shadow within me – of darkness, of inertia, of stability, of grounding, of emptiness, of yin. And I extend loving-kindness to it.

On this, the darkest night of all the year.

* * *
Jean Vanier, founder of l’Arche, has said that we will continue to despise other people until we come to see within ourselves the despicable.

Two thoughts

2007-12-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

Two unrelated items:

1. I read this today:

The Dalai Lama was teaching in front of a large audience when he received word that Mao Tse-tung had died. He paused and then started to weep. For most Tibetan people, nobody was more feared than Mao Tse-tung, yet the Dalai Lama's first reaction was to weep....

No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Boddhisattva, Pema Chodron, p. 316

I am moved beyond words by such compassion. It is that compassion that attracted me to Christianity in the first place. It is that which attracts me to Buddhism today.

2. For meditators, an interesting observation.

I've pointed out before Jon Kabat-Zinn's observation that even when the mind is depressed, the part of the mind that observes is not, itself depressed. That insight has provided me with a lot of help during the past months and years. A further elaboration of it: the part which observes my mind thinking as a 45-year-old male mind is similarly free from the construct of 45-year-oldness and the construct of maleness.

Who am I? indeed.

Give me a week (or so); I'll catch on...

2007-12-09T21:31:00.001-07:00

A week after returning from Kripalu, a yoga center in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I’m still mulling over the experience. But this evening I learned something that was taught to me at Kripalu.

Though I went there for a workshop led by Stephen Cope, the way the place works is that lots of yoga classes at various levels are available to anyone staying there. The Kripalu style of yoga is both slower and more introspective than the practice I’m accustomed to, but the teachers there are completely open to allowing visitors to practice the various postures in the ways that we’re accustomed to doing them. So I found a vigorous flow class and practiced a hybrid of the Kripalu pacing and the posture details I’m used to. One morning, I attended a class led by a teacher named Ranjit (I think). Toward the end of the practice, he called us into Triangle, and I moved into the version I’m accustomed to. I was tiring, and trembling slightly. He moved into position behind me and made a couple of gentle adjustments to my posture, helping with the twist, softening the shoulder of the vertical arm. At the end of practice, he suggested that I might find my yoga improve if I could manage to reduce my effort and strain by about 20 percent. Internally, I shook my head.

This evening, back in Jennifer’s Sunday evening level-2 power yoga class at CorePower Yoga here in Denver, she took us through a challenging and fun sequence of poses. She started the practice, as she usually does, with a short reading. This one talked about ways that we can close off our hearts from the experience of life. And about half-way through the evening’s practice, suddenly, Ranjit’s lesson came home to me. It took a week to sink in, but I realized that there are lots of different ways to close off a heart. My usual pattern for that is to withdraw from a situation or an experience, to close in. But I realized this evening that it’s also entirely possible to go the other way, using exertion and effort to keep the heart silent.

This realization has been mirrored in my meditation practice, as well. Recently, I’ve discovered that there can be too much of a good thing – that with some training and specific technique, mind-concentration practices can be performed to a degree I hadn’t really found previously. The mind tends to still in such concentration practice, and if I understood some of Stephen Cope’s discussions in last week’s workshop, the practice of concentration, itself, tends to reduce the strength of grasping and aversion in other parts of life. But in practicing such tight concentration, it’s possible to keep the mind’s focus so narrow that there is space for nothing else. Just as that kind of effort prevents monkey-mind jabbering, it also seems to prevent the open, aware, neutral witnessing experience from arising, as well.

So half-way through Jennifer’s class this evening, I may have learned some of what Ranjit tried to teach me last week.

Give me a week (or so); I'll catch on...

2007-12-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Unsatisfactoriness

2007-12-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I returned from a weekend retreat to Kripalu, a yoga center in western Massachusetts. Eventually, maybe I’ll write up something about my experiences and thoughts from there. Suffice it to say for this post that it was a wonderful blend of yoga, meditation, and instruction based on the Yoga Sutra, and I came home a little bit changed. For reasons not clear to me, the following came out in second person.

* * *

Knowing that you’d be coming back from retreat, you had arranged to take today off from work.

Your wife arranged to have a day off, as well, and you went grocery shopping together after getting the boys off to school. Pushing a cart around the aisles of Sam’s Club, you experienced the most profound and pervasive and clear-seeing of the unsatisfactoriness of existence that you’ve ever had. It was, literally, dis-illusioning.

It is quite startling to walk past pile after pile of devices people use to pursue happiness – triple-bladed razors, and multi-speaker sound systems, and liquor-filled chocolates, and frozen corn dogs, and cases of Coke Zero, and artificial poinsettias, and diamond rings, and economy sized bottles of Rogaine, and barbecued ribs (“whose?” you wondered), and Cuisinarts – and see in all of them strivings and in none of them fulfillment. And the sense was not in any way limited to materialism. It was an equal opportunity perception that applied as much to your job, your lifestyle, your engagement with family, your detachment from family, your community, your writings, your arguments, your accumulations.

What was, perhaps, most remarkable was not the apocalypse of the previously unimagined – it was, instead, a discovery of what has been glaringly obvious all along, but which was covered not by a conspiracy of others, but rather a contrivance of your own mind. Of course, it is all pretentious and vapid and unsuccessful. You knew that all along. But previously, you participated in the courteous and communal lie that it was all just fine, nonetheless. Previously, a prominent part of your mind was more than willing to see the emperor’s clothes.

This morning, that part of your mind seems to have retired, or at least retreated back from the front lines, allowing you to see what was in front of your face.

And not only is it everywhere, it’s grim. Detachment isn’t hard when what you find is a festering mess. But you indulged your sense of aversion as you languished in the repulsiveness of it all. A Buddha could have found, nonetheless, compassion and motivation. So you saw something. Good and fine.

Now keep seeing, but see also your aversion. Feel where it creates sensations. Notice them arise. Watch them as they persist. See them subside. Then see how aversive suffering can be let go of. And see how you can be of use to others.

Remember that the feeling of aversion subsided when you got home. But it wasn’t the getting there – it was the process of cleaning the garage floor, gathering the shards of glass from the bottle of molasses that fell from the torn grocery bag as you unloaded the car. The sense of aversion decreased more as you wiped up the dark syrup, goo-ing up the paper towels with fragrant mess. And it simply dissolved as you sponged clean the residue, leaving at least one spot of the garage floor, really pretty clean.

OM Circle, week 3

2007-11-24T22:05:00.000-07:00

(from a couple of weeks ago, just finished the write up)

OM Circle, week 3

Three regulars, two new participants and me. Six of us, sitting on the floor of a yoga studio’s office/storageroom/teacher-drop-your-stuff-off room. A makeshift altar with a couple of Buddhas, a flower and several pictures of gurus. Someone has placed a food offering before the images.

With brief instructions, we begin chanting OM. Harmonics fluctuate, thirds, minor and major, parallel fourths, but more seconds, the disharmony harmonizing. As I chamber my mouth and throat, sound is created in me. I vibrate. At first, just at my larynx. With a slight shift of my soft palate, the vibration shifts into my chest cavity. A mouth shape change, and the vibration shifts into my mask and skull. As each of my OMs fades into its own silence, it also fades into someone else’s OM – a cycle of death into life that ties us all into one. A person across from me intones a base note, just as I find my voice moving from a groan into a major third. His tone meshes and reshapes my own, inside my throat, and instead of singing one note, both blend at their source, and I cannot distinguish my own sound from his, from ours. After some period of time (I lose track during these exercises), someone taps me on the knee – the signal for me to move to the center of the circle for a time. I sit on a block in virasana. I’m bathed in sounds from others. Briefly, emotional response arises, then, though when I notice it, I half-intend to sustain it, it subsides. The interruption to my chant declines, and I resume. I find for several minutes that the vibration of the chant has moved into my arms and hands. I position them above my thighs, allowing them to vibrate in space. Another tap on the knee, and my time in the center is done. I shift back to the circle, another enters. I shape my sound to bathe her in tone. As different intonations run hoarse, I find another level to work. Then the leader says, softly, “last,” and I exhale the final OM across my larynx, up into my sinues, against the facial skeleton, into the chambers of my throat and mouth, and into the room, into silence.

From the inside, my hands are energy, their fields of perception extending beyond my skin. Unbounded. I rest them on my thighs. My mind strongly shifts to manifest a Ponderosa pine. “A Ponderosa?” I wonder. “Strange familiar.” The wordplay is opaque to me at the time. I think of inhaling the butterscotch scent of a Ponderosa’s bark in the heat of the sun.

Though we call it an OM circle, and though it is structured as an exercise of puja, we are largely engaged in the third, fourth and sixth limbs of the eight-limbed path of yoga: asana or posture, pranayama or breath control, and dharana or concentration. Each practice has its own characteristics that distinguish it from the others. The first night, it was the marked lightness I associated with a high. The second, it was the bright and clear dreams and the carried-through of concentration. Today it is the energy fields around my hands and, evidenced by this write-up, an unexpected energy that seems to have dispelled sleep, for now at any rate.

Off the Mat -- Ishvara Pranidhana

2007-11-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

(This is another in a series of dharma talks I've provided to my yoga students.)

The last of the niyamas is ishvara pranidhana. Until I started to prepare this, all the versions I’d read of the Yoga Sutra, and all the teachers I’d had explain this niyama to me translated it as “surrender to the Lord” or “surrender to God,” though they tend to do so without adopting any particular definition of “God” or “the Lord.” For several reasons I’ll get to shortly, “surrender to the Lord” was a pretty empty phrase for me.

Ishvara pranidhana doesn’t only appear in the Yoga Sutra in the recitation of niyamas. As Patanjali outlines the difficult and sometimes demanding steps along the path to liberation, he mentions, almost as an aside – that the same liberation can be reached simply by ishvara pranidhana. As I was preparing for this talk, I thought I’d refresh my memory of that discussion, so I picked up a modern translation of the Yoga Sutra – this one by Chip Hartranft – and looked for the sutras I’d remembered.

But what I found was not the familiar “surrender to the Lord” formulation I’d seen before. Hartranft translates ishvara pranidhana as aligning to the ideal of pure awareness. While that may strike you as even more difficult than “surrender to the Lord,” for me, it opened door after door.

To explain how and why, allow me to tell you a rather more personal story than I’ve done in the past.

At the death of my sister about fourteen years ago, the world that I’d trusted to that point seemed to have died with her. I found the joy the world offered to be only a coat of paint over contrivances. My spiritual life, a life to which I’d devoted much of my life, slowly dried up. Prayer became a mechanical exercise. I lost my faith in life, in my conception of God. It didn’t happen all at once. And as it occurred, it seemed less like a funeral and more like waking up from a night’s dream. I found rational explanations for creation made more sense to me than creation stories. I found coincidence a better explanation than divine intervention. I found mechanical cause-and-effect a more plausible story than magic.

During that process, I searched for meaning to life, finding only the limited meanings that I imposed on my life. I looked for purpose, finding only freedom. I found nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing non-contingent.

And through it all, I lived a normal life. My wife and I raised our young sons. I worked in an interesting industry, taking on challenging jobs. When I looked away from the core of things, life was great. But when I looked into the center, I found nothing. So I generally looked away. I conducted myself according to my remembered understandings of my faith, according to the commitments I’d made, according to the paths that had provided me with happiness before, despite the emptiness of the forms.

It was in that milieu eight and nine years ago that I encountered this thing called yoga. Yoga presented itself to me through a series of experiences that reignited my spiritual life. It seemed, in a word, magical. Way too much so. I didn’t trust it any more than I trusted anything else at that point. To explain the feelings of calm and peace and equanimity I felt at the end of practice, I told myself rationality stories – objective explanation stories – “it has nothing to do with anything more remarkable than chemical receptors in my brain responding to the chemicals my body releases through exercise.” To explain the strong affinity I felt to the practice, I told myself my feelings were just the usual delusion that “the grass is always greener” where I’m not, than it is where I am. To explain the occasional experiences of oneness, of energy, of vision, of bliss, I reminded myself of the power of suggestion and random thoughts on the human mind. To explain the improvement in my health, I concluded that I was just more careful in avoiding the things that had previously afflicted me. From the outside looking in – my preferred vantage point during those years – it’s always easy to rationalize and intellectualize and objectify the experience of another person. I managed, though a kind of mental gymnastic, to do that to my own experience. I lived at the bottom of a long and seldom uninterrupted depression. My world view was rather like being a marble at the bottom of an empty salad bowl. I could move around the bottom with relative ease, and my yoga practice gave me energy to move a ways up the sides, but as I moved out toward the edges of my experience, the going got harder and harder, and I’d find myself rolling back to the bottom again.

But a few years ago, something changed. A teacher I was working with at the time perceived that my marble was a ways up the side of the bowl, and she gave it a little nudge. And with that extra help, I found myself at the edge of the bowl, with a decision to make.

I had created a relationship to a world that was stable. It was one that enabled me to provide for my family. It was one that I could, at some cost to myself and my heart and my mind and my soul, maintain for years to come. It was one that was logical within its own confines, but not integral with all of the world I experienced. It was one that gave to people I loved what I thought they wanted and needed from me. And it was at the bottom of the familiar bowl.

The alternative – the one I was considering, at any rate – I intuitively knew would change me. And I didn’t know how that would work out, for myself, for my family, for my loved ones, for my stable, functional world view.

But I hoped – I hoped that it would allow me to feel again – to integrate everything I experienced, not just the parts that fit my intellectualized relationship to the world. Balanced on the edge of the bowl, I was suddenly free to choose something different, with all the promise and risk that such a choice entailed.

And here’s what I did: I looked deeply into my own experience – even the parts that I’d set aside because they didn’t fit my narrow, little box of a world. I realized that I was more open and honest and intact and entire – and happy – canoeing down the Green River that runs through the wilderness slickrock desert of eastern Utah than I could ever remember being in the world I’d created for myself. I realized that the times of my life that things worked best were times when I lived as closely to my experience – rather than to my ideas about my experience – as I could.

And realizing that, it dawned on me that I trusted existence – existence that included all of the rational and irrational, existence that acknowledged the silence and dryness that had developed in my organized religious life and the unpredictable and uncontrolled vibrant wetness that I encountered in and through yoga, existence that included my own desires, and the desires of my family and friends and colleagues, existence that included everything. I came to believe that shearing away contrivance and artifice and cloaks and coverings left not nothing, but compassion; not meaninglessness, but love; not nihilism, but something quite real. It wasn’t the God that I’d thought of before, but I realized that it was something – not nothing. And as I let go of even my own intellectual conceptualizing scaffolding, I found there was something more integral and real than anything I could cobble together.

But to get there, I had to let go of my contrived objectivity, always looking in from the outside, even when it came to my own life. I realized that I could trust existence, that I could allow myself to move from the outside objective, rational, intellectual observer of life – including my own – to an engaged, active, subjective, being. From the inside, you never really know what is going to happen next. You’re at personal risk in important ways that you’re not as an observer. I chose to be an actor in the play, rather than a member of the audience, critiquing the performance.

And one of the most important changes enabled by that decision was this: I would not live in a way that separated my heart and my mind. I had boxed up my subjective, feeling-driven, intuitive and compassionate heart for many years, as I allowed myself to rely almost exclusively on intellect and dispassionate observation. Sure, I’d feel things that conflicted with my mind, but I’d ascribe those conflicts, as Scrooge ascribed Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, to “a bit of undigested beef” – just the irrational workings of a physical body. Nothing meaningful. Just a misfiring of a neural pathway in my brain.

Just.

After I began to roll out of my comfort zone and into a new world, I felt the same conflicts between heart and mind. But instead of ignoring them, I followed my heart – not to the exclusion of my mind – but rather to a dance of them both.

My heart is connected to all hearts.

My mind is a version of all minds.

My body, an energy pattern knitting together elements born at the heart of stars, is a part of all bodies, also born of star fires.

My breath is a part of all breathing.

And I allowed myself to surrender to those senses. Do they feel irrational at times? Surely. But I don’t leave my doubting-lawyer brain at home. No, I bring it along for the ride. But I do trust existence. I trust the alignment I feel with existence, with compassion. I trust that I am not separated from existence – I feel it from the inside, I live it from the inside. I’ve gone from being a member of the audience to being an actor on the stage to embodying the character of the story. I’ve surrendered to my experience.

When I tried to articulate the change to some friends as concisely as I could, I said, “I feel aligned with the universe.”

So when I encountered Hartranft’s “aligning with the ideal of pure awareness,” I heard something that made real sense to me. Now mind you, I’m far, far from the end of the Yoga path. But my practice of yoga has allowed me to see further down the path than I did at the start, and what I see, so far, is that the universe does, in fact, have an alignment to it, and the more I strip away of my self and my habituated thinking and my clinging and my aversion, the more readily I can perceive the universe’s orientation, and it coincides with the love and kindness and compassion that resonate in me. While I’m not sure exactly how perceiving that alignment and moving gracefully within the context it creates will lead to liberation, I do sense greater ease within it than working against it.

* * *

The experience of ishvara pranidhana is something that we can perceive in a variety of ways, in a variety of contexts. Have you ever experienced a “flow” state when you were acting in a way that seemed perfect, whether on the mat, on a ski slope, or just talking with a friend? How did it feel? How long did it last?

Some people experience such “surrender” or “alignment” when working with a teacher they can trust. Others with a coach. Others feel such connections in nature and wilderness. When do you feel “authentic” or “integral” or “complete”?

Stillness behind, below, between, and inside

2007-10-21T08:04:00.000-06:00

Two things, linked:

1. Yesterday, I got around to listening to this podcast at Speaking of Faith. It is an interview of Matthew Sanford, a yoga teacher who has been paraplegic since he was in a car accident at the age of 13. The entire interview is well worth the time needed to listen to it, but one of the points he made in several different ways really resonated with me: that there is, at the core of us, a quality of experience he calls "silence" that he learned to discover, and then to perceive even in the active aspects of his life in the body and mind. I won't try to elaborate on his point, as I wouldn't do it justice. Listen to the interview.

2. Last night, I went to sleep listening to the rain falling on our roof. At some point in the night, I awoke to the sense of absolute silence. Of course, it wasn't really absolute -- I could hear my heart beating, the sound of my breath across my nostrils and through my broncheal tubes, of the shifting of sheets and blankets in the bed. But at some point in the night, the rain had changed to snow, and the snow absorbed all of the sounds that usually form the baseline that my mind has come to accept as "silence" -- traffic from the not-too-distant freeway, that sort of thing.

So this morning, I get up, shower, and decide to do my meditation practice before finishing getting ready for Church.

Usually, my meditation practice starts with about 15 minutes of mind-tennis, as my mind tries to volley with "thought" or "judgment" or "desire" each idea that flies in across the net. Then it settles into a kind of quiet vigilance.

But this time, three or four breaths in, I find this lake of silence. Then, as thoughts or desires or whatever arise, I perceive them clearly against the stillness of the background.

Yoga occurs when a body moves through space aware its interbeing with that same lake of stillness.

Ar, the Crone, and the Dragon

2007-10-17T14:58:00.000-06:00

With a nod to an old recording of a Jack Kornfield dharma talk, a version of a Scandinavian folk tale:

There once was a princess – Ar – who lived with her parents, the king and queen. The king and queen had overextended themselves, and had for some time relied on loans they obtained from a dragon who lived in the area, dragons having lots of gold and such.

The time came for the king and queen to pay the dragon back, but they didn’t have the money to do it. So they met with the dragon to see what could be worked out. As was the way in those days, they told the dragon that the only thing they had left was their daughter, Ar. The dragon thought about it for a few minutes, and said that he’d accept their offer, would take the princess as his wife, and would become a part of their family.

The daughter was as distressed as you might imagine, but showed more wisdom than her parents. She fled the city to a village on the outskirts of the forest, to a hovel where an old, wise woman lived. She told the old woman of her plight. When she was done with her story, the woman said, “Don’t worry so much. Here’s what you should do…”

Ar listened carefully, and when the old woman finished her instructions, Ar thanked her, and returned home.

Soon enough the wedding day came, with lots of celebrations and toasts and talk and ceremony. Ar was nervous, but dressed for the wedding, as the old woman had instructed her. Ar and the dragon were married. After the dinners and toasts and talk were all done, Ar and the dragon withdrew to their wedding chamber, and Ar said to the dragon, as the old woman had instructed, “Would you like me to undress, so we can consummate our marriage?” The dragon, responded, “Yes!” Ar then said, “One more thing – it would be fitting for you to remove as much as I do. Do you agree?” The dragon, highly motivated, agreed quickly.

Ar then began removing her wedding gown, and the dragon removed such trappings as he’d put on in honor of the occasion. But as Ar removed her gown, there was another gown beneath it. She looked to the dragon, and began to remove her second gown. The dragon, having only put on one layer of clothing for the event, began to peel off its skin. Dragons, like snakes and lizards, sometimes shed their skins, so it wasn’t too painful to do so. But as Ar removed her second gown, there was a third beneath it. The dragon, seeing this, used its claws to carve away its scales. Beneath Ar’s third gown was a fourth, and a fifth, and more – she had followed the old woman’s instructions to put on ten gowns. As she removed each gown, the dragon clawed off more and more.

As she took off her gowns, and as the dragon carved away more and more, Ar saw that his shape began to change. By the time that Ar had removed her tenth gown and stood before the dragon uncovered, the dragon carved away his tenth layer and stood before Ar, now a beautiful young man.

And then, they kissed.

Off the Mat -- Svadhyaya

2007-10-06T21:42:00.000-06:00

(Another in my series of dharma talks with my yoga class.)

Try to pronounce that one.

Svadhyaya means “self-study.” It stands for the unremarkable point that if we don’t pay attention to ourselves, we won’t understand ourselves.

The remarkable parts happen when we do pay attention to ourselves – or, rather, when we try to do so. “Self,” it turns out, is a remarkably slippery critter. To get the point, it’s worth trying to spotlight it. So by all means, go ahead. Close your eyes, and use your mind to identify what is “you.” Sometimes, we think of our “self” as an occupant of the position in space defined by the outside of our skin. But once you close your eyes, that spatial relationship mechanism starts to seem pretty artificial. Sit in a silent place, and you’ve lost the audial stimuli. Holding still, you will quickly lose track of most sensory stimuli. So once you get that far, move into your mind.

Are you your name? Well, that’s easy – of course not. You can change your name. Are you a particular set of memories? Are you the same person you remember being last week? Last year? Ten years ago? Thirty? If you’ve changed, what does it mean to talk about yourself during those periods? If you’ve changed over time, are “you” a particular pattern of behaviors and responses? When those change, are you someone other than you are today?

Whether we look at body, memory, behavior, or whatever, while we can see reasons to talk about a “self,” the more carefully we look, the less we seem to find. If you can look at something and think of it as a thing – whether it be a shoe, a fingernail, or a memory – once you see it as a thing, you realize that it doesn’t define you – in fact, it seems very much to be not the “you” that observes it. It’s just a stream of various perceptions.

If you sit in meditation (and meditation is the basic practice of “self study”) even for just a few minutes, you’ll quickly discover lots of thoughts – some are memories, some are fantasies, some are judgments. But whatever they are, they are like pictures that flash up on a movie screen. They aren’t you – you are the one observing them. Sometimes they convey a sense of familiarity – not only do you remember a particular event, you remember remembering the event previously. You can learn to recognize that sense of familiarity. But the fact that a memory is familiar does not make the memory “you.” Memories are other than “you.”

So what’s left? It’s a secret, and you have to find out for yourself. Or your “self’ Or your “Self” or your “SELF” or however you want to think of it.

Really – I’m not trying to hide the ball here. I could tell you what I’ve found when I looked, but if I did, what you would hear (or read) would seem (unremarkably) something that is not “you.”

To some degree, this is all quite sensible. If you first learned of yoga from seeing someone else practice, whether live or in a book or on a video of some kind, see if you can reconstruct what you thought yoga was and would be as you looked at it from the outside, and then compare that with your experience of yoga the first time you stepped onto a mat. And then compare that with your most recent experience on the yoga mat. One teacher I’m familiar with suggested that you perceive about 10% of what’s really going on when you watch someone else practice yoga compared with practicing it yourself. I’d go farther: they’re simply different experiences. One happens from the outside to someone else. The other is your own experience. One is a glove. The other is your living hand feeling the glove around it.

So if “self” is so slippery, what point is there in looking for it? There’s an easy answer and a deeper one. The easy one: realizing what isn’t “me” helps me to let go of ideas and beliefs that no longer serve me. I tend to get attached to things that I like, that provide security, that are familiar. While attachment itself can be a problem, attachment to things as they no longer are can really cause problems. Svadhyaya, self-study, helps bring me back to the present, to things as they are now, while I’m looking at them, rather than as how I remember they once-were-but-no-longer-are. The deeper answer to why not? Self-study, Patanjali’s svadhyaya, enables us to see our prejudices, our habits, our addictions, our self-delusions, our hypocrisies, our self-ish-ness. And seeing them enables us to work more skillfully around and through and past them. But it also allows us to see the warmth of our compassion for other beings, the clarity of our intelligence and perception, and to understand our relationship to – our “inter-being with,” as Thich Nhat Hahn calls it – all of existence. Wisdom.

When you’ve looked, what have you found?

Metta -- Practicing a Lovingkindness Meditation

2007-09-28T10:15:00.000-06:00

For PGK, should she stop by.

I like to live intuitively. I like to believe that as I hike up a dry canyon, I'll find a spring of fresh water before I dehydrate too badly; that beauty is spontaneous; that solutions will spring Athena-like fully grown from my mind; that understanding will be revealed like a curtain swept away from a window.

Often enough, that is exactly what happens.

So I was pretty delighted when I heard about the notion of a Buddhist meditation practice, metta, that engendered lovingkindness.

And I was equally dismayed when I learned the mechanics of the practice. (A basic set of instructions can be found here.)

What? I'm supposed to practice by repeating this blather to myself about "May I be healthy, may I be happy, may I be whatever"? How can that help anything? This is just one of those self-delusional New Age indulgences. I don't want contrivance. I want to be filled with divine love.

And so I set metta practice aside for several years, focusing myself on more "important" stuff.

Then, more recently, I ran across Sharon Salzberg's book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness, Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1995. Reading it, she provided more context for practicing a lovingkindness meditation, and I was probably more ready for the instruction at that point. As I recall her instruction, she recommended starting the practice by reference to oneself, and sustaining the practice not just for a five minute session, but for a week or a month of daily sessions, before even venturing beyond oneself and applying it to others.

Compromiser that I am, I figured that I spend 20-30 minutes each morning on an elliptical trainer, usually reading something. I could do a week's worth of elliptical trainer time practicing the metta meditation, rather than reading. (Yes, I know. Elegant image. Now lay it aside. ;-)) The first day, the practice felt pointless. The second through fourth days, I started to become aware of the ways that I resisted really allowing myself to feel lovingkindness toward myself, even at the basic level of the meditation. By the end of the week, something inside me had relaxed enough to settle into the practice.

So the next week, I started with myself, then shifted the meditation practice to someone I loved. The instruction I had told me that it was best to choose someone to whom I was not sexually attracted, to avoid confusing the experience with the attachment that can easily arise to supplant lovingkindness. With such an instruction, I knew exactly whom to use: the 18-month-old daughter of a family in my ward. She had a penchant for wandering down the aisles of the chapel during sacrament meeting, finding me, and plopping herself down, either on my lap for a nap, or on the pew beside me for a more elaborate game of giving and taking, usually involving the sketch pencil and kneadable eraser I usually bring to Church for sketching during sermons. It was easy to desire her health, happiness, peace, and clarity. So the second week, I enjoyed the practice of desiring the best for her.

The third week, I was supposed to start with myself, then move to the loved one, then move to a person about whom I felt neutral. Feel neutral? What does that mean? I don't know that I feel neutral toward anyone. I got over the intial confusion, picked out someone whom I didn't know very well, and used him. The meditation wasn't particularly illuminating or easy that week, but it wasn't terribly burdensome, either.

The fourth week, Salzberg's book instructed me to choose someone I disliked -- an enemy. The selection proved to be more of a challenge than the neutral person. I don't have enemies. I get along with everyone. Duh. Finally, I selected a person whom I perpetually seemed to be cross-wise with online. So I started the meditation with myself, shifted to my loved one, my neutral one, and added my antagonist.

So what did I find? Much to my surprise (and with a degree of chagrin, given my preference for Athenian-birth events, rather than deliberation and incremental ones), I found that I was happier that month than I ever expected to be, even though often enough, the happiness didn't seem directly traceable to the meditation practice. But some things were more readily traceable.

By seeing how I resisted allowing myself to feel lovingkindness toward myself, I was able to relent a little, let a little more light, a little more space in. I didn't have any earth-shaking revelations about loving the loved one, though the meditation did lead me to acknowledge explicitly how much I enjoy her company. I found myself paying a little more attention to the person I was so neutral about. In realizing neutrality, I realized that much of it stemmed from just not knowing him very well. The more I noticed, the more I found to value. The antagonist? First, the practice led me to look more carefully at antagonism and adversity. (I am a litigator, after all.) Attending to it more allowed me to see more antagonism, and more subtle ways that I am antagonistic, and more ways that I project antagonism onto others.

It also made me want to test some of the hypotheses I'd developed about my interactions.

Now, more than a year later? I've decided that love is mostly a muscle -- it can be developed with practice, it atrophies with disuse. Most of my life, I've loved what I've loved and I've been perplexed by its absence when I noticed I didn't love someone.

But mostly, I'm happier. My world has expanded a little bit. I'm less inclined to flip people off during freeway commutes. I notice more when I get mad, when I think someone is being intentionally contradictory, when I am about to dismiss someone as irrelevant or boring.

And I've concluded that there really isn't any clear line between loving myself, loving my little sacrament meeting companion, and loving Bin Laden.

A pearl goes up for auction
No one has enough,
so the pearl buys itself.
-- Rumi

Three Nephites, Nuclear War, and Bodhisattvas

2007-09-27T20:18:00.001-06:00

Three stories, one idea. The stories are set, respectively, 2000, 25, and 1300 years ago.

* * *

Mormon scripture recounts that 2000 years ago, after his death in Israel, the resurrected Jesus Christ appeared to inhabitants of the Americas. During that visit, he taught the gospel, healed the sick, and called disciples to serve the people following his ascension. As a boon to those disciples, he asked what they desired. All but three asked to serve God until they were 70 years, and then to be accepted into heaven. But the three…

…[Jesus] turned himself unto the three, and said unto them: What will ye that I should do unto you, when I am gone unto the Father? And they sorrowed in their hearts, for they durst not speak unto him the thing which they desired. And he said unto them: Behold, I know your thoughts… …[Y]e shall never taste of death; but ye shall live to behold all the doings of the Father unto the children of men, even until all things shall be fulfilled according to the will of the Father, when I shall come in my glory with the powers of heaven…. …[F]or ye have desired that ye might bring the souls of men unto me, while the world shall stand. …

And they are as the angels of God, and if they shall pray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever man it seemeth them good.

3 Nephi, chapter 28, passim, The Book of Mormon

Though they seem to have gone out of vogue in an Internet-linked world, in earlier times of the LDS Church, stories of unexpected and fleeting visits by the Three Nephites, as they were called, providing divine and timely assistance were told, much as angel visitation stories have been told for millennia by Christians. As a youth, I was impressed not so much by the magical aspects of the folktales of the three living (seemingly) forever, but rather by the idea of caring so deeply about the welfare of others that foregoing heaven’s happiness seemed a good trade.

* * *

Fast forward to 1983. I’m a 21-year-old sophomore in college. I’ve returned from serving a mission to teach the gospel to Latin American refugees in the barrios of southern California. America is deeply embroiled in the Cold War. American military planners have developed plans for “battlefield use” of nuclear weapons – the idea was that “low-yield” nuclear weapons could be used in controlled numbers to win battles, without precipitating the kind of mutually assured destruction that had been the baseline assumption about nuclear war during earlier decades. I had grown up with nuclear annihilation as a peculiar commonplace, a kind of low, constant background noise. Though grim, the battlefield-use notion seemed no more delusional than the instructions I grew up with outside Washington, D.C., where government buildings bore “Fallout Shelter” signs, and grade school teachers instructed us, in the event of a nuclear attack, to crawl under the classroom desks for shelter.

In November of 1983, a movie airs on television – The Day After. It shows the story of people living in Kansas when a nuclear war erupts between the US and the Soviet Union. In such detail and horror as could pass FCC muster in the 1980s, the movie tells the story of handfuls of survivors in a post-apocalypse world, assuming, of course, that anyone survived at all. It shows a world of radiation poisoning, people dying for lack of infrastructure that we take for granted – hospitals, food supplies, law and order. It ends on a note of grim suffering and hopelessness. In hindsight, it was a movie designed to show what a “survivable” nuclear war might actually mean, designed to persuade its audience that surviving such an event might be well and truly worse than dying in it. I watch the movie in an apartment that I share with five other roommates. We are all pretty solemn during the movie, though when it ends, they all remark, as the director probably intended, that they’d rather die in the destruction than try to live in its aftermath.

I remain silent for a time, then walk out into the night, devastated. As it happens, the weather is a mix of drizzling rain and snow. At some point, I realize I am barefoot. I climb the sharp hill from my apartment complex to the night-darkened campus of the university. Despite high school teachers who had ridiculed the fallout-training they were supposed to provide (one recommended that if we heard a report that nuclear war had broken out, we should climb up onto the roofs of our homes so we could watch the fireworks before we were vaporized), I’ve never internalized such a thing. The movie drives home to me how awful human existence could be. While I’ve had the usual –perhaps more than the usual – amount of inner-city school kid adversity, I’ve never imagined a situation that I’d rather die than endure. I keep walking aimlessly. As falling snow soaks my shirt through, collects in my hair, I replay the scenes of utter hopelessness. At some point in the night, my heart changes. I realize that stronger than my desire to live the life of comfort and hope that I’ve lived, and stronger than my desire to be with God after death, and stronger than my desire to avoid the horror depicted in the movie, stronger than any of those things is my desire to alleviate others’ suffering. No matter how bad my experience might get, if there are people in need of help, then I’d prefer to stick it out. If a nuclear war leaves me in a world headed toward total death, but doesn’t put us all there all at once, then I choose to live while I can extend compassion to others.

While I keep that realization to myself, even after I walk back through the snow to my apartment, it moves deeply into my mind and heart. And, though I don’t recognize it immediately, that realization is a kind of vow.

* * *

Next, head back to the 8th century, CE. The crown prince of a region that is now in India renounces his position and takes to a spiritual path, living the life of a renunciate. As Pema Chodron recounts the story, he gets to Nalanda University, a large, powerful monastery that attracts students from all over the Buddhist world. At Nalanda he is ordained a monk and takes the name Shantideva, or “God of Peace.”

Contrary to what his later reputation suggests, Shantideva was not well liked at Nalanda. Apparently, he was one of those people who didn’t show up for anything, never studying or coming to practice sessions. His fellow monks said that his three “realizations” were eating, sleeping, and shitting. Finally, in order to teach him a lesson, they invited him to give a talk to the entire university. Only the best students were accorded such an honor. You had to sit on a throne and, of course, have something to say. Since Shantideva was presumed to know nothing, the monks thought he would be shamed and humiliated into leaving the university.

(Pema Chodron, No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala, Boston: 2005, p. xi)

As happens in such stories, Shantideva accepted the invitation and delivered a brilliant discourse that has been recorded and preserved ever since, called The Way of the Bodhisattva. In it, he teaches a path for developing bodhicitta – an “awakened heart” – the desire to alleviate suffering, to free oneself from ignorance and habitual patterns in order to help others to do the same.

Buddhist tradition teaches that we can become enlightened, a state that the Buddha described simply as “awake.” In Buddhist terminology, a bodhisattva is a person who has achieved, herself, enlightenment, yet who remains engaged in life on earth to bring others to the same state. Sometimes a person will adopt that role as the natural result of a conscious recognition of connection to others – one who recognizes that until all beings are brought to enlightenment, no one individual’s attainment of that condition is complete. Sometimes a person adopts that role as the natural extension of a powerful compassion.

As the Buddha discovered, as Christ taught, as Mother Theresa embodied, as Ramakrishna showed, as Rumi and Hafiz and Ranier Marie Rilke and Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver all saw and wrote, at the very core of each of us is a connection to all other beings. To be sure, we can spend our entire lives without discovering it or acknowledging it. It is not forced upon us, any more than stillness is forced upon us. But, like stillness, it is always present, behind and beneath the sounds and engagements of daily life. It is as discoverable as stillness, and it is as foundational as stillness. And it is revealed at the opening of a mind to the messages of the heart.

In Shantideva’s terminology, that path is bodhicitta. He urges us to see the problems and challenges before us not as problems of how to find or preserve a good for ourselves and for those with whom we identify, but rather how to heal the entirety of problem, a perspective that cares as deeply for those causing us pain as for those feeling the pain, that values one’s own pain neither less nor more than any other’s. This was Gandhi’s approach to racism in South Africa and to British dominion in India. It wasn’t enough for Gandhi to force the British to leave India – he wanted them to want to leave India because they would want the best for Indians. It was Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s approach to civil rights in the United States, with his “I’ve been to the mountain” vision not of societal gains for African-Americans alone, but rather a world entirely transformed for the benefit of all.

There are many, many ways of labeling bodhicitta. Some simply call it “love.” Others, “the light of Christ.” Some call it “the Dharma.” Some call it the “true self;” others, the “no self.” Some call it “Yoga.” To my way of thinking, the label doesn’t matter much, so long as it provides us with a way to perceive the desire and honor its place, so long as the label doesn’t delude us into thinking that it is only a potential of a few, rather than one of all sentient beings.

Shantideva’s fully envisions the sacrifices entailed by this way of life, prefiguring the sacrifices of Gandhi and Rev. King:

For sentient beings, poor and destitute,
May I become a treasure ever plentiful,
And lie before them closely in their reach,
A varied source of all that they might need.

My body, thus, and all my goods besides,
And all my merits gained and to be gained,
I give them all away withholding nothing
To bring about the benefit of beings.
(v. 3:10-11)

The desire of a bodhisattva isn’t confined to Shantideva’s discourse 1300 years ago. A friend of mine recently recited Shantideva’s words as she aligned herself to the Way of the bodhisattva. She wrote about the experience here Her commitment led me to read and discover Shantideva.

* * *

And that leads me through these three stories to today.

In the years since I first wondered at (and felt the deep resonance to) the peculiar desire of the Three Nephites so to be of benefit to mankind that they’d forego heaven, in the years since I served as a missionary, in the years since I have stepped quite a distance from beliefs in a particular religion’s view of existence, my recognition on the snowy night in college continues. In my present, I seem to be as belief-deficient when it comes to Buddhist beliefs as I am with respect to Mormon beliefs. Yet my sense and perception of bodhicitta endures as a kind of essential alignment more elemental than belief.

Is a vow a promise or a choice of alignment or simply a recognition?

* * *

And now as long as space endures,
As long as there are beings to be found,
May I continue likewise to remain
To drive away the sorrows of the world.
-- The Way of the Bodhisattva, v. 10:55

Samadhi, a taste

2007-09-22T22:56:00.000-06:00

I practiced this evening at a yoga studio in the Castro district of San Francisco – Yoga Flow. Why there, rather than some place closer to the Financial district, where I’m staying? A couple of reasons – first, a couple of teachers who’ve done workshops I’ve attended in Denver teach at that studio – Darren Main and Rusty Wells – and I admire aspects of them both; second, it happened to have a class that fit the particular time slot I had available this evening.

So I get there by cab, climb the stairs to the second floor (all big-city yoga studios are second-floor kind of affairs – street level is too expensive), and introduce myself at the front desk, where the teacher, Kari Zabel, and I talk for just a few moments, but enough to discover that we both took teacher training (her first, my only) with same organization, though in different years, and so we have common backgrounds and some common acquaintances.

She runs a very effective practice – both well grounded in manner and approach, strongly colored by Sharon Gannon and David Life’s Jivamukti style. She leads chants well, confidently adjusts students, and ensures her presence reaches the entirety of the very large practice room. The sequence she calls us through is deliberate, unrushed, and intentional. It culminates in Peacock, then slowly proceeds through denoument to Corpse.

Once practice is over, I change back into business clothes, heading to a dinner with colleagues back downtown. I get advice to look for a cab on Castro, rather than Market. The sun is just down; the sky is clearing; the temperature is about 68. I wander around the block to Castro, and I find myself in an early evening crowd of gay men.

It’s at this point that I experience the perfect integration of the yoga practice and life that happens sometimes – that balance of comfort and enervation and stillness and motion and exhaustion and enlivenment and solitude and company, of perfect equanimity and perfect happiness, of beauty.

Samadhi.

I spot a cab a block and a half away, wave to it, confident of nothing rational. It flashes its lights, pulls up, whisks me off to my business dinner. During the drive, I find the refrain of Ziggy Marley’s “Love Is My Religion” echoing in my head. I simply am. I find the restaurant, get to the table, join my colleagues, and slowly, slowly, reenter normal existence.

OM Circle

2007-09-17T22:15:00.000-06:00

This evening, something I've wanted began to form itself.

I don't know whether it will survive to maturity or not, but there is more to it than there was before this evening.

Though I have yoga teachers and studios and students and co-practitioners in various settings, I have realized in recent months a lack of a community linked by yoga within which to grow and share and support and provide contrast.

Several weeks ago, one of my teacher/friends and I met for tea. We talked about our respective interests in forming a community that could explore more of Yoga than asana practices alone. Her resolve and my willingness to join the effort resulted in the first meeting this evening of an OM circle. Whatever it may become, this evening, it was small and simple: five people sitting on the floor of a small office above a bustling yoga studio. Heather -- the organizer, Jean -- Heather's mother, and three yogis Heather seemed to have collected from various interactions, myself included. Heather instructed us in the simple process -- we would sit in a comfortable meditation position in a circle, one person in the center, close our eyes, and chant OM, each person ending to take new breath as needed, then resuming. Each of us would take turns sitting in the center for a few minutes at a time.

Heather advised that her guru, whose name I forget, encouraged her to implement this. I tried to suspend my skepticism about all things guru-ic, remembering that I, too, have found important relationships with teachers and mentors at different stages of my life, and that I yet would welcome a teacher to guide my efforts. I managed to keep the mental gymnastics quiet -- I could honor her guru as manifested in the creative and energetic and kind person that she is. She then described various effects that could be anticipated from this exercise, ranging from audible experiences of additional or enhanced sounds, to perceptions of energy movements.

Even without that discussion, I was interested and mildly expectant. We began.

It was, in essence, singing a single syllable. I have sung in many situations and in many combinations of voices throughout my life. So this felt rather natural to me. My attention, as it always does when singing, went first to the breath, then to the intonation, the blend, the harmonies. After a few minutes, I modulated my tones, shifting from a bass register to a more natural baritone. At that level, I was chanting in thirds and fourths to the base tone. Once the harmonies developed, they would constantly change, as each other voice entered or dropped out, and as I chanted to the extent of the breath, and then stopped to inhale.

Dimensionally, the OM-ing crescendoed and softened, intonations droned and sharpened, I could feel the sounds being shaped by my vocal cords, by the lifting of my soft palate. I could feel the vibration of the tones in my belly, my chest, my throat, my facial mask. My mind shifted and drifted, always readily coming back to the present-sense experience of the chant. I was aware when the others' breath shifted, as one person moved out of the center, and another moved in. I noticed when others were running out of breath and sustained my OM until they resumed. At points, I felt that the sound was both a tool I could use, and a thing itself. Singer -- song. Dancer -- dance. It seemed a kind of energy. At other points, I felt slight energy effects in my arms and hands. Once, I felt a shakti kind of surge. The experience at the center of the circle, when my turn came, was not different in kind from the experience at the edge of the circle, though the sense of immersion in sound was more complete. Finally, at Heather's verbal instruction, we concluded the OM-ing.

At the end, we chanted a brief mantra in honor of Shiva and the lineage of instruction to which Heather pertains.

It felt devotional, but I was mildly disappointed that it had seemed quite so familiar -- singing with others always, in my experience, entails connection to and with them, always entails harmonies and, when done well, overtones, always entails intonation and timbre and involvement of the mind and body with the sound and the perception.

Then we opened our eyes. And I realized that we'd been chanting OM for about forty minutes -- I'd lost attention to time after the first few minutes. Eyes open, I also realized that my perceptions were different. It's hard to put a label on exactly how different, but I felt mildly high -- not really hyperventilating high, but mildly euphoric. As we shared our respective experiences, the euphoria gradually subsided. I wondered whether it was a result of the vibration of the chant, the concentration of the mind (once ended, I had realized how strongly focused my mind had been on the chant), the pranayama elements to the practice, or something else.

After a few more minutes, we ended the meeting and departed, agreeing to meet again on Monday evenings in the future for more.

Perhaps this is the beginning of a community.

Off the Mat -- Tapas

2007-09-09T14:44:00.000-06:00

(Another in a series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

Tapas:

Heat.

Intensity.

Drive.

Fire.

Austerity.

There is an interesting practice that I recommend you try sometime: svaha. It starts with a fire, so kindle a decent-sized fire in your fireplace or a campfire or, for that matter, your charcoal grill. For the purposes of this discussion and the mind-image, a good-sized campfire will do. You’ve kindled the flame. You respect its intensity, its potential for good or ill. You can now take two different approaches to the fire. By itself, it will die out over the next hour or two. That’s the nature of fire. Alternatively, you can feed it and keep it going.

Let’s suppose that you choose to maintain it. You now have two interesting choices about how to implement that decision. You can see the fire as demanding your attention and maintenance, or you can see the fire as an opportunity to transform what you no longer need into brightness and warmth – or to transform things that you want less than you want the brightness and warmth that will come from giving them up to the fire.

The ritual is to identify what you can put into the fire, and then to do so. While I’m as literal-minded as the next guy, some things just don’t burn too well, so I tend to think of this ritual as more of a way of re-assembling my interests and priorities in life than as a way to reduce no-longer-wanted/needed possessions to ashes. I have, on more than one occasion, written out a word or two on a slip of paper that I’ve tossed into the fire, giving up my attachment to the idea penned there. Perhaps, it’s been a treasured resentment. Maybe an insistence on my own viewpoint. You get the idea.

I like the brightness of fire.

But I’ve practiced a version of this many more times than I’ve built campfires. For many weeks in a row, one of my more wonderful yoga teachers began each class she taught with the simplified ritual of starting us in seated meditation, asking us to think of something we could give up, imagining it cupped in our hands, then raising the hands to the sky, giving it up to the divine fire. That practice worked for me by putting me into a mindset of seeing the obstacles to my yoga practice (both off-the-mat kinds of practice as well as on) as things I could give up.

Now maybe you aren’t as interested in or moved by rituals as I am. If not, there are other ways to practice tapas. The Book of Malachi in the Bible refers to God as the “refiner’s fire.” (Malachi 3:2) In simple terms, a smith would take gold ore, put it into the most intense fires that could be generated at the time, and would burn away everything that was not the gold. I like that verse and image, as it makes clear to us that our core essence is already gold. What is needed is a fire to remove the obstacles. I think that Malachi may have been getting poetically at the same kind of experience as that which Patanjali articulates in the Yoga Sutra, when he writes

For those who seek liberation wholeheartedly, realization is near.

How near depends on whether the practice is mild, moderate, or intense.
I.21-22

Doesn’t that sound rather like a football coach talking to his players in training camp before the season starts? Football coaches weren’t the first to figure out that intense personal commitment can turn talented players into something altogether different. Tapas is the niyama that speaks easily to our culture. While we may not really feel connected to saucha and we may think that santosha is a bit suspect, we can totally relate to tapas.

In a way, the “how near” question presented in I.22 is asking, essentially, “How badly do you want it?” But it isn’t a tax demanded by a greedy universe that we can pay grudgingly – it’s a transformation of ourselves – indeed, a transformation of our very notions of “self.”

Lama Surya Dass wrote:

Last night across the globe, millions of new parents were awakened by the sound of a crying baby. Around the world, these parents responded by groaning as they stood up and made their way to the baby's crib in order to do what had to be done. All of these parents were renouncing, giving up, or letting go of their much needed sleep because they cared more about the well-being of a little child. The child's needs were more important than their own. Their parental love was stronger than their attachment to their own sleep.

Renunciation, an important and recurring spiritual theme, is not that complicated to understand. Renunciation means sacrificing or giving up something that seems important at that moment in favor of something that we know ultimately has more meaning. Each time we do this, we are making a spiritual choice – a decision to go with the bigger picture. ...

A spiritual journey almost inevitably begins with a decision to renounce a certain way of life. But that decision is less about changing your environment or letting go of people and things than it is about transforming your inner being – learning the inner meaning of letting go and letting be in order to find wise naturalness and authentic simplicity.
(Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Personal Spiritual Life, Lama Surya Das, Broadway Books: NY, 1999, pp. 31-32)

Along the same lines, Ram Dass wrote in Be Here Now:

You might think of renunciation in terms of some external act like a New Year's resolution, or leaving family and friends to go off to a cave. But renunciation is much more subtle than that – and much harder – and much much more continuing. On the spiritual journey, renunciation means non-attachment.

To become free of attachment means to break the link identifying you with your desires. The desires continue; they are part of the dance of nature. But a renunciate no longer thinks that he is his desires.

(Be Here Now, Ram Dass, Lama Foundation: New Mexico, 1971, p. 9)

So what’s the benefit of tapas – of practicing yoga with deep intensity and commitment? Patanjali promises in language that seems to borrow from Malachi’s refiner’s fire idea that “as intense discipline burns up impurities, the body and its senses become supremely refined.” (II.43)

This is something as yogis we can sink their teeth into – something we can test. As you have committed to your practice, performed even just the on-the-mat work with commitment, managing your life to get you to practice, have you discovered that you have been able to perceive things through your senses and body more clearly?

On a very tangible and physical level, I have. As I’ve mentioned in class before, before I discovered yoga, I had gotten desperate enough to meet with back surgeons to see if they could help me fix the constant pain I was in. Though I started my practice of yoga for entirely different reasons, the more I practiced, and the more attention I paid to exactly what I was experiencing in my body, the more I began to perceive the actions, the postures, the motions I was making and holding that complicated and amplified my back problems. Seeing that, I began to change the ways that I sat, the ways that I moved, the ways that I stood. Doing that lessened the pain. The more I practiced, the more I began to distinguish between muscle groups affecting the positions of my lumbar vertebrae and disks. That led me to discovering that as I strengthened – really strengthened a lot – not only my back muscles, but also my psoas, my abdominals, my obliques – I found that I didn’t have any back pain left at all. Now, I don’t want to mislead – yoga didn’t magically heal my back. It did, however, refine my perceptions. It helped me to discover all those things about my back, and having discovered them, to change them. If I revert to the same behaviors I was pursuing when I was talking to back surgeons, I can make my back hurt again, just as it did before. But it’s been years since I wanted to do that.

Off the mat, commitment to the practice of Yoga has similarly refined my perceptions of my body that affect not only physical conditions, but also matters we more often talk of as related to the heart and mind. There is a radical and elemental connection between minds and hearts, spirits and bodies. The same kinds of refinements of perceptions can allow us to see how our actions cause harm to other beings and to ourselves. They can enable us to perceive the effects the foods we eat have on our bodies and on our minds. They can allow us to understand more clearly how other people see a situation, and how they feel about it.

At its core, Yoga can be understood as a set of practices that applies mindfulness to increasingly refined perceptions of the relationships between ourselves and the beings, the world, and the universe around us.

Everyone’s fire burns at different temperatures at different times. So what can you do to build tapas, if you feel like you’re less motivated, less inspired than you might be at other times?

Here’s what I do, in no particular order:

1. Connect with someone who inspires you. This can be anyone, living or dead, someone you’re close to or someone you’ve never met.

2. Get outside – outside your office, outside your house, outside your normal routine, outside your thoughts, outside your habits.

3. Yoga. For me, at any rate, no matter how grumpy, lethargic, sick, lazy, depressed, or bored I may feel, if I can get myself into a yoga practice, I start to feel better, more interested in practicing. When we practice yoga – especially the vinyasa style that we typically do in class – it gets easy to think of tapas as simply the body heat we generate, but the heating affects much more than just the temperature of our muscles and tendons – tapas affects our minds, as well.

One caution as a parting thought: tapas or intensity does not mean “force,” either on or off the mat. Forcing ourselves into a posture wrecks knees. Forcing ourselves into a thought process performs similar damage to our minds. Yoga tempers tapas with santosha (contentment) and ahimsa (non-harming). Find ways to make tapas compatible with those principles – not an opposition to them.

Off the Mat -- Santosha, Lab Report

2007-08-20T22:13:00.000-06:00

(Another in my continuing series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

Though I intended this next piece to be a discussion of my experience with the next niyama, tapas ("fire" or "discipline"), instead, life provided me with an opportunity to practice santosha, and I learned from the experience.

This summer, my family is intact again, my oldest son having returned from college. My wife and I have gotten fully comfortable with kids that go to bed later than we do. But we’re still parents, at heart. So the night before last, we went to bed, as usual, with lights still on in various parts of the house, two kids still up and about, one (the oldest) not home yet.

So I woke up at some point, and realized that the two younger kids had gone to bed, but the lights were still on. I thought, “hm – the oldest must not be home yet,” rolled over, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up again, about an hour later, and this time I looked at the clock.

3 a.m.

I could feel the usual blend of aggravation, worry, and annoyance begin to creep in.

* * *

For many, many years, I strongly resisted using mantras. I'd read about people adopting one mantra or another for various reasons. But repeating the same phrase over and over again always seemed like a kind of mental repression, not openness. Kind of the opposite of what I was seeking. Mind you, I’ve always been just fine with chanting in various languages. Though raised a Mormon, I could sing a Catholic mass in Latin well before I could repeat the Mormon Articles of Faith. So when a yoga teacher changed her routine and began starting each class she taught by chanting the first two verses of the Yoga Sutra in Sanskrit, I promptly took it upon myself to chant along with her. She looked at me curiously, but never objected.

Still, mantra practice, over and over and over again seemed an entirely different sort of thing. But three or four years ago, I began meditating. I tried out various meditation practices, and I found that a minute or two of chanting “OM” over and over and over again, whether aloud or just in my mind, seemed to open me up my mind and heart in ways that just holding still didn’t usually accomplish. At some point in the future, I’ll probably write up something more detailed about OM and mantras generally, but let’s save that for another time. Suffice it to say that it was the first mantra I was comfortable using. It was about mid-way between repetitious prayer and simply invoking the name of God.

Then, a year or two ago, I saw advertised a recording that included one of my favorite Sanskrit teachers, Manorama (“Man-OR-ama,” not “MAN-o-RAMA”). On a whim, I ordered the CD. It was delivered a few days later, and I was surprised to find that it was comprised of six or seven recordings of the same chant, performed by different artists in very different styles. Sometimes I use it to end yoga practices. At any rate, to abbreviate yet another long story, listening to the recording several times was enough to embed in my mind a mantra of a sort. It is really more of a short prayer than a long mantra. By most instruction, mantras are supposed to be as short as one to four syllables. Whatever.

For me, the four-line prayer worked just fine. First, it stuck in my head. With it lodged there, it started to come up at times. I found it helpful in beginning my meditation practice, focused as it is on drawing the heart to the single-point of meditation. I found it comfortingly familiar when I began a yoga practice in a hotel room far from home. Repeating it before stepping onto my mat in various yoga studios, I found it served as a way to dedicate and bring a sharpened mind to the act of beginning my practice.

After I'd done the dog-training exercise of repeating the mantra before and during so many yoga and meditation practices, I started to find that even pausing to repeat it in my mind while driving in rush hour traffic calmed me. And, back to the story from the night before last, I’ve found that it works the same way in the middle of the night, when a worry arises.

* * *

So at 3 a.m., I repeated the mantra in my mind. With late summer in Colorado in our yard, there are crickets that sing through the night. With the windows open to bring in the night coolness, they sing to us all night long. I made it only through the mantra two or three times before I realized that my pacing of its words were blending with the crickets’ song. And the worry about my son retreated, and I went back to sleep. (Yes, I realize that telling a story about a step toward enlightenment by focusing on going to sleep seems a little bit backwards, but bear with me.) I woke a couple of more times during the night and early hours of the morning, saw the house lights were still on, repeated the mantra (or a little bit of it, anyway), connected to the crickets' songs, and went back to sleep.

When dawn came, my wife and I got up, saw the lights still on, the car our son had been driving still not home, and we got decidedly more worried. We called our son’s cell phone, but it rang into voicemail. It was out of batteries or he’d turned it off. It was then, sitting at the kitchen table, that I realized that I had an opportunity to practice santosha. Practicing contentment and equanimity when everything is comfortable and easy is not a very challenging kind of practice. Practicing those things when your child is unexpectedly missing for longer than he's ever before been missing is, for me at least, an entirely different sort of thing.

I paused in the conversation with my wife about where he likely was and what his condition probably was, and I thought to myself, “I am aware of the feelings of worry and concern. I can be mindful of those feelings without diving into them more deeply. And I can practice contentment and equanimity, even now, even if my deepest worries (car accident, injured, dying, etc.) are all true.”

And just that slowing down and decision allowed those feelings to soften – not to go away entirely. They didn’t. But they softened enough that when my son got home an hour later, I was glad to see him and interested in the experience (he reported nothing more interesting than an unannounced sleep-over at a friend’s house -- was that something he should have mentioned?), rather than beside myself and angry, as I’d have been otherwise. And that non-threatening, non-dominating, non-command-and-control response, in turn, allowed him to accept the request that he let us know of such things in the future.

End of story.

Santosha – for me, the practice was two-fold. First, it was being mindful enough even in the middle of the night to recognize that I had a tool that could help me manage my otherwise-automatic-and-very-loud worry reflexes, and it was having developed and entrained my mind to mantra practice enough to have that tool available. Second, with the arising of consciousness and awakening with the dawn, it was recognizing that even my most dire worries did not have to prevent me from practicing santosha.

And the fruits of the santosha practice -- a happy reunion and a non-combative resolution of such situations in the future, seem pretty good to me.

Have you tried out santosha? What has your experience been?

Off the Mat -- Santosha

2007-08-10T11:30:00.000-06:00

(Another installment in my series of dharma talks with my yoga students.)

Santosha means “contentment.” When I first ran across this niyama, it bugged me.

Contentment? Didn’t Patanjali get the memo? Contentment is contemptible, we should always be striving, always climbing, always getting more, always unsatisfied with the status quo.

So I believed, and so I lived for many years. That kind of life hasn’t proven to be all it claimed to be. So I’ve begun to explore a different way of being. Taking a step back from the “everything, all the time” mentality has allowed me to discover moments when I have experience contentment. When it has arisen, it has felt like the opposite of suffering, rather like a kind of spaciousness; and it has seemed entirely possible despite poverty or pain, possible in hunger or wealth. On those occasions when it’s arisen, it hasn’t felt dulling or passivity-inspiring, at all – more like a kind of balance, a kind of okay-ness, even when I’m in the midst of a hard-fought court trial or a complicated family problem.

I’ve come to recognize santosha as a function of how I am internally, rather than what the situation is externally.

One teacher described it as a series of contrasts:

…serenity, but not complacency. It is comfort, but not submission; reconciliation, not apathy; acknowledgment, not aloofness. …

Too often we think too small. Some people believe they must close their eyes to the suffering of others in order to maintain their own contentment. They confuse indifference with detachment, passivity with peacefulness, and isolation with equanimity. But hiding one's head in the sand will not guarantee contentment. There is an old saying from India: “You can wake up a sleeping person but you cannot awaken someone who is pretending to sleep.”

That is something I can relate to – a sort of emotional adulthood. You don’t find yourself plunged into despair when something goes wrong, nor wildly elated when something goes right. Cyndi Lee calls it “unconditional happiness.”

On the mat, we continually confront such limitations. In a class I take on Saturdays from an extraordinarily lithe teacher, I’m continually confronted with how much shorter my hamstrings are than hers. I see how deeply her pelvis drops in lunges and I realize that mine will never match hers. When I see her move through a sun salutation with the grace of a cheetah, I’m aware of my own more giraffe-like qualities.

But even when I make those kinds of comparisons, santosha still can come through.

Whenever we perceive the grace of another’s movement, it is not because the other lacks limitations – being embodied is definitionally a limitation – but rather because the other has found a way to move lithely within her or his own body, even in the context of her or his own limitations. Those perceptions of another’s grace can provide us with a seed to plant and cultivate. Perceiving is the first step in consciously becoming. And the grace that we can see in another person is never – never – the result of the other’s perfect ease. It is, rather, the result of the other fully engaging within those limitations, whether they are short hamstrings, sore achilles’ tendons, a stiff neck, a messy divorce, a going-nowhere job, an undeveloped community, a chronic disease, or just bad teeth.

Christopher Reeve embodied grace within the wheelchair of a quadriplegic. Stephen Hawking embodies grace within a body ravaged by Lou Gerig’s disease. A marvelous yoga teacher I know embodies grace within a body formed by severe allergies and celiac disease. Mother Theresa embodied grace within her own despair and doubts.

Practicing santosha doesn’t require us to abandon hopes for or efforts aimed at obtaining freedom from physical restraints, from external oppression, or from illness or aging (though I suspect other things may limit our ability to escape mortality). Instead, it asks us to release the mental suffering we wrap around our experience of those situations. Doing that allows us see the actual problems more clearly and admit that once the current problems are solved, new dilemmas will arise, new intractable and annoying problems will come up.

But in allowing a sense of contentment to enter in, we’re not denying the problems, not refusing to participate, not conceding defeat. Instead, we’re finding a kind of ease in the very practice of being alive, with all of the obstacles, limits, and dilemmas that being alive entails.

In the end, living with santosha is acknowledging that there is no external condition that, when finally obtained or satisfied, will bring an end to our craving, our attachment, our desires, but grace in movement and thought and action are possible, nonetheless.

Practice ideas:

1. On the mat: find a couple of poses that you don’t like and practice them a lot.

Really. Find a pose that just doesn’t work for you, and commit to it for a month – if you practice outside of class sometimes, make sure you include the pose, twice, in each practice. If you’d like me to include the pose in the sequences I plan for JM classes, let me know what it is, and I’ll build it into our practices.

It’s hard to overemphasize how good a mind-conditioning practice it can be to decide to do a pose you hate with santosha, with an attitude of contentment. For me, the pose I hated most for a long time was utkatasana. The santosha practice didn’t change the pose from hard to easy. What really changed was my mind – I stopped focusing on how much I hated the pose, and I started thinking, “yep, I really don’t like this much, but I think I can take the pose deeper.” In thinking that way, I released my need for the pose to be pleasant. It didn’t produce some fairy tale ending – I didn’t suddenly see the light, get wrapped in a brand-new yoga outfit by my fairy godmother, and forever thereafter find utkatasana to be the easiest and pleasantest pose in the catalogue. To this day, I find it hard, challenging, annoying, difficult. But there has been a change – I no longer get into mind-games about how much suffering I’m experiencing in the pose. The absence of that chatter provides a kind of silent space I can move in and hold in utkatasana. That silence and space, in turn, allows me to see into the pose, and then through it and into life.

2. Off the mat: after a month of working with your least favorite yoga pose, find a situation in life that inspires the same kind of discomfort and frustration for you, but one that you’re reasonably certain would be as good for you as your hated yoga pose, if you were to do it. And then, again for one month, actively move into that situation and practice santosha. Give up expecting the situation to magically change and be all butterflies and flowers. Expect it to be what it is. But see if you can release your insistence that it be other than it is, and in so doing, find contentment even within the constraints of the situation or action.

I’d love to hear your experiences with finding contentment within uncomfortable situations, whether on the mat or off, whether individual or interpersonal, whether good or bad.

Unsatisfactory

2007-08-09T20:09:00.000-06:00

"Unsatisfactory Performance" was my elementary school's code for a failing grade. In elementary school, rather than separate subject classes, each student had one teacher, who assigned different grades for various aspects of a student's performance.

In high school, "Unsatsifactory Performance" was dropped in favor of the simpler, "E." (Yes, "E," not "F." I suspect that the "F" has arisen in more recent years because some of the students managed to persuade their parents that "E" stood for "Excellent" rather than "one step below a 'D'".)

College used the "F" motif for the same purpose.

Law school used numbers that ranged (so far as I could tell) from the mid-30s to the mid-80s, probably to confuse recruiters into giving us all jobs, as no one could tell what might or might not have been an "F" -- or an "E" -- or an "Unsatisfactory Progress."

Buddhism and Yoga, I've learned, also have their code-speak for flunking. They call it "dukkha." (Pronounce that like "duke - huh," being sure to make the "h" sound clear following the "k" of "duke-") I've been taught that "dukkha" is a word borrowed from (of course) Sanskrit. It's usually translated as "suffering" or "unsatisfactoriness." What is the grade assigned to?

Everything.

Not that everything is suffering. Only that dukkha permeates existence. Anything pleasurable will not last. Anything constructed will fall down. Anything that is born will also die. Anything aware will become unaware. Dukkha becomes the label for the perception of the failure of existence to fulfill our desires for existence.

The Buddha taught, in his first sermon following his enlightenment:

"Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha."

Even though Pali is a nicely and longly dead language, the etymology exercise doesn't end with defining it as "suffering." Dukkha was a word defined in reference to an ill-crafted wheel axel turning in an ill-crafted hole -- think of a lumpy cart wheel axle turning in a not-round hole. If "dukkha" meant, originally, "lack of space to move," it's opposite, "sukkha," meant "space."

In yoga terms, "lack of space" and "space" are pretty good metaphors for suffering and ease.

For human critters, confinement precipitates mind-states that involve suffering. Openness precipitates mind-states that involve ease. Imprisonment or liberation. In yoga poses, those ideas make a lot of sense.

* * *

So today has been an exercise in dukkha. For one reason or another, when I awoke this morning, I perceived everything as unsatisfactory -- my job was repetitive, my boss was unappreciative, my performance at work was flawed, my vacation was unrelaxing, my family was dysfunctional, my body was deteriorating, my thoughts were banal, my existence was shallow, my efforts were weak and half-hearted, my, my, my, my. The fundamental shabbiness of all existence shone through even the most polished surfaces. Jesus condemned the hypocrites as "whited sepulchres." Today, everything I saw was a whited sepulchre.

Usually, when I experience that sort of thing, I either follow it down into the mire and wind up depressed for days and weeks (prior life) or (more recently) notice it and label it as "depression" and then hold it apart from my perceiving self, implement self-help measures (exercise a lot, reconnect with friends, etc.). But today was a little different. As the more recent pattern for dealing with depression presented itself to my mind, I suddenly became aware of a little bit more than I'd perceived before.

And this time, rather than labeling the experience "depression" and putting it into a specimen container and placing it on a shelf, like a collectible critter, I realized that my routine for dealing with depression is a kind of alienation of the experience, a kind of avoidance of it, aversion to it, just as spiralling down into the depths is a kind of perverse attachment to it.

So today, I just stayed present with it -- practicing, of all things, a kind of contentment with it, neither drawing it in, nor pushing it out.

Doing that allowed the experience to continue for longer than I've usually allowed it. And what I found was a kind of peculiar clarity -- as if there is a kind of light that reveals the dukkha aspects of all things, but it's a kind of light that I haven't been able to -- perhaps haven't been willing to -- let through the lenses I use to see the world.

Strange to think that practicing contentment and equanimity might allow me to see through what is desired to what is. And strange to find that what is, isn't all it's cracked up to be. And even stranger to find that the seeing the unsatisfactoriness clearly wasn't all bad.

In fact, it was strangely liberating. As if sukkha is experienced only when dukkha is allowed to be.

Perhaps there's something to say for Unsatisfactory Performance.

Meditation on Shambhala Mountain Center Retreat

2007-08-01T18:30:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, I arrived at Shambhala Mountain Center for a four-day meditation and yoga retreat.

SMC is about a two hour drive from Denver – freeways to Ft. Collins, a two-to-four lane from Ft. Collins to a winding two-lane up and into the foothills to a dirt road, to an unpretentious faded maroon and yellow sign that marks a bumpy drive through a gap in the fenceline. With me for the drive up is a late-twenties college student who indicated a need for a ride from Boulder to Shambhala. When we met, she thanked me for the ride, we chatted for a bit, and she went quiet, napping in the hot sunshine of the roadtrip. At the gap in the fence, I slow and turn into the gate. There is an interesting sense of arrival, as I’ve much anticipated this, and there is a sense of quiet.

A sign points from the parking lot to a crushed stone path that leads a couple hundred yards to an old two-story cabin that looks like it was built in the 1920s as a ranch house. A sign in front says, “Registration.” We walk to it, my ride-sharer stops and greets some friends. I continue on. The front door is open. I climb the few steps to the front porch and walk in. There’s a table with printed clip-on nametags, alphabetized. I do a quick count – it looks like there will be about sixty of us in the program, maybe a few more, if others have arrived earlier than I. I don’t recognize any names, but I didn’t expect to.

A few paperwork items with a person behind a desk. Only one is unexpected – “rota.” The form I fill out says that “rota” is an essential part of the experience of Shambhala, and provides a place for me to record what “rota” I will be doing. The person behind the desk hands me a sign-up sheet with chores listed out – Sunday breakfast dishes, Friday sweeping Sacred Studies Meditation Room, things like that. Following many of them is a variety of handwriting styles and inks – names of people who’ve already taken on one thing or another. There is an open space beside “Saturday cleaning Sacred Studies Foyer” where I write my name. The person behind the desk hands me a map of the area that, from the looks of it, is a ninth or tenth generation photocopy of the original map. With a pink highlighter, she shows me the tent I’m assigned to, the registration cabin where we are now, the path to “downtown,” the road from registration to the bathhouse my tent is nearest.

I drive the rider to her bathhouse, we drop off her gear, and I then drive to my bathhouse and do the same with my gear, leaving it on the porch, and return the car to the parking lot.

Map in hand, I begin walking through Shambhala. It is a curious mixture of buildings – an old ranch-style cabin used for registration, a few trailers of the sort that construction crews use to house offices on work sites, some one- or two-room cabins that look cobbled together from spare parts from a building supply store, large tented buildings set on wooden platforms, and several nearly new buildings scattered around, the latter all bearing a similar style and design. Tents are grouped around bathhouses – two sets of tents are near the “downtown” area, an area consisting of a kitchen/food prep building (1920s cabin style), a massive dining hall tent, a 1920s cabin style gift-and-sundries shop, a smaller dining area tent, and a new Sacred Studies building. Other tent groups are scattered a quarter- to a half-mile from “downtown.” Mine’s an outlier, though not the farthest.

On the trip through downtown, I’m surrounded by people who are engaged in conversations, grouping here and there at improvised picnic tables. I wonder whether four days apart from my family, pursuing activities and interests they do not share, is going to be a good thing or not.

I find my way back to the bath house, carry my gear to my assigned tent. It’s a single, though there are two platforms, two foam rubber pads, two bookcase/shelves, and two racks. I grab my backpack, dropping the rest of the gear. Suddenly mindful of my non-mindfulness, I stop, unpack everything, and organize the tent before proceeding back to downtown and dinner.

Through the solitude of crowds, I get dinner and then make my way, as instructed by the schedule, to the Sacred Studies building. The entry has large doors defended by Tibetan-style stone lions. They try to look fierce, but their size puts them only slightly larger than the over-fed cat snoozing in the sun by the dining hall tent. The foyer to the building has benches, coat racks and cubbyholes, and a sign that requests we remove our shoes before proceeding through the next set of doors. I comply and push through the inner doors.

There is an entry area, and behind it, another set of double doors, these wide open, to a brightly lighted, bamboo-floored meditation hall. The ceiling is vaulted in the center, lower on the two open wings. On the back wall of the room is an altar, framed by large portraits of two men. I recognize the older one as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the younger one as his son, Sakyang Mipham Rinpoche. There is no furniture in the hall, but there are lots of yoga mats laid out with meditation cushions. About 2/3rds of them are occupied. I enter the hall. Despite the people shifting around, finding places to sit, shuffling odds and ends, it is palpably quiet and still.

***

The retreat is led by Cyndi Lee, an accomplished yoga teacher, and David Nichtern, a teacher of meditation, trained in Tibetan Buddhism and a student of the lineage that founded SMC. Most of their introductory remarks are not, themselves, remarkable. They outline the retreat’s intended structure and content enough to quiet the “what will happen next?” part of the participants’ monkey minds. They talk about their own experiences and background enough to quiet the “can I trust these people?” part of the participants’ monkey minds. And they talk long enough for us to settle into the physical room, wiggling on yoga mats, shifting on meditation cushions, glancing around the room at other participants, the altar, the lights, the windows.

Two things, though, stick in my mind about the leaders’ initial remarks. In her self-introduction, Cyndi Lee says something along the lines of this: “During the retreat, I will play the role of mother – when I see things that can be done better, I’m going to tell you so, and maybe adjust your poses to get you there. Don’t be offended.”

In his self-introduction David Nichtern says something along these lines: “Most of you probably don’t know anyone else here, so you’re probably a little lonely. In a meditation retreat, being a little lonely is a good thing.”

***

I signed up for the retreat because it combined both yoga and meditation, two practices that have become central to my life. As it turns out, I find the meditation a lot harder than the yoga.

The retreat is structured in four basic sessions, each one with a headline message which is elaborated through a meditation session (including dharma talk and practice) and a yoga practice. In normal life, I practice yoga between an hour and two hours a day (sometimes three, if you count the time in classes that I teach, too). By contrast, I sit on my meditation cushion about a half hour each day, and I always wind up opening my eyes between the 20 and 25 minute marks, because I can’t really believe that I haven’t been sitting for way more than a half hour by that point.

The first headline message worked through in meditation and a yoga practice is Making Friends With Yourself. Befitting such an innocuous-sounding message, the meditation practices were brief explorations of the mind, noting the thoughts as they arose. The meditation leader introduced us to the shamatha meditation practice of watching the breath. When we notice the mind wandering from that object of concentration, he instructed, just notice the fact of the wandering, and return the attention to the breath.

In my novice-style and inconsistent pranayama practice, I have worked a number of breath patterns, focusing on them closely, so this instruction sounds pretty easy. David says, though, not to try to control the breath – just watch it. And he instructs us to do the meditation with our eyes open, something I’ve never been able to manage very well, as I tend to find visual images endlessly distracting (don’t get me in an art gallery or sculpture garden if you want me to stay focused on anything other than paintings or sculpture).

This is the first time in years that I’ve tried to practice meditation other than alone, either in my closet (it’s a walk-in, with enough space on the floor for a pad), or my basement. Despite Cyndi and David’s efforts in the introductory session to quell monkey-mind responses to the novelty of the situation, my monkey-mind churning consumes almost all of the first session, just getting used to the idea of seeing something while meditating, being aware of other people while meditating. When I meditate alone, there is always a very clear and noticeable mind response when I hear anyone – even my dog –approaching. So meditating in the same room with sixty or seventy other people requires a bit of getting used to. Still, I’m surprised at how effective my mind is at zipping off to the usual storage shed of fantasies, tangents, visual fascination with the floor, distractions, and the like.

The second session headline is Dynamic Equilibrium, a concept I’m pretty comfortable with from yoga practices. There’s no such thing as a perfectly still pose. In every pose, opposing muscles are constantly adjusting their tension against one another. David introduces us to the idea that meditation works the same way – there is no such thing as the perfectly still mind – just stillness as a function of increasingly minute adjustments.

The third segment of the program, Obstacles as Path, gives us an opportunity to see the experience of disruptions and obstacles and interferences to the objective as the object of the meditation or yoga itself. As David and Cyndi introduce it, it sounds unpleasant. As we practice it, it is unpleasant. David remarks, “why should we think meditation is only about light and butterflies?” But the experience is worse than it sounds. David strikes the bell, and we’re into the meditation session. Because my right knee is bugging me a little after the first day, I opt for a vajrasana meditation pose.

Turns out that if obstacles to meditation are the objective, this is a good call. If comfort is the objective, I could have made a better choice. After about 15 minutes, I’m starting to hurt – both ankles, right foot, and a big knot that’s beginning to form under my right shoulder blade. I’ve opted to sit with my eyes closed, as the first day, I never really got to the meditative mind state with them open. After 20 minutes, I’m obsessed with the discomfort, with the pain the back, the pain in the ankles. After about 21 minutes, I’m mad at the teacher – really, really mad, because he didn’t tell us how long he was going to keep us in meditation. At 21:20 minutes, I’m wondering how long we’ve been sitting together. At 21:35 I’m wondering how much wiggling I can get away with. At 21:37, I’m starting to control my breath frequency and depth. At 21:40, I do circles with my neck, only realizing I must have decided to move my neck and head after I finish moving them. The circles stretch the knotted muscles a little bit, and I return to the breath. At 21:44, I’m thinking about the yoga teacher’s assistant who adjusted my downward dog pose the day before. At 21:52, I’m annoyed about how long we’re going to be sitting here. At 22:03, I’m getting really really mad.

You get the picture.

When my pissed-off-ness reaches its fourteenth or fifteenth peak of suffering – “how long is he going to keep us here!?!? He’s just being mean! Why should I sit here just because he told me to? How long—”

****GONG****

Suddenly, I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want the meditation to end with me bitching and whining inside myself, mentally yelling for it to end.

But’s that’s exactly what happens.

So instead of feeling like my demands were met, I feel like I childishly wasted the meditation period.

No bliss. No deep insights into impermanence. No sudden understanding of interdependent arising. Barely a few split seconds of even superficial awareness of my own mind.

How long was the sitting? I really haven’t any idea, there are no clocks in the hall, and David doesn’t tell us. In retrospect, I suspect it was about 40-45 minutes, but given the drama yelling match going on in my head, it could have been 15 minutes for all I know. I feel frustrated. A bit stupid. But I come away with this: I’m truly startled by how loud my mind gets and how little space is left for anything but its vociferous suffering as I do nothing more interesting than sit still for a bit.

David leads us through a walking meditation, which is both a relief, and kind of interesting. Whatever the artificial drama of the seated meditation session, the walking session allows me to settle my mind into seeing what comes up. We return to more seated meditation, more of a “normal” experience, more comfortable, more possible. And shorter.

In the yoga practice that follows, holding Warrior 3 for an extended period feels like a blessing.

***

That evening at dinner, one of the participants in the retreat recommends that I hike up to the top of a nearby (and not-too-tall) peak on a ridge to watch sunrise dawn.

***

I awaken well before dawn, glance out the tent’s east-facing window, and see only the night lights of Ft. Collins reflected against the clouds in the distance. I roll over. I awaken again a bit later. The east-facing window shows a bit more light in the eastern sky. I realize that it’s getting near time for departure. My mind pokes at memory to guess how long before sunrise. I suspect I should get going. I close my eyes again. I awaken again. After repeating the sequence yet again, I swing my feet to the floor, put on levis and lace up my hiking boots. I have a drink of water and head out of the tent. The sky is lighter than I expected. It’s probably later than I’d planned. Following the rough instructions I remember from last night, I find a trail to the Great Stupa (about which, more later). Every now and again, maybe a half dozen times before I get to the Stupa, the trail is marked by and passes between tall poles, wrapped in vertically long, but horizontally narrow, flags. Empty gates.

I pass by the Stupa itself, navigate around it, and head up a rough and steep dirt road up the mountain. I’m alone and entirely at peace. At the edge of the road, I find tufts of silver sage growing. I pick a few fringed leaves, twisting them in my fingers to release their scent and drop them into my pocket. It blends with the dew-strong scents of morning flowers and pines. The road crests beside a rocky crag. There’s a bench to rest on, but I see a thin trail leading to the rocks themselves, and several ways up from there. The three-peaked crag seems more than 50 feet high, less than a hundred. It’s the sort of crag that any respectable primate can climb. As I go up, I find in sheltered spots beneath overhanging rocks dried masses of what looks like potter’s clay, shaped to the size of a small snowball, pressed into the rock. Clearly human-brought. I haven’t any idea what they are or why they are placed there. I scramble higher. The air temperature is cool, but not overly so. The fleece shirt I’m wearing is damp from sweat, but not wet. As I scramble to the top, I look and my brain goes through the nearly instantaneous adjustment it always does when I think I’m alone and suddenly find that I’m not. I see that there are two people here already, sitting in meditation – a man I’ve seen in the dining tent, and the yoga instructor’s assistant. They smile, I nod, bow, and find a rock to sit on. I realize that I’m probably sitting between them and the bright point on the horizon where the sun will rise in a few seconds. I shift to a lower rock, off to the side, and at the edge of the crag. I sit.

The barest shred of the sun is just above the horizon, burning its edges. We’re high enough that I can see past the foothills, and the horizon is set by the long, flat plains east of Fort Collins. I settle into my seat, focus soft, eyes half-open, and gaze toward the rising sun. Even before the sun is halfway above the horizon, I’ve noticed its north-to-south motion, its summer morning path as it rises into the ecliptic plane. There is a steady breeze pressing gently against my back, sweeping past and through me. The air has a kind of clarity that seems brilliantly present and empty. I inhale, drawing in the breeze, exhale, noticing the breath rejoin the wind. My vision set on the sun rising above the horizon, my attention on my breath, my mind stills.

Arising in my mind, the impermanence of a sun rising over eroding mountains.

Then stillness.

I hear the dopplerizing of bird calls. A dozen or so small birds speed just over our heads, flying eastward and down into the valley below us, faster than the wind.

Arising in my mind, the emptiness of space and air all around the crag, my skin.

Then stillness.

I hear the two people with me at the mountaintop shift and rustle. After a few moments, they enter my line of vision, scrambling diagonally down the rocky crag. I hear their boots crunch gravel as they make their way to the dirt road, and head down mountain. The texture of my breath changes to the shaking of grief. From the inside, I watch it. My body is sobbing. I notice that I am alone again.

Then stillness.

Something clicks in my head. I straighten my spine and bow toward the rising sun. I turn and explore the rest of the top of the crag.

I’m at the highest point on the crag. It is marked with another vertically long, horizontally short flag. There are two other lower crests to the crag, each one marked the same way.

There is, in the niche formed at the base of an overhanging boulder, a Buddha statue. Around the statue are offerings – quarters, a Chapstik, a whistle, a broken clay pipe, a rolled-up dollar bill. I find in my pocket a bit of the silver sage I’d twisted on the path up to the crag. I set it before the Buddha.

Behind the boulder is a flat stone, large enough to stand on, but only barely. I pull off my boots and socks, my shirt, and I begin a sun salutation: standing, hands at heart center. Draw kneecaps up, tightening quads to femurs. Sweep arms wide, then up, alongside ears. Turn gaze straight up. In the morning-brightened sky, directly overhead, I see the last star of the night, still shining. Bend at hip joints, flat back, arms extended to either side, swan-diving forward and down. My gaze rests on the granite beneath my feet. Half lift, to a flat spine, arms still extended earthward; full forward bend, hands grasping calves, face pressed to shins. Then sweeping up to standing, hands at heart center. Then again. And again. And again.

Each motion is practiced, familiar. My mind is embedded in my flesh, in the air of the crag, in the stone at my feet, the star above me, the sun-brightening sky.

***

As I work my way down the dirt road from the crag, the air cools in spots, warms in others. At the back of the Stupa, I see a path that branches off and upward, more southerly than the eastward path I’m returning from. A sign indicates a Shinto shrine ahead. I follow the path. A couple of hundred yards up the hill, there is an open shelter that includes instructions. I draw the cleansing water from a covered basin, wash my hands, my mouth. I bow, passing through the gateways framing the path, empty space within them, before them, beyond them. I greet the shrine, see the offerings of rice, of salt. I bow, take a grain of salt and place it on my tongue. I clap loudly, twice; bow twice. Then work my way back down the path, through the empty gates.

At the Stupa, I remove my boots, enter. There are others here. I sit and gaze at the towering Buddha figure before me.

I stand and withdraw. Outside, I re-boot, and begin walking down the path to the Stupa. I stop at an offertory that I must have passed on my way up. I don’t remember it. It is elaborately bedraped with mala beads, packets of tea, coins, hair bands, photographs, scribbled notes, bandanas, pebbles. I add another silver sage leaf. At the front of it are half-charred incense sticks in a sand-filled bowl, blown out by the wind. I find a cigarette lighter at the base. Cupping the flame from the constant breeze, I hold it up to the tallest incense stick. It smolders. The wind blows out the lighter. I try again, holding flame to the incense, cupping the incense, the flame, the air with my hand. The incense catches fire, burns steadily. I release the lighter and un-cup my hand. The flame blows out, leaving a breeze-fresh glowing ember, smoking into the morning.

Off the Mat -- Saucha

2007-07-31T21:47:00.000-06:00

The first of the niyamas we’ll discuss is saucha – some people translate it as purity, others as cleanliness. Either way, it conveys a kind of personal discipline that encourages us to strip away non-essentials.

When it comes to our physical bodies, it means a great deal more than simply attending to basic cleanliness. Considering purity can lead us to being mindful about what we put into our bodies, about how actions make us feel. One of the things that I value most about yoga is the feeling of essentialness, of purity, that sometimes comes at the end of a physically demanding practice.

A cautionary note, though, about purity – something the leader of the meditation part of the retreat I attended recently pointed out: it’s really easy to get attached to the idea that yoga (and meditation, for that matter) is all about sweetness and light and butterflies and flowers. At times in my life, I’ve thought that pursuing purity would require me to avoid parts of life – people who didn’t fit my then-current notion of ideal, ideas that didn’t fit my preferred patterns, situations whose very existence seemed to contradict the ideas I thought to be right. In retrospect, I think I mistook attachment to the idea of purity for attention to the practice of purity. I’ll explain.

Attention to purity can teach us ways to engage with our own lives more directly, more clearly, helping us to simplify and slow down enough to discover the essence of our own thoughts and actions. From one vantage point, that simplification process is much of what happens on the yoga mat. Take Tadasana – Mountain pose: soles of feet pressing into the earth, side of big toes touching, heels slightly parted, kneecaps lifted slightly, hamstrings and quads both firm, pelvis balanced forward-and-back, abdominals engaged, spine lengthened, shoulders down, arms extended up, neck long. This is the slowed-down essence of what we do dozens of times a day – standing up – but it’s the most attentive, pure, essential and mindful version of standing up that I do in a day. All the rest are variations on that theme. Other poses deliver similar experiences of essentialness, of purity. Even in the years before I discovered yoga, I benefited from practicing purity.

I first read Walden, by Henry David Thoreau when I was in high school, then again several times in college. A handful of my favorite lines:

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

***

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life….

***

Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.

Thoreau got the idea of purity, of boiling life down enough to experience its essence. That was an approach that I valued long before I discovered yoga, and it bears on all kinds of aspects of life. I liked yoga when I found it, in part, precisely because it provided me with a way of experiencing clearly the pure physical essence of being embodied.

But, as I mentioned before, it’s pretty easy to slip from valuing what attention to purity allows us to see and experience into an attachment to notions of purity – “I appreciate purity, so I am pure,” “others who do not appreciate purity as I do are not pure,” “purity is better than impurity” … You get the picture. Purity can easily become a way to build up oneself by drawing lines: “I only shop at organic food stores,” or “I practice yoga more than anyone else I know.” At the extremes, it’s pretty easy (at least from the outside) to recognize self-righteousness and to distinguish between it and valuing purity itself. But sometimes the way we perform exactly the same action can swing the act from one of attachment and self-righteousness to one of experiencing life more clearly through purity.

The meditation leader followed his cautionary note about what we expect from yoga and meditation by pointing out that life is filled with all kinds of discomfort, unhappiness, suffering, and difficulty. If we expect nothing but sweetness and light from yoga and meditation, we’re in for a tremendous let-down, or we’re going to have to repress and ignore lots and lots of real experience. Purity doesn’t mean “pleasantness.” Pain can be pure. Unhappiness can be pure. So can discomfort. Experiencing them at their essentials can lead us to change not only the way that we think about those experiences, but the very ways that we experience them.

In the end, purity and cleanliness boil down to the same thing -- getting to the bare essentials of life.

Consider putting saucha into practice:

1. For breakfast, one day, set out your breakfast dishes, and put onto your plate or into your bowl, twelve blueberries – only twelve blueberries. Eat them one at a time with all the attention and effort you bring to your Warrior 2 pose. See what you experience.

2. At the end of a day, take a half hour to list what you did with your time that day. Consider what you might prune away.

3. If you practice yoga at home, take a clear-eyed look at the area where you practice. Does it need to be cleaned? Is it cluttered? If you don’t practice yoga at home, look at the place where you go to be quiet. My experience is that if I take the time to clean and straighten up before practicing, both at JM’s fitness center and at home, my practice goes better, my mind is less distracted, I am more centered.

4. Consider whether there are ways you might use attention to purity to change the way your mind works. Much of meditation is a practice of becoming aware of what is going on in our minds.

On the Road to Shambhala (Mountain Center)

2007-07-18T20:46:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow, returning Sunday night.

Looking forward to it.

Off the Mat -- Reflecting on the yamas and anticipating the niyamas

2007-07-16T20:59:00.000-06:00

(This is another post in the series of dharma talks I've presented to my yoga students.)

Off the mat: Reflecting on yamas and anticipating niyamas

We’ve now reviewed each of the five yamas (ethical practices for interacting with external world): ahimsa, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha, non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, mindful sexuality, non-grasping.

Not really the part of yoga you see in magazines or on television.

But as soon as Patanjali finishes outlining the yamas, he then describes the niyamas -- the personal disciplines of Yoga: saucha or purity, santosha or contentment, tapas or self-discipline, svadhyaya or self-study, and ishvara pranidhana or surrender.

At this point, you may be thinking, “gadzooks! Isn’t there any strength and flexibility and pretzel poses to Yoga, after all?”

Of course there are, and we’ll get to discussing them in a bit. But there’s a reason Patanjali starts with the yamas and niyamas: to take the physical asana practice from a peculiar kind of exercise and turn it into a path of liberation, we need to understand it as more than simply a three-dimensional performance of muscle and bone. The first two limbs of yoga help us to develop the understanding and the discipline that create the sensitivity and the perception we need to make better use of the posture and breathing practices of Yoga.

I read from Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison’s Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga, this past week and was impressed by their insight regarding the yamas and niyamas:

The yamas are in many ways the hardest work on this path [of Yoga], for they confront us with the enormous challenge of rechanneling our spiritual energies. The yamas form the very bedrock of our existence. Before encountering the yamas, we are prey to the whims of our minds. Our minds tell us we are good, so we feel good; our minds tell us we are bad, so we feel bad. Our orientation is outward; we continuously compare ourselves to others, and most of the time we find ourselves lacking. We search outside ourselves for the validation we crave. And since we have no control over this validation, we can never truly be at peace or gain access to our true power in this life. The yamas change all of this. The energy we have poured into fruitless effort now becomes redirected into a process that gains us lasting peace and freedom. The yamas are the fundamental renunciation of a life based on fear. They are the change. The niyamas are the fundamental practices that sustain a life based on love. They sustain the change.
p. 83.

I especially liked their point that practicing the yamas lets us stop living a life based on fear – fear of perceived threats by others, fear of truth, fear of not having enough, fear of not being loved, fear of letting go. Each of those fears affects not just our thoughts, but our entire lives. Also, each one tends to contract us more and more tightly around what we think of as our “me,” our “self,” the part of us that wants to be validated, protected and preserved. Yoga doesn’t teach us that the self is a bad thing (though as one continues practice, the concept of “self” tends to change rather dramatically) – but rather Yoga allows us to see the self and its actions in brighter light. The renunciations of the yamas – of violence, of falsehood, of taking what is not offered, of sexual misconduct, of grasping and clutching – are all practices that work counter to our instinctual patterns of “self”-building and “self”-protection. Why? Not to annihilate the self – Yoga isn’t about self-hatred. But rather to free the self from those behaviors that work like addictions.

Within its context, each of these practices appears to give one a degree of control, a way to protect the self. Violence seems to lead to dominion. We tell lies to control others by controlling the information they receive. Taking others’ belongings seems like a way to become wealthy. Sexual exploitation seems to provide control and power. Grasping is, invariably, an effort to control something that is going to change (or, more frequently, has already begun to change, despite our clutching). Like other addictive behaviors, following those paths actually amplifies the need for more of them. So rather than alleviating our fears, they increase them. The only way to get to the end of a circular path is to step off of it. Pursing such courses in seeking freedom from fear only perpetuates it.

So the yamas help us extricate ourselves from the paths that lead on and on, but never really get to where they promise.

Once free from – or, more realistically, just aware of – those unfruitful circles, we’re able to start sharpening the tools that will be required for the next steps. And the tools are, of course, aspects of the mind-body itself – the ways that we approach ourselves. Implementing them, as we’ll discuss in the coming weeks, has a sharply different focus than the yamas, and a very different feel. Implementing the yamas may require some re-tuning of our minds and attitudes, but to one degree or another, each of the yamas is already assumed as basic good conduct within our society. The niyamas, on the other hand, begin to shift our attention from external to internal, and our society has a lot less to say about how we approach ourselves.

Yoga teaches us to engage each being we encounter with compassion. That includes the beings we encounter inside each of us. The niyamas enable us to act toward that being, and all others, with compassion and clarity.

Reflections on the yamas, so far?

Celebrate Liberty Right Here, Right Now

2007-07-04T17:22:00.000-06:00

Along the lines of satya for an Independence Day Celebration:

"Meditation is really about freedom. It is first and foremost a liberative practice. It is a way of being that gives us back our life, and our happiness, right here, right now – that wrests it from the jaws of unawareness and habits of inattention and somnambulance that threatens to imprison us in ways that can be as painful, ultimately, as losing our outward freedoms. And one way it frees us is from continually making the same unwise decisions when the consequences of such are staring us right in the face and could be apprehended if only we would look, and actually see.

"For all these reasons, mindfulness can be a natural catalyst in deepening and broadening democracy, a democracy in which liberty is embodied not only in our rhetoric and in our laws and institutions and how they are implemented in practice, as important as that is, but also in our hard-earned wisdom as individual citizens, stemming from looking deeply into and feeling from inside our true nature, a wisdom that is embodied in our hearts and in our love for the interior landscapes of the mind and the heart. The more we become intimate with that landscape, the more we can participate effectively in society, in the appreciation of the beauty and unique potential of all of us. The more people come to know this terrain, the more we will all benefit from sharing in a distributive wisdom and goodwill of mutual regard that can translate into healthier communities and a healthier society, and a nation that knows its priorities and lives them in the world with authentic and unwavering reverence and respect.

"That kind of liberty cannot know borders. If others are not free, then in a very real way, we cannot be completely free or at peace either, just as we cannot be completely healthy in an unhealthy world."

John Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, pp. 566-68

And this from MLK:

"Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time."

--Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

Core works

2007-07-02T11:41:00.000-06:00

I've had several people ask me recently what they can do to improve their core muscles, so I thought I'd assemble this post for them...

Even when I'm teaching 45 minute classes, I still usually include at least 5 minutes of core work.

It is usually comprised of a combination of stuff. I have them do crunches of various varieties to stave off boredom.

Try these for a taste:

(1) bicycle crunches: lying on your back, interlock fingers behind head (not neck); draw knees into chest; extend right leg forward and off the floor; draw right elbow to outside of left knee; then alternate by extending the left leg while drawing in the right knee, and taking your left elbow to the outside of your right knee; continue alternating (and breathing) for 30-60 seconds at your own (best) pace.

Tips: Keep your neck neutrally long -- not leaning way forward, and not drawn forward by your hands. Tightly bending your neck can do damage, especially with the side-to-side motion of this practice. Make the crunches harder by keeping your back curled up even as you rotate from one side to the other. I usually coach my students to keep their shoulder blades entirely off the floor, though most of them can't manage that for very many reps, and the longer they go, the more uncurled their backs tend to get.

(2) oblique crunches: lying on your back, interlock fingers behind head (not neck), draw both knees into your chest, then drop them, together, to the right side, while keeping your shoulders flat on the mat. Then crunch by lifting your head, neck, shoulders, and back straight up to the ceiling on an exhale; hold for two or three counts, then inhale back down to the mat. Repeat for 30-45 seconds at your own best pace. Then bring your knees back to center, and drop them to the left, repeating on that side for the same amount of time.

Tips: To make this harder, lift your feet and knees slightly off the floor. As with bicycle crunches, try to keep your shoulder blades entirely off the floor for all of the reps. Work to isolate the obliques. In actuality, you can't stop using your psoas muscles in this sequence, but you can start to distinguish between the rectus abdominus (six-pack) muscles and the obliques, usually by feel, since the obliques are smaller (thinner) muscles and will fatigue and start hurting faster than the abdominus. See, e.g., here. One vanity-driven result of doing lots of oblique crunches is you tend to build up your anterior serratus muscles, which look kind of cool when you do twists.

(3) Pelvic lift crunches: Interlock your fingers behind your head; recline on your mat. Draw your legs up, while keeping your sacrum on the mat, feet together. Then lift your feet straight up, toward the ceiling. This motion is no more than an inch or two for the most flexible and strong yogis. For some, their hips don't leave the floor at all, but the muscles that would lift, if they could, are fully engaged. Then on an exhale, lift the heart straight up toward the ceiling, as well, lifting until the shoulder blades leave the ground. Then, while maintaining both pelvis and shoulder blades off the mat, pulse up for as long as you can. (Note, this one can be really hard.)

One tip for all crunches: there's nothing like really loud, really fast, rhythmic music to crunch by.

Beyond crunches, I put my classes into Downward-facing Dog, have them lift one leg straight back and up, and then draw the knee of the extended leg in to their noses (for most this requires, and I encourage, them to arch their backs and shift their weight forward, over their arms). I have them hold for two to five counts, then re-extend the leg; and repeat the sequence three to five times on each side. Sometimes, when I'm feeling perverse, I have them draw the knee first to the nose, then on the second extension, to the armpit on the same side as the leg, then on the third extension to the elbow of the opposite arm, which requires both a crunch and a twist.

Finally (and my favorite) I also have them practice Boat pose, which is tough to get in terms of alignment, but is outstanding when it comes to working the psoas and abdominals. I frequently have them alternate between Boat and East Stretch as a kind of counter-pose to the gut-cramping that happens if you hold Boat for extended periods.

Finally, if you're looking for kicks, you can do crunches while in Boat pose by drawing your extended legs a few inches toward your extended torso, then a few inches away from it.

Jnana Mudra and Nadis

2007-06-29T09:20:00.000-06:00

Yoga teaches that our bodies are filled with (composed of?) energy pathways that yogis call "nadis."

I mentioned in the prior post on pranayama that during parts of the session with Darren Main, I could feel energy moving through my arms and hands. Since that experience, I've used part of my meditation periods to focus more intently on the breath. This morning, at the peak of several inhalations, I again perceive a branching nadi in my right wrist, hand, and fingers. As I continued the practice, I had a lesser, but still perceptible, experience of the same in my left wrist, hand, and fingers. Interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I began teaching yoga in my home to a group of women from my congregation who have banded together to form a "Healthy Habits" group. They asked me to teach, and I agreed. Most of them are true beginners, without any prior practice. At the end of the session, I took a few minutes to show them a basic sitting pose, and then walked them through a basic breath cycle. Once they settled in, I joined them in meditation for a few minutes. My meditation posture usually includes the jnana mudra, and I moved into it that evening, as well. After the class, one of the participants asked me what the mudra was for. I gave the "standard" answer: it's a way of bringing mindfulness to my hands, giving them something to do, and that some people believe that the mudra connects energy pathways in the thumb and index finger.

I suppose I can answer the question a little more definitely in the future.