Day 35 of 100
Wow, over a third of the way there. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m finding more about what I’m not lately. This theme continues to be something to ponder. When I said in last post that I’m exploring who I am in negative space I don’t think I was painting the right picture. What I mean is that my practice is flushing out so much that I frequently feel like a blank piece of paper or an empty cup. The question is what do you do with all that space?
I was having a conversation recently in which this very topic came up unexpectedly. My massage therapist also practices Zen and out of the blue he started talking about his concerns about being so free of attachment that he feared becoming nothingness. I asked if his fear was of becoming beige, the dullest color of all. He confirmed that to be the concern he was having and it completely echoed my own curiosity about this practice. I asked him to write a guest post on the topic and I’ve got my fingers crossed that he’ll do it.
I do not have a fear of becoming beige (well I’m a fag, it would be electric beige like the gal in Precious). I can’t spell out exactly why that is. The evidence for me comes from a diffuse sense that beige is not what we are about. If non-attachment were boring, the Dalai Lama’s clothes would be more subdued and he’d not giggle all the time. Brad Warner would never use the word fuck (neither would I for that matter). Dharma Punx would be Dharma Curmudgeons. My Zentor (zen mentor) would not have pictures of himself laughing as his avatar. All the wordy Buddhist teachers would not write so many effing books. Pema Chodron would not crack jokes…etc.
My sense of this is that the fear of being beige is an inkling that the Self is starting to go away. As the page begins to get more empty, I fear that with no scenes written, no dialogue, no pictures of my life, that I will just not be there and this would be no good? No good? Really? Actually my sense of it is that this is great because I can write new lines now that I choose. They will get written line by line as life comes. I imagine it like dumping out my programming and writing new code. Well maybe not exactly that fresh. I think the ‘paper’ is still me and my body and there’s some of that that just ain’t gonna change or if it does, it’s gonna be slow.
Day 13 of 100
Wow it’s a been a busy week and a half. I started to think there were a couple nights where I was just too tired to get to the cushion, but I got there anyway. So far I’m maintaining the routine of two times a day at 25 minutes each. My head space is pretty clear and I’m getting to the point again where when I’m meditating it feels less like a body/mind meditating and more like just a mind-thing emanating awareness.
That sounds all pretty cool, but at some point along the journey (beyond just this 100 day thing), the coolness/exciting/ooo-ahh factor faded away so now it’s more just watching what happens as it happens. It leads me to think more and more that the word ‘mindful practice’ is much more appropriate and accurate than ‘spiritual practice’.
When I think of spiritual I think of looking for metaphysical evidence and answers. However when I think of being mindful I think more of what’s happening for me now which is to exercise bare awareness. Both practices are looking towards life mystery but spiritual practice to me feels more mystical while mindfulness practice feels more grounded. They are just two facets of the gem, but mindfulness feels more about me and where I’m at with it all today. That’s how this blog started anyway, with my phrase “mindfulness is the muscle, meditation is the gym”. So I feel like I’m anchored in my basic theme.
By no means do I have a plan or any answers to it all…I’m just being mindful of what arises and letting me and my practice organically grow.
I am ending this post with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings which for me describes my own organic journey. I find myself cracking the book open to this dog eared page all the time because it keeps reminding me of what I most need to know.
We enter the path of practice through the door of knowledge, perhaps from a Dharma talk or a book. We continue along the path, and our suffering lessens, little by little. But at some point, all our concepts and ideas must yield to our actual experience. Words and ideas are only useful if they are put into practice. When we stop discussing things and begin to realize the teachings in our own life, a moment comes when we realized that our life is the path, and we no longer rely merely on the forms of practice. Our action becomes “non-action,” and our practice becomes “non-practice.” The boundary has been crossed, and our practice cannot be set back. We do not have to transcend the “world of dust” (saha) in order to go to some dust-free world called nirvana. Suffering and nirvana are of the same substance. If we throw away the world of dust, we will have no nirvana.
Into the Quiet
I think I had a misconception about Zen. I think I expected that I would work towards enlightenment and I would eventually levitate and shit prolific lotus petals out of my ass, I would be so spiritual I would glow in the dark.
Error #1…”I think”. It ain’t about thinking. In reality and in practice is about training your mind to not use itself until it becomes very still and quiet. I’d say it’s like a lake without ripples. The problem with metaphors is that you have to use your mind to generate them and once you’ve activated the mind, you’ve dropped the practice…which leads me to…
Error #2…envisioning enlightenment and/or spiritual progress. Like what the fuck is that anyway? Again, when I use my mind to generate a fantasy, I’ve dropped my practice.
It begs an interesting question, though…If I keep my mind quiet all the time and don’t activate, I can’t tell you about the experience and I sure as hell can’t write a post about it.
At first I found this a little unsettling. I started blogging about my explorations of mindfulness, Buddhism, Zen, etc, as a way of journaling in public and going through my thought processes out loud. It is a way of processing through the concepts and integrating them. So to find that the practice is opposed to the process of thinking about the practice…it’s…well…it’s just un-American or some shit like that J
The outcome has been that I’ve not written much lately and just let the silence be. It’s unusual and rather counter intuitive to do that, I must say. At the same time, it’s incredibly expanding and deepening. In fact, at times (and without noticing it right away) I’ve found myself feeling like a lake with no ripples.
On Andy’s recommendation, I’ve been slowly (I find that as my mind has slowed down, I don’t inhale books like I used to, I tend now to savor them) reading through Karen Maezen-Miller’s new book Hand Wash Cold and picking a few gems, a number of laughs and unexpectedly, a few tears. One of the gems is one of her favorite quotes from her teacher: “Let’s just see how this goes”. It’s one of those semi-cryptic, possibly crazy Zen master statements that ripens over time. (I recommend this book by the way, if you are a reading type person…it’s like Mom’s version of Brad Warner’s writing style)
So lately I’ve been seeing how it goes. Is it good or bad? Well…it’s life…let’s see how it goes.
The Opposite of Bodhichitta
My co-worker, Deva, read my post on bodhichitta (loving-kindness/compassion) and asked if there was an opposite to that. I wasn’t really sure, so I cracked open my copy of the Sutra of Fifty Two Ways to Say You Suck and I found the answer…Bitchichitta. Bitchichitta is the energy of the awakened ass-holiness we all possess and exercise to different degrees. It’s that quality of being that arises when someone thoroughly pisses you off to the point you just know you have to say something back.
Bitchichitta has a function though. It shows me where I need to practice. Without bitchichitta I can never see the way to develop my bodhichitta and become a better member of the Earth Sangha.
“When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are the times that we connect with bodhichitta.” –Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You.
It also takes the patience and kindness that is fostered and strengthened in meditation and mindfulness practice. It takes being curioser and curioser because overcoming bitchichitta can be a challenge, especially if it has its foundation built on self righteousness. The action of curiosity is to create an open space in us in which to work.
In meditation practice the mind begins to slow down. We learn not to give any energy to the random thoughts that go by. By not feeding them, they diminish. There is a saying in the dynamics of energy and consciousness that says “where attention goes, energy flows.” Well, thoughts without energy tend to shrivel up and blow away. After enough of this practice, it becomes easier to see the gaps between thoughts and gaps between events and our reactions to them. In those gaps is the opportunity to transform bitchichitta into bodhichitta. Those gaps between ‘pissed off’ and ‘get them back’ are places of rest and the chance to choose differently, focus differently, give our attention to bodhichitta and make it bigger…where attention goes, energy flows.
So, yes, Deva, there is a Santa Claus, and there is an opposite to bodhichitta.
The Search for Buddha’s BENGAY
There’s a metaphor in Pema’s latest book, Take the Leap, that also struck me as being simple yet powerful. In it, she talks about going from habitual ways of living life to a more free method of operating that is based on what’s going on around you, rather than dramas playing out in your head. Her phrase for that is ‘don’t bite the hook’ of habit. But the metaphor she uses to express the concept is having poison ivy and knowing that the only way to not spread it is not to scratch. Scratching would be the same as ‘shenpa’ or inappropriate clinging to old ways of being.
So over the past couple of weeks since I’ve been home from vacation, I’ve been back on the South Beach diet (which is a method of carb control…cuz my carbs were a mess) and reducing coffee intake which in me creates artificial highs and lows like it does in everyone but I was finding that I used it to way to much and the effects were more intense than I liked.
Changing habits is tough because I want to scratch the poison ivy or, let me translate that back to my issue… I want a fuckin’ pot of coffee and a pile of biscuits.
Now I am trying to meditate through the cravings and use the internal space created by mindfulness to soften the feelings of jonesing, but there have been a couple days in the past few where I thought I was going to come unhinged. Yes, I gots da shenpa for da coffee and carbs, ya’ll. I am, however, seeing a shift in the mental battles that go on and I know it’s because I’ve been hitting the meditation cushion more regularly and with more focus than I ever have in the 27 years I’ve been meditating, and the addition of the Dharma has really been like adding jet fuel to the process. That poor mindfulness muscle of mine has gotten such the workout over the past month, I’m gonna have to get me a tub of Buddha’s BENGAY cream for the little bugger.
…and Buddha’s Benedryl for all the poison ivy
Follow up to Shenpa in the Moutains
I’ve been meaning to follow up on the last post. So yeah, you know it wasn’t all roses…wouldn’t be much dirty Dharma if it were, huh? LOL
If I had written that post at the end of my time in the mountains it would have been a little different. Well…little is the operative word I guess as you’ll see.
So what happened was…one night of my last week there, the ex was drinking (secretly of course). I got wind of this over the phone, so my entire drive back to the house was filled with old anger, ugly and hurtful things to say, dramatic re-enactments of arguments that had not happened yet, etc. Standard stuff I had gotten used to while living with an alcoholic. It was often like I turned red and swollen and 30 foot tall with anger and resentment.
Now what was different this time around was that my mindfulness muscle was strong enough that all those things were going on in my head, but this time, instead of 30 feet tall, it was about 3 inches. When I got home, I took a book and went to my room to read with the door shut. I’ll take 3 inches of drama over 30 feet any day.
I will tell you this, however, my mindfulness muscle was only strong enough to get through that episode. If it had happened again too soon, it would not have been so pretty…so I just got validation that I got a lot of sitting yet to do…not that I want to stack stressful situations up just to see how many I can take.
Anyway, there’s more to come. I am really behind on what I’ve wanted to blog, but I wanted to get this little bit cleaned up.
Ahead will be some more on death, giving up effing coffee (no i’m not bitter) and much to come on the class I’m taking on the Zen precepts.
Shenpa in the Mountains
I wrote this post during my vacation and am just now getting around to uploading it. I’m going to get it out here now and then follow up on it soon…because at the end of the post, it sounds kinda rosy and that is because I wrote it towards the end of the vacation portion of the trip. The next week, however, had a day that was not so smooth so you know it couldn’t be all lollipops and rainbows 
More on that later.
Pema Chodron’s latest book, Take the Leap, focuses on the concept of ‘shenpa’ which is a Tibetan word describing the idea of attachment or what she calls ‘getting hooked’. A better translation for me would be ‘clinging’. It makes more functional sense to me.
The importance of this concept is that in the teachings of Buddhism, a major cause of suffering in life is caused my inappropriate attachment to things, situations, etc. The reason I prefer the word clinging is because when I attach to something inappropriately, you’re going to find my claw marks in it should I have to let it go. ‘Clinging’, to me, describes that desperate life or death feeling that comes up when something I have shenpa for is taken away voluntarily or not. For instance, whether I voluntarily chose to give up my morning coffee or whether someone took it away from me, my concept of morning coffee would have deep gouges in it as I went through the throes of letting it go. I gots a lots o’ shenpa for my coffee, ya’ll.
Shenpa can be inappropriate clinging to anything, so it doesn’t matter if it’s aroused by things that are positive or negative. An example of clinging to what is negative in my own life would be the incredible anger, even hatred, that I had towards my ex and his addictions and the way our relationship dissolved around those things. For the longest time I felt quite justified in my hanging on to those negative feelings…my shenpa was mighty powerful strong on those items, yessiree. I chewed many a bitter pill and kept myself up nights over it.
Shenpa over positive or neutral things can be seen in the way I overly charged the notion of living in Colorado and being in the mountains and generally out in nature. When I first moved back to Texas, I not only had the clinging to negative things, but I also generated a lot of negative energy for my grief over not living in the mountains anymore. I was awash in comparing how awful Texas was to how wonderful Colorado was. Both versions of clinging were making me quite depressed. I was attached all over the place and it was making me gosh darn miserable…even worse (and here’s the shenpa part), I felt quite justified in all that clinging and that made me cling all the harder.
Anybody ever been all that caught up in something you just could not let it go whether it was good or bad for you? No, surely not J.
Well, ya’ll, all that clinging just sucked. It burned up a whole lotta energy and made me generally miserable most of the time. Meditation practice, thankfully, helped me de-energize all that craziness. Meditation helped me remember how to slow down and take my Cling-ons and extract the shenpa by letting the craziness come up in my head but choosing not to give any of it extra energy. Well, as the rule of energy and consciousness says: Where attention goes, energy flows…and I stopped giving the Cling-ons any juice to live off of…they sort of shrunk up and fell off.
I’m writing about this because in the last week, I’ve been back in Colorado and back around my ex and for him I’ve had mostly neutral feelings (the previously negative cling-on) and for the mountains and rivers and nature in general, I’ve been able to just be in them and with them and just enjoy them as they are, not as my magical cure alls (the previously positive cling-on).
Frankly, I have shocked myself. If I had planned these things rather than just let them evolve as they organically have, I could not have planned it all out better and more likely would have screwed something up.
Curiouser and Curiouser
I know it ain’t a word (curiouser), but it does get the point across as you’ll see later.
Just in time for my vacation, my two favorite authors and people I consider to be my teachers…Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron, have both released new books. Wasn’t that thoughtful of them? I sure think so.
It’s a good thing, because when I have to travel (which my habit/conditioned mind reads as stepping outside of my daily routine) I start to experience fear tremors. This morning is 2 days away from setting off back to Colorado and the tremors are in full force as I try to contemplate packing and organizing for 2 weeks away from home.
Whatever the case, I got the willies and that means it’s Pefect Pema Time.
Pema Chodron talks a great deal about dirty Dharma around the notion of dealing with groundlessness. Groundless being the state of ‘WTF!?’ and ‘Holy Shit’ where your notions of the everyday world (relative world to use a Buddhist term..as opposed to the Ultimate world) are at best not helping and at worst causing pain. DEFCON 1 would be total mental meltdown. I’m only at DEFCON 3-ish and staying with my breath to keep from going any lower. You know the DEFCON rating right? It’s a scale from 5 (best condition) to 1 (worst condition) and stands for Dharmic & Equanimity Failure Coming On Now. I think I read that in the Sutra on Pulling your Head Out of Your Ass.
One of her methods of explaining the mindset that will defuse some of the intensity is to stay open and curious to your feelings and reactions. Curious would mean approaching your opinions and strongly held notions that are causing a low DEFCON number with a gentle questioning openness. This is opposed to clinging to strongly held ideas and opinions that are not working. Thich Nhat Hanh would call it embracing the feeling with mindfulness like you would a child.
However you choose to understand it, the practice means to have you step out of your habit mind and into unconditioned mind. Not an easy task if the mindfulness muscle is not present to help create space around the feeling.
Space and openness would be the opposite to clinging and contraction. It sounds counter-intuitive to how we are generally taught to deal with issues, but trying it over and over again does create a certain amount of peace. Even if the space you create is a small distance of time between the moment you want to throw your shit out the window and actually doing it, in that amount of time you might just save your shit…just sayin.
So I’m going to be reading the new books and maybe start putting together blog posts I’ve been wanting to do where I take an author’s book and do a post per chapter that explores more deeply what their teachings are. And let me tell you this also dear readers…I’m going to be staying in my house with my ex, so there may be a lot of Dharma hitting the fan for the next two weeks and creating a lot of material for blogging as well. J
…and to keep from throwing shit and/or my ex out the window, I’ll be getting curiouser and curiouser!
A good day at Dharma Punx Houston
We had our 2nd meeting of Dharma Punx Houston today. I’m really liking the energy of the group. We have a Facebook group now called Dharma Punx Houston if you are interested in plugging in there.
I had a question recently about what is mindfulness. The word gets used a great deal and can sometimes loose it’s meaning as it is such a useful thing that it has gotten adopted into many different avenues.
At it’s most simple…and remember this blog is just my take on things and if you read my recent post on death, you’ll know the value of opinions …mindfulness is the capacity we have to pay attention. That’s about it. thanks for reading.
LOL…ok, so it’s deceptively simple. You can be mindful of anything. In fact, the most basic meditation instruction is to be mindful of your breath. Again, it’s deceptively simple. Try to just be mindful of your breath for 3 full breathings (all the way in, all the way out). Mindful of your breath means nothing else is in your field of awareness but your breath. If you can do it for 3 breaths, try 5, then 10 and if you can get that far, go for 10 minutes. On a busy day in my head, I’m lucky to get to 5 before I’m off to the races in thought.
You will find that mindfulness for our Western minds is a simple instruction that is difficult to follow. We are in love with our thinking minds and we are often swirled off into flights of fancy and thought before we even know we’ve been taken. Thich Nhat Hanh has a wonderful little book on the sutra (teaching) of the Four Establishments of Mindfulness called Transformation and Healing that is a great resource on a variety of practices taught by Buddha.
That’s the basics of what mindfulness is. Now, you can be mindful of anything…try being mindful while you cook a meal or sweep the floor. The reason it is a big deal for some of us is because meditation is based in mindfulness and meditation is at the core of what transformed Siddhartha Guatama into the Buddha. The simplicity of mindfulness opens the door to unconditioned mind and that’s my friends, is a big deal. And that is what got me to get all bloggy on ya’ll. I would say I “think” it’s important, but in reality, I feel it and I know it to be important as our usual way of going about life needs an upgrade. I don’t think we are going to find our current trajectory all that sustainable in the long run.
I won’t try to convince you of that, I’ll just blog away until you are all enlightened
ps: I added a link to Shinzen Young’s Youtube video blog. He really blows me away with his talks on the mechanics of meditation. Also, several books were added to the Source Material page.
A random mindfulness bell
I’ve read several times that in PlumVillage, Thich Nhat Hanh’s sangha in France, that they have a random bell that is rung throughout the day. When it rings everyone stops what they are doing and take 3 mindful breaths. I thought that sounded like a simple but really cool daily practice, but I could not randomly ring a bell and have it be actually random, so I googled “random mindfulness bell” or some such and got a hit for a program that I now have on my computer. It runs in the back ground and randomly throughout the day it rings. If I’m not on a work call, I stop what I’m doing, take 3 mindful breaths and continue on. It’s remarkable how settling and grounding it can be. It’s like a little re-set button. Being a student of Dirty Dharma, I always find it most interesting when I find the bell irritates me and I then have aggravation to cool down during my breathing.
here’s the link: http://www.mindfulnessdc.org/mindfulclock.html
mindfulness is the muscle, meditation is the gym
This phrase keeps coming to me over and over while sitting zazen, so much so that I’m creating this blog over it. I want to explore and collect ideas, readings, experiences, etc., that are not about rainbows and bunnies and happy times in the Pure Land or whatever. I want to know about Dharma covered in shit…or the more polished and less shitty way to say it: Dirty Dharma.
I use ‘Dharma’ because it’s through the study and practice of Zen Buddhism that I feel I’ve come to a way and a path that works for me. This blog is also an exploration of that personal journey from a little gay boy raised Catholic to a bigger boy all growed up and wondering about life at age 40. Let’s face it, when you grow up on the outside of the ‘norm’, life ain’t that easy, ya’ll. (yes ain’t is a word in Texas…I think we made it)
I also use the word mindfulness a lot because it’s a popular word with my favorite teacher in books and audio teachings: Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ll talk about him and his teachings a lot as he’s touched me more deeply than any others. I also find deep value in a lot of other folks as well and I’ll be writing about them too: Pema Chodron, Steve Hagan, Brad Warner, etc….I appreciate anyone who can take the practice and put it into useful words. These teachers pale in comparison, however, to the big ones: my parents, my dog, my job, my house, bad drivers…well you get the point, afterall this is a blog that got created for times when the Dharma hits the fan.
But it all comes back to mindfulness…if that muscle is not strong, the best Dharma in the world can easily blow right past us.
