A glimmer of definition — Sangha is a verb pt 2
My recent contribution to the Shambhala Sun’s discussions about the “unaffiliated” Buddhist has really spurred me into thinking a lot about my spiritual identity and the way I came to see Buddhism as a significant path.
For most of my life I have been quite comfortable as a spiritual vagabond. I did not have a sense of anything lacking. I felt quite content and whole just the way I was. When I encountered Buddhism I thought I would try something different and began exploring the Zen path (as this felt the most like me as I saw it through the eyes of Brad Warner) and I started taking periodic classes at the closest Soto Zen center to where I live…and yes I realize even having a Zen center or a Buddhist sangha nearby is a luxury many don’t have. I found that the newness of having similar minded others nearby became rather a rather heady prospect and I began to value this place over my own internal sense of direction. I began to measure my relative sense of value by how closely I was or was not following a traditional path. I began craving “affiliation”. Now if you remember the posts up til now, inappropriate craving or clinging or shenpa, is the surest path to stay hooked into the suffering of samsara…even if it’s positive clinging, it’s still clinging.
I began to devalue my “unaffiliated” status and feel really uncomfortable about it. That’s why when this discussion post came up, it really not only rattled my cage but broke through a pattern I wasn’t even aware of at the time. I saw clearly that I like being a rogue. I saw clearly that Siddhartha didn’t have have dharma and sangha, he didn’t have refuge…he sat and he found it himself. He was the ultimate unaffiliated Buddhist! I think this is why I find Dharma Punx a good fit for me. It feels like a gathering of the unaffiliated to sit and be ok with our unaffiliation (yeah it ain’t a word, remember I’m from Texas and we make shit up like that). It fits my gay identity of being unaffiliated. I am awash in unaffiliation and I love it. It means that I have to walk my Dirty Dharma path every moment of every day because that’s where I’m going to wake up, that’s where I’m going to be a bodhisattva, that’s where I’m going to find and live the intersection of Spirit and Matter…not because someone approves of me because I went through the proper ceremony.
Sangha is a verb. You work it, you live it every moment of every day. You work it with the bum on the street, with your parents, with your kids, with your friends, with your significant other, with your momentary hook ups, with the other people on the highway…with yourself. Sangha is much more than what happens inside four walls with rituals and ceremonies…sangha is where the rubber meets the road, ya’ll and I’m driving an unaffiliated car.
yeah…a little fired up right now LOL feeling a little lost in this midlife redefining of myself has lead me to really appreciate and savor moments of clarity, so I have to cut them in deep relief and make sure they don’t get lost.
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.
