Looking Back (Week 3/3)

I am posting my own responses to looking back over the last year in this blog weekly for three weeks. These are unedited writings done in class, offered here for my students and readers. This is week three out of three. The door is closing soon on Return: Setting New Year's Intentions That Stick, so sign up now if you are interested!

Note the photo above showing the conversation between my dominant and non-dominant hand. This is an especially powerful way to have an exchange with yourself about tender or complex topics.


(dominant hand)
Each time I write this prompt I think it will be dead for me, having done it three times already. I've explored my word in retrospect, looking at my intention word for 2016: connect. I've discovered lightly neglected feelings, and looked at all the interlocking growth and happenings. So what could possibly be left?

(non-dominant hand)
All the tiny specifics details and the endless moments of inspiration and desperation are left.

Looking Back Over the Year, Post 1/3

This is the first in a series of three year's end blog posts, in which I "practice what I preach" - going back over the year in a tender, curious way, exploring with forms like six word stories/memoirs, looking for key words in retrospect, getting a felt sense of the year that is ending.

Look for the next two in the next two weeks.

If these practices pique your interest, consider taking Return: Setting New Year's Intentions That Work class with me.

As is always the case in classes, where I wrote these, these pieces are written spontaneously and without editing. So please keep that in mind as you read.

I don’t know; that is okay

The same memoir, six different titles

Life and memoir in constant revision

Finding where I am triggered; everywhere

Family cabin finally sold; golden relief

So. I guess I really can!

Letting go of what seems known

Facing whiteness in my sangha, myself

Too much travel, even with cancellations

My body loves exercise - who knew?

Accountability in body, food, finances, love

Graduating from program no one knows

Signing up impulsively; sitting around forever

A reckoning, maybe, this year – that could be my looking back word for the year – my intention was to connect, and in order to do that, I had to reckon. Both in the simplest cowboy sense of familiarity (“I reckon!”) and in the intense, super powerful, coming home to roost sense.

Or value could be my looking back word: Value wound up being so much a part of this year: connecting with my values, and with what I value, connecting my values with what I do, enacting values, valuing my time, body, money, and more.

The more accurate word though I think is potency - discovering how rich I am, how much not just power, but effect I have on people. Owning that, noting that, gauging that: me and my sharpness, my softness, my every way I manifestness: like a potion that can poison or empower.

Potency yes more so than value is my looking back word. It feels linked to me also to the wrong kinds of richness: too many books, too much travel, too much fat intake, which makes my IBS flare up. Not just what I give out, but also what I take in, needs moderation, titrating.

“Do more dharma,” one student said.

 Teaching a week intensive is intense

 Collaborating again brings up unhealed wounds

 What other tools for trauma needed?

 Compassionate exchange: my perfect practice form

 Combining all I teach into one

 Herspiral Arts: Nurture Your Creative Nature

 Dedicating the merit to all beings

 Where there is a will, loss

So many things feel incomplete, not neat and tidy at this years’ end. And yet, why pretend otherwise? My own memoir and many others are in messy but forward progress. The deep need to coach one-on-one and grow my week-to-week online offerings have allowed my wisdom to specialize, to connect between things I’ve never connected to each other before.

So much inspiration and possibility ahead

Traveling less I am at home

Setting Soft Goals

Most of us find setting goals a tricky project. Immediately, structure triggers the critic, who kicks in and cuts us off at the pass. Do any of these lines ring familiar?
"Why even start when you know you can't accomplish it?"
"If I can't do x amount then I won't do it at all."
"I've tried it before this way 100 times, but THIS TIME it will work!"

A few years ago, a meditation instructor reminded me that "Good enough is basically good" - needing to remind our perfectionist parts that the world won't end if we don't do it exactly as we had hoped/envisioned/planned/determined is a crucial part of planning ahead. 

And as we head towards the new years, a time when a lot of people traditionally set goals, check in, assess, and make resolutions, I want to encourage you to make soft goals instead of hard ones, soft targets instead of hard targets, and explore what it would be like to allow for change and re-conneciton/assessment, being flexible instead of rigid. How do we do that? I have spent a lot of time in coaching and teaching gathering tools, guidelines, and teachings to help support this subtle but significant difference.

New Year's Intention

Every December in the last few years, I have practiced an adaptation of a game/exercise/prompt that visiting friends did with us five years ago. At that time, they mentioned they had begun to set an intention word for the year - a word to explore, to replace "resolutions" and instead be curious. That first year, my partner and I both chose "consumption" and explored that relationship via food, money and more throughout the year with as little aggression and as much curiosity as we could.


The next year, I picked another task-y like word, but the last few years I've been picking more open words, verbs like 2013's "Play," or 2014's "Breathe." This year, in late November I started to feel the call of intention words, exploring candidates like "Balance" that came to me on their own accord. After being pretty sure for a couple of weeks that "Balance" was the winner, I stumbled into "Value" in writing one day and realized it had a lot more juice: challenge, fear, power - than "Balance." So my 2015 word is "Value."

Here's the prompt I used at the beginning of 2014 for my writing classes to find their intention word:

I want you to find a word:

an intention word/s, a sankalpa*, for this year.

Explore. Play. Find a word or words or

start writing and let the word or words find you.

Try to soften and let it happen.

This is not a resolution.

This is not expectation.

This is finding a word or words you can weave into all you do for the next year.

If you already have an intention word, use this time to break it open.

Experiment with future six word stories for 2015.

Let the word/s fall apart and show you what they have to really say.

In my New Year's Intention Retreat, the first weekend of the year (this year's is this upcoming weekend), we use a period of silent contemplation to invite the word to come to us, then contemplate all the associations/meanings that arise, then write. The key factor is to INVITE the word, rather than forcing it or searching for it. 

Many folks find that one "doesn't come" the first time around, that they find many or none. That's fine. Keep staying open to what words want to attach to you for the next span of time.

This year, I am adding in work based on Danielle LaPorte's Desire Map. The gist of her work, though getting the book is both useful and powerful, is to search for - or invite - three or more words that match how you want to FEEL in any/all of your activities, so you can use them as feedback to see if what you are doing matches how you want to be feeling. I will be offering some exercises in this direction this weekend as well. I find her approach - instead of affirmations or resolutions or goals, looking for a felt sense of result and aiming for that - quite useful and in compliment to setting New Year's Intentions.

Play. Explore. Invite. If you have ways you use to prepare for the New Year, leave them here.

What Awareness Is

Intersection, 2011

This piece was written by a student, J.S., for the first class of this year. The prompt is for students to find an "intention word" for the year. This was her response.

I deeply appreciate how she gets into the nitty gritty of how we can relate with the parts of ourselves we don't like with real compassion - simply by seeing how they are a part of our physical existence. Everyone in the class really appreciated the physical imagery - it helps pop open an understanding that otherwise stays conceptual.

Awareness sometimes sounds passive - or is conceptualized this way. This student really makes it clear that awareness is active, and something we need to practice - a lot! - with gentleness.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Awareness. Attunement.

I’d like to be more aware and awake this year. Less caught up in the stories I tell myself, the chronic parade of tiresome explanations, expectations, assumptions that probably stem from some past truth, a hurt, or disappointment, but that may or may not have any relevance to the immediate now.

Yet it’s so easy to make those assumptions relevant – to believe they’re true and act on them and then bring about a negative situation in the very real here and now.

I would like to step outside the accretion of all that conditioned thinking, those automatic feelings. I feel as if there is a part to my personality that I can’t seem to shake off, a part that can be small, petty, gritchy, bitchy, prone to anger and judgment. I’d like to gather all that up, collect it all like you’d pull up lint from a garment, to suck up and vacuum the dusty, dirty, debris-ridden portions of my psyche and then empty it out and be done. But it keeps being there, oozing and emanating from my character much like sweat and mucus and oil are just a part of what’s daily produced by our bodies.

New Year's Intention

A few years ago, friends of ours introduced us to, or co-invented with us (none of us can seem to recall which happened) a practice of coming up with a single word for the upcoming year, on New Year's Eve. The word, we decided, should have many possible meanings, and not be stated as any kind of affirmation (I will play more in the coming year/I am playing more in the coming year) or resolution (I need to play more in the upcoming year). Instead, it would allow for word play - for exploration, for change in meaning, throughout the year.

The first one Dylan and I chose, and we chose the same, was "consume." We tried to gently explore our food consumption (going on a diet, eventually, but really focusing more on watching/noticing consumption than losing weight, which was a helpful change in perspective), and also financial consumption, consumption of goods, of energy, of social interactions.

Luckily, neither of us developed consumption.

Playful Humility

Today, the calendar year comes to an end.

This is no longer my New Year's. I have become too familiar with other traditions to see the end of this calendar as the end of my year. Naturally, fall feels most the end of the year for me, but according to the Tibetan Buddhist Calendar, my "calendar of faith" it comes in the beginning of March, which also feels pretty right. February is what we call "Mamo" season - a time when the tough stuff gets toughest, which is especially true to my experience having lived in Wisconsin my whole life. That's what is my real New Year's, now, in practice.

That having been said, for some reason New Year's Eve can be hard for me - I have always thought it was because of a pressure to perform - to enjoy parties, kind of like Halloween and St. Patty's Day, which don't trigger me but which I also mostly avoid. Maybe it's because it's the end of a tough time - the natural grieving period of the end-of-year holidays.

But this year I feel a slight change. A release in pressure, a chance to take it easy, and a desire to turn over to a new calendar. This quote was in my box today, from a weekly service sent out from a Shambhala teacher, and it hit the right chord (to join the mailing list or see the blog, click here).

PLAYFUL HUMILITY Humility in the Shambhala tradition involves playfulness, or a sense of humour. In many religious traditions, you feel humble because of a fear of punishment, pain, and sin. In the Shambhala world, you feel full of it. You feel healthy and good. In fact, you feel proud. Therefore, you feel humble. That’s one of the Shambhala contradictions, or we could say, dichotomies. Real humility is genuineness.
-Chogyam Trunpga Adopted from "Discipline in the Four Seasons," in GREAT EASTERN SUN: The Wisdom of Shambhala, page 63.

I hear that. I feel that. A humility that comes not because one is humiliated or trying to be "not humiliated (ie puffed up pride)" but a sense of wonder, of awe, and of course, of humor.

Here's to 2011, whatever you are, and my increasing sense of humble awareness, which, as it increases, I work to be even more humble about. There's nothing like the Dharma to be both awfully profound and ass-kickingly ironic at the same time.

Indoor Storms

Where have I been?
That's a good question.

I use this time of slowing down end of semester and year to consider how the past 365 days have gone. Where have I visited and taught, what has worked and what hasn't? These questions are crucial and it's not that I don't consider them throughout the year, of course. It's just that New Year's approaching brings revival to mind, and review.

The last month or so has been consistent with the rest of this fall - a blur of Hakomi therapy and resultant heavy emotional processing, weddings and other significant high-caliber celebrations, way too much travel for my own good without enough weekends off, buying the Shambhala Center here in Madison, and endless richness in my weekly writing classes. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to enact something I had been considering doing for awhile - actually using the last class of the week, Wednesday night, to write a "summary" of the week's replies from students and myself. Only, of course, it comes out in writing practice form, so it isn't a list, more a channelled essay. Because the first week I did it was a very rich and somewhat heavy topic (Sacred Space) the end piece blew us all away. This last week's (looking at images of landscapes and writing from there) didn't take as much out of me, but still helped to "process" all the 35 or so stories I hear each week. Anonymously, of course.

I hope to bring these pieces to this blog. I would like to let the students have that as a resource - a combined "hive mind" of wisdom that I don't want stopping at just me. Also, all of these pieces - mine and students' - I am ongoing collecting for an eventual book. Eventual meaning "I have enough on my plate right now but that doesn't stop me from planning it."

Today Dylan and I will finish hanging our new indoor storm windows, a somewhat dated way of keeping out wind that appealed to us when his grandfather in Maine demonstrated his to us a few months ago. I like this idea of the protection from leaking coming from the inside - and as my friend Morgan joked on Facebook when I first posted that we were considering them - "indoor storms are somewhat rare." It never hurts to have a little extra insulation for when things go a bit amok inside and not just out there, where tonight we are expecting our first big blizzard of the season.

The image the indoor storm windows give me is of a classic Tibetan Buddhist analogy: If you want to be able to walk the path, don't try to cover the whole path in carpet to keep your barefeet from getting poked and prodded. Instead, cover your own feet in shoes. Take responsibility for what hurts and work with it internally. This doesn't mean no social justice, but it does mean not making everything about us. Indoor storm protection seems like a good first step for me this way. After all, we can't stop the blizzard from coming, but we can keep the homefires burning.