The Surprise - and Not Surprise - of Death

This last Sunday, one of our long-term Madison Shambhala sangha members died. Fred Mather had ongoing health issues, heart ones amongst them, and so his death wasn't a surprise in a sense. Yet, of course, when we think someone might die soon and they don't, as happened a couple of times with Fred in the last few years, actual death comes as a surprise.

A friend asked today if I know how to handle death - then answered her self by saying I must, considering how many deaths I have been through. But I told her I don't really. I am not sure we ever know - she and I wondered over what "death skills" would be and how one acquires them - because each death is unique. And in addition, all the deaths I have experienced have either be traumatizing or re-traumatizing, so what I associate with death is trauma, not just grief and loss.

Hope, Fear, Fantasy, and Caring

Lately I've been thinking a lot about hope and fear. In Chogyam Trungpa's teachings, again interpreted from very old and deeply studied Tibetan Buddhist wisdom, hope and fear are actually very closely related. Not even two sides of the same coin, they both basically contain wisdom and neurosis. Hope is not better than fear, fear is not worse than hope. Generally, we give hope big applause, mixing it in with optimism, expectation, and setting goals. And we avoid fear like the plague (avoiding fear itself is a plague of suffering), conflating it with dread, failure, and death.

Being in a pretty groundless state lately (can you tell? I haven't posted to this blog in over a month!), I've been watching as I use hope to avoid fear. When I get afraid, I can see hope wagging her tail like an eager puppy. I've also been watching the edge of hope and when it turns into fantasy. None of this feels any more comfortable than being afraid, but it feels like at least I am DOING something. At least I am not getting caught in fear and sinking, right? Not really.

All following quote from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron:

We’re all addicted to hope—hope that the doubt and mystery will go away. This addiction has a painful effect on society: a society based on lots of people addicted to getting ground under their feet is not a very compassionate place.

Spontaneous Discipline

Sometimes, especially when I am behind on blogging, like I have been recently, I like to cheat by posting a talk I gave. That's the case today. The link leads you to soundcloud, and a recording of a talk I have tonight, at the Madison Shambhala Center, on Spontaneous Discipline.

Like most of our Thursday evening weekly dharma gathering talks, this one is based on a chapter in a collection of Chogyam Trungpa's talks. In this case, a new collection (of old talks) called Mindfulness in Action.

To tempt you to listen, and give you some framework, in the talk I cover the following:

1. How to define both spontaneity and discipline in a way that supports your practice and life.

2. How to work with obstacles as path instead of trying to get rid of them so you can keep going.

3. How to find joy in contentment - the absence of the drama of our traditional definitions of both being spontaneous and being disciplined.

Please listen in, enjoy, spread around!

Felt Sense/Thought Sense and Choosing What We Want

On our recent trip to Austin, Texas, my wife asked on a long drive to and from Dallas (long story) what I meant when I refer to "felt sense"*. She'd noted I use it a lot - when I am trying to process something I don't (yet) have words for, when talking about EMDR or TRE or other somatic modalities with therapists and coaches and the like. I even used it quite a bit in the most recent Level III Nalanda Miksang workshop I taught, though it is language more from the Shambhala Art teachings than Miksang.

So what does it mean, she said. Coming from anyone else it might sound airy-fairy, but I know from you it must mean something. What?

Indeed. 

Exploring the Spectrum of Fear

In preparing to co-teach a Level II Shambhala Training program this last weekend, I did a lot of reading about, contemplating and meditating on fear. Trungpa Rinpoche says that fear is our main reason to build a cocoon, a wall of habits and tendencies that give us a protective sense of solid self.

But of course, fear is not just one thing.

The Trap of Doubt, Delay and "Discipline"

Recently, I met with one of my writing feedback groups. Most of the folks in this small group are working on memoir, which is a supremely difficult genre. One woman in particular is writing a very hard tale about a very small but potent part of her life - a year or so of mental health struggles in which she lost most of her support network. It's a poignant story, and she tells it very directly.

Since she has begun, she's written with great momentum, clear about what comes next, able to pile through very tricky scenes with great ease. Then she hit some doubt - a moment of not being sure where the story was going next, or what the point was in writing/sharing it. And then she hit some stress - way too many external and internal stressors coming together at the wrong time. Her actually writing got delayed - put on the back burner - by a few months, due to illness and literal, physical inability to write. It's also inevitable that such an intense story would bring up doubt, eventually.

Fresh Start

One of the main teachings in Shambhala about meditation is the importance of using a fresh start when needed. Not to be mistaken for taking a break, fresh start is dropping the technique for just a moment, still seated, in mid-meditation, when you feel you have fully lost what you are doing. This fresh start you can take at any time - stop meditating, reconnect, then begin again freshly.

This can feel like a spring breeze coming in the window for the first time in however long you have been sitting. Finally feeling your breath, you know you are alive again.

This is how it feels coming out of sickness for me, too. Though I can get bogged down with all the "things I supposed to be doing," there is also a miraculous quality of appreciation for my health, no matter how major or minor the illness. In the case of a cold/flu, as I had a few weeks ago, breathing became very hard for awhile. So the simple act of breathing took on huge importance and felt very fresh as it returned. In fact, getting better for me paralleled the arrival of spring, with a strong sense of the chilly but warming air actually helping my lungs and sinuses lose some of their fire.

The key thing about fresh start - and I am reminding myself as much as I am reminding you, dear reader, is that it not only can happen all the time, but it DOES happen all the time. While we are stuck in our stale suffering, the world is changing, micro- and macroscopically around us all the time.  While impermanence can get a bad rap - the old aging, sickness and death stuff - it also means we have a fresh opportunity in every moment. That can be scary or it can be exciting - it's there no matter what we think of it.

Spontaneity, Serendipity, Accuracy and Curation

Quest 2015 Prompt from Jason Silva*
In what ways might you artfully curate your life in 2015 to occasion serendipity, creativity and awe?
Ontological designing says: We design our world and the world designs us back.
What are the linguistic and creative choices you can make in 2015 that will in turn act back upon you and transform you?

Lately, Ilana and I have been speaking to "curating" our lives: directing what we want to happen and making it happen. For instance, for me, a day off is a bit risky - so easy to consume lots of social media, even overwork, only to get to the end of the day and not have done the things I want to do and actually need to do: meditate, practice, write, exercise.

So how can I curate my life, my days off, like an exhibit - seeing on the wall what I want there - without overplanning it/overstructuring it so the exhibit feels like one of the walls at an early Paris museum?

So this question - curating to occasion serendipity, creativity and awe - takes me back to a core principle - a few of them - in Shambhala Buddhism.

1. The relationship between spontaneity and accuracy: Trungpa Rinpoche speaks to the necessity to allow for spontaneity in order to find accuracy. We so often emphasize planning/accuracy over spontaneity. But the natural order is in fact to arrive at spontanenity first, then allow accuracy to arise from that. In other words: if we are truly present, what is needed will arise.**

2. Serendipity - or magic - arises out of every situation. It is always there. Always. The question is: are we practicing - eg curating - our lives enough to recognize it? Sakyong Mipham often speaks to the fact that we already know how to meditate and contemplate - we just usually use these practices to focus on getting what we want or eliminating pain or ignoring what we don't want to see. If we use these practices - this power of mind that already exists - to see what is actually here, then we find we have all we need.**

3. Therefore, if I curate my life to allow for spontaneity, I will find the serendipity that is always there. Now the question: how do I curate for this? The answer might seem contradictory, but here Trungpa Rinpoche speaks to "intelligent spontaneity" and the role of discipline. I find the "answer" - mind you, not simple and not one-time, is practice. Doing the very things I avoid if I don't schedule them - same list - writing, exercise, meditation, practice - these are the things I have to structure (aka discipline) in order to allow for the space needed for serendipity.

As always, the questions I constantly, gently ask myself are:
Am I using this for compassion or to beat myself up?
Am I using this because it helps me feel better and be better or not?
Is this what is needed now?

I try to stay in touch with how it feels when I don't do what I want - see list above - and when I do,
that is the best motivation for me. What I do find, when I do practice, when I do curate: spontaneity arises around those structures and out of those spaces, serendipity knows where to find me.

*Quest 2015 is a "do it together" 2015 planning group happening with Jeffrey Davis. Here's a link to the video about this December 2014 curating-serendipity-group!
 
**I find it very, very important to state that none of these teachings are "prosperity principle" or abundance related in a financial way. I struggle with money, as so many do, and the idea here is NOT to blame ourselves if we don't have enough to eat, enough shelter, enough health or money. The main understanding is that of the daily suffering so many people experience, so much of it is mental state-based. If we can adjust our mental state, we can access clearer mental states and lower our amount of mental suffering. For most of us, that means that other forms of suffering will decrease, too. But it takes work and doesn't happen automatically. It is up to us - and up to the systems of oppression around us to get with what is happening, too.

Gritty Compassion

Note: I am participating in Quest2015 with Jeffrey Davis and company. This is the first post in response to themes they are giving us. So you'll see some extra hashtags and the like here. Thanks for the prompt this time, Jen Louden!

Prompt:

Grit without compassion is just grind. What would be most fun to create this year? How can self-compassionate grit support you in that creating? - See more at: http://trackingwonder.com/quest-2015/community/#sthash.tUQzm9Qg.dpuf

Grit without compassion is just grind. What would be most fun to create this year? How can self-compassionate grit support you in that creating?
-Jen Louden

Last night, unable to sleep because I was up working on memoir stuff and writing poetry (a great reason not to be sleeping! Inspiration!) I also did some reading in preparation for a meditation instructor training I am taking in December. It's a familiar chapter - the Four Foundations of Mindfulness in a book called Heart of the Buddha by Chogyam Trungpa. These are super essential, really fundamental teachings, the four foundations, and I have come back to them again and again - there are many eras of highlights, underlining, notes to refer to notes, marginalia from all kinds of stages in my Buddhist and Shambhala journey.

I glanced at a page in the chapter before (Intellect and Intuition), which speaks to Idiot Compassion, one of my favorite phrases from Trungpa Rinpoche. Idiot compassion is when we are actually using what we call compassion in an un-useful way - contributing to co-dependence, enabling, etc, to use common psychological terms. I love his teachings on this, and so read further, even though it wasn't assigned.

Then I spotted the word Karuna, which is another word for compassion (the most common Sanskrit word we use for compassion in the west is Maitri/Metta, which means Loving Kindness). I didn't know of the word karuna until the last couple of years. I am now taking part in a program called Karuna Training, which began in November of 2014 and will go for two years. Here's what Trungpa Rinpoche has to say about Karuna:

Karuna is usually translated as "compassion." However, the word compassion is filled with connotations in English which have nothing to do with karuna. So it is important to clarify what is meant by enlightened compassion  and how it differs from our usual notion of compassion... Enlightened compassion is not quite as simple-minded as that notion of a kindly, well-meaning soul...compassion is a state of calmness; it also involves intelligence and enormous vitality. Without intelligence and skillfulness (dare I say, grit?), compassion can degenerate into a bungling sort of charity.... In this type of compassion we do not just blindly launch into a project but we look into situations dispassionately.

Here's why this passage echoed in my head this morning. 
When I read Jen's prompt, I read it like this:
Compassion without grit is just grind.
Interesting mis-read, no? 

For someone who works with people in an ostensibly helping way, as a dharma teacher, this "mis-read" is actually more powerful for me. I can certainly find "compassion" (I put in quotes because real compassion is not like this) to be grinding - feel compassion fatigue, as the social work field calls it. I need some grit - some reality, some traction, some deep but practical reason - to feel and practice compassion.

The grit I find works best is to let myself rub up against structure - sort of like discipline but more flexible and loving. For instance, when I do self-care (self-compassion, in Jen's phrase above), I do get more done. I often have such a dim view of self-care - even though I think it's a good idea, the self-hatred kicks in before I even attempt to go to the gym, meditate, write, etc.

I know I am not alone in this. But here's what really makes life less of a grind - and I'll say it loud and clear here! - to actually DO THE GRIND - the gritty stuff like self-care and eating right, etc. those things actually help me feel less grind-y and more involved in real life. Otherwise I am just going through the motions in my work, and not really caring deeply for myself, or anyone else by extension.

And as for my work? The main work I need to do is make my work more financially sustainable. Though it often feels like "one more thing I have to do" it, too, is like going to the gym and eating right and meditating - essential self-care. Baseline self-care. And it all helps me be more present and truly compassionate for my students, my wife, my life.

Opening Up Overwhelm

Space Scrutiny, Chicago February 2013

This morning, I woke after a long sleep. I felt clear, rested, happy. My wife was off to her first day of training for a new job, and I had the whole day ahead of me.  

Yes, I thought. I have lots to do and time alone to do it in. Awesome. I've been waiting for this.

Then I got up, took a shower. During the shower I started to consider what comes first: yoga, certainly. But one hour? I don't have time for that. Maybe 20 minutes. I am hungry, so I should eat first. You know, speaking of body care I said to Dylan just yesterday that I wanted to get to the gym but we were both really wiped out and it didn't happen. I could go there today, too. Wait. When can I fit that in? I've got to clean for class tonight, and I have all that editing to do. Not to mention preparation for Toronto. I leave on Thursday. Ack.

Does this line of thinking sound familiar to you? I began to panic. By the time Dylan left for work, and I was dry and clean, I began to get a tinnitus sound in my left ear where I can hear my heart pumping overtime. I got into a frenzy of over-decision-making, knowing I can't do it all. 

Knowing I will likely choose work over taking care of myself. 

And yet, and yet, panicking wasn't helping me pick good self-care either. 

Ooo. Boy. I sat down and committed to meditating first. Yes. 

This is on my wipe-off board in our bedroom, a place where we write reminders and ways to cut through panicking beliefs that feed themselves. 

"Sit first, especially when in doubt."

And immediately what arose was this:
I am panicking because part of me believes that if I don't panic I won't get anything done.

This got further reiterated by martyring myself on "all the things that Dylan didn't do when I was out of town this weekend" - eg - see what happens when someone does not panic and prioritize?

Ha. Joke is on me:

What I can't seem to do when I panic, the one thing I become incapable of doing, is prioritizing.

Especially, I drop my self care all together, in favor of the belief that if I "just get done what needs doing, I'll be fine/worthy/good enough/won't need self care/will have time for self care/fill in the blank."

The meditation, brief though it was, undid the panic loop. 

Do I still have a lot to do and not enough time to do it in?

Yes.

Will some things have to fall by the way side, regardless of how hard I work?

Yes.

So I can still prioritize much-needed self-care and get a decent amount of work done?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

I'll probably come back to this post a lot today, and tomorrow, as I try and balance work and self-care over the next forty-eight hours before I board a flight for Toronto and disappear from the US for a fortnight. Even when I am there, may I look back here again and remember. Or, remember to sit. Just sit. Quietly, in the face of overwhelm and all the hidden, not-so-hidden beliefs and agendas it carries, and remind that part of myself, remind overwhelm itself: I am a human being.

I am not perfect.

Some things will not get done.

But what does need to be done is caring for me.

Otherwise any thing else I do will be tainted and speedy.

Any care I give to others or work I do will be biased

in favor of rushing and against all I am trying to do in my work

in the first place.

After I came to this, of course, I found this email in my inbox. I love it when email, something that cranks me up a lot to begin with (somuchtogetdonesolittletimetodoitiniambehindugh), drops these messages for me:

March 12, 2013

EXPRESSING OUR EMOTIONS

We have to make a relationship with our emotional energy. Usually, when we speak of expressing our energies, we are more concerned with the expression than with the energy itself, which seems to be rushing too fast. We are afraid the energy will overwhelm us, so we try to get rid of it through action. However, once you develop a harmonious relationship with your energy, then you can actually express it, and the style of expression becomes very sane, right to the point. 

-From The Sanity We Are Born With by Chogyam Trungpa

-Posted on the Ocean of Dharma, maintained by Carolyn Gimian

Juicy Anxiety

Collages by Cathy Riddle at Shambhala Art Part II, February 10, 2013

This last weekend I taught, for the very first time, the full curriculum of Shambhala Art Parts I+II. I was trained in LA over a year ago to teach this, and Part III. I attended a retreat this January, and that finally made me feel ready to teach a whole weekend. In the meantime, I had presented parts of it at a week-long Arts retreat with Lisa Stanley and done a talk and exercise in Paris in June of 2012.

I was, needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, nervous as fuck. Super anxious. I mean, really.
I teach full-time. I teach in all sorts of circumstances with strangers. And yet. Not having taught the material yet in public means, for me, that it isn't "mine" yet. A lot of the teachings in Shambhala Art overlap with Miksang and the way I teach Contemplative Writing (because the core text, True Perception, by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is the same). But the terms are different, the exercises different. Those are what didn't feel mine yet.

My familiar ground quickly became my students' anxieties. Yes. Not just mine, but theirs.

I don't mean that in any kind of sadistic way ("Oh yay! They are suffering! That's good! I can work with that!") but rather that this particular sweet set of five really opened up quickly and let it be known that they, too, were nervous. Nervous about doing exercises they don't know. Nervous about their bodies and about speech, introducing themselves, moving spontaneously in front of one another. Drawing. Speaking spontaneous poetry. Trusting one another as, in pairs, a sighted person led a blindfolded person around. A combination of every leadership retreat meets art retreat - at least one exercise triggered or intimidated everyone, and most, including myself, found nearly every exercise challenging.

And yet, strangely compelling.
I say strangely because normally we don't go towards anxiety. It sucks. Why go there? The students, granted, 4/5 knew me as a teacher, but still - the students trusted me. They quickly trusted each other and even started to trust themselves. Immediately we could all see what that trust brought forth - moments of total clarity, pure inspiration, in the middle of complete and consuming anxiety or distraction.

Inter cut. Inter twined. Inter dependent. While it is so tempting to say, to think, to look for messages that reiterate that inspiration and anxiety are, and should be, completely separate states, they aren't.
No way.
Let's face it.
I know very few people for whom even their most practiced artistic endeavor does not cause them at least momentary panic attacks each time they approach it. Not to mention "regular life non-art endeavors," though Trungpa would categorize everything we do as art. It happens. Shit happens.

And it turns out, no matter how many times we hear it we can't seem to hear it enough, lotuses grow out of mud. Compost is rotted vegetable matter that brings out better blooms. Manure is fertilizer for hearty crops. Going into the anxiety, with acknowledgement, gentleness and even some playfulness, is the only way. No sidetracking, no distraction will access the juice just waiting to be squeezed out of resistance.

Though I have quite the internal dictator, or perhaps because I have quite the internal dictator, I find it very important to distinguish here - sometimes we do need a break. A real honest breather. Some space. A walk in the woods away from the overdue article. A crying festival with a friend to process what's underneath not wanting to pick up the pen. Playing with another media, one with less tension associated with it, until you can relax enough to rediscover inspiration. I am not implying that dogged pursual is the way, all the way, 100% of the time.

But when we take space to rediscover, access what Trungpa calls Square One, and First Thought, we need to be honest about whether we are trying to escape or getting some space. Because anxiety knows. It is clever. And if we run away, it will hunt us down. If we are simply getting space, we discover that even in the seemingly solid intensity of anxiety, there is breathing room. Anxiety, nervousness, intensity - all of these and more grow in the darkness, in being ignored or avoided. Not the kind of growth that inspires - the kind of growth that chokes.

Don't take my word for it. Please. Turn on your bullshit detector and go out and test out what I am saying. Next time, instead of doing the same thing you always do (and we all have deeply ingrained habits around anxiety, especially in "making art"), try something new. Engage in a dialogue with your anxiety. Write down what you are really feeling. Pick up a brush and paint an entire black page before returning to your delicate watercolor. Let juicy anxiety and inspirational intensity dance with each other. Find the soft spot of fear, sadness, anger underneath and let it show you what it has to say.

I guarantee it won't be what you expect. It will be fresh. Real. Honest.
The best inspiration we can ever ask for.

Do Fairy Tales Come True?

Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison WI

"Look! Over here! It's a frog on a lily pad!"
Dylan saunters over, surprised by how beautiful the moment is - crystal clear water, a gorgeous lily bloom, an unblinking frog. But not by the presence of a frog on a lily pad.
"Haven't you seen that before?" she asks.
"Nope. Not once. Have you?"
"Once before, I think."
"I mean, I have an image in my head of it - from Frogger, from fairy tales, but never in reality."

And never like this, even in those fairy tales - cartoons with frog princes, comic print images.
Reality is so much more glorious. It feels an understatement to say this, almost redundant, except for that we forget. I forget, at least. Do you?

Why We Suffer

Honest Ed's, Mirvish Village, Toronto, ON

"If it is so beneficial, and I know it is, from experience, to not know what is coming next, to allow ourselves to open directly to the world and be present with what our senses deliver, then why don't we do it more often? No, even more importantly - why is our culture so against it?"

A question from the last Way of Nature class at Olbrich Botanical Gardens this last Sunday. I've gotten this question before in so many ways - from people learning about meditation, contemplative writing, contemplative photography, and, in this case, Haiku.

Another student answered something about our culture - about America and its materialism. Another about a fear of getting hurt. The whole time, I was drawn to the dry-erase board, where I came back to an earlier discussion about suffering, the Four Noble Truths and what it means to truly have no reference points.

"We don't, our culture doesn't support it, because it seems scary as shit," I said, once the other discussions had died down. "Not just us - everyone avoids it - it's pan-human behavior. It's suffering."

Absolute v. Relative

Japanese Gardens, Portland, OR

"Sure, I understand that on an Absolute level, all is space. We are empty of concept and things only exist as a part of a larger whole. But what about on the Relative level?"*

This is a question from a student at a Miksang Contemplative Photography weekend. It's not an uncommon question - in fact, since we talk about perception pretty much constantly during Miksang talks, in comes up a lot. But this time, we are pretty far along in the program - in a cumulative program called Absolute Eye - and he wants to know how we can experience the Absolute, if we can, on a Relative level.

If this seems to high faultin' to you, hang on and keep reading.

Cool Versus Cold

Miniature Train show, January 2012, Discovery World, Milwaukee WI

One of my favorite quotes about Buddhism is - many of my favorite quotes, truthfully, are - from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In True Perception, the Path of Dharma Art, he says: "Usually people think that if you lose everything - your ambition, your self-centeredness, your integrity and dignities - you will become a vegetable, a jellyfish. But it's not so. Instead you are suspended in space. It is quite titillating!"

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.

A Flea in Your Ear?

(a blurry shot of a Buddha in the Himalayan and Southeast Asian permanent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago juxtaposed against the LED exhibit of Jitish Kallat's steps)

"Puce a l'oreille" is a phrase in French I only learned late in my time studying abroad. A French friend and I were driving to her parent's house* and she said the phrase quite quickly, in regards to a set of friends she was describing to me. "A Flea in the Ear?!" I remarked back, slowing down the phrase, and she laughed. I imagine she was recalling, as was I, the time I was in a laundromat down the street from my flat and heard a suspicious-acting guy behind me say "Putain de la Merde!" which literally means "Whore of Shit." I thought he was talking to me, but it turns out that is a common - though vulgar - euphemism, similar to "Fuck this."

She giggled and then said that having "a flea in your ear" is like in English when we ask someone if their nose was tickling, because we were speaking of them. It means a rumor, and the idea is that the person the rumor is being told about would feel an itching in their ear, like a flea.
"But why a flea?" I asked - I was a linguistics student but still expected a story to answer every metaphor. "Good lord," she replied, "your guess is as good as mine."


I am studying currently for a seminary - Buddhist, secular, called "Sutrayana Seminary" in the Shambhala Tradition. I'll spend most of February in a small center - Karme Choling - in the middle of nowhere Vermont, surrounded by snow and other seminarians. I won't come out a monk or nun - it is simply to further my classical Buddhist "sutra" (scriptures/study) education. In the text today, as there is much studying to do in preparation for the retreat, I ran into the following description from Chogyam Trungpa. He is describing big, distracting thoughts while meditating, versus subtle, almost undetectable ones:

"It's like the difference between an elephant walking on you and a little flea on your nose."
I stopped in my tracks and laughed - though Trungpa was born in Tibet, his English was superb - very accurate, very precise, very curious. I don't know if this is a euphemism he is translating from another language (Tibetan? Sanskrit? Pali?), a classical description of the difference between "big" thoughts and flickering, idle "subtle" thoughts, or if he made up the images on the spot. But it brought the story of the flea in the ear right back to me.

The connection between body and mind, experiencing our thoughts physically, literally as sensations, comes up again and again in the texts. Whenever I teach, especially Miksang but also in writing, I refer back all the time to the importance of treating our mind as a sixth sense organ and our thoughts as something that organ senses. This is classic Buddhist phenomenology - I certainly didn't make it up - but when I teach something again and again, even if it is taught from my own experience, sometimes it becomes dull. This reading today really sharpened up for me the trust that we need to have that we can actually tell what the heck is going on at any given time, most especially in our minds. That we can train to sense even the tiniest sensations - even the tiniest thoughts, worries, elaborations, and learn to acknowledge them, then let them go and come back to what is happening now.

A common description, again, in classic Tibetan Buddhism, for the increased sensitivity of a practitioner of meditation is this. In regular life, before one began sitting as a regular practice, one experiences irritation like a hair on the back of one's hand. When having sat a lot, becoming more aware and present, it feels like a hair on one's eyeball. Why would one want that kind of sensation? Because the hair was actually that "damaging" (even beneficial) or intense all the time. The hair on the hand sensation is the delusion - it's not that we become more sensitive meaning we interpret things as more personal - we become more sensitive to how things actually are. We notice that even the tiniest, discursive gossip (flea in the ear, or flea on the nose) can cause disruption, pain, bad choices, hurt ourselves or someone else, and we learn to work with them.

We can instead run a flea circus, so to speak, where we train the fleas to do what we need done - working toward supporting ourselves, knowing ourselves thoroughly, not being so surprised and hurt all the time, helping others.

Trungpa describes samsaric body/mind as being unsynchronized. Again, we talk about this in Miksang, and a bit in writing practice, but somehow it really hit home with all the flea analogies. Just because we don't feel something in our body or mind doesn't mean it is not in pain - how many friends of mine have gone to the doctor for a regular checkup, only to have them find a tumor the patient never would have detected on her own? This kind of awareness isn't paranoia - it's finding out where the hurt is, dealing with it, healing it, before it kills us. We can equally stop hurtful words or thoughts before they "go too far" - beyond our control. Even gossip (about others, about ourselves to ourselves...) can grow the same way - cell upon cell until a flea has become an elephant, crushing everything in its sight.


footnote:
*Her parents lived in a quirky little country town called "Perne les Fontaines" - a Provencal village famous for having more fountains (40) than any other town. In particular, my favorite was the "Fontaine Gigot" - "Chunk of Meat Fountain."

Dream/Reality

Last night, before meditation at the Shambhala Center, I finally did one of the practices I was given at the 10-day retreat I did a week or so ago. I hadn't made space for it at home yet, and we had the supplies at the center, so since I was a bit early for setting up, I settled in and did it.

A practice I had done again and again for a week in a tent full of 100 people became, for me, intensely concentrated with just me alone in the silence of my local center's shrine room. In just 10 minutes of practicing, a LOT changed, shifted and I felt completely opened.

After meditation and cleaning up, I went home to do ordinary household things with Dylan - mow the lawn, weed, water our fruit plants/trees (strawberry plants, raspberry bushes, pear tree), etc. It was a cool evening, few mosquitoes, and the yard felt utterly alive to me. I slept heavily, fed by the hard work, though it took me awhile to go down, so entranced with the perfect evening air.

After the cats woke me at 5am, I went back to sleep and had this dream:
The Sakyong, Jamgon Mipham Rinpoche, who's the main teacher in Shambhala, was staying in our house. Even in the dream I thought of a story Diana Mukpo told us at the retreat - that she and Chogyam Trungpa (Mipham's father and former head of Shambhala) used to drop by their senior students' houses without warning for dinner, to see if they were uplifting their lives for everyone, including themselves, all the time. So here he was, in our house, currently without a bathroom sink, with tumbleweeds of cat hair and dust rolling around, and dirty dishes in the sink. I was mortified, but also so glad he was in my house. I went to a talk and saw him speak there, but then went home early and stayed up late cleaning. When he came back he seemed happy but said nothing about the difference in the house.

The important thing is that *I* felt it. When I told Dylan about the dream, about the stories of dropping in on their students, he looked mortified. "Too much work," he noted, and I tried to explain again - this isn't some outside standard, this is making your home as good as you want it to truly be as often as you can so that you can be your best - most alert, most rested, most supported. He got it, then. The Sakyong appeared in my dream not to bless me, not because I am special, but to remind me that I can be as prepared for myself, as honoring of myself, as for him. That I want to be. That there is no difference between me and him.

So I cleaned up my office today, put the shrine together with new supplies, and everything somehow found its place that had seemed homeless before. Putting together the books and texts from the retreat, a photo of the Sakyong fell out of my bag and landed face up on the floor. A slight smile, eyes directly looking at me, he reflected my own state - cleanliness is next to godliness, yes, but not some external god. Our own internal god, our own internal basic goodness, beyond good and bad, can land and open best in an uncluttered space.

The practice opened me up to this, I know that for certain. It, ironically, instead of taking me back to the retreat, brought me more here - into my home, into my life, into my "stuff" (of literal and metaphorical meaning). It's about time - as the retreat becomes more of a dream in my mind, a memory, the past, I don't want the teachings and their effect on me to fade. Last night was a reminder of how quickly it can all come back, and then some.

Here's to tasting just enough of the dream to sharpen up reality.

Magic at Marquette

Last night I met with my Marquette University students again. I had to miss last week, because of a nasty head cold, and this week I am still sniffling and hacking out phlegm. But I didn't want to miss this week - germless as I am - because we were talking about Magic.

It's clear from their response papers that some of them read the chapter on Magic from Shambhala, Sacred Path of the Warrior, with skepticism, and some read it with joy. That's natural. All semester I have been toying with the edges of the believable with them - giving them somewhat concrete assignments like "Color" or even "People" and when they come back, insisting that they experienced more than just a moment of "getting the assignment right" - in fact, that that wasn't what they were doing at all, rather, experiencing direct perception, which is, ultimately, experiencing reality directly. At first they were confounded - even the joyful ones - but after a semester of reading John Daido Loori (RIP) and Freeman Patterson and Chogyam Trungpa, and putting up with my weird chalkboard renditions of reality, they are becoming a bit more malleable.

And all of those things would mean nothing if it weren't for the practice. The practice of photographing, this tiny (most of them have little low-power point and shoots) miracle that allows them to share what they see with all of us in a dark room and discuss it. They have become "processed" as Chogyam Trungpa puts it, and like in cooking, you wait until the food softens, then add the spices. Now's when they are ready to absorb the most radical, and also simplest, teachings of them all.

In the chapter, Chogyam Trungpa says that not only is the space we can experience (if we allow ourselves - of course it is always there) spacious, relaxing and nifty, it is also charged with energy. Potential. Spontenaity. In the reading, he actually names it - Drala (above aggression or beyond the enemy in Tibetan) and then goes on to say that in fact there are, in a manner of speaking, Dralas - entities which exist in this space, of this space, which are this space. Even the wildly awake, in love students who accept most of what I or the readings say, took this one with a hard swallow. What? Is this guy talking about faeries here?! He sort of plunks this on at the end of the chapter, and doesn't leave much explanation.

So that's mostly what we talked about last night. After talking about what was mysterious in their lives (The Future, one woman said - these are college sophomores - another mentioned The Origins of Everything - Both Cosmic and Personal - and another, Relationships With Other Humans) I asked them if the cosmic - how the universe began - is really so different from how, say, they arrived in this class. There's an answer for the class - "I signed up for it" - or is there?

"In my Poli Sci class, we talk about this a lot," one student said, very excited. "How can you separate the origin of the universe from your own life?" We reference the Carl Sagan quote Loori used in our readings a few weeks ago - that you can't truly make an apple pie from scratch unless you go back to the beginning of the Universe. Another mentions in German class how they are reading a text which says we don't truly know anything at all, that science is actually less informed or answered than, say, religion.

Ok. Good. We've established space. They've learned a lot in the last 12 weeks - and certainly not just from me or the class or their experiences from this class. So then I drop the bomb.

"What does this idea of Drala entities mean, then? Are they faeries?" All the students shrug, one then shakes his head and raises his hand. "It's more like - well, we can't see it, but we experience it, right? Like the tuning fork example you gave, that we make contact with something, we know it, we have all felt it here, right?" and the rest of the students nod "So it's worth naming, but it sort of doesn't exist. I dunno. Something like that."

This from the student who's an RA in a dorm where a freshman just committed suicide over the last weekend, throwing the whole campus into shock.

"Thank you," I say to him. He's delivered it - or maybe the student's death delivered it - right to our doors. Naming the unnameable, the unknowable. I don't say it's a bit like naming God - these are Catholic, Christian or Atheist students still questioning a lot in religion - but they all toy with this as I wait a bit to speak.

"What about this idea of "beyond the enemy" though? What if we call it "beyond aggression?" They all look at me, dumbfounded. That's understandable. I bring it down to earth.

"See this table?" I sit on the same table every week. I like it - just the right height, swinging my long-skirted legs. I can see all of them, all their heads, and the whole chalkboard from here.
"I like this table. What if I were to go to the department head and say 'I really like this table. Please let me take it home,' and he says to me 'You know we are having a shortfall this year, Miriam, we really can't give up any table,' and we fight about it. Is the aggression only between me and the head of the department, or somewhere else?"

They squint at me, some giggle a bit. Really? Man she's a weirdo. What weird examples.
"What are some things like this in your life?"
"Grades," one pipes in.
"Getting good grades is good, right?"
They are Honors students. They all nod vigorously.
"But sometimes do you hurt others or yourself to get them?"
They keep nodding, some smirk, some look sad.
"Where's the aggression?"
"We're too attached to getting the good grades, just like you are too attached to getting the table."
I nod.
"And in that same German text," the student who mentioned it earlier rushes forward without raising her hand, eager, "it says that if things are too tight, there's no room to move."
"Right. Does hurting yourself over getting good grades mean you will get them?"
They frown, some look sadder. "No," one student answers.
"Why?"
"Because we miss out on the world, we miss out on joy, spontenaity, trying too hard. And we hurt ourselves, and sometimes others." You can feel the loss in the room. It's palpable.
"So if we let some space in, some not knowing, some doubt even, what happens?"
"There's room for change, for joy, even for pain, but also for --- (she gulps) Magic."
Ah. Yes.

The silence in the room is deep. This is not ordinary, is class over yet silence. The students are struck dumb, literally. Which is a good thing. Beginner's mind penetrates the darkened room.
"So when I am fighting with the department head, and I have aggression with him, where else is there aggression?"
"With the table. You're being aggressive toward the table."
"Is the table aggressive toward me?"
They laugh and shake their heads no.
"Ok. So you know how I told you to watch your energy photographing people? How that was really hard because - as he said - relationships are hard and mysterious?"
They nod.
"Guess what. You have had relationships this whole time. With color, with light, with a chair or table or oak leaf."
They nod.
"You have a relationship with everything, and everything relates to you. There is always energy there, and that energy - when it is open, without aggression and totally aware? That's beyond aggression. That's Drala. That's what we are naming."
"And when it's not Drala?" someone asks, frowning.
The German student answers her "There's no room for anything."
Right.

There are no class bells at Marquette. The class ends when we end it. I am remiss to do the normal closing up stuff - remind them of our show coming up, wish them a good Thanksgiving break.
"When you are shooting the next couple of weeks, don't forget about this. Heck, try to remember it even as you eat cafeteria food. (some groan) It's up to you. You are the gateway."

They get the hint. It's the end. Three out of the seven smile as they stand up, looking right at me. The rest don't chat like usual, deep in thought. I catch them up on what's due and wish them a good holiday. When they leave, I cry for a moment, spontaneous tears, totally unexpected, and completely without aggression.