Coughing

I've fallen behind on blogging, especially here. I started a momentum of writing about my weekly writing classes after they were done, and lost that momentum. That happens. I am working with my Return community on that a lot - coming back, returning to our intentions, even when we drift off.

I am returning. I return today with a cough.

It's not an awful cough, not by my standards. As someone who has had pleurisy, bronchitis, pretty much everything but pneumonia when it comes to viral and bacterial lung crap over the course of her young life, this is really not much. The tail end of a head cold, a bit of an itch in the back of my throat. Mostly dry, not wet, not super loud.

But any kind of cough makes people notice you.

End of In No Sense

Is this the end of innocence? Or the end of confusion? 

The end of delusion or the end of illusion?

What is innocence, anyway? In-no-sense. In no sense did I understand what marriage entails. And in no sense is it a problem. And yet. And yet. In some sense I thought I knew. That’s innocence – thinking we know? Or is that arrogance? Innocence is not even knowing there’s something to think or know about.

I would not prefer innocence. That Buddhist adage – don’t start and if you do start, get it over with quickly. Yeh. And yet, when I do slow down and realize what is really going on, I am so grateful that I have developed skills to notice. That I know something now, things I didn’t even realize one could know, then. When I was innocent.

Yin Support

Cracking ice in Sheboygan, Wi

Yin yoga was suggested to me a long time ago, back when I wanted to return to yoga, but wasn't sure which style or teacher to go with. As I posted here and here, I struggle with physical practices in particular, and need to have a sense of total safety (and anonymity, I've found - plenty of my students are yoga teachers, but I need to not be both their student and teacher at the same time). As a part of my new year's intention to support myself more, I have committed to yoga at least once a week at Jewel in the Lotus in Madison. And the main class I've been taking is Yin.

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."

Hakomi Therapy

Ever since my Facebook post about having an awesome Hakomi therapy experience, the crowds have been in questions - what on earth is this Hakomi thing and what exactly did I mean by an "awesome" experience? So here it comes...

Hakomi was first introduced to me by a friend who's been seeing a Hakomi-trained psychotherapist for a few months now. Every time she talked about her appointments and her therapist, I was very impressed. For someone who has been in therapy on and off for 14 years, it takes a lot to impress me now, and in fact, I haven't been in "talk" therapy for a couple of years now. I got on some meds, do a lot of meditation and writing, and for the most part, can process things out with friends or Dylan. But lately some things have gotten kicked up with my memoir writing that I felt I needed a therapist to help me deal with. So even though I got other recommendations from friends, I asked Becky to tell me what kind of practice her therapist did.

Hakomi, she told me. She had to spell it - I'd never heard it. Reiki, shamanism, acupuncture, EMDR, I've gone a lot of ways to network the mind and body, but not that. Her therapist focuses on talk therapy with a Hakomi edge - but I only found two (one of whom turned out to not be a Hakomi person after all) in Madison at all, and the one legit Hakomi person is really more, it appeared to me from her website, a massage therapist. Hmm. I like massage, but I do need *some* talking.

I emailed her with some questions about how the talk and massage worked together, and she replied. I still didn't quite get it, but something told me to keep persuing, so we talked on the phone and set an appointment. Still, I wasn't sure I could picture it - how would this work, massage and talk therapy together? I had faith, I guess you could say, or intuition that this is in fact exactly what I needed. After years of chronic issues with IBS and certain old back injuries, which have received chiropractic, acupunture and herbal help, as well as Ibuprofen, yoga, and PT, I was starting to notice that the emotional patterns didn't seem so separate from the physical ones. What if I could work on them together?

Upon meeting the therapist, I got a strong sense of being in the right place. Our minds mixed easily, but with good boundaries, and within the 1/2 hour introducing ourselves to each other, my mind offered up things I wouldn't "think" to say, and I let them come out. She told me there were many options, and always would be - I could treat it more like straightforward massage first, with bodily sensations guiding me as to what I needed, and/or what I needed to talk about, or we could start first with talking, or whatever. I chose massage - bad neck spasm that day - and was blow away by how integral, after all, the pain and issues are.

There's something about the nature of experiences that are profound that does, in fact, make them hard to describe. That's a bit how I feel right now about talking about it. I felt very vulnerable, physically revealed on the table, and my mind resisted it. She caught the resistance in the things I said, even in how my eyes looked, and kept asking me to be mindful and return to the hurt, no matter how it manifested. At every turn, every twitch, she gently witnessed for me, with me, my sensations and thoughts - thoughts as sensations. Nothing was rejected, nothing lost, all used for awareness. We certainly didn't "solve" anything, but "solving" anything I think is what has caused more problems for me in the past, in talk therapy and in body work.

I booked a second appointment, and would be happy to talk more specifically with anyone who thinks this kind of "therapy" might be right up their alley for now. I warned her that she may have referrals pouring in, that all my students may want to come to her, and she smiled. She's independently employed, too, and knows that is how business grows, even if from all the way across the country, from another Hakomi practicioner, who's never even met her.

I've had that, too, a woman join a class of mine saying that she'd just left Portland and her "writing practice instructor" told her to look for her "local writing practice teacher" when she settled in. The fact that there's only one of this therapist here in town makes me as grateful as that student was when she found me - sometimes there are none, sometimes more than one, and when you find the one right for you, regardless, gratitude ensues.