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!

Basic Creativity Reminders

I met with a couple of new clients this week, to see if we would match for me to help them manifest their creative practice time and/or projects. I have grown to love this work, this one-on-one (secretly my favorite way to interact in all cases) support. It keeps me on my toes, keeps me and them focused, and often makes me interpret, re-state or understanding things in a new way all the time, which is good overall for me as a practitioner and as a teacher, both.

These appointments, as beginning appointments often do, reminded me of some really basic, key things we often overlook. That, combined with having just returned from teaching a week-long contemplative writing retreat, have put the importance of structure back in the forefront of my mind. So I wanted to write a post with some of my favorite suggestions, tools, and ideas for how to make sure you do the things you want to do in your life, but can't seem to find/make time to do.

Relentless Gentleness

It may seem funny to pair the word "relentless" with the word "gentleness", but this is what I am working with more and more. I can be a somewhat relentless person - relentless in business (note I did not say ruthless), in personal relationships, in working on/with myself. However, that relentlessness can be quite tiring, has been exhausting, in fact. And so I am learning that my gentleness needs to be as relentless as the more common things associated with relentlessness:
ambition
appetite
striving.

What does relentless gentleness look like?
For me it looks like

1. Holding space in my schedule for resting, protecting time with cats, meditation, exercise.
2. Standing my ground against my own self-hating tendencies, the ones that push me too hard to work.
3. Leveraging the same pushy bits of myself that force me to work, to criticize and instead use those forces to force myself to rest, relax, just hang out.

It's a ground teaching in Vajrayana Buddhism that the place from where our confusion arises is also from where our wisdom is born. This relentlessness in myself is not inherently bad - it's strength, resilience and dedication. How I apply it, on the other hand, changes everything. Learning to direct the need to be committed and clear towards kindness is key; changing the tack of the sail of "get it done" to "make sure I sleep a full nine hours" is tricky but rewarding. And slowly but surely, the strengthened gentleness takes over more easily when the seemingly more powerful self-critic tries to take the reins.

Self Hatred Never Helps

I recently went to my annual physical. I knew going in that the painfully accurate scale would show me I have gained some weight, since pants have been tighter and my second chin a bit more prominent. Most of the time, I don't struggle too hard with this - I am as active as I can be, and eat relatively healthy.

I don't believe, not rationally, that fat=unhealthy, and have worked hard to get over early prejudices against myself and others in regards to body shape and size.

But beliefs run deep. Especially when it comes to our own bodies.

So when the scale showed me I weigh more than I hoped but less than I feared, I could feel the self-hatred start to creep in. Walking from the weight and height room to the examining room, even as I joked with the nurse about not putting my shoes back on, in my head I was making plans:
-Do Whole 30
-Get gym membership and go 3 times a week

The messages behind these - eat better and exercise more - are not problematic. 
But the tone was. Even if Whole 30 would be good for my body, or more exercise, they will not be helpful - or sustainable - if I take this attitude towards myself --

The tone was something more like this:
-You cannot be trusted to take care of yourself without structure. Restrict your diet and stick to it.
-You must push a lot harder on exercise. You resist it too much. Just fucking do it.

I wish I could say that's when I knew I was in trouble. Instead, behind the scenes a quiet and familiar war waged. I didn't even notice it until I was out of the appointment and at home, feeling shitty. The more sensitive and human aspect of myself put up weak arguments to be kind to myself, and the more aggressive and fearful part put up far too forceful arguments to be mean to myself.

Recently, my best friend has come up with a slogan that I love (this is my phrasing of it):
"Self hatred never helps."

After my appointment, as I cried on her proverbial phone shoulder (she lives in Portland), I came back to this phrase on my own. I asked of both of us - if self hatred, which is so deep, so default and habitual, doesn't work - which I believe it doesn't - what does?

Rebecca went on to describe attentiveness, kindness, curiosity. An ongoing, everyday engagement. We discussed the habitual patterns that seem to attract self-hatred: overly regulated systems like strict diets, as well as the polar opposite: spacing out and providing no structure at all. Then we engaged the mindsets that create so much space around the hatred that it loses its power, like asking what my body wants right now.

The problem, if it is a problem, is that self-hatred is easier, more convenient, habitual. 

Most of us crave easy answers - a prescripted diet or exercise plan, for instance. And for some of us, those work. Some of us respond well to regulated, even tight structure.

But in my experience coaching, teaching and human beinging, I find that most of us struggle, push back, and fight that tight of a structure. Self-hatred easily coopts whatever it can for it's own purposes, so that even if we enjoy a cleanse once, and decide we'd like to do it more regularly, behind the scenes, self hatred makes it into a project, tries to use it to punish us and prove a point.

So the answer might be diet and exercise, might even be a prescribed diet and exercise plan, but it must be flexible. Kind.

Body and diet, exercise and weight are such incredibly loaded, often poisonous waters for all of us, especially women. The last refuge of self hatred, a deeply culturally and personally embedded dark alley in the back of our minds and hearts. Coming to really feel and notice that self hatred never helps, is never a useful view or motivation, is essential. And it is a bottom line, a definite statement that underlines lots of quite less definite but strongly intuitive understandings about kindness and flexibility with ourselves and others.

These are the questions I will be contemplating around this:
-What kinds of structures seem to magnetize self-hatred?
-What kinds of structures seem to magnetize flexibility, space and understanding?
-Which causes lead to which effects? When I self hate, do I really feel better? 
-Balance is flexibility - not rigidity. Where is the balance? And it is not one point, so what does it feel like when I am stressed? Traveling? Alone? With others? 

It's crucial for each of us to truly feel that self hatred never helps, otherwise it is an empty adage. 

Simple answers are not the mostly likely to be true when it comes to human psyche.  

Self-hatred is an easy answer, a short-cut habit. It's ready availability makes it feel like truth, but it is only so accessible because it is a well-worn path, not because it is true. 

Relaxing back into the complexity and feeling what is true right now needs to be paired with a deeper, more compassionate ongoing view.  

For eating, for work, for life, for everything.

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.

Discernment and Structure

Student at my Washington Island writing retreat last week.

Discipline is a word I try to avoid using in my teaching.
It is a word that one of my teachers, Natalie Goldberg, does not use.
Most of the time we associate the word discipline with punishment.
Very few people respond to the word discipline with the gentleness I believe we need to continue practicing.

Usually I use the word structure to replace it - meaning, the positive parts of discipline (knowing where/when/how you will do your practice(s)) without the negative (punishment, cruelty, self-denigration). 

Ideally.

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.

Groundless Inspiration.

Confession time:


When I have not written in this blog for awhile, like recently, it's not because of block.
Or not the kind of writer's block one would normally think of: a lack, a drying up, an inability.
Instead, I have been too inspired.

Too inspired. Tired from being inspired. Not opening books that I know will spark off my mind. Too many ideas, and I cannot get them all down on page or screen. If I could write each time I get an idea, I would be writing all the time. I can't keep it all organized. I know that, especially as I increasingly guide people through the process of book-length memoirs, I should not say this out loud. I should tell you that I have an ideas document, that I use Evernote, that I know how to make all these thoughts manifest into being.

But some days, after teaching, reading, talking so much (so much richness! my god! no complaints!) the last thing I want to do is process more. Chogyam Trungpa says there is no such thing as a moment off, no such thing as vacation. But I need space, and I think - since he taught meditation - this he would understand. Room for the ideas to run around, disappear and reappear in a form that is more digested and bloggable, bookable, speakable.

Last night, on a quiet walk at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, sans camera or notebook with my wife, I cried and said lately, since getting back from a busy, full and wonderful teaching and personal trip to Toronto for eleven days, I have felt utterly overwhelmed. Too much. Too much good work, too much energy, too much to read.

What a "problem" to have! I wake grateful for this "issue" every day, and also, I know that it is one that I will be working with, if I am truly as blessed as it seems, the rest of my (hopefully long) life. Some days all falls into place, organizes itself. The memoir writing is clear, the blogs perk up and fill themselves with my thoughts, the client and student appointments, the classes, sharpen and soften in the right rhythms. Most days.

In fact, the days where this does not occur are the days when I am "off," when I have to structure my own time. I fight between the part of me that wants time "off," truly off, on the beach off, technology off off, and the parts of me that recognize my need for structure: yoga, exercise, writing, cleaning. If I know what is next, I can relax and let go. This is my own personal balance, but I recognize in many of my students how universal it is. Because it is personal for all of us, and intuitive, while we may find systems or ways of understanding it, it changes - and should stay this flexible - from day to day, week to week, month to month.

The groundlessness that accompanies a day off after weeks of work is so so so familiar to me. In particular, I got trained into it working in technical theater, when my only days off were either once a week - Mondays - in which I slept and drank, or weeks on end, waiting for another gig, where I'd get lost and depressed, anxious and come up with projects I would never complete.

Of course, it turns out groundlessness - not knowing what will happen next, the sudden anxiety or panic of open time without a plan - is so universal and human. Some of us have an acquired taste for it and others hate it - and the hatred can come in the form of overplanning for me. But can I love that open time with just the right amount of structure? Each time I hit an open - or relatively open - patch, I have to remind myself that I can. That's what I am doing right now, in fact. And in the process of writing this, a friend writes to see if I want to go see a photography exhibit with her today. I say to myself: why yes. I can. I have my blog posts done for the week, I can schedule some email catch up for later. It's a gorgeous day. Let's do it.

And for just a moment, the groundlessness feels liberating. The secret is: it always is. The inspiration is groundless, always is, and is always liberating.

Remind me next time, ok? I have a hard time remembering, just like every other human being.