Inversion

Today I participated in a Restorative Yoga workshop. Our teacher emphasized inversions, to get the blood going back through our system. Since I am going back to Vermont this Friday, and with the inversions, this poem that I wrote comes to mind, which went onto a friend's art piece in Vermont five years ago.

Branches Beneath

I am

roots up,

tumbling

skirt of earth,

wind dispersing

cloud feet.

Show me

your ankles

sneaking

from under

heavy weight

skin bark.

Watch water

return to sky source,

tears rising

from toes,

upside-down

ballerina,

dangling.

Letting things turn upside down, mix around, in life right now. Fascinating and frightening.

Papa Terma

For many many years, I waited for it, longed for it, imagined it.
A letter, a note, a picture with words; some kind of written confirmation.
Something from my father, who died when I was 12, saying that he loved me
missed me
would miss me
wished me well
with some words of wisdom and gentleness to guide me through the rest of my life
without him.

After searching through banker's box after banker's box, piles of economic journals, graded computer programming papers, receipts copied again and again, after years and years of secretly and not-so-secretly searching, hoping some time in the four years he was sick he thought to write to me, hoping somewhere in all the detritus of our now-sold childhood home, I would find IT. And I would know that was IT - THE letter, THE note, THE missive, THE missing piece.

I never did. Nothing for me, for either of my brothers.
"You should be glad you had a father than loved you" my mother would say on days when she was competitive over grief with me. The implication was at least when I had him he was great, even if I no longer had him in any way. Not many memories, and no notes, persay, not even to me when he was alive from him alive. Much less from him then alive now dead to me alive.

A couple of months ago I finally wrote myself that note. The feeling was one of finding the text in myself - the message mostly derived from Hakomi therapy, asking my inner voices what I need at a fundamental level - the text oriented around being gentle with myself, having perspective for all of life, and not working too hard - basically "do as I say not as I did." The message wasn't from him them, it was from him now - my dead father, as if he has grown this whole time alongside me, and seen how wrong he was in overworking, wrong he was in not being present to much in my life or my family's life, and how much he wanted to make sure I don't make the same mistakes.

For if my father were still alive I am pretty certain he wouldn't be able to see that. My living through his death and long past means I can start to see these things - I think his living through Cancer wouldn't have helped. But who knows. All I know now is that I received it not from me, persay, but from some part of him in me that has been secreted away, grown and opened, and now is blossoming when I need it most.

A Terma. Something buried from him, deep inside his Basic Goodness, his real self, hidden in the mindstream of our genes, coming alive when it is needed most. I am grateful for these teachings on Terma from Tibetan Buddhism - though my literal father would have likely scoffed at them as a skeptic, the inner father who is finally opening, that little voice, deep inside me, he knows it is true. We plant seeds and never know how they will mature, and the way his voice comes to me now, reassuring me I am making the right choices, to in fact do as he is saying now and not as he said or did then, I know he meant the best all along. He never meant to harm. He didn't know better. I can still be angry, and still forgive.

Looking through boxes a few nights ago I found this image of my dad and his mom. No date - I think it must have been just before he got sick. His mom, who was always so gentle and loving with me, was so severe with him (as you can tell in the photo). Ah the irony. He was quite loving with me but also so severe. The tone of the Terma I have received is that of this exact moment - laugh, love, be open. Don't care how you look in a photograph. You are fine. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you or the world as it is. There are very few photographs of my father, especially later in life, as he was always the photographer, rather than the photographed. So this is a hidden photo, a surprise, as pictures of him always are from this era. And usually, he is not smiling. So a Terma within a Terma. I offer it to you, dear reader, as it was given to me - a quiet gift on a snowy day.

Chicken/Egg

I often wonder what comes first: the chicken or the egg. How did I land in this beautiful house, with this amazing partner and stunningly meaningful work for which I get paid a living wage? There has been a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, and also a lot of wonder and amazing conclusions.

I often cannot tell which action in my life resulted in where I am or a particular effect. I have been reading a lot about Karma lately in preparation for Seminary and the one thing I am finally getting is that it warns us that things are never as simple as A leading to B, or even A and B leading to C. Causes have supporting causes, conditions, circumstances. Everything is interacting with everything else. So to say "I went to this meditation class and the rest is history" is both a fallacy and has accuracy.

Two things I know for sure, though, that have equally affected me are writing and Buddhism. It comes together often, like today, that the things I learn from one are clearly manifest in the other. Today I am meeting with my editor to talk about my memoir, and editing is no longer as scary to me as it used to be. How can that be? How can I have gone from hating it to looking forward to it, secretly? It's not masochism - I don't look forward to criticism. But I look forward to finding fault so I can rework it into magic.

I feel the exact same way, 99% of the time, now about *myself* - if I have done something unhelpful, unbeneficial to myself or someone else, I want to know about it. I used to hate that, feel that I had been exposed, found out, that I was an imposter of a person who was secretly horrible. Now, it's more of a "Huh. Sorry about that. Now what can I do to make it better?"
I feel almost as if I am in the same place in my life, my meditation practice and my writing, especially right now.

So, I don't much care which came first for the moment. I just care that I am here.

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."