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Welcome to a new year. The passing year has been a challenging time. Many have struggled with anxiety, depression and isolation. Challenging times remind me how important meditation is to our self-care.  And how essential self-care is to building health and resilience to meet the world. When the going gets tough, the tough sit down … and collect themselves.

Meditation has many applications. But as a healing modality, meditation can be seen as a fundamental reconnection to ourselves. Each time we return to the breath we are returning to ourselves. And when we have the presence of mind to actually feel the breath, we are reconnecting on a very intimate level. Each breath can be like a gently healing hand on our heart. Far from making us soft and unprotected, I have found this loving connection to help build confidence, resilience, and strength.

When the going gets tough, the tough get soft. Soft enough to meet the hard stuff.

Far from building egotism, awareness based selfcare gives us the strength to look past our self-obsession in order to connect sanely with our world.

I’m excited to invite you to some upcoming online classes and offerings. Please consider joining online.

 

… events that may interest you: 

                                            – upcoming!

NEW YORK INSIGHT MEDITATION CENTER

Meditation as an Act of Healing – Working with Fear and Anxiety 

Thursday, January 19th, 2023, | 7:00pm – 9:00pm ET

 

   to register:

https://www.nyimc.org/event/meditation-as-an-act-of-healing-working-with-fear-and-anxiety/

 

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Online: Meditation as an Act of Healing – Working with Fear and Anxiety Practicum

Saturday, February 4th, 2023 from 10:00am – 1:00pm ET

 

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SHAMBHALA MEDITATION CENTER OF NEW YORK

Public Sitting, Tuesdays at noon, open to all

Learn to Mediate – 1^st Tuesday at 6

guided introduction to meditation, open to all of any level of experience

To register: https://ny.shambhala.org/

 

 

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DHARMAJUNKIES MONDAY ZOOM ROOM

Mondays 7pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3282366303

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MEDITATION BASED LIFE COACHING

Let me help support your sanity and self-care. In the spirit of the new year, I am offering complimentary convos to help you craft a daily meditation practice, offer inspiration, or just listen.

For those interested in ongoing practice and support, for the next month, I will be offering Personalized Life Coaching, Meditation Instruction & Public Speaking Coaching at on a pay what you can donation basis.

A BUDDHIST CONTEMPLATION ON THE MIDDLE WAY

 

When I was a child, it was common for fathers to keep long hours at work or travel away from home. The dad’s were swimming upstream to compete in a society making its long slide away from the warmth of the family to the insatiable urges of the marketplace. We had come through the war, and before that the great depression. After that societal trauma we ended up on the winning side and didn’t look back. There seemed no limit to prosperity, as long as we were willing to work hard enough.

 

As the oldest child, I spent a lot of time in the company of the women in my life. My mother and grandmothers were great nurturers who ran from the anxiety of past scarcity to fill our home with pasta and meatballs. We didn’t have much, but what we did have, we ate.  The mammal in my midbrain came to love the women who fed me.

 

My Italian grandmother would prepare an after service feast every Sunday. It would include her slow cooked ragu – which was a tomato sauce stew of pork, meatballs, and sausage – lasagna, spaghetti, garlic bread, and overcooked grey broccoli saturated in garlic. My grandfather’s contribution was to sit at the head of the table and say grace which, as he was our pastor, always went on far too long. We would sit staring at the food we had been smelling all morning as he intoned about Matthew and Mark. When he finally came to his dramatic climax, we would devour the meal while retelling routines from “Get Smart” and “The Jackie Gleason Show.” Afterwards, the women would clean up and the men would repair to the living room and snore through some sport or another.

 

They say that the trauma can continue through generations. The fruits of the scarcity of an immigrant journey, the great depression, and the feeling that we had to scramble madly to compete with the world we saw on TV, lodged in our bellies and arteries. The more we had, the more we seemed to need. Food was a panacea. It brought family together, it was what we did when we celebrated, and it was how we grieved. As an adult, I was conditioned to believe that more was the answer to everything. There is so much love in this picture. But, as there was an underlying fear, there was a lack of awareness. I became addicted to anything that would give me energy, calm me down, or quiet the screaming inside. I never learned to see myself as enough. And the trumpeting of more, more, more helped to drown out my feelings. This over consumption is naturally not sustainable.

 

In the Buddhist tradition, the idea of renunciation is not seen as a punishment, but an acknowledgement of the richness we possess. In the Mahayana tradition, we are asked to look at our motivation. Are our actions a close-eyed attempt to make up for the pain? Or are we enriching ourselves in order to be present for ourselves and our loved ones? Are we willing to become awake and see when enough is enough.

 

The Buddha spoke of the middle way. Like renunciation, this is not penance. The middle way is a place of optimum awareness. The extremes of scarcity and indulgence, binging and purging, being overfed and undernourished, are all paces we hide from ourselves and our feelings. The middle way can be seen as a feast of all the things we are not overdoing. Once we say a gentle “enough” to one thing, we can immediately raise our gaze and see all the things we were missing in our fear driven obsession.  Once that drink becomes enough, those carbs are enough, or our love is enough, then we can open our mind to everything else. And we will find that much of what we are missing, we actually already have. Renunciation of the extremes opens us to the middle way. And the middle way allows the vantage to see the richness of the life we have.

 

This said, pulling away from extremes is not easy. Especially at first. The reasons we indulge our fixations are often attempts to heal ourselves or comfort the frightened places within. That pasta had become a dear old friend. The idea of turning away in order to find new friends seems harsh. But, with the cultivation of mindfulness, we develop the awareness to see the richness around us. That’s where gratitude comes in. By turning our mind to the richness we already possess, we can feel more comforted, complete, and confident.  Then we are less reliant on the crutches we employ to navigate our feelings and our fear. Fear is part of living. With confidence born of awareness, we can smile at our fear and find healthy ways to build our resilience. We have less need to fill ourselves up when we feel we are enough.

 

Therefore, the practice of meditation is not shutting down, it’s opening up to the beauty of what we already have. Renunciation is not restricting ourselves, it’s simply turning away from that which we no longer need in order to see all the things we have.

 

The process suggested by our meditation practice is to renounce that which we know is taking us out of balance by gently coming back to the middle path. From there we can develop the awareness of the richness all around us.

 

WELCOMING YOUR BRAIN TO THE NEW YEAR!

I am offering free new year’s meditation and life coaching sessions to those who need support for sanity and a gentle voice defining and orienting toward your vision. 

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WAKING UP TO A NEW DAY

Back in the 70′, meditation master Chogyam Trungpa would begin his talks with a rousing “Good Morning!” – although his talks usually started later than scheduled. Sometimes much later. With the 70’s being the 70’s, and considering his commitment to meet his western students as they were, some talks began so late students had to be roused from sleep to attend. In those wee hours, his usual greeting of “good morning” was not entirely ironic.

 

“Good Morning” seemed an appropriate greeting for a talk on meditation, any time of day. In particular, Trungpa felt that meditation represented a new beginning and a fresh start everytime we come back to the present. Rather than admonish his students when their minds wandered, he encouraged them to see coming back to the breath as an opportunity to wake up. Trungpa famously said that the only problem we have is believing we have a problem. When our mind is distracted and we notice that distraction, it is not a problem. In fact, it’s an opportunity to wake up.

 

But how did we know we were distracted?

 

That moment of remembering comes so quickly we hardly regard it – except to berate ourselves for being distracted. The moment of complaint appears to be our first thought, as though the Buddha’s were saying, “wake up you asshole!”  And instead of waking up, we’ll further occlude ourselves with obsessive recrimination. For some of us, this happens first thing every morning.  But, this first complaint we acknowledge is not our first thought. Our first thought is simply a message from the universe reminding us to come back. It’s a sharp razor cut to our web of distraction.  Only that.  There is no need for discussion or elaboration. And why do we assume we’ve done something wrong, anyway? In fact, that moment of noticing our distraction IS waking up.  Each time we notice we’re not awake is an opportunity to wake up.  And each time we notice, and have the courage to come back to the present, we are doing good work. Very good work. We are training our mind to be awake.

 

Trungpa pointed to this moment of noticing we are lost in thought as a profound moment of awakening. He called it the “jerk of awareness.”  And then he told his students to consider him their jerk of awareness.  Helping students learn to awaken was his primary role. From the moment he came to the west, Trungpa understood that it was his mission to be of service to this new world. He understood that being an exalted Lama made him a commodity in this materialistic culture.  In western society we are trained toward materialism and tend toward theism in relation to spiritual teachers. We believe they are above us and should perhaps save us from ourselves. In this way, by deifying the teacher, and elevating our perception of meditation practice, we were safely separated from the process. We could collect teachers and teachings as though they were artifacts.  The more we collect, the greater our material  sense of self worth. We post pretty slogans to our wall, but do any of the teachings actually change us?   Trungpa felt he needed to de-elevate himself in order to be of the people. He wanted to express the teachings so they might actually penetrate our conditioned materialistic superficial layer. He wanted to speak directly to a basic goodness that lies below materialism so the teachings might actually have an effect.

 

To this end, Rinpoche began to open the doors to his home and met with students as friends. He removed the robes that he felt served to elevate him. He wore cowboy shirts and jeans, smoked cigarettes and drank Colt 45.  He wasn’t there to save anyone or change anything. He was there to learn from this new world and to become the jerk of awareness in his students’ lives.  Each time we were brave enough to come back to the present, he was there reminding us that we can do it. We can live full and complete lives. Good Morning. The choice is ours in every moment. We can separate ourselves from our lives by making ourselves a big deal, or we can keep coming back to simply waking up. Good Morning.

 

And each moment we are awake, we can begin to see more clearly. And as we see more clearly, we learn to drop the robes of our habit mindedness and see past superficial materialism into the truth of each moment. I am here. I am awake. How can I reduce the pretensions in my life and learn to be here honestly, simply and directly?  Just me without the robes. Just me as I am.

 

Good Morning. How can help?

 

A contemporary of Trungpa’s was the Soto Zen Master Suzuki, Roshi. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a classic manual of meditation in which he teaches that we can adopt the mind of a beginner, which is already there.  This means remembering our awakened state, which has been there all along. Enlightenment is not an achievable state. Rather it is a place of no achievement. It is a place of allowing ourselves to be just so without artifice. This is sometimes called “Naked Mind.”  Naken Mind cannot be achieved, it has to be remembered.  Enter the “jerk of awareness.”

 

But how do we achieve the unachievable?  We can train our minds to see beyond the “thingness” into the wholeness of experience, by recognizing when we are distracted and then building the neural networking to return to the present without clinging to a mask or a concept. In time, we see past the seemingly solid facades of our mental constructs and begin to see the vibrancy of life around us.  We train ourselves to be wide eyed, like an awakening child.  That moment we realize we are distracted is a sacred moment. It is a crack in the armour of solid mind. These cracks, or gaps in our reasoning, allow the sunlight of a new day to shine into our shadowed life. Each moment we notice we are off course, instead of berating ourselves, or creating a complicated story, we can come back to the naked present, just now and just so.  Each time we return is an opportunity to experience the joy of waking up.

 

In time, we learn to see life with new eyes as a perpetual discovery of the present. Instead of hiding behind all we’ve done and become, we can see through the eyes of a child and just be. Like a child, discovering its own toes, we can be amazed at everything we see. When was the last time we laughed for no reason? Smiled at the barista? Noticed birds outside our window?  Or just felt the tenderness of our own heart for no reason at all. When was the last morning we awoke with a smile, instead of the well cultivated cynicism we hide behind. And if we do dae to wake up smiling, how soon is is before we douse ourselves in anxious misery to meet the day?

 

This year can be a time of change, if we want it. We can turn our mind away from the usual guilt, compulsion and complaint, toward the possibility of openness. Instead of living the same old shit, we can look out the window and see what’s out there.  Good morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Path to Spiritual Wellness is paved in gratitude. ‘Tis the season. Fa-la-la…

But why does the joy I am encouraged to feel during the holidays make me lonely, tired, and stressed out?  The warmth of Christmas often competes for my brain space with sadness and worry.  Appreciation for what I actually do have becomes upstaged by things I imagine I don’t have.

There are people I’ve lost, places I will never see, and many, many things I cannot afford. In the waning light of the season, it’s easy to take false refuge in shadows that erode my wellbeing. When that begins to happen – just as the shadows begin to creep in, is a very good time to remember my actual vow of refuge, which is to turn my mind from self-centered thinking toward gratitude and compassion. I try to remind myself that with all I’ve lost, never had, or will not attain, what I do possess right now is the power to change my mind.  I can turn my mind to see beyond the traps of doubt and resentment to the goodness of the world I have. Gratitude practice is not just a nice thing to do, it actually changes the way the mind works. This season is a challenging time, and so I am committing to gratitude practice every morning to bolster my spiritual health.

It is interesting to see how gratitude actually changes the functioning of the brain. The power of gratitude to alter mood is similar to exercise. It’s so simple and has such a demonstrative effect, but like working out or taking a brisk walk, I sometimes fall out of shape and have resistance to the effort. On those days, I find it helpful to gently push myself toward a practical expression of mental health. In this way, I find gratitude sometimes takes a bit of effort. It’s so much easier to remain in the shadows of my habitual thinking when I am feeling low. So, making a gentle commitment to daily gratitude practice makes it easier to access the tools that make my mind an easier place to be.

But why is it so easy to fall into the dark? The dark shapes in my shadowed thinking keep me locked away from my life. Some of my favorite go-tos are judgement and envy. It’s easy for me to feel envious of the fact that others seem to have more than I do, more love, more family, more joy. I compare myself and feel less than less-than. On the other hand, to protect against that, I’ll judge everyone and everything. I adopt a cynical posture toward the season. Feeling superior to a those I desperately want connection to give me a false sense of protection. This ‘false refuge’ seems to protect me from being let down or hurt. But why am I assuming I will be rejected?

And who is actually making me feel less-than?

Am I the one letting myself down? Am I shutting out my life by refusing to join the party as I find fault in everything? When I look past my protective shadows, I see that false superiority and envious resentment are two sides of the coin of feeling “less than.”  And indulging these defenses – such as creating a list of “harms against me” – only encourages that feeling. In order to hide from feeling badly, I make myself feel worse. This woe-is-me syndrome might work for Wednesday Addams (as it seemed to for me at her age) but this game is just cringe at this point. It’s time to turn my mind away from obsession with its shadows, doubt and lack. It’s time to join my own party, already in progress.

When I feel into my defensive posturing, I see that underneath I am fearful and insecure. Instead of loving myself, I spend the mental energy building a case to support this feeling of being not enough. Isn’t creating a list of harms I perceive to have received only creating a world of contention and dis-ease in my life? And what does this do to my sense of wellness?  But, if creating mental lists of what don’t have supports my sense of lack, then maybe the opposite would hold in terms of building spiritual fitness. Maybe remembering the riches, I ignore while complaining would help to build a sense of confidence. Maybe this would support spiritual wellness.

Spiritual wellness is a sense of wellbeing based on our connection to our basic goodness. It is not based on the material things that feel good for a time. It is a connection to our heart that allows us to uplift our spirits in a natural way. But what happens when our mood is low and we fall into anhedonia, which is the inability to feel joy? Material things are fine in the moment, but they can sometimes make things worse. Spiritual health is based on behavior. What am I doing to enhance my sense of wellbeing? Working out a bit, helps to move the mind out of the funk of its shadowed thinking. And doing this in spite of feeling unhappy actually works better than thinking through it. Just taking a walk or stretching a bit change how the mind works. This may not affect my finances or social status, it may not make me less lonely, but it always changes how my mind processes these things.

Like working out, small increments of gratitude practice on a daily basis help to keep up spiritual fitness. This is true any day, but especially on the days I “don’t wanna”. That gentle push to remember the things I have that mean so much keeps me from falling into the shadows of “woe me” thinking. It’s like spiritual aerobics. And no matter how I felt before, I always feel uplifted afterward.

Taking the time to remember the things we have in our life that we value is healing emotionally, but it also creates a physical experience of wellness in our nervous system. And it reminds us of all the things we are missing by locking ourselves into the negative. Life is short. It’s time for me to remember the goodness of this life whether I want to or not.

 

Practice suggestion: 

While making a list of the things we value in our life is a helpful step in turning the mind, it is only our first step.

1. Make a brief list of a few people, places, feelings or things in life for which you are grateful
2. Take one and remember it for a moment or two.
3. Then place your hand over your heart and feel the feelings associated with these thoughts.
4. Then drop your hand, and your thoughts, and sit for a moment.
5. Do this for the next item on your list.

Remember to make this easy and light. Be careful not to overtrain. We don’t need to regard everything good in our life today only to exhaust the process tomorrow. Remember this is about training the mind.

Do this every day for a committed period of time as a daily morning practice. Try it for a week or 10 days and see if you get any insight into how to keep spiritually fit.

 

 

 

Ego is a term used to indicate an aspect of our psychology that we identify as “me”.  However, on closer inspection, there seem to be a number of “me’s” that we employ – and believe – depending on our circumstance. There is the me that I find at work, the me that I feel when relaxing, the me that meditates and the me that can’t sit still.

 

These self-identities are important to our emotional and social wellbeing. They offer a reference point from which we can communicate to our milieu.  Psychologists label a “strong sense of self” as being important to create healthy relationships in life.  As ego states are defined partially by the specific situations to which they are linked, a healthy sense of ego, it would seem, is one in which we do not cling too tightly or believe too literally.  Looking closely to their make up we see that these ego states are comprised of habitual patterns or behaviors. Each particular ego state is like a program that employs a series of functions.  Frequently these disparate selves lie in dissonance to one another.  For instance, the child self may behave differently than the adult self. This dissonance becomes conflict when we cling to the identity. We cling so tightly that we don’t see around ourselves. We are like fish who don’t recognize that water we live in. It becomes an ocean of “Me”.  We sometimes believe there is only Me and whatever we are going through. In this way, inflamed ego states are essentially narcissistic.

 

The tighter we cling to these ego states the more inflamed they become and the more real  they feel. This self-clinging causes obscurations in our ability to see, and understand, others.  The more pressure we feel in life, the tighter we cling to our identities, the less we understand what is going on around us. As we do this, the habit patterns associated with those identities become ingrained in us. The fact that these identities are not consistent, doesn’t seem to sway us.  Lost in the moment “who I am” becomes all important.

 

As we develop mindful awareness in meditation practice, we begin to see the space around “Me”. In time, we awaken into the water of context – we become aware. This awareness allows us to understand that these identification states are fictitious. As compelling as they feel, ego states are merely comprised of patterns.  And as we develop awareness, we develop the ability to choose which of these patterns we find helpful and when to employ them. In this way, we become freed of the grip of self-identification. Or, as is said, we become free of the bondage of self.

 

From a Buddhist perspective, the problem is not ego – or the sense of self, itself.  The issue is our clinging to the sense of self. This clinging is what creates our imprisonment. The tighter we cling to this provisional identity, the stronger the patterns are, and the more limiting those patterns become.  As these patterns happen unconsciously, we don’t see our self-clinging, but believe we NEED whatever it is we think will protect “ME.”  We compulsively cling to objects in our environment that we feel will enhance or protect our sense of self. BUt, of course we don’t see this. We only see the things we think we want. That hamburger, that lovely piece of jewelry, that person who looked our way.  We mistakenly believe that the things to which we cling will protect us. We miss the fact that at the core of this process we are clinging to our ego. As our ego state isn’t actually there, we ultimately feel bereft and this drives our compulsion further.

 

The more empty we feel, the more we cling to things we believe will fill us. And the tighter we cling, the less we see. The less we see, the more imprisoned we are in the limiting patterns of “Me”.  Our ego is no longer a device to secure us socially, but has become a series of patterns that we employ without conscious consent.

 

Meditation practice is the practice of training the mind to see the space around itself. And, it allows us to connect to an essential sense of wellbeing. As we return to the breath, we are returning to our heart. As we return to the heart, we are building a connection to ourselves that strengthens us. This unconditioned confidence is a sense of wellbeing that is not dependent on clinging. In fact, it is radiant. Rather than continually taking from life, we are able to give back.

 

When we develop the confidence of self-awareness, we are free of the bondage of self. We have less need to cling to ourselves and everything around us, as if we are drowning. Liberation in meditation means freedom from the compulsive attachment to the limiting patterns of “Me”. In truth, we are much more than our fear based beliefs. We are capable of great love.  Feeling love for ourselves is not egotistical. It is an appropriate non-codependent action that reinforces our essential sense of wellbeing and diminishes the need for clinging.  Rather than blindly gripping to self, offering ourselves  self-love and radiating that love to others, gives us the confidence to see past our defensive and limiting patterns.

 

PATIENCE, THE KEY TO SYNCHRONICITY

 

Learning to work with anxiety is an important practice for anyone trying to maintain mindful balance in their lives. How often are we thrown off-course in life due to reacting unmindfully when prompted by our fear. Something feels wrong, and before we can look into what that may be, we spring forward as if to escape the discomfort. I can’t count the times I have made missteps in my life by lurching blindly.

 

The alternative is to breath out and take a moment to break the blind momentum. Learning to live mindfully requires this application of patience.

 

Anxiety prompts us to move. And although we register being anxious as a problem, anxiety is natural to anyone with a nervous system. It’s the inflammation of our largely unseen neurological system. In spiritual and wellness traditions this energy system is seen as our lifeforce. Whether we call it “prana”, “Chi” or “Windhorse” this lifeforce is how we feel. Although it holds sway over a good portion of our experience, it remains a silent partner to our consciousness. When we are in balance that life force flows evenly, buoying our spirits. But when the lifeforce is impeded or provoked in a defensive response, we feel uncomfortable. Anxiety has a triggering effect that causes programmed places in the body to seize up and grip in a neurological reaction. This is interpreted as signaling danger. These places of gripping in the body distort the flow of our lifeforce, which in turn, channels our thinking and wellbeing.   Anxiety registering in the body triggers what Jon Kabat-Zinn referred to as catastrophic thinking. We go immediately to the “nuclear options” of fight, flight, or freeze.

 

 

This unease might register with a tapping of the foot or a clicking of the pen. But before we know it, we are moving. As if trying to shed this reactive skin we need to run, drink, eat, dance or lash out against someone we love. We are barking at the shadows in our mind in blind attempts to free ourselves. Anxiety moves us more surely than any inspiration or aspiration. Yet, the blindness of reaction means that we are not mindful of this movement. So, we often jump further into the fire.

 

 

Meditation practice works to calm the nervous system. In time, consistent daily practice will create a buffering space between impulse and action – and specifically between anxiety and reaction. We can train ourselves to feel uneasy and not react in animal action but to pause, just a moment, in order to allow our higher functioning to inform the process.  We allow ourselves to feel uneasy long enough to make a beneficial decision.

 

 

Buddhist teachings refer to the paramita of Patience as an important practice in allowing us to develop mindfulness. But in our culture, we place a moral spin on this otherwise practical tool. We mistake the tool of patience for resignation as we ‘grin and bear it’. However, in Buddhist Paramita Practice Patience is seen as a pause in our reactic=ve momentum that leads to greater tolerance, understanding and offers us a fresh start free of habitual reactions. Rather than reacting, we are responding. And if our view is to develop mindful awareness in our life, anxiety can be seen as a prompt to take a beat and see what is actually happening. In this case, employing the breath to calm the nervous system is a very simple but effective tool.  When in the throes of a panic reaction, the idea of taking a beat, or taking a breath seems innocuous. When we are in an anxiety state we mistake our panic for reality. And we become very important to ourselves. This brings about the catastrophic thinking Kabat-Zinn referred to. The more important we feel our problems are, the more important we seem to become. Ironically, this disconnects us from ourselves as our mind and body become desynchronized and we enter a very impacted state of being.

 

Yet, the remedy is simple. We ignore our inflammed ego and simply pause and connect to the experience of our breathing. Our breathing is largely happening in the body and our awareness will allow the nervous reaction to settle. As the body relaxes it releases some of its gripping tension and the mind can rest in the present where it can do its best, most effective work. In meditation parlance, this is called synchronizing mind and body. And when mind and body are in synch, our lifeforce returns to balance and flow. We are synchronizing with our life in the present. Rather than agitating our life by reacting to anxiety, we are accepting the anxiety with patience and responding to life accurately.

 

The practice of meditation is the basic template for developing the patience that leads to a mindful understanding of ourselves that is deeper than the reactive worlds we inhabit when fueled by anxiety.  In this way, when we sit like a Buddha we are learning to wake up.

 

The unreliable narrator is a technique used by writers to tell their story from a point of view that is changing, altered, or diminished in some respect. This creates a sense of un-ease in the reader. However, despite its temporal unreliability, this technique often reads as organic as it feels closer to how our minds actually work. One mistake uncreative the writer makes is to try and force the organic flow of reality into a two-dimensional, linear narrative. There is a sense of comfort in aligning the forces of our life inside the lines, but it is simply not the way our mind naturally flows. Nor, is it how the reality around us actually works.

 

Meditation Master Chogyam Trungpa would sometimes tell his students, “You are not a reliable witness.” Simply said, life is organic. It flows, changes, and develops. Navigating life requires a great deal of letting go. Life also returns to themes. So, by watching our own mind at work, the meditator learns to recognize patterns rather than grab on to specifics. Specifics become real to us as we cling to them, but that interrupts the organic flow of our mind, and it decreases our ability to see the space around that to which we cling. We lose context. And the clinging builds a sense of expectation. We try to straighten the wavering lines of the narrative into a form we find comforting.  Then we make up our version of the details.

 

Our version of the details often coalesces around themes we find self-identifiable. “We are at fault and the world is punishing us”, “we are misunderstood and always alone”, “we are amazing, and life is great.” Perhaps each morning we shout in the mirror “I believe in myself, and life is what I make it”, but then end our day in despair because we’ve turned into the same dissatisfying game again. We all have central points around which we build the (false) narratives of our lives. As this is not how we really are, nor how reality works, our self-story creates a cognitive dissonance with life. It is as though we are always fighting upstream. Trying to fit square pegs into round holes, we end up pounding our way through life. But our meditation experience suggests our journey through life might be much more elegant. Through the self-awareness we develop in meditation practice, we see the stubborn attachment we have to make our story fit the circumstance.  It seems we have it turned around. Maybe we’re going about it backwards.

 

Letting go of our attachment to having life make sense, we find that life is about discovery. Any given moment is its own thing. Each moment is not obligated to our interpretation. Reality just is.  In the Vajrayana tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, they refer to “just so”, “life as it is” or “things as they are” as the highest understanding. The comedian Lenny Bruce startled his milieu by asking his audience to see ‘what is’ rather than ‘what should be.’ This shift in narrative requires us to look beyond the solid points in our story and see what is truly there. This means seeing beyond our looking. It means seeing beyond our expectations. Our meditation practice gives us the familiarity with our patterns, narratives, and stories to be able to recognize them and to let them go. So, it is our work to recognize the patterns, let go and see beyond. Perhaps what we see is less definable than we find comfortable. Maybe, ‘what is’ is unclear and yet to be revealed. But, if we smile at our story, and continue to let go and see beyond, this journey through life becomes a discovery rather than a rote striking out of the things we think we should be doing. Maybe today our world will be revealed as more alive than we think.

 

The writer who follows the flow and patterns of their story as it reveals itself to them allows the story to tell itself.  A creative writer is, at their base, simply an observer.  They may be a chronicler or even a director of the narrative flow. But it is essential for the story to have integrity and for the story to reveal itself as it develops. It is said, believe half of what you see and less of what you hear. Mediators might add none of what you think. This is not to say, we go through life blind. Far from it. We are removing the blinders of ego-warped misperception and beginning to see what is there.

 

The great playwright Harold Pinter grew up in the rough east end of post-World War 2 London. He endured violence, antisemitism, and poverty. He said the most frightening experience was the blank page inserted in his typewriter each morning. While many of the dangerous elements in his life led to predictable outcomes, with the blank page anything might happen.  And so, Pinter might have shuttered his eyes and written formulaic drawing room comedies that reiterated familiar story lines. This would have made him financially comfortable, but would have robbed us of the perplexing, unsettling explorations of moment-to-moment existence that perplexed audiences and transformed modern theater. His plays eschewed stage description, backstory, and character explanation in favor of moments on stage that simply led to the next moment. And in this way, without over-explanation, the story was revealed as it happened in a way that made little sense, but felt absolutely real.

 

Maybe there is only one thing worth having on our bucket list. To allow life to reveal itself.

 

 

SADNESS

 

The journey that unfolds through our meditation practice begins with acceptance. We accept where we are in the present and, returning to the breath, we are returning to the heart of our experience. In this way, we are accepting each moment. In time, with consistent practice, we train the mind to accept our life as it is. The heart of our present experience expands to all our experience. And in time, we see our life not in terms of the time we have, but how we can deepen the experience of that time.

 

Buddhist teachings regard time as elastic.  Our experience of time expands and deepens when we are growing and when we are aware. While our time is long or short chronologically, it can also be shallow or deep experimentally. We often cruise across the surface of our life, accomplishing, accumulating, and crossing off items on our ‘to do’ list.  But sometimes life stops us, and we experience the profundity of being alive. Sometimes this process is amazing as with the birth of a child, falling in love, or beginning a new life.  And sometimes being stopped in our life is simply painful, as with the death of a loved one, leaving a relationship or losing a job. But most of these profound experiences were accompanied by moments of fear and pain. If we fixated on the fear, we might never have contacted the depth of our life.

 

One of the ways we avoid fully experiencing our life is when are locked into the surface of our life. This materialistic approach is necessary but is not the entirety of our life. Yet, out of fear and anxiety we lock into the momentum of our ‘to do’ list trying to outrun the deeper feelings that threaten to block our momentum. But these very deep feelings grant access to the fullness of our experience. The fullness of experience is happening now and at no other time. It is only here and in no other place. Acceptance of the moment grants access to deeper understanding.

 

Therefore, we can see acceptance as an act of love.

 

It’s our work as mediators to deepen our experience and get more out of the time we’re gifted. This requires acceptance of the interruption. We learn to welcome the fear as a harbinger of a peak experience. In this way, we can develop the inner strength to see all experience as a possibility. Experience is a gateway to understanding.  One very potent gateway is the experience of sadness because if we allow ourselves to feel it, we can be subsumed into a very rich world. Of course, this is the very reason we will avoid sadness by picking up a drink, overeating, or trying to fill the resounding space sadness creates. “I don’t have time for this, I’ve got to get back to my list!” Perhaps we are afraid of a breakdown, or of falling apart. But if we develop the bravery of a compassionate heart, we can look into the chasm of sadness and touch something very real. Then the breakdown may become a breakthrough. And falling apart might lead us to a fresher more unencumbered relationship to ourselves.

 

Sadness is a potent gateway because it is very real. Trungpa, Rinpoche called it the most genuine emotion. Unlike anger, for instance, which often deflects outward into a defensive posture and fixation, sadness forces us to look inward and access our feelings.

 

Once we recognize sadness, we can look into the experience with acceptance, kindness, love, and patience. Pema Chodron always recommended we eschew intellectualizing and feel the feeling. This is hard with the reflective intensity of anger. But with sadness, all we need is   loving acceptance to get below the waterline of experience and investigate the experience of our feelings. This does not require narrative or explanation.  In fact, investigating our experience can lead to a wordless state of just feeling. Just sitting in the gentle embrace of our broken heart can be healing on a profound level.

 

But then it is important to honor the experience by letting go and allowing it to shift, change and perhaps become something else. The discipline here is that once we’ve contacted the gateway of sadness, we allow ourselves to pass through. This requires letting go. Letting g is not pushing away. Letting go is loosening our grip. It means the experience of sadness is as it is and that is more than enough. It is not about the ‘me’ I so stoutly defend. Sadness is.

 

With the power of love, we can open to sadness.  And with the power of acceptance, we can allow ourselves to be led. With the power of our wisdom, we can feel something new about ourselves in this very old human feeling. Then with the power of discipline, we can let go and step less encumbered into the next moment.