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| Prayer beads made by me for my first Ashtanga yoga teacher Itay Dollinger. |
Breathe, breathe in the air,
cherish this moment,
cherish this breath.
Tomorrow is a new day for everyone
brand new moon, brand new sun.
When you feel life coming down on you,
like a heavy weight.
When you feel this crazy society
adding to the strain.
Take a stroll to the nearest waters
and remember your place.
Many moons have risen and fallen
long, long before you came.
--follow the sun, xavier rudd
Slogan 9: Turn things around
On the bright side this week, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. So that's good. I’ll admit. It has been a tough week for finding the bright side as so many of us have reached a new level of weariness with this election season. Thank goodness, there are eloquent women like Michelle Obama to help Turn things around.
And poets like Bob Dylan.
Against the backdrop of this week in the election cycle, our slogan from Monday evening could not have been more appropriate. To practice the slogan Turn things around means that we do not have the luxury of turning away from the difficult and painful situations that descend upon us in their untimely and unwanted manner. Let’s face it. It is easy to want what we want. Getting what we want? Well, according to Oscar Wilde, that warrants another philosophical conversation entirely. One involving answered prayers as punishment from the gods.
We are not in the habit of investigating our suffering, the circumstances that try our patience and cost us one of our most enduring riches, our generosity of spirit. It is not an automatic response to turn in the direction of that which is causing us pain or to cultivate a curiosity for everything in our lives that we earnestly desire to be otherwise because we never ever asked for whatever this is. Nevertheless, here is where the treasure lies. According to the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, our weeds, believe it or not, are our treasures. We just have to learn how to look at them.
It often takes extraordinary courage to Turn things around. In the October issue of The Sun magazine is the interview of what I would easily say are two extraordinary men—an Israeli and a Palestinian. Each man has lost a daughter to the conflict that has plagued both Palestinians and Israelis in that region of the world we have come to call Israel for the last 100 years. Think about it. I had trouble writing the previous sentence. I did not know how to name this region because it has one name on a map that seemingly unites very different people and not very well. When conflict lives at the level of language, it means it lives in identity as well. Identity is how we navigate the world, not only how we find our place in it, but once found, how we feel supported by it.
So how did these men turn around tragedies of this magnitude? How do these men day after day turn to see the treasure in their sorrow? By making room for the other’s story about the land they inhabit. For them, this is the path forward to peace. For these men who have experienced the worst, the only way forward is to be hopeful. So much language is used to silence others. Listening to the other’s narrative reveals what they fear, who they blame, what they have in common as human beings. These men have come to understand in the starkest terms that violence begets more violence. They recognize that in light of the violence they live with, it is easy to believe that violence is the answer. Their detractors will tell them that talking does not change anything. But for them attempting to change the language, change the narrative is action. They do not deny the other’s right to violence; they understand that it does not work in the end.
This is what it looks like to take the more difficult path, to take responsibility, to become an adult in the world. To change the language of revolution as Bob Dylan did when writing a narrative in song for our times. As bad as the election rhetoric has been, we do not turn away, we go in the direction of the negative and turn things around. In twenty-five days when we finally have an outcome to this election, we will also be a nation in need of healing.
What will be our role in transforming all of the raw material that has come our way this year into healing?
Set your intentions
Dream with care
Post dated: Friday, 14 October 2016
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| Storm clouds over the Sierra Nevada. |
Rest in the openness of mind.
This slogan is both starting point and ending point in meditation practice, a bookend to all of the events of our lives, the big and the small, the good and the not so good, or--for all of us perfection seekers out there--the not quite good enough. In other words, this slogan is a reminder of the ever-present witness to whatever is. We do not know everything and we control even less. It puts us face to face with our issues of trust and the sage advice of Dory, that little blue fish at Pixar, to just keep swimming.
When I arrived at our meditation session Monday evening, I began with a bit of hard-earned humor. It had taken me many hours that day to get to that point, so, I thought it not only worth noting, but celebrating. Also, it is not such a great endorsement of a meditation practice to have the teacher arrive with steam still streaming from her ears.
Much of my afternoon had been devoted to attempts too numerous to document to resolve a computer problem. In the end, I was reduced to copying my notes for the evening by longhand because the computer and the printer had ceased communicating with one another. I arrived with the following moral: Computers were invented to remind us that we are not in control. Ditto children, ditto spouses/significant others, ditto automobiles, ditto (name of favorite bete-noire), etc, etc, etc. This was not the lesson I had planned for the evening, but human experience, or folly, often lends itself to the appropriate segue.
I have been fascinated recently by the notion--and the words themselves--of love as muscular practice. The author of this idea is Krista Tippett, long-time NPR host and creator of the podcast On Being. TIppett has won the Peabody award for broadcasting and in 2014 was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama for her thoughtful work in pursuit of the mysteries of being human. Tippett is a captivating interviewer and has curated some of the most intelligent and inspiring conversations with activists and luminaries in the fields of science, theology, and the arts. I am reading her most recent book Becoming Wise, in which she addresses the notion of love as muscular practice as part of her vision of a common life for humanity in this century.
Love as muscular practice. Remember the Hokey Pokey? That's what it's all about, kids. If we want to understand love, we are going to have to understand suffering. This means, we have to learn how to cultivate compassion. In meditation practice, the most direct way to develop compassion is to practice sending and receiving. It is a formidable practice. On the inhale, we are instructed to take in (receive), first, our pain or what causes us pain--grief, anger, confusion, frustration. Receiving it, we thereby transform it, so that on the exhale, we can send out lightness and healing and ease.
The Lojong slogans pertaining to this practice read as follows:
Slogan 7: Practice sending and receiving alternately on the breath.
Slogan 8: Begin sending and receiving practice with yourself.
We begin with ourselves, and once we have some mastery over our squeamishness about accepting our own pain, we can then graduate to the level of receiving the pain of another, which we come to understand over time that we have the power to transform into healing. We also come to understand that our pain and the pain of another are one and the same.
Here is Buddhist priest, poet and author Zoketsu Norman Fischer's explanation of our natural ability to do this practice. When we breathe in, we say yes to another moment of life, to its pain, sorrow and loss; breathing out, we let go of everything in this moment and return to peace. Inhale, exhale. This is our contract with life. We agree to participate fully. Muscular practice. Heart, lungs, senses.
Three days after my daughter was born, we had to take her to her first pediatrician's appointment. This is a routine visit to eliminate the concern of jaundice. On the drive to the doctor's office, I was overcome with this overwhelming sensation of vulnerability. It was like waking up, only I was waking up, at last or maybe, really, for the first time, to the incredible responsibility I had agreed to shoulder upon giving birth to this child. Muscular practice, indeed. We do not turn away. We receive. We take the next breath in, and, then, we let it go.
Before the struggle, we rest in the openness of mind. After the struggle, we rest in the openness of mind. A leap of faith? Perhaps. That sounds like a muscular practice to me.
Post dated: Wednesday, 5 October 2016
Post dated: Tuesday, 20 September 2016
This slogan is both starting point and ending point in meditation practice, a bookend to all of the events of our lives, the big and the small, the good and the not so good, or--for all of us perfection seekers out there--the not quite good enough. In other words, this slogan is a reminder of the ever-present witness to whatever is. We do not know everything and we control even less. It puts us face to face with our issues of trust and the sage advice of Dory, that little blue fish at Pixar, to just keep swimming.
When I arrived at our meditation session Monday evening, I began with a bit of hard-earned humor. It had taken me many hours that day to get to that point, so, I thought it not only worth noting, but celebrating. Also, it is not such a great endorsement of a meditation practice to have the teacher arrive with steam still streaming from her ears.
Much of my afternoon had been devoted to attempts too numerous to document to resolve a computer problem. In the end, I was reduced to copying my notes for the evening by longhand because the computer and the printer had ceased communicating with one another. I arrived with the following moral: Computers were invented to remind us that we are not in control. Ditto children, ditto spouses/significant others, ditto automobiles, ditto (name of favorite bete-noire), etc, etc, etc. This was not the lesson I had planned for the evening, but human experience, or folly, often lends itself to the appropriate segue.
I have been fascinated recently by the notion--and the words themselves--of love as muscular practice. The author of this idea is Krista Tippett, long-time NPR host and creator of the podcast On Being. TIppett has won the Peabody award for broadcasting and in 2014 was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama for her thoughtful work in pursuit of the mysteries of being human. Tippett is a captivating interviewer and has curated some of the most intelligent and inspiring conversations with activists and luminaries in the fields of science, theology, and the arts. I am reading her most recent book Becoming Wise, in which she addresses the notion of love as muscular practice as part of her vision of a common life for humanity in this century.
Love as muscular practice. Remember the Hokey Pokey? That's what it's all about, kids. If we want to understand love, we are going to have to understand suffering. This means, we have to learn how to cultivate compassion. In meditation practice, the most direct way to develop compassion is to practice sending and receiving. It is a formidable practice. On the inhale, we are instructed to take in (receive), first, our pain or what causes us pain--grief, anger, confusion, frustration. Receiving it, we thereby transform it, so that on the exhale, we can send out lightness and healing and ease.
The Lojong slogans pertaining to this practice read as follows:
Slogan 7: Practice sending and receiving alternately on the breath.
Slogan 8: Begin sending and receiving practice with yourself.
We begin with ourselves, and once we have some mastery over our squeamishness about accepting our own pain, we can then graduate to the level of receiving the pain of another, which we come to understand over time that we have the power to transform into healing. We also come to understand that our pain and the pain of another are one and the same.
Here is Buddhist priest, poet and author Zoketsu Norman Fischer's explanation of our natural ability to do this practice. When we breathe in, we say yes to another moment of life, to its pain, sorrow and loss; breathing out, we let go of everything in this moment and return to peace. Inhale, exhale. This is our contract with life. We agree to participate fully. Muscular practice. Heart, lungs, senses.
Three days after my daughter was born, we had to take her to her first pediatrician's appointment. This is a routine visit to eliminate the concern of jaundice. On the drive to the doctor's office, I was overcome with this overwhelming sensation of vulnerability. It was like waking up, only I was waking up, at last or maybe, really, for the first time, to the incredible responsibility I had agreed to shoulder upon giving birth to this child. Muscular practice, indeed. We do not turn away. We receive. We take the next breath in, and, then, we let it go.
Before the struggle, we rest in the openness of mind. After the struggle, we rest in the openness of mind. A leap of faith? Perhaps. That sounds like a muscular practice to me.
Post dated: Wednesday, 5 October 2016
"Most of us don't want to change.
Really.
I mean,
Why should we?
What we want are sort of modifications on the original model.
We keep on being ourselves.
But, just, hopefully, better versions of ourselves.
"But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that
you just change."
--from documentary "One More Time with Feeling," on the making of the album Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
It seems right to connect Nick Cave to meditation practice. As a singer, Cave's voice is hypnotic. For such a slight-built man, Cave is a force of nature. When you look at him in still photos or in one of the many available YouTube videos of him performing, you are overwhelmed first by his creative energy. The complete dedication to his art and craft as a singer/songwriter/performer registers powerfully upon you as audience member. His muses, they sit right on his shoulder. They share that sort of relationship. It is akin to meditation students who have marveled at their teacher's backs. A whole lifetime of discipline and devotion and practice are hard to miss in the body. It is the beauty that Keats wrote about, and at the atomic level.
Yes. It is that sort of intensity.
But this is not why Nick Cave became part of our meditation practice this week. In preparation for class Monday evening, I was following my own muses--or those of the cosmos. During my sitting one day last week, I had been practicing with the lojong slogans of Atisha, number 22: Practice when you're distracted. In Norman Fischer's commentary on this particular slogan, Fischer writes of a Zen saying he is fond of that complements this slogan. The saying is: "When you fall down on the ground, you use the ground to get up."
After my practice on this day, I went downstairs to have coffee and to read the newspaper. When life affords this luxury, it is a routine I use to my full advantage. This is how I came across a review of the documentary by director Andrew Dominik "One More Time with Feeling," which is also the name of a song on Cave's latest album Skeleton Tree. This song and the documentary are about Cave and Cave's wife's journey of grief following the tragic death of their 15-year-old son who died after a fall from a cliff a year ago July.
Given the scope of this tragedy, it is difficult not to feel a bit like a voyeur while watching the documentary trailer or listening to the album's songs. And, still, I could not shake the echoing of the slogan I had just practiced with that morning: Practice when you're distracted. Or, when you fall down on the ground, use the ground to get back up.
Grief. Heartache. Death. Loss. And the flip side of each one. They knock us down. We have to learn to use the ground to get back up. In some cases, it does not seem humanly possible. And yet, in a most intimate and revealing and heart-baring way, this is what Cave and his wife chose to do by making this documentary. They have allowed the world to see them on their journey to get back up.
This is the story I brought with me to share Monday night for meditation practice. Stark, extreme, raw, grief. How do we go forward? How do we take the next breath? How will our voice that comes from that next breath ever be the same?
There is a quote that circulates from time to time on various yoga, meditation and mindfulness sites. It reads, "In a world where you can be anything, be kind." Since I recently stumbled upon kindness as a translation of the first yama of Patanjali, ahimsa, which typically translates as non-violence or do no harm, I borrow this quote to end the lesson this slogan and Cave's story have taught me. They remind me of one of my favorite sayings of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who once upon a time observed the following about being kind:
"If we could read the secret history of our "enemies," we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
Om Shantih
Really.
I mean,
Why should we?
What we want are sort of modifications on the original model.
We keep on being ourselves.
But, just, hopefully, better versions of ourselves.
"But what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic that
you just change."
--from documentary "One More Time with Feeling," on the making of the album Skeleton Tree by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
It seems right to connect Nick Cave to meditation practice. As a singer, Cave's voice is hypnotic. For such a slight-built man, Cave is a force of nature. When you look at him in still photos or in one of the many available YouTube videos of him performing, you are overwhelmed first by his creative energy. The complete dedication to his art and craft as a singer/songwriter/performer registers powerfully upon you as audience member. His muses, they sit right on his shoulder. They share that sort of relationship. It is akin to meditation students who have marveled at their teacher's backs. A whole lifetime of discipline and devotion and practice are hard to miss in the body. It is the beauty that Keats wrote about, and at the atomic level.
Yes. It is that sort of intensity.
But this is not why Nick Cave became part of our meditation practice this week. In preparation for class Monday evening, I was following my own muses--or those of the cosmos. During my sitting one day last week, I had been practicing with the lojong slogans of Atisha, number 22: Practice when you're distracted. In Norman Fischer's commentary on this particular slogan, Fischer writes of a Zen saying he is fond of that complements this slogan. The saying is: "When you fall down on the ground, you use the ground to get up."
After my practice on this day, I went downstairs to have coffee and to read the newspaper. When life affords this luxury, it is a routine I use to my full advantage. This is how I came across a review of the documentary by director Andrew Dominik "One More Time with Feeling," which is also the name of a song on Cave's latest album Skeleton Tree. This song and the documentary are about Cave and Cave's wife's journey of grief following the tragic death of their 15-year-old son who died after a fall from a cliff a year ago July.
Given the scope of this tragedy, it is difficult not to feel a bit like a voyeur while watching the documentary trailer or listening to the album's songs. And, still, I could not shake the echoing of the slogan I had just practiced with that morning: Practice when you're distracted. Or, when you fall down on the ground, use the ground to get back up.
Grief. Heartache. Death. Loss. And the flip side of each one. They knock us down. We have to learn to use the ground to get back up. In some cases, it does not seem humanly possible. And yet, in a most intimate and revealing and heart-baring way, this is what Cave and his wife chose to do by making this documentary. They have allowed the world to see them on their journey to get back up.
This is the story I brought with me to share Monday night for meditation practice. Stark, extreme, raw, grief. How do we go forward? How do we take the next breath? How will our voice that comes from that next breath ever be the same?
There is a quote that circulates from time to time on various yoga, meditation and mindfulness sites. It reads, "In a world where you can be anything, be kind." Since I recently stumbled upon kindness as a translation of the first yama of Patanjali, ahimsa, which typically translates as non-violence or do no harm, I borrow this quote to end the lesson this slogan and Cave's story have taught me. They remind me of one of my favorite sayings of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who once upon a time observed the following about being kind:
"If we could read the secret history of our "enemies," we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
Om Shantih
Post dated: Tuesday, 20 September 2016
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