Twitter Dharma.

Although I never use it, I do have a Twitter account, which I joined in an effort to figure out what it is.  I’m still not completely sure.  But when I found myself randomly looking at my account recently, the Dalai Lama had a tweet that read

“If you become more concerned for the welfare of others, you will experience a sense of calm, inner strength and self-confidence.”

Many of the Dalai Lama’s quotes seem to me to be rather overgeneralized, but this one jumped out at me.  It was an idea that had never occurred to me: the connection between other-concern and self-confidence.  It seems paradoxical and seemingly at odds with what we’ve been led to believe: that the route to self-confidence is through acheivement or creating a new storyline in your head (“I’m OK. I’m lovable. I’m good enough”, etc.).  But here, the Dalai Lama is suggesting that the way to self-confidence is by getting off the story that it’s all about you.  Which makes sense, since self-loathing, criticism, and judgment all stem from the same source that arrogance and excessive pride do: the ego.  These strategies are all ways that the ego constantly returns to its three favorite subjects: me, me, and me.  By taking interest in others and being actively engaged in their welfare, the ego’s grip on our minds might relax a bit and standing in the background, we might just quietly and simply be happy.  It’s worth a shot at least.

Yes you can.

 

This postcard has been on my fridge a few months. It shows a old picture of the entrance to Williams Canyon near Cave of the Winds, Manitou Springs, Colorado. The sign says “Narrows. YES YOU CAN.  A million others have.”   It finally occurred to me what a profound sign this is.  It’s not a far stretch to consider the canyon our lives, or any of the great challenges of being human.  You can.  It’s all possible.  It’s been done before.  You will make it.  Keep going forward.  

 

Accepting the truth of transiency

Yesterday while leaving my room to go to work, I looked at my bookshelf and decided to take a small bit of a teaching out into the world with me.  I picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind, and randomly flipped it open:

“Because we cannot accept the truth of transiency, we suffer.”

This is one of the most basic, fundamental points that the Buddha taught.  Impermanence is one of the marks of existence, and a resistance to it’s nature will cause trouble.  I have heard this expressed in numerous ways over the years, and have come to see that it is true on many different levels.  But later, while biking home, I had a thought about this that made me laugh:

“Everything is impermanent.  Including our ability to remember that things are impermanent.”

And so we have a spiritual practice, to remind ourselves again and again.  And when we have forgotten again and again, we return again and again.  Over and over, every day.  And then it changes.

 

 

Concentration on the matter in hand

Yesterday, I went to the Musee Mechanique (I’d add the little authentic french accents, but they don’t on their website) at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.  Although much of what is to be seen down by the wharf is big, shiny, and glitzy, the Musee is a charming throwback to the simple arcade.  There, you will find plenty of mechanical and electronic entertainment devices generally grouped into categories such as sports, fortune-telling, strength demonstrations, music players, and old-fashioned moving images such as zoetropes and mutoscopes from the 19th century all the way up to some modern games from the late 20th century.  It’s worth a visit.

One machine that I plunked my quarter into was an horoscope writer.  It consisted of a wooden case that housed an automated typewriter.  After you dialed in your sign (I’m a Scorpio), the typewriter magically hammered away a message, and delivered it to you in a slot on the side.  Among other things about my personality that were revealed by the ghost typewriter, I was most interested in the solution to my weaknesses:

I mused for a few minutes about this turn of phrase: “concentration on the matter in hand,” and finally decided that this was another case of good old fashioned American Zen wisdom.  What is the matter at hand?  This.  Whatever I am doing is the matter at hand, and should be treated accordingly, with care, attention, and my full concentration.  It is challenging, given the facility of our modern tools, not to give myself over to multiple efficiencies: texting while eating breakfast, talking on the phone while cleaning my room, juggling knives while washing the dishes.  Well, maybe I don’t juggle knives yet.  But sometimes it seems like I’m juggling everything else.  It’s a good reminder from the old-fashioned Musee machine that I can only give my whole self to something when I am fully engaged on this matter in hand.

This is my only life

This morning, while sitting, the thought came to me: “This is my only life.”  I couldn’t place where it came from.  It seemed to just appear from space, and hang there in my consciousness as something significant and profound.

This reminded me of an interview I read with Gillian Welch recently in which she said about her song “A dark turn of mind” that she was certain she had heard that in a folk song, but a thorough search through sources turned up nothing: she had indeed created it herself.

This is my only life.  At the moment, I wasn’t thinking about whether we reincarnate or not: I was thinking about how I only experience my life in this moment, no matter what I’m doing.  The past is only stories and the future only conjecture.  In other words, it’s a simple expression of being present to the only moment our life takes place.

The gentle middle ground

Since I’ve been home for the holidays, I’ve picked up some old books I haven’t read in awhile.  One of them is Rob Brezsny’s Pronoia.  An upbeat, relentlessly positive workbook to encourage optimism and creative expression, the book is certainly worthwhile, an antidote to the easy lapses of cynicism and anxiety that mark so much of our days.  There are hundreds of small activities, quotes, stories, and essays, but today, the one that caught my attention was Brezsny’s recommendation to explore the farthest reaches of two ideas: one, that there is nothing special at all about you.  The other, that you are the most important being on the planet.  His advice is to spend one day going out of your way to be as commonplace as possible, get nothing done, eat fast food, and sit around on the couch.  The very next day, get extravagant and indulge yourself in fine food, treat yourself to a massage, and do whatever else befits a person of such high standards and status.  And the third day, alternate the two modes of being every two hours until you’ve achieved an equilibrium where you aren’t attached to either way of being.

At first, such advice strikes me as an exercise in finding the middle way, or at least breaking out of habitual notions of aspiration or aversion.  But the more I think about it, the more doubt I have that this is the best way to discover a harmonious middle ground.  It seems aggressive to me, reminding me of Chinese medicinal theories on diet.  Foods in the Chinese methodology is considered yan or ying, having the qualities of either polarity.  When too many foods of one extreme are consumed, the body is thrown out of balance, and one solution is to respond with the complementary food to balance out the system.  Which is why, after a night of drinking alcohol, the body craves heavy, fatty foods like a greasy burger or a chimichanga.

While such swings might be ultimately effective, they are not healthy.  Dramatic shifts from one position to the next are considered difficult on the system, and a more relaxed approach is in keeping with the harmony of balance.  For example, brown rice is considered the perfect middle ground, the neutral food that should occupy a large portion of one’s energetic diet.  The idea of resorting to extremes also reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s advice about anger: while commonplace advice recommends “venting” anger through beating up a pillow or some such acting out, Hanh suggests that this is only “rehearsing” your anger.

My point is that explorations of extremes are titillating, fun, and can feel revelatory.  But in the long run, they may not be the healthiest approach to finding the middle ground.  It may be that listening quietly to more subtle cues and making gentle adjustments produces long-lasting change.

It

Another lapse.
A month goes by, a few weeks more.
Time flits along on wings, and surely there wasn’t anything I could do about it,
not being able to remember a single moment that wasn’t full
with activity, with intention.
Where could I have added one thing?
And so I must conclude,
I didn’t have any idea where I was going,
or what I was doing, and if I did,
very little control over it.

One teacher says:

“Wisdom is knowing you’re headed in the wrong direction
and not being too worried about it.”

The operative word in question here being “it,” of course:
the acupressure point of existence.

 

Thank you sickness!

I’ve been sick for the last couple days.  A cold that has clogged my sinuses, scratched my throat, and made my body feel like I’ve been pummeled in a prize-fighting ring.  Today, there came a moment that always occurs within every bout of illness.  I feel really glad to be sick.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m still miserable, and the feeling doesn’t last that long. But for a short while, I really appreciate all that being sick has to offer.

First of all, being sick slows me down.  Since I do most things quickly and efficiently, the relaxed pace of illness gives me a very good excuse to take it easy.  My mind is slowed down too, which usually means that rather than spouting off a million thoughts a second, I feel a bit spacy . . . or spacious, depending on how I want to look at it.

Second, being sick gives me the opportunity to take care of myself, treat myself, and be generous to what I need.  Not quite generous enough to take the day off of work, but permission to not have to achieve so much.  Which is in itself, a great freedom.

And finally, sickness has a way of making me feel somehow wiser and more serious.  Perhaps this is because I feel closer to death and am mindful of the precarious state of my day-to-day health, noticing the uncontrollable impermanence of my body.

These small moments of gratitude always seem particularly precious to me since they feel like genuine thankfulness: after all, who would fake being grateful to their illness?  But then again, maybe I am faking it.  Sometimes, pretending to be grateful is enough to open the doors to an authentic gratitude.  I’ll see what it’s like next time.  For now, I’m just thankful that I’m well enough to be able to see and type and put together one sentence after another at this moment.

Don’t have to

While sitting this morning, the thought came to me that I don’t have to do anything.  Typically, my day is a running monologue of all the many things I should be doing but never have time for.  If I don’t write it all down on paper, I’m keeping it all in my head, some of which gets done, some of which doesn’t.  This morning, I appreciate the aspect of mediation that provides freedom from anxiety.  There isn’t anything to do, I can’t be productive, I just get to sit here.

I remember a time when sitting down for meditation provoked rather than palliated my restlessness.  My urge to be doing something would cause my body to go into tension which I would hopefully notice and deliberately relax.  But now, sitting down seems to be a blessed relief from the insistent need to move forward, improve, fix, and otherwise attempt to control my life.  Although I know that the pressure for activity will return (and it should if I want to lead a balanced human life), I am grateful for some small space in which I don’t have to.

Who owns this?

I went to a one-day meditation recently at the Headlands, north of San Francisco.  One of the functions of the Headlands is to provide an education in the natural world for children from the city.  I passed a page of writing posted on the wall that one of these children had written.  The question was:  ”Who owns the ocean?”

At the headlands, you can walk up on a high bluff and look out at the vastness of miles and miles of empty ocean.  Looking at it, I thought of the question and was struck by the utter absurdity that anybody could own such a thing, or lay claim to it.  Immediately, I turned around and thought how it was every bit as absurd to own the land.  And yet, through consensus of time and struggle of power, we create the idea that somebody does.

From this thought, it was only a short trip to the realization that nobody owns me.  Not even me.  The thought that I don’t own myself was immediately liberating, putting into different language the idea that there is no separate and independent self.

But if I don’t own myself, what then?  I still believe that I am responsible for myself and what I do, but I can relax about my needs to get somewhere, to do something, to be somebody.  I am fully a co-creation of this world, and while I can do my part, I am not in total control over my life.  To not own my life is to not grasp it as something solid, permanent, in need of defense and patriotic fervor.  I can freely allow others to share my life with me, and together we can move through this world with cooperation and openness.