Being present on the journey, releasing the destination

Today it became obvious that someone has a problem with me. Now I think most people encounter difficult relationships (or difficult patches in good relationships) from time to time. My self-talk in these moments tends to oscillate between, This is totally not my fault. There's nothing I can do. This person has her own issues, and, I'm a horrible person. I've ruined another relationship. It's all my fault. If only I'd..., I could have prevented this. Most of the time (and probably in this case), it's somewhere in between the two extremes. But also, placing blame is beside the point.

"To practice is to use all that arises within us for the growth of understanding, compassion, and freedom."
~ Jack Kornfield

So there is the difficulty itself, and then there is my response to the difficulty. I sat this afternoon in meditation, watching the thoughts surrounding this relationship swirl around and recognizing that they resemble other thoughts that often come up for me in meditation. I'm reading A Path With Heart, and I tried to follow some of Kornfield's suggestions for exploring what he calls insistent visitors. Kornfield explains, "When any experience of body, heart or mind keeps repeating in consciousness, it is a signal that this visitor is asking for a deeper and fuller attention... We must recognize that this is its way of asking us to give it more attention, to understand it more clearly. This process involves investigation, acceptance, understanding, and forgiveness."

So that is the journey. I started to explore the physical sensations, feelings, etc. associated with these thoughts. I sat there, trying to experience all of this, trying to understand it further. And suddenly, I heard this little voice under all that practice. It said, Do you understand it yet? If you can just understand it, you can fix this... and then you won't have these problems any more."

That kind of stopped me in my tracks. Wow. Is that where I think I'm going? Is that what I've been practicing for all this time? So I won't have any more difficulties? So people will love me? I asked myself these questions, and whatever had spoken inside me shrugged and said, Yep.

OK then. Now we have a problem. Even going as far as enlightenment, assuming this state exists, is no guarantee of being loved by all beings. It is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It does not exempt one from all future hardships. It certainly doesn't pay the rent. But more importantly, here is a deeper, more insidious version of the story "It's all my fault. If only I'd..., I could have prevented this."

So I guess now my practice is to learn to be present on the path, not to arrive at what I perceive to be the destination, but to truly experience what the path is. To fully experience what surprises I might encounter along the way. To truly seek understanding, compassion, and freedom as they exist everywhere on the journey and not just at the destination. To go deeper down the rabbit hole and see what illusions and attachments are hiding in the next layer down.

Darn it, says that little voice. I really thought we were getting somewhere. I was sure that universal admiration was just around the corner. That would have been way easier.

All I can do is shrug and say, Yep.

Sipping the rainwater

Just because you can’t drink all that falls
doesn’t mean you give up taking sips
of rainwater. If the nut
of the mystery can’t be held,
at least let me touch the shell.
-- Rumi

Today is a rare misty day in San Diego. This almost-rain makes me nostalgic for the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I want to put on some gortex and go sit under a big fir and look at the ocean. Thinking about rain led me to this Rumi poem. This life is such a mystery, but one we should dive into with our entire beings, even though we cannot see or comprehend all that there is. We don't have much choice, really. We are part of it all. We can close our eyes and our ears and our minds to the unknown, or we can open our hearts and try to hold a sense of it: Life! Without fear, try to taste what you can.

Rumi also wrote:

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?
Don't argue or answer rationally.
Let us die,
and dying, reply.

The mystery is within us as well as outside. I'm not even sure there is an inside and an outside. Yoga and meditation take me to that place where the two meet. So do the tops of mountains, and the forest, and the ocean. So does wild weather: the wind and the rain. Poetry. Music. That moment on a run where thoughts end and you become part of the trail, part of the world.

I think that Rumi means that in the moment of death, if we have regularly lived life from the heart, we will accept this too. The final mystery. The last merge. And that our readiness to connect cannot be argued rationally but can only be known in that moment. I have no idea what it means to die, but maybe I am starting to understand what it means to live. To feel the nutshell, rough under my hand. To turn my face to the sky and taste the rain.

Totems

I recently talked in this blog about being open to messages from the world around us. Sometimes these messages take the form of animals that come into our lives and seem more meaningful than chance encounters. This is akin to the idea of a totem in shamanistic traditions, a guardian animal or spirit that watches over an individual, family or tribe. Whether or not you believe in the existence of totems, I think that it is worth considering what we can learn from the creatures that come into our lives.

Some of you know already why I call myself "dragonfly". When I lived in Japan, I had a significant encounter with dragonflies one fall day in the mountains. At that time of year, the dragonflies are always around - but this day I had a spiritual experience that was particularly significant to me, and when the dragonflies appeared, I had the distinct sense that they were there to guide me forward in my life. They danced around me in the air with such joy, and I felt drawn to their energy. It was much, much later that I read about the significance of the dragonfly totem. This source looks at dragonflies a bit more scientifically, and this one is a bit more metaphorical. Common elements of the dragonfly totem are:

• Change and transformation
• Seeing through illusion; seeing things from different angles

Learning about this amazed me because I had already decided that the dragonflies appeared to me that day to teach me: to reveal some truths and to guide me through a significant personal transformation. Ever since the dragonflies have been with me, there's no question that I have been through a pretty major metamorphosis. (I know that many, many people, especially women, are drawn to dragonflies, and normally I try to avoid popular symbolism. ;-) However, the dragonfly experience was so significant and personal to me that its popularity does not dissuade me. Given the symbolism of the dragonfly, it does not surprise me that many people rely on its energy, as transformation and true seeing are key goals of this life on earth.)

In the last few days, I've been visited by a different creature. Each time I leave my apartment, there is a hummingbird sitting outside my door. When it sees me, it flies up, hovers in front of me intently, and then takes off. I tried to tell myself that it's a coincidence, but I can't help but feel that the hummingbird has been waiting for me. I tried to take a picture of it, but it declined to be photographed, so here instead is the plant where it has been sitting:

This view is literally one step outside my door!

This bird was waiting for me so many times that I became curious about whether it was trying to tell me something, so I looked up hummingbird totems. Wow! Among other things, hummingbirds are associated with:

• Renewal and resurrection
• Awakening to the beauty of the present moment, to joy, to the five senses
• Achieving balance
• Independence and courage

There is no question that these four things summarize where I am on my journey right now. Hello, hummingbird. Thank you for reminding me that I have everything I need right now, to rise up and hover in this moment, in this moment, in this moment, joyful and open.

A Virtual Sangha?

To practice right mindfulness we need the right environment, and that environment is our Sangha. Without a Sangha, we are very weak. In a society where everyone is rushing, everyone is being carried away by their habit energies, practice is very difficult. That is why our Sangha is our salvation. The Sangha where everyone is practicing mindful walking, mindful speaking, mindful eating seems to be the only chance for us to succeed in ending the vicious cycle.

And what is the Sangha? The Sangha is a community of people who agree with each other that if we do not practice right mindfulness, we will lose all the beautiful things in our soul and all around us. People in the Sangha standing near us, practicing with us, support us so that we are not pulled away from the present moment."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, from Friends on the Path: Living Spiritual Communities in A Lifetime of Peace edited by Jennifer Schwamm Willis (p. 280)

It is so important to have a community of people who support your practice. Waking up is painful - changing habits you have followed for your whole life is not easy. I fail more than I succeed; time and time again I lost track of the practice. I often long for more of a community to practice with, especially at work. I have friends who practice yoga and meditation, but few I see regularly. I go to yoga classes for the sense of community support, but don't see the other students outside of class, and most of the people I see during the day do not follow the same practices. I know that there are lots of yogis and meditators in San Diego, and that I can go out and find them. But my life is consumed by my work and my studies, and I have another year to go at least before I obtain my MA. It is all I can do just to get all the work done, but I am concerned by the fact that there will always be excuses like this and I really do feel like the more yoga there is in my life, the better I feel.

I don't think it is for everyone to drop everything and go live in an ashram or other practice community. I want to practice engagement in my work, not leave my work behind. Sometimes, I do question my career choice. I wonder if I shouldn't be teaching yoga. But I'm halfway through an expensive degree - and in fact, I'm excited about what I do. I still hope that International Education can contribute positively to the world.

And besides: I'm worried about the illusion behind the idea that changing my career will make my life better. I hear this too much in the world: If I was just doing something different, if I could just find Mr. Right, if I lived somewhere different, I would be happier. I'm suspicious of it. There's lots of stuff to work with, whatever I'm doing, and I suspect that the path will be much the same, no matter which fork I take.

So there's still the question of community - How do I find one? Do I need to? I'm not sure what the answers are, but I do know that the internet has brought an interesting dimension to this search. I hear a lot about the evils of the internet - and I'll be the first to admit that I spend way too much time on it, I allow the internet to bring me out of the present moment every day, to steal attention from the breath, to lull me out of reality and to dull my attention. But like any tool, the internet is not inherently evil, and one gift it has brought me is a kind of virtual sangha. Through this blog, I have discovered a wide-ranging blogging community of like-minded folks - and I thank you for reading, for commenting, for supporting my practice. I hope that I am supporting yours. In the absence of a warm, human, local community, the virtual sangha may be the next best thing.

Now here's the rub: blogging, reading blogs, and commenting is not really practice. Getting practice ideas from the internet is only useful if you follow it up with the actual practice. Talking about yoga and meditation is not at all the same as doing yoga and meditation. I would hate to quit the internet cold turkey - but I would like to learn how to use the internet more constructively and less as a distraction. I'm grateful for and excited about this community, but I'm curious about ways the internet can be a better tool to support my practice in the real world, to maximize the benefits and minimize the negative influence it brings to my life.

I'm putting it to the commmunity. Any ideas?

More on suffering - I get it!

OK, I wrote that last post and I still didn't feel like I was "getting" what I was writing about. I was writing about my pain and what causes it, but I wasn't really understanding how to work with it. I guess I was mostly writing about my faith that the pain was there to help me wake up because lots of yogis say so!

I'm still reading Stephen Cope, and this morning I read something that helped me "get" it.

It is important to understand that in the yogic view, the phenomenal world is not seen in itself as unreal. It is just seen as the tip of the iceburg. Our delusion is not that we think of the gross phenomenal world as real, but that we miss the hidden depths that underlie it. We miss its interiority. And thereby, we reamin oblivious of our deep and subtle connectedness to the whole realm of mind and matter.

... The goal... is not to disengage from the phenomenal world, but to turn to embrace it more and more deeply - to discover its hidden depths. And in order to do that, paradoxicaly, we do not reject the vicissitudes of the embodied life. We do not reject suffering. Rather, we turn and go thorugh the doorway of suffering. We turn to embrace our neuroses, our conflicts, our difficult bodies and minds, and we let them be the bridge to a fuller life. Our task is not to free ourselves from the world, but to fully embrace the world - to embrace the real.

OK, now that is something I can work with. I've experienced this paradox before - when you open yourself to the pain, it diminishes. Over the past couple of weeks, I've actually been admitting to people - and most of all, to myself - that I'm in pain: talking about it, exposing it to the air, experiencing it fully and seeing how it felt. Today, for the first time in ages, I feel like myself again.

Aha! It's interesting to me that I used a phrase at the end of my last post about "the path opening inwards" but I only just realized what I meant. The yoga was there, in my heart, all along.

Suffering

He who suffers much will know much.
-- Greek Proverb

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
-- Ben Okri

I've been sitting on this blog post for a long time, trying to find my way into it. It's hard to write about suffering, but I've experienced so much loss and change in the past year that it's getting so I can't write about anything else. Yoga philosophy refers to five kleshas, or afflictions that cause our suffering. This article is a discussion of the kleshas in the context of difficult losses, including suggestions for practices that work with the kleshas. In it, Bo Forbes provides the following useful description:

AVIDYA: The inability to see things for what they are; this causes you to mistake transient, ego-related matters for permanent, soul-related ones.
ASMITA: The tendency to overidentify with your ego; this keeps you from connecting with your soul.
RAGA: The flame of desire that causes addiction to pleasure; this discourages you from leaving your comfort zone for more evolved territory.
DVESHA: The aversion to pain; this creates a quicksand-like cycle of misery and self-hatred that sucks you under and suffocates your will to evolve.
ABHINIVESHA: The fear of death or a clinging to life; this dilutes your focus and interferes with your ability to experience the spiritual freedom that is the goal of yoga.

I've been reading Stephen Cope's book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. In it, Cope describes four erroneous beliefs that underlie the delusion of the kleshas (p. 64):

1. The belief in the permanence of objects
2. The belief in the ultimate reality of the body
3. The belief that our state of suffering is really happiness
4. The belief that our bodies, minds and feelings are our true Self

So here we are again: loss shatters our belief in permanence and forces us to examine our delusions. It awakens us to the nature of our suffering and drives us in the search to realize the full potential of our being. Cope suggests that pain, loss, and disappointment can be key motivators in leading people to release their attachments to past, future and sense of self, and to progress in their spiritual practice.

He also quotes Bhagwan S. Rajneesh's commentary on the Yoga Sutras:

Yoga means that now there is no hope, now there is no future... Total despair is needed... A moment comes to every human being when he feels total hopelessness. Absolute meaninglessness happens to him. When he becomes aware that whatsoever he is doing is useless, wheresoever he is going, he is going to nowhere, all life is meaningless - suddenly hopes drop, future drops, and for the first time you are in tune with the present, for the first time you are face to face with reality... When you are not moving into the future, not moving into the past, then you start moving within yourself - because your being is here and now. You are present here and now.
You can enter this reality.

So with each disappointment, with each departed friend, with the end of love, with each death, I am trying to find my way into yoga, into the here and now. I am suffering, but I feel the path opening inward and I have a lot of faith.

Man up a tree

Recently, I discovered this blog, in which there has been a lot recently about a zen koan about a man up a tree. The Dalai Grandma outlines the story like this:

The basic idea is, You are hanging from a tree by your mouth. You can't reach a branch with your hands or feet. Someone comes by and asks you to tell him about Zen. You have a dilemma: if you speak, you fall and die. If you don't, you are abandoning your responsibility to others. What do you do?

The man's dilemma spoke to me too, so I have been following the blog carefully. The Dalai Grandma's final post on the koan is here. The part that caught my attention was this in particular:

The thought came as an image while I was carefully steering through the parking lot at the health club, where people seemed likely today to get in wrecks. I visualized a man hanging from a tree, hanging by his mouth, remember, in his dilemma, and then I saw the grass just a few inches under him. Aha, I thought. The koan cleverly omits to say how high in the tree he is. So, no problem. Just let go and fall out of the dilemma. Land on the nice soft grass. Sometimes we make our dilemma so convoluted that this is the only way to handle it.

She also makes reference to a John Burroughs quote: leap and the net will appear.

In addition to the obvious, the leap of faith I talked about in a previous post, this whole recurring theme has really made me think about how I tend to complicate everything, trying to make everything mean something. Sometimes I get so caught up in it all that it takes the mental equivalent of a slap in the face to wake me up.

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about this in her book Start Where You Are.

...interruptions themselves - surprises, unexpected events, bolts out of the blue - can awaken us to the experience of both absolute and relative bodhichitta, to the open, spacious quality of our minds and the warmth of our hearts.

This is the slogan about surprises as gifts. These surprises can be pleasant or unpleasant; the main point is that they can stop our minds. You're walking along and a snowball hits you on the side of your head. It stops your mind. (p. 78)

The surprise that can wake you up can be something very small. For example, recently I was carrying on at length about something in my own mind when a friend said to me, "Look the situation is very simple" and proceeded to summarize my situation in a couple of sentences. His words stopped me like that snowball in the side of my head. At first, I was offended by the logic. No, my situation is not simple, I protested to myself. But the honest truth was that my situation was simple, I just didn't want to see it. Like in the Dalai Grandma's interpretation of the Man in the Tree koan, I could just let go of the branch and fall to the ground.

Sometimes we need friends who can wake us up like this. People who see the world in different terms and are able to shake you out of your habitual way of seeing. This week I am trying to see the world as simple and logical. To accept things as they are, and not to make things mean more than they do. I am also trying to find the patience to sit with my dilemmas, as one sits with a koan. And to embrace the surprises, even the unpleasant ones.

And to trust that the universe will give me what I need. Including, when I'm ready to leap, a net.