The Sky is Falling

Last Friday was a weird day. It began with a phone call at 7:15 am from my mother saying, "I don't know if you have the national news on..." The last time she did that it was about the same time of day on 9/11/01, so I was a little weirded out. This time she went on to say, "A plane crashed in Clarence Center and I wanted to let you know that we're okay." It was a mile from their house.

Along with watching a fair amount of CNN that morning, I watched myself. I noticed what I was and wasn't thinking and feeling, and my reactions to the fact that I was thinking and feeling what I was or wasn't.

It was: shocking, exciting, cool, interesting, sad - kind of in that order. I couldn't help but wonder if there was something wrong with me for putting sad at the bottom and exciting near the top. I was also aware of my emotional distance from the circumstances. Although I was all of these things, I was never very much of any of them.

Some conclusions I have drawn:

• Despite our best intentions, we are all nascent gawkers at heart. Curiosity is an important human trait and crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species, we just have to remember to have manners.
  
• It is easy to be conditioned to believe that you must feel sad/bad/glad on behalf others, or you are cold, unfeeling or indifferent to the well-being of others. Tragedy can be acknowledged without enmeshment.
• Tragic circumstances are generally an excuse for us to indulge ourselves in drama. Drama is an addiction that feeds on itself and off the indulgences of others, and tragedies are great justifications for throwing ourselves into it head first.
  
• Disasters have a coolness to them that it is okay for us to acknowledge. Pyroclastic flow from a volcano is nightmarish (currents of hot gas and rock which travel at speeds as great as 450 mi/h, at temperatures of about 1,000˚C), but as any 8 year old boy will admit, incredibly cool. Acknowledging the coolness does not detract from the tragedy. It is, among other things, a way of being comfortable our lack of control over circumstances.

I will admit that it took me a couple of days to understand that my distance, and my ability to observe and question my actions and reactions, was something I should see as an accomplishment of sorts. It is a measure of "skillfullness" in relationship to my goals of experiencing greater equanimity. I strive not to be Chicken Little.

Notice the Itch, But Don't Scratch It

The phrase above was a "pull out" quote for an article about meditation. I don't know or remember the content of the article - I likely didn't actually read it - but the phrase entered my brain and began to bounce around like a pinball, setting off all kinds of lights and bells.

DING! The first light goes on and I am confronted by my own actual tendency to actually scratch my actual itches when I'm sitting in meditation. I can be notoriously twitchy, much to the "delight" of my fellow meditators and my own dismay.

This set in play the question of, "What is it that causes me to regularly indulge myself this way? Do I not understand this principle or is it something else?" I had to admit that I do it without bothering to think about it first. I just do it. It's a subtle kind of laziness.

This shed an insight into how this translates into our interactions with our environment in general. My day is full of little pings of input, itches of irritation, distraction and annoyance. We scratch them (react) without any thought to whether they require a response or not. What would happen if we just sat with them? Just let it be, without the necessity to counteract?

Being present with our interactive "itches" creates a space for us to develop a relationship with them, providing an opportunity for insight. When we don't indulge in automatically dismissing them with a reactive "scratch", an awareness forms around them. This awareness is the first step to clarity, and the breaking of bad interpersonal habits.

Just once today, fail to scratch that itch, and see what happens.

Hand Cream, Electric Shocks and Self-Determination

A quote from Jonah Lehrer's book, How We Decide:

"A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electrical shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. Half of the people were then supplied with a fake pain-relieving cream. Even though the cream had no analgesic properties⎯it was just a hand moisturizer⎯people given the pretend cream said the shocks were significantly less painful. The placebo effect eased their suffering. Wager then imaged the specific parts of the brain that controlled this psychological process. He discovered that the placebo effect depended largely on activity in the prefrontal cortex. When people were told that they'd just received a pain-relieving cream, their frontal lobes responded by inhibiting the activity of emotional brain areas (like the insula) that normally respond to bodily pain. Because people expected to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Their predictions became self-fulfilling prophecies."

I began to wonder how often we provide our own placebos, create our own self-fulfulling prophecy. The power of anticipation to color our experiences is something that I believe we all instinctively have a sense of. It is not, perhaps, given as much weight and consideration as it should. It is, apparently, a neurological phenomenon. If we anticipate pain, we experience it; if we anticipate a lack or diminishment of pain then we experience that as well.

The corollary to anticipation or self-placebo being a determinant in whether our experience is painful or not, is that our experiences of pleasant versus unpleasant color our reactions to our experience, which then influence the outcome.

So, those "creating our reality" people are right, at least on this point. Fearing the worst can contribute to creating the worst and vice versa. The crucial piece of this construct is that you can't think or suppose that things will be painless; you must know it. This difference is importance in the brain's response where the "reality" is created and is where it becomes more difficult. It is not a matter of pasting on a smile (although your mother was right; a smile does have some part in changing how you feel); it is deep seated trust in the character of the experience.

Love Letter to a Sangha

Dear Sangha,

Couldn't sleep this morning. I woke at something like 3:40 am. Sometimes I can read myself back to sleep, so I grabbed a copy of the Shambala Sun that was sitting near my bed.

I can't tell you the mental path that got me to this place, but I decided that chanting the three refuges would be a nice way to finish lulling myself to sleep. This chant (which is the only chant I know in Pali because it's ridiculously easy) essentially says that I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. What this means for me is that I can rest myself in the recognition of the existence of the Buddha, the wisdom he enumerates, and the community of others.

Different times have yielded different reactions to the recognition of these refuges. As with any nugget of wisdom, where I am and what I am in process with informs the insights that result from its examination.

I want you to know that you, sangha, were the thing that drew my attention. I was thinking about what a basket case I've been with you for the last few months and I've been feeling kind of bad about it. When I needed to work out some serious crap, I spread it all over your Rohatsu sesshin, making you all look for the "benefits" and "gifts" in my fidgety, emotionally volatile disruptiveness. When I started my constitutional homeopathic remedy, you got the day where my ability to govern my focus and communication abilities went so far off base that I felt like I had ADD, interrupting and acting distracted when you tried to tell me of your pain or your personal journey.

I want you to know that it's a compliment to you. It is, as it turns out, your own fault. You created a good, strong container that I was able to use as the crucible to burn away my most recent layers of pain. You made a place where I felt safe, allowing me to blow through some less than attractive processes.

I'm afraid that you may be stuck with me for a while. The best way I can think of to thank you is by helping to maintain that container for others, giving back as good as I got. Thanks for the refuge.

Never did get back to sleep.

Who is Number 1?

I was listening to a program today about memory. One of the topics was a woman who has unusual memory skills in that she can remember in deep detail any event that was of interest to her. This could be her 13th birthday, or the day a foreign leader was assassinated. Everything from exact date and times, to conversations, feelings and incidental details was completely accessible to her. She still needs to take notes at meetings, write out grocery lists, and keep a calendar. It is only the times surrounding these incidents (and they apparently are legion) of which she has perfect recall.

One of the researchers discussing her said that she is "both the warden and the prisoner of her memories". By this, he means that she has the gift of being able to recall in rich detail her fondest moments, but she is unable to forget any incident that might have marred them. Unlike most of us, she cannot leave out the unpleasant parts and forget any associated slights.

This made me think that we all can be seen to be both the keeper and the captive of our memory. Memory is (evolutionarily) designed to be about the future, not the past. We have memory so that we can remember where the berry bushes are, and which water hole has bad water. It reminds us that fire is hot and that there is often a speed trap at that stretch of road a few blocks up. Memories exist to provide the benefit of learning to provide a pool of knowledge regarding outside forces and, as importantly, the consequences of our own behavior.

The bonus feature is that we can reminisce - think back on past pleasant experiences in order to relive the positive feelings that they invoked. The curse of memory is that along with the ability to reminisce, it can trap us in our past. I have seen people use "memory" as a handy catch-all for their personal issues. Unlike the woman in the memory study, most of us have imperfect memories that allow us to edit them in ways that support our present assumptions or behaviors.

Even if our memory of an event is relatively unsullied, how much do we look to them for excuses for our own behavior. Felt insulted or ignored by someone? Still holding on to that? I deeply hope and pray that the many times I have spoken thoughtlessly or behaved in a scattered or disrespectful manner are not being carefully catalogued and recalled.

The questions to ask are, "Is it a lesson to learn from or a grudge to carry? Is this genuinely serving me now and in my future? " If not, it's your keeper not your ward.

Roast Beef, Bruce Lee and More

Yeah. I know. I've been gone; really, really gone for a long time. It's something that when I started this blog I SWORE I wouldn't do.

Well I'm back now.

Cautionary tales:

#1
A guru at an ashram had a cat who was a welcome member of the community except that during meditation periods, the cat would pester and rub against everyone. So before each meditation session, the guru would tie the cat to a pole outside. Pretty soon, people began to believe that tying the cat to the pole was a ritual of import and significance and when the cat died, they were bereft since they could no longer continue the ritual. (Gratitude to Elizabeth Gilbert.)

#2
There is a particular martial arts style which uses distinct elbow techniques, kicks, and footwork. This technique has been passed down from teacher to student in toto as a masterful and complete system. It turns out that the original teacher of this technique had one arm that ended at the elbow and a club foot. Here were a whole group of students who were learning to fight with a missing arm and a club foot.

#2A
Universally venerated martial artist Bruce Lee was known for his high jumps and kicks. This led his admirers to perceive a qualitative difference between moving high and moving low. Lee's style was dictated by the inflexibility that resulted from a broken ankle.

#3
(Probably apocryphal, but often told) A woman always cut the ends off of her roast before putting it in the roasting pan. One day someone asked her why she did it. "Why, don't you?" she answered. Finding out she was singular in her roasting technique, she declared, "My mother always did it." So, she called her mother asked why she always cut the ends off her roasts. Mom told her that it was simply because her pan was always too small.

Think of these examples and pay attention to that which you believe to be true. What are you taking at face value? Does this set of circumstances, expectations and rules fit you?

Does it call to question how much you should trust? That everything should be questioned? That's not the lesson I'm asking you to see. I firmly believe that sometimes it's okay just to trust. Only through sacrificing yourself to trust can you delve deeply enough into an experience to see what the inherent value is. It's also where you can often find enough information to ask the hard questions, to find out where you might find some reward in moving toward adopting and where you'd be taking on someone else's concept of the ideal.

The Cauldron of Transformation

Thought I knew what that was. Turned out I didn't have any idea until now. Five days of sitting, walking (barely - about a foot a minute), sitting, bowing, sitting, oryoki (ritual eating), bowing, sitting, walking, (drink tea, go to the bathroom, sit in a real chair) sitting, bowing, sitting walking.....you get the idea. Physically, emotionally, mentally rigorous.

It burns away everything until you can begin to touch the space between the notes, and then contemplate the possibility that there are no notes.

Drove my car home at about 18 mph. Granted, it was slippery, but that just made me not look like an idiot for driving home at 18 mph. Seemed fast to me.

Rohastu Sesshin Day 3 Haiku:
A figure of stone
Scoured and worn by wind and sand
Each breath sets me free

Rohastus Sesshin Day 4:
At 5:30 am I watched the snow skitter across the lake ice.

I wanted to write a poem.
Something about how the wind blew snow ghosts across the thin, hard ice,
while underneath, the water lay still;
dark, deep and liquid.

Then the dawn broke
and I could see that the waves had shattered the night's ice,
and what I had seen was the surface of the lake
rippled by the wind.

Good thing I didn't write that poem.

Rohastu Sesshin Day 5 Haiku:
We sit in Zazen
Never knowing we are there
The snow buries us.

Gassho.