reflections from Indra’s Net, etc.

in habits I trust

With my room in a flu(mmo)x of books, towers of dishevelled documents, magazines, unhung decorations and an underwear drawer down to its last pair of trunks … I would have said previously that things are in disarray, but now I see that things are in a formative state ~ and that things, all things always, are in a formative state, as in always forming and reforming, never settling into one state or another, and as I type this I feel the relief that comes with beginning to know this at a deeper and deeper experiential level.¹

I am still settling in at home, and I feel I have the time to be patient because there is a relatively secure future here. (I say “relative” because who knows what might happen.) Also I trust myself and the universe and I feel the universe trusts me because it senses that I am sensing that I am it.

I am of the universe in the same way a wave is of the ocean, not separate.

I deepen into becoming an instrument of this divine oceanic reality, and I am equipped to accommodate anything that happens, whether I like what happens or not.

I realised recently that I am not the boss of reality and I have been saying this jokingly to friends, but I mean it. [5.55]

Reality is the boss, and there is very little I can do to influence the untold number of events that unfold on its watch. But I watch what I can, and what I can influence is how I respond to events. By training myself to respond constructively to everything I observe, I form new mental, emotional and behavioural habits that are more and more wholesome every day.

In habits I trust.

I am piecing together some ideas that interest me very much about the (w)holistic importance of being responsible for my (and only my) mental, emotional and behavioural habits.

These ideas are grounded in the #dharma, sustained by near-constant mindfulness and #meditation in all action, and increasingly backed by #neuroscience, which makes me feel all boisterous and joyful because these ideas (when and only when applied) lead inexorably to the experience of something called sukkha (in Buddhism, and probably many other things in the world’s many spiritual traditions), which means “genuine happiness”.

Not fleeting happiness, not pleasure conflated with happiness.

Genuine, abiding contentment with all that is, without the overlay of judgement saying, “This is good, now I am happy,” or “This is bad, now I am unhappy.”

These (w)holistic ideas about personal responsibility have profound implications for collective wellbeing and long-term sustainability (a healthy world arises out of healthy minds) but their application does start with the individual. If the individual is lucky (as I am) to meet with what we all deserve, they will have the support of a community that understands these implications at least on some level,

and this collective support is what turns individual awareness and responsibility into a bonafide superpower. #sangha

These ideas have some very cool names … Indra’s Net (thanks Marc) … the morphogenetic field or morphic resonance (thanks Rupert Not Murdoch) … the holographic universe (thanks Einstein, Michael Talbot, et. al.), the #dharma … and are exemplified by the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats” (thanks Pierce ~ may we discover together that JFK did indeed lift this from the Bible, and that maybe the Flood is actually a metaphor about a time in Biblical history when a flood of awakening wiped out swathes of ignorance in the psyche of humankind, because we know … or at least, strongly suspect … these episodes of collective awakening come in waves through history and can never really be talked about directly, so: metaphor to the rescue).

I don’t have the time or the desire to elaborate further on these ideas at the moment, because I have a group meditation to attend in 9 … 8 minutes. For now it will be enough to share the Serenity Prayer.

May I ask you to leave your notes below ~ as always, my intention for sharing these thoughts is to stimulate dialogue. If public dialogue is not your jam, get in touch directly here. If commenting on WordPress is a laborious chore because you don’t already have an account, please share this post with your comments on the socials, because it’s a dialogue we sorely need to help us transition from the doldrums of modern civilisation into whatever form is next.

I say “flu(mmo)x” because the confusion comes from within me (who is flux), not from within the state of my room, which is also in flux, but not necessarily confusing. ↩︎

vision and insight ~ in service of awakening and wholeness

bit of an update for anyone who’s curious because they know
things have been a bit misshapen for me recently

I held something very heavy for a visitor at work the other day, and it was only later when I was writing the case note at home (we had gone overtime on that shift before I realised I had completely spaced on writing the note at work) that I realised how heavy it had been, but also I realised that maybe it hadn’t seemed heavy at the time because, I realised, I must have a natural ability to hold this space for others without much in the way of formal training.

I’ve said ‘realised’ a lot because that night after work was rich with insight.

I realised I am naturally good at this work, and that was pleasing to say the least ~ to know that I have a natural talent for helping people and for supporting them in distress just lights up my heart. Which leads to and supports the next thing 👇🏻

I had been reflecting that night after work, on a new opportunity I am exploring to live, volunteer and potentially ordain as a Zen monk at a Buddhist meditation centre in Springwood in the next few months years, and remembering that I have this vision to become a Buddhist Psychotherapist, coach, dharma teacher and author of new psychology. This has been a vision for a few years now, but I lose sight of it now and then, when life is especially stressful and demanding that my attention go more toward spot fires and admin than to long-term plans of the future and potential.

Which brings me to the other point of reflection that night – one I haven’t shared on the socials yet – which is that Nikki and I are separating. I haven’t been able to sense hope or even have sight of a future in the last two months because I have been couch-surfing and house-sitting through the separation. I have also not been able to maintain the practices and routines that keep my present in shape for the future I desire and deserve, one of genuine happiness in service to humanity and the planet. That’s why I say in the precise that things have been a bit misshapen lately. However, house-sitting for a month at my mum’s place, I have had the time and space to reflect and get back in touch with what feels like my sacred purpose here on this beautiful planet.

The curious mixture of emotions resulting from these reflections was a cocktail of high elation and deep sadness ( … interesting that these should be so dichotomised … 🤔 ) which reminded me that sometimes I have trouble regulating joy. The tinge of regret among the sadness and the hurt of recalling the moment when the separation was initiated … these were nuances that made this rich experience all the more stimulating.

I was going to draft this post then, but needed to be up for something in the morning and am proud of myself for being able to regulate enough to rest because I am understanding more and more these days that the realisation of the above-mentioned vision depends, of course, on my own wellbeing and self-care.

I say ‘of course’ because of course it’s obvious once you’ve realised this, but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to understand this, which seems weird now that I know it 🤔 😂 I wanted to post about that here soon, but the gist of it is the recent insight for me that my recovery of wellness from dependence on substances and other addictions depends on building a wholesome and self-compassionate lifestyle that naturally erodes that dependence and becomes the foundation for genuine wellbeing.

I always thought I needed to drop my addictions at once and then I would be able to build a wholesome lifestyle, but my whole approach around this has shifted. I now see that a lifestyle characterised by wholesome roundedness includes and naturally leads to the sort of healthy coping skills we need to manage stress without dependence on substances and behaviours that trigger substances in the brain.

This approach inspires a lot of hope in me, because it feels like the right way to go about this – compared to my former approach of dropping all my dependencies at once to ‘go clean’, hoping that I will magically develop the coping and stress-management skills I need to be okay with life’s demands without the support of drugs and maladaptive behaviours, like the ol’ coffee to wake up and weed to get sleep routine or the need to be drunk at a party to socialise. Which hasn’t actually been a problem for me since my early 30s.

None of my dependencies have been a real problem for a while, actually. I’ve been saying and feeling like I’ve been in genuine recovery for a few years now, including the periods of setback that even now I can see (while I’m in them) are just a part of the journey. This confidence comes from having gradually improved my lifestyle to support not just sobriety but a thriving growth and an ever-deepening connection to my spiritual (or true) self.

That improvement has been greatly supported by Nikki over the years, and part of the sadness I feel about our separation is that we won’t be supporting each other as closely in that as before. I am also happy and grateful though, that we are still supporting each other during this time of transition, because it means the love was real even if we are no longer compatible for the romantic and intimate closeness we had for the last seven years or so.

Like I said, the emotions around this are mixed because that sadness co-exists with joy from knowing I am getting myself into a position where I can deepen my connection with and understanding of these Buddhist practices and ideas and become better able to support others in the journey from distress and suffering to ease and genuine happiness, thereby helping to bring about a more-harmonious and sustainable world for all. Note the subtitle of this blog: a health world arises out of healthy minds. I deeply believe this and can even say I know it on an intuitive level, and not just because Buddha said “mind is the forerunner of all states”.

Of course there is a unity between body and mind, and I have been feeling enthusiastic lately about learning primal and animal movement as part of my holistic health regime, but that’s for another post and another time.

I have spoken to my current Zen teacher Arno about this plan to ordain, and he supports it. If the plan comes through, I will be taking ordination with a different teacher – the abbot at Bodhi Chan Meditation Centre where Pathway Zen sit for our sesshins twice a year, in Springwood. The Sanbo Zen lineage I have been sitting with does not have a monastic tradition or pathway, believing the valid point that awakening must be pursued in the “marketplace” as a “householder”, compared to a monastic, who has taken “the path of homelessness”.

I value this idea alongside such ideas from Zen that “a day without work is a day without food”, inspiring the work-practice of samu. I am under no illusion that ordaining in the West will necessarily mean I don’t work at all and depend entirely on the lay community for my sustenance and accommodation. I do not expect this kind of support, though it may be the case that such lay–monastic community relationships exist even in humble Brisvedas. I expect that I will continue working part-time in the mental-health space, and of course I will always have general life affairs to manage.

I am not going away to the Himalayas to sit in a cave facing the wall for nine years. I will very much still be living in the “marketplace”, the only difference being that I will have taken some vows, be observing a set of monastic precepts, and training as a monk among those “worldly” obligations.

All that said, there is a possibility I will not be able or expected to work (in some traditions the monks are not even allowed to handle money).

I met Arno for coffee the other day after one of his talks at QUT, and got onto the question of whether I will be able to work if I ordain. I said I thought I could because I knew a Zen monk down south who worked part-time in disability support. Arno said no, if you ordain you will be dedicating yourself solely to the task of liberation.

And I find it interesting that I don’t baulk when I hear this ~ it doesn’t seem like some outlandish thing, to think I could do that. On the contrary, when I hear this I hear a call to ordain that I have been hearing for 10+ years and think it’s time to answer the phone!

Every individual has the potential to realise enlightenment in this lifetime (in this very moment!) and I am dedicating myself to realising that potential because I genuinely believe it’s the best way I can empower myself to genuinely help others and contribute to the wise, compassionate, sustainable and harmonious future we deserve.

So yeah, that’s a lot, and my first real post on the socials for a while. There’s been a lot to deal with lately that has kept me focused on IRL stuff, but I’m hoping that during the house sit and into the future I’ll have more time and consistency to write and share more.

releasing attachment trauma through mindfulness of the body

This podcast!

“Top Down and Bottom Up Processing: How Our Mind Creates Our Sense of Self and the World and How to Restart the Process” by Josh Korda, Dharmapunx teacher and Buddhist chaplain

we (unconsciously) attract and are attracted to romantic partners because their loving style is similar
to what we learned to expect in our upbringing ~ mindfulness of the body interrupts that unhealthy cycle … if we want to become conscious, we have to go through the body.

In this podcast, Josh describes the psychological mechanism that causes us to choose partners who replicate the loving style of our caregivers, regardless of course, whether that loving style was healthy or not.

I have wondered for soooooo many years, why do we attract and feel attracted to partners who are just like our parents? This is a whole phenomenon in the psychology world. Some say we are able to heal our attachment traumas in and through these relationships we attract because of this patterning mechanism that Korda describes. But we all know of someone who continues attracting an abusive partner and we’re all standing around watching this train wreck happening yet the person can’t see it coming. That person might be ourself.

Frustrating doesn’t really cut it, to say how it feels to be in or witnessing these cycles.

I was halfway through this episode and couldn’t finish the rest at the time, and was eagerly anticipating the second half because this question of how to restart the process has been on my radar for yonks.

I thought there might be some specialised trick, a hack from the convergence of neuroscience and ancient Buddhism, and it is a hack from that convergence, but it’s just the application of mindfulness ~ in particular, mindfulness of the body.

Mindfulness of the body is the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, followed by mindfulness of feelings, mind and phenomena … mindfulness of kāyā, vedanā, cittā and dhammas.

The body is where bottom-up processing occurs.

Top-down processing is not embodied, and is encoded with our cache of stored memories from the past ~ when we are in top-down we are filtering stimuli through the lens of our past.

When we are embodied we are filtering stimuli only through the present.

Buddha described a causal chain: feelings and impulses (bottom-up) precede thoughts (top-down) in our experience, so we think we are making conscious decisions but our thoughts are actually just following our feelings. This causal chain has been validated by modern neuroscience. (I think this is correct, but I’ve confused myself in writing it, because Buddha also said, “Mind is the forerunner of all states.”) Korda relates the image of the monkey (mind) that thinks it is steering the elephant.

By cultivating awareness of the body, we get ahead of that causal chain and are able to see reality as it is, in the present, without interpreting stimuli through the filter of our conceptual database from the past.

In top-down we unconsciously find ourselves attracted to loving styles that were modelled in our upbringing (even if they were unhealthy) and by cultivating bottom-up processing through mindfulness of the body and feelings, we can let go of the trauma and escape this cycle of continuing to attract partners who trigger our old abandonment and attachment wounds.

If we want to become conscious, we have to go through the body.

It’s not magic, but this insight and its application is key to the work I am doing on myself and imparting to others through posts like this.

Have a listen, apply the practice, let me know what you think.

concentration depends on a healthy ego

After a meditation recently where I was very easily distracted, unable to concentrate for long, I started wondering about the defilements and/or the Five Hindrances, and ethics (vinaya or virtue, in Buddhism). The Five Hindrances are a traditional categorisation of obstacles to concentration ~ ultimately, obstacles to self-mastery:

desire
aversion
sloth and torpor
restlessness
doubt

Honestly, I think itchiness should be the Sixth Hindrance!

While the Hindrances are obstacles to concentration, we practise virtue to protect and support our concentration. The timeless example is that it’s hard to have a clear mind in the afternoon when we’ve committed murder in the morning. And we practise concentration on the present to allow insight to penetrate illusion …

👆🏽 in this sense, concentration meditation is a transpersonal practice, and therefore everything that supports concentration is a therapeutic practice ~ this might seem like an arbitrary distinction (and isn’t duality precisely what we are trying to escape!?) but it’s a helpful dichotomy for me at the moment.

During that very-distracted meditation, I thought, The mental content doesn’t seem to be about any obvious breach of ethics, so why is it that I am especially disturbed today?

Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t aware of how my conduct compromises one of the less-obvious ethical precepts, such as ‘do not extol self over others’ or the one about not harbouring ill-will.

Maybe a distracted mind is just something a student needs to accept ~ radical acceptance of that fourth Hindrance, restlessness.

It certainly seems that access to consistently strong concentration is dependent on factors outside my control, but also I’m not sure about that.

There must be things we can do that support concentration.

I don’t know ~ I’m trying to understand what to do with distraction in meditation, with what has been called kapicitta since Buddha’s time. Monkey mind! It’s old school.

In the concentration basket of the Eightfold Path, with right mindfulness (samma sati) we notice our mind has wandered, and with right effort (samma vayama) we bring the mind back to right concentration (samma samadhi). Over and over again, and gradually we become more content among suffering.

I had to look up ‘defilements’ again, and read about the kleshas ~ rooted in the Three Poisons of ignorance, attachment and aversion, the defilements or afflictions are the 108 mental states that disturb the mind and result in unwholesome actions.

So yeah, I was right in my wondering, even if I was supposed to be concentrating at the time and allowing thoughts to come, dwell and fall away 👈🏼 that is the practice, the whole practice and nothing but the practice.

And yet, I was compelled to scrounge around for a pen and scribble on the nearest piece of paper (my precepts sheet), “I am enough”, because I felt I had arrived at some insight that would continue to bug me until I made a note and allowed myself to forget the idea while I continued concentrating.

As I currently understand it, the whole practice in Zen is to concentrate on an object of meditation that keeps us from indulging the monkey mind (kapicitta), and we concentrate some more until some kind of non-cognitive insight penetrates illusion.

Yes but there are other things, such as ethics, which support the practice of concentration. Concentration is but one aspect of the Eightfold Path ~ surely the other aspects of the Path are complementary to concentration (samadhi).

Let’s see if I can remember the others, and see if what I’m thinking about here fits among any of those:

right concentration
right mindfulness
right effort
right speech
right action
right livelihood
right view
right resolve

Maybe it falls within right view (samya dristi), but I’m guessing here ~ wondering whether our perception of self is an aspect of right view. If I have an unhealthy view of self, will that compromise concentration? I think so, yes.

Because it seemed a lot of the mental content (kleshas or afflictions) were about how I could be better: more loving, more organised, more efficient, more available, less distracted all the time, more able to concentrate, and I thought, We may need to complement our (transpersonal) concentration practice with the (therapeutic) practice of treating the health of our ego.

If we cultivate healthy ego, our ego is not always going to be popping up and saying, “Do this!” or “Do that!” when we’re already damn-well trying to do exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, which is concentrating!

This is not a new insight for me ~ it’s been percolating for a while and keeps coming up in my reflections. Reflecting on it has been helpful if only because it colours in the details of my own practice.

And these reflections may also illuminate beyond the lines of what I feel like calling “the original Buddhism” ~ I mean, we might need to elucidate other Hindrances or nuances of the kleshas to accommodate the mental state of humans in the twenty-first century, compared with the mental state of humans when the Buddha was alive and teaching.

As I draft this today, I have been tinkering with the various documents where I am trying to track the development and expression of these ideas in a more coherent way that I can share with others, but for now this meandering post will have to do.

I love a good meandering post.

I am distractedly curious and passionate about understanding and applying these ideas, and helping others to do so. As I move into the mental-health sector as a peer-support worker I hope to find opportunities to do so.

Meanwhile, I have updated the Heartwards website where I am starting to publish ideas from a transpersonal perspective about mental-health peer work. And I have opened but not worked on a hypertext project I think of more often again lately, called Whatness. I would like to add something about the Hindrances there, because processing such ideas enough to be able to express them without reference to some other source means I have integrated them enough to apply them on the fly.

Meanwhile, if you’re reflecting on things that support concentration in meditation, I’d love to hear about in the comments.

Legend 🤙🏼

becoming Possum – applied eudaemonics

re-adaptation
regarding adaptation
redoing adaptation

on accepting reality for long enough to learn adaptive coping mechanisms to replace maladaptive ones

because Possum inspires and motivates me to be a human animal capable of adapting to the urban environment that has displaced us from our natural habitat

I am disappointed with myself at the moment and doing my best to not berate myself over and over because I know that would be maladaptive.

I had a couple of drinks last night while making dinner and listening to Paul Kelly. So far so great, I was feeling good and not trying to drink my pain away as I learnt how to excel at for the last 30 years in our culture.

Actually I did have a persistent headache, but I wasn’t experiencing intense emotional pain. I felt I was coping pretty well with our stressors and was safe to have a wee tipple. I was treating the booze a bit like paracetamol, a kind of experiment. And I felt like getting a buzz on. It felt healthy, and it was, compared with how I’ve abused substances in the past, so I can say truthfully that overall I’m making progress with becoming less dependent on exogenous hedonic pleasure for that false and fleeting sense of well-being it brings.

This kind of thinking helps me to curb the self-flagellation.

Thing is, I’m supposed to be on a self-initiated three-month “sobriety binge”. I want to subject myself to coping with reality without external crutches like booze and weed and Minecraft and see what comes up, what I learn, how I manage. I’ve done these sobriety binges before and they’re great, like a detox, very illuminating.

What started as a few healthy drinks to get a buzz on and curb a headache turned into Nikki and I sharing a bottle of vodka. Still not such a great big deal in itself. We didn’t drink a bottle each, which is something. I feel confident we will not relapse so far that we are doing that again, once or twice a week.

We are making progress with becoming less dependent on exogenous hedonic pleasure for that false and fleeting sense of well-being it brings.

We didn’t get so intoxicated that our perceptions fucked out completely, causing us to do anything we deeply regretted, as we have done in the past. Of course I value the Buddhist precept recommending that we not intoxicate self or others, lest we become unskilful and cause harm. I also value the Middle Way, and am less likely these days to exploit the teaching of “moderation in moderation”, to justify excessive binges that result in immediate harm and then days and days of regret and shame.

So there is progress being made – I am becoming Possum, the great urban adaptor. I am proud of myself and of Nikki and I am immensely grateful that I share this journey with such a committed alchemist as my wife. We are learning that there are ways of transmuting suffering into joy and that idea is feeling less and less abstract and esoteric and inaccessible as we draw from the courage to actually implement the ideas and test them, apply them.

By turning toward suffering with the right coping skills, we are learning a lot about the nature of mind and reality and about the way these interact to form interpretations of either happiness or misery, and in that turning toward we are finding choice, the ability to choose our interpretation, to choose happiness in the midst of suffering. Just imagining that and feeling it’s possible brings a micro-moment of actual joy, an emotion that is rare for me at this stage but becoming slowly more frequent.

So far still good and actually this little story doesn’t have the plot twist that usually follows the “so far so good” trope.

What concerned me this morning was the underlying motives to drink that I was not quite aware of last night.

The motive was to get a buzz on and curb a headache, which really is not such a big deal. I’m not a crack addict or a criminal and I don’t fly into drunken rages and trash the place. I don’t beat my kid and then fuck off for days at a time to whack the pudding in the mistaken hope that this will make me feel better and then return home full of misplaced shame. I am a kind and gentle contemplative person who was raised in a materialistic culture and doing pretty well at getting off the hedonic treadmill by learning applied eudaemonics.

Sick! Kickin at goalposts I’ve set for myself and sometimes missing. But I was raised around AFL and as the joke runs, aussie-rules football is the only game where you get a point for missing!

Still, the motive was to make reality more pleasant than it was (by adding a ‘buzz’), and to avoid the pain of a headache instead of accepting that symptom as a message screaming, SLLLLOOOOOOOOOOW DOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWN.

I’m still learning how to stop and do nothing and relax and enjoy just being alive on a beautiful planet.

The plan was to do our home-coming decompression meditation, have a couple of bevvies making dinner while Nikki did some gaming, then crash out early to practise good sleep hygiene as the first foundation of mental and emotional fitness.

That’s my trip these days – I’m that kind of “fitness freak”. That’s why I feel disappointed. I let myself down. But I can accept that, and start where I am with beginner’s mind.

The plan was to be responsible and do self-care. Our life has been a comet of stress lately, and yesterday was no different except I felt I was keeping abreast of it, not getting blown away by its sheer force. We pulled into the driveway yesterday feeling we had got to a place in our incessant metaphysical nattering that we could stop and just be without trying to solve the problems of the collective unconscious with the power of conscious thought alone.

Because life happens while we’re busy making plans, Nikki got a call from a friend whose daughter and our friend has been admitted to the psych ward. The family is not coping well and we’re trying to position ourselves as advocates for the daughter to help them navigate the punitive public mental-health-emergency system. So Nikki spent an hour and a half on the phone, advocating on the daughter’s behalf, which is good, this is what we want to be doing, just maybe not at 5.30pm on Friday, mere moments after we had decided to stop and just be without trying to solve the problems of the collective unconscious with the power of conscious thought alone.

The phone call was not the problem. It just kind of threw us out. The problem (for want of a better word) is not even that a few drinks became 3 and then 5 and 6 until we finished the bottle.

We had a nice dinner, Nikki did some gaming while I did some study and we went to bed watching Dead Poets Society, because I thought it would be a nice easy-going drama that wouldn’t be too stimulating and would distract me just enough to drift off to sleep. I’ve been afraid of sleeplessness since a heinous mid-week bout of insomnia.

Somehow it was 1.30am before I was able to wrench myself away from what I had somehow forgotten is a profoundly inspiring (read: stimulating) film for me. This was progress for me – normally I would eat the whole proverbial bag of chips.

I even managed to sleep instead of bouncing off the walls of my mind all night, which is sometimes what happens when I drink enough to edit the unpleasant out of reality but not enough to wipe myself out.

The ‘problem’ is I employed a maladaptive coping mechanism to deal with stress I’m almost not aware of because it has become so normalised. The problem is I don’t know how to do nothing and just be for long enough to relax on a Friday evening.

It’s not a problem exactly because these skills can be learnt.

It’s not even a problem exactly that I woke up wide-eyed and pinging at 6.30am, still with the headache.

It’s just I’m disappointed because I thwarted the opportunity to get the rest I needed and now I’m back to square-one. I was wanting to bounce back from that heinous mid-week insomnia, and instead I did maligned adaptation.

Like the possum that fell into one of Nikki’s succulents on our back deck the other night, which picked itself up and scampered away when I stepped out to see WTF that noise had been. Possum inspires and motivates me to be a human animal capable of adapting to the urban environment that has displaced us from our natural habitat. Through healthy adaptation we are able to flourish – that is what eudaemonia is all about, human flourishing. It’s about getting off the pleasure train (the hedonic treadmill) so we can stop long enough to see where we are with clear and healthy eyes, without resistance, without trying to change reality to suit our desires.

I said to Nikki when I woke up that I find it vaguely distressing or depressing that in our culture we don’t know how to do nothing, how to just relax and stop and be still. We are either being productive or entertaining ourselves or distracting ourselves or running around doing errands. And then we need to use things outside ourselves to bring the nervous system back to relax mode. Things like booze, which don’t even actually do that anyway – hence the term maladaptive coping mechanism.

Nikki and I are not employed in the traditional sense and we still manage to pull 16-hour days 6 days a week because being alive and healthy is a full-time business.

And we’re needing to teach ourselves how to de-stress from that in ways that are healthy. But we are at least teaching ourselves these skills, and it is precisely these skills that I am hoping to share with others through the business I’m setting up around Kokoro 心 Heart:

coping skills
mental, emotional and nervous-system regulation
- through meditation and the art of skilfully doing nothing in motion

Today hopefully there will be nothing but a long swim and some cross-stitching. [We ended up visiting our friend in the psych ward, but today today – the day of posting, two days later – we are going for a long swim. I went to a day-long silent-meditation retreat yesterday and have managed to get 9 hours sleep last night!]

[Meanwhile yesterday:] I at least am successfully not berating myself, and remembering:

S = R x r

H = R x a

where

S = suffering

R = Reality

r = resistance

H = happiness

a = acceptance

So that:

Suffering = Reality x resistance

Happiness = Reality x acceptance

I am accepting that this self-inflicted tiredness is where I am at, and remembering that the world as it is (with me not sleeping well in it and everything) is perfectly imperfect.

A unique and deeply personal modality is forming around me through Zen training, Cultivating Emotional Balance and Somatic Experiencing.

I am learning to have an embodied mindful awareness throughout the day and it is helping me to notice those once-hidden underlying motives to avoid reality in one way or another.

Through making this unconscious conscious without freaking out, we gradually become awakened enough to accept reality and all its warts with equanimity and joy.

That’s what I believe anyway and I’m doing the experiment to see if it’s true.

During my “sobriety binge” I got tipsy and messed with my sleep – now I’m trying to respond to that with kindness so I don’t continue repeating this cycle of maladaptive coping mechanisms.

working with reactivity to reduce suffering

Here is a talk by Donald Rothberg called “Ten Ways of Practicing with Reactivity”, which helped me with something like an insight about a false belief I suffer from. He says that if a child’s parents get divorced, that child may believe it was their fault and because they don’t have the capacity to reframe this false belief, they may experience the cognitive distortion that any future relationship trouble is their fault. I can certainly vouch for this, and I hope I can remember this in future to prevent myself from berating myself endlessly when even the most minor disturbance occurs in my family of choice.

At that link you’ll be able to download a resource listing the ten ways of practising with reactivity, the first of which is to cultivate wisdom. Easier said than done, but Donald provides the teaching of the Two Arrows to help us get started. If someone hurts us, or if we hurt another, that is the First Arrow – if we then begin berating ourselves or ruminating on the hurt, that is the Second Arrow. If we lash out, that’s another Second Arrow, et cetera et cetera, ad nauseum. We may not be able to prevent another from hurting us, and we often are not able to refrain from acting with reactivity, but we can be skillful about how we respond after the fact.

Something we can do after the fact is cultivate the heart practices. I have been starting to do this more recently, and it really helps – if we flood our minds with compassion or forgiveness, there is less room for resentment and anger. I also use this emotional first-aid resource that I developed for myself and have shared here before.

Donald also encourages us to use relatively mundane instances of unpleasantness to practise becoming aware of reactivity. When something vaguely unpleasant happens, something manageable and not too triggering, stay with it. This way we’ll be able to start noticing when reactivity is happening and how it feels – it’s an easy-to-remember way of practising mindfulness throughout the day.

I found it interesting that he talks about reactivity in the context of dukkha, that classically unpleasant experience of suffering or dissatisfaction in the Buddhist conception of our deluded interface with reality – that first one in the Four Noble truths, that suffering exists. He says that reactivity generally manifests as either grasping or aversion, and it seems to hold water for me.

Reactivity is a thing I’ve been trying to understand and move away from, so having it placed in the context of the Four Noble truths helps me feel like the experience is held in a container I trust and have faith in. I understand that grasping and aversion cause suffering because they fuel the wish for reality to be other than it is, and now reactivity is just another way of describing an experience that falls in the attachment basket.

The above are just the bits of Donald’s talk that landed with me – check out the rest of the talk and the accompanying document if you’re interested in learning how to be less reactive and more responsive in life.

mindfulness as an antidote for disappointment

A not insignificant benefit of mindfulness I have noticed: when we are not mindful, our habitual mind seems to be almost-constantly making “micro-plans” … “I’d like to do get time in the garden today”, “I need to put air in the tyres later”, “I really should make sure I blah blah blah”, and because this is happening a mile a minute, soon enough (sometimes within five minutes of waking) our mind has made plans on our behalf and our day is loaded with the dreaded expectation; because we could never achieve the myriad things we imagine every five seconds, this mindless planning is an automated way of setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment, our day resulting in ten thousand micro-dissatisfactions, which accumulate over a lifetime.

One way of defining “dukkah” that isn’t as frightful and extremist as suffering is dissatisfaction, or maybe disappointment: we expected that hedonic pleasure would be satisfying in away that it usually isn’t, and then we are disappointed. Samsara, being characterised by dukkah, is inherently dissatisfying if we aren’t mindful of the way our habituated and conditioned mind creates all these micro-expectations for us.

When we cultivate mindfulness on the cushion, we begin to notice ourselves creating these expectations throughout the day and it becomes easier to keep them in check.

If we have to be dualist and say that nirvana, being the “opposite” of samsara, is a state of being satisfied with what is, then it may not be hyperbole to say that by cultivating mindfulness we place ourselves in more-consistent alignment with a lived experience of nirvana which, after all, is not some other place we need to get to in time or space but more like a way of perceiving correctly where we’re already at.

By enjoying this place without loading ourselves up with expectations, we experience an abiding state of enoughness and are free to do what we can without aspiring to do what we can’t.

slogan one, reminder two: be aware of death; impermanence

Point One The preliminaries, which are the basis for dharma practice

Slogan One First, train in the preliminaries (the Four Reminders or the Four Thoughts)

Reminder Two Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone; Impermanence

~~~

*TRIGGER WARNING*

considering the state of our world and minds,
the idea of suicide is bound to come up eventually;
I consider it great consolation that contemplating the inevitability of death
is a powerful antidote for the thought of self-inflicted death

the break in-between

I am pleased to report that I have recently dropped the whole work-eat-sleep-and-shit-till-you-die routine. I have taken a financial hit to gain more time affluence, meaning more time for reflection and meditation. The mere acts of writing thoughts and engaging with philosophy and exploring our spiritual nature are things that make my life worthwhile and I hadn’t been doing them enough due to the demands of employment.

It was getting depressing, to say the least – without time for reflection or anything other than work, life’s difficulties were causing a paralysis I could only imagine solving with suicide. I don’t know how people do it for decades in a row. I guess they adjust and reconcile themselves with certain sacrifices. But I don’t want to just adjust. I want to adapt, evolve, and I want to make sure I’m not making sacrifices I will regret on my deathbed.

Regret has always been my biggest fear.

I want to adapt and evolve and accommodate the making of meaning among the demands on my time now that I’m a husband and dad. I want to set the example for my son that there is more to life than just employment, but also for all the people I encounter because we can’t go on like this, depriving ourselves of meaning because material wealth is believed to be all we need for a happy life. Clearly it’s not, because we are all in the West wealthier than ever before and that wealth has been gained through the sacrifice of our collective wellbeing. And to think the word “wealth” was originally derived from weal.

We are less happy despite our relative affluence because increased affluence makes it easier to distract ourselves from facing up to the transformative power of suffering.

A lot of us are running ourselves into the ground for the sake of material security, and in the process neglecting what hopes we can have for psychospiritual security if we gave more time to reflecting on what really makes life worthwhile. And let’s face it, death is the only thing that makes life worthwhile. The word “security” is not quite appropriate in the context of the psychospiritual journey, because on this Path there are no guarantees. I’m not talking about securing a place in Heaven, but a certain few reflections can prepare us for the end of our lives and point us toward a karmic trajectory that is going to be more favourable than if we had neglected spiritual aspirations in favour of, say, yachts!

To help with this aspiration, the second Reminder in the lojong teachings is one of those reflections:

be aware of death; remember that everything is impermanent.

Everything dies, and not just biological organisms – ideas, feelings, thoughts, moods, and situations, are all fleeting. It’s easy to say and know that everything dies, and to think of organisms. But the reality of biological death or mortality is more distant from our immediate experience than emotions are, unless we cultivate a practice of reflecting on impermanence. With our thoughts, feelings and emotions we can see how they are born, dwell for a time, and then fall away. Remembering this helps to let go of attachment – to achievement and ambition, to objects and people, but also to pride and hubris and the over-inflated ego. To illustrate this I like the image of the butterfly.

The self-destruction of the caterpillar is such a perfect metaphor about dissolution of ego attachment. As the caterpillar turns into goo before it somehow morphs into a butterfly, so the ego must dissolve before we can transform into the compassionate beasts we always were.

Reflecting on the impermanence of the ego helps us to learn and grow, because reduced attachment promotes the healthy ego we need to admit we were wrong or don’t know.

Zane and I have butted heads a lot because I have low tolerance for people who can’t admit they were wrong, and Zane lacks the healthy ego development to be gracious about his own ignorance. But when I embrace Butterfly and relinquish my attachment to the value of Socratic ignorance, I am able to swallow my pride and humble myself before his misdemeanours and try to help him understand why some of his behaviours are problematic.

When I feel frustrated with Zane’s transgressions I can try, with sufficient training, to remember that the emotions will pass if I let go of attachment to whatever identity I think has been hurt or disgruntled by the behaviour. When I am able to do this I feel an acute sense of joy because I have dropped my misguided sense of self-righteousness for the purpose of helping a young human learn how to become a well-rounded adult. And we get along better and we smile and we laugh and we don’t scowl so much and I feel good about myself instead of feeling like a goddamn grouch.

To support the renunciation of self-attachment, I have recently introduced a practice of “training in the preliminaries” to my sadhana, because the preliminaries remind me that 1) human life is precious, 2) feelings are fleeting, and 4) attachment to things that are precious but fleeting is foolish and a primary cause of suffering. Of course there are four Reminders in the preliminaries, but the third Reminder about karma has less bearing on the mitigation of suicidal ideation, so I won’t go into that here.

It is enough to say for now that when I feel like ending things because my means for coping are so depleted that I think we’d all be better off without me (which is merely the result of unresolved childhood wounds and has no actual bearing on the nature of present reality), having familiarised myself with these preliminaries helps to mitigate my wish to terminate existence. What a relief!

~ ~ ~

I had a dream after reading about karma the other day and the whole vibe was about the importance of doing the right thing(s) in life so we don’t experience (unfortunate) rebirth and go through a whole other lifetime of suffering. But what about this lifetime? if, like me, we are on the fence about reincarnation. If we could let go of attachment to our thoughts and feelings (if we could stop mis-identifying with our emotions and moods as who we are) then our current lifetime would be so much easier to deal with and there would be fewer causes of wrong thought and action. It’s easy to not accrue negative karma when we’re feeling happy and relaxed, but how often are we in those states? The whole test of our mettle as karmic consequences is the way we think, speak and behave when we are distressed.

I hadn’t really expected that reflecting on impermanence would lead to reflecting on attachment and karma, but (lack of) awareness of non-permanence seems now to obviously underpin our (misguided) notions of identity and how we behave from that identity. When we are attached to a fixed identity, we suffer – when we are more loosely defined by a fluid identity rich with non-attachment, suffering is more easy to bear. When we are suffering less, we karma better.

Also, including these Reminders in my sadhana has helped me to see that they are each complements of the others – it is hard to think of rebirth without thinking of karma, and hard to think of impermanence without thinking about clinging, et cetera.

The reading that informed the above-mentioned dream was about the Buddhist perspective on suicide – tabs I had open from a recent post referencing the monk on the Rage Against the Machine cover – and the author made a very resonant point that suicide is almost always a result of a serious case of mistaken identity.

We mistake our thoughts and feelings for who we are, when what we are is really the vast space wherein that identity manifests temporarily and always in flux. We shoot ourselves in the head because we think that’s where our suffering comes from, tragically unaware that among that very hardware is the toolkit we can train ourselves to use for the mitigation of that suffering. Recognising the non-permanence of our thoughts/feelings is among the first steps in escaping the suffering caused by mistaking our mental/physical body as what we are.

I’m starting to sound like a broken record now.

A first step in recognising the non-permanence of our thoughts/feelings is the cultivation of mindfulness, supported by ethical conduct and leading to the experience of wisdom.

~ ~ ~

I pulled the blood-death card out of a tarot deck the other day, and was pleased because I take death to represent change more than anything else and I need some change – we need something to break and die to bring this period of turmoil to an end. I mean that in a personal or domestic as well as in a global sense. I need a break – we all need to be given a break for a while, but that’s not going to happen. We cannot put life on hold while we repair the damage we have caused.

Meanwhile, suicide is not an option, though my afflicted mind subjects me to considering it anyway.

There is potential for psychotic break, by which I mean a break from illusion, but I want to hold that at bay for now, work on the container I need for that to not spill over into spiritual emergency.

We can’t afford a holiday.

Where to next then? Maybe that break between thoughts – the space in-between, where stillness resides.

How to get there? I’m not sure that question is the purpose of this post.

I know I was pleased when, after pulling the blood-death card, I checked in with this lojong-writing practice and was reminded that Slogan One, Reminder Two is about awareness of death. Death as a meditation object. I’ve been thinking about this lately. I understand or believe it’s a powerful practice – for one, to awaken awareness of Reminder One, the preciousness of human life as an unsurpassed opportunity for liberation, but also as a motivation to be fully alive in the present, fully present in this life.

That’s a golden thing – something to be pleased about, to be sure to be sure.

Yet … I had been avoiding this meditation – as I avoided tonglen, the practice of exchanging oneself for others, a central meditation of the lojong teachings. These are practices that make me feel uncomfortable, just to think about. Perhaps for that reason entirely, they are exactly the practices I should be stepping into. But I have so much discomfort already – it seems like folly to actively seek more … but I sense a paradox here.

The discomfort I am currently experiencing due to tenancy issues outside the bounds of my control, it is base mundane banal … profane is the word I was looking for. The discomfort I would face in these practices has a much-more sacred vibe about it. By embracing existential or psychospiritual discomfort – by turning toward it as the kid in Stranger Things turned toward the monster he faced in the Upside Down – may the discomfort of profane angst evaporate. By confronting the sacred reality that all including life is impermanent, may our afflicted attachment to profane suffering fall away, allowing us to finally live.

So there’s that: confronting the uncomfortable existential truth of death and impermanence may be a root-cause treatment for the discomfort of relative or profane suffering; may we experience equanimity in the face of samsaric daily life by embracing our opportunity to practise enough virtue before an untimely death. This is how McLeod describes the teaching – let’s call it the vinaya argument, the argument from ethics or virtue.

He adds as well the reminder that after death, nothing but the results of virtuous or nonvirtuous actions will remain. As we say (but may not truly know without a death-contemplation practice), no material/profane gains can be taken with us through the grave. The death-scientists of Ancient Egypt may disagree with this, I dunno. They put coins on the eyes of the buried for reasons I don’t understand.

Whatever the result of any potential dissonance between the Buddhist and the Egyptian view, this Reminder buoys me in my recent decision to prioritise wellbeing over traditional employment. The decision was to sacrifice material wealth to gain more time affluence – to have more time for the contemplation of reality, so that I might die poor and happy instead of poor and unhappy, which is where the employment path was leading me. I was told by Nikki just now that when I was quitting my job I said it was partly because I wanted more time to contemplate death. Sounds like something I would say!

I’ll think on this some more over the coming weeks, and maybe I’ll add an edit to this post.

Meanwhile, do you have any guided meditations or other teachings you can recommend for the contemplation of death? And/or the practice of tonglen, of exchanging oneself for others? Absolute bodhicitta sounds very cool, and Shantideva assures us that this is the fastest Path:

They who desire shelter quickly
For themselves and for all others
Should use this sacred mystery,
The exchanging of oneself for others

Imagine how screwed you would be if everyone died!

What does it mean that our thoughts create reality?

I noticed upon waking this morning that I almost immediately began worrying, and I was able to bring myself back into the present of the body, which was a relief. It’s frustrating that my habitual tendency is to worry, because I know it just causes suffering, but I feel like it was a small win today to recognise that and make an effort to respond skilfully using some of the practices I have been taught.

Afterward I reflected on how the mind really does create (our interpretation of) reality and if we can become more aware of our habitual thought patterns and do the work of editing them, we can change (the way we perceive) reality, and by changing that perception we may as well have changed reality because the state of our perceptions determines our happiness and wellbeing more than the state of reality actually does.

This is my current understanding of what people mean when they say our thoughts create (our) reality: our perceptions are more real than reality itself. I understand this is something taught in Buddhism … “mind is the forerunner of all states” and “perceive all dharmas as dreams” … but I’m curious to know what the modern psychology and neuroscience says about this.

It could be the difference between happiness and suffering, because whether we are happy or suffering depends on our relationship with / interpretation of events, does it not?

So my affirmation today: remain mindful as much as possible, and know that awareness of thought patterns empowers me to choose how I feel; negative thought patterns do not have to be allowed their habitual free reign.

how to contribute to the worth economy

upon reflection during this post, it turns out there was a reason I have always eaten the cupcake first
~ photo by Chanhee Lee on Unsplash ~

I’ve been prioritising what I call “happiness habits” lately and it’s doing me well. I have a routine of rituals I do each morning, and a few other must-do’s each day, but otherwise I’m trying to refrain from having expectations other than this in my day. The situation with our co-tenant persists, which makes it hard to do much each day. Sometimes if all I can manage to maintain is my meditation practice I am happy.

I was talking to Nikki the other day about how much a regular practice of compassion meditation is helping me cope with our situation, and we talked about how such foundations must be built before anything else, and I really appreciate that.

I’m proud of having got myself to a place where I’m actually feeling pretty good among the pretty shitty situation we’re in with our co-tenant. I made the affirmation this morning that

I will keep up with observing the basics and not have majorly high expectations of myself to do a lot more

because I understand that’s where we start to go wrong in our culture: we try to achieve all this stuff because we think we need to prove ourselves, but in doing so we neglect the practices of being that would have us feeling worth without having to prove ourselves;

all motivation/intention must come from a place where we already recognise our inherent worth, otherwise that motivation will become tainted by the wish to be validated by others and we’ll be chasing this forever without satisfaction because no amount of external validation can fill the void where our self-worth should be;

anything we achieve to supplement our self-worth is going to suck worth out of the worth-economy, whereas anything we achieve from a sense of inherent self-worth is going to contribute worth.

I wrote about something similar recently, in a post called “on self-esteem as a precursor for achievement …” where I mentioned how societal expectations drive a lot of us to be always achieving, never satisfied to just exist and accept ourselves for our inherent worth.

I didn’t go into how we might cultivate that sense of inherent self-worth, but I’d like to drop a few thoughts here because a big part of the narrative shift I’m contributing to with Kokoro 心 Heart is about internal self-talk, which is where our sense of worth (or lack thereof) begins.

I believe the path to a sustainable and harmonious future on this planet is paved by creating a culture of individuals who are internally sustainable and harmonious. Because individuals create culture as much, if not more, than they are influenced by culture. We are culture, and the future is determined by the state of our present.

One way we can begin to create that culture of internally healthy individuals is by looking at our own self-talk. For me, there are some essential meditation and contemplation practices that are indispensable in healing my negative self-talk, and they are:

mindfulness
(self-)compassion
(self-)forgiveness
gratitude

I spend some time each day reflecting on and practising these, and sometimes I find it hard to justify the time because I feel like I should be achieving something else … anything else, just not wellbeing.

But that’s absurd, and there’s a logic to be understood here: no amount of external achievement can satisfactorily supplement the sense of worth that comes from laying the foundation of these practices first; so the foundational practices need to come first, and are justified on these grounds.

Anything extra I can do, after I have done these exercises, is just the cream on top. If I have a really productive day, that’s just a cherry on top of the cream. Please excuse the shonky metaphor, but without that foundational cupcake we’re left with just a handful of whipped cream and a slimy glacé cherry.

The understanding we live by is arse-about in Western culture: we live for the external, and neglect the internal. But the internal is all that exists. This is a fundamental aspect of the narratives we need to change in ourselves and thereby our culture.

Does this make sense?

What does this mean for you?