Dharma Demons & A Trauma To The Head

I have been awol from the blogging world this week. If I had to write a note to the teacher it might look something like this: "Carole has been absent this past week because of a severe trauma to the head. She incurred this while trying to build an iweb site and register a domain name. She is still a bit dizzy and more stunned than usual so please excuse her from gym class."

Anyway the end result of banging my head against the internet is that you can visit www.zendotstudio.com and see an online portfolio which may be useful to me for more purposes than knocking myself silly.

I have noticed a couple of Dharma demons who visited me this week. The first one is what I would call an "habitual tendency", a term used by my Zen teacher. Over at Full Contact Enlightenment she links to an article which describes our "emotional signature" (which sounds a lot like habitual tendency). Don't you love that term, emotional signature? So we can say to friends, "Oh yes I signed that little drama we had yesterday with my emotional signature. Do you like the little flourish on the s or the way I always forget to dot the i?" No, not so much?" Anyway check out this piece by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, it is a very interesting read. And looks like he has a book coming out this fall called "Rebel Buddha". I love that title. I don't get too attached to words do I?

But I have digressed. Remember the Dharma demon I referred to a few thousand words back? My partner got sick, either a touch of the flu or food poisoning or something like that, on Monday. Well for me, a little alarm button goes off, all whiny, a fearsome little buzzer that goes something like: oh no, I hope I don't get this. I always catch everything. I don't want to be sick. I hate being sick. I will probably catch this, I always do." says she who has been shell-shocked by a number of illnesses in her adult life. I recognized the little refrain right away and immediately called in the mind to do a little remedial work. " We've got an emotional clean-up in aisle 6. And call out the neural pathway crew to lay in a new groove and put up "don't go there "sign on the old road." The crew did their work rather efficiently and while I imagined feeling a little unwell, the week passed sans stomach upset.

Demon #2 dropped in for a little visit yesterday while we were chatting with a friend about finding a house and property to buy here on the island. Several small, off-handed remarks by the chatee (or was he the chatter?) threw me into spasms of fear. Oh no, what if we can't find a place? What if everything is too expensive? too small? too ugly? Yada yada yada.

I recognized how little it takes to awaken those demons of fear and worry, a classic human habitual tendencies, I think. We bounce back and forth between fear and hope, I once heard Pema Chodron say. And again, once I could see what old monkey (or was that gorilla) mind was up to he collapsed like one of those inflatable clowns (not before he'd bounced around my mental landscape for a bit).

So that was my week, pursued by demons, brutalized by digital thugs. In between I had enough time to have lunch with friends in Victoria and deliver some art to ArtCraft for their summer show. How's your week been?