Rushing Toward Beauty & Building Resilience

8"x10" Footprints On The Earth Oil & Cold Wax

While I was painting this afternoon I noticed at one point, how much I was in a hurry to get a part of the painting that I didn't like covered up. That little palette knife was just doing 90 in a school zone.  I could feel the rushing, the almost breathless way I went after the offending spot.  And I thought to myself, "isn't this interesting?  What's that all about?"  And it struck me that this is very like me in many parts of my life, this lack of tolerance for the imperfect, for the messy, a reaction that often leads to feelings of frustration.

Feeling sick?  Let's get that out of the way.  Messy kitchen?    Messy life?   Let's get that cleaned up. A Longing for problems to disappear in a poof.  Hmm... in a hurry to make the ugly; beautiful, the imperfect; less flawed.  A magnetic draw towards beauty and perfection.  Definitely encouraged by our culture, I think we all have this in varying degrees.

8"x10" Uncovered Oil and Cold Wax

And aiming oneself in the direction of clean and tidy and beautiful is a fine intention, let's not get weird here. It's perhaps the rush away from mess and chaos, that requires reflection.  And how we handle the movement from what we "find undesirable" to it's counterpart is vital to our well being, I think.

It came to me how much depth and complexity I rob myself of, when I hurry to get things all "nice" without appreciating the nuances of messy.  Perhaps I miss finding the interesting hidden line or shape, or a new direction in a painting I am in a hurry to get resolved.

16"x16" Tethered  Oil & Cold wax

Maybe I am thinking about things in this way because I've been dealing with a dental adventure that found me having a tooth extracted last week.  Around the same time I came across a German doctor who writes about finding meaning in illness. His take is that the healing lives in the more complicated crevices of understanding, buried in the deeper meaning of our symptoms, instead of in the headlong rush to get those symptoms out of the way. In the same breath that it makes sense to me, I also want to get on with what interests me (some habits die a slow painful death)!  I've gathered my arsenal of natural remedies and am marching my little holistic army toward that dental infection.  The inclination to be well is fine, don't get me wrong, it is the energy we bring to it that's important, I think.

I was reminded of the quality of "resilience" in my work, my health and some frustrating encounters with Samsung's customer service this week. I listened to a talk by Joan Borysenko a couple of weeks ago on "stress hardiness" or resilience and it really resonated with me. Unfortunately I can't link you to that talk because it's no longer available but here's a similar one. She talked about the 3 C's of stress hardiness: 1. Commitment- a sense of purpose and engagement with the world.  2. Control- a belief that our actions can make a difference.  3.  Challenge - an understanding that life is constantly changing but viewing that change as exciting rather than scary.  Here's a nice little blogpost someone wrote about it.

I am really working on #3, viewing the less desirable ones as exciting.  How about you? I wish you a stress hardy week.

Feeding Your Demons

I was going to crop this photo of the Buddha painting I just finished and then was amused because it looks like he's waiting for a call.  ET, is that you?

Last night I decided to listen to a Dharma talk and chose some talks by Tsultrim Allione of Tara Mandala.  I like her quiet presence and the fact that she is a woman who follows a practice from a female Tibetan tradition.  The talks were fine but they reminded me to return to her book "Feeding Your Demons" which is outstanding.  The book is subtitled "Ancient Wisdom For Resolving Inner Conflict" and is based on the ancient Tibetan practice called "Chod" (pronounce che).

It's interesting how we all have our thing.  Yesterday I was over at Peter's monkeymind blog and he said, okay after this I'm not going to write about fear anymore.  One of my great teachers has been my physical health and sometimes I think you might get tired of hearing about it.....  It can be a great source of frustration and longing and grasping for me.  Am I ever going to feel well? and blah, blah, blah?  I go over the same territory so many times it get's boring even to me.  But it's like a compost bin, lots of rich, stinky stuff here that makes the garden grow.

I decided it was time to bark up a different tree regarding my health (and I'm not even a dog person)  Maybe I  should meow down a different mouse hole??  But I digress in a fit of foolishness. Tsultrim Allione has a chapter on "The Demons of Illness" and so with a slightly nagging sore throat I turned to it and started to read.   In the afternoon as I worked in the garden I was aware of the vague sense of feeling crummy (and man, I could see how much I just want to push this away, in a poof, wave my magic wand, be gone, kind of way)  but I said to myself, "Self, maybe what you need to do is ask, what are these feelings of unwellness trying to tell you, what is the message here.  All the herbs and vitamins  have just not cut it."   

And so when I turned to Allione's chapter on illness I was ready to hear what she had to say.  I think she had been snooping on my thoughts..... because listen to her: "If we always treat the symptoms by trying to suppress them and never understand what the disease is trying to tell us, we may miss important information that the body is trying to communicate."  In another place she says. "If we can shift our conventional understanding of illness to see it as a form of energy, we can understand this way of healing..... In order for us to "get" an illness, it has to be able to find in us a receptive environment, like a key fitting into a keyhole.."

Now where is she going with this you might ask.  I have examined my inclination to feel responsible, inferior and a failure for "getting sick".  I acknowledge my part in it for the way I have used my mind, but that is not the whole story.  Sometimes I just wonder if it is my karma to be sick, but then I remind myself to be careful about that thought too.  Maybe yes, but I don't know this for sure.  I am aware that I can't will something to disappear, but I can do my part.  

And here's what Allione so skillfully reminds us when she sites the research of Candace Pert, a specialist in immunology: "she discovered that consciously setting an intention or creating a visualization can affect the "periaqueductal gray" (does this sound like some kind of parrot to you?), located between the 3rd and 4th ventricles in the brain.... it can explain how it is possible for our conscious mind to enter the network and play a deliberate part."  It's not so much that the mind has power, she says but "that the body and mind are one... intelligence is distributed democratically all over the body."  I like that.  We're a democratic entity.  At least democracy exists somewhere!  And this is in keeping with Buddhist thought that the mind is simply another sense organs with thoughts as their object, a nose smells odours, a mind thinks thoughts.  In the west we assign so much power to the mind.  It seems so unbalanced when you stop and think about it.

So the process of feeding your demons is one of finding the feelings of illness or pain in your body, personifying them and then sitting across from them and having a wee chat.  How do they look?  What do they want?  What do they need?  And how will they feel when they get it?  And then we feed them something to nourish them, a nectar that we create from our own bodies which prevents them from feeding on us.  She has a series of steps for this "chod" practice and it can be used for other things besides physical illness.  I won't explain it here in detail but it is definitely worth exploring.

I used this method when I first bought the book last year and found it helpful but then in true human fashion I forgot about it and went on to something else.   Call me crazy but I tried it again this morning and I don't have a sore throat tonight.  My demon looked kind of like this sharp nosed cartoon character, dressed in black, a little angled fedoa, arched eyebrows.  He found me rather weak and wanting, an easy host he said.  He told me I needed to have more faith, more belief in my self (but I thought there was no self???.)  Points taken.  His nectar was lemon pie filling which he slurped up with gusto, it was sunny and tart and sweet all at once and it was just what the demon ordered, apparently.   He said he would feel hopeful when he got what he needed.

Does this all sound somewhat odd to you?  For me it addresses the whole issue on another level, a level that is not connected to logic and reason, a level that is connected to the mystery that exists, to the unknown, the subconscious.  It addresses "the conflict" whatever it may be  on a level we seldom go to.  I am pushed there because logic and reason have failed to resolve my "conflict". I believe we are pushed to greater depths by our own suffering and conflicts, if we are willing to go there.  For me it is about having faith and following the call of my own intuitive self, not the little self, but that source of deeper knowing.  

Here is my wish for you.  May your suffering lead you to deeper understanding of life.  May it transform you.  May you emerge as someone deeper and wiser and more compassionate than the one who started out on this journey.  May your suffering be the kind that leads to the end of suffering. May you savour the sweet and sour all at once.  Now go... and fix yourself some lemon pudding or whatever your demons are shouting and banging on the table for.

Waking Up to What We Do

Okay I hear you.  What the heck is that over there where there's supposed to be a piece of art, you're asking.  My partner said it was Zen dots!  It is in fact some scrabble tiles that I'm making into pendants using some Asian stamps and yes that may be Zen dots they're sitting on.  We have them in for testing but their origin is still undetermined!  Now that we've cleared that up I can move on to the day's Dharma.

Yesterday Christine shared a quote  in the blog comments that said,  (I paraphrase) "everything that comes into our circle is there to teach us something" and that expresses so well how there is Dharma everywhere if we are willing to look.

Today started with a call from a friend.  She is an old friend, not given to a great deal of self reflection, but kind and thoughtful and doing the best she can, as we all are.  I hadn't seen her since early December and she visited Friday.  She looked terrible and had been sick for 4 weeks with a cold or flu and various complaints that just weren't going away.  We walked and talked.  She has a stressful job working with handicapped kids.  At one point she looked at me and said that her husband had said to her, "we create our own stress".  I agreed and I could tell from the silence that somehow the proverbial penny was finally dropping for her.  

This morning said friend called and when I heard her voice I knew she was still off work.  "I know why I'm sick", she said.  I thought oh, oh, I hope she didn't bring me anything really contagious (my we're self centred little creatures!)   "It's stress", she said.  A light had gone on over the weekend.  All the things piling up, worrying about her daughters' problems, the relationship between one daughter and her husband, her very stressful job; things had reached a level where whether she wanted to acknowledge it on a conscious level or not, the body was rebelling.  My friend the monk says, "if we don't get it when it whispers in our ear, sooner or later we'll get hit by the two by four."  And of course she is not making any reference to household renovations.  So my friend is being visited by some medium sized lumber.  She is finally having to look at "how we create our own suffering" and what to do with that.

She called me because we have always seen each other through tough times.  Several years ago I was touched by her tender caring when I was really sick.  I like to think she called me because she knows I will support her.  I offered a "hearty good for you" for figuring out what the problem was and reassured her that it was all good, that everyone at some point has to wake up and look at their pain.  And that is the beginning of healing.  

And then to figure out what to do.  We talked about her options.  She had a call in to a chiro that deals with emotional issues and she talked about how she didn't want to go back to work.  I reminded her of the little AA prayer that talks about looking at what we can change.  She was already thinking about parts of her job that she could let go.  And so as she talked and I offered the bits of Dharma that seemed like they might be helpful (including these things don't get dealt with overnight).  I reminded her of some meditation CD's I'd leant her last year and told her how helpful the book of small inspirational quote she'd brought me when I'd been in the hospital had been.  It felt good to be able to support her and it felt good to see that she was dealing with the "real" issues in her life, not just putting on the antibiotic bandaid.

And so there it was the Dharma ....  How most of us have to be dragged there kicking and screaming, to a place where we are willing to have a good hard look at what we do.  And it is all good ... good that we got there (the compassionate side of suffering).  It is our opportunity to do the real work of our life.  And we all get there when we get there, no sooner or later, and all we need to bring is our willingness.  And  the suffering that she was experiencing is the suffering that  leads to the end of suffering.   So I say a good for you to my friend because it is not easy.  But it is definitely rewarding and enriches our lives.  In a recent blog post I quoted PT Sudo who said the  Japanese character for crisis could be translated as both, danger and  opportunity, the makings of an interesting soup don't you think?  I'll have a bowl of that, hold the matzo balls.

The Mad Witch of Zen

There are many things I know in my head that I don't know yet in my heart. What I need to understand hasn't made the long journey, as the quote credited to Chief Seattle goes ("The longest journey we'll ever take is from the head to the heart.") Today I woke up with a sore throat.  For most people this isn't a welcome thing but you get up, get on with your day.  Maybe grumble a bit.  Today I did get up and get on with my day but for me being sick is a serious bummer.  You think I'd be used to it by now.  You think I'd accept it.  But I can't quite do this.  I don't want it.  I don't like it and I push it away.  For me a sore throat is not just a sore throat.  For some time I have realized that I have built a story around illness.  No, that's not quite it. .... I have built a giant arm wrenching novel around it.  It's set somewhere dark and nasty, filled with lots of sinister and sad characters where I imagine (unlike Hemingway) that the sun never rises.

We all tell ourselves stories.  What else is the ego but an amassing of stories really, about how we are, why we are that way, and how things should really be.  We create ourselves with our stories.  We are walking illusions.  Some of the stories we tell ourselves are helpful.  Things like "I'm good at this" or "I always bounce back".  Mostly if we look carefully we  have some good stories.  On the good days they're easier to find in the mental library.  

But today I pulled out the well worn volume called "oh no, I'm sick again.  I'm always sick.  Every time I turn around I'm sick.  Will I ever be well?"  Sounds like a bad, cry in your beer, country and western sound track.  And  logically I know this is a most unhelpful story, and yet....  I have told it to myself off and on since I had chronic fatigue syndrome 2o years ago so it is a comfortable old story with a leather cover and a silk tassel book mark.  It is not an enjoyable story but easy reading, second nature.

So what does it take to redraft that story? There are a variety of skills that go into this I think, applied at various times, in various combinations, in a kind of trial and error, let's experiment kind of way.  Ah, let's get out the Bunson Burner, remember that cute little accessory from high school chemistry.  We know the object of this little experiment. It would be "Drop the story. " ... And the apparatus, well I guess that would be me and mind and my heart and my blood and bones. 

 And then there's the method.  (Remember the layout of that little science report?)  So first I am aware that I am telling a story.  Or am I?  Well,truthfully sometimes I am past the first chapter, well into the moping, before I even realize I am telling the story.  So I need to be vigilant and pay attention to the oncoming story .... so I can be prepared when it's sitting at the check-out desk waiting for me.  Then I need to "grasp the will" as my Zen teacher calls it, which I find pretty hard when I feel crummy.  The draw to feel sad and bad and wallow is pretty strong.  The inclination to wrong view "everyone else is healthy and out there having a wonderful time." is pretty enticing.  That's how it seems but in addition to being untrue it feeds the wallow mentality.  

And then there is patience, ah good ol' grounded, steady patience.  Long standing, karmic patterns need time.  The work needs to be done over and over.  Change doesn't  happen NOW, just because I want it to.  Ah, big lesson. Patience, patience and more patience.  And how about some compassion for the confused little self.  The self that blames itself for being sick, feels a failure for being sick.  And then how about letting go, that famous Zen ingredient, so rarified and special, invisible and ethereal. ...... so simple and direct, the knife to slice through it all. ....Just let go of the story.  If only for a moment.  And then another.  .... And then one day ....poof, inexplicably it's gone for good.

So while I take my vitamin C and do my qi gong  I will also put all the above ingredients in a little flask on the Bunson Burner and patiently await the alchemical reaction, all the while stirring like a mad witch.  I will ask for help and say a little prayer and try not to remember that my chemistry teacher told me that "three moons were going to rise in the sky if I passed chemistry."  I still fondly remember Mr Martin.  He sounded a lot like WC Fields.