Zendots To Zen Squares

If I'm Zen Dot Studio then what happens when I paint squares? Is that a koan? Are these Zen Squares? And what is Zen Squared? Is that a math-ematical equation? Would Einstein know the answer?

We've all said "shit happens" or am I leaping into the realm of giant assumptions? But sometimes fun things happen too! This little painting happened the other day in the studio. I say this because in truth that's how it is sometimes. Things emerge from somewhere and you recognize them as something to work with rather than something to line the bin with. When work goes well I never really feel like " I did it". I am often as surprised as anyone at the end result! Look what fell off the easel. Where'd that come from?

I don't know if you can see but I cut little squares of words out to add in. Come on in for a closer look. Little words like meditation and happiness, and self and faith and see and kindness and few more. Something about it made me think "encaustic" and because I don't work in that medium I decided to do a little kamikaze encaustic. I melted some beeswax and applied it to the surface. I used an embossing heat gun to smooth out the wax and called it done! For me there's a retro feel about it all but also a feel of film stock and pixels. These little squares are just jumping around. Also there is a sense of the ethereal, of mystery and foreigness too, maybe French. Someone on one of the art blogs was talking about getting sound or taste relating to colour, for me it's just feeling.

And where is the Dharma for me in all of this? I am really relishing taking back my studio from the clean state of ever preparedness for the real estate market. And two observations come to mind. After a long period of not much studio time I seem to have more creative energy. It's like it was a dormant, underground period that was helpful. It wasn't like, oh I haven't been working, now I'm stiff and arthritic and I need time to limber up. Quite the opposite.

And that is the mystery I think. We never know what will happen. It is about relinquishing expectations and control and just being with what is. And well tomorrow who knows what? Maybe everything will come up black smears and brown lumps. Where I do have choice is in how I view it. Barry over at the Ox Herding Blog once said something that really struck me, "we're always saying things like "expect the best but be prepared for the worst." Why don't we prepare for the best?" he suggested. Something about that reminded me of a saying my Zen teacher has:"look up".

From a lot of the reading I've done on the human mind, it seems we're a hard wired to "look down" or at least behind us to see what's chasing us. It takes a conscious effort, a turning of the mind (at least for me) to expect the best and look up. It's subtle and it's something I find I need to be constantly vigilant about. That old monkey mind is a busy little customer, that often likes to fling you-know-what at anyone who might decide to enter the temple. And if we know that's what monkeys do, well then we don't have to get too excited about it. We just use whatever skillful means we know to send them on their way. Or maybe we just enter by a different door? Happy monkey hunting. And be careful, I hear they have been known to bite.

What is Your Mind Drinking?

Well this is not the Green Tara as promised but it is green. It's an oldy (from the summer) that I realized I hadn't photographed. It has a high gloss resin finish that gives it a kind of glistening sheen that is quite pleasing. A little recycled prayer flags, some hand stamping combined with a little acrylic paint and some image transfer. The colours remind me of kool-aid or freshie, if anyone remembers that kool-aid tag along.

Today I have been working with patience, trust and surrender. I won't say too much but it has to do with real-estate goings-on. Who said "the doubting mind is hell". Seems like a quote I've heard. And in it's effort to grab onto something, you can watch the mind reach for a tumbler of single malt doubt. Strong, enticing stuff, doesn't take much to get you going. Somehow the mind prefers known intoxicants to standing on the edge of nothing, staring into the abyss of wait and see. It's not a bad abyss, it's just we're so unfamiliar with that whole experience that we don't really know how to balance there on the edge. The edge makes us nervous and twitchy.

The other thing I have been watching the mind do, is go over the details and the facts, combing them for some type of certainty, hoping to pull up some gleaming shard of reassurance that everything is just fine. But in truth we are standing on the edge. And that is fine. It's good to learn how to balance on one foot, not waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So as I go about my day I get to see how important it is to be aware of the little tricks my mind likes to play, the stories it likes to conjure, kind of like a tempestuous 10 year old that likes to tell stories that scare all the small children in the lunchroom. I can cast a stern eye on it and tell it to stop or I can simply give a little grin and remind it that I see what it's up to.

So there's kool-aid and stories even though summer's over. Maybe it's time to put them away and bring out the candy apples and pumpkins and get ready for the Hungry Ghosts.

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.

What Is Faith?

Over  at Peter's Monkey Mind a discussion started on "faith".  It is something that has been on my list of things to write about in my 100 days of Dharma and so it seems like a good time to pull out my list and put that satisfying stroke through"faith".

When I was at University back in the dark ages, no make that the ice age (it was Winnipeg after all) I took a religious studies course.  I remember being completely baffled by the concept of "faith".  It made no sense to me.  You believed in something that there was no logical proof for?  How did that work?  I scratched my head and forgot about it.

When I started studying with my Zen teacher, the idea of faith came up again.  Not faith in anything (as we talked about over at the Monkeymind Cafe) but faith as a general disposition toward life.  It can seem like an abstract concept but really it is as practical as any other Buddhist idea, meant to be lived.  My teacher talks about "looking up" which I take to mean trusting or having a positive orientation to whatever the situation, knowing that what is happening, even if it doesn't  seem that way at the time, is for our highest and best good.  It may not be what we'd choose from the smorgasboard of life, but it is perhaps what we need.  She would also say, when asked why some unpleasant thing happened, that "something is working itself out."  Who are we to know what is good or bad really, the why's and the where fors, with our incomplete picture of the universe?  There is so much more to life and situations than we can see from our subjective little gopher holes out here in the landscape.

Sharon Salzberg has written a whole book on faith from the Buddhist perspective. Several of her definitions seem helpful, "to have faith is to offer one's heart or give over ones' heart..... It  is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey."   Later she adds to this: "Though we may repeatedly stumble, afraid to move forward in the dark, we have the strength to take that magnitude of risk because of faith."   These ideas reinforce the thought that faith is a way of life, rather than a concept, that we are living it, not thinking about it.

The following words on faith attributed to the Buddha help us recognize what faith looks like: "When faith arises it arrests the Five Hindrances (doubt, sensual desire, anger, sloth, restlessness and worry) and the heart becomes free from them, clear, serene and undisturbed."    Sounds like pure freedom, that ultimate state of faith.  And like numerous other Buddhist practices, it seems clear that faith takes time to cultivate and develop.  Salzberg adds, "The offering of one's heart happens in stages, with shadings of hesitation and bursts of freedom."

I find that sometimes it is easy to have faith, sometimes I forget to have faith and sometimes when I am really afraid I work very hard to have faith.  In a strange way, at these times, it seems,  I am clinging to faith, looking for faith to save me. It seems to me that I remember faith when I am in the toughest of spots and while I recognize that I can do better than using faith as some sort of crutch or band-aid it also makes me see the value of those tough spots.... ah I am learning about faith.  And perhaps sometimes I have faith without even knowing or thinking about it.