Working With Body Tension & Karmic Stuff

This is a close up shot of a piece I am slowly working on (perhaps I am inspired to slowness by the slugs that have all but decimated our garden).  It seems there are never enough hours in the day for both gardening and artwork, but I've said that before, haven't I?  I am not whining, really.  I promise.  Although occasionally I do have a little wine.

But I must confess I always turn a little green when I see the concerted efforts of those working away in their studios everyday.  Ah... (she gives a wistful sigh which goes well with her green complexion). An osteopath told me sighing is good for releasing tension.  Try it.

But I have made my choices about how to spend my time.  I was talking about "choices" in terms of money with a friend the other day, but it is the same for time.  If we attempt to live with awareness we choose where we spend our time and our $$.  There is only so much of both to go around.  I keep telling myself this is the year of the house and next year I will have more art time.  I may be deluded, time will confirm or make a fool of me.  How do you deal with this?

But there is always lots of Dharma up on the radar, no matter what I do, even if I'm not here writing about it.  I have been sitting twice a day in preparation for a week long retreat in August.  I'm in training, like a marathon runner (well maybe a slightly slacker marathon runner, the bald guy at the back of the pack).  My body needs this extra sitting, my mind needs this.

As I sit a little longer and more often I have been noticing all the subtle ways and places I hold tension and how good it feels to find those spots and let them go.  I am seeing strongly, how the mind doesn't settle with ease if there is no ease in the body, how the body tenses when the mind starts reciting the list of things to do.  I think this can't be repeated too often. The mind/ body, which practice shows us, are really a single unit, has somehow in our modern world been divided  into two separate things (did I miss a divorce in People magazine?). Where did this separation come from?  "I think therefore I am?"  Did this leave the body out of the equation of being?

This relaxing of the body has become a big part of my sitting.  I have been doing a form of qi gong meditation for part of the time when I sit, which is really just concentrating or focusing on the hara (the area just below the navel).  In doing this I am reminded so much of how we don't make anything happen.  We focus and then when the qi or energy becomes strong enough it moves.  WE are not doing.  We are simply being.

Another part of my practice, as always, involves chipping away at my "karmic" or habitual stuff, the stuff we come here with, the personal stuff that we each have.  This is such an important part of practice for me, to work with your personal stuff in a way that helps loosen it and if we're lucky release.  Sometimes we have to go about this in different ways.  And mostly it is hard even to see our own patterns and foibles; easy to see that of others. And the karmic stuff of others is their business, not ours.  But that's another topic entirely.

I have been chipping away at  my mountain of stuff (can I sell this stuff anywhere, maybe on ebay?)  I have got the loader and the backhoe out and I am surveying "my stuff" from a totally different angle, using some Shamanic journeying, (okay so no bulldozers were involved).  It's the same stuff (sigh), just seeing it from a different angle.  It lends new perspectives and new tools for the chipping away process.  It is this chipping away and releasing of our karmic patterns that will ultimately help us to see more clearly and release us from suffering.

Many monks when they have their "kenshos" or awakening experiences have past life rememberings.  Shamanic journeying can help us relate to some of what is unseen in a similar way.  Although again we must be careful not to "want" too much, or delude ourselves.  As always on the path, we must proceed with caution and attend to what niggles.

And so I have been working away at those inclinations to retreat, working with fear, approaching it in different ways (like training a wild animal?), by doing some body work, by being willing to see what catches me, in a non judgmental way.  I am learning to be comfortable in my own skin.  In my Shamanic work it has been expressed as "hiding" which is just another way to say we feel uncomfortable exposing and being who we are.  While some might see this as navel gazing, I believe it is an essential part of the inner journey.  I don't think we can blast through it all by our will and simply extended sitting.  What are your practices for working with your "personal" stuff?  And have you had any success selling it on ebay?

My Lemonade Stand

Salt Spring Island is bulging with artists and open studios.  Every crook & nanny here does art and every nook and cranny is crammed with art.  The Saturday market in Ganges is like Manhattan at rush hour (Okay so I've never been to Manhattan at rush hour or any other time)  but you're getting the picture.  I brought some art with me to the island from my bigger island that I live on and  poked and snooped around, thinking I might find a venue.  My work lay in walking the middle road of checking out possibilities but trying not to be attached to outcomes.  The market, because the traffic is so high, has as many rules as customers.  You have to live here for at least 6 mos and jump through hoops of fire to get a spot.  You can tell the old timers by their singed butts (no this is not really true, well maybe, but I never checked that closely).

But we did spend the morning at the market as customers, after parking far enough away that we had to pack a lunch to get there.  But there are fabulous local treasures and we wouldn't miss it .  We bought some locally made curry spices, some pea shoots and sunflower sprouts and a salad roll stuffed with sprouts from the sprout guy.  We had a shot of wheat grass juice from our friend Jim, at Rawsome Living Foods and tasted his awesome raw homous.  We bought some of his raw granola but snoozed too late to get any raw flax crackers.  We sampled some amazing pasta and pesto from a little shop with a serious Italian chef.  We bought handmade soap in little bargain mystery packs.  It was a quintessential summer market day.  Sun blazing, people everywhere, music and tasty smells wafting over everything.

After that we retired back to our lovely home exchange and I decided to put a sign out by the road and hang my art in the garden.  It was fun and in fact I love doing this.  I arranged my journals on a rustic old saw horse and put out a couple of lovely baskets, one with cards and the other with matted prints.  I put out some original collage work on a little black cafe table and we found some hooks that would hold a number of original canvases on the trellis deck railing.   I put out a lovely little bamboo dish of scrabble tile pendants, poured a cool drink and sat down in the shade.

I watered some plants, did a few on-line chores and then started to wonder where everyone was.  The mind always looking for action began it's chattering.   Len commented on how nice the colours of the paintings looked in the bright sunshine and took some pictures.  My mind on the other hand started to rumble, "not one person has driven down from the road".  I looked at the paintings and decided that was because they really weren't very nice.  And on and on. blah, blah, blah ....  We did our qi gong on the lawn in a the shade of a hawthorn tree.  And as my mind quieted  I caught it by it's tail and yanked away the banana it had been chewing on.  "Okay, that logic, well it defies logic ... How could people decide my art was crappy if they hadn't even seen it?"  I inquired.   Such is the nature of the mind.  It tells us stories that appear to be based on logic but are so fuzzy you can hardly recognize them for their furry coating.

And so we chuckled and said it's kind of like the lemonade stand you had when you were a kid.  You spent a lot of time setting it up in front of your house, making the lemonade and signs, finding chairs and change.  The process and preparation were exciting.  And then there was the sitting and the waiting ... and the minutes ... and the hours went by.  And after a while you got tired of it.  So you drank all the lemonade or gave it away to your friends.  But at the end of the day you were happy and at some point you did it all over again. 

Maybe my lemonade stand was quieter than the sound of  one hand clapping but we passed a lovely summer afternoon in a beautiful garden.  And I was reminded once again not to be too attached to outcomes  and to have faith.  It was an opportunity to think about what might work in the future.  And I was reminded that I had fun getting it set up and it wasn't really a problem unless I made it into one.  Always, we have the choice.  So there was the Dharma as usual waiting to show it's wise little face and offer some teaching, even on a sunny, summer afternoon, proving once again that the Dharma is always waiting patiently to offer us just what we need.  And if you're on Salt Spring Island tomorrow, you just might see my little sign by the red bicycle when you're driving down the road.

 

The Energy of Community

Today was our last qi gong class until September.  I will miss this intensive 4 hours of practice each week.  It reminds me of how important community is.  It was listening to more advanced students talk about their experience of chi that encouraged me to sit longer and actually experience the difference, to see how much stronger the experience of chi is when you sit for an hour instead of 1/2 hour or 45 minutes.

But what I was really reminded of today was how strong the chi is when you sit with the group, how we all build and share and surf on each others presence and energy.  It is so beneficial and encouraging to feel this.  And if you've never sat with a group, you might feel surprised by this experience.  I don't think there is anyone who doesn't notice the power of group sittings.

I remember this too from when I sat with the Zen Sangha that I belonged to for 4 years, how there was an energy that deepened our meditation when we sat and walked together.  And the energy at the Buddhist temple where we would go on retreat was even stronger.

It seems in our everyday world, especially here in the west we don't think much about this  invisible energy, how it is part of our life, present in each person and available for cultivation of health, awareness and well being.  We can't see it or hear it, or taste it, or smell it in any usual way, and so it seems to the modern western mind that it doesn't exist.  It is kind of sad really, that the rational, scientific mind has pre-empted so much of our experience.  The invisible part of the universe is unavailable to most westerners.  We know that blood circulates in the body because when we cut ourselves we see it, but chi, where is that?  It's like we lost our way at some point in the evolutionary process.  We took the big super highway of the material world (headed over to Walmart)  and left the narrower roads  of the unseen spirit, chi or energy,  to grow weeds and become unused footpaths.

I guess I am unravelling two threads here, one that meanders down the path of what we have lost by neglecting the invisible world of spirit and energy, a whole topic of it's own really.  And the other thread is attached to community.  And yet when the community thread came up today it was attached to the thread of energy and spirit.  I have thought a lot about both these things over the years.  When I look at what's missing in a lot of people's lives I sense it is both of these things, a sense of belonging and sharing and a sense of the deeper meaning of life. 

 It is that sense of connection that human beings long for at some level, that collective embrace that makes us relax and feel at home here in the world.  And I think our restlessness and anxiety is somehow fueled by the lack of the spiritual, by  not approaching questions like what are we here for, what is our mission, how do we decide what is important to do and how to behave toward our fellow beings and the earth we live on.  If you combine a sense of community with spirit, or unseen energy, it seems to me you end up with something very powerful.  In Buddhism, the community of spiritual practitioners is considered one of the three treasures or jewels, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.  And true Sangha provides this sense of community of those on the path.  

So that's what I'm thinking about today and since landing here  in the blogoshpere I have sensed I have joined another Sangha, one that stretches out toward you, in invisible space, boundless and without end.  Bows to you all, cyber sangha!

Exploring the Mental Landscape

Okay I finally did it.  I was inspired  enough by my qi gong classmates and our teacher's constant reminder, that if you keep taking the pot off the burner the water is never going to boil.  Even though somewhere in the night, an hour went missing, I managed to find 2 one hour periods to sit in meditation.

In the morning I was thinking about Alice, a woman in our class who is always up front about her experience.  Yesterday she expressed a lot of frustration at not "feeling the chi" when she sits. She is feeling pretty disappointed by this, really wanting to experience it, and wondering in the end if she has any chi.  I could see some of myself in Alice and started to wonder what separates those classmates who are getting the "big chi buzz" and those of us who are asking where is this illusive chi hiding.

As I did my first sit this morning, it came to me.  Besides the hours of practice that the chi filled students have put in over the years, I could see three fundamental difference.  These differences seemed, to me, to all involve mental attitude, if we can call it that.  First those chi-key guys believe when they sit down that they are going to feel the chi.  Past experience leads them to feel this way.  They have no doubt that the chi is there and that they will feel it.  The rest of us aren't so sure.  We think thoughts like: maybe this won't work for me, maybe I'll never feel the chi, maybe I'm the exception.  Doubt in Buddhism is one of the five hindrances.

The other mental attitude that stands in our way is that feeling of frustration and impatience.  Where is that darn chi, it should be here by now.  I told it to pick me up at 5 o'clock and I'm still standing on the corner waiting.  Our frustration and impatience tightens our bodies, closes our minds and natters away in our ears.  Man it is a pesky companion!

And then there is desire, attachment (the good 'ol cause of suffering in Buddhist lingo).  We want to experience that feeling of chi.  We want, we want, we want.  We are so full of wanting there is no place for the chi to sit.  It's like the old comment that the Zen master makes about the archer in competition.  "His need to win prevents him from hitting his mark."

So these were my discoveries.   If I could just sit with some openness and presence and believe that the chi was already there in my lower dan tien that would be step number one.  Give up doubt.  Number two: let go of frustration. Don't waste  your energy checking in on the chi and then winding yourself up into a chi seeking pretzel because what you find doesn't meet your expectations.  And these expectations are linked to the wanting, the desire, the attachment that we taste so strongly that it obscures the flavour of anything else.  ....  So my work was to just sit and know that the chi was present (just like our Buddha nature) but that I am not quite skilled enough to feel it strongly, that it takes time and patience and tending and trust.  And so I relaxed and experimented and explored.  And interestingly by leaving the pot on the burner a little longer and adjusting my mental fedora which was slightly askew I seemed to have a more focused meditation and a greater sense of the growing chi.

It is so interesting to watch the impact our sometimes subtle (sometimes not so subtle) mental attitude has on how things play out for us.  Our minds are powerful little pieces of equipment.  It's too bad they don't come with a better operator's manual.  But knowing me I would never read the instructions until something went wrong!

Pink Floyd On Yin And Yang

Today was my Saturday qi gong class. Our diminutive master began the class by talking about yin and yang, about how there is always a little yin in the yang and always a little yang in the yin (sounds like some kind of cross contamination, Oh, oh we're going to have to throw out the yang, someone got some yin in it).  The example our instructor used was:  even on a hot sunny day when a mountain is in full sun (yang) the other side of the mountain is in the shade (yin).  Even at night when it is dark (yin) when the moon comes out a little yang is introduced by it's light.

This way of looking at the world does not come naturally to us in the West.  We like our lives cut and dried, black & white, either/or.  It is the basis of our Western dialectic view of the world.  And there is a  static, brittle, polarized quality to this.  Now maybe I'm romanticizing all things Eastern, as we Westerners have been known to do (egads I'm carving up the world into compass points, east & west and assigning value!  My Western roots are showing).

But today I was taken with the idea that, in everything, there is a seed of its opposite.  It reminds me of how dynamic and full of movement the world is.  It's always changing and flowing, just as they've discovered in advanced physics (and I am the last person that should be discussing anything mildly sciencey) particles are not static.  Even though things look solid and stable, at a very base level those devilish little atoms are zinging about.  From a Buddhist point of view this is an expression of  a basic truth. In Buddhism one of the marks of existence is impermanence and change.  Things are always moving, flowing, changing from one state to another even though we may be unaware of it.  We are sometimes surprised, shocked or disappointed when this truth presents itself for inspection.  What  we thought we wanted now bores us, who we love decides to leave us, or our bodies age or  get sick.  Yet if we really understand impermanence we will not be surprised by change.

Within adversity lies opportunity, expresses the idea that everything holds the seeds of its opposite.  Some event or circumstance may seem undesirable to us but if we look deeply at it we can find the opportunity.  We often learn the most from the difficult things in life.  They pull us to an edge that we are not willing to go to otherwise.  They wake us up.  The idea that there is a compassionate side to suffering was surprising to me when I first heard it.  Suffering is just suffering, I thought, something to be avoided if at all possible.  But I have come to see how  it wakes us up, shakes us up and allows us to open to the truth, whatever it is in our specific situation.  It is often said that what brings us to Buddhist practice is suffering of some sort.  

Through our suffering we learn how to be with what is.  Instead of carving our world up into what we like and don't like and rejecting parts of our experience, we get to taste it all, the sweet and the bitter and strangely our lives are fuller and richer for this.  If we suffer from some illness, not only do we get to experience the truth of sickness, (and eventually old age and death) that the Buddha observed but it may soften us up so that our hearts go out to others who are unwell.  We become more compassionate, more empathic,  more humble humans.

When things are tough we can take solace in the fact that what we find difficult, will move and shift just as surely as the things we cling to.  "And this too shall pass," can be a helpful little mantra whether it's a sunny afternoon on the mountain top or a dark night under a new moon (or if you're Pink Floyd, the dark side of the moon).  

The Zen of Right Effort

This afternoon I went to my 3 1/2 hour Qi gong class.  A big part of this practice is a meditation where you find your chi (as if you might have misplaced it somewhere. Excuse me sir, that's my chi you're sitting on.)  

The first place in the body where you are directed to focus  is at the middle dan tien, 2 finger widths below the breast bone.  After a few days if you are diligent and fortunate you may have a sense that the chi has made the short trip to the lower dan tien (or hara) just below the navel.  Then the chi's itinerary is to move down and around the back, unblocking the channels, and finally going up to the top of the head, and purchasing a round trip ticket back to the middle dan tien (never once complaining about missing a seat sale).  When this happens you have cleared the 3 major blockages in the body (lower back, mid back and back of the neck) and the chi  stops for a little celebration party in your head and then flows freely through all the channels.  This takes varying amounts of time for people depending on their level of health and commitment to the practice. 

Our trusty master always goes around the circle of students checking how our chi is and where our chi is (fine thanks for asking).  We have some advanced students in the class who have unblocked all their channels and apparently chi dances freely in their heads.  The rest of us are quite curious about this.  Our instructor encourages us to sit longer saying" it's like a putting a pot of water on to boil, if you keep taking it off the heat it will never boil."  It is a good analogy, all of us little luke warm pots, never quite turning the heat of effort and commitment up high enough.   Even though our master is a Taoist he is expressing one of the aspects of the Buddhist eightfold path, right effort.

As he makes his way around the circle a lot of people find they are too busy to do their meditation every day and he looks at them with clear eyes and tells them the times is there, that he used to work 10 hours a day at two jobs and still found time for meditation.  Rumour has it that this graceful, dignified little man used to work as a janitor at the University. 

As suggested I do my meditation diligently, twice a day, 30 minutes each time but I know those sittings are not quite enough.  I feel enthused when I hear him talk of the benefits of practice but I need to do more than feel excited about the idea once a week.   What am I doing, what are my classmates doing that prevent us from finding enough time for this valuable practice?  

I can only answer for me, but it seems that time somehow slips through my fingers.  I feel like there are not enough waking hours but in truth if I look, I squander my time as if I were going to live forever.  I have heard it said that the problem is we don't fully understand "impermanence".  If each day I reminded myself that my time here is finite and it's length unknown I might regard each moment as more precious. I might squander less. It's like water, pouring freely from the tap, we watch it wash down the drain without thought.  We need to live in the arid flats of time, our minds fully attentive to how we measure out the drops of our lives.

As it is I waste my valuable life energy zinging around on the internet, sitting in front of the television, doing goodness knows what.  It's not that I'm bad or stupid.  I'm just a little unconscious.  I need to wake up from my groggy half life. It's not a matter of becoming my own personal arm banded time police but just being more mindful, making more conscious choices.  I'm not talking about sucking the pleasure out of my day but just being aware of my intentions and priorities and making my choices from that place, choosing not to squander.  Maybe  it's about getting up an hour earlier.  Maybe it's about getting down to work when it's time, instead of doing this and that.

I have heard this topic on the lips of others this week. " I need more exercise.  I need more fresh air.  I don't want to sit so long at the computer."  (Me to myself: I need to paint more.) It seems a common problem, getting to those things we say we want to do, changing our behaviour to more wholesome states but with a little awareness, conscious intention and the grasping of our will, anything is possible.  I will end with a quote by PT Sudo, "Do not feel overwhelmed by the length of this journey.  All you ever need do is focus on one thing, what you are doing.  Stay on the path and put one foot in front of the other---- that is all.  There is joy in the struggle."

The Uncharted Territory of the Body

Ah the body ... Today I went to the first class in a set of 5 Qi Gong classes and it got me thinking about the body, that place of pain, pleasure and mystery.   I studied with this same diminutive Qi Gong master last fall and it was amazing.  He adds sitting meditation to the movements he teaches making it an especially powerful experience.  I remember a number of years ago becoming aware of how much tension was locked in my body as I sat in meditation.  Yet the practice I was engaged in didn't address this.  I could address it on my own, but there it was the vast uncharted territory of the body.  Where to start, how to proceed?  I was baffled.

I read an article called "Meditating With the Body" by Reginald Ray and that gave me a hint that working skillfully with the body was possible.  As a typical Westerner I spend a lot of time in my head and working with mental  and emotional flotsam and jetsam seems fairly straightforward, not easy, but understandable.  But the body and it's tension, it's psychosomatic language, it's aches and pains, its stubborn, frightening ailments, now how did one enter there and begin to decode these strange messages?   No secret decoder ring available in the Captain Karma Crunch.

In his book, "Touching Enlightenment (Finding Realization in the Body)" Ray says,"The body is our forest, our jungle, the "outlandish" expanse where we might allow ourselves to be stripped down to our most irreducible person and see what, if anything remains.  In this I am speaking not of the body we think we have.  Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it. To surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness."

I like the idea (ah see, there is the head!) of working with the body because it gets me out of my head and I am more likely to end up in the moment, right here, right now .... whether it be trying to sense the chi or feeling that tightness in my shoulder.  There is something I sense about it that seems like a more direct route in some cases, if this makes any sense.  

Do I understand how to work with my body?  Not really.  This is definitely a foreign land to me who is so at home in her head.  But this is an aim of mine.  Through Qi Gong I can see how to approach the body somewhat, how to feel the energy that flows through it or find energy that is blocked and working its mischief.  Sometimes those blockages can tell me things about the mental emotional state that the mind refuses to unleash.  And  really we are an integrated whole, a body/mind,  rather than a mind and a body but we tend to do the separate and compartmentalize thing here in the west.   

And then there is the issue of  balance.  One of the stories of Qi gong is that it was developed in the Shao Lin Temple as a balancing influence to their hours of intense sitting in which the body remained immobile.  And in terms of working with the body  I think we, Westerners (or should I speak only for myself?!)  are a bit  like drooling infants (pause while I wipe my chin).

As Reginald Ray reminds us in his book, "To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied.  To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation."  So it is with enthusiasm that I restart my Qi Gong practice which has fallen off during the previous months.  And I rededicate myself to navigating the mysteries of the body, working with it's energies and understanding in a different way than with my pointy little head.