Seasonal Koan: What's The Opposite of Namaste?

10"x10" Deep In The Forest

It's that time of year when the opportunity to see if you're enlightened offers itself up to you. It's kind of like a little gift disguised as family dressed up in holiday duds. It's our collective opportunity to put our practice where our mouth is, if you care to see it that way. You know that quip, "if you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family." Well here come the holidays. My mother used to say we all have our own "mishigas" (which means craziness in Yiddish) and this time of year brings it out.  Mostly we panic, grit our teeth and fall victim to our old familiar "pain speech".  Here they are, our "famous person(s) ringing the doorbell, all ready to drag us through our personal mishigas.  It's kind of like the reverse of "Namaste", it's "the pain in me recognizes the pain in you", and we're off to the races.  We become the living embodiment of the email that should have been left in the "draft" folder.

16"x16" Crossing The Inner Landscape

But there are other ways, really, I'm not kidding you, not that I'm so skilled, but I'm working on it. This fall I attended several retreats with a Buddhist teacher whose wisdom speaks directly to my heart: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. He talks about how we are constantly "draining" ourselves, depleting our precious human battery. And it's bad enough when that happens to your car, but we tend to forget  about what's under our human hood. And when we feel our depletion do we know how to nourish and recharge ourselves? Do we think TV or a glass of wine, or a little treat might do the trick? Perhaps temporarily, but then we end right back there in drain mode. Tenzin Wangyal's teachings aim at connecting us with the stillness of the body, the silence of our speech and the spaciousness of our minds so that we might consistently nourish that deep place in us the is the source of our strength, peace, creativity and fearlessness.

10"x10" Notes From The Evening

How do we remember to pause and connect with our inner refuges of stillness, silence and spaciousness when Uncle Henry tells the same story for the 10th time?  Tenzin Wangyal offers us a great little trick. When we feel the tug of that pain that's just the reminder we need.  And mostly we're pretty familiar with those painful feelings, it's just we forget the next step.  We either sink deeply into the pain or reject it completely, or maybe dance between the two. His suggestion is that the nagging thoughts of the egoic mind that are constantly finding fault can remind us to connect with the stillness of our bodies. The nattering of our internal voice or perhaps our unkind speech to others is the reminder to connect with silence.  And our crazy imaginings, run wild can offer us the opportunity to sense the space that is always around and within us.

16"x16" Cloud Mountain

In his attempts to help us bring our practice into the parts of our life that need it the most he suggests we think of it as a game.  Our challenge is how can we win at this tricky, moving, ever challenging game of deinstalling the things that push our buttons.  This can help make our "problems" lively in  an upbeat way that encourages us to work with them rather than lament them or crumple from them into the perfect little Christmas ball.  What's your game this season?  May it be merry and bright. 

ps: with many thanks to technical wizardry of Lynette Monteiro for helping me retrieve this lost post from the ether. Many bows to her.  

Panhandling for Dharma

I am the little bear doing somersaults on the easel, or at least that's me goofing off.  I'm doing a little big city living in a downtown condo in Vancouver high above the city on the 11th floor of a very swanky condo.  We're doing another home exchange and it's always interesting to move into someone else's living space for a little while.  There is always this period of transition at first, the feeling of being unsettled and not knowing quite what to do, a strange restlessness, a discomfort, but not quite.

It's interesting to see that I felt much more at home in the 2 island exchanges.  There is a constant din of traffic and sirens and car alarms and horns and while I always think I love the light, these floor to ceiling windows make me feel like a goldfish in a bowl.  There is no respite from the visual and auditory stimulation.  And while up front I don't feel overtly bothered by it, I sense a background, subliminal feeling of overload, if that makes any sense.  I couldn't imagine passing all my days here.  And while I know that quiet comes from within, I have a sense that until you are a very advanced practitioner, you need that outer silence as well, to help you connect with the inner silence.

What I love about the big city is the people watching.  There is such diversity, so many different, interesting sorts.  Today I saw an older woman pushing a baby stroller and instead of having a baby in the seat, she had a tame white duck or goose sitting on the canopy of the stroller.  A live goose in downtown Vancouver, I swear.  Standing on the corner waiting for the light to change as if this was quite common place.  As if she might meet another person coming down the street with say a small fox perched on a wagon.  Who am I to say what is normal or odd or how reality should unfold?  And as we strolled down Commercial Street, we notice a rather cool looking guy dressed all in black sitting in front of a closed shop.  Placed about 6 feet in front of him was a small table with some flowers in a pop bottle and a little sign that said: "Last Chance Counseling Service"  If I had a little more nerve I might have gone and asked for some.  He looked a little wise, like he'd been around the block once or twice.  And what was he doing there?  Was he offering a service?  Was he trying to make some money?  

And then there are all the homeless folk, asking for money, trying to sell you a bookmark, or a poem or just lying on the sidewalk with a newspaper for a pillow.  My heart goes out to them.  And I wonder, "what is it good to do?"  I know some people very firmly believe that you shouldn't give them money.  They just spend it on their "habits".  I have such mixed feelings about it.  Sometimes I give.  Sometimes I don't.  But one thing I try and do is offer them something, a smile, a word, a look that says yes I see you.  You exist for me.    A couple of years ago I attended a talk by a young man who had done the street Dharma practice where you go out and live on the street for a couple of days.  He talked about his panhandling experience and how he felt invisible and less than human because people turn away.  We turn away because we're uncomfortable, embarrassed, not interested.  But we forget that there is another human being on the other end of the turning away.  For us, the entitled, it may seem hard to understand how someone can be diminished when we look away.  After that I realized that it is very small offering, but it is always available for me to give, a bit of dignity offered in the willingness to look  you in the eye.

So that's my big city Dharma.  The noise reminds me of how important silence is to me.   And I get to experience a huge range of human diversity here where the sites and sounds are multiplied and magnified.   I can watch us strange and miraculous human entities, each with our own karma playing itself out.  I can offer what small thing I have, a bit of myself.  And I can live for a short time up in the sky, behind glass,  with the city lights twinkling all around me like stars, remembering all the strange things I have seen, which include a small package in an apartment window that contained jasmine scented angel snot (I am not kidding, I saw it with my own eyes) and I'd only had a single glass of wine!

The Zen of Writing Without Words

When I started writing "100 Days of Dharma" at the beginning of January I didn't think about how many words I'd be spilling out on to the page.  It never occurred to me that I'd become conscious of talking too much.  There are many things we can't see when we set out on our travels, namely what lies round the bend.  So here I am thinking about  "right speech", one of the tenets of the eightfold path that leads to the end of suffering.  One of the aspects of right speech is not engaging in idle chatter.  Now I don't think of this as idle chatter, but on many occasions I have thought of it as too many words.  

So then I have my koan, how do I write "100 Days of Dharma" without words?  I could simply say enough words and stop, or write less frequently (which in truth would be much more convenient for me) but I want to complete my 100 Days of Dharma for a variety of reason.  I guess I am curious to see if I can do it.   And it feels like good Dharma practice to go through with it,  good discipline.  When I look inside, the combination of writing and the Dharma have clicked into their little lock position.  And it's a way to build a little writing muscle, weight lifting the alphabet.  

Originally it was my plan to just write in a private journal, you know one with a lovely cover and lined pages.  I think if I'd done that I might not be wondering if it were too many words, but that's speculation at this point.  I ended up in the blogosphere because of an Etsy tip that suggested a blog was a good companion to your shop.  Supposedly I was to write about Etsy related stuff.  Yet the blogging immediately took on a life of it's own that doesn't have a huge amount to do with Etsy other than providing a little welcome mat to the shop.

When I started I thought the blog will make me more committed, less likely to abandon the empty page when the first pang of sloth & torpor hit (sound like a couple of cartoon characters don't they?).   The threat of a little public shaming is apparently effective for me.  But I think the public nature of the writing is also what leads me to ask  " is this too many words?"  Then I have to ask why is this?  Is it my ego, my little self again, primping and straightening in front of the mirror?  Am I simply worried that you will think I'm a blabbermouth, a bag of self inflated hot air, a windbag of tornado proportions, a blathering bombastic Buddha babbler (okay enough already) ?  I think if I am to be truthful there is some of that.

So I am thinking about silence, the fact that we need silence to get to know ourselves, that our true realizations often come when we are sitting silently.  And that in general I know I'd be better off if I listened more and talked less.  And so there is the work for today and always. And so I will end with fewer words than usual perhaps, a fitting ode to silence and right speech and with a quote from Sengstau, the 3rd Zen Patriarch "The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth."  I think I am going to need a very big bag of bread crumbs to get me home, Hansel.