Wise Heart Way

whatever ideas you might have, the opposite might also be true

The End of a Year of Slow Reading

This is my last post on The Wise Heart, and I want to begin by thanking Mary Ann for initiating this blog and maintaining it.  Doing a “slow reading” of a book with a group of good friends has been a wonderful experience, and an entirely new way to experience a text.  So thank you, Mary Ann!  Let us proceed into 2010 with Radical Acceptance.

 

Kornfield’s last chapter is called “The Awakened Heart.”  And for me, this is what the practice has been about this year--a process of opening my heart to what is present in this moment, to who I am in this moment, to what I have to offer in this moment. 

     Kornfield says, “We have within us an extraordinary capacity for love, joy, and unshakable freedom.”  I have taken to the Buddhist tradition largely because of this notion that we already possess what we most deeply desire.  Yes, we forget, but we are constantly called to wake up.  And when we wake up, we move forward in confidence knowing that we are the Four Radiant Abodes:  loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

   And Kornfield says, though these conditions may be innate, the Buddhist path uses systematic trainings to cultivate these conditions.   These trainings include meditation, visualization, directed inquiry, awareness of thoughts, attention to feelings, and other reflective practices such as writing, insight dialogue, mindful viewing, conscious breathing, progressive relaxation, and moment by moment mindfulness.  Our work together this year has been the practice of cultivating these new conditions within ourselves.

     I am grateful to the circle of Holy Friends who have participated in this collaborative enterprise of waking ourselves up to the truth of who we are and the world we inhabit, and look forward to another year of practice.  Who knows where our practice will take us this year, but as the Quakers say, “Way will open.”

THE TAO OF WINTER

The white winter moon hangs large and round in the dark. The fullness of the Yin is everywhere apparent: all is cold, dark, contracted, low. We feel the strangeness of being human, the fragility of it all. According to the Tao, winter offers stillness and clarity. Sweetie grows fat and fluffy overnight, her winter coat surprises me each year. We both stay close to the fire and my fingers stroke her silkiness. The long green spears of the Lady Palms shiver and scratch against the glass. Later, I fold myself under a thick duvet and hear my husband’s even breathing. The moonlight streaks the carpet as bright as day. This is life’s feminine, softer season and if I keep real quiet I know its true. Everything rests; nothing expands except when we close our eyes and enter the silence. Then, like walking into a field of snow, the vastness stretches without end. This year, I pledge to live in Direct Experience. I pledge to live in the Noticing. In the morning, I’ll see Florida’s yellow leaves piled on the deck by old pots that once held summer flowers. The azaleas will look gray and bitter and the tiny savannah of a front yard will be hopelessly brown. I’ll brew coffee. Then I’ll throw on my brother's huge, soft, black hoodie, open the front door to an icy blast. The cold strips everything to its core, illuminating what’s underneath. I’ll scoop up the New York Times from the bricks and life will start over again.

Trust

My wish for all of us, especially Lez during these frigid days, is trust in the process. Thank you, Border Collie Woman, for sharing your heart. Please know we support you in all the messiness and pain and chaos of this harsh life event. I've thought a lot about winter, about the natural need to retreat and I commend Lez for her wise decision to withdraw---and to feel the heartache and chaos and smashing of her best-laid plans. 

The Thicket of Views and Opinions

a follow-up to my Jan. 3 post. . .

Kornfield says “the wisdom of uncertainty frees us from what Buddhist psychology calls the thicket of views and opinions.”  This is a really great lesson for me right now.  Especially in the light of our listening to the teachings of Andrew Cohen and his comments on “undefended awareness.”  So I have held some very definite views and opinions on what I intended to do this year.  The universe has constructed circumstance such that I’m forced to drop those views and reside in uncertainty.  Kornfield says “when we are free from views, we are willing to learn.” 

His practice at the end of  chapter twenty-three is called “Don’t Know Mind,” and it’s probably yet another example of this book offering me exactly what I need at the very moment I need it.  This will become my core meditation during this week of silent retreat, and I think it’s worth copying here.  It can be found on p. 381 of The Wise Heart.

Sit quietly and easily.  Focus on your breath or body.  When you feel settled, bring to mind a time ten years ahead.  Recognize that you don’t know what will happen then.  Feel the not knowing and relax with it.  Think of the earth spinning through space with hundreds of thousands of people being born and dying every day.  Where does each life come from?  How did it start?  What changes are ahead for us?  There are so many things we don’t know.  Feel the truth of don’t-know mind, relax, and become comfortable with it.

    Now, bring to mind a conflict, inner or outer.  Be aware of all the thoughts and opinions you have about how things should be , about how other people should be.  Now recognize that you don’t really know.  Maybe the wrong thing will lead to something better.  You don’t know.

     Consider how it would be to approach yourself, the situation, the other people with don’t-know mind.  Don’t know.  Not sure.  No fixed opinion.  Allow yourself to want to understand anew.  Approach it with don’t-know mind, with openness.

     How does resting in don’t-know mind affect the situation?  Does it improve it, make it wiser, easier?  More relaxed?

     Practice don’t-know mind until you are comfortable resting in uncertainty, until you can do your best and laugh and say, “Don’t know.”

Best Laid Plans. . .

Dear Wise Hearts,

It’s the second day of my retreat, and I rise early to read The Wise Heart and do some writing.  I had wanted to finish my Wise Heart posts before the end of the year.  Alas, the soul was willing, the body not so.  The first day of a retreat is usually exhilarating for me, but yesterday was brutal.  I cried most of the day.  Undoubtedly, it is the beginning of coming to terms with some hard truths.  And the big one is this:  things are not going as I had planned.  God is laughing.  Yes, the big thought I grappled with yesterday was my deep disappointment at the huge turn of events in my sabbatical year. 

     First, the knee is healing slowly, holding me back severely in my yoga practice.  And in addition to the knee (my left), I have sustained a severe hamstring injury in my right leg.  These injuries have posed a huge problem for my yoga teacher-training.  How can I be a yoga teacher when I can’t seem to do yoga very well?  The skill of any teaching grows out of the depth of the teacher’s practice.  And though I do have a deep practice in breathing, moving, and striving for focus on the mat, and though I do practice the ashtanga eight-limbed path, I don’t have a strong or flexible asana practice right now.  This causes me distress.  And if I examine this distress, I would surely find it based in ego (the ego loves to quantify things, doesn’t it?).  I want to present myself in a certain positive and successful way for my students and fellow practitioners (and certainly for my teachers), and for right now, that is not going to happen on the mat.  And since the mat has become a huge metaphor for life, I have to examine how this belief plays out in other areas.  Another opportunity for practice.

   There are great contradictions, though, in this state of events.  First, right at the time when I seem to be debilitated, Theresa and Calvin are entrusting me with more and more opportunities to teach.  I am so happy about this.  And Jeff Davis has asked me to be a part of a small core of yogi/writers who will go through his first intensive training to be facilitators of Yoga as Muse workshops.  So opportunities for growth have not stopped, even though it appears my qualifications are questionable.  I cannot tell you how this has shaken my confidence.  

     Second disappointment and alteration to Lezlie’s plans for the sabbatical: the book stalls out.  Comes to a crashing halt, actually, at the end of October.  I cried, I was afraid, I wanted to quit.  It was a very familiar pattern for Lezlie:  things get hard and I cave.  Jeff helped me tremendously, becoming not just my writing coach, but my therapist, too.  I wondered if my extreme anxiety about and dislike of writing was a sign that I simply should not be doing it.  Aren’t we called to be joyful?  If so, why do I keep returning to what makes me unhappy?  (Could this be yet another demonstration of a destructive conditioned response??)  I’ve written about this in other blogs, so I won’t belabor this point YET AGAIN.  Still these feelings have been baffling and confidence rocking. 

    Then, Tim Lynch sends me an email on his reading of scientist Paul Dirac.  Dirac, commenting on the process of creative discovery, says that this process is riddled with anxiety.  “Anxiety (not joy), felt during the creative process, is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the breakthrough.”  Aha!  Maybe what I’m experiencing is the beginning of breakthrough!   But how do I know?  How do I know this?  I need confidence to move forward.

    And finally, the third blow of the greatly anticipated year of white space came last month when it was discovered there is a mass of cells-gone-wild in my left breast.  The last six weeks have been filled with brutal tests, doctor’s appointments, and research scary enough to send me to Pine Lawn to buy a plot.  Surgery will take place in two weeks, followed by radiation, and I don’t know how many weeks of further debilitation.   This seems like much more than a minor derailing of my plans.  It seems like a multiple-car train wreck.  Everything is in disarray.  Cars are strewn all over the place and it will take an energy greater than my own to get them back on track.

   Again, the wretched ego rears its knobby head.  In addition to the huge distraction that surgery and recovery pose for me, there is the dealing with another huge contradiction to my version of identity.  I have thought of myself as a person of health, of energy, of fitness.  I am not that person any longer and this is unnerving and anxiety inducing.   I know (hope) this is a temporary state of being.  I know I have the ability to heal.  I know I will muster the energy to work toward healing.  I will do what is necessary because I can “do the work.”  But it just wasn’t part of my plans.  And I fear that, at my age, the chances for full recovery are fairly slim.  So goes one version of Lezlie’s identity.    

     I know, I know, I already hear what you’re saying:  No, Lezlie, this is a good thing!  Stripping away the “personal” versions of self is exactly what evolution is all about.  I get it.  But I’m just trying to tell you what is in my heart right now, in spite of what my head knows.  I’m sad, and disappointed, and fearful, and I’m not quite sure how to proceed.  What am I supposed to be now that my identity props are buckling underneath me?  The small self is pretty much ruling the roost these days, scrambling for territory in a mad panic.  I’d rather things be going another way, even though I know there is much to gain from these apparent losses.  Right now, I can’t see myself on the other shore, though I want to have full faith that I will get there.

     So, from one perspective, projects of the sabbatical come to a standstill.  I can hear what you’re saying, again, this time you’re jumping up and down and saying it louder:  “YES, YES, Lezlie, this may be true (temporarily) IF you assume that writing the book and doing yoga are the primary projects of the sabbatical.  But what about the larger project?  The project of Lezlie growing up and stepping more fully into her skin?”  Yes, I remember that project.  I just didn’t expect it would be quite this hard.

    But what about my plans? I can hear myself whining.  There’s a little girl inside me who is throwing a fit.  She feels completely dismissed, and quite frankly she feels completely helpless.  She as no idea how to proceed, how to think about herself, how to fix herself, how to make decisions about the future.

    In this state this first Sunday morning of the new decade, I pick up Kornfield’s The Wise Heart.  In Chapter 23 he writes about being at ease with insecurity.  It’s so easy to talk about this as a useful practice—until you’re really in a state of insecurity, and your mind is fighting to find some tiny bit of firm ground, and you’re flailing against a self-declared set of conditions that suddenly appear untenable.  What if I can’t do yoga any more?  What if I really can’t write a mediocre book, much less a good one?  What if my version of a future has to be amended?   Such thoughts reduce bold, happy, confident, capable Lezlie to a wobbly bowl of insecurity. 

    But Kornfield says we can bring fearlessness and trust to any circumstance.    He talks at length about trusting the process of life.  Andrew Cohen talks about trusting the process, too—and learning to participate in the process.   I have wise teachers all around me.  Kornfield quotes a Zen text:  “To live in trusting mind is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.”  To live in trusting mind.  I must cultivate a way to live in trusting mind.  He says, “Instead of struggling to perfect the world, we relax, we rest in the uncertainty” (372).

This is, of course, good advice, and as I read this chapter, I can feel the tightness in my chest loosening a bit.  But just a bit.  Because right now, in my current state of disappointment, I don’t know quite how to do this.  But I have no choice right now but to try.  My plan for this year is demolished. My version of perfection is out the window.  I have no idea how to proceed. But the practice abides:  To breathe.  To sit.  To get quiet.   It’s the hardest practice I’ve undertaken.

P.S.      I feel the need to place a small disclaimer on these comments, for fear I seem to be catastrophizing the physical challenges of the moment. Please know that I am very aware that my physical challenges are not life-threatening, or even life-style threatening.  The body will repair.  I know so many people who are facing life-threatening physical challenges, and I do not in any way want to equate my problems to theirs.  It’s the state of being that resides under my health issues that is the core of this writing.  My willingness to be aware of life as it emerges, to resist judging what emerges, to experience what emerges fully, and to be open to the wisdom that every experience offers up.

test your awareness

2009 summary and 2010 intention

This post comes out of the ILP retreat and follow-up, but also my year-long slow read of Wise Heart, the many conversations I have with friends about our relationships to ourselves, others, and the world, and the psychological work I've done in group. More than ever I believe that the psychological work and the spiritual work are the same. "Faith" in a greater consciousness or greater good or God or whatever you want to call it, is something I have never understood or felt, although I know I have felt the longing for it. This year I have experienced a glimmer of it. I don't believe that it's something I can or will pursue in and of itself, but it seems to be a natural development of other work I'm doing, and I can see how once certain doors are open it's probably impossible to close them again.

Thanks are not enough to express to Lezlie for organizing and hosting ILP retreat and giving us opportunity to learn from Andrew Cohen and each other. How blessed are we to have the Border Collie, always gathering and herding us towards the next interesting place in our lives!?

I've been thinking a lot about my intention (small i) for the coming year. I don't know that I have made the big I Intention, the evolutionary kind Andrew Cohen describes. Honestly, I'm not sure I truly understand what that means. As I say, I have experienced glimmers. But I can't quite hold onto those glimmers -- yet, anyway.  If I am part of the evolution the greater consciousness as Cohen describes it, I believe I am in the amoeba contingent.

But I'm not going to get hung up on where I am, because right now it feels too much like trying to measure up to some standard, and that kind of thinking is not useful. Evolutionary or not, I am committed to change and growth. I feel incredibly fortunate to have friends who support and encourage that and compel me to think and feel in different ways.

As you know, I've been involved in group therapy for almost two years. I cannot fully express how important this work has been and how much I have been changed by it. Most importantly I feel like I have finally acquired the tools for what is really the life-long, never-ending work of a conscious human being. Godsends, these tools. I've done a lot of work with  mindfulness meditation, with recognizing my limiting beliefs and defended behaviors, with uncovering buried feelings and memories that have driven those behaviors, and with recognizing my life experiences are not personal. All the work I've done with group has also been supported by my reading of Wise Heart Way.

Although I've taken giant steps, in the great stream of things, I know they're really baby steps. (When I get upset with myself for not making more progress or falling back even my son will remind me -- it's practice, all you have to do is the practice.)  I am committed to continuing this work and remaining in the process. I feel a deep trust that my practice will continue to help me grow and change my relationship to myself, others, and the world. That's my intention, my commitment for the coming year and for all years and every day to be in this process of becoming more aware.

The most important thing I have learned over the last two years is how blind and deaf I have been and continue to be in my own life. Using the tools I've acquired, I can continue to practice increasing my awareness. But frankly, I've learned  it's best for me to assume I am always deluded. Always, always deluded. 

I love what Lezlie  suggested we do at our ILP retreat -- calling each other on expressions of limiting beliefs. I want to reiterate an open invitation to you, my friends, to point out where I am deluded. Just don't be surprised when I don't seem to hear you though. I know there is a lot I don't hear or see, and I also know I am a very slow learner when it comes to my own life.

As important as you, my friends are (Holy Friends as Lezlie would say) -- incredibly important  -- my therapist and my therapy group are also important to the change and growth process. I would still be blubbering out of control in Lezlie's living room, as I did two years ago, if it weren't for Peter compassionately holding my feet to the fire or if I hadn't learned from the inner lives revealed by others.

Thanks to Lezlie for nudging me towards therapy and thanks to providence for creating a venue that seems perfectly designed for me. (Mindfulness based cognitive therapy with a group dynamic.) There is a level of openness and accountability that happens in group that is unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it just doesn't happen, probably can't happen, even among friends as close as we are, although we edge more towards the ability to do that for each other.

I'm surprised and grateful for the therapy group experience which inspired exponential growth in compassion for myself and for others. The group experience allows me to take myself seriously and not so seriously at the same time. That's huge. My spirit and my heart are palpably lighter. And I'm like a kid with a new toy, wishing everyone, my friends and family, could experience what I have experienced in group. (Maybe you already have -- but don't be too sure.)

Anyway. End of summary. Onward and upward.

Besides an ongoing commitment to stay in the process of becoming more aware, I do have a specific area I want to focus on (open to) this coming year: acceptance and forgiveness. Those words came to me several weeks ago and they stuck, like lighthearted did this year, but the words make me uneasy and I've been reluctant to commit. I realize that's because acceptance and forgiveness are hiding behind who-knows-what in the dark, dank, cobwebby cellar of my mind, a place I don't like to visit.  (I am absolutely sure it's also hiding in fat cells on my body, by the way.) So yes, Cohen's directive to face everything/avoid nothing is a good one for me in 2010. My intention is to open myself to acceptance and forgiveness.

My slow-reading book for the coming year is Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. It's been on my list for years, and I think it will be perfect for me now. I have been lax about blogging, but I will keep posting here from time to time here about my reading and journey towards becoming ever more aware. I  invite you to do the same if it will be helpful for you. Contact me if you need log in information.

Gratitude for Friends--and for the middle way.

Dear Kären and Mary Ann, fellow wise-heart bloggers,

I’m returning to The Wise Heart this morning, after a month-long hiatus from it.  I’ve missed it. This morning I read the first half of Ch. 23, Kornfield’s description of the Middle Way.  And once again, I enjoy the remarkable experience of thinking that the universe has constructed experience specifically for my benefit. This reading could not have been more perfect for me at this moment in my life.

So first, before I summarize what he has said—for summarize is about the most that can be done, since what is says is so pure, so clear, so devoid of ornament, leaving nothing to do for those of us who depend on mere interpretation to get us through life—I have to speak directly to the two of you.  I want to express my deep gratitude to both of you for your friendship and especially for the support and wisdom you have shared with me in the last two weeks.  From both of you, I have received wisdom, compassion, and love that the Buddhist principles exhort us to embrace.  From both of you I have received comfort.  With both of you, I feel safe and cared for.  This is a gift beyond the capacity of my humble words to express.  But please know, as I read this chapter this chilly, rainy morning, and really felt the enormous insights it holds, I thought of both of you with every sentence.  I thank you from the bottom of my pitiful little heart for your presence in my life.
 
So, right off the bat (again) Kornfield speaks directly to me with the quotation from Sutta Nipata:

At one time I had wanted to find someplace where I could take shelter, but I never saw any such place.  There is nothing in this world that is solid at base and not a part of it that is changeless.

I should restrict my comments to just this single quotation, for it is the heart of so much misguided thinking in our world.  I am certainly a victim of the belief that shelter can be found, firm footing is around the corner, permanent comfort is at hand.  In fact, I could probably trace most actions of my life to this belief.  I have worked and studied and controlled and striven in virtually every arena of my life to find solid ground.  To arrive.  To feel successful or secure or happy or worthy or lovely or even just OK.  All of these actions represent some form of attachment or aversion.  Most of these actions rely on controlling or changing things on the outside in such a way that I gain comfort, albeit temporary.  Push and pull.  Drive and stop.  Grasp and let go. Be still, take action.  Speak, be silent.  I have volleyed back and forth between various forms of anxiety and ecstasy.
    
The middle way, of course, cautions against such behavior, suggests there is a space, a point of being, where we “come to rest between the play of opposites” (368).  Kornfield says, “Learning to rest in the middle way requires trust in life itself” (368).
      
Just now, I’m reading the works of Jon Katz who writes beautifully of this challenge in Running to the Mountain.  He describes his own struggle to seek solitude and spiritual growth and simultaneously reside in the world of family, bookstores and pizza palors.   His is thoughtful and sometimes hilarious personal journey that revolved around buying a rustic cabin in upstate New York and trying to be in the world but not of it.  Thinking he was going to have scads of time and energy for the creative life, he finds himself overwhelmed with maintaining decent living conditions on his mountaintop.  Chaos reigned for months.
    
I can identify.  Thinking I was in clear, open, white space, I now face a personal challenge that seems an annoying deterrence from the work I had planned to do at this point in my sabbatical, in my life.  My health issues put me at the brink of distress, of disunity.  My body is acting oblivious to my own natural good will for myself.  Ha.  And here comes Kornfield saying be “open to the way things are . . . learn to embrace tension, paradox, change . . . instead of seeking resolution” (369).
   
So what to do?  Faced with a circumstance over which I would love to assert control, to find quick resolution, I am forced to recognize the middle way and find well-being right where I am. The relentless “fixer” has to stand down.  What a practice.
 
Kornfield concludes this section on the middle way by reminding us we can “bring fearlessness and trust to any circumstances” (373).  I know this moment in my life is an opportunity to really get this lesson.  But I also know that I can trust that I don’t have to get the lesson alone.  You have both said this to me.  I have fellow-students right by my side, comforting me, guiding me, encouraging me,  teaching me, walking the middle way.

Last Chapter!

Practice: Meditations on Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Gratitude and Joy