See You In August!

It is that time of year. I consider it the last hurrah of summer. Harvest Time. the true end of the season for productivity, the beginning of the time for introspection. Time to get together and celebrate, reflect, and gather the seeds of the future. A New Year's Eve of sorts. The rhythm of my life marks time with this event.

When a womyn's thoughts turn to the Midwest, and tent seam sealer is applied!

I am leaving for Cleveland tomorrow. A flurry of excited packing and errands all day today. Then we caravan from Cleveland to the Festival. My 16th consecutive Festival is this year. Festival is becoming just a more elaborate backdrop for this "Family Reunion" with the best girlfriends a woman could ever have. These are the women I will live with like the Golden Girls when that time comes.

I'll be back mid-August, all relaxed and refreshed. The energy I usually spend with my car keys between my knuckes and checking to see if my doors are locked will be spent laughing. You'd be amazed how much energy that is. It's like a big gear shift from caution to joy, and I simply refuse to do without it for a single year.

Travel safely my sistahs!

The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Non-Doing and John Tarrant

I want John Tarrant, Roshi to be my cool Uncle that I can call up and have lunch with from time to time. John Tarrant currently teaches at the Pacific Zen Institute in the San Francisco Bay area. He's had lots of incarnations -- Jungian analyst, accomplished poet, lobbyist for Aboriginal rights in Australia (he's from Tasmania), factory worker, industrial fisherman, and on and on. He has written a couple books, one of which is called Bring Me the Rhinoceros & Other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy.
I went to see a talk he gave, and a workshop at the Unitarian Church, who sponsored him to come to Portland. It was a wonderful introduction to koan practice, which had been totally mysterious to me -- well, it still is. But now it's just slightly less scary, because I can now hear the koans in his warm Tasmanian accent.

He has an earlier book called The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life. This book brings a lot of his Jungian influence, and is easy to open at any page to just enjoy a painting with words, really, that blends archetype and Zen, human experience and light.

Here is one of my favorite parts of his book. That rumbling underground you hear is my Puritan ancestors spinning in their graves.

Doing Nothing

We often forget the value of allowing the night and the day to flow in and out of the house while, on the hillside, the grass grows by itself. In general we are not lazy enough, and struggle too hard. Anyone can achieve things but to do nothing requires resolve. To become one with sitting is to become one with walking, with working, with jumping about, with being sad, with falling in love. The world goes its way, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and we are at home. What our integrity leads us to do then is what the old Chinese teachers called "the things of Buddha" -- eating, drinking, laughing, feeding the children, weeping, burying the dead.

The man whose aorta split open at sea said that when he was recovering after surgery, he noticed something: "The habit body, the opinions and thoughts that I normally carry around was quiet. Usually they make a kind of veil, or a buffer over things. But they were silent. And that was very nice."
When we let drop the veils of our usual preconceptions, we are closer to our lives, sustained without knowing why. When we cannot see how healing or the next step in our lives will appear, and no longer know what we can expect, the step we must take just emerges out of nothingness, like the grass. What rises to meet our need comes from a domain deeper than the realm of custom, more ancient, beneath our feet and our awareness, thousand armed, beyond our control. To live without veils, in modesty and unknowing, is to trust the abyss, as a swimmer trusts to the ocean, and gently moves both hands and feet; it is to flow through the day like boys on a raft down the Mississippi. The old Chinese teachers called such activity "doing nothing," or "not-doing." This doing nothing is an inner event that can take place in strenuous action or utter stillness. To do nothing is always harder than we imagine.
Not-doing, in which we lounge around and loaf at our ease, is a kind of falling out of our lives, the way when his aorta split the man fell through and beyond his habits. Visible and invisible hands reach out and we find that we have always been supported by much that is unknown ans beyond our plans. Just as Alice, in the surprising, uncontrollable moment of dropping down the rabbit hole, found a marmalade jar on a shelf, we meet common things in a field of wonder. The orderly progress of breakfast, lunch, and dinner catches us and there is the beauty of work, tea, jam on toast, the body's cabinet of pains, the quick feet of rain scratching toward us over dry leaves.
Unlike ordinary laziness, in which we merely avoid something we think we ought to be doing, the laziness of not-doing has a refined and charged quality. By comparison, ordinary laziness is hard work, and requires distraction. When we truly do nothing, a fertile, widening silence appears. Close to the mystery, we drift along. There is no resistance to delusion, yet delusion can find no ground to cling to. In the midst of action we rely on the stillness that is everywhere present. If the world is imagining itself without our existence, why then, we let it do so. When we truly do nothing, we allow that falling can be good, that arms might catch us when we do fall, that the world may sustain and surprise us at the same time. We respond naturally, witnessing the web of life of which we are a part, just as water runs downhill and the white clouds run before a breeze.
After a certain point, knowing and effort don't bring us into closer harmony with eternity; our love for fragile creatures provides a route. Francis of Assisi spoke with the birds. The Japanese poet Issa was concerned for the little forms of life:

Don't worry spiders,
I keep house
casually.
Not-doing, having no urgent plans, we dawdle in the intimate while, like a child jumping puddles on the way home from school. The world comes to us then, and we belong in it, in the morning light at equinox, with the hawks swinging on the updrafts over the headlands and, in the afternoon, with the fog rising out of the ocean to fling itself, kraken-like, onto the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. At last we are at home in this fleeting life.

Where have I been?

I have returned from a fairly arduous journey to the Omega Institute in New York State, and then Worcester, Mass. All this to train in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR. This, as you may recall, has been a piece that is falling into place since I've been working on the puzzle of burnout and professional drifting.
It took three airplanes, a hotel for one night, and then a $90 taxi ride (which I thankfully got to share with someone) just to get to Omega. Some moments in the trip were quite stressful, as there were many transitions, and often, arrangements were to be made at the last minute, it was not clear how we might get from one place to another, etc. I decided that this was all part of the weeding-out process -- how badly do you want this training? I found myself thinking about Huike, the Second Chinese Ancestor of Zen, who stood in the snow outside Bodhidharma's cave for years waiting for instruction, then finally cut off his right arm. Bodhidharma only then agreed to give him the teachings. Okay, so it wasn't that bad! I was going to make a note of the difficulty on my comment card, when I realized that getting there was difficult for everybody. Oh. Nevermind. We got to participate in a 5-Day scrunching of a usual 8-week MBSR course. Then we moved to Worcester, and the UMass Medical Center the epicenter of MBSR, and home of the Center for Mindfulness, to discuss what we learned, and continue to incorporate the fundamental attitudes and philosophies into our bones.

There were people there from all over the country, and all over the world: Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, UK, France, Italy. It was a lot of fun to get to know these colleagues, and to spend such intimate time together. I think I will never forget serious Mattias from Norway, who, in a difficult-to-detect moment of levity, mentioned that in the CFM offices, he had found and sat in Jon Kabat-Zinn's chair, reporting in near-deadpan delivery and Norwegian accent, "And I think I am still high from it."
There were many lovely moments as well as plenty of irritations. Much like any retreat, much like any life. I enjoyed connecting with another Zennie and admitting that we had had it with all the talking and processing (a major component of MBSR and a very helpful way for beginners to begin to get a sense of practice) and just wanted to sit! We also decided that we would write our own book, called Mindful Bitchiness, and go on the retreat circuit, making millions. I still blame the hip-openers in the yoga portions of the retreat for releasing the bitchiness I apparently store in that part of my body. >:( grrrr

I have a lot of respect for Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of MBSR. He can easily be credited with bringing meditation into the medical mainstream. I'm glad somebody wants to actually do research. A portion of our training was about learning how the mind-body split happened (see Descartes), and the impact it has on us as individuals, patients, medical providers, etc.
The making of an MBSR teacher is a lengthy process, and that is as it should be. I have come out knowing a little better what I have and what I need to be a beginner MBSR instructor. I am so far doing all right with not imposing some time frame on myself, or having some particular idea of how this needs to happen, but rather letting it unfold, and choosing to take the steps I need in this gradual process -- to participate in a daily yoga and meditation practice, choosing to obtain support from going to yoga classes and meditation retreats, and now I have a mountain of supporting materials -- articles, meditation and yoga CDs to transcribe... and to gather a group of 6 or more friends / family / colleagues / hapless victims who will continue to show up for 2 1/2 hours a week and love me anyway as I practice my first 8-week course on them. eeek!
In moments of clarity, which tend to come from long silent retreats, I know deeply, physically that there is nothing more important than becoming aware of this life. It is something we all share, but that is so easy to forget. MBSR brings meditation and mindfulness to everyone. There is no spiritual language, no esoteric chanting, no shroud of the metaphysical, no intimidating rituals, no matching clothing, not even a charismatic leader! It's just moving through a few basic body practices, noticing our bodies and minds --without trying to change anything -- just noticing, accepting, or maybe not accepting, but noticing the not-accepting, and then noticing some more.

And from one my favorite (and only slightly esoteric) chants: "Moment after moment there is nothing but this."