Day of Mindfulness

I got to lead a Day of Mindfulness today. I was inspired to write something poem-like. Enjoy!

"Day of Mindfulness"

I got to see the sunlight fall just right

along the corkscrew filbert

I got to feel the gentle attention

of the breeze and

watch the pansies

nodding and shaking their heads,

“Yes! No!”

I got to lift my nose to the smell of blooming and

with a glance, by chance

I got to catch the moment the spider’s web

caught the air and with

complete faith in the wind and

complete confidence in herself

up up up

she flew with no discernible way to steer

Apparently the pear leaves became

three inches long in the night, and

today I got to see them. Each one.

I got to hear the neighbors fire up their lawn mowers and

I got to watch judgment and irritation

streak across like comets.

I got to feel tiredness behind my eyes

and I got to

get chilly as the sun went down.

I got to sit quietly and see clearly and melt,

grateful into this world.

Absorbed

The blog has been a little quiet lately. I am absorbing some recent food sensitivity testing (ah, West Coast). It's like absorbing a bowling ball, now that I realize this body may not optimally benefit from the foods that have been primary in my diet for years: Dairy, eggs, soy, and wheat effing gluten. There are a few more oddities, like almonds and flax.

It's been about a week since I've gone off these foods. It's taken most of my attention. I'll be reintroducing them in the next little while to see how the body does. It's a very experiential, observational process, which I appreciate.

First realization: NOBODY wants to be this person!

Second realization: I have been rather unconscious about my food choices. I do pretty well being awake and aware in the moment of eating. But wow, that cheese habit was an ingrained rut, even as a student of the Roshi of Mindful Eating!

Third realization: I am noticing a much more stable energy. My usual energy crashes at 10am (followed by mozzarella stick or yogurt) and 3pm (followed by cheese & crackers with tea) have not happened in the last couple days. I even forgot to eat dinner the other night. Lunch and dinner time roll around, and it is a surprise to me. One I can even put off with no discomfort. This is new and interesting. The Naturopath I have been seeing uses the metaphor of using the wrong fuel in your car -- it won't run as well, and could even be damaging. Right fuel, optimal operation!

My aspiration is to find the Middle Way in this: Somewhere between complete refusal to deal and aggressively neurotic obsessiveness.

Just letting Wallace & Gromit enjoy the cheese & crackers for me for a while.

See below

Re: My last post, or, the mind as carnival duck pond game.

Sitting a Zazenkai today, this was an entertaining distraction. Enjoy:

Pick a Winner Every Time!

During Sesshin, in our efforts to empty the mind, Chozen Roshi reassured that it is not really possible to stop the mind. She referred to the term mindstream. This is apparently a term used more commonly in Theravada and Vajrayana practices, and after looking it up, I am perhaps even a bit more confused than I was before, so forgive me if I am not communicating about it clearly. Basically the point is that the mindstream is continuous, and flows even through lifetimes. Purifying the mindstream, as I understand it, is about reducing and removing the pollutants of greed, anger and ignorance.

It's easy for me to visualize the "stream of consciousness" or the "stream of thought." This common metaphor encourages us to sit on the banks, watching a little stream, and observing the leaves of thought and sensation innocently floating by. I would add, perhaps a bit judgmentally, observing the random trash floating by, particularly my "greatest hits," which are my most repetitive thoughts. With practice, the stream might sometimes slow down to some degree, but really doesn't altogether stop. The trick is to stay on the banks, rather than reaching out and grabbing hold of any of the tempting items floating by.

While it may still be true that my mind is a 2-year-old black lab that eats poop, it would also seem that my mind is the duck pond at the fair.

Pick a Lucky Duck originally uploaded by dcjohn

Pick a winner every time! A game requiring no skill! A prize every time! I remember playing the duck pond carnival game as a child. I remember the ducks had numbers written on the bottoms, in permanent marker. If you picked a duck with the number one on the bottom, you won the big fluffy huge pink teddy bear dangling at the top of the kiosk. But as the numbers got higher, those were the less desirable, and much more common prizes.

I think I might have been about seven years old when I last played this game. I, of course, picked a high number. I "won" -- I am not kidding -- a Roy Rogers poster.

Now, nothing against Roy Rogers -- he was a sweet man. But what kid on earth wants a Roy Rogers poster in the late 70's? Where did they even get this "prize"? The funny thing was, I actually put it up in my room for a while. I won it, right?

I am always similarly tempted to reach out and grab items of thought in the mindstream. But they tend to be the same things over and over -- just like the duck pond and its circular stream -- the same little duck-thoughts over and over, despite how important the mind insists they are, the endless hope and the mind's insistence that this time, this thought is the enormous pink teddy bear, not the Roy Rogers poster.

But just like at the fair, each thought really is always the Roy Rogers poster. And there is nothing more satisfying than going to the fair, watching those cute little ducks just float on by, and leaving emptyhanded.

prize everytime originally uploaded by pulpmojo

Pari-Nirvana Sesshin

The Reclining Buddha, Ancient City, Bangkok, originally uploaded by Miek37

I'm not sure what I expected, but my expectations did not, of course, resemble reality. The Teisho were all about the Buddha's last weeks of life, and his teachings during this time. This much I expected. But what I wasn't expecting (why not?) was that we meditated upon death -- our own death -- for the week:

Breathing each breath as if it were our last. Eating each meal as if it were our last. Visualizing our own death on the cushion in as much detail as possible. Then visualizing the responses of others in those first moments, a day after... a week after, maybe a memorial service. Then one month, 6 months, a year, 5 years, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years later. What endures?

I was surprised by how quickly life moves on. What a self-centered and wrong view -- that the whole world will stop upon my death. Sure, there would be a few people who would really be hurting with the loss for a while. But for the most part, and in the long run, it's like taking a spoonful of dry sand out of the beach. It all just fills right back in.

We held the awareness of the inevitability of death for ourselves and also for others. We were encouraged to look upon others as we passed, worked, ate together with the knowledge that they could die tonight. To look at the monastery as if it were a hospice.

My resistance to all of this was subtle. As I watched people come and go the moment I picked up the hospice visualization, my first thought / sense was something akin to sympathy: "Aw, you guys are in a hospice." Then immediately realizing, "Fool, you're in the hospice too!" I found this kind of resistance a bit comical.

Another kind of resistance was noticing some holding onto ideas of the Heaven of my Christian upbringing. This idea that the self not only continues indefinitely, but that you get a body upgrade, complete with wings and no suffering. And Heaven has all your favorite foods and all your deceased relatives, friends, and pets. I don't even believe in this anymore, but that's where the mind wanted to go; a simple, sure, solid answer, rather than really holding the question, holding the not-knowing, and just sitting with the fact of total dissolution.

But it's not even the death of the body that the mind had as much resistance to. I can see the interconnectedness and this body's place on the food chain. No, it's the end of this small self, this personality that freaks me out and causes my mind to comfort its anxiety with humor.

I initially found this response years ago when a friend who was in medical school took me on a tour of the cadaver lab. I noticed my nervous laughter for what it was. But I also could not seem to stop it.

During the retreat, I couldn't really feel anything when telling myself this was the last meal. The last chance to taste anything in this body. The last time to hear frogs singing. The last time to feel the breath in the belly. The last breath I would ever take. There's a store of denial there. Apparently I just don't believe it. So I ended up trying different ways to settle this awareness more deeply. I tried to find words to convince myself of the permanence of death -- that I would cease to exist. Then, of course, I just ended up thinking of the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch:

"It's not pinin,' it's passed on! This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late parrot! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolical processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-PARROT!"

And in one of my visualizations -- dying on the patch of ground I was (again) digging out blackberries for work practice, I ended up having a rather hilarious vision of the monastery immediately just rolling right on with the schedule, without even moving my decomposing body from the side of the driveway. At least not until their Japanese Gardening Consultant advised them about a week later that this was not the most auspicious placement for dead bodies. So then someone had to move my dead body out to the back forty for their work practice.

One person shared that they kept having visions of flowers throughout the retreat, and didn't know why. Isn't it obvious? Aren't we all just these various fleeting little expressions of life? Here to be seen and appreciated, and treated with kindness?

I ask you: What endures?