Myriad Jizos

Grasses, Trees and the Great Earth Sesshin.  This sesshin is also focused on Jizo Bodhisattva.  It's a kinder, gentler sesshin, in that there is a great deal of outdoor meditation.  There is a large meadow, and a generous woods, and everyone grabs a little 3'x3' section of tarp and heads out with their cushion to a spot for most of the meditation periods.

Except for the one block of meditation after the lunch break when we were making ceramic Jizo statues for the Jizo garden.

The taller ones are the main molded ceramic Jizos made at the Monastery.  Articles of clothing are made for them during Jizo ceremonies to honor children who have died.  

One of the amazing Japanese Jizos at the entrance of the Jizo Garden

There are many kinds of Jizos all along the trails and tucked away in the Jizo Garden.  

Chozen Roshi would talk about Jizo in her Dharma talks, and then we'd go make them.  I had no idea we would be doing crafts at sesshin.

She spoke about Jizo's "division bodies" or "transformation bodies".  Whenever there is a need, and a person calls out for Jizo to help them,  Jizo comes to their aid in whatever form is needed for that person.

"...When someone is suffering and cries out even silently for help, a transformation body is born because of that request.  How many transformation bodies are there?  As many beings as there are right now who are in distress and asking for help, that is, right now, the number of transformation bodies.  

This has important implications... If we are in need of spiritual help, we should ask for it.  Our asking is the causefor the arising of division bodies.  If we don't ask, not only are we stuck in our own pride, but we are blocking the arising of bodhisattvas like Jizo.  

We all have had the experience of being transformed by becoming aware of someone's vulnerability and suffering.  We are often not aware of their plight until they ask for help." 

So our ceramic Jizos are little division bodies, being made for the garden and everyone who comes through there.  Each day, more little "division bodies" would be created.  I loved to go and visit them on the breaks as they dried in the sun.  Some of them were bisque fired, glazed and completed by the end of the week.  Some were left from last year, and other people glazed those and put them out in the Jizo garden, dedicating them to someone or something.

This is my overwhelming favorite.  Clearly a division body -- a Jizo called into being by and for parents with tantruming children.    The person who made this later shared that her whole sesshin was spent struggling with her own tantruming child mind.

I don't know who made the Kitty Jizo with Mice.  But wow.  

Some pieces from last year that were bisque fired but did not get to be glazed.  

Some Jizos from a previous retreat in which people carved Jizos from stone.  

The Path.  It is like an Easter egg hunt out there in the Jizo garden.

 Here are some of the ones that got finished during the week and placed in the garden:

Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple Open

Some last minute preparations.  Fluffy newly-sewn Zabutons.

Jizo greets us at the Zendo entrance.

Cakes and fruit, light, incense, and flowers for the Buddhas.

Enso by Shodo Harada Roshi.  Hogen points out that this enso reveals Roshi's state of mind, and encourages us to imagine the state of mind that could create such a piece.  

Please sign the guest book!

The teachers.

The Zendo was already full!  

Sitting in our new Temple for the first time, listening to the "new" sounds.  We are now in a neighborhood filled with the sounds of children!  At the seats nearest the walls, as the natural light fades, the lights in the ceiling gradually reveal our own shadows on the wall.  There is a faint smell of floor varnish and paint.  There is a lightheartedness, and a getting-to-know-you feeling in this place.  There is a sense of stunned joy that this is actually happening.  

Our first night, we did a Five Precepts ceremony.  Rooting the Temple in ethics from the start.

   

Living Bodhisattva

I want to share something significant.  It's another post about a therapist-teacher in my "lineage": Marsha Linehan.  I don't use the term Bodhisattva lightly.  Marsha Linehan is responsible for decreasing suffering on a grand scale, people.  The occasion for this post is that she has now "come out" about her own history of severe mental illness.

Courageous

I have been in the field of mental health long enough to have seen how things were before her therapy, DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) was widely used.  And it was ugly.    

Marsha Linehan developed DBT in the early 1990's for people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).   Prior to DBT, people with this diagnosis were pretty much the lepers of mental health.  Mostly women, usually trauma survivors, some broad-brush features of BPD are:  Extreme emotional sensitivity -- like having no skin -- and the concomitant extreme ups and downs in mood, a tendency to see things in a very polarized way, engaging in self-injurious behavior and / or frequent suicide attempts.  Therapists in the past did not have effective tools to think about or deal with this high-risk, high-suffering population for whom traditional therapies often did not work.  So therapists -- in the face of this tremendous, excruciating pain, ostensibly with the responsibility to relieve that pain, and an inability to do so -- would become frustrated.  Sometimes even experiencing rage at the patient.  Unable to tolerate or even admit their own helplessness and rage, they would often blame the patient for "manipulation,"  not wanting or not trying to get well.  And reduce their behaviors to "trying to get attention."

This is probably why she couldn't have "come out" a minute sooner.

This article reveals Linehan's account of her own 2-year(!) psychiatric hospitalization in the 1960's, which included electroconvulsive therapy, hard core antipsychotic and sedative medications, Freudian therapy and isolation.  Truly the dark ages*.  Things maybe got a little better in that by the 80's and 90's they stopped keeping people with BPD in the hospital for long durations.  Though that didn't stop therapists from dealing with their own helplessness by turning people with BPD into caricatures, or worse.

I have heard colleagues on the crisis phone line I used to work for verbally demean clients, and after hanging up, feel justified and bemoan how the caller was "such a Borderline."  Also have heard of clinical supervisors end all discussion of cases because they were "just a Borderline."  Therapists in general were so hostile to people with Borderline that it became a pejorative term in the field.  Early in my career I witnessed a woman with this diagnosis in a hospital being strapped to a gurney.  There are some situations in which this might be appropriate to protect someone from self-injuring. It was the extra words that the hospital employees used, getting close to her face and saying, "There, now you made us tie you down.  Now you got what you wanted.  Are you happy now?  Huh?"  Remember, many (not all) of these people are survivors of violence, including childhood sexual abuse.  It makes my guts churn just thinking about it.

So here comes DBT treatment:  It's a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy / Zen fusion.  Marsha Linehan, a clinical psychologist and researcher had also been practicing contemplative prayer in the Catholic tradition for decades.  She had also become a serious Zen student.  She took on this patient population that others wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, and figured out how to operationalize and teach the skills of mindfulness, step by step.

The dialectic in dialectical behavior therapy is an ongoing search for synthesis of polarities.  The primary dialectic in this treatment is Acceptance and Change.  The revolutionary part of this treatment, in my mind, was the acceptance part.  Half of the treatment is about expressing compassion, and validating the patient's experience, sometimes called "seeing the function in the dysfunction."  But this is only half.  Acknowledging and validating someone's feelings is indeed powerful but in some cases, there's an urgency and a sense in the client coming in with REAL life-or-death problems that need SOMETHING.  NOW!!!  DBT includes many many practical skills to place in clients' hands.  Oh that didn't work?  Here's ten, twenty, fifty more things you can try.

This is another primary dialectic

Mostly, though, DBT is for therapists.  It gives therapists a structure within which to work.  It requires that this work be done by team.  That there be a classroom component for teaching skills in addition to the individual therapy component.  And it requires that team to practice the skills themselves, and on each other in a regular meeting.  Marsha Linehan wrote a textbook (dense as hell), and a skills training manual.  The training manual details out step-by-step, session-by-session how to run a DBT class.  The textbook guides the creation and maintenance of a DBT program.  A handful of colleagues and I followed these to the letter in the rural county mental health agency I worked in, and no shit, it worked!  Sometimes I felt like I was emergency-landing a plane with Marsha in my headphones talking me through the steps.   

While I was practicing DBT in this agency, it didn't take me long to realize I needed to deepen my own mindfulness practice somehow.  Then this Zen monastery opened up in the county I worked in, and well, one thing led to another.

Marsha has some serious fans, of course, and I'm unashamedly one of them.  I often joke that I'll make a bundle off my "WWMD" bracelet line.  When she gave a training here, I was able to personally give her one of the singed-robe Jizo Bodhisattva statues made by the monastery.

I have always seen her as a manifestation of  Jizo Bodhisattva going into the hell realms to get others out.

Marsha Linehan, again, with optimism and fearlessness, has done the therapeutic community and the clients we see a tremendous service.  Thank you.


*These meds continue to have their useful place for certain diagnoses and situations, and ECT, now apparently much more refined, is reportedly making a comeback as more of a scalpel rather than the chainsaw it once was.  

Life in the Backyard and the Wide World

There have been some changes on the homefront:

Ms. Hannah Banana got adopted to our home about a week and a half ago. She is a two-year-old yellow lab girl. We might be her third or fourth residence. At her last residence she spent the day on a chain in the backyard, and the night in the kitchen. Shelter before that, and who knows what before that. She had a litter of puppies before she was 18 months old. She's had a rough life, and came to us so anxious. She is absorbing so much attention right now.

There are a lot of problems she doesn't have, but she does have plenty. Her first week, she would not stop pacing and panting. She was like a shark that couldn't stop moving. It has been lovely to see her relax enough to be able to take naps.

It is clear she has never been on a regular walk before, and pulls like a truck. She is 60 lbs of muscle. She is highly sensitive to sounds and does a lot of alert barking. Car rides are full of barking. The vet trip was a complete trauma. She doesn't really know her name, as it was probably given to her at the shelter only 4 months ago. She is terrified of the wide world, and is currently cloistered to the kitchen and backyard (as am I for much of the day) as we work on taking little visits to the front yard and the sidewalk.

And, she is also sweet as sugar. She has a good heart, and all of her difficulties seem to stem from anxiety and fear. Her baseline anxiety level is going down every day which is also amazing to watch. She learns incredibly fast, has that Labrador willingness. She wants so much to be good! We have already trained her into a chest-clip harness, which helps with the pulling. Labs can apparently be talked into lots of things with a sing-song voice and treats! My old cattle dog mix would never have fallen for any kind of routine like that.

Hannah is also still -- and will be -- a puppy / adolescent until age 3 to 5. So much energy!

Working with ideas and expectations has been interesting -- I didn't think I'd pick a dog that needed so much rehab, but here she is. A Jizo mission in fur. I can't say it was entirely an emotion-mind decision. We had waited a year and four months since Cody died. Thankfully with the remainder of this Sabbatical I have the time to work with her.

I have so missed having a dog. What a pleasure to have a new friend.

Jizo Shrines

One vow I took when I decided to blog was to never apologize for stretches of blogging absence. So I'm not. Instead I'm sharing a couple examples of recycled tin Jizo shrines.

Yesterday, I had the absolute pleasure of bringing a few bags of crafty goodness to a new event called the Spring Sangha Day, and assisting Sangha members to make their own portable, recycled Jizo shrines. I would say it was a real hit.

Another awesome thing about it was that there is no way I could ever use all the fabric, saved tins, fancy paper, mod podge, and glittery bits that I have squirreled in this lifetime. Sharing feels so much better.

Off to Sesshin tomorrow. Have a lovely week, y'all.

It Takes A Village, People

I just finished a weekend with my 22-month-old "Buddha-son". It's easier to introduce him to other folks at the park as my "nephew," but my husband and I were invited to be the Buddhist half of his spiritual guides along with a Christian couple.

One of his moms is an old friend from college, who stood up at my wedding, and is a sister to me. She is also on the path of Zen. Amazingly, we both came to this path completely independently of each other. She is about to take Jukai in Iowa next week. Incredible.

I had not spent any significant time with Hans since his baby blessing when he was an infant.

He departed blowing kisses from his carseat. I found him to be a surprisingly agreeable little guy, especially for an almost-two-year-old. His meltdowns are usually for good reason: HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired), just like mine. Well, I guess you could add poopy diapers. And I bet it would not take long for me to melt down if I had poopy diapers. That might appropriately fall under the "angry" category.

Anyway, I feel like I just did a Beginners' Mind weekend retreat. Entering the world of a toddler is just not much different than Sesshin. He was even awake at 4:30 am (having come to Pacific time from Central time). We spent time at the park, and at one point watched a little iridescent bug for what, five, ten, fifteen minutes? It's relentless; a roller coaster of emotion, requiring constant consciousness and intentional widening and narrowing of focus. The difficult times just keep calling for more growth to contain it all. The sweet, wonderful times feel so cosmically delightful. And Hans simply embodies wholeheartedness. He would give big hugs, one by one, to everyone's who was standing in the kitchen in one moment, and then fling himself, inconsolably sobbing, from one end of the house to another in the next moment.

But there was a point on a hike we took at the coast, at which I felt like an Auntie in an elephant herd. I simply knew that if anyone ever tried anything on this boy, they would have to get through me first.
What is that? What causes this connection? Is it biology? It sure feels biological. But I've been around other kids, and don't necessarily experience that, or at least I'm not conscious of it. Is it the closeness between me and his Mommy? The time spent with him? I find it kind of astounding.

So I googled around and discovered that the word for these "aunties" of either sex in species of animals who do share parenting is called "allomother."

I ran across an article in the NY Times discussing a primatologist's research into this phenomenon. Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in her book called Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, theorizes that humans developed this ability to cooperatively parent not to be competitive with other groups, but because it was effective:

“I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

She posits that it's this development of cooperative breeding that is the source of much of our behavior and extreme sociability (empathy, cooperation, relative pacifism, and trust), rather than the complexity of our brains.

And that somehow, it's those helpless babies who trigger and promote "many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine."

So apparently it takes a village, not only to raise children, but to evolve ourselves.

Praise and Blame

Even as a solid rock is unshaken by the wind, so are the wise unshaken by praise and blame.

~Buddha

Praise and blame is one of my old sensitivities. Growing up, praise was the currency of life. Competing against my brother for what seemed to be a finite resource in an anxious family, I learned very well how winnow out praise, how to avoid or even deflect blame. As a child, I saw my brother suffer as he would often fall outside the lines of expectation, with sometimes harsh consequences, and I learned through him what not to do. Receiving praise at home and at school seemed to buy temporary respite from worry, anxiety, fear. Any blame would fall hard on me, and I would struggle mightily to get out of it, to recover this fragile sense of my goodness again.

It is also important to factor in the larger spiritual and cultural backdrop -- the Puritanical obsession with Heaven and Hell -- that looming sense of reward and punishment from on high which takes us out of the wisdom of our bodies and the reality of the present moment, and into some future to be feared or craved. A praise junkie was innocently, inadvertently created.
The construction of ego happens so early. I learned to pay close attention outside of myself to the sources of praise and blame, and carefully figure out just what it would take to extract them from my environment. Yet, even as I focused so hard on being "good" to earn praise and avoid blame -- by getting good grades, staying out of trouble, following the rules, etc., any feeling of reassurance from without could only be temporary. The pursuit of praise becomes an addiction.

When the source of peace is outside myself, I am destabilized and constantly trying to control that which is uncontrollable. "What does everybody think of me?" That tired refrain, that song stuck in my head, that habit of mind, putting its finger to the wind and being buffeted by the ever-changing opinions and views of others, usually as reported, amplified, exaggerated by my anxious and hypervigilant Inner Critic, and causing me to run around in circles, try to squeeze myself into an approved shape like a mass of play-doh, or just stop frozen in fear.

I am now looking very closely at the intentions behind all that I do. How much is based upon fear? Fear of blame, fear of loss of connection, fear of discomfort in any way, fear of the dissolution of this papier mache ego? How to be motivated by love and not fear?

First do no harm. I am learning to cultivate a life motivated by -- rooted in-- the ethics of the precepts. I continue to consult my own experience relative to the precepts, and finding skillfullness and right action being reinforced by this very body.

I am learning that an intention of love and a sense of my complete interconnectedness can be a source of fearlessness. When I engage in right action for right action's sake, and not for some external reward, my actions are less sticky, and I can let go of the outcome -- in this way, I can free all beings from this ego's sticky needs and agendas. Examining the intention behind everything, I can feel a world of difference, even in what may appear on the outside to be an identical action.
Intention is the bridge between thought and action. When I think / believe that I am a thing, distinct from all those "other" things outside of me me me, I think I am small, vulnerable, and my intentions coalesce around defending this small distinct jellybean I consider myself, and from that flow my actions. My life becomes one big commercial for the product of I, me, mine, trying to convince the world and my small self of the quality and worth of this product. That incorrect view naturally leads to those less than skillful intentions and actions, rooted in fear, and feels like a rollercoaster with ups and downs made of praise and blame.
Jizo Bodhisattva embodies a fearless love, rooted in the Earth itself. Still and solid as rock. In stillness my own compass points clearly (in stillness I find I actually have my own compass).

Thich Nhat Hanh enlarges the Paramita of Patience, calling it Inclusiveness, and encouraging us all to "make our heart(s) big." Big like the earth. "If your heart is small, one unjust word or act will make you suffer. But if your heart is large, if you have understanding and compassion, that word or deed will not have the power to make you suffer. You will be able to receive, embrace, and transform it in an instant. What counts here is your capacity."
The Buddha counseled his son Rahula in this way: "Develop a state of mind like the earth, Rahula. For on the earth, people throw clean and unclean things, dung and urine...and the earth is not troubled." All the elements are inclusive and untroubled in this way, absorbing and transforming everything without judgment. We are all composed of these same elements, and we all have this inherent capacity.

The Buddha also said, "Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height."