Life is Suffering...

In meditation class this week we talked about suffering. What a relief it is to let go of denial, start at the beginning with your arm around your suffering. It's kind of a bad news/good news thing, so you have to stay with it through the process.

So why are you suffering right now? (Don't forget to ask with compassion.) We listened to a recording of a poem:

Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,

Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts

Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves

in the infinite ocean of samsara.

Rest in natural great peace.

The poem is recited by one Sogyal Rinpoche, written by Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. The Tibetan-accented english, the gathering force of the background music, the weight of the words sinking into the open sky of mind, the poem repeatedly repeated...rest, of course we want to rest! Why can't we rest? Yes, beaten, yes neurotic, yes relentless, yes pounding. And yes, peace. We can rest. You can rest! Wanted it to keep going, wanted it to stop. It stopped.

When I looked at the cardboard cover of this little 3" cd, there are the two rinpoche (what's plural for rinpoche?? is it like fish?) laughing faces, smiling eyes, inclined toward one another. Good marketing. (I've been schooled in the devil's deals of western-style advertising). I better listen to that again, so I can have what they have, right? I say that with all sincerity. I am totally open to a revelation in whatever wrapping.

So what is my suffering right now? Summer passed. I thought often about posting but made the choice to be with the moment instead of sitting writing about it.

Now everything is still passing, again. We are here, in the school routine, my kids like the superhero you only see when he stops running, the angled light meaning the end of the gardening season--I want to be creating...what am I creating? All I'm doing is watching things pass away, and feeling sadness, feeling lost.

Diagnosis: Clearly I'm feeling a foolish attachment to the time that is forever swiftly fleeting.

Remedy: A moment in the evening to savor.

A musician (favorite song: We three kings) and a scientist (Doppler effect demonstrated in your living room), just for an hour or less on a fall evening, exploring possibilities of tone, of frequency, of being.

We ended meditation class by following our teacher in yoga nidra. I felt aware of very specific parts of me. How nice to take notice of my throat when it is healthy, and not just when it starts to hurt. How fascinating to feel a vibrating energy all up and down my shoulders, arms, fingers--almost like I could regulate involuntary bodily systems. Boy if I could the first thing I'd do would be to make my hair behave.

What if I could always remember that feeling after yoga nidra--of space when I'm compressed, of time when I'm rushed? Can I be conscious, forgiving, a witness to self, expanding? Simply and only animated earth, without expectations, only awareness. So life is suffering... and awareness can be, unexpectedly, joy. That's the good news! Hope you stayed long enough to get the good news.

Posting from the dig

My meditation teacher said these words to close our sitting session today:

May all be happy

May all be free from pain

May all live with love and compassion

May all awaken, and be free

All those who are being born and those who are dying

Those who are peaceful and those who are violent

Those who are poor, and those who have great wealth.

And sitting there I felt the compression of those intentions into the very small space of my heart, which in the wrong conditions would be unspeakably depressing: they cannot all occur, and we are immobilized right here with our human misery. Luckily all the conditions were right: I was sitting with like-minded people in a quiet room, the clocks echoing each other in a perfectly syncopated drumbeat like musician's hearts, having delivered my children to their safe, welcoming, sweet teachers and friends, with the memory of a good day yesterday and the prospect of a good day ahead. I could take it in, and make space. Perhaps it is more accurate to say make time?

How to do this when feeling pressed? When conditions aren't ideal?

It seems to be all about time, and timing. It is not always the right time to claim my needs, my wants, my view of the way things should be. There will be time for it, though. Meanwhile there is an opportunity for there to be other ways, other's needs, other's gifts. Open, open, says my heart (and you have to do it right when you are asking your son for the three-thousandth time to hang up his clothes instead of dumping them on the floor, it adds) and allow the time for the process. The trick is knowing when the right time for the right point of connection is in relationship, isn't it? Like knowing when is the right time to swing the bat to connect with the ball. Too early or too late and I get nothin'.

That moment in meditation class was full of both sadness and joy at the same time, evenly matched. Everyone is being born, everyone is dying, everyone is peaceful and everyone is violent, everyone is poor and everyone has great wealth.

In my mind I saw the sound of the bell aerobatically leaving the metal cylinder like a stunt plane doing a sixteen point roll, and leveling out as it flew by, crossing my face at lip-level and lifting the corners of my mouth into an involuntary smile. As the bell sounded again to end the session I saw all those intentions dissolve into a fine mist that expanded in all directions, swelling my boundaries and saturating my cells.

Last night my daughter said "when I have a tooth under my pillow and I lay back on it, I feel like my pillow is magic." It seems that losing teeth is a good time for memorable life lessons from Dora, as I wrote about another one here! What's this one?-- about waiting for the right time, and not knowing when that will be, and relating in the moment as well as you can, letting rigidity go.

Good grief! It's the same, it's the same lessons over and over, yet always I feel like an archeologist unearthing something buried by hundreds of feet of lava.

And so much for facebook. That lasted about one week. I gotta connect with faces, with voices, with energy. Excuse me for being an old fart, but Facebook is indifferently crazy and crazy-making.

Please, make me look good

This is Theo's artwork from a school assignment. Isn't it cool? This is some British actor I don't know. I love the closeness with which he observed the details, as with the circle of the iris cut off at the top, and the lines in the forehead (and some hairs, which he repeated as in a mirror image--a little funny in this "complete the face" project.) As my husband said, that is what an 11-year old boy will do if someone asks him to do it . . .

this, however, is what he will do if left to his 'druthers. A little levity in an otherwise rocky morning--I needed that!

I had given him the recent New Yorker issue with all the portraits of world leaders taken when they were gathered in New York for a UN meeting in September. I found these pictures fascinating. Have a look if you missed them (Dec. 7 issue). I thought Theo was going to do the half-face completion thing again; I was humorously mistaken! But Netanyahu looks much improved here, no? (no offense intended . . .) Apparently before his picture was taken, and then stopping by several times later on, he asked the photographer "Please, make me look good." Was it just coincidence that his face was one of two that Theo chose to doodle upon? Hmmm.

I felt the panic that filled me upon waking and all during meditation recede with contemplating the chuckles he must have gotten out of this. I added one too many things to my plate yesterday afternoon. Luckily, my friend Sarah understood, relieving me of the task, and even flipped what I saw as disappointing inability to help as an important communication from my heart that I must respect. Took a Deep Breath. Went to Yoga. Found my way into that crink again, felt it give just a little bit more.

My First

Theo. I haven't talked much about him here yet. What an amazing bundle of being he is. Waldorf schoolers have a saying that you are your child's first teacher. I wonder if they say you can reverse that--quite sincerely I say that this child was my first teacher. Regarding the kind of lessons that require extreme self-inspection and bare-naked honesty, he was the one, he was first and he made me a mother, which as some of you know, is a completely different kind of creature from any other.
In pouring myself so completely into him, I caught a glimpse of what I might be capable of, and simultaneously what the cost of failure might be. In seeing and hoping what he could become, I started to understand the potential I would not have so easily extended to myself. Perhaps others mature into these realizations at an earlier age (or stage) of life, but it took becoming a mother to Theo and then to Dora and then some for me to start thinking this way.

This is the boy who was so alarmed by the sensory input of being in water that we struggled to find a way to wash his hair until, at the age of 6, we found a truly superlative swimming teacher. For the first three months of swimming lessons she broke the experience down into manageable pieces: look, you are doing so well to put your shoulder in the water, and then see what happens if you bend your knees and let the water come around your neck, then don't you want to see this funny wiggly fish toy?--put your goggles on and put just your face in, and then well, this magical bell can only be heard if your ear is under the water. Thank you, thank you Marilyn. Now look!

This morning was a microcosm of his life when, after refusing to compromise on the one tortilla left (half of it? with half a piece of toast?) he said "Nope. It's all or nothing with me." Well. At least he said it with a smile on his face! He can be reasonable (he is a libra) , and heartbreakingly empathetic (because he knows what it is to feel things deeply) but his first reaction to things is often "Nope. That's not what I had in mind." For a new mother who wants to give everything to her son, this is a very demanding, exhausting, stance for a child to present. On top of my own standards, it nearly flattened me.

At the same time, I understood it! I am quite particular too, and at various times run the spectrum between being overly flexible (read: trying to please) and completely self-centered (read: trying to sort out what I need to do from what the world out there is saying). Finding ways to learn to mediate between a vulnerable yet visionary child and the supersized, sense-exploding bustle of life was (is) a hauntingly steep learning curve.

And then, the JOY! when we navigate it . . . when I see him ride the boogie board with pure happiness on his face . . . when I take my newly learned meditation and awareness skills and take him through a bodyscan, as I did twice in the past two weeks when he came to me for help, and see him take deeper breaths, relax into the night, and release himself from the grip of his nightmarish thoughts to the peace of the moment.

Doing the bodyscan with myself has been to lift a massive weight off, but to do it with him was to see the unnecessary, arbitrary nature of the negative thought loop, to appreciate more fully how breaking it down into manageable pieces of inhalation, exhalation is the equivalent of turning the light on and opening the dreaded closet of monsters in a child's bedroom. Look in front of this thought, look behind it--there is nothing there! There are no shadows, no monsters, no THING except the moment, here, breathing, and look how peaceful it is.

Compared to what I used to do, which was to make all sorts of assurances about how safe he is, how comfortable, platitudes, in essence telling him what his experience ought to be, telling him to try to overlay forcefully happy thoughts over the scary ones, this opening of the closet door is like jumping on a quiet, clean, high speed train after dragging ourselves on foot through the mud. More than that, it feels true, and important, and real, because it is inside of him, it will always be there, and he can access it now. It is hard to express how powerful this is. How good.

What if I could become the awareness behind my thoughts?

Nothing brings suffering as does

the untamed, uncontrolled, unattended and unrestrained mind.

That mind brings suffering.

Nothing brings joy as does a

tamed, controlled, attended and restrained mind.

This mind brings joy.

----The Buddha

While I was sitting this morning I heard some whispering. "Don't ask mommy any questions!" "Move over." "Shh!" My son and daughter have caught up with the shift to an earlier schedule, and this morning they were watching me. I felt my breathing slow. Model the perfect meditating mommy, if you can. It was very sweet of them to tip toe round me so. Perhaps because I was discovered near the end of the window, I allowed myself to enjoy it instead of tensing up with anticipation of what interruption would come despite their best intentions. Could it be I was aware of my thoughts about them instead of being my thoughts about them? Yesterday I asked them what they thought the difference was between "hope" and "expectation." My son thought that the difference was that with hope, you know there might be a chance it won't happen. "So you're more flexible about the outcome?" I asked. Yeah, he said, there might be a million in one chance that you won't get what you want. Which tells you a little bit about how often he is disappointed, hoping for (or expecting) odds like that!

Tonight in class we talked about skills to use with the "monkey mind." If simply meditating on the breath is blocked by too many thoughts or one that that is too big you can make them, or it, the object of the meditation. How much the actual practice of this would be different from just flat out having the thought might well depend on how much you love, or how badly you want off, the roller coaster. You can count, or name, or observe thoughts. "You don't get more points for having fewer thoughts," my teacher said. Competitive types are crestfallen, while I sigh with relief. "Although that is a very nice place to be," she added. Hmm.

Some of the other suggestions have to do with visualizing moving receptacles for thoughts that float (like clouds in the sky, or leaves on a river) or trundle (like cars on a train) away from you. You can imagine you are a cat, waiting at a mouse hole, and hope that your thoughts are as wise as a mouse would be in this scenario. If you are waiting, the reasoning goes, perhaps the thoughts will find somewhere else to play. Or at least, if they make a break for it, you will not be surprised or disturbed? With feline grace, you deal them summary blows and silence ensues? Not sure about this.

We practiced twice in class. I love this! Several of us commented on the power of meditating in the group. I could hear others breathing, I felt the ease of concentration for just a bit, I settled right down into my bones. I went through the list. Counting: not so good. Made me want a thought for each breath, to keep rhythm. Naming: okay, I've sort of been doing this already, it's pretty useful and I'll practice it more . . . planning, gardening, judging. Clouds felt too wispy--if I set my thoughts on clouds it would be like Wiley Coyote's anvil falling from the sky. Boxcars worked okay, but I really didn't want to let all of my thoughts go off down the track forever . . . I just wanted a break from them right now.

What ended up happening was pretty cool. I just listened for a little bit and looked around behind my eyelids. I saw that reddish blackness that is the back of your eyelid. A small shaped appeared and swelled into a ball. I could put my thoughts in the ball, where they would ricochet around like children in a bouncy house. I could keep an eye on them. I could step away, watch from over here. And if I needed any of them I could call them. Those were the thoughts I had about it, anyway. I may have done it a bit. I may have nodded a bit, too. I was super relaxed and peaceful. Very different from when I have been sitting in the mornings.

It made me think of the reading I did about Sensory Integration when Theo was diagnosed, and how one book said that true happiness is receiving all the information from your senses and being able to process it and respond appropriately in real time. Just think! Physically, it is the equivalent of being Philip Petit, that serenely crazy high wire walker, who is one of the few people, by the way, who have rendered Stephen Colbert speechless. SO living in the moment. SO in tune with every nuance of balance. HUGELY egocentric, of course, which must be what stumped S.C., because his persona on that show is all about eclipsing any piddling news item or famous guest with the self-perceived luminosity of his being, right?

So. Integrating. Physical and mental, internal and external, awareness and serenity, all bundled up into a little person sitting on a stool. Luminous. That's what I'm aiming for. (hoping, not expecting.)