Joining the UUCA

It has been quiet here for the last little while, but I have not abandoned this space or the intent I have for it. Sometimes, though, you’ve got to stop talking about things and just do them. I have been trying to find my way along this path that I set for myself. That has led to a decision to join the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. I have been going to services there on and off for a few months. I am really impressed by the people and by their commitment to progressive social change, social justice, inclusiveness and many of the other things that I hold dear. They’re good people. If all goes as planned, I’ll officially become a member next Sunday. That will include a ceremony and some specific commitments on my part to this community. I am fighting a lifetime of not being a joiner, though, in doing this. Every Sunday I don’t want to go when I get up. Every time that I fight through that and go, I’m glad I went. There is a zen meditation group that meets for an hour before the summer service or also for an hour before the early service in the rest of the year. There’s a small community of buddhists in the congregation and that tradition is well respected. One of the hymns in the service today was a breath meditation exercise put to music.

This is a harder time for me than when I was writing a lot this winter and spring. I see the fruits of this practice every day, but the kind of ecstatic experiences that drove me further and further into it for a while are no longer happening. That’s common, I hear. That’s part of why I think having a community of good people is so important for me. You need to have other people to lean on. I have experienced a lot of sadness in the last couple of months. That sadness has gotten in the way of my practice at times. In the longer term,  I think the sadness is a good motivator for practice, though. This world is never going to be what we want it to be. The grasping and wanting for things that we believe will make us happy tends to have the opposite effect. It is wanting things to be different than they are that hurts. I really want to be able to accept things as they are. That doesn’t mean being passive in life, but it does mean understanding that you will fail and that’s okay. It means understanding what is beyond your control, even if those things are extremely important to you.

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong | Video on TED.com

Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong | Video on TED.com.

I watched the video of this TED talk on Saturday and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The whole thing is really worth watching and it’s only 18 minutes. The part that really kept coming back to me was a comment she attributes to Ira Glass from an interview she did with him. He says that the staff of the show jokes that the “crypto theme” of all This American Life episodes is “I thought this one thing was gonna happen and something else happened instead”.

What struck me as soon as I heard those words is that this is pretty much life in a nutshell.

A moment

Tomorrow I fly to another city for work. I’ll be gone a couple of days. I have a fear of flying. The fear is not that complicated. It consists of two big parts. One is quite close to universal. I don’t want to die. When things go really wrong in airplanes, you die more often than not. Depending on the manner in which things go wrong, you may die a very unpleasant death surrounded by a couple hundred screaming, panicking others. As fears go, it’s neither more or less rational than most others. The other half of it is that I don’t like not being in control. I’d probably feel much better about flying if I could take the controls. You combine the two and it’s a fairly potent fear.

In the day or two prior to a flight, my general anxiety, irritability, and fear levels tend to go up. I can counter it somewhat by being mindful of it, by not letting my brain spin out horror stories. I went to the grocery earlier today. I was in a fairly mindful state when I went in, but as I wandered through the store, I kind of dazed out a bit. I rounded a corner going from one aisle to the next. It’s a tight corner because the counter for the pharmacy is at this particular corner. As I did that, I saw an older man with a twisted leg tumble from his knees to the floor, then try to use a cane to prop himself up. I saw a younger, but still much older than me woman pushing a wheel chair behind him. I was shocked and concerned. Then I saw that a basket of groceries was in the wheel chair. He had not fallen from it.

The older man started to get up, but fell again. I felt myself cringe and pull back in fear or repulsion.  I watched as the guy made one more attempt to his feet and the older woman apologized for blocking me and then said that his mind wasn’t all there. Then it struck me that I could find a way to help. I didn’ think it was wise to try to help the older man directly. If his mind is not all there and he’s at all agitated by a stranger getting in his face, that could end badly. I stopped and slowed myself. I breathed. I looked for a moment where I could help. It found me.  I could tell that the woman wanted him back in the chair. As the woman moved to help the guy get all the way to his feet, I asked if I could help hold the basket. She said yes. I took the basket from the chair. It was heavy. She helped the guy into the chair. She apologized again for blocking me as this was happening. I told her not to worry, that I was in no hurry. As the guy sat in the chair, he reached for the basket. The woman said “you can hold it in your lap”. I helped him take it from me and get it settled in his lap. Then I moved on.

I didn’t do anything heroic or even all that commendable. I’m not looking for a pat on the back. There were people in front of me having a problem and I helped them. I hope, though, that it made their day a little easier. For me, the instantaneous reaction to seeing the old man go sprawling onto the floor in front of me was the same reaction to having to fly. I saw the inevitable deterioration and death, the loss of control or the illusion of control that lies ahead of all of us. Now, perhaps obviously, I didn’t instantly contextualize and verbalize it to myself like that, but I know what that feeling is. It would have been easy to give in to that feeling and turn and go the other way. Or, perhaps to just wait there and let them take care of it. I’m glad I didn’t do either of those things.

Well, that happened

Internet memes never really die. I still see occasional “All ur base” jokes. They have different kinds of lives, though. Some rise slowly over time like a wave that finally crashes down on pop culture before largely receding. Some show up out of nowhere, are briefly everywhere, and then more or less disappear. A few transcend mere memehood and become something more, some part of our ongoing cultural consciousness, at least for some segment of the population. I kind of hope that “well, that happened” becomes one of those latter types. Admittedly, it is often used as a punchline to cheap jokes and such, but there’s something about the inherent acceptance of things as they are in it that I really like. That happened. You can’t change it. It’s obvious that it was weird or unpleasant, but just let it go.

I have had a weird month to six weeks or so. I think I’ve done or said a few things that might have been a little off putting to some people.  I thought about blaming it on the Super Moon. I still might. 🙂  Hell, it might be the Super Moon’s fault for all I know. I think I’m just going to look back at my frame of mind from the last few weeks with “Well, that happened” as the guiding attitude. I’ll just keep attempting to do better going forward.

Is it a path?

People who follow a meditation focused approach to their spirituality often refer to it as a “path”. That is such a common way of characterizing it that it took me a moment to think of some other way to phrase it. I don’t know whether it is our way of understanding the word “path” that is flawed or if the analogy itself is, but I don’t think it is adequate.  In a park or a nature preserve, you might find a path that meanders its way through a circle that takes you back to where you started. Generally, however, there is a notion of linear progress implied in the word. We start in one place and ultimately end up at a destination. I don’t know that this is true when it comes to spirituality. I find that I often end up back at the same places, re-learning the same lessons in different contexts. I will make progress and then I will falter. I will be dedicated and reap the benefits of that dedication, then I will lapse. I will know something with such powerful force that it seems to permeate my every thought and reaction for a while. Then my life will take me through something and I will see that had I remembered that which I once knew so powerfully, I might well have avoided some great amount of pain and strife.

Over the last two weeks, my meditation has been spotty. It has probably averaged just a bit more than every other day. I am about to go workout and then come back to this apartment and meditate. It is Saturday morning and my last meditation was Wednesday night. Over the last few days, I have lost whatever equanimity I am normally able to maintain. With that, my moods have been erratic. If I had been out and among people more, perhaps my behavior would have been, too. Certainly, the various ways, by phone and by internet that I communicate with my friends and family has borne witness to this.  I’m going to re-learn and re-apply some lessons now, or at the least, I hope to be able to do that. I suppose we’ll see. I’m sure at some point, I’ll be right back here writing another post that is very similar to this one. For now, I’m going to try to cut myself the same slack that I try to cut other people. No blaming, no shaming, I will let my failings over the last couple of weeks go and just endeavor to do better going forward.

more to consider

I said I thought I knew what the correct answer to my last question was. I ran across this little bit from Gil Fronsdal and it certainly seems relevant,  thought I’m not sure which side of the argument it comes down on:

Giving a brief sermon, the Abbess (of a Buddhist monastery) once said, “A hot furnace does not need to be heated. A loving heart does not need to be loved. Being loving is more important than being loved.”

If the point is to be awake and present in the here and now, then certainly those memories and imaginings are harmful. Yet, in the introduction to the piece that this bit is in, he says that part of the value of the stories derives from your ability to imagine yourself in the circumstances and situations described in the stories. If those memories or imaginings bring you to a loving place and one without self pity or a feeling of loss or regret, aren’t they a tool toward cultivating a loving, open heart?

Pondering this

I have found myself pondering these words with a question:

when she says the words
you long to hear
to everyone
to no one
to the aether

Pretend they’re for you
if that makes you feel better
You’re everyone
You’re no one.
You’re the aether

What if a dream makes you happy? Is it okay to live in that dream if not having it be your reality doesn’t bring you down? What if it brings you down sometimes, but not as often or as much as it makes you happy? If you remember or imagine your head on her shoulder, the feel of her hands, the myriad bits of color in her eyes and how they combine to form an impression and that’s enough, do you really do yourself a service to remember how it really is? I know the ‘correct’ answer, but is it the right one?

Just Do It

I was a teenager, mid way through high school when Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan was launched. My late teens and early 20s were the most physically active, physically fit period of my life. Yet, people who embraced the “Just Do It” slogan always struck me as being total douchebags. Please forgive me if you were one of them. At 20, I nearly joined the marines via an ROTC scholarship program that came with a service commitment. In fact, I actually signed the papers to join, but having already had two knee surgeries, that commitment was based on being approved by their doctors. I wasn’t approved. Though in many ways, I was living the “Just Do It” theme when it came to fitness (and my daily runs amped up considerably when I started talking to that recruiter), I sometimes took a visceral dislike to anyone I’d see wearing a shirt with that on it.

It has struck me of late that this can be, in fact, a very Buddhist way of looking at the world. I’m not a Zen practitioner, but based on my experience with them, it seems like a slogan that would fit very well with their way of seeing things, in particular. It certainly applies well to the practice of meditation. Don’t plan to do it. Don’t read about doing it. Don’t consider whether or not or when you should do it. Just do it. It won’t take any longer than the time you put into thinking or planning on doing it and it will be actually doing it. You’ll be accomplishing it and benefiting from it. Has anything changed about the slogan or how one could apply it since 1988? No. The feeling that it was something embraced by a certain type of pompous douchebag was entirely my perception. It does not matter whether or to what degree the perception was correct or incorrect. It is simply my orientation that changed. While I am loathe to even suggest that every problem can be solved by a change in your attitude, your attitude certainly has a huge effect on how you interact with the world. Too much belief in “the power of positivity” leads you to the kind of moronic magical thinking that you find in books like The Secret. It also can lead to wrong-headed blaming of victims for things they cannot control. It leads people to say things like you survive cancer by being positive and determined, and thus those who die from it just had the wrong attitude–something that actual medical research has shown to be hooey. It leads to people blanket blaming the poor for being poor and the discriminated against for “letting it get to them”. I want to be clear that I’m not on board with any of that.

I will say that I’ve seen a couple of big changes in my life in recent months that came from nothing other than a change of attitude. Certainly, that’s a huge part of my approach toward meditation. I have failures here and there, but for the most part, I manage to sit and meditate every single day. My very last post was all about a change in attitude if you think about it. When I stopped seeing a situation as frustrating for what I couldn’t have and started seeing it as wonderful for what I do have, everything changed. And now, yes, I’ll even say that this change has applied to my attitude toward fitness. I had some medical/hormonal problems in my late 20s and early 30s that led to putting on a lot of weight. I actually got treatment for it for a number of years, got to where I was working out regularly, etc. I never lost the weight, even when I was running 20-25 miles a week on an elliptical and eating a restrictive diet. I may be stuck with the weight for good. The difference, of course, being that when I did that running, I was in good cardiovascular shape. The hormone treatment and the exercise also combined to just generally make me feel better. During the years of my marriage, I let that go. My attempts at getting in regular exercise over the last couple of years have come and gone in fits and starts. I’ve had some successes. My favorite was completing the 100 push-ups challenge last year. I eventually gave up on the hormone treatments. There were some nasty side effects for me and some long term risks. The benefits barely outweighed them and when my medical insurance went from supporting the treatment to actively making it a hassle to get it, it became easier not to.

Exercise at any point in the last decade has been something that I felt like I had to do when I was doing it. Even when I was doing all that running on the elliptical, I never enjoyed doing it. In fact, I kind of dreaded it. It was just something I needed to do for my health or to try to keep my weight in check, etc. What has changed lately is that I see it as something I’m doing for me. It’s a kindness. It’s me time. I really love being alive and, maybe, it’s something that will give me more time here. It’s not something I have to do. It’s something that I want to do. Getting to where I wanted to do it was a choice, though. I have physical limitations that will get in the way at times. I’ve got metal in one knee because of two reconstructions. I’ve got arthritis in both from injuries. Both knees have sent me to the emergency room at times. They have a tendency, even back when I was skinny and in good shape, to dislocate themselves. I’ll likely never be an outdoor runner again because of that and there will be times when I can’t work out at all because of it. I know that. But when those factors are not at play, I just do it.

On an emotion

I’ve realized recently that there is still a legacy of having spent more of my life in my head than heart in how I’m able to apply the lessons of my meditation practice to everyday life. It is very easy for me to say “you are not your thoughts” and apply that. It’s much harder for me to apply that to feelings. You are not your feelings. Feelings, too, are just a process. They’re a vital process. They’re a process that needs to be integrated into your life and your experience of the world, but they should not rule you any more than sheer intellect should rule you. My means of not being ruled by my feelings for much of my life was to be ruled by my intellect. That was, obviously, not a balanced approach and it caused as many problems as it solved. In trying to get in touch with and really experience my feelings in recent years (and a lot in the last year or so), I probably over-corrected a bit at times. So having learned to really experience my feelings, I’m now also learning to address them in a mindful way. It’s touch and go at times.

I’m going to use an example that I had been quite adamant in my own head about not discussing publicly. It’s the insistence on keeping it somewhat private that made me come to the conclusion that I should talk about it. There are people who know about this, but in the grand scheme of things, not many. Last fall, I developed a crush on someone. I didn’t know her very well, as perhaps is often the case when you first get a crush on someone, but as I got to know her a little better I liked her more and more to the point of developing the worst crush of my adult life on her. As part of getting to know her better, I learned that she was in a relationship. For me, ethically, that was kind of where it had to end. Even if she had any interest in me (a question I’m usually clueless about until a woman just tells me), I think in Buddhist terms the idea of pursuing someone in a relationship falls squarely under the rubric of “sexual misconduct” and also quite clearly fails to be “right intention”. Of course, as I’ve learned in recent years, you can’t just turn an emotion like that off. You can deny it. You can suppress it. You will get neither healthy nor happy outcomes from doing either of those things. I tried to address it mindfully and, I think, largely failed for a good while. I could get the correct intellectual perspective on it, but I could not create the kind of visceral change in my orientation to the situation that I wished, at least not for quite some time. I wanted it to not matter and to just move on with being nothing other friends and being happy with that.

It was when I recently came back to the idea of being grateful about what I have in my life that I started to make a turn toward a wiser way of approaching this. I am a pretty content person. I have great friends. Some of my favorite people are local to me. Now that I’m back in the southeast, almost all of my favorite people are no more than a day’s drive from me. I have everything I need in terms of food, shelter, financial stability, etc. I’m back in the profession that I feel I belong in, one that gives me both satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment when I practice it. I am grateful for all of that. It is the feeling of gratitude that I carry with me that generates much of the happiness that I feel on a daily basis. It feels terribly ungrateful to me to look at this beautiful, smart, kind, talented, amazing individual who I also get to call my friend and be unhappy that it’s not something more. I should be (and am) really grateful for that. When I first felt that feeling, things started to change. I even had a couple of days where I felt like the crush was gone. During those days, I think I developed the right perspective and the right intention. I’m going to feel what I feel. There’s no need to categorize it, label, it and put it in some box. That is what separates us from our experience. It separates us from the richness of our lives. To even say that you have a crush kind of puts you a level removed from what you’re feeling. It’s no longer just a feeling, it’s a feeling plus analysis plus categorization, etc, etc. For me, I find that it is the practice of gratitude that almost always brings me about to really feeling and experiencing things in a wise and generous manner. It’s so easy, probably too easy, to be dissatisfied, to want more than what we have. I think that without genuine and powerful gratitude, we are never fully satisfied with all of the wonderful things we have.

Whether or not we can control the circumstances that we face, we can control how we react to them. I don’t mean that first kind of instant reaction. When it’s truly instant, that is what it is. Though often we let those first reactions become our way of experiencing a situation without ever stopping to allow our innate wisdom to take over. What I can control in this situation is how I think about it and how I react to the emotions that I experience. I’m choosing to react with gratitude now. I’m not telling myself to react that way and then beating myself up for failing. I’m not telling you that I’m going to react that way to project an image. I’m just doing it. Sometimes, it really is that easy. Since making that decision, all of the angst about the situation has disappeared. And, believe me, there was angst for a while. Now, instead of angst over not getting what I want, I get to enjoy the gift of having this person in my life. Instead of wishing I could be in love with this woman, I just get to love this person, like I love so many of you who may read this. That is most definitely not a ‘lesser’ love. The love I have for my friends and family is the greatest thing in my life. Even a year ago I couldn’t have come to this point. I know it because I know the patterns of my life. I’d have driven myself nuts over not getting what I wanted or trying to figure out how to get what I wanted. The potential for that to have carried on indefinitely is…much stronger than I’d even like to admit. It feels like a really profound change to not be doing that, more profound than I think I can really convey. I owe this change to the meditation.

Days off

I took two and a half days off from meditation. It wasn’t intentional. I was busy with work and other stuff and just failed to take even a few minutes to sit and do it. This is what I found occurring and increasing during those two and a half days: mood swings would take me up and down much more dramatically than normal, I would find myself restless, bored, and yet unwilling to or unable to think of something to do that would end the restlessness and boredom, a little angsty, in general, and a little sad about some things that I kind of thought I had put behind me.

I’m quite sure that these two and a half days were the most I’ve gone without meditation since mid November. I’ve missed a day here and there, since early October, but not many. If my awareness of the benefits that I’ve seen from meditation wasn’t enough on its own, this newfound awareness of just what happens when I abstain is a real reinforcement of just how important this practice is in my life.