December 8, 2012: Lovingkindness Meditation

For this drawing I drove last year to Davenport and parked in an area along the river called the “Gold Coast,” where charming Victorian homes in various states of repair dot the hillside overlooking the Mississippi River. 

After I drew the house I decided to use the image for our Christmas card, but I couldn’t resist adding the Buddhist metta (lovingkindness) meditation along the side. The metta meditation can be so powerful; if you haven't already, I invite you to memorize it and incorporate it into your meditation practice.

Here’s a description of the metta from Quiet Mind: a Beginners Guide to Meditation, compiled and edited by Susan Piver (Shambhala, 2008):

“The Pail word for lovingkindess is metta. The practice of metta helps us honor the urge toward happiness in both ourselves and others. We develop the ability to embrace all parts of ourselves: the difficult aspects as well as the noble. As we continue practicing from that base of inner generosity, metta gives us the ability to embrace all parts of the world” (p. 55).

And, from pp. 58-62:

“Begin by sending metta to yourself:

            May I be free from danger.

            May I be happy.

            May I be healthy.

            May I live with ease.

“Move on to someone you find inspiring or to whom you feel grateful. This person is called 'the benefactor.' Bring this person’s presence into your mind, and direct the metta phrases to him or her:

            May you be free from danger.

            May you be happy.

            May you be healthy.

            May you live with ease.

“Next, move on to a beloved friend, sending an unconditional lovingkindness to that person in the same way:

May you be free from danger.

            May you be happy.

            May you be healthy.

            May you live with ease.

“The next person is called 'neutral.' This is somebody you neither like nor dislike. If you have trouble coming up with a suitable neutral person, try thinking of a clerk you’ve seen at the supermarket or perhaps someone who walks his dog past your house. Again, use the same phrases you’ve used before, but this time directed to the neutral person:

May you be free from danger.

            May you be happy.

            May you be healthy.

            May you live with ease.

“Now you’re ready to send lovingkindness to someone with whom you’ve had difficulty or conflict. To send lovingkindness to difficult or threatening people is not to forget about your own needs. It doesn’t require denial of your own pain, anger, or fear. Nor does doing this practice mean you’re excusing abuse or cruelty. Rather, you’re engaging in the marvelous process of discovering and cultivating your inherent capacity for unconditional love.

May you be free from danger.

            May you be happy.

            May you be healthy.

            May you live with ease.

“In the final phase of the practice, we move on to offer metta to all beings everywhere, without distinction or exception:

May you be free from danger.

            May you be happy.

            May you be healthy.

            May you live with ease.

“In lovingkindness, our minds are open and expansive – spacious enough to contain all the pleasures and pains of a life fully lived. Pain, in this context, doesn’t feel like a betrayal or an overwhelming force. It is part of the reality of human experience and an opportunity for us to practice maintaining our authentic presence. Every single one of us can cultivate lovingkindess and wisdom so that happiness becomes our powerful and natural expression of being.”

November 13: Happy Endings/Beginnings

I've noticed in my own life and among my friends and family that happy endings/beginnings seem to transpire most often when dreams are kept alive...but not forced. Buddhists call this “non-grasping,” and it is an important way of being that helps us reduce our own suffering. If we want something too badly, we suffer while our coveted dream eludes our grasp. In fact, it is said that when the Buddha was asked to summarize his teaching in one sentence, he said, “Nothing whatsoever should be grasped at or clung to.” 

November 6: Light and Love Surround Us

With the time change in early November comes a bit of melancholy as the sun begins to set to early in the day. Last year at this time I sketched a corner of our kitchen to remind that no matter how short the daylight hours, light and love still surround us.    

October 23, 2012: What Fuels You?

The irony of making a living as a freelance writer can be that you end up having so little time for your own creative writing projects…maybe even less time than when you did something else for a living. That’s why I have an “art first” policy, which means that I try to get up early on weekdays and spend my first waking hour on a personal writing or art project. The next half-hour is reserved for meditation combined with exercise, preferably outdoors. This time of making stuff, meditation, motion, and marveling (have the yellows ever been this brilliant in October?) – provides the fuel for the day.

October 16, 2012: Looking and Seeing

Sometimes I hurry through a busy day and realize I did not experience a single moment of true present-moment awareness. But fall colors have a way of reminding me to look, and not just to look, but to really see. And drawing what I see takes me even more deeply into the moment. I drew this tree a year ago but I still can feel the warm October sun on my back and see those deep shadows in front of me.

August 30, 2012: What Surprised You Today?

Years ago I heard about a Basque spiritual tradition that can help us capture a little mindfulness in retrospect. Here's how it goes: at the end of the day, either write in a journal about the questions below or gather with someone and ask each other to answer them:

• What surprised you today?
• What inspired you?
• What moved you?
• What made you think differently?

Okra is one of my recent surprises. How about you?

August 18, 2012 Real But Not True

 
Who among us isn’t occasionally led around the nose by our own strong feelings of aversion or wanting? In this April 18, 2012 podcast on Tara Brach’s web site, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche, in conversation with Brach, explains how we can be compassionate with feelings that are “real,” yet gently examine them to see if they are “true.” Sometimes our strong feelings come from past experiences that are internalized in the body, he says. Rather than suppressing or overriding them, we can take them seriously, gently examining them to help ourselves determine whether they are real and true – or real but not true – before we take action.

As an illustration, Rinpoche humorously describes the compassionate, mindful internal conversation he had with his feelings after he found himself unable to cross a glass-floor sky bridge between buildings in Thailand.

I’ll definitely be taking a look at Rinpoche’s new book, Open Mind, Open Heart: Awakening the Power of Essence Love.

July 27, 2012 Beauty is in the Eye

C. and I took an ecotour of a section of the Mississippi along eastern Iowa last night along with a dozen members of my reading group and a few of their partners. With our naturalist tour guide who navigated the pontoon boat, we spotted a half dozen great blue heron during our 90-minute ride. Each time we came close to one of these introverted creatures, the group issued a pleased “Ahh!” while the bird slowly spread its wings, revealing blues and grays, and meandered to a perch further down the river.

When we spotted a few turkey vultures drifting lazily above, someone said "They’re so ugly.” Another person quipped “Their breath must really stink” after the guide reminded us they eat carrion, serving as nature's clean-up crew. She also told us that if a vulture is in danger, it will vomit on its predator, stinging its eyes long enough for the vulture to fly away. Pretty crafty if you ask me, and personally, I love the sight of their fringed wings riding the wind current.

I’ll admit that the sight of hundreds of double-crested cormorants nesting in trees on an island in the Mississippi did give me an eerie feeling. There were so many of them, and their bodies seemed too heavy for perching on trees.  

The tour guide defended the double-crested cormorants. “They’re considered ugly by some, but they have the most beautiful turquoise eyes.” When I googled “cormorant eyes” today, I was indeed struck by the intricate beauty that I saw in several photos. What a color palate Mother Nature uses with that brilliant combination of blue, turquoise, and yellow!

We can assign our hierarchies to nature’s creatures, but nature just…is.

June 19, 2012: Begin Again

In meditation circles, there’s a saying, “Begin Again,” to remind ourselves that when we meditate, we are always beginning again. If our minds wander into the territory of planning, or whining, or ruminating, or whatevering, we know that we can always begin again – go back to the focal point, which might be our breath, or a tree outside the window, or a phrase or mantra that we’re repeating to ourselves. I see a corollary when I draw in my journals: I’m always beginning again. I don’t have high expectations that I’ll produce an image that I will particularly like, yet sometimes I do. What magic, this practice of beginning again, I thought, as I drew these Echinacea – purple cone flowers – my favorite of the prairie forbes.

April 22, 2012: On Joy, Part II: Timelessness

Time is an issue when it comes to joy. “To experience joy,” says Tara Brach, clinical psychologist and meditation teacher, “we have to enter into timelessness…we need to expand out and occupy the moment.” When we are constantly thinking there’s not enough time, we’re exerting a pressure that interferes with joy.

I used to teach at a college with a man named Don who also taught Tai Chi. If you had a conversation with him while walking down the hall, you walked at his pace: very, very slowly. When I would tell him how much his pace reminded me that I was constantly in a hurry, he would respond, “There is always plenty of time, Suzanne.” It’s years later, and I’ve moved on from teaching, but when I’m feeling too hurried, I still call up Don’s mantra: “There is always plenty of time.”

Of course he knew that we don’t always have plenty of time. He was teaching me that if it was going to be my habit to think there wasn’t enough time, then I would always be hurrying down that hallway. He was teaching me how to enter into timelessness – helping me prepare the way for joy.

April 15, 2012: On Joy: From the Experts

At ten months old when our grandson, L., came upon something that interested him, whether crawling or side-stepping around sofas, chairs, or someone’s pant legs, he uttered a surprised “Heh!” – which sounded like “Huh, wonder what this is?” combined with a gleeful “I can’t believe I get to examine this!” Later, at fifteen months, his exclamation became a sophisticated: “Wow!” Already, he was an expert in joy.

Tara Brach, a clinical psychologist and meditation teacher, says joy is considered a “divine abode” by Buddhists and arises when we open ourselves up to reality – both to beauty and to suffering. It’s characterized by a full openness – a “Yes” to life, no matter what.

We can say yes to what is unpleasant and allow ourselves to feel what we’re feeling. (“Yes, I feel sad about X.”) We can also say yes to what’s pleasant – but without grasping after it. When we try to hold onto something pleasant, Brach reminds us, it usually eludes our grasp. She quotes these lines from poet William Blake: “He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

In order to feel joy, we have to be willing to go with the flow instead of trying to manage the flow. We shift from grasping after our wants and avoiding our fears…to accepting what is – perhaps, like little L., saying “Wow!” to what we encounter.

For more on joy, I recommend spending a few hours in the presence of a toddler. Or check out Tara Brach’s hour-long podcast on “joy” at: http://tarabrach.com/audioarchives2011.html . (Go to the 2011 archives and find 10/26/11 Divine Abodes: Joy.)

March 12, 2012: Impermanence, Revisited

Ginger is gone now. We had to put her down last week; her eyes and body told us it was time.

It would be easy to focus only on the sorrow, but I am grateful that my meditation and mindfulness practice helps me acknowledge the joys, too – memories of Ginger romping ahead of us on the wooded path, her curly tail waving as she chased a squirrel…Ginger grabbing a stick, inviting one of our sons to play tug of war…Ginger running toward us when it was time to get back in the car.

In the abstract we know that nothing ever stays the same, but sometimes we are faced with this truth on a deeper level. The Buddha taught that attachment to things and people and ways of life are futile. Attachment leads to grasping, which leads to suffering, or dukkha. The solution to suffering, I have oh-so-slowly come to accept, is to end the grasping, like the Buddha said, rather than try to escape from the universal law of impermanence. 

Through all these years of walking Ginger in the woods and postage-stamp prairies tucked in and around Iowa City, Ames, and eastern Iowa, nature has demonstrated the law of impermanence. Bloodroot pushes out of the ground in April like old, gnarled palms that turn youthful and flat as they rise, then old and leathery as spring progresses. Sweet Williams release their aromatic lilac scent for a few days in May, after which the smell turns musky and then fades. Purple coneflowers bloom in June like they’re forever, and then suddenly they’re passing the baton to their grey-headed coneflower cousins with the yellow petals. In the fall a deer carcass gets picked over by hungry, cawing ravens; a hawk flies over with a mouse in its talons. Canadian geese honk southward and then north again, leaving the old and sick behind.

At the end, she sniffed more than ran in the woods. Her eyes turned milky and she chased squirrels only in her dreams, her paws twitching.  

If you let go a little, you’ll have a little peace, the Buddhists say. If you let go a lot you’ll have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you’ll have complete peace.  Mahusukha, the Great Happiness…the great release – nature knows this and Ginger knew it, too. It may take me a lifetime to bend my own mind to it, but I can’t say that I haven’t had a good teacher.

Rest in peace, dear beast.

October 13, 2011: Gratitude

These flowers caught my eye the day before I sketched them. It was October, and my husband and I had biked on the luscious Duck Creek Trail in Davenport. I decided to come back the next day and sketch them before it rained, because they surely wouldn’t be that brilliant again until late summer of the next year. In my journal I wrote beside the sketch, “It’s hard to let go of these warm, sunny, colorful fall days. Seems like we’ve only recently caught a late-summer stride with biking, hiking, appreciating, savoring…can’t we start all over again, now? Does fall always have to gift us with the reminder that we only get one life apiece?” 

But of course the Buddhists remind us to be grateful for impermanence, for it is what lends poignancy to life. Without our sense of impermanence, another day would just be another day – instead of the gift that it really is.

August 21, 2011: The Blessing Beast

Ginger, AKA The Beast, AKA Hot Dog on the days that she suns outdoors on the steps, as she was doing on this day when I sketched her. As a matter of fact, Ginger is the subject appearing most often in my journals. She’s almost 16 now, weighs 55 pounds, and is still mostly muscle from the days when she used to bound five miles to my two, on our daily hikes in the woods. We still walk everyday, but now I run mostly in place, two miles to her half-mile, while she sniffs and moseys. I love this creature because she seems so in the moment. She teaches me daily how to just…be. Bless this beast who blesses us!