June 19, 2012: Begin Again
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.”
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.
March 12, 2012: Impermanence, Revisited
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.
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! July, 2012: Can Mindfulness Training Fix Boredom?
Occasionally in my mindfulness/meditation workshops a participant will allude to the stress of coping with work – or a life – that isn’t challenging enough. Can a meditation practice be a panacea for boredom?
Cultivating a mindful state can help with moments of
boredom, but to alleviate chronic ennui, we may have to figure out how to
challenge ourselves more. As Eric Maisel put it recently in a Psychology Today article (“Who Stole
Your Brian?), “If you have a good brain and the world you grow up in demands
that you shut it down, you are bound to suffer.”
Maisel says that it is “natural and predictable that our
environment may pressure us not to think. This pressure will produce pain as we
intuit that we are missing out on a native opportunity and will negatively
affect our personality, producing everything from ‘math anxiety’ to
‘depression.’ If you were born to think and got pushed off that path, now is
the time to make use of your available personality to craft a new, friendlier
relationship with your brain.”
I agree. Mindfulness and meditation can only go so far in
improving our lives. Pursuing our passions, nurturing a sense of curiosity, and
taking on new learning curves is also part of the equation.
Sometimes when we feel like we’re crawling out of our skin,
we need to do something different. Just ask a cicada!
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