The Dream of Being Enough

I had a dream that came to me while I was at the hotel in Boardman, OR, although I can only remember a small fragment. I had the impression I was receiving a hymn (I don’t think I actually was) but anyway I could see the words written on the page although most were fuzzy and unreadable. I could only make out the third line, which said ‘…you are enough.’ Of course having the words didn’t tell me the melody, so I just started singing that line in a rather unmelodic and indistinct way. But there was clearly power in it, and as soon as I started singing I had a double awareness of being both the singer and also being in front of that singer, receiving the song as a message meant especially for me. The singer, which may have been my Higher Self, sang the words and reached out to touch me with tenderness and an unconditional loving regard. Even though I was seeing through the eyes of the singer, I could feel a settling and an expansion of trust and safety in the body in front of me as my body was touched. It brought about a profoundly peaceful feeling of being at home in myself, and I saw the brightening radiance in the body in front of me as the song’s magic worked. There was a certain naturalness about him, much like a young pup at rest in the lap of his owner, safe and blissful with no self-consciousness, no stress or doubt, completely at home in the flesh.

A Thousand Registers of Gratitude

My heart feels like a giant mansion cut out of crisp, glistening marble. Every step makes penetrating echoes that reverberate through the empty halls, carrying back the warm whispers of last night’s revels in the heavy stillness of my current solitude.

I feel neither joy nor sorrow, only the scoop that has removed my heart and left this metallic wind tunnel, the aftertaste of shaved ice, maraschino cherries, and the tang of acid.

This mansion is my home; the many rooms are the myriad beings that arise before me, dancing me into faraway realms, cardiographers of Loneliness and Belonging. In their arms I soar beyond what limits me, beyond fear, beyond time, as I awaken in fits and starts to the breathless wonder of Self-awareness.

I go walking and marvel at the immensity of this house. I give praise to the stars above held aloft in the heavens. I give praise to the Earth Mother that oversees the birthing and the dying. I give praise to the Viscera of my body, to the vulnerable Heart, and to the Lamp of the Mind that perceives the Sacred.

At home in myself, I sing in a thousand registers of gratitude.

Delineating the Sacred

For the last moon I did a daily practice of casting a circle and entering sacred space. Sometimes I did a small bit of ritual, sometimes not. The point was not to overload myself with elaborate ritual expectations, but to develop a practice that would make the ritualization of space habitual and easy. Despite my mind's best (and often fleeting) intentions, I find it hard to create moments to acknowledge or ritualize my inner spiritual desires.

When my mind is engaged in daily, routine business, it can be so difficult to spark an awareness of spirit, of authentic self, or higher purpose. My most consistently successful practice to help open myself up to that is sitting meditation. Yoga, when I do it as a spirit opening practice and not simply as a workout, can help do the trick as well. And occasionally I can get inspired for a strategic walk or outdoor time that gives enough space to be aware of the sheer miraculous nature of being alive. But it has always been a bit more challenging to intentionally open up space at a given place or time (like a full moon, or the solstice, or my mom's birthday) without making it feel contrived or awkward.

So the daily circle casting was designed to help ingrain the practice and make it thoughtless and easy. The circle is a psycho-spiritual symbol that helps the mind transition to a different state of awareness. This altered or heightened consciousness allow the ritualized expression of spiritual states (prayer, silence, ecstasy, song, sex, etc) and satisfies an inner need to recognize the transient, intense, and bewildering ride of human existence. Some would say (and if they say it enough perhaps it becomes true) that the circle also acts as a container. This allows the psychic and emotional energy released by the ritual games to be collected, concentrated, and focused towards a singular intent, recognition, or prayer.

It was a good start to a life-long practice. I have a strong desire to become fluent in creating and entering sacred space. This is important both to have regular access to replenish and nourish myself, but also to open channels to help others I love when they are needing to visit the same.

You know, from time to time I need to get down

Tonight I found myself spontaneously meditating, with Robyn's Body Talk playing in the background no less. Just goes to show how irrelevant specific formations of internal peace practice can be. Most Buddhists monks would probably say that music (especially Swedish electronica/dance ;) is an interference to meditation since it overrides the natural vibrations of the mind. I was actually enjoying it immensely, and not because I was having an internal dance party during my sit. My breath, mind, and body-energy were very chillaxed (=chill + relaxed).

Anyway, to the point. I was thinking how I've continued to struggle with a dualistic conception of my meditation practice. Either I need to do it (and do it a LOT) because it's the only thing bringing more sanity, balance, and light into my life and my world OR I don't need to do it because everything is already OK the way it is, or rather I have already learned to be OK with everything the way it is and mediation has done its job.

Tonight it occurred to me that maybe part of my hang up results from a simplistic, goal-oriented approach to meditation. Rather I should say a singular goal oriented approach, i.e. a specific, one-time, all-encompassing acquisition of wisdom. All of this depends largely on the assumption of an uninterrupted, singular personality in my life, a constant "ego." Now this is something very suspect. This "I" that engages the world and (seemingly) controls my responses is only a very tiny shard of a multi-faceted being, that much I am clear on now.

So maybe it's possible to achieve specific revelations of wisdom within specific chapters of my life. Maybe the meditation mandate (or whatever mandate) can be contracted, fulfilled, and then renewed again later under new circumstances. I guess it raises the question - how many lives can I live in a single lifetime, or maybe, how many times will be I be transformed, renewed, and re-charged with new obstacles/lessons/challenges?

I guess the truly non-dual perspective would see individual beads on a string and simultaneously know the necklace as well. Yes yes.

I would like to give myself permission to sit spontaneously more often.

With all the body-listening, nadi-filling, breath-grounding, lotus-opening, divine-talking goodness that so often comes to grace my sense field. Yes.

Gratefully,
Always,
A

The Practice of No-Practice

For a long time, my practice has been a manifestation of discipline. Only when I was balanced, strong, patient, kind -- all of which was enhanced by a regular meditation practice -- only then did I imagine I was following the right path. When my heart is attuned and my mind spacious, I carry a stronger sense of connectedness, I can be more mindful of my true nature.

What a terrible judgement that was! How unhappy I became when I couldn't be balanced, when I wasn't strong, when I acted impatiently or selfishly. As I understood it, the path of spiritual discipline is like taming an unruly child and only when the child was behaving could I be proud of my work.

These past two years I have moved out of that comfort zone as my graduate (and married) life demands more of my time and energy. I can no longer maintain the constant discipline required to keep my child extra well-behaved. Often I feel less connected, less grounded. I am trying to create a more constant, subliminal sense of spiritual connectedness as I hustle through the city.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not totally enjoy or condone this lifestyle, but I am finding lessons nonetheless. Discipline has advantages to be sure, but without it I am learning not to judge my daily experiences. Rather I'm intimately sensing the contours of my own spiritual path, every moment of every day, good, bad, everywhere in between.

When I surrendered myself to this work (the mystic life, marriage, graduate school, simply living) it came from a deeply spiritual place. Now it feels like everything I encounter reveals the divine through me, and every action is worthy of dedicating back to that source. More and more my own understanding seems like an insufficient whisper, a mere distraction from the ever-present stream of revelations.

I act and interact from a fundamental impulse, like water falling downhill, or fire consuming a tree. It doesn't mater whether I am the water, the fire, or the tree. When I live according to this nature, there is great peace.

With a good compass, you don't need the map

That little tidbit came out in a conversation with a good friend today. I've long had this feeling that the only really crucial step for a human being to make in the course of awakening is learning how to listen to the heart. What a terribly cliched but immensely meaningful statement. It's not the easiest thing to do. It requires inner stillness, awareness, and courage, especially because awakening to your intuitive guide means overcoming the inertia of short-comings, poor behavior, self-centeredness, etc, etc.

And yet there is still the terrible, gnawing tendency for our rational minds to think and scheme and know the plan, to eliminate the uncertainty that lies ahead of us. Sometimes a job or relationship gives us the feeling that our life is "on track" or that we know exactly where we are heading; sometimes life throws strange curves and eludes every attempt to be controlled or put back "on track." The thinking mind gets nasty vertigo when it contemplates the void of not having a plan. For most people this dis-ease leads to a kind of existential nausea. For those who tend to over-strategize and over-plan their lives, the mental gears will fly until the brain overheats, searching desperately for an answer.

Balancing in stillness, beholding uncertainty. How can you ever plan without knowing what's to come?

On Why You Should Take the Stage

It doesn't exactly matter what you do today. In fact it hardly matters what you do with your entire life, and without a doubt I could eventually teach you how to see your life as a momentary collocation of incoherent conditions, as ready to signify something meaningful as it is ready to collapse into oblivion as soon as those conditions that support your life cease to cohere. But this truth, as much as it's useful to one who walks the path of awakening, as much as it leads you to a true understanding of how existence is in a state of perpetual change, has astonishingly less utility to one who intends to live within the material world as a social being, a person charged with the obligation of love and having personal interest in the well-being of friends, lovers, family, society, and the entire earth at large. Making that step from emptiness back into fullness, as well as continually mediating the difference between the two, is the life-long challenge of the awakened.

There is nothing involved with self-interest that can actually bring a true seeker back from the edge of emptiness. Largely this is because any residual self-interest actually prevents a seeker from fully comprehending the experience of encountering that edge. Having looked into the emptiness of self, of desire, of accomplishment, and dreams, it is nothing short of compassion that brings one fully back into this world of changing form, where identity, ignorance, and violence are the most prevalent forms of being and clear awareness walks like a foreign ghost. Compassion itself arises primarily from the realization that All is One and that the illusion of separation, out of which we construct notions of identity and privacy, and from which we can justify violence and inaction, is a false construct born out of our mind's tendency to dualistic thinking. We don't merely have an interest in compassion, it is the clearest realization of our true nature.

As far as I can discern, compassion contains elements of tolerance, acceptance, understanding, and love, in order of increasing purity and intensity. What matters least, and I will return to this with more force later, is how good you are at being compassionate. The core element of compassion, as is encapsulated in the bodhisattva vow, is a sincere willingness to commit yourself to the path of purification and righteousness so that one day you reach the perfection of a bodhisattva, a nearly-perfect awakened being who stays in this world to help liberate countless other sentient beings. To take this first step, which in Buddhism is known as bodhicitta (the thought of turning towards awakening), indicates an extremely powerful shift in the psyche of a person. That being understood, the attainment of bodhisattva-hood is of the least importance to what the path of the bodhisattva offers, namely, a way of being in which awakening oneself and helping others to do the same are inseparable.

Day to day we are presented with a different kind of challenge. Whether we have just recently undertaken the bodhi path or whether we have returned many times from the edge, we are most obstinately confronted with an important aspect of our humanity - the limit of our powers. Compared to the superheroes of our cultures - the Buddhas and Christs, the Gandhis and Mother Theresas, the Emma Goldmans and Nelson Mandelas - most of us are less powerfully endowed in our capacity to effect change. The situation is exacerbated for those who are well informed about the complex and immense problems that face our human society, including the condition of our earth and its resources. To them, the enormity of these problems can quickly overwhelm their spirits, diminish their optimism, or drain their vigourous desire to be a force for positive change.

The important part, which can be best understood after seeing that particular edge of emptiness, is not the extent to which your actions impact the world, but the quality of surrender with which you perform those actions. This is detailed most beautifully in the sacred Hindu book, the Bhagavad Gita, which explores the consequences of action, righteous living, and moral duty. Krishna, as the incarnate form of the Absolute Divine, explains to Arjuna, ¨Whatever you do, make it an offering to me -- the food you eat, the sacrifices you make, the help you give, even your suffering.¨ Out of this, I have begun to distill what I understand as the principal components of compassionate action, which rest in the collaboration of grace, offering, and surrender.

Grace is generally understood uniquely from a theistic perspective. From a Christian theology, what matters in the eyes of the divine is not the extent or quality of the works we perform while alive. Neither is it simply a matter of becoming better or more skilled. The obsession with ¨perfect¨ performance is a distraction of the ego, grounded more in the concern of how our actions will reflect upon our character, reputation, or self-image. [Again, the antidote to fixation on ego is the realization of emptiness.] Grace means that everything we do, whether skillful or clumsy, successful or disasterous, and everything we are, whether selfless or greedy, generous or impatient, absolutely everything is loved. It´s not about being worthy or unworthy. Even our mistakes are loved. Even flawed efforts are loved. The trick is to fix this deeply in your mind - as deep as your breath and as deep as your heartbeat - that you are always in grace. It´s not something you earn or deserve (or even don´t deserve). You are just always totally loved.

Next is offering, by which I mean learning how to separate our desire to achieve a specific good result from our (higher) desire to live in a compassionate manner. By offering our actions towards the highest good, regardless of our ignorance of what exactly that should look like, we can step over the fence of our tiny human comprehension into the the realm of something much larger and more subtle. This practice is really quite simple, requiring more in terms of trust and devotion than it does in knowledge and understanding. What's required is little more than the sincere expression that your actions, both small and large, contribute to an increase in wisdom (awakening), peace, and compassion, which are essential foundations of bodhicitta. It can be helpful to use prayer as a method to orient this in your own psychology. A deeper exploration of emptiness, inter-dependent origination, and chaos theory (or non-linear complex dynamics) can be extremely illuminating for those who want to muse on how individual actions encounter a world of tremendous complexity, and how small initial changes can expand to large (and often unforeseeable) consequences.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is surrender. Surrender is perhaps the highest practice, one that involves humility, patience, and love. From the one hand, surrender can be approached through the practice of Zen action. In any given moment or through any particular action, the quality of Zen is one of spontaneous creativity and natural expression of your true nature. Fundamentally this is extremely simple, because being exactly as you are is the only thing you can do without any effort, intrigue, or design. In practice, to begin, it can be tricky to learn how to ¨get out of your own way¨ so you can spontaneously and naturally be yourself. As with grace, there is never any wrong answer or bad action. This requires that we learn to see our self with clarity, loving and accepting everything just as it is without needing to augment or alter what we see to placate our ego-based self-image.

On the other hand, surrender can mean opening yourself to spaces that are dark, scary, difficult, or painful. This comes with an implicit trust that nagivating through treacherous or frightening terrain can reveal powerful things, healing old wounds or providing new wisdom to shine forth on future paths. Eventually you can start to realize the slight contraction of hesitation or resistance that is caused by fear; this can actually serve as a guide to indicate exactly what places you need to move into. Surrendering to this process accelerates personal growth, emotional and spiritual healing, and the development of skillful action. Even more importantly, it allows you to be right where you need to be at this very moment. What you will seldom know, even though occassionally you might get a small glimpse, is exactly how your actions and offerings are affecting other people. There is an essential reciprocity present in every single moment of offering and surrender. Certainly when you share with others, your light, your knowledge, your encouragement or kindness, whatever it might be, you are also always receiving wonderful gifts.

So when partnered with grace and offering, the key wisdom to remember is whatever you are or whatever you have to offer in this moment is good. Knowing this is one thing, and will not be very much help to you. Living and breathing it will unlock a tremendous sense of power, satisfaction, and peace. No matter what mistakes you make, (which are, after all, always potent offerings given to you for learning and incorporating into future endeavors) you will always rest in the understanding of grace and the satisfaction of having offered yourself in the very large and collective process of awakening, reconciliation, and justice. You become, more and more with every passing day, an instrument of the divine. We are, after all, the eyes-hands-and-voice of creation, and you, my love, are a small particle in the ocean of life's adventure.