happy spring...

happy again... my new meds (well, new a year ago now) have really turned me into a different person... mostly i'm happy, most days - almost all days - i'm glad to be alive. Pema Chödrön says,

“I’m glad to be alive to agreeable, I’m glad to be alive to disagreeable. And I’m glad to be alive to sour and sweet and tingly and itchy, and refreshing and cold and hot and the whole thing. And it doesn’t matter that there is this voice that says I don’t like this, or I do like this, that’s fine, you know, that’s also fine, but somehow open and at home, with your body, your mind, and your world, and meditation is actually the means or, the tools that we need… It actually is that the present moment is the doorway to liberation, vastness, unobstructed quality of our mind. And we could experience the world that way.”

and just because of the meds i do begin to feel glad to be alive to different experiences, interested in what's around the corner... i know my world is still small and cramped compared to the "liberation, vastness, unobstructed quality of our mind" that i experience when i do meditate regularly (haven't been, due to the falling-asleep issue)............but i open my arms to the wind and the sunlight and i tip my head back to blue sky or rainy.... and laugh or smile and just feel glad. i love the trees blooming right now - i've taken photos - wait let me upload them...




and i love the blossoms falling so sweet and fluttery, flowing and eddying like powdery snow in the wake of cars... i love the tulips so red and the tulips falling apart... this morning i walked out in the park and i loved the birdsong and the sound of wind in the trees, the sweet smell and feel of dewy grass... spring is in full swing and summer's coming... i have so much to cover in my classes and so much joy to be able to have so much to teach.

looking ahead to the summer, i'm gonna quote (with some editing) from an email i sent to Nadine... i'm laughing as i note somewhat more anxiety and somewhat less 'glad to be alive' than what i'm expressing now... that's ok... glad to be alive to anxious and glad to be alive to peace.

"have a trip planned to Montana and Wyoming (wild beautiful country like in Brokeback Mountain) to see a bunch of cousins - but it's me and mom in the car for 10 days - what was i thinking? ? panic setting in. wondering how to fix that - but her whole trip depends on me chauffeuring. well, i'm gonna ask her how i can shorten it - there may be some days at the beginning and end where the cousins can drive her places.

i mean... i know the scenery is beautiful but... TEN DAYS???? damn...

on top of that i just accepted a job from the boss's boss's boss, writing curriculum in the summer... which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't already accepted another job writing curriculum for my own boss (the principal) and a third (well that was foisted upon me) working with an outside program to design and provide select services to specific students.

I don't know what all these jobs entail and how much of my time they'll take up, but I'm starting to worry that I won't get any summer break, and come fall I'll feel like I was at school all during my break. I'm told curriculum writing involves taking all the materials away and coming back later, not being at school all the time, but i'm suspicious. anyway i took the jobs for the sake of the serious banking of brownie points... so i think i should just focus on that and consider this summer an investment... frontload the brownie points... hopefully the investment will pay off in the long term and not just be a stupid move in a game i was bound to lose.

so i have this wyoming-montana trip lined up at the end of june/beginning of july, and a week-long queer buddhist retreat in august (same one i went to last year) and id like to get something else in, a trip to new york maybe - i'd like to see the cousins in Boston and Colin and Joel in NYC... and just be in NYC for a day or two... i miss it and i love being there when i get the chance... i've also thought about going overseas somewhere but i don't think i really have time for that... and i'd like to go somewhere with R (she is not interested in the NY-Boston trip). She can't really get any time off work for various reasons... so a quick trip to England to see our friends there is out. A quick trip to Minneapolis is more appealing to her... but that's frustrating cuz it's in driving distance but we'd have to fly because R doesn't have any time. So all this adds up in terms of time and money. I'd have to choose between my east-coast trip and our couple trip to MN, and R doesn't seem to care but I don't know if she does or not, or if I do or not ("I can spend time with you at home," she says). So anyway. Lots to think about. Lots of balancing acts... between what i want to do if i could do anything, and what's in the realm of the possible, and commitments i've made that i am reconsidering too late...

(end of email to Nadine)

so that's my news, my life, my state of mind. long post... my 800th, incidentally. yay me, yay blog. blog is 6 years old, born on May 18, 2004. Weird. May 3 is another anniversary, a good one - first contact with a friend. Recently met a new potential friend - translator of classical poetry in Persian, Latin, Chinese, etc etc... speaks every language, it seems... he knows more than i do about a lot of things, which makes it fun to learn from him but also makes me feel stupid, so i can't take too many hours of conversation with him... he also talks a lot... so you know, like any friend, good and bad mixed together. trying to make more friends here in Chicago... settle in and make it home. still doesn't feel like home and when i think about it i'd still rather be in NYC, but Chicago is so much cheaper and really has many charms, so i need to reconcile myself to being here.

babbling now.

love to all.

daily Dharma: hope and fear

I've always loved this teaching... excerpted from Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart. I won't put it in blockquotes cuz there's so much... blockquote it in your mind ;) .

The idea of "giving up hope" is weird to us... think of it as giving up aggression toward yourself... well, see how she defines it. I interpret hope as a sort of tension, being at odds with reality, harboring aggression toward oneself and toward life; hopelessness means relaxing, accepting oneself, seeing what's really happening and being present to it so that one can respond calmly and intelligently. I wouldn't call it hopelessness but I get what she means.

I excised so much in the hope that it would be short enough to be read, that it may seem a little jerky; you can read the whole thing here or here. Also, I didn't always use ellipses or brackets because they seem distracting... again, read the real thing at these links.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

"[C]ompletely giving up hope... is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

"We long to have some reliable, comfortable ground under our feet, but we’ve tried a thousand ways to hide and a thousand ways to tie up all the loose ends, and the ground just keeps moving under us.

"The difference between theism and non-theism is not whether one does or does not believe in God... Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there is some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us... Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment.

"The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it is happening because we personally made the wrong move.

"Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there is one, there is always the other. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives.

"Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.

"[Instead,] we can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We [can] renounce the tenacious hope that we could be saved from being who we are.

"Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what is going on.

"If we totally experience hopelessness, giving up all hope of alternatives to the present moment, we can have a joyful relationship with our lives, an honest, direct relationship, one that no longer ignores reality."

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Where does meditation come into this? Meditation is simply (and difficult-ly) the practice of continually letting go of hope and fear and relaxing into the present moment...

That doesn't make me any less nervous as I try to get ready to go on my meditation retreat... which I still might panic and back out of...

On a lighter note, last night I had this whole complicated dream about looking for cookies with Loopy... there were many adventures on the road to cookies, and then the cookies were misplaced, and we got separated, and then I found the cookies, and then I was told not to eat those, that my cookies were somewhere else......... I don't know how to interpret this dream except to say that I like cookies.

space for space

i finally made up a little meditation space in my home.

in the midst of all the chaos and strong emotions, i've been going up to the center to meditate a lot more often, and now have a meditation instructor. i've been wanting a daily practice, then longing for it, and finally got up the willpower to move some of the physical obstructions (a loveseat & a big box of crap) that were in the space where I wanted to be.

i put up pictures of my teachers (Miri will know who they are: Pema, Khandro R., and Thich Nhat Han - i will add the Sakyong when I find a good big pic). I added a pic of a lotus flower about to blossom - wanted a photo of something transitory that lives and dies quickly, as humans do (considered and rejected an AIG ad). There is also a small incense burner, incense, and a cigarette lighter with an ad from a porn shop on it (hey, it was free). And a poster of an amazing stupa in Nepal, which is one of my favorite places on earth.

gave it a trial run today - went well. had to move the poster because it was in my line of sight and too distracting. i worried that it would be weird to have the teachers' pix there, like i was worshipping them or something, but it feels like they are just there to encourage me, so that's a great support.

so yeah. hope i can stick to this.

not doing a good job at this job or at finding a new job.

Took the day off yesterday to go to a job fair. Panicked, cried, changed clothes, wasted time, slept when I should have been working, and missed the thing completely. Drove up to the gates at 3pm - the event was 12-3.

Cried and cried in the car. Felt terrible. Called myself names. As I cried, everything awful from the past month came up to stab me as well.

Desperately sought something to hold onto, some story or drama to take and run with. But, each story that presented itself, I recognized as such, and dropped it.

So I again tried, and managed - for a few minutes - to follow the teaching discussed below, about staying present, leaning in, letting my heart be pierced. Again I found that when I did that, in my tears, I saw things that I wouldn't have seen if I'd been all in my head - brilliant tulips - decided to drive home through the city - felt present and alive - despite the pain and flowing tears the whole time.

And then the feeling passed. Like a storm in the desert that rushes past, heavy and powerful with thunder and lightning and torrential downpours, then gone. I still felt weak and ragged, but I didn't feel all that misery and self-hatred or hysteria.



(by calc-tufa, aka too-ticky, one of my fave flickr peeps esp when it comes to Arizona pix)

I guess I'll keep trying.

forward march (or may)

loopy told me a very corny joke on May 4. "It's Star Wars day," she said. Of course, I said, "What?" and she said, "May the fourth be with you." Uuuuugggghhhh.

Reminds me of how my grandmother and mother always used to call the fourth of March "moving day." You know. "March forth." Aaaaaaaarrrrrgh.

Anyway.

Here is the photo that's been my wallpaper on my phone for two weeks.


I took it on my way to meditation two weeks ago, crying near-hysterically cuz my meds hadn't kicked in and stoned on my meds cuz i hadn't eaten. Still, when I saw this (in some ways unremarkable) image, it somehow got through to me.

I took the pic and put it on my phone to remind me to look forward instead of backward... it would be easy to get mired in cherished memories and drown in them (as I have been for months, to the detriment of myself and others). The future is scary and hard to deal with at the moment.

But the past is not coming back, no matter what the future holds, and dwelling in it "robs [me] of the present moment," to quote one of the teachings I've heard. I have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Here is one of the teachings that's been sustaining me:

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is happening. It's too much. It's gone too far....

Basically, disappointment, embarrassment, and all these places where we just cannot feel good, are a sort of death.... Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's definitely the path of compassion—the path of cultivating human bravery and kind-heartedness.

~Pema Chödrön

This is a hard teaching, but I've been working with it a lot. Facing the present instead of running away and hiding.... when I can do this, it does seem to deepen both my moment-to-moment connection to the world; it also helps me experience my feelings and then let them go.

And sometimes when I'm present I can accept unexpected gifts, like these beautiful clouds gathering over a car dealership as I hurried to a Chinese restaurant last night:



The world is full of richness and beauty, if I can only slow down and breathe and see and feel, and not be afraid of any of those things. Especially that whole feeling thing. Dangit.

One foot in front of the other.

overcome

Wow. I'm trying to do job apps and, wow. Some of these jobs sound so great and I feel so unqualified.* I keep almost bursting into tears.

I'm tempted to think "if only I had done x or y in the last decade, I would be more qualified," but, I remind myself to just "sit with the vulnerability" of these feelings of inadequacy... and maybe give the people I'm applying to a chance to decide for themselves whether I'm adequate or not... just give it a shot and see where it goes.

To quote from the notes from a meditation seminar I attended in the fall of 2005 (which I just ripped out of a notebook and filed while waiting for my new OS to install)...

• plan the plan, don't plan the results
  
• make a choice - do something - then you find out what happens next
  
• allow results of what you've done to manifest & then see what you think

Trying to be more gentle, relaxed with this experience... ok, so since I can't seem to relax (my shoulders ache - I've been tensed up for days!), maybe I could have some compassion for myself in this situation?

Why is that so hard?

That mean voice keeps telling me that I've done everything wrong and that these unpleasant feelings of inadequacy are the appropriate punishment for all my mistakes.

Sigh. Breathe. Breathe. That's all I can do. And keep trying to write this goddamn cover letter without crying.

---

*Sample course description:

Law in American Society (Honors)
Students identify, analyze, and explain the structures and functions of the American legal system in this survey course which shall cover constitutional, criminal, and civil law in America. Students investigate and analyze the judicial system under the United States Constitution, using historical perspectives from Supreme Court decisions, responses to those decisions, and concrete illustrations of recent expansion of constitutional rights. Students evaluate their ever-increasing freedoms and responsibilities under the American system of law.

Part of me says, oh come on, you could teach that - and the other part of me replies, are you nuts? I could just as easily teach AP Chinese—which is also offered at this school.

boiled potatoes

So I went to the meditation retreat and had a very interesting experience.

Basically, I had what one would be tempted to call "bad meditation" the whole time. I was exhausted and kept falling asleep, and my back hurt unless I sat with perfect posture.

I kept having weird little dreams with my eyes open, like, that the sweater of the person in front of me was changing colors, or that the person in front of me was scratching their leg or talking to a neighbor--then I'd wake up and they were sitting there motionless.

So I felt like it wasn't gonna be of any benefit to me.

On Sunday, toward the end, we got into smaller groups to talk about our experiences and a guy next to me said that he had read that "meditation when you're angry is like boiling a pot of potatoes..."

(What the fuck is he talking about?? I thought)

"...it seems like nothing's changing, but gradually, they get softer."

And suddenly I realized that that had EXACTLY been my experience.

Saturday night after a whole day of hours & hours of "bad meditation," I went home and was able to have a good cry, talk to Loopy, and feel that rage (see previous post) start to loosen and melt. It had seriously not occurred to me that this might have been possible because of my meditation all day, however "bad."

Pretty cool eh... the teachers have always said that there's no such thing as "bad meditation," that it is beneficial no matter whether it feels "good" or "bad" while you're doing it.

Huh.

two discoveries and a song

discovery #1

Meditation has done great things for my brain, and dare I say it, my heart. But I really am not even a little bit interested in the more esoteric aspects of Buddhism.

If I had had any doubts on that, today's meditation workshop put them to rest.

It started off on the wrong foot for me, with some chanting that was full of references to enlightened beings who were "noble sons of noble families," which just got me thinking about what a great racket they had going in Tibet back in the day—see, rich people are born rich because they were good in a past life, and if you want to be reborn rich in your next life, you'll not only break your back schlepping your yaks back and forth to the salt mines or tilling the barley fields, you'll give most of your salt/barley/yak's milk to the rich lazy bastards so they can sit around breathing all day while you break your back in the aforementioned activities.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Chinese method of "liberation" was the way to go (seeing as how it involved mass murder and starvation), but I'm not a real big fan of the old way either.

Anyway, back to today's class—after the politically incorrect chanting (which even includes the phrase "golden yoke of your imperial rule")(What can I say—I can't stop being a Marxist just cuz I'm sitting and breathing!)........it alternated between things that I already knew (good posture helps you stay comfortable; focus on your breath) and things in which I had no interest whatsoever (there are three gates to the phenomenal world and three ways of learning the dharma, or something like that).

So..... good to know.

I might give it one last shot with an upcoming event in Chicago, but then again, I might just stick to breathing.

discovery #2

I have never before had a good therapist in my entire life.

"Our little Italian friend" (I don't see why we shouldn't call him that, although of course he is neither little nor our friend, but how could a guy with that name not be Italian?) is a good therapist.

In itself, this is a good thing.

However, it also causes me to realize, for the first time, that in the last twelve years, I have blown a mind-boggling amount of money on people who were either crazier than I, or no more/less helpful than an especially attentive friend and a cup of tea.

Anyone who has a way to make me feel less annoyed about this, please feel free to comment. I've tried telling myself that it's still less $$ than it would have cost to put a child through college (assuming they went to Harvard), or that it's what some people spend on their weddings (if they're royalty), but so far I'm still annoyed.

3. The song.

Tonya's laundry story reminded me of many similar stories from my college years... also, of a song I made up with my dearly beloved college roommate, Amy. (If I have that wrong—which is entirely likely since this is now, what, seventeen years ago, yes we're that old—please feel free to correct me).

Anyway, here it is. Sing it (I insist, sing it right now!)(kidding) to the tune of the Beatles' "Yesterday."

Laundry day
When Holworthy* seems so far away
But all my clothes are soiled with grime and gray
O look at all this laun-da-ray...

Why my clothes aren't dry I ask why,**
but no one knows. (oooo-oooo-oo-oo-oo)
What I would not give at this point
to have my clothes (oh oh oh)

I think there might have been another verse but I can't remember. Anyone else?

---

*esoteric Hahvahd reference... location of laundry room in the Yahd.
**universal reference...you know, when you feed more & more quarters into the dryer to no avail...

the object

"Even though the bewildered mind is untrained, it is already meditating whether we know it or not. ...Whatever we're doing...we're always placing our mind on one object or another. For example, ...[often] the object of our meditation is 'me.'"

--Turning the Mind Into an Ally
Sakyong Mipham

Today I noticed that my usual object of contemplation—the one that continues all day long, whenever I'm not making an effort to do something different—is either "I know" or "I'm right."

This was distressing, because, even though the lovely Loopy seems to be under the delusion that I can be stubborn and myopic as hell, I like to think of myself as such an open-minded, kind-hearted, generous-spirited person.

But I noticed that as I walked along idly thinking about various things—first about a dear friend who is stuck in depression and anxiety, then about teaching and some useful strategies in the classroom—that all this was a meditation on "I know" and "I'm right."

As in, I know exactly what my friend should do to feel better and when I get a chance I'm going to tell him, and I'm right about teaching and what the hell is wrong with all those other racist idiots who think they're teachers?

*sigh* They said this might happen—that when we start to try to see things clearly, we might start to see ourselves clearly and maybe we wouldn't like that so much.

They also gave us an antidote: loving kindness. The more we can accept our failings with loving kindness, the more we can do the same for other people.

I'm working on it.

I'll let you know how it goes.

For those of you with zero interest in all this introspection, I've decided to provide more Flickr photos (other people's that is) for your entertainment. Sometimes they'll be relevant to the post, sometimes not. YMMV. Enjoy.

what is she doing on Monday nights anyway?

I posted last week about how I was making some very slow but still perceptible progress.

I've made some more since then. Today I finished the main part of the first thing I needed to do. There's more to do, but I feel pretty optimistic, because this slow but perceptible progress continues.

I have tried to do a number of things (career-wise) in my life but always came up against this same obstacle, this same mental block, after a while. In all previous attempts I have just said "to hell with it," and gone on to something else. But teaching is different. I really want to do it.

So I have been determined to figure out how to work my way through this obstacle. Not dodge it, not trick myself out of it, not fix it with a band aid, but work through it, because I'm sick of allowing my life to be limited by it. I don't know what to call it, but it's real and it's there.

A BIG part of this work is my attempt to develop a new relationship with work, a new model of what it feels like to work (posted about this before last April).

I've been trying to undo my old m.o., where I have a war in my head between an abusive authority figure ("get your ass in that chair, you lazy selfish spoiled brat! what the hell is wrong with you? you're ruining our whole life!") and a rebellious child. ("NO! I won't and you can't make me! I hate you!")

(This used to work for me as long as I just obeyed the abusive authority figure. College friends will remember me whipping myself into a frenzy every semester. But once I stopped being willing to endure the self-inflicted cruelty, I stopped being able to accomplish anything, because I didn't have another way to even say to myself that it was time to work.)

The agonizingly slow but definitely perceptible improvement is, I think, largely attributable to a couple of things. (1) The use of a bunch of different techniques to reduce my anxiety level (relaxation, EMDR, etc.) and (2) All this Buddhism stuff I've been reading lately.

Specifically, the Buddhism stuff takes a completely new approach. Ang asked a while ago what I'm doing at "meditation" on Mondays, so I'm going to try to describe one aspect of it.

Therapy, psychiatry, addictions all take the approach of trying to fix something—trying to make discomfort go away, trying to be/feel better.

Buddhism says that that's impossible, basically. Sickness, aging and death (along with disappointment, embarrassment, frustration, headaches and other unpleasant experiences) are inevitable parts of life.

That sounds really gloomy, I know—I tried to talk to Loopy about it a couple days ago and she looked at me in alarm—"What, are you turning into Sylvia Plath??!?" Well, it's not saying that there aren't a lot of pleasant experiences too!

But the paradoxical thing is that this perspective is extremely helpful and even relaxing.

The idea is that when we fear and avoid discomfort, we are acting as though we are too weak to handle it—as though we won't be able to endure it. Essentially, we are teaching our animal brain that pain and discomfort are like death, and that at any sign of them, we have to run, or hide, or Do Something to block the feeling.

So we feel weaker and weaker, and our "comfort zone" gets smaller and smaller until we can hardly move for fear of feeling pain.

It's conditioning, like with Pavlov's dog.


But that's good news. My anxiety isn't a Character Defect. It isn't a DSM Diagnosis. It's just training. So there can be re-training.

And the re-training is simple, tho of course not easy.

When I'm uncomfortable, that doesn't mean that anything is wrong. I'm not about to die. So I don't have to react with panic and fear and set about in a frantic attempt to grab something that will make me feel better. Instead I can just be uncomfortable.

This gives me the space to look calmly at the situation and, if there's something I should be doing differently, try to do that, but if not, then just accept that the situation is uncomfortable. (Anyone reminded of the "Serenity Prayer"?)

So I'm teaching myself that discomfort (even pain) is not unbearable, and that I am strong enough to endure it. To do that, I have to practice not giving in to compulsions—the compulsion to stop work and go play with Flickr, for example, when I start to feel discouraged. I have to practice experiencing discomfort and not running away from it.

So that's what I was describing doing last Tuesday—practicing not running away. It was really great to find that I could actually do that. I didn't put the feeling into words then, but looking back I felt incredibly victorious.

But to do that, to stay in the uncomfortable situation, I have to stay in the present moment, stay mindful.

That's what meditation is for—to practice enduring when we feel like escaping, and to practice staying in the present moment when we would rather start thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, anything else but now. To practice sitting in one place when our brain is saying, "this is stupid, this is boring, I've had it, I give up."

It involves silly little things like not scratching an itch (during meditation). It's called "refraining." Just refraining from scratching the itch, noticing that I feel like "I can't stand it, I have to scratch!!!!" and still not scratching. And eventually, I realize that my brain was lying to me when it said "I can't stand it!" Because I can. Whaddya know.

Oddly enough, it seems to work. Over time, the bigger "itches," like "this paper sucks, I can't stand writing it, it makes me feel stupid, I have to go do something else!" can also be resisted.

I don't know if I'm explaining it well, but anyway, it works for me.

despite all the flickr-ing

I have actually gotten some work done recently.

Yes, really! There has been a definite improvement in the amount of time I've spent actually working. I've even made perceptible progress. Maybe I should get the progress bars Loopy has for her knitting, & use them to keep track of all the stuff I have to do to get my teaching certification (a year late, in case you're counting). On second thought maybe not.

The whole Buddhism/meditation thing has been really helpful. I keep meaning to post about that, but whenever I'm thinking clearly enough to post about meditation, that means I'm thinking clearly enough to know I have more important stuff to do than post about meditation.

Soon, though. I promise.