watch your thoughts for they become your actions, watch your actions for they become your habits, watch your habits for they become your character, watch your character for it becomes your destiny
– paraphrased from Ghandi
Watching
June 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Response
May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Why ask about behavior when you are soul essence, and a way of seeing into presence!
Plus you’re with us! How could you worry?You may as well free a few words from your vocabulary.
why and how and impossible
Open the mouth cage and let those fly away. We are all born by accident, but still this wandering caravan will make camp in perfection.Forget the nonsense categories or here and there, race, nation, religion
starting point and destination. You are soul and your are love, not a sprite or an angel or a human being!
Godman-woman God-man God-Godwoman…
No more questions now as to what it is we’re doing here– Rumi
Separation
May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Separation, differentiation, comparison and competition, these are all ways in which we must have survived from the beginning of time, in order to evolve and survive. I can’t help but wonder why we haven’t stopped to ask ourselves if these means are still critical to survival, our habit to separate has continued yet I think instead of propelling forward it is now holding us back. What drives us to think that our well being, happiness, ect… feels greater if someone else’s is less than? You making more money than me, or being happier than me does’t take away or add to my reality. I think in the end it is a zero sum game, we don’t need others to “lose” in order to “win”.
Our conditioned ego’s have taken over and many times we only feel good when we think we are smarter, happier, richer, funnier, better looking, kinder, more loving, wittier, than the next person. My triggers are endless, probably like yours. When I find myself being particularly triggered by another person and I can pause enough to make the choice to separate or come closer to together, I imagine both the person and myself as children. For me it works almost every time. When I picture the person as an innocent two year old playing in the grass and smiling and only needing love and protection I can’t help but soften.
We are all part of one another, nothing exists by itself. The Prajnaparamita or better known as the Heart Sutra, tells us that there is no attainment, nothing is produced or destroyed. This paper that I am writing on is part of the sun, without the sun the tree could not grow, without the sun the logger would not have food, without the logger the tree would not be transformed into paper, and so on.
In emptiness is everything – it isn’t nihilistic, devoid of anything, it is that we are all part of one thing. We all just want to be happy, healthy safe and free at the very core of who we are – and that brings us together. Ponder that for a while.
With love.
Pursuit of Happiness
April 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment
I was just perusing facebook when I can across a friend’s post, “Life can be amazing and miraculous one minute and horrible the next, here’ to waiting for the next amazing moment”. And it got me to thinking – We hear a lot about the pursuit of happiness and our right to it. What we fail to see is that it is precisely our pursuit of happiness that causes our suffering – and thus keeps us from that “happiness” we are looking for. I have spent much of my life in that same pursuit – barely tolerating the less than pleasurable experiences in desperate search of the next happy moment. When that moment comes I cling, and maybe you do too, not wanting the feeling or experience to change or dissipate.
I remember the day I gave birth to my son Henry. It was the mist intense experience I had ever had – anticipation, joy, pain, absence of pain and pure joy. I felt each emotion as if I imagine it would feel like if I were born blind and one day was able to see. The visceral feeling of each moment of that day will never leave me. And while I was very focused on the moment and appreciating each second (with the exception of the excruciating pain of the last stages of labor of course) I was terrified for the experience to pass. I instantly started worrying that my 12 weeks of maternity leave would not be enough – and I mean immediately, as in hours after giving birth I was crying and anxious. So I clung to each day as if it were my last – and I cried each day anticipating the day that I would have to leave my perfect little boy at home while I went to work. That extreme clinging to the moment and anticipation of the future took away from my ability to just enjoy and cherish where I was.
And then one day, a month into my maternity leave as I was rediscovering my meditation practice and study I read a paragraph from Mark Epstein’s “Thoughts Without a Thinker” that jolted me into a brief glimpse of awareness. Awareness that I was causing my own suffering. It was around the idea that the pursuit of pleasure leads to dissatisfaction as pleasure itself is not sustainable, primarily because we become content with what felt “pleasurable” initially, so we seek more.
“When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are made so that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution” – Epstein
It was an awareness that the contrast of my pain from labor allowed me to appreciate the absence of pain once he was delivered. And that if I continue to seek that moment, even if I have the moment again, it won’t be the same, it is not sustainable in a constant way. By yearning for my environment to not change I was not appreciating what I had in the now. So I slowly let go of clinging to the idea that this utopia we had created in Henry’s first few months would change, and pursuit of a constant state of anything only leads to discontent. We are not wired for contentment.
So if you are like me in any way, and are clinging to a moment, a feeling, a touch, anything – let it go and know that the next painful, frustrating, or even mildly annoying experience you have will only help you enjoy the next “good” moment that much more.
Nameless
April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name”
– Lao Tzu
An unexamined life
May 4, 2012 by Leave a Comment
I just finished a lengthy discussion with an old friend of mine about life and labels and sexuality. The last time we saw each other we were talking about what it may have been like if she ended up with two daughters and a wife instead of two daughters and a husband. She has been in the middle of the sexuality spectrum since I have known her, and it was a toss up as to if she would end up with a man or woman. Her husband is significantly older than her and it is likely that someday she will end up back in the dating pool, and may end up with a woman. It would be such a pity if people jump to the conclusion that her marriage was a sham, or that she has been dishonest with herself or them all those years.
Because if there is one thing I think humans love to do it is label people, and put them in a box. It is safe, predictable, comfortable, that is if they stay in that box. By like me and you, most of us don’t. Sometimes even the box we agree to be in is defined differently by you than it is me.
For example, I came out as a lesbian just as I was finishing my freshman year of college, I was about to turn 19. Unlike many people I know, I came out before I ever had a girlfriend. That isn’t to say I didn’t have a crush. At the time I was dating men, and I had a lot of first and second dates, but rarely more. I had met a guy, let’s call him Dan. He was great, a school nurse, smart, funny, handsome. I went out with him a dozen times. But something was missing. Parallel to dating Dan I was fantasizing about my best female friend, we will call her Sarah. For all intents and purposes we were having an emotional affair, but nothing physical. So, like many times before, I just told myself it was a fleeting crush, a phase and that it happened to everyone. One night Sarah and I had plans to hang out just the two of us. I was really looking forward to it. It had been a long week of school and work and I only wanted to hang out with her. Go to a bar, drink a few beers, talk and laugh all night. Just as we were getting ready to leave her phone rang. It was Joe, the dud of a guy she had a crush on that had been stringing her along. Suddenly he wanted to go out. “Do you mind?” Sarah says…”He hasn’t called in weeks and I really want to see him.” I knew that they would get drunk and have sex. Gag. So I slumped off and pouted and decided to call Dan. He had just gotten back from the city teaching sailing lessons and yes, he would love to go out. He picked me up and we went to Fridays, I guess that was a big deal when I was 18. I shudder at the thought now. I decided that I was going to do the same. Get drunk and have sex, after all, maybe I would feel better and Dan was a great guy, nurse, sailing instructor, he had a JEEP! We drank the night away (he was 21 to my 18 and the server didn’t seem to think I needed to be carded) and ended up at his house. Halfway through the “adventure” I started crying, got up, got dressed and went home. Immediately upon arriving my friend Sue was sitting in the kitchen. “what’s up K” she asks. “I am gay.” As you can imagine that led to a few hours of talking and more crying and a few more beers.
At that moment I had never been more sure of anything in my life. I was gay, that was it. I am now a few days shy of 35 years old, married over to a wonderful woman (together 9 years last week) and we have a two year old son.
So what does this have to do with examining your life and labels and such. Well, it wasn’t always so cut and dry. I have struggled as a gay person, as many do. It is damn hard sometimes. Other times I forget, because I am really just a married person with a beautiful family. So I moved from one label, straight, to another, gay. And people have a whole different set of expectations of you depending on which you are. Everyone in my life expected I would have children from a very young age, I always adored them and am a natural caretaker. The minute I came out almost every person’s response was “but I thought you wanted kids?” Hello, I didn’t give up my uterus! I am the same person, same values, same everything, except now I want to date women.
My wife is more feminine than I am. So of course once everyone got over the fact that we still both had our uterus’ they assumed she would give birth. When in fact she wasn’t sure about being pregnant and I knew it I wanted to with every cell in my body.
You get my point. As humans we label people and we expect them to behave according to that label. And when they don’t we may question their authenticity, their honesty. When in fact we may have no idea who they are or what they set out to think, feel, or do.
As long as you are self aware, and examining your own life and living as authentically as you can, screw what others expect. It is your life.
As a practice I try to end my thoughts about other people with “maybe”. Maybe there are this, or maybe there are that…or maybe not. Nothing is certain.
As Socrates said, “an unexamined life is not worth living.”
justlikeyoume 