TROPISM

“Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding.”

Ursula K. LeGuin

Perhaps I am coining a word when I use “chronotropism” to refer to a response an individual makes to the passage of time. The word “tropism” is defined as “the responsive growth or movement of an organism toward or away from an external stimulus.” The word is derived from the Greek word for turn or turning. In biology, there are a number of tropisms related to how plants respond to the environmental conditions, including sunshine, water, and even the proximity of other plants and non-sentient beings (think rocks). At its base is the idea of process, of adaptation, of resilience. Process and progress.

Chronotropism came to mind as I was thinking about how our lives are played out within the progress of time. If we move at all, we are acting in a stream of time. If we engage in recalling memories, we are within the envelope of time. And just at this time of year, the last day of one year on the cusp of a new one, I am thinking about how we express it as the “turn” of a new year. And it is a tropism in its own way, is it not? Our minds are turning towards the future and away from the year (actually the moment) just passing away. We are always in the stream of time, always turning, always moving in ways that are responses to the stimuli of life as we live it on a daily basis.

A recent article on the management of time as it relates to one's organic circadian rhythms also plays into this consideration of chronotropism. The article was directed at the young and restless who hold jobs and are developing their lives in ways that now drift away from older people, such as me. The article had all the jargon associated with the business/work world. There were references to productivity and efficiency and maximizing effort. There were suggestions about timing one's activities to match in some more harmonious way the rhythms of the body. For instance, it was suggested that one experiment with the time of day to see how certain periods allowed for sharper focus for more demanding work and other periods when such work would constitute mental overload. It is in these latter periods that one might engage right brain activities or even participate in some physical activity.

It seems to me that human biology has its built in circadian rhythms that relate to neurochemical balances and that these effects will be operative no matter what one's intentions are to overcome them. But having said that, it is useful to think about the times of day, the energy stores, wakefulness/sleepiness, and to make an effort to pace oneself within those innate biological constraints. After all, the body requires the miracle of sleep in a variety of manifestations in order to maintain robust health. This is true no matter how one might shave off hours from sleep in the hope of becoming more “efficient.” There are limits to what we can manage by intention alone.

When I think about chronotropism, I imagine that the tasks of the day, including all uninvited distractions and interruptions, are the stimuli that cause us to respond. The definition above states that the stimuli cause movement or growth in the organism and the metaphor of tropism the way I am using it also applies to how we respond to the stimuli we experience in the course of our daily stream of time. I suppose that all stimuli are not of equal potency for plants responding to their external forces and that there are some that are, in balance, negative and do not promote growth. They might, in fact, be detrimental to the organism's welfare. I think the same is true for humans.

The stimuli that we experience are as vast and complicated as all of life. We are sensitive to the pressures of economics, politics, the work place, relationships inside and outside of the nuclear family, the dynamics of community, the effects of climate change on how we behave and construct our homes and cities, for instance. One can name factors in all aspects of our lives that serve as stimuli for us. Not all of them, of course, are positive in the sense that we learn from them and make positive changes in how we understand and move ahead in our lives. Moving ahead implies growth with the passage of time, just as Darwin understood evolution to underscore changes in morphology over long expanses of time. The dynamic of change suggests that only those responses to stimuli persist because they represent some benefit to the survival of a species. Along the way to some persistent change in morphology or behavior patterns there will probably be certain traits that appear but that are washed out of the system over time.

When I think of the human trajectory over time I imagine that what we think are permanent changes in our patterns of life and our relationships to human constructs, like government or economic systems, will in the long run wash out and some other changes we can't predict will emerge as the ones that bring the greatest accommodation and growth for survival of the species. If one takes this longer view of life and of time, then it is possible to manage the troubling events of the day in a way that dials down fear and anxiety. What we think is dramatically affecting our lives today will lessen and perhaps dissolve altogether over our a short or longer span of time.

I also think we tend to imagine that the stimuli that affect us so noticeably and that we think are stand-alone events are actually manifestations and permutations themselves of multiple stimuli acting to change their character. For instance, we isolate such things as stock market gyrations and political election results as signal events when, in fact, they are just the swings of the pendulum that have been set in motion by global markets and socially agreed upon structures of governance, respectively.

I use the examples of economics and politics because they are so obviously followed by so many people and are used to evaluate the health of a society. But, of course, there are millions of other factors that play into our individual and communal health. In my meditation courses I introduce the idea of what I call the wholeness axis. By that I mean the holistic notion of what it is to be a human being. I tease it apart to work with how body, mind, and spirit contribute to an integration of parts to the whole. In the realm of chronotropism there might be stimuli directed at only the body or only the mind, or spirit. Yet, the entire organism responds in various ways to adjust to the stimulus. From the onset of the stimulus to its being experienced, to the changes that result from it, there is the passage of time. The stimulus causes effects and these effects, in turn, cause new and different things to happen. Time flows on in its natural and unemotional streaming.

When we make an effort to coordinate our thoughts and activities with our physiological rhythms, we are engaging our whole self in ways that allow stimuli/responses to manifest in the dynamics of holistic health. One cannot name a philosopher or scientist (what was Einstein, after all?), poet or playwright, dancer, economist, politician, parent, teacher, who has not dealt in some way with chronotropism in the myriad ways that human cognition and achievement manifest. Each of us does the same no matter how our lives are constructed and play out over time. It affects the babe and the elder, it spans birth to death—and beyond. When we are attuned to the world around us, we respond. When we notice how we respond, we can change in conscious ways, in ways that promote a strong and robust environment in which all of us can participate. This is the growth part of chronotropism. It is a tendency to use the stimuli, even the most noxious, in ways that promote growth. It is one of the paradoxes of our lives that what seems most troublesome and harmful can be the seed of growth-promoting change. Humans have this capacity for conscious choice and to choose that which supports all in a common cause.

I use time wastefully sometimes and wish to take this turn from a passing year to a new one as an opportunity to reflect on just how I am in synchrony with the rhythms of the universe in ways that contribute to my own health and that of the billions of others on this planet—and for the planet itself. How much time do we have? How will we spend this most precious non-renewable resource? Perhaps it is my age that prompts these thoughts, but perhaps it is just a swing of the pendulum of consciousness. Over time, may all of us notice the ways in which we are improving so that we may leave a brighter future to those yet unborn. Isn't this what time is for?

A GIFT

This is a story about a Christmas from about 60 years ago. The context of the story is centered on how my family celebrated Christmases for a few years when we children were quite young. We celebrated Christmas Eve with Grandma and her sisters at their house which, as I remember it, was cozy and old-fashioned, a house perhaps built in the 1930s. There was all about abundant dark wood wainscoting and Persian rugs over hardwood floors. The rugs were spacious and resplendent with their indigo blues, soupy creams, and blood-red threads. The adults sat in overstuffed chairs and it was dark enough in the main room to show off the Christmas tree with all its lights, brighter because of the dimly lit room. When one is young enough, it is the sensual pleasures of the holiday that gather attention and so it was for me to be enveloped in the warm and the dark. But at this time of year in a Quaker household the emphasis on Christmas Eve was the ceremony of readings and silent prayers. We read the Christmas story from the Bible in the book of Luke and then Henry Van Dyke's essay, Keeping Christmas, from his1905 collection of seasonal essays, The Spirit of Christmas. (His impressionistic image appears here.) This year, I was selected to read the Van Dyke piece and can remember the dread I had of stumbling and the embarrassment before all the adults when I actually did hesitate and backtrack with the unfamiliar text. Of course, the silent prayers that followed always took too much time for a young kid. Yet, it was in this stillness that I grew to understand more of the depth of the holiday, which I yearned for in poorly articulated ways. It was in this stillness and in this depth that there emerged more of the story of one particular Christmas those few years at Grandma's.

It was very intimidating to be among so many adults acting so seriously at a joyous time of year. It would take many years for me to grow into that particular holiday mood but the germs of it were planted those years with Grandma and her relatives. The time of year, the early darkness, the serious story about Jesus and his complicated entry into life were juxtaposed with all the mythological and illogical aspects of a confusing holiday. Life at school with my peers had us focused on holiday foods, on glittery decorations, on long gift wish lists, on someone called Santa who made some arbitrary decisions about good and bad among us with all the implied consequences if one fell on one side of the calculation and not on the other, and on the exhausting build-up of anticipation.

My relationship to Christmas was a complicated one as long as I can remember. I think I caught on to the mythology/reality of Santa pretty early and tried hard not to infect my siblings with the reality as the years rolled on. Perhaps it was my exposure to deeply religious elders at a young age that angled me away from the secular elements of Christmas that never seemed to jibe with the rich symbolism of the ancient story. When I got older, it was difficult for me to tell my parents what it was I wanted for Christmas. I remember one year when I tried to steer them away from all the gift-giving, the heaps of presents that took my mom weeks to wrap in secret in the basement. It wasn't possible for them to understand how uncomfortable it was for me to sift through all the presents and not get to what I really wanted for Christmas. What I really wanted was for the family to gather together in the lights of the tree in a time of sacred meaning. The mountain of presents on Christmas morning and my dad's absence when he was called away to the hospital for one of his obstetrical patients prevented that from ever happening. I admit that even when our own children were growing up presents from a wish list were what we gave. But we also gave them the readings that had become a tradition and a symbol of the sacred meaning so important to me.

One of my Grandma's oldest, dearest, and most loyal friends was a woman her age who asked us to call her “Nana.” Her name was also Byrd Lomax. She was from Texas and I think she and Grandma became linked for life there in the early years of the 20^th century. Nana might have been someone who nursed Grandma through a serious bout of tuberculosis those early years. When Grandma got old and debilitated from a series of strokes, Nana moved from her home in Texas to Boulder, Colorado, to be a live-in caretaker for Grandma. That is when I got to know her better. But when I was about 11 or 12 years old, the one Christmas Nana shared with all of us, I received a gift from her that I have to this day on my dresser. It was in the embracing aura of the age-encrusted old house and after all the readings had been completed that we received the presents from Grandma. I don't remember what Grandma gave us that year (it was actually dad who decided what presents we should receive with Grandma paying for them), but I will never forget what Nana gave me. It was a very small package, the size of which appealed to me in the face of the mountain we had piled up at our house. I didn't understand what it was at first and reflexively thought it to be such a small and insignificant gift, but then it opened up like the wings of an angel and inside this small nut-like housing was a miniature detailed carving of the Madonna. The housing was as dark as walnut but the Madonna was bright white in contrast. (An image of this magic gift is attached here.). She glowed in her long gown and her head was encircled with a halo, all carved in detail, etched in its own way. I don't know what Nana's religious tradition was and the Quakers had never made any fuss over the Madonna, but I felt an instantaneous affiliation with the spirit of this gift. I felt that Nana had actually seen me in my sadness and a precocious overreaction to the over-glow of an exaggerated and misplaced consumption. I felt she had reached down to me and placed in my hands a gift of great value, perhaps a gift she herself had cherished on her own personal altar and had thought I might also cherish. I have cherished it all these intervening years and not just at Christmastime. The intervening years have been filled with Quaker traditions and commitments, studies of all the major faith traditions, as well as training as a chaplain in Zen Buddhist forms. Yet, this little Madonna shines today just as she did when I opened the wings of her grotto. She houses Nana's sensitivity to one young boy's deepest need many years ago and represents an ideal for me today as I strive to be faithful. When I think about it now, the gift was a miniaturized version of the room in which we all sat. Just as the room and its deepened dark had opened up to this wonderful gift, so the gift itself had opened up into a mysterious realm when its shell-like doors had swung open on their little hinges. The lights of the tree and the glow of the Madonna in her retreat had opened up into a newly forming consciousness.

I would like to think that I have the sensitivity to know what another little child's deepest need is at any time but particularly at Christmas when the magic of a spiritual life began. But we don't know what is in another person's heart or what a small gift at a certain time will mean over a lifetime. We can listen and keep our eyes open and make the best guesses we can. We can lean down and notice and consider. We can celebrate and make joy and love the greatest gifts. We can be ready for not-knowing and for the mystery at the heart of things.

11-24-18

SIN

What does sin have to do with anything? Let's get the definition from the dictionary. Sin is a transgression or a religious or moral law, especially when deliberate. In theology it is a condition of estrangement from God as a result of breaking his law. It can be any offense, violation, fault, or error. I have had sin on my mind the past few days. Actually, it has been on my mind more often over the last two years since Trump was elected. Of course, I have calculated the wages of sin in my own case almost all my life and I think it is the persistence of sin that has kept me on the path of right behavior, to the extent it is possible for me to do that. Much depends on my mental life and experiences and those have shaped my idea of sin.

Sin has been a weighty topic for me in my Christianity and less so in my Zen Buddhism. As a Christian one is forever reminded of what price Jesus paid for all of our sins. The foundation of the Christian faith is based on the story of Adam and Eve and how now everyone born to the earth is born a sinner—all because our spiritual progenitors ate an apple. I suppose that supposition of a sinful beginning infused my initial experiences in Christianity and in Quakerism. It wasn't so noticeable in Quakerism as practiced in an unprogrammed way. There wasn't anyone to reinforce one's sinfulness. What sins one had were taken before God in silent worship and dealt with there. I think this is how I have come to the idea of sin.

Now, what has gotten my curiosity is a combination of some promptings from the likes of Krista Tippett and David Brooks. They were included in my musings in this week's letter to the kids. I tend to churn some ideas for a while and try to see them for different angles to better understand them and me. My recent reading of David Brooks' The Road to Character and a Krista Tippett interview with Anand Giridharadas in which they talked about aspects of spirituality related to the economic system we live under. David Brooks calls for a heightened “moral ecology” in his book, all of it devoted to profiling the lives of a few people whom he thought had lived a moral life, given different life circumstances. Both sources probe the question of sin in indirect ways, just as we now acknowledge sin in ways that do not directly name it.

Krista often laments (I think that is the best word to describe her frustration and tone of loss) that we don't have adequate language to talk about some of the most troublesome problems in our society in the 21^st century. She says we don't have the words to create common ground, words that people on different sides of the political and economic divides can agree upon to discuss their biases. My thoughts are that we do have the words and they are common words with many definitions and nuances. We are limited to the words that have always been used to describe everything we now share or experience. I don't think Krista would want to invent some new words for concepts that lie at the heart of our differences. New words in this context would make no sense and would be a return to the Tower of Babel. There would be no way to create a context of sharing in which warring parties could communicate. So, what is the lamentation all about?

I think some of the answer to that question stems from having words with robust meanings drop out of our lexicon. The word “sin,” for example, is a word with meanings almost everyone on the planet can agree on. But in my recent experience, I don't read or hear anyone using it in daily discourse. I don't hear anyone using it in the contexts of politics, economics, social media, medicine, law, journalism, or commerce. In some ways, sin has become a relative term in an age in which the president has normalized sin. He has deceived his own followers with talk that is blatantly false. He has claimed that the media publish “fake news.” He has as much as admitted to acts of misogyny and molestation that in the public square for common citizens have resulted in indictments and convictions. He has criticized and pilloried those he suspects of being “disloyal” to him. He has in this way committed acts of character assassination and outright defamation of character. He infringes on the rules of law and those of globally recognized human rights. He is rude and coarse in his language (not that that is a sin, apparently) and demeaning of others. When his behavior is highlighted in the media (as it is every single day now for two years) there is rarely a reference to his evil nature. The word “evil” can't be used by those who recognize the behavior for what it is, but themselves have some internal proscription against using it in public.

I think we are co-opted by this man and by our own ambivalence with concepts like evil and sin. He has intimidated almost everyone into accepting his normalized sinful and evil behavior. I think we can use the power of these two words in ways that uphold their opposites. We can reinforce the strength of making moral and ethical choices by once again using powerful words to defeat the ideas Trump's alternate reality promulgates. I think these evil ideas and motivations have always been a part of our human condition but over the centuries they have sulked into the woodwork and then resurfaced—over and over. We have had a period with Obama in which they were solidly in the woodwork but now they have emerged once again and they have a voice of a president to give them power they don't deserve in a civilized country. I see this happening in different societies across the globe and an emergence in one place reinforces its appearance somewhere else in the world. Anti-semitism is one of these tools of the aggrieved and it is now on the rise in America. It has always been part of our national character, an evil occurrence at any time. It is not clear to me why the Jewish people have been so targeted over the centuries and it is even less clear to me why it should be reignited now. In any case, we ought not attach the word “evil” only to the killing of Jews in their synagogues, but to call it evil when the slightest hint of anti-semitism arises in conversations, in print, or on the walls of the synagogues themselves.

I have been thinking about the extent to which language and social structures intersect and interact to shape one another. I have curiosity about how language evolves along with society and the parameters that change the way societies change. In what ways has society changed now that has us normalizing evil and sinful acts and speech? If we haven't had a need for the words “evil” and “sin,” then why should that be if the facts of their existence are part of human behavior, albeit an unseemly and primitive aspect? Who can help me understand this?

I recalled reading a Jonathan Edwards (his image graces this post) sermon titled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in my high school class on American history/literature, the “combined class” of my junior year. Even then, there were no yawning pits of hell described or subscribed to in the Christianity of my youth. In fact, the sermons of Billy Graham I heard on the radio on Sunday mornings were more intimidating and threatening than what I read of Jonathan Edwards. With that in mind, I reread that sermon and tried to reposition myself in the mindset of his times. We have had layers of centuries to bury the fear and trembling that must have been part of daily life in the early colonies. On this side of life there were fears and threats of a subsistence existence that made a life in heaven desirable. Thinking that all of that safety and comfort from pain and suffering could be wiped away by one's sins on earth must have kept the attention of the faithful. What in our society today could equal the conditions under which morals, ethics, and a faithful life would be the desirable path? What would our hell look like? And to whom would we turn to save us from it?

I read today that a Pew Center for Research poll found that 90% of Americans believe in God or some transcendent force. This was surprising to me, given that it is also true that many now call themselves spiritual but not religious and attendance at formal places of worship has dropped over time. Apparently, there are new expressions of spirituality. Four new paths were profiled in the article in the Washington Post. One was the Christianity of the rodeo circuit where contestants find their spiritual lives in the arenas. Another was the pursuit of witchcraft. A Buddhist monastery in the South was also included—a nod to spiritual but not religious. Buddhism is a mixed concept for many people because it is non-deist but still considered a religion. It attracts many people who don't feel comfortable with present day Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

I admit to the comforts of Zen in my own life during periods when I questioned the role of Christianity in my spiritual life. I used it as cover for not facing the importance of Christian discipline and commitment in the formation of my own faith. But my own life has evolved and over the years I have found a place for both Christianity and Zen Buddhism. I have been haunted by the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton and have found daily comfort and spiritual direction from the simple faith of Brother Lawrence (The Practice of the Presence of God). Yet, Zen has opened many doors onto the spiritual landscape for me and I adhere to my bodhisattva vows (vows we took as chaplaincy students in our commitment of service) as a path to right behavior. I don't remember Roshi Joan Halifax, my teacher, discussing evil or sin during our chaplaincy training at Upaya, but it was in the background of the teachings around facing one's obstacles, facing social injustices and transgressions, and developing a habit of social action to combat inequities and suffering. So, once again, the powerful words “evil” and “sin” were there but not used in the robust way they could have been. If one doesn't use the word for what it signifies, then there is some commission and omission in bypassing the essence of what they describe. Buddhists refer to such things as delusions which includes the usual human faults and failings such as lust, greed, anger, etc. But the word “sin” isn't used. Perhaps that is a result of the Buddhist belief that all of us are born pure and without fault and that we spend our lives on a path to redeem our purity after backsliding into those states that characterize human nature.

I don't claim any great insights into this dilemma of making meaning of our present day circumstances and somehow relating them to some sort of redemption. In fact, what I say here is pretentious and assumes more than I know. I am in a state of curiosity and that makes me sound more erudite than I really am. But I want to return to Jonathan Edwards and let you read what he spoke to his timorous flock on July 8, 1741.

“There is laid in the very Nature of carnal man a Foundation for the Torments of Hell. There are those corrupt Principles, in reigning Power in them, and in full Possession of them, that are Seeds of Hell Fire. These Principles are active and powerful, and exceeding violent in their Nature, and if it were not for the restraining Hand of God upon them, they would soon break out, they would flame out after the same Manner as the same Corruptions, the same Enmity does in the Hearts of damned Souls, and would beget the same Torments in 'em as they do in them.”

“Sin is the Ruin and Misery of the Soul; it is destructive in it's Nature; and if God should leave it without Restraint, there would need nothing else to make the Soul perfectly miserable.”

“But the foolish Children of Men do miserably delude themselves in their own Schemes, and in their Confidence in their own Strength and Wisdom; they trust to nothing but a Shadow.”

“Were it not that so is the sovereign Pleasure of God, the Earth would not bear you one Moment; for you are a Burden to it; the Creation groans with you; the Creature is made Subject to the Bondage of Corruption, not willingly; the Sun don't willingly shine upon you to give you Light to serve Sin and Satan; the Earth don't willingly yield her Increase to satisfy your Lusts; nor is it willingly a Stage for your Wickedness to be acted upon; the Air don't willingly serve you for Breath to maintain the Flame of Life in our Vitals, while you spend your Life in the Service of God's Enemies. God's creatures are Good, and were made for Men to serve God with, and don't willingly subserve to any other Purpose, and groan to their Nature and End. And the World would spue you out, were it not for the sovereign Hand of him who hath subjected it in Hope.”

“The wrath of God is like great Waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an Outlet is given, and the longer the Stream is stop'd, the more rapid and mighty is it's Course, when once it is let loose.”

“... you are in the hands of an angry God; 'tees nothing but his meer Pleasure that keeps you from being this Moment swallowed up in everlasting Destruction.”

“You hang by a slender Thread, with the Flames of divine Wrath flashing about it, and ready every Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no Interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the Flames of Wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one Moment.”

It is at this point that I turn to the news of the day and the ongoing holocaust wildfire that has destroyed so much of California geography, including the town of Paradise. Its power and ferocity has caught people seeking escape in their cars on clogged roads and incinerated all in its path. How could these people have prepared for such a tragedy? And how about the innocent victims of wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan? And the genocides in Yemen and Myanmar? I think about the catastrophes of Indonesian and Japanese tsunamis and the devastation of hurricanes such as the one striking New Orleans some years back. How does one predict the power of such circumstances and isn't one brought to one's knees without recourse to conventional methods of control?

What is in the offing of a life lived coarsely, deceitfully, evilly, and without regard for the separation that exists between life as a thug on the street (or in the White House) and a life with a view of heaven? What does one turn towards in times of catastrophe and thuggery? Are we not challenged to imagine our lives differently? Isn't Jonathan Edwards pointing towards the inflation of ego that David Brooks names the “Big Me”? It is possible to meet these challenges to ego inflation by reshaping a moral base and reintroducing the words and concepts that “sin,” “evil,”and “soul”, connote. It is possible to formulate a secular and somewhat sanitized “platform” for revising our relationships with the earth and with one another. It is also possible to revitalize the religious base of belief that is still present in the traditional religions as well as the alternative spiritual practices now being explored.

The idea of a newly imagined public theology is surfacing in pockets of discernment. I suggest that we reexamine and reexplore the roots of our American public theology to see if there might be some useful material that could contribute to this dialogue. Is it possible for us to bring Jonathan Edwards and the scientists investigating climate change and its consequences together in the same dialogue about what might be a humane course forward in our fractious world? What do we have to lose by thinking out loud about human pride, acquisitiveness, accountability, and responsibility in light of natural occurrences for which we still have no full explanation, let alone any reasonable means of dealing with their consequences? Public theology must imagine its intersections with science, consumerism, the fate of the earth, as well as the human need, desire, and drive to make meaning of not-knowing and what it means to lack the control over our own destinies that we now assume to possess. Could we turn to faith as a beginning? Could we use our faith not as a way of avoiding our difficult circumstances, but as a way of confronting them and working with them for humane purposes? Could we face sin and evil head on and name them for what they are as a way of deflating their power? What are our intentions for our common fate?

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 8

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 8

In Class 7, the dualities that are a natural presence in our lives and that dwell at the heart of our emotions, attitudes, and actions were front and center in the meditative space. I tried to show how they provide a useful purpose in defining the “self” and how they also possess shadow sides and dark underbellies. It was my intention to suggest that both sides of a duality can be brought much closer together in many instances, if not unified within us. The unity that contains them is what makes us fully human in our frailties, follies, and failures as well as our greatest and most noble virtues and exertions.

This class is intended to examine the third of the three major questions I posed at the very beginning of the course: What then shall I do? These three questions are the motivation for my daily meditation and their translations into context, relationships, and action/interaction are the framework for my practice. Perhaps they can serve you as usefully in your practices.

The parts of meditation we have explored are all of a piece, with one aspect predominating at one time or another. The tools for stabilizing the wholeness axis and making use of the forces that work to unbalance us on any given day are available for us to use as they are needed. We can pause and find the meditative space and enter it wherever we are. Yet, we remain in a state of relative isolation as we sit or stand or walk. We are prepared for something else. But what?

One of the most powerful mysteries of meditation and, thus, of the human heart and mind is how intense focus on the “self” can transform into care for and care of others. Indeed, just as we noticed in Class 1, all of the steps and stages of self care are part of establishing the healthy ground for acting outside our mental constructions, acting with compassion. Compassion, that transitive step after empathy, emerges naturally from “self” and, ironically, depends on “self” for its active life. When one is able to give up one's self for another, then one has embodied compassion in all its dimensions. We as atomized and singular individuals enter into a physical relationship of care of and for others. How does this happen? What carries us over into compassion?

One of the most difficult of all of life's lessons, it seems to me, is how to manage losses. Loss is one of the most solid and intractable causes of suffering because at its root is fear. Meditative space mirrors the losses we experience in our mundane life. We are not schooled in how to deal with loss and we are never practiced at it enough to be good at embracing it. An often-told story has it that a wise man offered a young boy a priceless treasure if he could find one house in his village that had not been touched by loss. Of course, he returned to the wise man with the news that he couldn't find one house and the wise man offered him the knowledge of loss as the treasure. Yes, and the meditative space will be infused with the shadows and realities of losses. It will be the most difficult of visitors to accommodate. When we get the visit from a loss there is the inevitable pushing back, the attempt to isolate it from our experience, to rationalize it into something else--all the ways we have of turning away from our fear. We separate it from ourselves, once again contributing to the divided self. No matter the origin of loss or its dimensions, we seek to lessen our suffering as a result of it. Maybe we ignore it or distract ourselves from it. My thought is that losses have something to teach us about forgiveness and letting go because they are rooted in fear and fear is a powerful underlying disabling emotion (remember fight, flight, or freeze?).

Losses, our own and others', are powerful because we embody them. We embody our own in our consciousness and we embody the losses of others when we “walk in their shoes” and express empathy. They are blunt force traumas to our wholeness axis, to how we see ourselves and our emotional lives. We are never habituated to loss but receive every one as a surprise, even though we may know something of its context. Our relationship to the final loss of life (death) is always unrehearsed and psychically traumatic. I think this happens by degrees but not because it is absent from life altogether. Everyone in the village has known loss and over a lifetime the losses do mount up. Because losses will show up in meditation, we can use the same tools of preparation for them that we use for monkeys and gorillas or any of the other joys and sorrows or sharp dualities that visit us. We get better at using the tools and better at understanding loss and particular losses. With practice, we are better able to comprehend the biggest loss of our lives—our lives. Any loss we suffer or see someone else suffer reminds us that we will at some point face our own mortality. We may not see it this way when we see what losses a hurricane or a mass shooting create, but our empathic attunement points to the losses in life and our own death that lurk in the background. And where there is loss there is fear.

Because we personalize loss so thoroughly (ours and that of others), we see ourselves as victims of cruel fate. We separate ourselves from what is part of the natural order for humans. Instead of seeing loss as part of human life, we see it as unnatural and cruel. The acts that lead to loss are often cruel and violent but we add suffering to the pain of loss. Can we distinguish the pain of loss from the suffering we personalize? Maybe. Is it possible to work with the pain of loss and to make the choice not to suffer because of it? Can we understand the context of the pain and let go of the suffering? Can we choose to forgive ourselves and others the causes of the pain and not continue to suffer? What would that mean to healing?

The meditative space has room for both the pain and suffering of losses because it contains all possibilities and mirrors everything. Sometimes, there is no way to let go of the suffering accompanying loss. But if we are able to see it for what it is and lessen its hold on us (can we toggle between the loss and our personal resource, as we can do with other traumas?), then perhaps one day it will be possible to let it go. Letting go is as difficult as being adept at losing. We seek the solace of meditation when trauma and loss are at our door, but meditation in its comprehensive inclusiveness also embraces our accomplishments, the causes for our celebrations, and the great joys and triumphs of the human spirit. We employ meditation to assist us in dealing with the darkness but forget that meditation is also a place for great light. But, in the grand scope of human life and death, we know that we will also be letting go of the sources of light as we know them in our mundane lives. We open to not-knowing in what lies beyond our earthly consciousness. While we have explored the necessity and value of each of the class themes, let us briefly notice what we might let go in each, all in service of compassion.

In Class 1 we explored “self” as a subjective experience, but we might be letting go of

its isolation from the world.

In Class 2 we looked at various constituents of the divided self. We might let go of our

ideal version of ourselves.

In Class 3 we cleared space for meditation and enlisted poetry as an entry point to it and as

a resource. We might let go of some of the tautness and dependence we have on our

personal resource.

In Class 4 we looked at how expansive the meditative space could be and how “flow”

sometimes characterizes it. We might let go of this space as defended territory.

In Class 5 we confronted the monkeys in our inner lives. We might let go of their

intimidation.

In Class 6 we braced ourselves against the forces of our outer lives. We might let go of

some of the burden they impose by making choices more supportive of

our resilient zone.

In Class 7 we looked at the dualities that tend to describe and define our lives. We might let

go of their insistence and entertain ambiguity and greater nuance.

In Class 8 we have explored the culmination of light and dark through compassion. We might

let go of some of the suffering of loss and some of the oppression of fear.

What helps with loss is the support we feel from grounding and resourcing. Resourcing may include the support we feel not only from the earth and the context of our present life circumstances, but also from the support we sense from others in community. When we meditate in a public space, we are in interaction with all those present, even though we may be in silence with our eyes closed. We are oscillating between the strength of our inner space and the felt energies of those near us. When we act on that support and reach out, our losses and demons are quieted in the shared experience of being human. We know that our compassion for others is merging with their compassion for us (“are we not of interest to one another?,” asks Elizabeth Alexander) and we know this in a way that is beyond linguistic knowledge. In our meditative space, are we able to imagine someone we know or someone unknown to us who has pain and suffers as we do? One ancient meditative practice is based on this very exercise and it allows us to offer and receive compassion in the interconnected web of human experience.

Sometimes the losses we experience are not of our making and certainly the losses of others most often do not share our own life circumstances. Yet, when we embody the losses, when we attune to them in ways that awaken empathy, we can remain in a state of reactivity until we turn to them and offer forgiveness for the pain and the suffering they have created, whether or not we have caused them or they are our own or belong to someone else. In this way, we transition from empathy to compassion. This is the release from empathic block and exhaustion we looked at in Class 1. The act of forgiveness is the action/interaction opening us to compassion. Forgiving is not forgetting. It is releasing judgment and allowing for care of self and others within a wider context. Within compassion lie all the possibilities for meeting the pain and suffering that accompany loss. Compassion does not necessarily diminish pain and suffering but it does allow for eventual healing. Meditation can be the space in which compassion is accessed and then enacted. In a way, when we offer forgiveness for the conditions and judgments that lead to pain and suffering, this is a form of letting go. Our compassion has allowed for the reality of loss and the natural reactions to it, but forgiveness of causes and conditions brings us into an I/Thou relationship with ourselves and others, as developed by the philosopher Martin Buber in his I and Thou. Isn't compassion at the heart of caring and self care—and meditation itself? I believe that what we can aspire to is a state of greater personal liberation in spite of all the forces that move through our lives because we are human beings.

So, meditation and everything it holds contains self and other in what Martin Buber refers to when he says: birth and death “do depend not on whether I 'affirm' or 'deny' the world in my soul, but on how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life—and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect.”

It is my hope that this course on meditation has offered something that is useful and of benefit to you in your lives. May all of you know peace, joy, and an undivided and healthy life.

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 7

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 7

In Class 6 we looked at what a “full catastrophe” life might look like and maybe we discovered that it looked a lot like our own. We added the heavy presence of the gorilla from our mundane outer life to the frantic and harried presence of the monkeys of our inner life. It is no wonder that we often think of our lives as zoos. In all of this, I attempted to make something creative and useful out of all the noise and drama. Still, there is the notion that we can divide our lives up into inner and outer and this reinforces how we form dualities in other parts of our lives. Doing this emphasizes even more how divided we feel sometimes as we are compelled to choose one side of a duality over the other. In this class I will attempt to bring some of those dualities into a closer connection within the meditative space.

Meditation merely opens a window on our minds. There is nothing esoteric about the forms of meditation. There is nothing magic to be granted or grasped. Grounding and resourcing are as personal and accessible as anything in our minds could be. If meditation does not lead to eternal Truth and Beauty, to the idealized self or enlightenment, then it can at least lead to a better understanding of who we are, what we are here for, and what we might do as we make our way through our lives.

This course began with an examination of what we could do to take better care of ourselves and, thus, take better care of others. It was on this basis that we proceeded to celebrate the undivided self and to see that there are ways to heal ourselves in instances where we feel divided or imperfect as we compare ourselves to someone whose life context differs significantly from our own. I continued to stress the importance of returning to the body in which we experience ourselves, to practice calming by way of grounding and resourcing and reflecting on the vast choices open to us in meditation. All of these efforts are important and key to using the meditative space as an extension of our conscious lives.

Having said that, some important components of what the meditation container holds for us are still left out of the discussion. While we begin with our “self” primarily in our attentive gaze, we are not who we are without considering the duality of self/other that helps define us as individuals. I think dualities such as self/other often create barriers and boundaries that separate, but the duality of self/other helps clarify what we know about ourselves and how we are different from something or someone else as well as to know what is common to us all. I have mentioned how neuroscience has documented where the protoself is located and how the autobiographical self evolves over a lifetime. Recognition of these important concepts emerging from brain networks helps us develop a sound and healthy sense of self. This leads to emotional stabilization and regulation and resilience in ways that a meditative practice can contribute.

The most immediate duality in our lives is the self/other duality but, just as with the perceived duality we experience between our true self and the idealized self, there can be significant gaps of pain between ourselves and those with whom we interact. How are we to step beyond our own world to consider the world of another? Martin Buber is addressing just this gap in his reference to I/It. We sometimes treat ourselves as objects in a separate and wholly different life and we treat others as objects in the same way. When we take the stance of participant/observer in our lives, we become the subject of our attention. We can do the same thing with others in their lives. Buber says that “when Thou is spoken, there is no thing.” When we no longer treat anything or anyone as an object, then we are better able to consider deeper relationships with them. We are also able to generate feelings of empathy and act compassionately. Buber also writes about how I/Thou relationships are unbounded and like a stream of “continuous happening.” If we don't recognize this about our present-day relationships, then perhaps the contexts of our lives have shifted away from how our lives can be meaningful to one another. If meditation is one's vehicle into the inner space of being, then the work of integrating dualities can happen there. The practice of oscillating between our personal resource and what the monkeys of the inner world bring to us is the same practice of oscillating between our resource and the gorillas of the outer world. When everything is a subject and nothing is an object, then compassion takes an easy path.

At the beginning of the course, the context included the neuroscientific documentation of networks in which “self” can be located. It included as well the idea of an autobiographical self, a self-talk narrative that involves naming and labeling of emotional states and streams of consciousness that allow us to sense, observe, coalesce meaning, and act as participant/observers in knowing what we have experienced and to really know that the experiences are our own. Our relationships to everything in our lives shift from moment to moment and from day to day as the contexts of events, thoughts, and emotions shift. It seems to me that we find it easier to deal with hard divisions, with dualities, than with ambiguity, nuance, and unpredictability. I suppose that our primordial beginnings made choices like that more conducive to survival. Security and territory were more often preserved by choosing one part of a duality, even if it meant choosing the wrong side of it 49% of the time. The odds were on the side of choosing correctly more often than not. But in these times dualities are severely limiting because they eliminate some useful parts of our selves that we could use to our benefit and because, too, survival now is not about an actual saber-toothed tiger. Survival, in fact, might hang on our ability to incorporate dual natures into our concept of self/other and to become more open to what makes others who they are and to see in what ways all of us are similar.

Here is a list of dualities that comes to mind easily but which is in no way inclusive:

devotion coercion

outrage indifference

loyalty subservience

protection oppression

owner slave

independence imprisonment

advertising propaganda

free will manipulation

faith dogma

interdependence isolation

community atomization

birth death

concord war

humility arrogance

abundance poverty

passivity engagement

ego EGO

The list of potential dualities is vastly longer and that we are able to add to it reveals how our minds can easily default to a “this or that” instead of a “this and that” mentality. I am not suggesting here that we can altogether eliminate thinking about and acting on dualities. I am suggesting that dualities can separate useful partners and this can emerge from our thoughts in meditation. Meditation may be the place where dualities dance before us in different combinations. In some sense, maturity in our humanness is manifested in how we are personally able to hold both sides of a duality in contradictory tension.

Here I would like to suggest that the most obvious desirable, comfortable, ethical, and moral choice in a duality also has its shadow side, its dark underbelly. For instance, protection can become dominance, coercion, and oppression—its very opposite in the duality. Free will may tip over into manipulation and anarchy. Faith may take on command and control and wind up as dogma and violence. But, are we not all of these multitudes? And do we not look away when we pick only the side of a duality that suits us or soothes us? And, if we even acknowledge the role both sides play in life, do we notice how we feel it pertains to others rather than to ourselves? Do we not maintain the self/other duality at the cost of our own integration, one of the wonderful benefits of meditation and attentive self care?

I suppose I am trying to make the case for integration, for “believing in the world,” as Buber puts it. He speaks to the healing power of integration of all aspects of what it is to be human. That said, there will always be gorillas and monkeys with which to contend. If we know of their presence and acknowledge them as pieces of ourselves and do not keep them on the other side of who we think we are in the self/other duality(“that is not the real me,” “what right do they have to be here?”), we are closer to healthy integration. Just as we wake every day to who we think we are, they will be there to contend and occupy. With grounding and resourcing we will be up to the task of moving them to the side or quieting their insistent chatter. Don't let them force you out of your meditation so they can wreck the house. When looking at yourself in the mirror (which is what meditation is, after all), will you be able to say “I accept you”, or, as Franz Wright says in his poem (“The Only Animal”), “I do not condemn you”? How much do we accept and how much can we learn to accept? How can the habit of meditation assist us in seeing more clearly the necessity and value of honoring the dualities in our lives? And, then, how are we called to work with them in the work we do every day?

The last class in this course will explore how the meditative space honors the the self/other duality as a way of knowing ourselves better ( Who am I?), of understanding the relationships we have with the life events and people that appear in our daily lives (What am I here for?), and transition into a consideration of what it means to fully integrate our lives by our own choices and actions. (What then shall I do?) Meditation is a sacred space of the self but it is also a preparation for respecting and caring for others. Perhaps there is a possibility for fusion of inner and outer worlds and for a closer connection between self and other.

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 6

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 6

In Class 5, I offered some ideas about what the inner life might look like once we sit down to meditate and attempt to quiet our minds. I wanted to emphasize that the noisy activity that often (always?) characterizes what we encounter is perfectly normal and provides the basis upon which we can build resilience through the mechanics of dealing with reactivity and supporting responsivity. It is important to remember that flaming insights into the nature of being human can so easily flame out, leaving us disappointed and somewhat empty. The important point here is that building resilience and a greater sense of well-being ask of us some discipline, some energy, some intention, some accountability. The “practice” of meditation is just that—showing up for meditation on a regular basis.

It is useful to remind ourselves that the process of experimentation involves not just trial, but also re-trial. “Error” and “failure” are only words we attach as judgments to falling short of personal expectations of “success.” They are good words with useful connections but, like all useful words, they invite judgment and then we have more unclaimed baggage. When we consider personal experiences and those we label successes or failures, we sometimes feel we have arrived somewhere. My experience has been that both are good teachers and, like all good teachers, allow me to continue the process of learning and integration. Can any one of us say that we are where we are in the present context of our life only because of personal successes? And aren't we where we are today because of the experiments in living we have experienced?

Yes, meditation carries the taints of exclusivity, of retreat, of withdrawal, passivity, complacency, indifference, uncaring, and disconnection. These states of mind or attitudes are the opposite of what we saw as contributors to self care. These states remove us from the world and, more importantly, connections with our own emotional lives. All of this can be true of meditation if it exists as a thing in itself, as an object and an end and not a means to something more creative and useful on a larger scale. This is especially the case when we consider what is happening outside the meditative space, the space we create for ourselves in our bedrooms or other places in our homes. These are places of practice and habit, but they do remain removed from the spaces in which we spend most of our waking hours—the office cubicle, the automobile, the grocery store, the day care center. At first, our meditative space will feel like a strange place in which we encounter strange forces that are more easily overlooked or ignored outright. The last class suggested that within those forces and within that space there is creativity and an opportunity to understand our lives more fully.

There is nothing wrong with escaping the anger and outrages of the “outer” world. Sometimes it is necessary to turn off the news or walk away from a confrontational conversation. The reactivity that results from feeling angered or outraged is protective but it is also useful. If we remain in a state of reactivity, then it is easy to be overwhelmed by it and this leads to greater outrage and conflict. I have sometimes found myself promoting meditation as a way of dealing with the troubling discontinuities in our society and culture and offering meditation as a panacea of sorts. However, in my own mind I have found that that leads to an exaggerated passivity and acceptance of what happens around me. I chalk everything up to “that is just the way things are” or “it is what it is” and move back into a state of mental blandness. My meditation cushion has been something of a hiding place and an escape in the past.

But, if we can be creative about how we deal with the inner monkeys, then we can be equally creative about how we deal with outer life gorillas. You know, the 800 pound gorilla everyone tries to ignore but whose weight buries us all. I believe most people can recognize an 800 pound gorilla when they see one. It is in the act of looking and really seeing that we confront it. When we know our own fear (and isn't that the basis of most angers and outrages?) then we are able to act in ways that can curtail it. Our lives today are full of gorillas. They are huge and threatening and their presence and surprising masks keep us unmoored and ungrounded. Having said that, feeling ungrounded can remind us of our own useful grounding, the act of creating space and becoming physically present to ourselves. Then, we can call upon our personal resources to remind us that joy and hope are possible, no matter the wild animals inside us and outside in the world. Meditation and all the possible entry points into its space are only means to another end.

In Class 5, I made mention of how we can work with some of the perceptions and realities of being human that apply to all aspects of the wholeness axis. I suggested that a rounded notion of self included the qualities of imperfection, impermanence, interdependence, insecurity, unpredictability, uncertainty, and mortality. These same characteristics are mirrored in the wider world and infuse society and culture. In essence, they are part of the context of our lives and have manifestations in our relationships with self and other. Poetry as it is written, meditation as it is practiced, are just vehicles to some larger and more creative end. The same is true for anger, outrage, joy, hope, and all the other feelings we humans can generate. If they remain as stand-alone acts and don't generate ripples into our interactions with one another, then of what use are they but as isolated objects of mental activity? For instance, how important might it be to work with the idea of unpredictability? How much of our lives can we predict or control? If we agree that unpredictability is integral to our lives, then how are we to work with it in ways that keep us from becoming paralyzed or outright crazy? I think we ground and resource ourselves in ways that are personal and true. We understand that life on earth has always been unpredictable and, even with the assurances of science and technology to the contrary, we continue to experiment with the elements of life that are common to all of us. By experimenting, we craft our own coping mechanisms and we make it through a day full of unpredictability. The same is true for our feelings of imperfection, impermanence, insecurity, uncertainty, and mortality.

We depend on the hope that pleasure and happiness are permanent and pains and sorrows are impermanent but the truth is that everything is impermanent. Impermanence and mortality are kissing cousins in the gorilla family. These gorillas are in the room and in our lives every day. The media draw their outlines for us with every report of a natural disaster, a mass shooting, political instability, economic collapse somewhere, or nuclear catastrophe. We know them more locally when we receive a cancer diagnosis or someone near and dear to us dies. The meditative space receives and contains all of this.

But we are familiar with the shapes of the gorilla and we know that we can ground and resource in spite of them. We may face them initially with our reactive selves, a very normal survival instinct. However, we know now that we can calm ourselves into the resilient zone by our simple habits of pausing, grounding, and resourcing. Then we can choose with greater clarity how we will respond. We return to basics, to what we can only truly know in our sensing life, and those are the physiologic certainties of our own bodies, minds, and spirits. If meditation offers a space for that vital experience, then it has become useful beyond being an escape. It has become useful as a means to the end of greater resilience in doing the work we do every day.

If you acknowledge that all the feelings you have that tend to make you feel unbalanced, divided, and imperfect, and that these feelings are universally human, then maybe it is easier to perceive that interdependence is also a vital factor in self care, the wholeness axis and personal integration, and in nurturing responsivity and resilience. Does any one of us really stand alone? If we often experience a divided self, don't we also recognize how we are separated from one another? There is a tendency for each of us to think that what we are experiencing of the monkeys and gorillas is unique to our lives and that to describe them to someone else exposes us as vulnerable and weak and incapable. My own experiences with depression taught me that deflating the ego that had some investment in my illness opened my life to others and that made it easier for them to describe their own versions of the gorilla. I think this is true for all monkeys and gorillas. After all, how many species of anger, fear, or outrage are there? We may be surprised that they intrude in our lives at any given time, but they are not mysterious creatures outside our imaginations. Tribal members since the dawn of time have known that banding together against the woolly mammoth was the only real hope of survival. But survival in our times looks very different. Survival for us implies cooperation on a grander scale with much more at stake. Yet, the need to belong can manifest in the smallest group or any context that includes others. We nourish a sense of community when we offer loving kindness and compassion to others as well as to ourselves. When we do this, we have begun to integrate inner and outer lives and we open up the meditative space to a caring heart.

As we develop greater confidence in ourselves, in grounding in our bodies, finding and using our resources, acknowledging monkeys and gorillas, we move beyond context and relationships with all of these things and into versions of community where self and other are vitally important. We will look at the interactions of self and other in Class 7 and explore how meditation helps make that possible.

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 5

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 5

Class 4 examined what creating a meditative space might look like. The idea of contending with the mind's commotions to clear a more pristine and quiet area is one of the most difficult aspects of meditation. There is something about sitting to be quiet and calm that invites noise and entanglements. It is these cacophonous forces that discourage many people from pursuing what could be a most helpful and healing interaction. We think there is a real difference between the environment of our outer lives and that of our inner lives. Just as we expect some perfect ideal of ourselves, so we expect that when we make the decision to sit quietly we will have a carpet of soft comfort unrolled before us. It is surprising when that doesn't happen and frustrating when we encounter commotion every time we sit to meditate. It is so easy to adapt to the commotion we can see and hear in our awake lives than to struggle with sometimes even greater disordered forces that collide in our minds.

The clamorous cacophony of our minds when left to themselves is classically referred to as “monkey mind,” that state in which wild and unbidden animal sounds and images impinge on orderly thought (refer here to the quote of Michel Montaigne). This is normal for the mind. It is what minds do when left open to the elements of meditation. It seems that the monkeys are always playing in the background and we only notice them when we expect quiet. If we sit and open up the mind without grounding or resourcing, then we are thrown in with all those wild forces. If we at first ground ourselves in our bodies, sensing the breath and enlisting the parasympathetic nervous system, then choose our strongest and most meaningful resource, we have cleared space over which we have control. If then we become the participant/observer of our thoughts, we can begin to choose what we want our minds to consider, if anything. The point is that we get to choose. If we are once again besieged by monkeys, then we can return to the breath and to our personal resource to quiet the noise. The process of quieting is just that, a process, one that is always being altered in one way or another. I would say that in any given meditation period I do this oscillating between noise and resource many times, always beginning again but always in a slightly different place in the stream of thought. Isn't it said by wise people that we can't step into the stream twice in the same place? So it is with meditation and the context of our minds from one moment to the next. Sometimes that new beginning feels like progress and sometimes it feels like a rescue. But what it feels like will come from our own exertions and it will be ours to claim. Even if the stake we claim turns out to be a dud in that moment, we will have made the choice and hold to the freedom that brings.

I would like to suggest that this commotion and confusion is creative. In addition to being a normal phenomenon of mind, it is also the context for understanding ourselves and the world more fully. It is in this understanding that we are able to break away from the tethers of being controlled and oppressed to a state of liberation. To do this, we need to begin to understand better what being human entails. We have already observed how debilitating it can be to strive for some ideal self, to create a pain gap between who we aspire to be and who we truly are. We have explored how “self” is constituted in the brain and how our unique identities evolve from our autobiographical experiences. To go a bit further in understanding how the self can become the ground of creativity we need to consider more ways in which the self can be profiled.

To this end, let me add to the definition of self the qualities of imperfection, impermanence, interdependence, insecurity, unpredictability, uncertainty, and mortality. These are forces that may intrude on our meditations repeatedly and with varying degrees of force and noise. They are the same forces that lurk in the backs of our minds during waking hours when we are tending to tasks of mundane life, like doing laundry or making school lunches or flossing our teeth. When we sit expecting a quiet space, they are there to bedevil us. Yet, it is in giving ourselves over to them that we are able to embrace a more fully rounded emotional life. Because they are embodied and true to our existence as human beings on earth, we add them to the pain of our divided selves when we push them away in hopes they will disappear. When we have fooled ourselves and they return in full force to our desired quiet space of meditation, we are outraged at their presence and persistence. But are we not railing against what rounds out our human character? Are we not dishonoring our true selves? Are we not disowning who we are? And in doing so, do we not create our own suffering?

When we encounter monkeys, we often treat them as we do other threats and stresses. We trigger reactivity (the hard-wired fight, flight, freeze), frame a relationship with them, and formulate judgments about them. (“Is this a dangerous situation?”, “Is it safe to pause and respond?”). Beyond the protections of the reactive state, layers of judgment can build up and these become unclaimed baggage, emotional and otherwise (“I was so weak”, “I shouldn't have said that”, “I am a failure”).

If, instead, we are able to recognize our impermanent state and our vulnerability, then aren't we in a good place to pause and create the conditions for creative action and interaction? Are we not then participant/observers of our own life and able to make choices about what happens next? While life has its unpredictable aspects (how much can we truly predict or control?), we can say we don't know what “next” means. When we do ask “What then shall I do?” (see notes for Class 1), we open up the infinite expanse of possibilities and we get to choose what comes next. The notion of choice, of having options from which to choose, gives us control over a certain number of elements in our lives, especially within our inner lives and the meditative space (forces in our outer, mundane lives, are less respectful of our choosing and we will look at them in Class 6). All of this process is part and parcel of sitting in meditation and moving beyond grounding and resourcing. And what seems effective in the meditative space of our minds, also becomes effective in the mental space of our waking days. It is for this very reason that dividing up our lives into “inner” and “outer” doesn't make much sense because effective mental processing applies to the wholeness axis. With practice in meditation, we practice how to be in every part of our lives, always progressing to greater integration, even if it doesn't always feel that positive.

In the last two classes we will look more closely at how we might choose to respond to simple dualities that divide us and that arise all the time in the meditative space. We will also explore how to approach the judgments we make based on them. Are we held prisoner by our judgments or can we consider them and then let them go?

So, the inner commotion that surges up in meditation is the creative ground for greater flexibility, resilience, and adaptability. We are more balanced on our feet and in our thoughts. We have made friends with the monkeys and we have tamed them to some extent. Yes, they will be there when you return, but they will be different every time. The key is to show up for the show and to address them with kindness, for in doing so, one shows kindness and acceptance for what it is to be a human rather than a monkey (so little separates us genetically, but in crucially important ways) and to be who you truly are.

The kindness and understanding we show to ourselves and the ways in which we deal with our personal monkeys also contribute to what is referred to as neuroplasticity of the brain. Neuroplasticity is all about exercising within the resilient zone, modulating between activation and responsivity but attempting to spend as much time as possible in the calming phase. When we are able to accomplish this, we are in a position to literally change our minds. The firing and wiring that occur in the brain from repeated channeling in specific networks reinforce the kindness and compassion that are healing and allow us to become more adaptable in a world that appears increasingly out of anyone's control. So, a good case can be made for meditating as a habit and repeating all the basic steps that lead in the direction of more personal freedom over what initially seems intractably constricting and inescapable.

In Class 6 we will take a look at how the meditative space interacts with the wider world. We have already noticed how “inner” and “outer” are a somewhat false duality, but encountering the “full catastrophe” of life has additional dimensions. We will go from “monkey mind” to “full catastrophe” and see where it takes us.

11-22-18

MEDITATION NOTES 4

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 4

Class 3 introduced the idea of resourcing as the next step in meditation after grounding or centering. Sources of meaning, peace, joy, and calm can change, just as the circumstances of life and the meditative space change. All of the notions of CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, and INTERACTION are organic and personal, depending on the conscious choices we make. They are “bottom-up” and emerge from our daily lives. The resource selected on any given day may be a source of stability and strength but it may also change from day to day. You get to choose which one works and how it works for you.

One of my biggest challenges as a beginning meditator was what to do after sitting on my cushion or chair, positioning my crossed legs, and focusing on my breath for grounding. What was supposed to happen next? We have already explored some of the ways in which meditation can support self care, how it can be structured with attention to CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, and INTERACTIONS. When it comes to describing the meditative space and how we gain access to it, we are confronted with the challenges posed by the limited language we have to say what it is. I like to think of this space we are creating every time we sit to meditate as a place where we experience what is now called “flow.” It is a nod to limited language choices that we use in references to “stream of consciousness,” “flow of a river,” and where the idea of water becomes a way of accessing the meditative space. Flow is a concept developed extensively by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1990s and expanded since then to include what we now call mindfulness. Flow is a state of mind that includes the following components: (1) Intense and focused concentration on the present moment, (2) Merging of action and awareness, (3) A loss of reflective self-consciousness, (4) A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity, (5) A distortion of temporal experience (one's subjective experience is altered), and (6) Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding. When one is in a state of flow, one is said to be “in the zone,” and I interpret this to be the resilient zone we defined in Class 1.

Because the meditative space can be inhabited by an infinite number of objects, subjects, and relationships (including memories), the state of flow can represent our absorption with joy and peace in one moment and with trauma and sorrow in another. The flow state is not a state of bliss or “zoning out.” It is a state that begins with intention and leads to attention and the expenditure of energy. It is the space we move into with grounding, a sense of stability and relaxation, and with a meaningful personal resource at our core. It is a state in which we can define the CONTEXT of our thoughts in the moment, the emotional RELATIONSHIPS we identify as meaningful, and we can decide how our INTERACTIVE energy will be spent. In a sense, we can create the meditative space in which we wish to settle.

It is important to point out that accessing this space depends on showing up, being present to one's own mind and autobiographical self. That is not to say that what enters the space will be predictable and orderly. In fact, almost every session of meditation I have gets crowded with the harpies and demons and aggressively insistent lists that are present in my mundane life day-to-day. It isn't until I ground and name my resource that I can begin to clear enough space for the conscious choices that lead to focus and calming. We will look at some of those uninvited guests in future classes. At this stage, it is important to have intention and some amount of discipline to show up and sit down, if sitting is how you meditate. When one accesses the meditative space during the course of a busy work day, when mental pausing is the entry point to meditation, then this may occur while walking or driving or sitting at a computer terminal. The important point is that one makes the choice to take the pause. Once again, it takes only milliseconds to move from grounding to resourcing and then into the space where calming can occur.

The quiet space we value and can create in our homes is not always available to us in mundane life. While it is a wonderful place to tend and while I would like to think it is possible to attain this space in the midst of noise and activity, it is not always possible. The process of meditation, however, is always available and can become a part of a busy outer life, if only for brief periods of a few breaths. Conscious breathing opens up the wholeness axis to physiologic calming and support of the parasympathetic nervous system. We escape the pressure of circumstances in which we find ourselves and enter a space where we know our own bodies and their capacities to support us in the resilient zone. It is back to the basics with us in control. We transition from our hard-wired reactivity to responsivity.

I think clearing space for the meditative mind is one of the more difficult aspects of the process. Getting started on any given day at any given time depends on meeting so many demands in mundane life, but noticing that makes the need for meditation even clearer. How can we cope with the demands without grounding and resourcing and finding the space in which we can regulate our emotions and restore our courage and strength? Perhaps, what begins as a hobby will become a habit and then something you can inhabit as a refuge or a sanctuary for restoration. This may become for you an immersion, a cleansing, a clarification, a diving, a submergence, a flooding, a baptism of sorts, an ablution, a purification—all experiences referring to water and the power of “flow.”

When all is said and done using the limited words and concepts that are familiar to us, we are left with mystery at the heart of meditation. There are frontiers yet undiscovered in neuroscience and, thus, in meditation. It is possible that scientific experimentation will uncover those frontiers but it is also possible that they will remain always out of science's reach. In any case, mystery will surround our efforts to describe what happens in the human brain that opens up mental space for what we call meditation or reflection. If we are comfortable with the idea and reality that our lives change all the time, then there is a new opportunity for exploration of mind every day. The open-ended aspect of this experience lends an element of freedom to our daily lives.

Creating the environment for meditation is about suspending time and concepts of space and opening to the creative potential of the human brain where anything is possible and everything is useful. This is a place where we can experience peace in seconds or minutes (our mundane lives) or over the course of months or years (the life of a hermit or monk). We get to make choices. We get to ask questions and experiment to find what works for us. We act as participant/observers of our own lives and honor the relationship we have with ourselves. Are you comfortable with mystery and unpredictability?

Class 5 will look at what happens when we enter a meditative space and work with our inner lives.

11-22-18

Meditation Notes 3

COLLOQUY FOR CLASS 3

In our last class on care and healing, we looked at how one uses the format of identifying context, the facts and details of any situation, and then working with the relationships we have to that particular context at a particular time. In this regard, relationships refer to our feelings generated by the emotions we have and which are often hidden in our subconscious. Thinking about context grounds us in our own lives and keeps us in touch with our inner spaces and how we perceive the world around us. The details of mundane life are a stream but we don't often perceive them that way. There seem to be individual periods of punctuation and interruption and disjointed connections. We seem to be more aware of the stream-like characteristics of our emotional lives and can perceive them as moving from one to the next. That said, we have more control over our inner lives, the meditative spaces, and can make choices about the possibilities that curiosity and inquiry open to us. This class focuses on what happens once we consciously enter the stream of our emotional lives with the intent to direct our attention to one thought at a time. The relationship we have identified as important to us assists in this effort of attention. The thread of attention here will be on resourcing, finding a source of meaning that can serve us as we settle into the meditative space. Poetry can be one source (not the source) for this step in meditation. It needs to be said that “resource” is a verb as well as a noun and, in the context of this course, represents a process of change.

Poetry needs no defense. It is able to stand on its own as a formation of mind and language. Its reputation for being arcane or difficult or irrelevant precedes it. But, like the outlier, the coyote, the nerd, the misfit, the holy fool, it has its own integrity, take it or leave it. I have chosen to take it in and place it into the class on meditation because of what it offers my experience with exploration of the mind. I offer it to all of you, thinking that it might take on some useful purpose as you explore your own versions of meditation. Once again, I emphasize that poetry is not one thing, rigid and fixed, just as any poem or meditation session is not just one concept or experience. If you can accept the idea that we are changing all the time in body, mind, and spirit (the wholeness axis), then perhaps you can see how poems change in relation to the changing contexts of our lives. If we take time and give poems a chance to speak to us, they will sound one way today and a different way tomorrow. That happens because the context of our lives changes from day to day and so we engage the poem as changing beings.

What I hope to do in this discourse is to show how I think poetry belongs to our considerations and explorations of meditation. It is not the only doorway to meditation (and may be, in fact, a stand-alone meditation in itself; if not in reading it, but also in writing it) but it can serve us in that capacity as well as any other. With the domain of self care always in mind, I would like to refer to some of those initial considerations (Class 1) when writing about the potential of poetry to stabilize our minds and open up space for meditation. In addition, I want to explore how the factors that seem to be important in meditation are also present in poems ( i.e, CONTEXT, RELATIONSHIPS, INTERACTION), just as they are present in encounters we have in our mundane life and I include here those occasions when we can replace reactivity with responsivity. The poems I have included in each class seem to me to be related in some way to the thread (theme) of that class, but you may read them differently. That leads us into experimentation with interpretation, always a good and healthy thing in lifelong learning.

It is worth emphasizing as often as I can that what each of these classes does is to tease out a thread from the whole fabric of the wholeness axis and from the fabric of meditation when, in fact, the intention is not to unravel but to make sure each thread tightens down the warp and woof of the entire project. It is by looking at the threads and seeing their contributions that we are able to integrate all of them into the whole. We do this with our lives and scientists do it with their experiments. By experimentation with pieces and threads, we come to some concept of how our lives are changing and progressing and we grow in appreciation and gratitude. By this method, we are able to make choices and change our minds.

I don't believe that there is any such thing as a “minor” poet. There are poets that make it big on the world scene for any number of reasons, and there are those that don't. But all of them begin with the same blank piece of paper and begin to choose words from similar cultural lexicons in different languages. In this, they begin as we would, were we to attempt a poem. What differs, of course, is the CONTEXTS of their different lives, the RELATIONSHIPS they have to their lives and their work, and the INTERACTIVE choices they make when they write. We read them on one day with our own contexts, relationships, and interactions and then on another day with a different set of factors, with different eyes and ears.

The CONTEXT of poetry includes, most obviously, language—words with meanings that are often straightforward and sometimes ambiguous. How they aggregate to create a narrative is a process that neuroscientists believe begins non-linguistically in parts of the brain dedicated to sorting and selecting representations or patterns in mental maps. Once narrative coalesces, the words become symbols and allow us to distance ourselves from experience long enough to perceive patterns in a complex universe. When we communicate those patterns to others, we open a gateway to understanding and sharing. This is the basic ground of communication and the ground of poetry as well. Perception of poetry as communication is segmented in the brain where a “top-down,” executive left brain deals with language as defined words and a “bottom-up” right brain takes a dominant role in interpreting words with ambiguous meaning. In addition, imagery evoked by poetry seems to activate areas of the right hemisphere dedicated to the visuospatial processes of the brain. The poet may be freeing us from the onerous entrapment of fixed meaning (left brain influence) and inducing an integrated state that contributes to the wholeness axis and emotional regulation in the resilient zone. A few moments of breath awareness or poetry reflection can create a state in our minds of receptive awareness to what arises. It is this pause or step back that rescues us from reactivity and fosters responsivity. These pauses are available to us at all times but poetry can also be a vehicle that transports us into mindful awareness and meditation.

It seems that the effectiveness of a poem's message depends on our state of intentionality to receive. But poems can also activate a state of receptive awareness. It is believed they do this by stimulating a sensory immediacy that is the ground of experience and that is the basis for integrating the wholeness axis in meditation. Poems enable observation with some clarity, as they imply relationships without didactic descriptions. Poems, because of the immediacy of their personally rendered imagery and sensations for the poet (and maybe in the same ways or different ways for us) can create entirely new ways of conceptualizing the world. In this way, poems bring forth new ways of knowing our own worlds. Words create worlds.

In Class 2 I mentioned how important it seems to be able to name and label feelings as a way of healing the pain gap, the split that divides the person we aspire to be and the person we truly are. In naming and labeling feelings, we are supporting emotional balance and approaching resilience. The role of self-talk is important in how we do this, as it makes us the subject of our own lives instead of being the object. The dialogue is with ourselves and, by this means, we open up creative inquiry. Neuroscience has shown that exercising the ability to use words to describe internal states of being, such as feelings, makes us more resilient in adapting to stress and trauma.

So, that is some of the landscape, the context, of poetry. What can we make of RELATIONSHIPS and INTERACTIONS? I believe we can discern context and relationships within any poem, but poetry in general also offers us a way to be in relationship with it. My relationship to poetry has to do with what it offers me as a resource. Resourcing is an important part of wholeness axis stabilization and follows on after grounding. It has been shown that resourcing as a conscious effort is very effective in contributing to how we respond to traumas, large and small. But the meditative space is reserved not only for dealing with traumas, as its contents are infinitely potential and include anything that is possible to experience. The list of resources is as vast as there are people who can name elements of their lives that give them meaning and joy. In this way, naming something that represents safety, peace, joy, and personal meaning is contrasted with that resource's play against the trauma that may occupy the meditative space at any given time. We dwell for a time on trauma here only to demonstrate how resourcing in meditation can address some of the most difficult aspects of our inner and outer lives.

Resourcing does not ask for the trauma to be rehearsed or repeated or relived. Retraumatization is a real phenomenon, as most of us can attest because of our experiences with the cycles of rumination that loop in our minds. Instead, we characterize the trauma in terms that describe how it feels to us: How big is it? Is it heavy? Does it have a color? Or a temperature? Where in the body does it sit? Our resourcing has supplied us with other imagery and sensations that bring us calm and joy. Perhaps it is the image of a spiritual leader, a place in nature, a pleasant childhood memory, a loved one, an icon, a poem. In dealing specifically with the trauma, resourcing enables us to be in control of the oscillation or toggling between the characterized trauma and the resource. This can take any time that seems comfortable. With each visit to the trauma, it is good to ask how it has changed in character—Is it as heavy? Is it still as hot? Has it moved from its original location? In this way, the resource is a safety net below the abyss of trauma. Now, obviously, there are big traumas (you get to decide which is big and which is little, not someone else) that require the help of a professional, but for many of the smaller traumas that bedevil all of us, this technique can prove useful in stabilizing and regulating back into the resilient zone. Pausing, breathing, noticing posture, grounding all flow into mindful awareness and support the parasympathetic nervous system as it calms the body. Resourcing can be the next step in our efforts to deal with those traumas and stresses that require more than momentary mindfulness.

Perhaps the rhythm of the poem, the imagery, the alliteration, the overall flow help us access the doorway to meditation. Again, it is just one way of gaining this access and can be effective for those who are receptive to it and work with it. It isn't for everyone, but it is available. It might be worth a try to pick a poem and let its beauty and energy become a resource. Let yourself develop a relationship and history with the poem and the poet behind it. Read it aloud several days in a row; notice how your relationship with it changes, how it might generate questions about its meaning or how it contributes to your daily toil. Poetry may be beautifully pointless or pointlessly beautiful, but either way it is a representation of the flow of consciousness of which we can partake. It can contribute to our efforts at self care.

The thread of this class is not so much poetry as it is the helpfulness of having another entry point to meditation and to use poetry or any other resource as a way of doing that. The emphasis is on using elements of beauty, peace, and joy as counterpoints to the darker and negative stresses and traumas that are a part of our lives and, thus, part of the meditative space we inhabit.

This points to Class 4 where we will explore how one can make space and time for meditation.