zenjones

Hallowe’en is a week away, and as my practice more and more becomes an exploration of fear, I thought I would use the holiday to deepen my awareness of fear.

It is interesting that we have this celebration of all things scary—as if our culture knows the importance of awareness of fear. There are many ways in our culture to experience fear in a controlled environment: horror movies, amusement park rides, reading scary novels. But, of course, one of the main causes of fear is realizing you have no control.

I remember going to see Jaws and “controlling” my fear. I was surprised and gratified that I could use my mind to avoid fear, telling myself it was only a movie, and being curious as to how they achieved their horrific effects. I did this at all horror movies after that, keeping a tight rein on my reactions. It wasn’t ’til Alien, 15 years later, that I decided, What the heck, let’s see what happens if I let myself get scared. I shrieked, I mashed my face into a throw pillow, and eventually found myself sitting on the back of the couch pressed against the wall, trying to escape that monster. It was really fun to let myself get scared!

Real fear is not so fun, nor so easily accessible. For me, anger is my instant refuge. No matter what fear inspires it (of being unloved, of being discovered worthless, of losing comfort, of loss of control, of loss of identity), I flip right to anger, and rarely experience the actual fear viscerally. Often I can see it intellectually, and I go back to try to re-experience it sometimes, but anger keeps me safe from fear.

Hallowe’en is concerned with the fear of death, which doesn’t do much for me. I’ve survived the deaths of loved ones, and I don’t fear what comes after this life. I do have a fear of many of the processes that take you up to death—of pain, of loss of independence and loss of dignity.

I wish I could greet the fear in my life as I did when I let myself experience fear at horror movies: Hey, this is fun! And I wonder what our costumes would look like if we dressed up as our real fears.

Oh, I had opinions. Like, everything about Questhaven is wrong. Starting with the name. We Ordinary Minders are not on a quest. We know that everything we have is right here; it’s only a matter of becoming aware. And the pictures were the kitchiest I’ve ever experienced outside a museum. And the religious iconography! Jesus Christ as Lord Mountbatten, that image in every room as if to say, “He was really one of us.”

But eventually the opinions calmed down, and there was lots of sitting quite happily amid the wild natural surroundings. I was most aware of the sounds of the animals; of the sound of the crows’ wings in flight, the cricket in the corner, and the coyotes singing their raucous song. Oh, and the birds! At sunrise and sunset it was impossible to separate out the individual songs there were so many.

I was jisha this sesshin and it was the perfect job for me. I could exercise my planning brain for something functional and immediate. Once the planning brain had its fun, it left me alone a little to be present. I tried to have people outside as much as possible, to see the stars and feel the cool breeze.

On the way home, John told us he was leaving our group. That was a big deal for several reasons. There was the loss of John’s energy and enthusiasm, which I’ve felt has added some lightness and humor to our group. And there was the surprise of it: in my experience, people don’t usually leave after they’ve been with us for a year or two. So I will miss John, but I am happy that he will have an opportunity to find a practice that fits him better.

Of all the sesshins I’ve attended, I felt more connected to this group, and more able to be present. Although I feel very much at home with our Santa Rosa gang, I’m usually part of the monitor team and so I am often taken up with problem solving, coordinating, and helping during our sesshins. And in San Diego, the locals there are the experts and I spend time trying to figure out how to “act as one” when I don’t know what action is called for. But at Questhaven, we were all just figuring it out as we went along, so there was more room for mistakes, more acceptance of my own awkwardness.

P.p. has been amazingly valuable in ways I did not anticipate. I’m surprised at how different the experience of the last month has been compared to what I thought it would be. I thought I would have lighthearted days of “being aware of hands” or something fun like that. But it wasn’t lighthearted at all. Being aware of conditioned behavior, believed thoughts, etc. is hard work.

What emerged for me was the awareness that The Five Questions have become more of a habit with me, especially “Can I think of this as my path?” I noticed this every day, but most recently in regard to our car. I found myself describing our car in the most derogatory way, and offending my husband. He picked it out and has cared for it assiduously over the past six years, so that it is almost never broken down, and so it (a 15-year-old American car) gets 30 miles to the gallon. If I’d had my way, we’d have bought a brand-new Prius a couple years ago, and would still be paying it off, and certainly we wouldn’t have saved nearly as much money on gas as it would have cost to buy it, and certainly buying a new car would be much more expensive in environmental terms than keeping this old one in good running shape.

But oh, I don’t like driving around in it. And oh, when certain friends make fun of it, I get very defensive. I want to put a sign in the window that says, “I could afford a Lexus if I wanted it.” And oh, I want it.

But it’s been the best lesson of conditioning. In my family we bought new cars every year. My poor parents lived under the constant stress of keeping up with those Joneses. My father would no more drive a 5-year-old car than he would walk down the streets of Rolling Hills naked. And that was a very deeply ingrained lesson.

So it is my path to see how important it is to me that perfect strangers think I’m successful. And to sit with my abject envy over Ann’s new car.

This is a season of so many endings for me. A dear friend that I will not see so much of now that I spend my weekdays in San Francisco gave me a paragraph from a book by Rachel Naomi Remen. It seemed to reflect my new found appreciation of accepting my path:

Most people have come to prefer certain of life’s experiences and deny or reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all cost, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness. Or even that the love we have been given can be trusted… Beyond comfort lies grace, mystery, and adventure. We may need to let go of our beliefs and ideas about life in order to have life.

Here’s to grace, mystery, and adventure!

And today is, once again, non-manifestation of anger day. For most of p.p. I didn’t have too much anger. But I can feel it more often now. And I think it has to do with the dread of a new situation—a new living situation, a new city to get used to, a new job, new people. This morning I found myself wishing I could just curl up and stay in Healdsburg.

So I notice the spiky-ness. It seems I become aware of it in time to prevent myself from “manifesting” it about 20% of the time. Which seems like a lot, considering most of my life I believed my anger, I believed that that person was the cause of my anger, and if they’d just get it together to act right, I wouldn’t be angry.

I can’t believe how deeply conditioned I am to this. I remember my parents screaming at us, “You make me so mad!” And my little brother—at age two—getting spanked for bad table manners, because the bad table manners made my father so mad! I have tried to discuss this with my brother, now that he has children of his own, but he agrees with my father. After a particularly stomach-turning meal with lots of yelling and threatening, I tried to explain that that kind of behavior has all kinds of negative ramifications, including, possibly, my own anorexia as a young adult, his 12-year-old daughter’s anorexia, my father’s congestive heart failure, my brother’s own astronomical blood pressure and severe gout. But my brother comes back with, “If they would just do what I said, I wouldn’t get mad.” And my brother is a smart, sweet man who loves his children very much.

So I will try to increase my “catches” to 30%, and for the rest, I’ll keep a card in my pocket and one in my wallet, asking “What do you feel angry about right now?” That includes all the other anger feelings like irritation and annoyance.

I went to breakfast yesterday with a close girlfriend and her 8-year-old daughter. My girlfriend’s sister was also with us. They flew in from out of town to visit me and attend the Harvest Fair and have a “girls’ weekend.”Â

It was very interesting because culturally and politically my GF is halfway between her sister and me. Her sister is conservative, blue-collar, rural. I’m liberal, intellectual, and urban. Both my GF and her sister are Christians, though I have always considered my friend tolerant and practical (she was an atheist when I met her and told me that she has chosen church because her husband was raised that way and she thinks it’s a good way to instill moral values in her children).

My friend was talking about a book she’d read called “Eat. Pray. Love.” She’d told me before about how much she loved this book. She brought it up right after I’d mentioned (because she’d asked) that I was attending a zen retreat next weekend. But to the description and praise she’d recounted to me, she added that, “It was the first time I’d read about meditation that wasn’t totally wacky or completely non-sensical.”

I was surprised at her characterization, but sort of on to the next thing.

It wasn’t ’til later that I thought to say, “Yeah, asking your imaginary supernatural friend for material goods is so logical and makes so much sense.”

I wonder why my defenses didn’t come up until some time later? I realized I was very angry and considered for a moment if this friend and I might be done. I’m guessing that she was trying to make her sister feel less uncomfortable with this wacky and non-sensical friend of hers. But still…

I’m off to meet them at the Snoopy Museum. I’m aware of feeling closed-up a little, a little tension around my shoulders and back. I will be more careful—and that’s not necessarily what I want. I liked it yesterday before my defenses came up. I was loose and happy to see my friend and goof off with her daughter. So I’m not going to try to fix this or anything, but I’m just going to try to be aware of it.

And also to be aware of my own judgements about people, especially religion.

I chose the job in San Francisco.

And now that I’ve chosen, that little anxiety buzz that kept me inflated has seeped out and I’m sad and tired. I mean, I’m happy about the job. It’s a good job and I’m looking forward to starting.

But with saying yes to that, I had to say no to the cool job in Boston, and good-bye to my women-in-business group today, and good-bye, really good-bye to the dream of my agency in Healdsburg. I mean, of course I said good-bye to that in April. But now it’s really real.

I thought that once I’d decided, life would be a round of happy excitement. And planning, wonderful planning. But my practice period awareness exercise—that one of noticing my planning behavior—seems to have taken that away from me. In fact, my husband is planning like mad, and I’m reading it as an indication of his own slight anxiousness.

We had a great group meeting on Wednesday. We talked about forgiveness, and it was so interesting, everyone’s different take. I had a really classic forgiveness experience earlier this summer. I printed out Ezra’s forgiveness meditation (from At Home in the Muddy Water) and made it part of my daily meditation for a few weeks. After 4 days, I noticed a little shift in my resistance; and after a couple weeks I felt pretty good about it. Good enough that I noticed when that resistance came up again and I pulled out my crib sheet.

I feel very good to know that I have that crib sheet. That I have a group like ours where I can go and talk about these very important subjects that don’t seem to get discussed anywhere else. Thank you all. I’d say I’m sorry that I won’t be able to attend Wednesday night sittings anymore, but I didn’t really go all that much. However, I’ll still be around on weekends. And I’ll be updating the website!

This year I tried taking classes on a stationary bike. I’d never done it before, and whenever I told someone I was thinking of it, they usually shook their heads and said something like, “That’s for animals!”

Ever since I injured myself five years ago, I have not been able to run, and I have not been able to find an activity that would get my heart rate out of its sluggish rut. Spinning did that, and more.

The most valuable thing about spinning, however, was not the physical effects, but the awareness effects. It was a lot like practice period items where you take yourself out of your habitual, comfortable rituals and plonk yourself right in the middle of something new and awkward.

I started out terribly self-conscious. I was older by 20 years and heavier by 40 pounds than everyone in my class and, at first, I needed long breaks for my red face to fade from heart-attack-purple to sun-stroke-pink. In a way, it was kind of liberating. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone and there’s no way I was going to. I gave myself up to the clutziness and just enjoyed it. In fact, I was so glad to be over-50 and not having to worry about what the guy behind me thought of my butt. I just stopped worrying what people would think and thought about what was important to me.

My workouts were my workouts. If I wanted to coast along that was okay. As I got more stamina, I started having fun seeing how fast I could make those pedals turn and impressing the heck out of myself. And the music! The music was fantastic—a lot of it was songs I’d never heard before, y’know, songs the kids are listening to. But I sat right under the speaker and there were times that I felt the music in a way I hadn’t done since I was chooblin’ at Grateful Dead happenings in the sixties.

And then it became really fun, in a way that exercise had never really been for me. I felt so much better on days when I took the class. I’m sure it was because of endorphins and heart rate and adrenalin and whatever, but it was also the act of doing something where all I really had to do was be aware.

So I get to work on judgements and attachments and envy and acceptance and pity and smugness, superiority. But there are also lovely moments of joy, of being in my body and feeling how dutifully it works, how it gets stronger, how really fabulous it is to stretch out those calf muscles, how lovely it is to stop. And how good it is to be 50-something wearing  skintight bike shorts with the three-inch-thick seat pad, and not care if other people think I look funny. Too much.