zenjones

Right now? I’m attached to the schedule I’ve created. I’m attached to not accomplishing it, to failing. In order to hold off the realization that I’m going to fail, I’m very attached to planning. Okay, if I don’t worry about practice period and if i put off that bike ride with my husband and just stay right here and work… Hmmm. Maybe I’m attached to work as evidence that I am valuable.

Wow. That thought allowed me to take a deep old breath. I like this practice period.

Last Monday, when he was talking about p.p. (as Ellen calls it), Ezra said that one of the things we might notice was “moments of simple delight.” I love that phrase.

I think I’m attached to that concept.

Yesterday, “notice blaming” was my wake up call. I set my Outlook program to remind me every half hour, and, interestingly enough, there was actually one time when it binged on when I wasn’t blaming anyone! However, when I noticed myself blaming my husband for my crankiness, or blaming my husband for my lateness, or, wait a minute, maybe it is his fault! No, no. I tried to also notice if I was then blaming myself for blaming. What a convoluted concept.

As excited as I am about starting practice period, I am also resistant. My “pattern interrupt” for this month is not reading while I eat and while I get dressed. So while I was dressing this morning, I kept picking up my book automatically and then catching myself and putting it down. I spent most of the time noticing how annoyed I was at not being able to do my regular thing.

My menu item for today is “notice blaming.” The challenge will be to just notice it, not to judge it, or castigate myself for it.

I’m interested in what the rest of the zen group is doing during this period. If any of you think it’d would be helpful to your awareness practice to write in this blog, I’d be happy to have you. And it’s very easy–just push the comment button below and type in the box that comes up. Then put submit comment, and you are done! The more adventurous among you can even post images.

I hope to write here most practice period days, to heighen my own awareness, and to perhaps bring me out of my mechanicalness.

Hiked Pt. Reyes with KKJ yesterday. Bear Valley out to Arch Rock. We walked through the Sonoma County golden-hills-of-summer terrain, the paleolithic redwoods-and-ferns-and-symphony-of-streams terrain, the live-oak-and-scrub terrain, and finally to the rocky-and-sandy-coastal-habitat-for-seagulls terrain.

KKJ is the guy who gave me the first Joko Beck book. We have been hiking and talking about zen thoughts, zen theories, for 15 years. However, he doesn’t sit, doesn’t really have a practice, and hasn’t read Beck in years, so our conversations are getting a little surreal. We don’t speak the same language. But we sure don’t stop talking the whole way!

Yesterday we discussed the phrase “Believing your own thoughts” which I’ve sort of just accepted as meaning one thing—believing the fear-inspired and/or emotion-based thoughts. But KKJ pointed out that it really says believing all thoughts, even those that are just functional. So we went back and forth on that for a while. I said I’d ask my teacher.

I am so grateful for Pt. Reyes, for the people who started national parks, for the natural beauty that I can dip into at will up here.

One of our members has only a few days to live. She’s had cancer for a while; hasn’t attended our group in a long time. In fact, she’d pretty much stopped attending by the time I started with this group 5 years ago.

What I know about her: she is a poet, she practices. The couple times she attended our group since I began, her comments were insightful, and mostly over my head. I have heard that she has been fully aware and experiencing her own decline, and talking about it with her loved ones.

I mostly think about her daughters, who are about the age I was when my mother died. That event was the most painful and saddest in my life. Even now, 22 years later, I feel my heart grow large in my chest and tears back up behind my eyes at the mere thought of her.

But her death also resulted in some of the most profound learning in my life. I was—and had been for a long time—a cynical hard-partying person. I ran with a self-destructive crowd, many of whom are dead or lost to drug addictions. Soon after the death of my mother, my own behavior became exponentially more risky, more thoughtless, and more out-of-control. More drugs, crime, dangerous sexual behavior, manipulating people, lying to myself, being with violent people, car accidents. When I told my friends that I couldn’t seem to stop my life from spiraling down, they couldn’t figure out what I was talking about.

Luckily, a new friend convinced me to see a therapist and I began to experience my life. I recognized the pain and trauma that brought me to my original cynicism, I experienced the sorrow—and the joy—of mourning, of crying, of letting go of the tight hold I had over my emotions. And I discovered myself—a person who’d always been there, just walled behind defenses. I realized I loved school, and went back for a degree. I found wonderful work with funny, interesting people. I found my husband, one of the greatest gifts of my life. And I came to zen practice.

So I am sad for those young women, her daughters. And maybe they already know themselves, maybe they don’t need the kind of transformation I did. Maybe they will mourn and move on. But I know that from death and pain can come life and joy, and so I am not too sad.

I’ve been studiously ignoring the Practice Period Agreement ever since I printed it out last week. For an explanation of practice period, you can go here (nice web design, Ann!). I usually love practice period. Am always surprised.

So “How do you see your primary gap in practice, and how, specifically, do you plan to address it?” I’m asleep all the time. “Asleep” in the zen sense of being not aware. My particular manifestation would be legion, but mostly I believe my own thoughts. I also hide from what I’m doing with addiction. My addiction? Reading. I read while I eat, I read while I brush my teeth, I read while I’m talking to friends and clients on the phone. I used to read while I drove but that got a little dicey. I’ve considered inventing waterproof paper so I can read in the shower. And that’s always the worst part of sesshin for me–all that lovely time when I could be reading.

So I think I’ll not read when I eat. Agh.

And I’m going to blog daily, about my practice that day.

One more question on the agreement: How do you plan to make your practice more continuous throughout the day? I’ll set my Outlook reminder to go off every half hour, with a different item from the “menu items” list.

Makes me think of the Roz Chast cartoon, “National Everything Awareness Day“.

It’s been a couple weeks since I attended a 5-day sesshin at the Zen Center San Diego and I’m a little sad that the lighter-than-air sensation has worn off. The first week after I felt like every day was magic, all was good. I was probably unbearable.

I realized that all my opinions don’t have much to do with reality. Oh, what an eye-opener. My judgements–they felt so solid, so real, even as I told myself that they were just mine and had nothing to do with the person next to me or what was actually happening. I guess I should have got a clue when the squiggles in the plaster on the wall I was staring at started jumping around and calling my name. And you should have seen what the figure in the carpet was doing!

Now we head into practice period, and I’ve got another sesshin (albeit shorter) in October.