Just about every difficult or disastrous situation has occurred because at least one person involved either didn’t know egocentric karmic conditioning was not their authentic nature or was fooled into believing it was for long enough to do something unfortunate.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to get, to experience, that the voice talking in your head is not who you are. In fact, it takes a lot of looking to realize there’s a voice talking. “I don’t want to, I have to, I need, I don’t feel like it, it’s too hard, I’ll do it later”…sound so very much like they must be me, it’s just me thinking. It requires a lot of close attending to catch on that there’s “someone,” who actually feels most like “me,” who is listening to the voice talking.
People are conditioned to take ownership of and responsibility for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with them except they all happen in the same body/mind. Opposite opinions arise constantly, we feel one way and then another about any number of topics, one day we feel agreeable the next we don’t, and yet we go right on saying “I,” as if we are one consistent entity that is thinking of and expressing these disparate notions. This is the world of duality, and the way a “self” can appear to be separate from every “thing” else is if that illusory self takes up, and argues to maintain, opposing positions. I think X, we don’t agree, you feel Y, but at least we’re in accord that they really are delusional.
There’s a handy little tool we can apply to see if we are close to center or have been bamboozled again by egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate: We can look to see if there’s an argument in progress.
Are you arguing for or against something? Are you arguing inside your own head or with another “outside” person? Is there a voice in your head arguing that there’s something wrong with you? If there’s an argument, you can know it’s egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate doing the arguing, no matter how convinced it wants you to be that it’s “really you.” How can we know that? We can know that because the heart never argues, and the ego never stops arguing.
Isn’t that a handy little check-in?
In gassho,
Cheri
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
What We Are Up To
[This is, verbatim, an email sent on December 7 to our current email class, “It’s Time to Feel Good.” The focus of the class is to make a recording of the loving encouragement of your internal mentor to keep your commitments to yourself. The commitment participants have in common is to record (R) and listen (L) to the recording as often possible. (One class member suggests we’ve coined a new verb, R/Ling.) The point is to drown out the voices of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, which usually dominate our internal dialogue, with what we know to be true.]
TTFG Dec. 7
What We Are Up To
Gassho,
I sensed in the most recent batch of responses a creeping reassertion of the slimy, slippery, sneaky tentacles of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, and it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time for a review of just what we’re up to here. Please, if you are not feeling those creeping tendrils, do not think I’m addressing this to you—though it’s always helpful to be forewarned, n’est-ce pas? Sooner or later, they will creep.
Remember in What You Practice Is What You Have how often I came back to “one process does not lead to another”? Another way to say that is “the outcome is the same as the process.” In conditioned thinking you can “do this and get that;” which is a lie. In truth, if you do this you’ll only ever get this.
In other words, you do a process as a practice because what you get is the process that you practice. (Ha, this really IS Zen.) Or, one doesn’t lead to the other; one is the other.
The value of Zen awareness practice—when you do it!—is that you don’t question the process. You just do it. (We must keep in mind here that Zen awareness practice is completely voluntary. We sign on. We ask to do it because we want to end suffering and believe this is the way to do that.) So we do the practice. No if, ands, or buts. What you do in awareness practice is to do what you’re given to do. You don’t evaluate it, you don’t decide to do it based on how you feel about it or whether it feels good or you like it or you can see the value in it or you want to—you just do it. Because you said you would. Because you decided to. Because you committed to do it.
The opportunity with that commitment is to look at what prevents you from keeping it. Overcoming the resistance that arises is what the practice is about. Overcoming that resistance is what will free you. The fact of the matter is that your commitment could be to wake up every morning of your life and pat your nose 3 times—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is doing what you committed to do. It has nothing to do with whether or not what you’re doing is beneficial, though in this case, practicing awareness, is far beyond merely beneficial. The point is that in the process of doing whatever it is you’ve committed to, the fighting it, resisting it, whining, arguing, complaining—whatever you’re indulging while doing the practice—is how you get to see everything that is between you and whatever it is you want for your life; everything that stands between you and life itself because all of that resistance is egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, the only thing keeping you from the life you know is possible for you.
Through keeping this one commitment—to talk to and listen to the unconditionally loving, wise compassionate guidance of your authentic nature—you will learn how to keep a commitment to whatever you choose. I am suggesting to you that the ultimate commitment is to live life, not egocentric karmic conditioning, and that’s what this process will allow you to do.
This is how you train yourself in practicing keeping commitments. In this discipline you learn to physically execute what you authentically commit to. This is how you get out of the world of karmic conditioning. You have to do the process because the outcome is inherent in the process. You don’t do the process to end suffering; by doing the process you end suffering—the outcome is the process.
I will love to read (in 50 words or fewer) what happens as you consider this.
In gassho,
Cheri
TTFG Dec. 7
What We Are Up To
Gassho,
I sensed in the most recent batch of responses a creeping reassertion of the slimy, slippery, sneaky tentacles of egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, and it occurred to me that perhaps it’s time for a review of just what we’re up to here. Please, if you are not feeling those creeping tendrils, do not think I’m addressing this to you—though it’s always helpful to be forewarned, n’est-ce pas? Sooner or later, they will creep.
Remember in What You Practice Is What You Have how often I came back to “one process does not lead to another”? Another way to say that is “the outcome is the same as the process.” In conditioned thinking you can “do this and get that;” which is a lie. In truth, if you do this you’ll only ever get this.
In other words, you do a process as a practice because what you get is the process that you practice. (Ha, this really IS Zen.) Or, one doesn’t lead to the other; one is the other.
The value of Zen awareness practice—when you do it!—is that you don’t question the process. You just do it. (We must keep in mind here that Zen awareness practice is completely voluntary. We sign on. We ask to do it because we want to end suffering and believe this is the way to do that.) So we do the practice. No if, ands, or buts. What you do in awareness practice is to do what you’re given to do. You don’t evaluate it, you don’t decide to do it based on how you feel about it or whether it feels good or you like it or you can see the value in it or you want to—you just do it. Because you said you would. Because you decided to. Because you committed to do it.
The opportunity with that commitment is to look at what prevents you from keeping it. Overcoming the resistance that arises is what the practice is about. Overcoming that resistance is what will free you. The fact of the matter is that your commitment could be to wake up every morning of your life and pat your nose 3 times—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is doing what you committed to do. It has nothing to do with whether or not what you’re doing is beneficial, though in this case, practicing awareness, is far beyond merely beneficial. The point is that in the process of doing whatever it is you’ve committed to, the fighting it, resisting it, whining, arguing, complaining—whatever you’re indulging while doing the practice—is how you get to see everything that is between you and whatever it is you want for your life; everything that stands between you and life itself because all of that resistance is egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate, the only thing keeping you from the life you know is possible for you.
Through keeping this one commitment—to talk to and listen to the unconditionally loving, wise compassionate guidance of your authentic nature—you will learn how to keep a commitment to whatever you choose. I am suggesting to you that the ultimate commitment is to live life, not egocentric karmic conditioning, and that’s what this process will allow you to do.
This is how you train yourself in practicing keeping commitments. In this discipline you learn to physically execute what you authentically commit to. This is how you get out of the world of karmic conditioning. You have to do the process because the outcome is inherent in the process. You don’t do the process to end suffering; by doing the process you end suffering—the outcome is the process.
I will love to read (in 50 words or fewer) what happens as you consider this.
In gassho,
Cheri
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Talk about Snakes…
Gassho,
There’s an Old Zen Story about the monk who wakes up one morning with snakes crawling all over her body. She, understandably, became immediately hysterical. When those called to her by her wild shrieking attempted to tell her there were in fact no snakes, she became even more upset. She was inconsolable. The head monk called in the local physician who suggested drugs to calm her down. She screamed louder at the thought. Next a therapist was brought in, but unable to communicate at all through the yelling and thrashing, suggested that perhaps the doctor was right. Finally (finally?!) they decided to send for a Zen Master. The master arrived, sat down quietly in a corner of the room and began to meditate. Eventually the monk was drawn into the stillness and slowly calmed enough to tell the master what was happening.
“They’re all over me,” she moaned piteously. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them, they’re everywhere. What can I do? Please help me,” she pleaded.
The master nodded thoughtfully and then told the monk, “I will help you. But first I must go to a far city; I will return in two weeks. Until then you must do two things.” “Anything,” cried the monk. “I will do anything.”
“Very good,” said the master. “Until I return you must, first, watch these snakes very, very carefully. Observe them minutely. Note their color, sizes, shapes, textures, patterns, and facial features. See everything there is to see about them and, second, do not mention them to a soul. Say not a word about them to anyone.”
When the master returned two weeks later, the head monk ran through the gate excitedly calling, “The snakes are gone! The monk is cured!”
I had quite a difficult situation arise this week. Nothing like waking up with snakes all over me, but one of those circumstances that can try one’s practice. The temptation, for me anyway, when that sort of thing happens is to talk about it. I’ve heard there’s a culture somewhere that, when there’s a death, assigns “telling the story” to the person closest to the deceased. The individual tells the story over and over until there’s no more emotional charge. Or perhaps until the facts have integrated enough that the person is free simply to grieve and begin to accept. Who knows?
I’ve long suspected that, depending on the situation, telling the story can be more a matter of “adding fuel to the fire” than taking steps to let it go. There can be that little spin, the right choice of words to elicit the desired response. Each telling can add another layer, voices might slip in, there’s a touch of added emotion, some memories surface from similar situations… And, yet, without any outlet it can feel as if the energy, remaining contained, festers.
What is a person to do? Yep, you guessed it—a person can pick up their recorder and have a very helpful talk with the Mentor. The story can come out. The story is heard again and again, if one so chooses. Information, encouragement, clarity, wisdom, compassion can come in from a source with no investment in anything other than the end of suffering.
The result of this choice to turn to the Mentor via the recording and listening was a letting go personal best for me. I highly recommend it. It is such a savings in time, energy, money, and effort. We have “stop, drop, and breathe,” and now to that we can add, “stop, pick up the recorder, breathe, hit record, and talk.” Okay, it’s not as catchy—but it’s equally powerful.
In gassho,
Cheri
There’s an Old Zen Story about the monk who wakes up one morning with snakes crawling all over her body. She, understandably, became immediately hysterical. When those called to her by her wild shrieking attempted to tell her there were in fact no snakes, she became even more upset. She was inconsolable. The head monk called in the local physician who suggested drugs to calm her down. She screamed louder at the thought. Next a therapist was brought in, but unable to communicate at all through the yelling and thrashing, suggested that perhaps the doctor was right. Finally (finally?!) they decided to send for a Zen Master. The master arrived, sat down quietly in a corner of the room and began to meditate. Eventually the monk was drawn into the stillness and slowly calmed enough to tell the master what was happening.
“They’re all over me,” she moaned piteously. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them, they’re everywhere. What can I do? Please help me,” she pleaded.
The master nodded thoughtfully and then told the monk, “I will help you. But first I must go to a far city; I will return in two weeks. Until then you must do two things.” “Anything,” cried the monk. “I will do anything.”
“Very good,” said the master. “Until I return you must, first, watch these snakes very, very carefully. Observe them minutely. Note their color, sizes, shapes, textures, patterns, and facial features. See everything there is to see about them and, second, do not mention them to a soul. Say not a word about them to anyone.”
When the master returned two weeks later, the head monk ran through the gate excitedly calling, “The snakes are gone! The monk is cured!”
I had quite a difficult situation arise this week. Nothing like waking up with snakes all over me, but one of those circumstances that can try one’s practice. The temptation, for me anyway, when that sort of thing happens is to talk about it. I’ve heard there’s a culture somewhere that, when there’s a death, assigns “telling the story” to the person closest to the deceased. The individual tells the story over and over until there’s no more emotional charge. Or perhaps until the facts have integrated enough that the person is free simply to grieve and begin to accept. Who knows?
I’ve long suspected that, depending on the situation, telling the story can be more a matter of “adding fuel to the fire” than taking steps to let it go. There can be that little spin, the right choice of words to elicit the desired response. Each telling can add another layer, voices might slip in, there’s a touch of added emotion, some memories surface from similar situations… And, yet, without any outlet it can feel as if the energy, remaining contained, festers.
What is a person to do? Yep, you guessed it—a person can pick up their recorder and have a very helpful talk with the Mentor. The story can come out. The story is heard again and again, if one so chooses. Information, encouragement, clarity, wisdom, compassion can come in from a source with no investment in anything other than the end of suffering.
The result of this choice to turn to the Mentor via the recording and listening was a letting go personal best for me. I highly recommend it. It is such a savings in time, energy, money, and effort. We have “stop, drop, and breathe,” and now to that we can add, “stop, pick up the recorder, breathe, hit record, and talk.” Okay, it’s not as catchy—but it’s equally powerful.
In gassho,
Cheri
Friday, November 19, 2010
Picking Up the Pieces
This is from one of the monks. It is helpful for dealing with old emotional wounds.
Picking Up the Pieces
My favorite lesson from studying Buddhism has been this: You are not special.
We walk around convinced that we are different, that our challenges are greater than others, that other people just can't understand. They can understand. They're dealing with the same challenges, and believing the same lies about them.
Those lies serve a purpose. They prevent us from sharing our insights about the problems, and thereby protect the source of those problems. When we stop believing we're special and different, then we can begin helping each other overcome the challenges we all face.
In that spirit, I offer a bit on one of my own challenges. I suspect many folks will recognize themselves in it.
Frequently as I go about my life, the memory of some painful experience will pop up in my awareness. My immediate reaction is to get away from the pain. I want to separate myself from the experience, to get outside of it, to put up a barrier between myself and that past trauma, so I alienate myself from both the initial experience and the experience of remembering.
There is a belief that this is a necessary process; if I just relive the misery of it often enough, surely I will avoid that sort of pain in the future... right?
This is a very clever lie, and it serves to maintain the system of suffering. If I believe that it is not OK to have been the person who experienced that pain, then I can set myself apart from it. I can bury my head in the sand - pretend it isn't happening. As long as I am pretending I am not the sort of person these things can happen to, I am not in a position to address the conditions that lead to experiencing that pain: I am primed for a repeat of the experience.
If instead of believing that it wasn't OK, I accept that I was a person who experienced something traumatic, then I can see the memory for what it is: A record of a time that has passed, and no longer has the power to hurt me. If I look more closely I see that the pain I feel today is the pain of alienation. When I was pained, I longed for escape, and so I tried to push away the person who was hurting. Later, as the experience resurfaced, again and again I practiced pushing it away until the pain of alienation was greater than the pain of the experience itself.
The pain I feel today is all smoke and mirrors. It is a construct of little pieces of me that I have cut away in my desire to escape, and the stories I have told about losing them. All of that is in the past.
Today, when I look closely, I can see the trick that is being played. I can retake those bits I have pushed away, accept that I was once someone who was hurt, and follow the memory all the way back to that moment I have tried to avoid. There, aware and accepting, I can see that the pain that was need no longer be, and let it lie in the past. This done, the construct falls apart, the sting is taken out of the memory, and that which desires my suffering has one less tool to work with.
Today I can see something else. The system this process serves to maintain is clever, but mindless. It must again and again cause me to feel pain, and so it will forever serve up every memory I might wish I could forget. The great opportunity is this: So long as I am looking closely when it happens, this system which works to make me suffer will dutifully seek out and bring to me all of the places I have been hurt. I need only reach out and collect those pieces I have lost. In its desire to cause my suffering it will serve to make me whole.
Picking Up the Pieces
My favorite lesson from studying Buddhism has been this: You are not special.
We walk around convinced that we are different, that our challenges are greater than others, that other people just can't understand. They can understand. They're dealing with the same challenges, and believing the same lies about them.
Those lies serve a purpose. They prevent us from sharing our insights about the problems, and thereby protect the source of those problems. When we stop believing we're special and different, then we can begin helping each other overcome the challenges we all face.
In that spirit, I offer a bit on one of my own challenges. I suspect many folks will recognize themselves in it.
Frequently as I go about my life, the memory of some painful experience will pop up in my awareness. My immediate reaction is to get away from the pain. I want to separate myself from the experience, to get outside of it, to put up a barrier between myself and that past trauma, so I alienate myself from both the initial experience and the experience of remembering.
There is a belief that this is a necessary process; if I just relive the misery of it often enough, surely I will avoid that sort of pain in the future... right?
This is a very clever lie, and it serves to maintain the system of suffering. If I believe that it is not OK to have been the person who experienced that pain, then I can set myself apart from it. I can bury my head in the sand - pretend it isn't happening. As long as I am pretending I am not the sort of person these things can happen to, I am not in a position to address the conditions that lead to experiencing that pain: I am primed for a repeat of the experience.
If instead of believing that it wasn't OK, I accept that I was a person who experienced something traumatic, then I can see the memory for what it is: A record of a time that has passed, and no longer has the power to hurt me. If I look more closely I see that the pain I feel today is the pain of alienation. When I was pained, I longed for escape, and so I tried to push away the person who was hurting. Later, as the experience resurfaced, again and again I practiced pushing it away until the pain of alienation was greater than the pain of the experience itself.
The pain I feel today is all smoke and mirrors. It is a construct of little pieces of me that I have cut away in my desire to escape, and the stories I have told about losing them. All of that is in the past.
Today, when I look closely, I can see the trick that is being played. I can retake those bits I have pushed away, accept that I was once someone who was hurt, and follow the memory all the way back to that moment I have tried to avoid. There, aware and accepting, I can see that the pain that was need no longer be, and let it lie in the past. This done, the construct falls apart, the sting is taken out of the memory, and that which desires my suffering has one less tool to work with.
Today I can see something else. The system this process serves to maintain is clever, but mindless. It must again and again cause me to feel pain, and so it will forever serve up every memory I might wish I could forget. The great opportunity is this: So long as I am looking closely when it happens, this system which works to make me suffer will dutifully seek out and bring to me all of the places I have been hurt. I need only reach out and collect those pieces I have lost. In its desire to cause my suffering it will serve to make me whole.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
"I can't do this!"
See if this is at all familiar. There is something in your life that you are really unhappy with. Could be anything. Could be a job, a relationship, where you live, your weight or level of fitness, finances…whatever. And you’ve been trying to be okay with this whatever-it-is for a really long time.
I’m not talking about the habitual daily ploy of “I don’t like” that conditioned mind is using all the time to maintain dissatisfaction and the illusion of separateness. I’m referring to a cyclic process of descending to a place of “I can’t do this,” followed by a “pep talk” from conditioned mind that convinces you that, “Yes, you can because you have to. You have responsibilities, bills, people to care for. Besides you can’t just quit your life! That would be crazy. You’ll starve. You’ll die a street person with a shopping cart full of junk parked next to you in the gutter where you’ve fallen.”
After that little pep talk, you, as the old song says, “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.” You use the tools of practice, reassuring yourself that you can do it, you just need to work harder. “Supportive” voices tell you that if you were really doing spiritual practice you wouldn’t be having this problem, and you bravely soldier on toward the next round of, “I just can’t do this.”
A monk recently sent me this:
“There is an old saying, often attributed to Mark Twain (like so many others!), 'To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' This is the essence of projection. We take our conditioned understanding of the world and we project it onto every experience we have. In this way, no matter what is going on in our life, we have an experience that perpetuates the patterns of thought we have been conditioned to. If we are conditioned to be angry, the whole world is an opportunity to be angry. If we have been conditioned to be victims, the whole world is trying to victimize us.
The truth of the matter is that not very much of any significance happens to the vast majority of us. We wake up, we eat, we pass waste, we sleep. In between we do some things that allow us to keep the process going. We are, after all, islands of curiously persistent chemistry. Like all other life forms, we are spectacularly well suited to our way of going about this. In addition, we have the wonderful knack of being aware of the process. On its own, the experience of going about our lives is one of joy and contentment.
Ego, however, wants none of this. Ego wants to be a star. Ego takes the essentially meaningless events of life and projects onto them a conditioned drama in which we are the center of attention. In short, Ego makes up a life, and convinces us we are living it.
Consider: You are the star of one show, a supporting character in several more, and an extra in 6.7 billion others. The overwhelming majority of the time that you make an appearance in any life, you are little more than a canvas on which another ego paints a bit of story. This is an indisputable fact of life.
Ask yourself: what does it serve to have a problem with that?”
A very good question, indeed, the answer to which can take us in at least a couple of interesting directions. One possibility is to eliminate the drama ego imposes on our lives through its endless melodramatic projections of misery and despair. This approach would look something like, “Well, this seems to be what I keep choosing in my life so I’m just going to accept my choice, admit this is what I truly want, and enjoy the consequences of the decision. I continue to choose that food, that person, that story, that job, that activity and, therefore, I will acknowledge that is what I want more than I want an alternative and that will be that.” Or, you could decide that rather than allowing “your,” or someone else’s ego, to paint a story on the canvas that you’ve assumed is your life, you will start listening to the deeper wisdom, the gentle longing, the sweet tug toward what your heart wishes for, a possibility that continues to appear to you in all its clarity right before the first voice tells you, with that edge of panic, “You can’t do that! You have to do what you’ve always done. You have to keep doing what makes you unhappy, that’s the responsible thing to do.”
Gassho,
Cheri
I’m not talking about the habitual daily ploy of “I don’t like” that conditioned mind is using all the time to maintain dissatisfaction and the illusion of separateness. I’m referring to a cyclic process of descending to a place of “I can’t do this,” followed by a “pep talk” from conditioned mind that convinces you that, “Yes, you can because you have to. You have responsibilities, bills, people to care for. Besides you can’t just quit your life! That would be crazy. You’ll starve. You’ll die a street person with a shopping cart full of junk parked next to you in the gutter where you’ve fallen.”
After that little pep talk, you, as the old song says, “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.” You use the tools of practice, reassuring yourself that you can do it, you just need to work harder. “Supportive” voices tell you that if you were really doing spiritual practice you wouldn’t be having this problem, and you bravely soldier on toward the next round of, “I just can’t do this.”
A monk recently sent me this:
“There is an old saying, often attributed to Mark Twain (like so many others!), 'To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' This is the essence of projection. We take our conditioned understanding of the world and we project it onto every experience we have. In this way, no matter what is going on in our life, we have an experience that perpetuates the patterns of thought we have been conditioned to. If we are conditioned to be angry, the whole world is an opportunity to be angry. If we have been conditioned to be victims, the whole world is trying to victimize us.
The truth of the matter is that not very much of any significance happens to the vast majority of us. We wake up, we eat, we pass waste, we sleep. In between we do some things that allow us to keep the process going. We are, after all, islands of curiously persistent chemistry. Like all other life forms, we are spectacularly well suited to our way of going about this. In addition, we have the wonderful knack of being aware of the process. On its own, the experience of going about our lives is one of joy and contentment.
Ego, however, wants none of this. Ego wants to be a star. Ego takes the essentially meaningless events of life and projects onto them a conditioned drama in which we are the center of attention. In short, Ego makes up a life, and convinces us we are living it.
Consider: You are the star of one show, a supporting character in several more, and an extra in 6.7 billion others. The overwhelming majority of the time that you make an appearance in any life, you are little more than a canvas on which another ego paints a bit of story. This is an indisputable fact of life.
Ask yourself: what does it serve to have a problem with that?”
A very good question, indeed, the answer to which can take us in at least a couple of interesting directions. One possibility is to eliminate the drama ego imposes on our lives through its endless melodramatic projections of misery and despair. This approach would look something like, “Well, this seems to be what I keep choosing in my life so I’m just going to accept my choice, admit this is what I truly want, and enjoy the consequences of the decision. I continue to choose that food, that person, that story, that job, that activity and, therefore, I will acknowledge that is what I want more than I want an alternative and that will be that.” Or, you could decide that rather than allowing “your,” or someone else’s ego, to paint a story on the canvas that you’ve assumed is your life, you will start listening to the deeper wisdom, the gentle longing, the sweet tug toward what your heart wishes for, a possibility that continues to appear to you in all its clarity right before the first voice tells you, with that edge of panic, “You can’t do that! You have to do what you’ve always done. You have to keep doing what makes you unhappy, that’s the responsible thing to do.”
Gassho,
Cheri
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
It Is Time to Feel Good
This is encouragement to sign up for the new email class, “It’s Time to Feel Good.” It is time to feel good. It’s long past time to feel good for most folks, and the only thing standing between a life of suffering that is not wanted and a life of freedom and well-being that is wanted is the resistance of conditioned mind as it tries to maintain its control over a human’s life. “You don’t have time.” “It’s too much money.” “You can’t afford it.” “You won’t do the work anyway.” Look to see if, without that conversation, you would want to have some additional, powerful support for yourself going through the holiday season and into a new year.
I’ve introduced this new work of “what you practice is what you have” with something akin to mild trepidation and a whole lot of excitement. This is as close to “it” (as in “this is it”) as I’ve managed to articulate. It has been received by our Sangha pretty much as I had anticipated; when at center people are eager and enthusiastic, and when identified with egocentric karmic conditioning/self hate, there’s the standard resistance. This we can work with. We all do, all the time.
What I was really curious about is how this new approach would be received by the larger community of practitioners who use our perspective in combination with other approaches. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long, as most of the people I meet at events, workshops and retreats participate in all kinds of other practices—the curse of so many options!
The response so far is very good. At a recent workshop a participant expressed amazement at the depth of her response to the work. This is someone who has done a lot of practice—and a lot of practices—and figured she’d done just about everything and knew how it all worked. She found herself stunned that so simple an act—being coached, mentored, inspired, reminded, and encouraged in her own voice—could produce such a profound experience of compassionate acceptance within her for her.
I could never understand why so many people are programmed to “hate the sound of my own voice.” Now I get it. With that programming, people are unlikely ever to be open to hearing compassionate words from the one person truly capable of loving them unconditionally.
Just as I did with the work of There Is Nothing Wrong With You when it was first introduced, I want to guide folks through this practice here at the beginning. Over the years we will all become familiar with how it works, but in the beginning karmic conditioning can throw up roadblocks and confusing directions likely to impede progress unless those efforts to sabotage are thwarted. I am devoted to thwarting sabotage!
It’s time to feel good, folks. Let’s.
In gassho,
Cheri
I’ve introduced this new work of “what you practice is what you have” with something akin to mild trepidation and a whole lot of excitement. This is as close to “it” (as in “this is it”) as I’ve managed to articulate. It has been received by our Sangha pretty much as I had anticipated; when at center people are eager and enthusiastic, and when identified with egocentric karmic conditioning/self hate, there’s the standard resistance. This we can work with. We all do, all the time.
What I was really curious about is how this new approach would be received by the larger community of practitioners who use our perspective in combination with other approaches. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long, as most of the people I meet at events, workshops and retreats participate in all kinds of other practices—the curse of so many options!
The response so far is very good. At a recent workshop a participant expressed amazement at the depth of her response to the work. This is someone who has done a lot of practice—and a lot of practices—and figured she’d done just about everything and knew how it all worked. She found herself stunned that so simple an act—being coached, mentored, inspired, reminded, and encouraged in her own voice—could produce such a profound experience of compassionate acceptance within her for her.
I could never understand why so many people are programmed to “hate the sound of my own voice.” Now I get it. With that programming, people are unlikely ever to be open to hearing compassionate words from the one person truly capable of loving them unconditionally.
Just as I did with the work of There Is Nothing Wrong With You when it was first introduced, I want to guide folks through this practice here at the beginning. Over the years we will all become familiar with how it works, but in the beginning karmic conditioning can throw up roadblocks and confusing directions likely to impede progress unless those efforts to sabotage are thwarted. I am devoted to thwarting sabotage!
It’s time to feel good, folks. Let’s.
In gassho,
Cheri
Monday, October 4, 2010
Only Don’t Know
Gassho,
In a conversation I had with a friend, he said, “I’m trying to figure out your mood; what your energy is doing.” (That’s California-speak for, “How you doin’?”)
Me: “Why not see what your energy is doing instead of projecting onto me?” (We have that kind of relationship.)
He: “Good idea. Here’s a better one: How about if I don’t “figure out” what either mood is? Why should I allow conditioned mind to frame and label everything, then get me to believe I know what’s going on?”
Me: “Great question!”
What followed was a lively, rather profound exploration of the relationship between what is in the moment and the multi-layered process of interpretation used by conditioned mind to set up the suffering world of “I/me/mine.”
From awareness practice we know, intellectually at least, that labels are not things. To help us see how we confuse words and concepts with the thing itself, Alan Watts offered that great image of a hungry person walking into a restaurant and eating the menu. When asked, “How are you feeling?” most people will answer with a word or words that they believe express a state of sensations/emotions. If the person says they feel anxious or depressed or afraid, we don’t actually know much of anything about what they feel. We’re meant to project our own experience of a state we call by the same label and everyone can go on pretending we know what we’re talking about. (Not hard to understand why people so often feel misunderstood.)
This habit of looking to conditioned mind to tell us about the moment we’re arising into is, of course, the source of suffering. If one is not here, right here, eyes wide open, nothing else going on as the moment arises, one has no way of realizing that all those interpretations an egocentric karmically conditioned mind are putting forth are not true. One tiny flicker of assumption, based on a word that suggests a concept designed to create an illusion, and the hapless human is light-years off into an imaginary world of made-up nonsense that will result in nothing but suffering.
Karmic conditioning is ceaselessly seeking to reinforce its own imaginary reality. In each moment it projects and the unconscious human believes. We’ve all heard those examples of the hungry person driving down the street only seeing restaurants, or the person with a near empty gas tank seeing nothing that isn’t a gas station, or the very clear, “when a pickpocket sees a saint he sees only his pockets.” What’s less obvious is that a person who is karmically predisposed to fear sees every situation as dangerous, a victim always feels mistreated, the entitled expect to be first in line, and the arrogant assume the best is their God-given right. Each of us assumes that our assumptions are reality and that what conditioned mind is presenting is accurate. But of course neither is true.
Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn was famous for using, “Only don’t know” to point people toward his “don’t know Zen.” Not knowing, knowing that we don’t know, knowing there’s nothing to know and there is no one to know it is a very helpful understanding, But just as important as the “don’t know” in this good advice is the “only.” Only. Solely and exclusively. Nothing else. Just that. Everywhere, all the time, “don’t know.” Do not think you know and do not try to know. With that focus it gets harder and harder for egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate to build and maintain a world of suffering for us. Instead of just going along with the same tired old program, we can ask, moment-by-moment, “Is that so?” “How do you know that?” “Who says so?” “What if that’s not true?” “What else is possible here?”
In gassho,
Cheri
In a conversation I had with a friend, he said, “I’m trying to figure out your mood; what your energy is doing.” (That’s California-speak for, “How you doin’?”)
Me: “Why not see what your energy is doing instead of projecting onto me?” (We have that kind of relationship.)
He: “Good idea. Here’s a better one: How about if I don’t “figure out” what either mood is? Why should I allow conditioned mind to frame and label everything, then get me to believe I know what’s going on?”
Me: “Great question!”
What followed was a lively, rather profound exploration of the relationship between what is in the moment and the multi-layered process of interpretation used by conditioned mind to set up the suffering world of “I/me/mine.”
From awareness practice we know, intellectually at least, that labels are not things. To help us see how we confuse words and concepts with the thing itself, Alan Watts offered that great image of a hungry person walking into a restaurant and eating the menu. When asked, “How are you feeling?” most people will answer with a word or words that they believe express a state of sensations/emotions. If the person says they feel anxious or depressed or afraid, we don’t actually know much of anything about what they feel. We’re meant to project our own experience of a state we call by the same label and everyone can go on pretending we know what we’re talking about. (Not hard to understand why people so often feel misunderstood.)
This habit of looking to conditioned mind to tell us about the moment we’re arising into is, of course, the source of suffering. If one is not here, right here, eyes wide open, nothing else going on as the moment arises, one has no way of realizing that all those interpretations an egocentric karmically conditioned mind are putting forth are not true. One tiny flicker of assumption, based on a word that suggests a concept designed to create an illusion, and the hapless human is light-years off into an imaginary world of made-up nonsense that will result in nothing but suffering.
Karmic conditioning is ceaselessly seeking to reinforce its own imaginary reality. In each moment it projects and the unconscious human believes. We’ve all heard those examples of the hungry person driving down the street only seeing restaurants, or the person with a near empty gas tank seeing nothing that isn’t a gas station, or the very clear, “when a pickpocket sees a saint he sees only his pockets.” What’s less obvious is that a person who is karmically predisposed to fear sees every situation as dangerous, a victim always feels mistreated, the entitled expect to be first in line, and the arrogant assume the best is their God-given right. Each of us assumes that our assumptions are reality and that what conditioned mind is presenting is accurate. But of course neither is true.
Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn was famous for using, “Only don’t know” to point people toward his “don’t know Zen.” Not knowing, knowing that we don’t know, knowing there’s nothing to know and there is no one to know it is a very helpful understanding, But just as important as the “don’t know” in this good advice is the “only.” Only. Solely and exclusively. Nothing else. Just that. Everywhere, all the time, “don’t know.” Do not think you know and do not try to know. With that focus it gets harder and harder for egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate to build and maintain a world of suffering for us. Instead of just going along with the same tired old program, we can ask, moment-by-moment, “Is that so?” “How do you know that?” “Who says so?” “What if that’s not true?” “What else is possible here?”
In gassho,
Cheri
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