Day 90: Potential, Part III

In aid of what.  Exactly. 

It takes me straight back to that early idea I’d garnered, that people sat in order to create a little happy glow for themselves that wore off as they interacted with the world, whereupon they had to go back to the cushion to regain it.  Is that really why we sit?  So we can be happy?  So we can feel more connected to people when we’re on the cushion than we do when we’re actually interacting with them?  So we can come to see all of our stories about the world as just that – stories?  Do we really sit to get better at sitting?

A sidebar:  On a seven-day silent retreat last year, one of the teachers – an older, white, cisgendered woman – talked us through the metaphor of seeing our mental stories as a film.  That, as we sit and watch the rising and falling away of the stories that we tell ourselves about our lives, we can come to the realization that they are like a film, and we are the audience.  We may become absorbed to the point where a movie feels real – our heart races, we lean forward, our muscles tense when the hero is in trouble – but then we can suddenly realize, it’s a story!  And we can sit back and catch our breath and see how we are separate from the action on the screen.

This is true, and very helpful in many ways.  When my colleague dismisses something I say with absolutely no acknowledgement, it is easy to get caught up in a larger story.  No-one takes me seriously.  Or, I’m a failure and nothing I say is very important.  And if we believe and act on those stories, we’re trapped.  But at the same time, if I am a woman, and my colleague is a man, and this kind of dismissal happens regularly (and worse yet, he then repeats what I’ve said as his idea), it seems to me that to say that my understanding of that interaction as sexist and as part of a large structure of misogyny is just a story I’m telling myself – well, that’s simplistic.  And, perhaps more importantly, devoid of transformative potential.

So I wrote a question to the teacher, saying that, while I find it very useful to understand many of my stories about my life as, just that, stories, I wasn’t so sure that I was comfortable thinking about, say, racism as just a story and could she please address that?

Two days later, she said that she’d received that question, and offered a one-line answer about how, of course, we wouldn’t want to say that racism is a story.  Period.  The lack of depth and understanding were deeply troubling to me (and, I found out later, to at least one person of color in the room).  But also, I think, symptomatic of what I’ve been circling around with all of this writing – that mindfulness, as it is often practiced and described and taught today, has had its radical potential subverted by a paradigm of individual practice geared towards self-understanding and self-improvement.

What do I mean by that? 

When mindfulness is something we do on the cushion, with very little teaching about how to carry it out into the world, it is robbed of its potential.  When it is about a detached watching of the mind, decoupled from teachings about wise action arising from an understanding of the self and others and the nature of reality, it is robbed of its potential.  When we sit on our cushions offering compassion to people near and far, and then sit in a meeting unable to even recognize that we’re Othering the asshole across the table who just. won’t. listen.  Well, where is our practice then?

And I’m not saying it’s easy.  In fact, when people talk about how they couldn’t do a week-long silent retreat, I want to say, dude – that’s the easy part.  It’s doing a life-long engaged retreat in the world that’s really really hard.  And doing it without engaging in spiritual bypassing (I just love everyone!) is even harder.  It requires getting very down and dirty with some really difficult emotions.  Because here’s another secret no-one wants to say out loud about mindfulness – it’s not all about being peaceful and serene and happy.  If you’re going to be mindful of whatever arises as it arises?  Well, my friend, you are going to feel anger, and fear, and deep grief.  You are going to feel agitation, and a very strong desire to run away from all those things you’re feeling.  That’s what our minds and bodies do.  They feel it all.  It’s just that our minds keep wanting to stick with the emotions that we’re comfortable feeling (or that we feel like we’re allowed to feel – and there are all kinds of social constraints around that; another essay for another time), and tell us all kinds of stories to keep us in those emotions.

But, I think, radical change comes when we feel all the feels, as my daughters would say.

Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, in her jointly-authored book Radical Dharma, talks about mindfulness and anti-racism work.  And she calls for white folks to come to anti-racism work not from a space of “what can I do for you (poor people of color)”, but, instead, to begin by recognizing the pain that the system of racism inflicts upon us.  Not to center ourselves, but instead to understand more clearly what Lilla Watson means when she says, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mind, then let us work together.” 

To understand that my liberation – the cessation of my pain and suffering – is bound up with the liberation of everybody else?  To feel that in my bones, instead of just in my head?  Well, my friends, that – that – is radical.  That is transformative.

And it can be one of the gifts of mindfulness, practiced, well, mindfully.  When it, first, engages with what Kabat-Zinn calls the whole catastrophe – not just the joy and the bliss, but the sorrow and rage.  And when it gets its ass off the cushion and into the world to continue that practice.  When the practice take place not only in the isolation chamber of our own minds, but in conversation with others.  In mutuality with the world.

If I truly look at someone else through the eyes of lovingkindness – eyes that recognize our common humanity – how could I possibly lock someone up at the border?  Separate someone from their child?  Draw zoning lines that limit the access of other people’s children to the education my children enjoy?  If I look at myself through the eyes of lovingkindness, how can I allow someone to encroach on my boundaries?  Dismiss me as worthless?  Waste my time with hateful and draining speech?

If I look at the world that way, how can I not want to find ways to adjust my consumption to cause less damage?  How can I eat an animal that has lived its entire life in fear, pain, and misery?

And, through all of this, when I regard myself with compassion, how can I not sit with my own fear of failure, my grief that the world is this messed up, the shame that I have contributed to these systems, the feeling that I am not enough and can’t do enough – how can I not hold all of that with love and offer myself kindness for being an imperfect being in an imperfect world?  Not alone in my imperfection, nor in the world, but in community with other imperfect beings.

If we all really could hang on to that, off the cushion, the world would tremble.

And so, when I see all the ways in which we turn mindfulness into an isolated, isolating practice.  When I see how the ways that mindfulness is practiced exclude broad swaths of embodiment in favor of those that align with one dominant model of being in the world.  When I see those who raise these issues being dismissed with the suggestion that they just need to sit with their feelings until they come into a more right understanding of them.

In honesty, it pisses me off.  It frustrates me.  I grieve.  And I also understand.  I recognize those things in myself and in my own practice and discussion of practice.  I see that I am implicated. 

I also feel fear.  To truly live this way?  What a commitment.  What a tremendous life’s work.  And people – to do this means, for me, that I’ve got to learn to set boundaries out of a place of love and care for myself. And that’s not the only fear. I quite literally cannot imagine what our world would look like if we lived from this place of loving presence.

That’s what I mean by transformative.  And by radical.  It seems to me that a practice like mindfulness, fully engaged with, changes everything.  And maybe that’s why, when mere mortals engage with it, we do it in our limited, human way.  We fit it into the systems we already know so well – here, in the West, systems which emphasize individuality and achievement.  It gets smaller, but also more approachable and manageable.  Explicable.  And the potential diminishes.  We practice mindfulness…unmindfully.

Day89: Potential, Part II

Once I understood that, not only did my aversion to sitting meditation decrease significantly, but I began, slowly slowly, to recognize all the ways in which I had been, at hugely important times in my life, attending with care and attention to the present moment, on purpose, without (and this has always been my struggle) judgment.  And with, as I came to understand later, compassion for myself in my struggle.

When I realized this in my mid-thirties, I immediately recognized that I’d been using mindfulness to manage a difficult relationship with a colleague.  Little by little, instead of reacting to hostility engendered by something I’d said by apologizing and trying desperately to make her like me, I had learned to recognize the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that drove me to fix it at all costs.  That didn’t stop me at first from trying to fix it, but little by little, the practice of awareness had begun to give me space.  And in that space, I could give myself the gift of time to decide – did I really do something wrong?  And if I didn’t, what would I like to do to respond to this difficult moment, instead of trying to survive it?

Mindfulness.

And once I saw that, I saw that my practice dated back even further.  To the way that I learned to watch the nerve pain in my leg, rising and falling and changing, without attachment to how it felt ten minutes ago, or how it might feel ten years from now.  Noticing that allowed me to see all the fears and stories I’d attached to that pain, and to see them for what they were – fears and stories that also rose and fell away.

Or the way I’d finally learned to manage lifelong insomnia.  From my early teenage years on, going to bed involved hours of lying awake while ruminating and fretting, worrying over what I should have done differently, or what I was going to do when the next crisis hit me.  In my thirties, mindfulness (not that I called it that at the time) allowed me to notice when I’d headed down those rabbit holes, and to kindly and gently call my attention back to my breathing.  (Note: for anyone who wants to have a sitting practice, I don’t recommend using this exact trick to fall asleep – to this day, I have to fight drowsiness when I sit in meditation, I think largely because of the neurological connections I built at this time.  I’m laughing again – the mind is a funny, funny thing!)

Dating back even further.  To when my first daughter was an infant, and I was driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge to visit my husband’s grandmother.  Thanks to his engineering class, I learned that, in the event of an earthquake, a portion of the eastern span of the bridge was meant to fall into the bay, to prevent the entire thing from pulling itself apart (this is good engineering, by the way).  And I obsessed over what I would do if that happened while I was on the bridge.  I calculated how fast we’d be going when we hit the water, and that, unfortunately, we were likely to survive the fall.  Which meant drowning, unless I could get a window cracked before we hit the water and the electronics shorted out, so the car could fill and equalize the pressure so I could open a door and get us out.  I imagined the whole thing in my head again and again and again. And again.  And again.  It was awful.  And then I read about neuroplasticity, and about the ability of the brain to rewire itself, and I decided I was going to get off that superhighway of bridge-collapse-drowning despair and rewrite the neural connections.  But to do that, I had to notice when I started down the story so that I could step away from it.  Which I did.

Mindfulness. 

I could go on and on.  But what this all means is that, as I have begun to come to realize, I have long had a robust mindfulness practice.  One that has given me deep insight into my mind and its inner workings, as well as into the fundamental interconnectedness of all beings (the realization of which is, in itself, yet another essay).  A practice that did not, in spite of my flirtation with meditation in my twenties, rely in any way on sitting meditation.

And yet, to this day, when people talk about their years of mindfulness practice, I have trouble claiming the depth of my own, precisely because it was not a silent sitting practice.

And isn’t that interesting.

My reading and talking to other people suggests that I am not alone in this.  That being able to complete long sits, and, especially, long silent retreats, are considered some kind of gold standard against which all other practices are held.  This strikes me as a limiting and limited way of assessing and judging practice.  Totally aside from the problematics of assessing others’ practice, when assessing our own, is it really productive to judge it on the basis of: I sat for X hours, or Y many days in a row, or Z number of retreats this year?  As a friend recently asked me when I spoke with her about going on retreat (and I should say here that I am not against retreats in general, and that my retreat experiences have been intensely valuable in my overall practice, and that I’m looking forward to finding the time and money to go on another one):  in aid of what?

Day 88: Potential, Part I

I've been thinking a lot about that realization I had the other day that I'm not writing about (some of) the things that are on my mind the most, because I really want to get them right.  So, in the spirit of letting go of that a little, here's a short series on something that really has been occupying a lot of mental real estate lately.  Imperfect, but out there.

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”  - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I don’t think it would be an understatement to say that mindfulness has saved my life.  At the same time, it is also true that I have often felt, and still feel, alienated from and resistant to mindfulness. 

I know.  It’s complicated.

I’m not even sure where to start.

I think that, because I am a linguistic anthropologist, it’s perhaps best to start with the ways that words like meditation and mindfulness are used, and the prototypes that build up around those uses.  Of most interest to me is how those prototypes exclude certain practices and people, in ways that are actually antithetical to the practice of mindfulness.  In ways that rob mindfulness practice of its potential to radically transform social structures and relationships. 

In my twenties and thirties, living in Berkeley and even after moving down to Southern California, I knew lots of people who engaged in what we might think of as present-oriented activities, especially yoga and meditation.  In that context, my exposure to meditation often came from people who talked about how hard it was.  Especially when talking about sitting for long periods, or going on meditation retreats, from which they would come back talking about excruciating physical pain, mental and emotional storms, and, at the end, a fantastic feeling of peace and oneness with everything that, inevitably, they would describe as “wearing off”.  From my perspective, I could go for a hard workout, work on my dissertation, and drink a glass of wine with the same effects, and with a lot less expenditure of time and money.

More seriously, I felt (and still do feel) a very deep resistance to the idea of putting myself into a situation that causes extreme physical pain, just for the opportunity to watch that pain mindfully.  As someone who has lived with chronic nerve pain, and who had survived several bouts of deep depression, I just could not, for the life of me, discern the need to create more pain for myself.  It felt unkind.  And also limiting, in the sense that it seemed like a practice that couldn’t be open to everyone.  I knew people, myself included, who just physically could not sit for ten hours a day.  To do so would be to ignore the very real limitations of my body.

Unfortunately, in some settings and with some people, to say that is to show, not discernment, but resistance.  And the prescription is to get on that cushion and suck it up.

I tell this story in conjunction with the definition of mindfulness above, to point to the ways in which mindfulness practice, in the West, has come to be identified almost solely with sitting meditation, and with the project of self-knowledge and self-improvement.  And I want to suggest that, while the self-knowledge gained through individual practice has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, I feel strongly that by limiting our understanding and practice of mindfulness to that, we also limit its radical and transformative potential to the transformation of the individual. (The assumption being that that is sufficient.)

My resistance to what I perceived to be a potentially damaging practice caused me to avoid sitting meditation entirely (even though I had had a sitting practice in my twenties).  I have come to see that as a form of wise discernment.  Even as I was avoiding sitting meditation, however, that same wise part of myself knew that mindfulness, and the Buddhist tenets upon which secular Western mindfulness is largely based, had something important to offer.  In seeking out information about the practice of mindfulness, I also continued to carefully watch and attend to my aversion, exploring its causes and conditions, noting how it felt in my body, and what stories attached themselves to it.

And I’m laughing at myself right now.  Because even though the next part of this story is about how I came to realize that I’d been practicing mindfulness for more than two decades before I allowed myself to call my practice “mindfulness”, I had not, until the moment of this writing, realized that, in all of the careful ways that I recognized and attended to my aversion to sitting meditation as it was being offered to me, I was practicing mindfulness. 

That is funny!

Two books changed everything for me, slowly slowly, but surely.  The first was the wise little book Buddhism Without Belief, which not only gave me permission to practice secular Buddhism, but also brought me to an understanding of non-attachment which let me – a parent who could not imagine feeling non-attachment to my children – begin to recognize the Four Noble Truths, and to explore the practices offered by each one.  That is the subject of another essay.  The second book was called The Mindfulness Revolution; it is a collection of essays about the practice of mindfulness, gathered together in one place.  In one essay, the author said something along the lines of: we don’t sit in meditation to get better at sitting or breathing, or even to get better at meditating; we sit in meditation to strengthen our ability to be present in our day-to-day lives. 

What?

Nothing I’d heard from anyone I knew who sat in meditation had led me to believe that the practice that took place on the cushion was meant to be a practice that continued off the cushion.  I literally thought that the goal of meditation was to create a peaceful feeling that lasted for a while after the practice ended, and then wore off and had to be renewed.  And I couldn’t make that make sense to me.  But this – this made sense.  I understood it in my mind to be like going to the gym.  At the time, I hated exercise.  So when I exercised, god knew it wasn’t to get better at exercising – it was to be strong for picking up my daughters and swinging them around, for grabbing all the bags of groceries in one trip in from the car, for going camping with my dog and my family.  In other words, I exercised so that all the muscles I built up in the gym were available to me in my real life.

You mean meditation works that way?

Turns out, the answer is yes.

Day 62: An honest horse

I was mulling over a post I want to write about Disco (which will be forthcoming), when the phrase "an honest horse" came to mind.  She is an honest horse.  When people say that, I take it to mean that the horse they're talking about is out there, doing their best, and if they spook or don't do what you ask, it's not out of malice.  It's honest.  They were scared, or they didn't know what to do, or they were hurting.  It means that even if you have a bad ride, or (knock on wood) get hurt, it's not because the horse was trying to get you off or hurt you.

As that came to mind, I found myself thinking - I wish people were honest people, in that same sense.

And then came the very interesting thought: I actually think they usually are. 

Isn't that interesting?  To consider that, maybe, most people, when they do something hurtful - even really hurtful - are acting out of fear or ignorance or inability, rather than true malice.  I think that's interesting because it so often feels like malice, especially when it's a repeated behavior.  Especially when it's a really damaging behavior that we have no control over, and maybe can't even remove ourselves from the influence of. 

I'll be honest.  I know that I've hurt people.  (OK, that's a ridiculous way to say that - I'm human, of COURSE I've hurt people.)  But if I'm being straight with myself (instead of mean and self-judge-y and setting myself up to fail), it's usually an honest hurt.  It comes out of my own ignorance or fear or inability.  (Is this resonating with the hurt people hurt people thing from last week, or what?)

But (still being honest), when someone else hurts me - especially when, outwardly, it's actively directed at me and who I am and what I do - it feels like malice.  It doesn't feel like an honest action.  (I also feel that way when D's being particularly troublesome - it can feel personal.  But it's easier for me to step back and realize that it's not, in fact, personal when it's a horse instead of an adult human being.)

I think I need to think more about this.  It's a very unformed sort of thought.  But it feels both true and useful in some important way.

Day 61: The second arrow, Part 2

Another place where thinking about the second arrow has been interesting and helpful is in dealing with my health.  At the moment, that has to do with having an autoimmune arthritis. (Or two: I put it this way because my initial diagnosis was seronegative RA.  About seven or more months ago, I developed some patches of psoriasis, and my rheumatologist added psoriatic arthritis to the list - this is one potential course of the disease, to start with the arthritis and then move to psoriasis.  I thought we'd changed diagnoses, but my PCP pointed out that overlapping and multiple diagnoses are possible, and that that hasn't been ruled out.  At this stage, I find it easier to talk about autoimmune arthritis.)

The first arrow is pretty easy to notice.  On many days (not all), joint pain, sometimes fatigue, weakness in my hands.  Typing hurts.  Those things are uncomfortable or outright painful.

But then there's the second arrow.  That arrow takes the form of stories about how this is so awful and unfair; or about how it's only going to get worse; or about how frustrating and upsetting it is to not be able to open a jar, when I used to have the strongest hands in the house.  They own the future - and it's always the most negative future possible: I won't be able to ride any more; if swimming hurts, and walking hurts, how will I ever get any exercise?  And if I don't exercise, how will I sleep?  How will my clothes fit?  Those stories take me out of the present experience and into all kinds of things that haven't happened yet, and adds the misery of those things onto the discomfort and unhappiness of the current moment.  Worse yet, they linger, clinging to my attention even when the current discomfort wanes, or when other, happier things might have caught my attention, were it not so bound up in offering energy to the rantings of the second arrow.

Recently, the first arrow has had to do with the drugs that I'm on.  I'm experiencing what I believe to be some side effects from the big gun drug I take every week, and I'm preparing to go off that drug to see if a) the side effects abate, and b) we can find something that works without the side effects (and maybe even c) something that works better than this one to control inflammation and pain).  The side effects range from annoying to pretty darned uncomfortable.  But they're not (I'm assured) life-threatening in any way, and I'm mostly able to live with them.

The second arrow - boy howdy, are there second arrows around this one!  I shouldn't be on these drugs, I should be able to control this through diet/willpower/energy work/sleep/exercise.  My rheumatologist and cardiologist both think I'm nuts and are simply humoring me.  The last time I went off this particular drug, I had to live with a pretty unfun flare - I don't like pain, I'm back to work full time, how will I manage if I enter into a flare and have to spent six hours on my feet and run back and forth across campus twice a day?  What if I don't lose all the weight I gained on this drug and I'm just lazy and fat after all?  What if my clothes and rings never fit again?

Do you see how crazy my second arrows are?  Stories, fears, anticipation (or whatever the word is for negative anticipation - and why don't we have a word for that?  Dread isn't quite right, although it's close.  Maybe nonticipation?  Antiticipation?).  And those thoughts usually have the energy of a squirrel hyped up on amphetamines set loose in a nut store.  They don't quit.

The first arrow is what it is.  Pain happens to everyone.  People get sick who don't deserve it.   I'm part of everyone, and I'm not immune to life's ups and downs.  I'm not going to get out of this one without getting hit by those first arrows.  (Hell, I'm not going to get out of this one alive!)

But the second arrow?  That one I have some leverage over.  That one, I can look at and say, thank you for trying to keep me safe, but I've got this.  Not always, not every time.  But even sometimes is a good start.  There's a spaciousness in refusing the second arrow, in trying not to pre-own the (not yet happened, maybe never will happen) suffering of the future.  The first arrow is more than enough, thank you.  I'll stick with that.

Day 54: Back at work

One of the interesting differences between summer and the semester, for me, isn't really the amount of work - I do work more during the school year, obviously, but I also work during the summer - it's being around people all the time again.  Often the same people (academic departments and colleges are like families - you're with the same people for decades - and, like families, they are more and less functional, depending on their composition at any given time).

Two quotes* that have kept running through my head last week and this week:

Hurt people hurt people. 
Buddha would love boundaries.

They go together, right?



*Dudes, I'm an academic.  I have tried to get good attributions for these, but I can't!  I've always heard the first in the context of AA, and the second I have heard attributed to Pema Chodron.  My apologies to the originators of these sentiments, if it is someone other than these.

Day 51: The second arrow

I've been thinking a lot lately about the Buddhist teaching of the second arrow.  The basic idea is that a pain happens (the first arrow), and then we pile other things onto the pain - stories, regrets, fears - and that is the second arrow.

We had a little less than five days between Tilly's diagnosis and her death.  Her diagnosis came as a total shock.  She was only eleven.  In June, she was hiking all over the eastern Sierra with us.  A little more than three weeks before her death, she had bloodwork done (pursuant to starting a medication for itchy skin), with no hint that cancer was raging through her system.  But the day we got the diagnosis, xrays showed her lungs filled with tumors (and since dogs rarely get primary lung cancer, that suggested that there must have been other tumors elsewhere, probably abdominal). 

She'd spent the night with the vet, waiting for the results and getting stabilized.  Then we brought her home with Tramadol, drugs to help with congestion, and painkilling injections for when things started to really go downhill.  I also cancelled my then-upcoming five-day silent retreat at Spirit Rock.  (It was on compassion; and I was very clear that the most compassionate thing I knew to do for myself, my dog, and my family was to be here at home.)  And, while my formal sitting practice frankly went to hell, I lived those five days as a practice of mindfulness.  (And please note that word "practice".  It means that there were a lot of nonmindful bits in there!)

The definitions of mindfulness that I cite in my classes generally involve at least these elements: moment-to-moment awareness of what is happening (this can be physical, environmental, emotional, psychological, etc), on purpose, without judgement (and, I would add, with compassion).

And that's what I tried to do.

And it was really interesting.

During those five days, there were a lot of first-arrow pains.  There was the night that she went to scratch the rug next to my side of the bed as she always did before going to sleep, and she had to stop and lie down to pant because it was hard to catch her breath.  And the day she couldn't get up into the car by herself anymore.  All the markers of decline, all the signs that she was uncomfortable.  It's hard to watch anyone we love suffering, and that causes suffering.  Those things were really happening, right there in the moment, and the emotions that came with observing them were painful ones.

And then there were the second-arrow pains.  Lying on the front lawn trying to get work done, with Tilly curled up in the sun next to me.  A good moment.  And the second arrow hits - I won't be able to do this any more.  I will miss her terribly.  I can't imagine my life without her.  And then the realization - but she is here.  I am doing this with her now.  If I am present for this moment now, she is not gone.  All the pain was coming from my mind being somewhere other than in the moment that was actually happening.  (Except, notice, that those thoughts were actually happening and causing actual pain - something to bring non-judgemental, compassionate awareness to.) 

Such an interesting thing to notice.  Because here's the thing: preowning all the pain of not having her around didn't in any way lessen what I'm feeling right now.  What it did do, though, was move me away from whatever peace there might be in the moments I had with her then.  Isn't that interesting? 

Noticing the second arrow is useful.  But the definition of mindfulness suggests that we observe that second arrow without judgement (I'm such an idiot!  Why am I doing that?!) or pushing away (I shouldn't feel that, I don't want to feel that!), and with compassion (this is a painful moment).  Doing that made it easier to work with it, without pushing it away or blaming myself for "doing this to myself" - it's normal to think and feel all those things.

But, in that last week, the great gift of noticing was that it made it a bit easier to allow the second arrow to fall a bit more lightly and sting a little less, while being present for the whole experience.  It also meant that I was able to take on board the gift of those good moments - like lying in the sun with my girl - just a little bit more. 

On her last morning, as we waited for the vet to come to the house, all four of us stopped everything we were doing and came together in the living room.  I sat on the floor next to Tilly while she napped in her favorite place on the cool tiles.  Rick and the girls sat in their usual chairs, and we all read or sat quietly, or whatever seemed best.  It was exactly the kind of quiet family moment that we all love.  And for whole minutes at a time, I was able to let the second arrow go and just be in the present moment, which was a really good moment.

Since then, I keep noticing the first and second arrows.  Coming home late at night and grabbing my stuff so I can hurry to the door to stop Tilly from barking and waking up the neighbors - and then realizing that I don't have to?  First arrow.  Putting on my walking shoes and waiting for a nose to get in the way while trying to "help"?  First arrow.  Imagining that I will never again find a dog like Tilly?  Second arrow.  Wanting MY dog back, right now, thankyouverymuch?  Second arrow.  Wanting reality to be something other than what it is?  (Which, by the way, it turns out I want quite often - who knew?)  Second arrow.

It's not that I'm not feeling how much all of this hurts.  It's that watching it all rise and fall and rise and fall gives me a lot of hope that there will be fewer hurting moments in the future, and more equanimity about feeling how much it hurts now.  It's a really interesting experience.  My very own godawful mindfulness retreat. 

Day 20: A place to sit

My view for today's meditation:

When I can, I prefer to sit outside.  And there is truly nothing better than sitting near the ocean.  Add in a lovely, quiet, bluff-top garden, and I'm in heaven.  Today is my dear friend's birthday, and she decided that her celebration should start with some time in quiet beautiful contemplation, followed by lunch and a wander through shops, all with friends.  I think it ended up being as much a gift for us, as for her!

I hope your days had a bit of peace and quiet in them, too. Or raucous joy, whichever it is that you most need today.  I confess to being rather ecumenical about sources of joy, contentment, and peace.

Day 8: Connecting

On the way to an appointment this afternoon, driving along the Coast Highway with the top down, I got a call saying that they were running about 15 minutes late.  As it was, I was going to be early.  So I pulled off, got out of the car, and sat myself down on a flat spot to watch the ocean for a while.  It's a perfect day - clear, 80, onshore breeze.  And I just sat, enjoying the sun, and the breeze, and the expanse of the ocean in front of me.

There are ground squirrels everywhere in the bluffs that overlook the coast - they run around and play and chitter at one another.  There came a point when I looked over to my left and saw, sitting there just quietly, a ground squirrel. She was up on her hind legs, front paws resting on her belly, gazing out at the ocean, completely at peace.

I was moved by such a heartfelt sense of deep connection - there we were, two busy beings, taking a moment out of our days to regard beauty, to sit quietly with the world.

Before I left, I bowed to her presence, which so enriched my own.

Day 6: Food for thought

Context:  I am currently about six months into a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher certification program.  So much more to say, but I'll leave it at that for now.

A quote from the book Science Set Free (Rupurt Sheldrake), talking about the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead:

"Reality consists of moments in process, and one moment informs the next.  The distinction between moments requires the experiencer to feel the difference between the moment of now and past or future moments.  Every actuality is a moment of experience.  As it expires and becomes a past moment, it is succeeded by a new moment of "now", a new subject of experience.  Meanwhile the moment that has just expired becomes a past object for the new subject."  

That really describes one of the insights offered by meditation - that reality is just the rising and falling of right-now experience, and that the moment of now feeds into and creates the next moment of now, just as it was created by past moments of now.  Interesting...