There is no 100% analogy, but one of the ideas I like to consider contemplatively is ‘outward’ life as a mirror of mind, and mind as a kind of petri-dish in which influences have a chance to interact. It does seem to me that although I can’t always choose the influences (I can choose some), I can and do bring a kind of base solution of mind into which those influences sit. The solution may be heavier or lighter, more or less agenda’ed or relaxed; influences and impressions will sit a longer or shorter time before giving read-outs or a suggestion.
Those awaited for precious read-outs might then be almost too subtle to hold, or read like giant billboards fallen across my path, forcing me to stop, or act.
LA Story
Ah, I just had the biggest smile thinking of the film LA Story.
I wonder if it is still as great as I remember. 🙂
This isn’t meant to be a commentary on free-will btw, because I’m only describing how things seem. Admittedly, it is a dreamy sense of everything, likely rooted in years of dream practice and fantastical imaginative play.
But I think there’s something to it, too.
Now that I attend therapy sessions only every other week, there is so much to catch up on, but also greater chance for happenings to have taken a few different turns, or for circles to complete. The patterns are more intricate and leveled. Like this morning… I began with health, since health and anxiety around health appears to be a driving narrative at the moment., but the health conversation moved quickly into recent decisions I’ve made to trust myself in ways I hadn’t recognized myself doing, and some dare-I-say-it, stable corewell-being at the center of that confidence.
Valentine’s Day this year (even though I spent the actual day at a doctor’s office) was a chance to recognize the loving gestures I’ve made toward myself, believing my own impressions when chances have arisen to turn against myself instead. As we talked, disparate strings showed themselves to be not so disparate after all. I shared too, what I first framed as a very silly dream that nonetheless kept whispering “Look more deeply.” And indeed the dream became quite profound when mixed with my therapist’s humor and validation, our shared laughter bubbling over like that mischievous teenagers. Suffice it to say, there was an unlikely and out-of-place experience of intimacy, in which a pedestal-ed teacher was wonderfully ordinary.
In that ordinariness, life was easy, alive and free, and there was not a thing in the world I needed to do to earn that. Just let it be.
For the first time in several years, I am reading many books at once. Or at least, I’m dabbling in many while deeply reading few. Most are fiction, a few are activism-based, and then there is TSK.
Some days I read furiously, as much as possible, as though digging tunnels to make an escape. Others, I delicately sift and brush single sentences at a time, taking care not to lose hints of meaning, content to stay where I am.
Either way, I find that I’m longing for solitude and quiet arts, thus the knitting and memoir writing as well. One book I just re-read was Circe, a superb re-imagining of a nymph out of Greek mythology, recast as a witch drawn to humans, banished to an island as punishment. She finds banishment suits her far more than acceptance in the palaces ever could.
I guess I keep bringing this up, but the more I write about ‘my life’, the more simultaneously confusing and beautiful it seems. The consistent practice of questioning assumptions about the way things are, can make everything I write seem like a lie, every story I pin down, some genre of fiction–which is frightening, quaking, exposing of groundlessness indicative of reality. I’m not uncomfortable in this ghostiness, except when I feel trapped outside looking in.
“Don’t worry, there is nothing real about your confusion.” -Lojong
“You take nothing for granted.” – Something I once heard in meditation
Negative capability is a phrase first used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 to explain the capacity of the greatest writers to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability to perceive and recognize truths beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning. [Wikipedia] (came across as a note-to-self recently)
[[I haven’t picked up the book for a few days, but continue musing on the feeling and notion of the the book itself, even closed(!), as a practice. Why, oh why, is the way I work with things so odd, when compared against what others describe!]]
One of the few notes I have from childhood is from an elementary school teacher at the Playhouse and Biltmore School, who asks my mother to please stop putting barrettes in my hair, because instead of napping I take them out and play with them, distracting the other children.
“Stephanie is disruptive.”
And I’ll admit, there is something disruptive about me, something mischievous I’m always trying to pin down and trim away at to be able to settle down and fit in. Sometimes at work, I call it “puppy dog energy”, hoping others will see me in a playful rather than nervous way when I can’t help myself and say something I absolutely know better than to throw into the mix during simple small talk or break room conversation. Why do I do this?
“Stephanie is disruptive.”
I remember the relief I felt when a friend introduced me to Padmasambhava, suggesting I pick up the book Crazy Wisdom. I wasn’t privy then, to all the stories and controversies surrounding Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, so when the text hit me like a lightning bolt, I had no hesitation letting go into the experience of getting to know the aspects of mind and expression he channels so potently. I read the book quickly, unpacked it longer (and still). To describe that feeling in the context of this post, it was “Ah, there is a teacher who, instead of feeling Stephanie is disruptive for playing with the barrettes in her hair and wanting the attention of other children, would be delighted by these qualities and tendencies!”
When talking to my therapist I once described the need I have to constantly remind everyone and myself “that we are human”. When I feel energy go flat, or find myself in too rarefied a group, I want to stir it up, and am allergic to ego policing. A case can be made that we already feel human most of the time, so spiritual practice should lead us beyond, however we must remember that contemplative practice opens endlessly; what makes sense at one level may be disregarded at the next, only to pick up again yet later. Over time practice becomes fluid the way that working with recipes gives way to more and more experimentation as ingredients become familiar.
I’m learning to knit right now, and I find that I can’t multitask in any way without tangling my project. I need quiet and full concentration. When I see the more experience knitters around me, they chat and sing, watch TV and listen to books or podcasts while knitting. They throw it down and pick it up at a whim! I can’t do that now, but one day, I will. I’ll work with various kinds of yarn and make different types of stitches. The practice will become easy.
So, there’s a way in which I’m in this place with TSK. It is giving me permission and more trust than it did before. As with the “too late” shift I wrote about, it is almost like the book is curious about me, asking more open ended questions. There is intimacy present, a gentle walking-along-together-on-a-beautiful-day conversation. “What do you see?” “Yes, that’s fine.” “Nice.” Since it is TSK asking these questions, already I hear them as coming from the particular and peculiarly bright place I experience asbeingTSK, and feel loved and understood–the opposite of corrected and scrutinized as a troublesome student it is hard to have around.
I’m tempted to write about guru yoga in this context, but will set that aside for now.
I’ve been watching the effects of the letting go I’ve done this year so far, of ‘supports’ of a certain kind. Going down to once every-2-week therapy sessions is one thing. I definitely see the effects of that, because I do write more and try to lean out more into more public expressions of my life, reach into the past for answers, less. Which feels incredibly good, and doesn’t make me ‘believe in’ therapy less. If anything, I see how positive attachments nourish confidence and sufficiency.
The decision I want to make now has to do with the Waking Up app, which I’ve subscribed to for a few years. This is my go-to app for meditations before work in my car, and occasional discussions about consciousness that gel with my modern interests. It’s an inquiry based meditation style, with a beginning course format, and basically I’ve found it refreshing to stay rooted and respectful to source texts without longing for a past or other world, some different reality.
When I began with Buddhism and meditation, quite a while ago now, “dzogchen” was the most mysterious thing, and I like the way Harris has made it less so. In the circles I’ve been drawn to there is always the idea one doesn’t have to study for years and years, but rather can start at the end (Harris often uses “Arrive instantly”). Yet, still there has for me been some feeling of “too late”—of reaching the gate after having done all the necessary chores, closed out.
How could I have known, back then, what I would have needed to know, to be now where I need to be?
In fact, a teacher I truly love once hurt my feelings by saying it was too late for me. Over the years I kept waiting for him to take it back or clarify, wrestling with what I’ve felt as double standards and blind spots… thinking something like “What then, are we just playing around? Is the start-at-the-end stuff just some fun concept?” But today, and I can’t explain this, “too late” struck as quite liberating. “Give up” wasn’t meant to bully me or get me to go away. Or, if it was, I’ve unpacked precisely the opposite message. Yes, it’s too late. How wonderful!
What this means for subscribing to the app or not, I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem to matter either way.
Writing a memoir (which I’m doing as part of therapy/coaching) while studying TSK, is exceedingly strange, but also one of the most interesting things I’ve ever done. I’m fascinated by the way I reach for something that at first seems so tangible and sure, only for it to wiggle and change the closer I get. Events that have preoccupied me, spinning into some mechanism that ongoingly has shaped my view—of the world, the past, future, and the characters of other people—often aren’t what I thought they were. Or, at least I can’t be sure. Layers appear.
There is the first level story, full of beliefs about motivations and choices, but inquiry invites the second level in, which questions that story. This leaves open possibilities and interpretations the character in the first level of the story refuses to see. The second layer asks “What if it isn’t, though?”, “What didn’t I see?” Or, S’s famous “What else is true?”
Something I’ve been working out over the last 3 years in particular (and part of why I decided to go through therapy at all), is that this inquiry level shouldn’t necessarily negate the straight story level. The story still matters. Even if the character doesn’t really exist and the events didn’t happen, the experience has some value. The linear story may not be strictly true, however that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to tell it (also doesn’t mean one should).
The value may just be in learning to allow stories and ‘me’ to be non-linear and even nonsensical to so-called others. The attempt in and of itself stirs joy, especially in those constricted moments when my character insists on believing there are no ways out of what can seem an unfairly fixed struggle. It may be time to actively challenge the idea that linear stories and formulas are what is being asked for at all.
I’m laying on a heating pad, playing with a contemplative exercise a teacher I regard highly gave to a group years ago. I am one of two people in that group who actually did the exercise I think, much less two or three times.
Each time was revelatory.
It is a surprisingly radical act to consciously do nothing*.
The basics of the exercise are as follows: –Ask yourself the question “How does my life seem to me now?” Then write for five minutes. –Next, *do nothing*, for three to four hours, not even meditate. (My version today will not be this long; we’ll call it a micro-contemplation.) –At the end, you ask yourself the same question. Then write for five minutes.
This can be a kind of ‘state of things’ address to one’s self, although there is no need to answer in an itemized kind of way. The main thing is to experience/compare the way one’s mind behaves with less or more spaciousness. Today is a perfect day for something like this, as it’s breezy and cool outside, George is content to be a foot warmer, and I’ve been staving off anxiety.
*leaving aside the question of whether this kind of doing nothing is actually doing nothing. It is closer to doing nothing that what one normally does, hahaha
A month between posts again, but with good reason. I’ve been on a book binge, have traveled a little for work, and have been participating in a focused practice with friends, called “99 Days” — a play on the song 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, but with a positive overall intention of seeing and potentially affecting long standing habits.
You may remember that years ago research came out suggesting that it would take roughly 100 days to undo an old habit or to install a new one. So basically what we do is check in with one another every day for 99 days, which keeps our focus pretty steady. We each choose something different at first, although as time goes on and we support and follow one another, the practices have a way of blending.
My focus? I started with one, but moved into another I titled Unlearning Isolation, after a phrase in Rebecca Campbell’s book Light is the New Black.
In Rebecca’s book, it was almost a throw-away line, but one that jumped out and seized me strongly, becoming an easy intention to hold and remember day to day. My idea was to see if I could undo some of the isolating patterns I’ve cultivated as part of my personality for longer than I remember, by first noticing, then stepping out of them in a systematic way. I’ve had fairly good results so far.
It hasn’t been predictable. My early ideas feel almost quaint now – things like reading at the pool instead of inside of my apartment, or occasionally answering the phone without fielding calls. Instead, invitations have come up, and challenges to do things differently while traveling, like not wearing my i-pod as much, actually engaging with those around me.
Honestly, it has been a lot of fun.
One of the first things that happened was that I seemed to become hyper-aware of micro-expressions people, including myself, cycle through when engaging with the world. For many of us, there is a polite openness followed by a sudden gear switching, that if you really see in action, is quite amazing. Getting to that closing point, then breathing to relax and stay open a little longer, can feel like ‘going lucid’ in a dream.
In fact I had one quite wonderful encounter alongside a quite stressful one that I don’t think would have occurred if I’d not been out of my comfort zone in the first place.
There are stubborn obstacles that remain however, like a drained feeling after talking on the phone, that if I don’t slow down to work with, turns into a dread I then want to avoid. I suppose becoming more sensitive, making it into a thing, is part of the process, though. It has helped to hear from others that what I think of as highly personal struggles, are not too uncommon, like wanting to avoid events, being happy one didn’t, and then being very thankful when said events are over. 🙂
Have returned from a trip – my first to Europe – and from writing elsewhere about the trip in a way that surprised me. The recounting poured through like sunshine first thing in the morning, and I could hardly leave my bed–where I’d started off writing just a few simple notes–for most of the day. :
By 6 pm I was hobbling in pain, my back loudly protesting what I’d done, but wasn’t sorry. In the community, there came genuine appreciation that I’d tried to bring into the experience those who had not been able to go, to include them in the adventure. Of course, it wasn’t that I could include anyone anywhere, but they appreciated that I took the time to show they were already included… something the dynamics of the group have taught me to see throughout ten years involvement.
This felt connected to my waking a few weeks ago with the thought loudly before my eyes: “I don’t want to teach. I (just) want to write!” Which seemed odd out of context of the many years in which I’ve worked to articulate knowledge I feel has empowered my life, with the idea of ‘helping’ others. I felt released from that burden.
Why have I done that anyway? In part, out of a desire to show appreciation, to ‘make good’, like a child who is well aware of what their parents have sacrificed to give them greater opportunities. But times have changed. There is a hierarchical way of sharing, of giving and receiving, that isn’t quite appropriate anymore, even if our institutions and formulas have not moved beyond that way of thinking. We’re walking funny lines.
The ‘appreciating food’ practice a friend on the trip shared, consisted of taking a moment to contemplate how our meals, in all their myriad components, had reached our table. Each time we ate together she walked through some of the many factors and relationships required for any given meal, much less the innumerable factors necessary to gather such disparate people as we ourselves from all over the world, to appreciate that presentation. This practice, although simple, deeply affected my way of seeing during the trip. Perhaps the writing took on that flavor as a natural overflow.
It is far too easy to snap into a category and write ‘about that’, to try to line things up with calculations of what is wanted… what is most ‘useful’. However, the benefit of going with what pours out is that there is 0 pretending. There are too many factors, so you give up on capturing them all in advance, and go along with the momentum appreciatively.
This may be what Steve Jobs was getting at when he said that people don’t know what they want until you show them. Market research is useful, but incredibly limited. It matters to me that I’m clear and that what I write takes in mind the benefit of others, but I can’t be driven by that. I can’t be driven by a motive to ‘do good’. That’s an effect that in a way, I trust to happen from a deeper devotional intention.
There is a TED Talk that speaks to this beautifully, given by Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote Eat Pray Love. She gave this talk about genius and inspiration after the gigantic success of that novel, so it comes from a vulnerable place, asking, “What if my best work is behind me?” It isn’t a talk centralizing on fear. Rather, it draws upon the way genius moves, and what genius is… how much wider and free-er than can be contained by the will of a vessel trying to do well or be special.
If you haven’t seen it, it is worth the 20 minutes, and gets better and better as it goes on.
My reflection on 2017 is not complete without writing at least something about Twin Peaks: The Return. However, anyone who watches or has watched the show will immediately understand how hard it is to do so.
Pictured: Area above my work desk. Left: a few of the incredible Twin Peaks: The Return art posters created by Cristiano Siqueira. Right: image of temple meditation by Marina Pissarova. See how nicely they fit together?
First, I can’t think of any show less able to squish into some category. Second, there are a thousand more qualified detail-maniacs writing about Twin Peaks right now. I mean, I joined a Facebook group during the time of the show’s airing, and continually marveled at the level of Beautiful Mind style dot-connecting that went on, but I couldn’t engage in much directly, because my way of watching seemed so different.
Still, maybe that different way of absorbing the material brings something of value to offer.
When Twin Peaks first aired back in the early nineties, it was hardly a blip on my radar. I was young and wild, and had just returned from my first away-from-home adventure in the mountains of Colorado – an environment not so different from Twin Peaks. This would make my discovering the show later in life somewhat precious, triggering deep nostalgia, but at the time I was simply indifferent.
Rather, the show came to my attention again in about 2010, through a meditation community, during a dream studies workshop, in a virtual world. We (as avatars from all over the world) were sharing moments, during waking life and dreaming, wherein there arose some feeling of uncanny. People cited all sorts of surreal matrix-y moments and odd encounters, in some cases things they had never shared with others before, and a particularly well-read person in the group mentioned experiencing this feeling strongly, while watching Twin Peaks. Others chimed in agreements.
This was noteworthy, because during years of ongoing discussions, television had rarely come up as a topic in this rather bookish group, much less as informative to contemplative exploration. So I rented the DVDs through Netflix, and watched them all over the course of just a week.
“Ah, I get it!” I thought. The show was immediately quirky and charming, but more than that, the process of watching itself, felt like a weird sort of spiritual practice, or at least many elements did. I’d never been drawn to gritty shows (so had little exposure to David Lynch or Mark Frost), and some seeming ridiculousness pushed beyond my tolerance levels, but the weaving in of the intuitive and sense of the spiritual into even the petty felt dare I say, more realistic, than a normal story.
I was also completely smitten with the sweet boy-scout character at the center of it all …just liked spending time with him. Nothing of what Dale Cooper was experiencing in his dreams seemed that unusual to me, and I felt that should we meet, we would understand one another.
Back in 2010 there were already a few rumors cropping up about a possible revamping of the show, and this built up lightly in the background of my attention until the exciting first teasings on Twitter.
Imagining what I wanted from a next season, there were just a few requests: Dale Cooper, and a sustaining of that uncanny feeling. Everything else I left open, but I also did more research, watching Lynch films, reading some of the more obscure theories. When the show began, I read The Secret History of Twin Peaks and The Tapes of Dale Cooper.
So I felt ready.
I wasn’t, Thank Goodness.
Twin Peaks gets its place on my accomplishments/worthy-of-reflection list for 2017 because it was A LOT OF WORK. It took far more than an hour of engagement each episode, not just to process the intensity of some of the scenes and try to connect or project what they might lead to, but also to suspend and eventually let go of judgement and further expectations.
Each part (sorry, not episode) absolutely had to be watched twice: once without subtitles and once with. Homages to films and artists had to be happily researched (see bottom of this post), and more and more obscure theories had to be, or seemed like they had to be, understood.
Then, all of that ‘information’ had to be thrown out: one had to go into each part, and each scene in each part, and each character in each scene in each part, as a new canvas. That’s trust, man. And what or whom was I trusting?
I think I was trusting the art itself. I wasn’t necessarily ‘a Lynchian’ like many, trusting the Artist, but there was some rareness of connection, and I was leaning into that, in spite of several scenes that were deeply disturbing without that context.
I stuck with it because Twin Peaks: The Return, is extra-dimensional, not in the way of telling ‘someone’ an extra-dimensional story, but in giving openings the viewers(?) walk into, or dream into, themselves.
A main question asked by the series, is one I ask myself all the time:
“Who is The Dreamer?”
“The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.”
-Joseph Campbell
(some of the) Films:
Being There
Sunset Boulevard
Laura
Lost Highway
Mulholland Drive
Eraserhead
Inception
Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Shining
(some of the) Artists: Edvard Munch
Rene’ Magritte
Francis Bacon
Edward Hopper
~ Singing Gecko 