Morning Coffee With Grandma: What is Zen?

7:00 Quietly awakened by morning light.  Roll over, sigh happily - nothing scheduled this morning. close eyes.
8:20  Wake up again. (In Zen this is called gradual awakening.  I've always believed in it.)
8:45  Pulling the compression sleeve on my lymphedemic arm, I accidentally sock my jaw.
9:00  Take vitals. I am alive. I thought so.
9:05  Get on Vine of Obstacles, read Forum, answer another student with a post that includes one of the few things I know for sure - you have to have a semi run into your house before you will start to meditate.  Then, if you're a woman, it's going to take twice the effort, because you've been trained to take care of everyone else, and don't get above yourself.  I don't have to go into a tirade about how Oprah and the other marketers make a lot of money by convincing you that what you need is a $100 haircut and a pedicure.  Most of us eventually figure out that that doesn't work.  Also, an old saying in feminism is "To get anywhere a woman has to be twice as good as a man.  Fortunately, that's not hard."

Actually, on one of my early Zen retreats I was walking down the residence hall when I saw that someone else had left her door open.  There, neatly laid out on her dresser, were four pairs of earrings. I thought, being new to all this, "Are these people Zen?"  Some of the women wore full makeup every day, too.  It turned out that -
(a)  Most were Catholic, drawn to this retreat because it was at Grailville and was led by a Jesuit Priest/Zen Master.  And -
(b)  Zen is not about what you wear.
(c)  Not everyone gets that.  When I went to a "real" Zen retreat, the other students all wore black and did NOT wear earrings or makeup or ever look up at the flowering trees.  Was that Zen? Now I was confused.

9:30  Done with coffee.  Time to put the post-it sign on my study door and do my practice.  Not that sitting down to meditate is the practice.  The practice is . . . umm . . .Well, sit down, shut up, and pay attention is fundamental.  But the "pay attention" part is supposed to keep going.  Pay attention all day long, every moment, every step.  That's the practice, as I understand it now.
~~~~~

In case you didn't recognize her above, here's a more usual view of the beautiful Pema Chodron, who got liberated and then got liberated.

One more thing:  I'm thinking I ought to call this blog The Dally Grandma.  Any opinions?

Zen and Bipolar: What to do When You're Going High, Part 1

This morning I'm having fun with a three-month-old list I made titled 100 Cool and Stupid Things to Do.  It is gratifying to see that though I closed that file and forgot about it, I got a lot of those things done.  (And am reminded to do others.)

One thing on that list was the suggestion to write this post, as part of a larger project about Zen for Bipolars.  I'm neither low nor high today, just in that nice balanced space between waves, so I'll take advantage of that and begin.

Starting up on a manic moodswing is similar to being pleasantly excited for a normie (I don't like that word, we're not abnormal, but what else can I call people-who-don't-have-moodswings?  Maybe "ordinary people"?)  But it includes the allure of a mental shapness and confidence.  And it will not naturally subside.  That's my experience, and I was just ordinary until I was 33, so I know the difference.  This difference highlights the crucial fact that bipolar is a neurochemical dis-order.  That's why chemicals are often useful in the treatment.

Science is telling us these days about brain plasticity, that is, how we can change our brains even into old age.  There's a lot of further research on the specific effects of meditation on the brain. My own experience is that nothing will calm you down better when you're too excited than meditation, which has been briefly described like this: 

Sit down.
Shut up.
Breathe.

Teachers of young children call this a time-out.  It works.  Even little ones can follow those directions for a few minutes.  For kids with temper or panic attacks, a one-minute meditation of three deep breaths, exhaling all the way, can work magic.

But the little ones have an advantage over us; someone is making them do it.  (Most elementary school is a formidable training in doing what an authority tells you to do.)  As a grown-up, you have to exert this control over yourself, unless a manic episode gets so bad that you are hospitalized.  Then you will be medicated.  If  you are really bothering people, you will sometimes be shut in a 'quiet room" for a time.  Interestingly, a quiet room is rather like a Zen meditation hall:  empty, clean, quiet.  No screens, no one to talk to, no stimulation, nothing but a mattress on the floor. But we can actually arrange our own quiet times.

They can have the same calming effect as contemplating nature.  That doesn't mean hiking, climbing, caving, making a big effort to accomplish something.  Contemplation is simply walking or wandering alone in a park or woods, just for the sake of experiencing nature.  I love doing that on retreat.  (Caution: it is  stimulating to be exposed to sun, heat, and light.)

To the left is a photo I took at Grailville in 2010, a month before my scheduled transplant, when I was very sick and very frightened.  It was a good retreat for me, given that. Perhaps you can see how calming it was.

I like the subtle colors and shadows in the photo, which is of the hedge that separates Grailville from a meadow; if you look, you might be able to make out the wire fence in the late-morning shadows.  I took photos that year for the first time; it became a contemplative activity for me, and neither the teacher nor anyone else chastised me.  Ama Samy's retreats are relaxed and kind in the way I understand retreats are at Springwater Center, founded by Toni Packer.

[If you know someone who is bipolar, or close to a bipolar, feel free to share this post on Facebook or elsewhere.  You can use the little icons below.]

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
~~~~~~~
Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

Sunrise at Grailville

Recognizing Love

Feeling clear enough to have a second cup of caffeine and think about blogging.  Yesterday I went off the Percocet and just on Tylenol.  Some healing in the night - this morning I have not felt the need for the Tylenol (you have to monitor it - too much hurts your liver).  Maybe it was from Nancy van Deusen's lentil soup - she appeared on my doorstep with it yesterday morning, an angel in a gray hoodie.  She was so happy to be doing this for me, giving me the best she's got, her own homemade soup. 

I have had something else beyond price from all this - I have learned to recognize love when it comes my way.  This has followed directly on Laura's gift of her kidney - I think I wrote about that here back then - it seemed the universe opened up a golden track, that there was this benevolence, this giving, even this taking care of me, a friendly universe instead of the sad threats I experienced in childhood, like so many children of broken people.  I have begun just seeing and feeling the love that is in front of me.  I feel it as healing in the center of my body.

Tom came into my study a while back to tell me I coughed a lot in the night, and he is concerned about me breathing deeply and exercising my lungs.  I have a little machine for that, a spirometer I think it is.  But also, in the hospital I was walking 10 minutes or more at a time around the halls, and I'm not doing that here.  As I listened to him I felt the love and caring that this came from.  How astonishing - to have a husband like this.  I have to dress, put shoes on, and do some walking meditation around the house.  If the sun comes out, I might walk outside for a few minutes.

I think a lot about the oxymoron:  a Zen Blog.  The Way is beyond words - so what is it I do here?  A kind of art form, I guess, like stacking stones at a crossroads.  A kind of appreciation.  Also, I try to just present myself and say, Well, this is Zen too. It's not about preaching anything.  It is very ordinary.  I am convalescing.  That sounds like a journey from A to B, from surgery to Being Well Again.  But there is no end point to this particular journey - no assurance, we're done now.  Actually, my experience is that whenever you reach one of those, it's highly disappointing.  Remember graduation?
(image:  Rainbow sunrise at Grailville)

"Every day's a good day."

Grailville meadows at sunset

Well, just briefly before I go pick up my thyroid med and get a blood draw and do some banking and drop off overdue library books - we got back home from retreat Friday afternoon, feeling very well, the soft stream of emptiness still around my ankles.  We went to Zen Sat. morning and so loved the deep silence - there are a number of dedicated practitioners there, and everyone sat quietly.  Then we heard a talk by Lew Richmond on the spiritual opportunities, you could say, of aging.

Sheba had been wonderfully cared for by my neighbors, Cindy and Lauren, and all was well.  This was one time Ama Samy did not quote the visionary, Hildegard, but we remembered her most-quoted vision -

And all shall be well.
And all shall be well.
And all manner of things shall be well.

As I corresponded just now with my friends on the transplant e-list, I noted that of course I am praying that everything goes well these next weeks for both me and Laura.  And of course that the surgeries go well.  They should; OSU is very experienced.  But on a deeper level I want to accept whatever comes.  Inscribing his latest book for us, Ama Samy wrote for me - "Every day's a good day."  In this situation, that will do as the koan of your life - that no matter what transpires, it is the way it is and has to be, and it is good to be alive.

Love to all, especially to those I sat with on the retreat.

This group of tall daisies sticks out onto the concrete ramp up to the Caravansary - the refurbished barn where we sit meditating.   The above picture shows them on Monday.  I especially liked that dying flower in the middle.  The bees - fat black ones -are busy at the freshest flower, showing no sorrow for that one that is wilting away.

There is a koan that speaks to this somehow.  A true Buddha is not made of wood, clay, or gold, but is found "in the inner recesses of the house."  I take it that's this house of the self, our body.  The true Buddha is the one that wilts. Fallible, messy, scattered mind, unwelcome obsessions, and all.

Hallelujah!

Two Sunflowers

First report from Grailville, where our retreat starts tomorrow.  Since I am almost surely not going to be able to do all the sits, I have brought amusements - books, a manuscript, the netbook, colored pencils and drawing paper and erasers and little sharpener, very compact art supplies.  Right away I was sorry I didn't bring water colors.  Extra batteries for the camera, and the above picture of our front porch tested whether I could download pictures. Miracle - the wireless internet is not only in the coffee shop, but in our rooms!  Until I set up and found that out, I felt oddly lonely, though Tom and I can still talk, and are in adjoining rooms.  But we won't talk after first sit tomorrow evening.

I brought every conceivable garment for cold weather down to heavy socks and scarves, and wouldn't you know it was 86 degrees today. 

For my Zen friends, this is an easy retreat.  Sit about 8 hours spaced through the day, and you don't have to go to all the sits - no one will come after you.  It is odd in that many participants will not be students of
Zen, yet; Ama Samy is also a Jesuit priest, and attracts many Catholics from the area. . . For my non-Zen friends it is an unthinkable ordeal.  Added to all that sitting is the silence, which is pretty well observed.  Wbat, not talk for a week?!  At more formal Zen retreats, not talking usually supposes not reading or writing, which is a lot of effort, though I enjoy the silence.  I might continue to blog. It could be interesting to chronicle the inner weather.  Or I might just post the day's photo.

And oh yes - we learned on ther way down (by cell) that my transplant surgery is scheduled for Oct. 12.

Morning Fog

What a beginning to the week! I awoke from a restless dream - Grandson's energy still in the house - and reached for my clock to press the light on it and see the time. But my hand brushed my water bottle, which is one of those things with a straw in it they give you in the hospital, and it fell to the floor and spilled. Water, water everywhere. Sitting up, I lit up the clock, and then it fell from my hand to way under the bed somewhere. The time, BTW, was 5:00 a.m. I usually get two more sleep cycles.

What a mess, trying to mop it up and not wake up Tom. At least I got in the linen closet for an old towel and didn't use one of the new ones. Back to bed, I lay there thinking about Things To Do, worrying about getting my computer backed up. Thinking this is the result of watching all those explosions before bed, on TV. Eating badly over the weekend. So much excitement with grandson. It had accumulated in my patchwork body/mind. Sleep was not going to come back.

Get back up, drink a cup of lightly caffeinated coffee, find that an important e-mail has bounced, yet again. Research the student, find a different address, try again. Resist getting mad at the student. It is now 6:00 a.m. Here I am. Morning fog.

Yesterday it was warm - 40 degrees - here, rainy and foggy all day long. We were on the freeway, Tom driving, me in the back of the van with Otto, and I was admiring the beauty of the city resting in layers of fog. It is a peaceful look. Then Tom said, "What an ugly day."

He meant it made driving hard, mostly, but also, that it wasn't sunny. It usually isn't - I've heard that Columbus gets as little sun as Seattle, we just don't think of it that way, and continue to be unpleasantly surprised. People complain about it as if overcast skies are an unnatural deviation from The Way Things Supposed to Be. I certainly feel this way about the ridiculous state of being I'm in. I seem to be on a roll of clumsiness - last night a glass slipped from my hand and fell a few inches to the table, and shattered. It shouldn't have broken, but it did. Last week I dropped the sugar bowl. I don't like this not-with-it state, and am inclined to fix myself. Coffee, blogging, meditate, come on, get fixed.

In my morning mail, the daily dharma from Tricycle magazine happens to be about equanimity. Gil Fronsdal is talking to me. I think about standing calmly in the middle of it all, including the awkwardness of my body, dropping things, spilling things, making messy karma everywhere.

Of course, we love morning fog when we're at Grailville for Ama Samy's fall retreat. It is usually foggy at 6:00 a.m. when we walk toward the Caravansery, the lovely arc where we sit. The fog doesn't interfere with us or make it hard to walk. We are aware we're sitting in a cloud. We trust it to burn off.

Entering the Zone of Silence

I am reading a book titled Wabi-Sabi and thinking about hermit monks and my days. This is a rare day without a medical appointment, which feels spacious and very pleasing, since the sun is out.

The book breaks down the two Japanese words that add up to refer to a concept of natural, simple beauty.

Wabi is internal, one's way of life or path
Sabi the external, the material, the world of forms

I don't think one's Way can really be very separate from one's external world, the space you live in, the ways you spend time. Imagine waking up in a stereotypical guy's dorm room - ancient empty pizza boxes, the smell of fast food, beer cans, unrinsed, dirty socks and underwear on the floor, stale air, stale bedclothes, closets a tumble of unbalanced stuff. How spiritual could you feel? (I have to admit, what I know about this is gained from watching those cute guys make over people's homes, back when we got Bravo on cable. Hmm, maybe a memory here and there from misspent youth, the sort of thing you prefer not to access.)

The opposite of that image is a room on retreat. Not all retreats have private rooms, but the ones I've gone on at Grailville did. The rooms are small and spare, not an extra thing in them, none of that fancy hotel stuff of mints and little shampoos and huge, stiff bedspreads. Wooden floors, no rugs. You learn to bring only what you must have, almost like a camping wardrobe, comfortable clothes you can layer when it's cold.

The outside of the little campus is equally simple, devoid of signs that flash time/temperature and giant TV screens with ads for concerts. Retreat theory is no reading, writing, or TV during the week. Near some buildings are signs that say "Entering the Zone of Silence" - no idle chatter, either. So you are taken down to a life that's much simpler, almost qualifies as wabi-sabi. All told, it is as close to hermit monk as I've gotten. What a treat it is for a woman, too - because our houses are so much more than we need, and they become a burden to us. Our lives are much more than we need. Fancier, busier.

I've been thinking of the first Teacher I ever heard, a Theravadan abbot familiarly known as Bhante G. A tiny man, he sat crosslegged on a table in the coffeeshop at Borders and spoke to a small crowd what I would learn was called "the dharma," reality as Buddhism sees it. I was transfixed when he said "Most serious students find three or four hours a day for meditation and study."

Seeing my astonished expression, he laughed a little and said to me, "Really."

I am getting more interested in time for a spiritual life now that I have a life again, back on my feet, anemia resolved, not ill at the moment, enjoying decent energy and mood. I find myself awakened, of course, to all sorts of messes. Things to catch up on, learning how to get back to some routine duties like planning meals and cooking.

I know the first principle of time management: there is always time for what is truly important. Out of all the less important things in my life, what to give up?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
a postscript: When I saw Bhante G speak he was very old, much older than me. Now he looks younger than me (see image above). How to explain that?

Forced Retreat

No pix again. I am on computer 21 at the library, thinking as I stood in line to sign up that many people are standing in line in Texas for drinking water or something to eat. Here, we eat computer access; four days now without power. We all got in a bad mood last night when the rumor that our power would be back on by dark proved false.

If I had the skills to pull up a picture, it would be of Grailville, where we have gone on retreat for ten years now. When the hurricane hit, I was already depressed, having realized that I am just too handicapped now to go on retreat. Even the packing and two-hour drive is hard on me, and I get sick. I can't sleep. I ache all over.

And Ama Samy's annual Zen retreat is easy, only 7 or 8 hours a day of meditation, doesn't start till 6:00 a.m., you have freedom to wander in contemplation of nature, or not attend a sit at all. Other retreats are much harder. The only kind of retreat I could go on now would be in a luxury convention center, with a good bed. If there are retreats like that, I can't afford them. So, I thought, my retreat days are over. That led me to decide that I am done growing spiritually. God help us.

Now this; forced retreat. Despite the morning New York Times and the battery-powered radio, this is more boring and uncomfortable than any retreat. And you have to come up with your own meals. And no schedule to sustain you.

The picture I would post today would be a rendering of Napoleon's army struggling back from the Russian campaign, a military debacle I happen to know about. Everyone is showing stress, even the telephone solicitors. Nice people talk bitterly about the "A-holes" who speed through the intersections where the traffic lights are still not working. People are dying for an iced drink, the 6:30 news, dying to do a load of wash.

I wondered today, what is it that makes this so bad (once you get used to the shocking sense of vulnerability)? At first it drove you crazy, every minute you discovered something you couldn't do. But in just four days I have grown so used to it that I don't even try to turn the light on when I enter a room. In fact, it's so quiet, there's so little to do, that I find myself up by candle light resolving ancient issues, just as if it were Thursday on retreat.

Waiting an hour for my computer, I picked up a new book by Alexander McCall Smith. My daughter Cassie likes these lovely, contemplative novels. Here is a bit that struck me: "Missing names, missing persons---how remarkable it was, [Mma Ramotswe] thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world . . . "

We took our lunch to Walnut Grove cemetery today. The dead were as peaceful as ever, undisturbed by the little piles of tree limbs, the occasional broken monument. I wondered why in the world I am ever afraid of death.

Debility, now, sickness, pain--I don't like those. I'm working on my attitude, though not working too hard. The lawn guy agrees, thinking positive just doesn't cut it.