Sun and shadow

Life certainly is, isn't it?  Tashi, now, is alert for the sunshine, and enjoys it fully.  I've had to work at being that smart in my animal body.

I do credit what happiness I have to many buddhas and bodhissatvas along the way - the helping hand you sometimes get in unlikely places.  But most of all, I have to credit my practice - and the teachers who have nudged me along the Zen path.  It is said that "A Zen student must go straight on a narrow mountain road that has 99 curves."  And curve balls, too.

The course description below nods to major things I've learned as I stumbled on.  As it implies, the practice goes far beyond meditation to pervade our daily life.
If you live in the Columbus area, you can still register for this fall session through Friday at 7 pm.
(As for the way this messed up the formatting on the flier - I give. I'm a writer, not a graphic artist.)
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The Zen Way to a Balanced Life
A four-week course in establishing a daily life practice.

11:00 - 12:30 Saturdays
November 2, 9, 16, 23.
Columbus, Ohio

Meditation is widely prescribed now for stess relief. However, it was not developed in as a sort
of mental backrub, but as an element of a wholehearted life.

Everyone is invited, regardless of experience in meditation. This course will ground you in both
walking and sitting meditation (zazen) as they have been practiced in the Japanese Zen tradition
since the 12th century. It will also touch on the principles for living deeply that are sometimes
called The Boundless Qualities of our minds, with emphasis on equanimity. Zazen and these
principles are compatible with every religion and belief system.

Each session will also include chi gong techniques for awareness and relaxation, suggestions for
nourishing our own basic goodness, a brief creative exercise, and opportunities for sharing. We
will touch down on —

Setting up a daily meditation practice

Managing your life and time

Relieving stress and depression with gratitude

Finding meaning in creative giving

The course will meet in my home in Clintonville. The cost is $60, payable in advance by check or
Paypal, $50 for students and seniors. To learn more or to register, e-mail Jeanne at
jdesy@zencat.com or call 263-9275.

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Contemporary Zen strays by struggling to get away from the heart's
innermost request - to realize the same heart as Buddha. Our problem is not
that we aspire too much, but that we aspire too little, and aim for selfcentered
wisdom and compassion rather than the full-blown real deal.
~ Dosho Port
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Jeanne Desy began practicing meditation for healing when she had breast cancer in 1997, and
has led meditation groups and workshops since. She earned a PhD in literary theory at Ohio
State in 1995, and has taught literature and writing at several Ohio colleges. Her fiction and
poetry have won Ohio Arts Council awards. Her story, “The Princess Who Stood on Her Own
Two Feet,” is taught around the world as a feminist fairy tale.

To Study the Self

Sycamore in fall

After a ragged week or two I am back to alternating up and down days or, as I prefer to call them now, high-energy, low-energy.  The best thing about this is that the moods are more moderate than they were this fall, which makes the high-energy days especially good, since I can be creative without angst, without my mind tending to flare off in every direction.

The reason I am noting this here instead of in my private journal is that I realize I never felt this good before.  Before the bipolar broke out, and broke me out of my attempts to live according to conventional standards.  Before I got off the 20 years of over-medication wished upon me by one psychiatrist after another. Before my kidney transplant, when I was just too low-energy to do anything but survive.  Before I got back on minimal and judicious psychotropics.  But especially, before I had cancer, which was when I set out on a dead-serious meditation practice and years of retreats and study of the Buddha way.  That made the difference. 

If I summed that up, I'd say now I'm able to just be here, doing what I'm doing without a lot of conflicting desires and ideas messing me up.  I've developed some equanimity and contentment.  I feel centered.

I didn't get here through psychotherapy, though it was necessary.  Getting to know yourself takes more than an hour a week of someone listening to you.  The idea of zazen (the Zen style of meditation) is that we spend many hours watching our own minds and selves in action, and opening ourselves to the bigger mind.  My Buddhist readers know I am about to quote famous lines from Dogen's Genjokoan:

To study the Way is to study the self. 
To study the self is to forget the self. 
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. 

"To forget the self" means to me that I am no longer in the grip of my impulses and conditioning.  I do this blog because I hope to inspire readers a little, or just give them a bright spot in the day.  I can't make anyone happy.  You have to do the work, a lot of it.  I'm just here on the path beckoning, saying, You really ought to try this for six months or a year.

If you are a beginner at meditation or keep losing your way, here is a post I found recently on how to form the habit of meditation that makes sense to me.
[p.s. And please take in the comment below. - he knows what he's talking about.] 

The Fifth Noble Truth

Moon, by Joe Brainard

Now, I prefer to think of the Buddha's founding insights as The Four Realities, but most places they are known as The Four Noble Truths, and you can look them up.  Over the years I have revisited them often, testing whether they make sense.  Now I have come to believe that something important is left out.  The Fourth Noble Truth lays out what is called The Eightfold Path.  It is a formidable prescription for effort in every area of your life, involving wisdom, ethics, meditation and mindfulness.  What is missing is how you begin.

I have seen hundreds of people begin meditation because they wanted stress relief, people who did not want to take it any further, to look at how they lived and what concepts they carried around in their minds.  Some of them last, in a way, going to a meditation group once a week or filling seven bowls with fresh (city) water every morning, but most don't.

You will not stick with it, you will not really do it - not even with that one little part, daily meditation - unless you begin with a fervent  vow to get yourself out of your misery.   That's going to emanate from really seeing and feeling your misery. 

I remember - feeling my way out of the dark room of cancer, a room cluttered with black boxes in which there was a door with just a crack of light around it to indicate it was there.  I'd known a few happy people.  I thought maybe happiness was possible.  That door out of my misery - it was clear to me that I had to get to it myself.  Medical science was adding to my misery, I won't go into that here.  My family had, as usual, failed me utterly, abandoning me after all showing up pro forma in my hospital room.  In my journal I noted it had been 17 days since my surgery, and my mother had not called me.  Ditto what I thought of as friendships - they didn't go to this level. They turned out to be social distractions.

The church brought me dinner every night for a week, but each of those women refused to come in and visit when I asked them to, and each time my heart dropped, I was so terribly lonely.  The therapist I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was one more nice girl who wanted to explain me to understand my poor mother couldn't face my cancer.  Jesus, it was my cancer.  My minister wanted to show me how wise he was, told me she didn't choose to become an addict.  Everywhere I turned, no one heard me.  On top of this, what I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was the appearance of memories of sexual abuse after my father's death. Well, I'm feeling bad just touching down on all this. That's about all the memoir I can stand.

I could sit on the bottom of that for only so long before I decided somewhere in my gut, Dammit, I've got to do something.  Some of us are like this.  We will goddamnit do something!  This sort of will - even courage - is a gift, a lucky accident of dna and karma, and a certain persistence was something I had cultivated in my life.  Lucky there.  And all I could think of to do was a healing visualization I'd heard three different unrelated times in my life.  More luck.

I knew enough about forming new habits to decide I would have to work at this, do it every single day.  I further decided I couldn't stand to spend ten minutes at it, but five was not enough, so I made it seven minutes (with the kitchen timer).  I tied it to a reward.  If I did it, I let myself watch the 11 a.m. rerun of Law and Order, which distracted me from my nightmare.  I did it sitting in my recliner.  Things unfolded from there.

I believe that realization of our suffering, and that vow, are essential.  You will not make that vow until  you understand that no one else can help you.  Happiness will not fall from the sky.  It will not "happen."  It's not in that "relationship" you hope will "come your way."  You have to get to work.  Only then will you begin to practice as though your hair is on fire.  That's the Fifth Noble Truth, or maybe it's the preliminary practice.