Dallying on the Sabbath

If you feel like dallying, here's a most relaxing folk song from my childhood.  According to a commentor, the singer is Elizabeth Guest from a CD of lullabies titled "Sleep, Baby, Sleep."  Ahh.  What I need to listen to at bedtime, since I am having the insomnia problems typical of the elderly, compounded by the insomnia that is common to the bipolar mind.

I'd like to teach the world . . . wait - that reminds me of another song.  I found a beautiful rendition on YouTube with no ads on it.

Ahh.  Naturally stoned.

I wish I could teach the world to go back to something that was a given in American culture when I was a girl, in the days before the Baby Boom upset the applecart - honoring the sabbath day.  In Ohio, which was uniformally either Christian or Don't Care back then, the sabbath meant Sunday, a day to restore yourself spiritually and physically.  A day of rest.  Almost nothing was open on Sunday but the churches.  You know what? - it didn't hurt anyone.  It meant that one day a week the alcoholics had no bars to hang out in.  Maybe church hurt some people; or maybe that was really a family dysfunction that church got blamed  for. 

It was true that in the fifties the middle-class housewife often felt obliged to put forward a big meal, a nice Sunday dinner, maybe complete with her own always from-scratch cinnamon rolls or chocolate layer cake.  But after the meal, and the dishes done, even the women got time off.  You know what people did on nice days when I was a girl?  Packed food from home to picnic in the park.  Or took a drive in the country.

What do we have now, sixty years later?  Everyone working at WalofEvilMart with no benefits or pension in order to serve those who don't have to work Sunday and are running around buying stuff and eating mediocre (or worse) food out and trolling the malls and watching expensive shoot-em-up movies.  Then those people work all week to pay for that stuff, and child care.

The learned articles about why this developed nation has such poor health statistics often talk about the toll  stress takes on people.  What do all those hardworking people do to reduce stress?  Spend money they don't have (that is, use credit cards) on pedicures, massages, trips to Disneyland, cruises, more eating out, and expensive clothes to wear to hot yoga.  As for Western medicine, in desperation it has co-opted meditation, stripped it of ethics and mythological depth, and teaches it as Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. It costs a lot to go to the retreats at which you can get certified to teach that.

A little aside here.  A couple of years ago I applied to teach meditation in the educational arm of a local big hospital system.  My interview ended with the director telling me that of course, I couldn't in any way talk about religion.  I thought that over and called later to withdraw my application. There are already enough people teaching practices stripped of the religion that devised them.

 Oh well. It's up to each of us to save ourselves.  I was going to conclude with a photo of Tashi demonstrating what she knows about lowering stress, but my photos are ultraslow to upload.  All of America seems to be on the internet on this beautiful spring day.

The Mousie and Mindfulness Express

The poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns, (subtitled "On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785") begins - 

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O' what a panic's in thy breastie!

and that opening line is justly famous. It's a long poem - people didn't have so much to entertain themselves with back then - and it ends -

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
                    On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
                     I guess an' fear!

How very Zen, I thought, the way I do, on coming across this poem today.  The animal knows only the present; the poet thinks his large mind is more complicated, busy with bad memories and anxiety about the future.  Before that last stanza, he has been contemplating human life and said -

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men,
                        Gang aft a-gley . . .

a justly famous line that touches right down on uncertainty.  As I get it, the poor mouse is also uncertain when the rude poet disturbs her nest, but not until that moment.  I must say this:  it is not all good to just bumble around in the present; it means you don't have foresight.  The Dalai Lama has commented that life is harder in the animal realm, because animals have so little control over their lives. In the moment they have to find food and water and safe shelter, and be alert.  They have no emergency supplies or FEMA.  Had this mousie been able to predict the plough, she might have built her test somewhere else, anywhere but in a field under cultivation.  Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, one of my all-time favorite books, centers on a field mouse, a widow in fact, who does realize the plough is coming, and furthermore has a sick child.  Humans on the other hand, who are, in theory, able to imagine probable futures, build house on sand, and when a hurricane wipes them away, they build again in the same place.

American society has latched onto mindfulness meditation as a secular activity divorced from Eastern religions and designed to lower stress and blood pressure and aid in healing.  I noted with some amazement today that our health club is offering what they call Mindfulness Express meditation, a course that costs, I think, $75.  Why don't people commercialize prayer like this?  On the other hand, why do people feel free to secularize Buddhist practices?

I know the great Chogyam Trungpa believed that Americans needed an essence of Buddhism without a lot of folderol, so invented Shambala; and I don't know much more about it, except that a friend of mine loved it and stuck with it.  Coming at us from the medical establishment there's Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction meditation, inaugurated by Jon Kabat-Zinn and eagerly adopted by the medical profession as "complementary medicine."  Both men had more access to (bona fide) Teachers than I've had, and I greatly admire their work.  I have always hoped that MBSR leads some people to explore the religion that gave birth to the idea of being present in this very moment.  A Teacher I know hopes it opens that door.

Yet, I wonder.  Even if people without Teachers can hang on to a meditation practice and do it right, if they are not getting to know themselves, if they are not attempting to practice the, ah, lifestyle of the Eightfold Path and to gain wisdom, does it get them anywhere?  Or does it just enable them to stay on the hedonic treadmill, and refresh the energy to keep striving madly, and get stressed over and over again. 

And that's all I know.  Except that mice are so cute, it's a wonder Facebook isn't crawling with them.  All those cats, I guess.