Enlightenment

Stella Doro lily doesn't know it's too late to bloom.  Note the sheltered ladybug.

Salvation, if we can talk about it at all, is the end of ambition, which is when you become completely one with your experience. Knowledge becomes one with wisdom, which is called buddhahood or the awakened state of mind. You realize that you never needed to make the journey at all . . .
Chogyam Trungpa, “The Human Realm,” in Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, page 258.

My main practice is Zen, but with an interest in other streams.  A year or so ago I bought "The Practice of Contemplative Photography," which includes some photographs by Trungpa Rinpoche, and that stimulated my interest in his work.  Like Shunryu Suzuki, he is more difficult to understand than his American followers, but worth the effort.

What these words remind me of is that I am perfectly what I am, what I was made to be by long and wide streams of karma, national, genetic, historical, environmental, and so on.  In Zen we talk about "the self," or "the conditioned self."  At one time I believed my task was to get rid of it.  I did, I believed that, because it was becoming clear to me that my histrionic hypersensitive over-responsible and bipolar self was the source of my suffering.  I remember Daniel Terragno asking me reasonably, "How could you do that?"  I thought we weren't communicating very well.

You cannot not be who you are. Your brain and your butt are the shape they are.  And you are okay.  But (as many teachers have added), you still need to work a little harder.  You may be OCD, but you can learn how to throw away a cereal box. You may be hypersensitive to criticism, but you can learn whose criticism to avoid or how to deflect it. It's bit by bit, inch by inch. There's always work to do

When I started a regular meditation practice, it was in a frenzy of fear that the cancer in my breast would kill me.  This was irrational; it had been discovered on a mammogram at stage one.  Nevertheless, I began doing a white light healing meditation you can find taught all over the world.  From there I somehow moved into just sitting following my breath, then a lot of other practices.  At this point in my life, I was also in torment with my alcoholic family, and they weren't the only people in my life driving me crazy.  That was how I saw life then: they drove me crazy.

There was some truth to that.  Some people are hard to take, and you should have a really good reason to spend time with them.  Over the next couple of years I was going to leave behind several people who just weren't good for me.  It was hard every single time.  Now I am amazed that I ever tolerated them.  But I didn't see the reality then.  My reality was governed by an idea that I should like everyone, tolerate rudeness, cultivate patience, and enjoy pool parties.  I mean, of course. 

You know what?  I like a genuine beach and a nice big body of water, as well as a creek and a waterfall.  I hate swimming pools, chlorine, cold water. It's a matter of personal preferences.  But I had to take swimming lessons and push push push myself to try and try harder - in the face of fibromyalgia pain - because, well, everyone said swimming was good for you.  And I thought I should learn to like it.  And certainly I had to go to my brother's pool parties because, well, he invited me.  Though another thing I really don't like is being around people who are devoting themselves to drinking all day.

One of the things Zen says is that when you are enlightened, you will taste a cup of tea and know for yourself whether the water is hot or cold.  It's a metaphor.  You learn you don't like Carol, and you're cold when you're cold, and hungry when you're hungry.  Other children of alcoholics may recognize the denial of ordinary needs that was enforced in my childhood.

I thought practice would teach me how to handle all the problems in my life back then. It has, including that some things can't be solved.  Also, I often see more clearly now where the problem lies, and how it can be handled.  This is hard for me to say, but there's actually nothing wrong with Carol, and I bet some people like her.  She is what she is.  I just - sorry, I just didn't like her.  And don't miss her.

In short, what I am gradually approaching with practice is not universal joy but being aware.  That includes, though it is not limited to, what you like and don't like, moment by moment.  It applies to many mundane things that can add up to STRESS.  It's very interesting how the little raft takes you far, but not where you thought it was going. 

[In looking up the hot and cold thing, I was led to a dharma talk I think must be by Shinge Roshi, for those who want to think more about this.]

In withdrawal

I do not remember Neurontin withdrawal being this awful, but it is for some people. Google the phrase and you get 25,800 hits, about half as many as for heroin withdrawal, which was the gold standard for suffering when I was young and saw the film "The Man with the Golden Arm." As I recall, the star actually tried to climb the walls when he was locked in a room, in withdrawal.

It was prescribed earlier this year for the peripheral neuralgia that set in so fast, and it worked surprisingly well. This stuff seems to be the first drug of choice these days for nerve pain, but was formulated to act on epilepsy. It is so good it helps people through meth withdrawal. It smoothed me out emotionally, it helped calm down the neuralgia, it shut down my GI tract. I soon decided to cut back from 300 mg. at night to 200. Unfortunately, I didn't make many notes about it in my health log, how long it took, how bad it was, and I really can't stand the idea of cruising my journal from that time to see if I can tell.

So this fall a new medication shut down my GI tract again. I take several medications that contribute to constipation, and the others are essential. Neurontin was the only one I could ease off on.

The neuropathy seems worse, but tolerable, very cold feet and a sock of strange neural sensation halfway up my leg. I can take my attention away from that, though. I even sleep through the night sometimes. The depression is another story. It is not your everyday holiday blues, though I have had a problem with that for a long time, the way children of alcoholics do, because what is a worse time of year to be miserable and alone than when all the people in the commercials are having a great time? This is the kind of depression you may experience when your whole life falls apart, clinical depression. The kind where you wake up each day with a groan, sorry to see another day, sorry to wake up, feeling that a day is just something to get through until at last it is night and you can (you hope) fall asleep. It is real, chemical depression, something that happens to people like me with a genetic susceptibility. It goes beyond dissatisfaction with my life to dissaisfaction with the very nature of life itself.

Now, my left brain, my reasoning self, knows that it is sunny outside. I see red berries on a wild honeysuckle outside my window, the giant old sycamores in the ravine white in the sun. But I see the berries in the shade, I know the branches will be picked clean by the hungry robins before long.

My left brain, my reason, knows I will feel different some day, maybe even in one minute. Right now it is high noon, the hours of high fire according to Eastern ways of thinking about the energy of the day, and I feel more human than when I woke up. More alive. I have had over a cup of real coffee, the kind with caffeine, and I think it helped. Cried a little, it seemed to help. A brisk walk in the brisk air might help but I am just too what? tired, apathetic, unmotivated.

This is like having on my face a scuba mask (something I hate) made of the most brilliant optical glass, but subtly tinted gray, so that I see everything clearly, and everything is gray. We all die. What we do doesn't matter. None of what we did will last very long or make any difference. Our love for one another is tremendously faulty, our relationships shallow, able to wash away or held in place by creaky cultural locks.

Is all this true? Sort of. Or yes, a partial truth, my reasoning self knows. But in a fully awake state, I also see a beauty of constant birth and creation. I feel an eagerness for life while I have it. I enjoy. Not enjoying anything is one feature of profound depression; it is called anhedonia.

One thing I am glad about is that I know enough to avoid situations in which someone has made me angry. Over the years I learned that. When my mood is this bad I could say anything. Even if I don't lose control, to be around people is too demanding. I can't keep my end up. I don't want to.

I know a couple of people who have been stuck in this state, for decades. Even to me, and I should know better, they do things that look like the exact wrong thing to do. But these actions make sense from inside you. You seclude yourself, because you're just not up to social interchange, to reaction and conversation. You do know that no one wants you around if you're not in "a good mood." You stop drawing or writing, the things that usually make you feel like yourself, but that have to come from somewhere inside that self. You skip social events, skip class, skip church. What self? You don't seem to have one, you are so flat.

Doesn't it seem like a bad deal to have chemistry like this? That's in the midst of the generally bad deal that is life.

I have to wonder, how is it that people who don't have this chemistry can suffer so much, as if their lives were always tuned in to a low hum of a song in the background, a voice singing This isn't it. Right now I feel that if I could wake up feeling like I sometimes feel, just human, just awake and rested, - I'd be in a chorus line singing "New York, New York" and kicking up my heels.