Alana's Dharma Blog

Immediately after I wrote the blog post, A Topic the Never Gets Old — Me and Mine Again,  I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here:

I was working on a blog about self and self belongings. It is so clear that I collect items, claim them as my own, in order to reinforce my sense of identity, to prove my Alananess to myself and the world.  But a deeper question keeps nagging me — why do I create the sense of self (that owner/claimer of belongings) in the first place?

Obviously, as a practitioner looking to escape continued re-birth, I am, at least somewhat, concerned about the high costs of self and self belonging — it is a daily exercise for me to recognize the work of collecting (bot identity and belonging), the work of maintaining and the inevitable pain of loss that come along with this self and these items I claim. Still, despite the suffering that the concepts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ cause me I persist building up my Alanahood.

Maybe I should try looking at this through the lens of LP Nut’s hidden beliefs and benefits. If I know it hurts why do it? What benefits do I think this self brings me? Is it actually true?

Now I’m still not clear on all the details, but my first impulse is that I think myself protects me. All those years I used to fight unyielding with my Mom about the terms of our relationship — how often to call, frequency and length of visits, allowable topics and presumptions of closeness —  I did it with a sense that I had to “hold the line”,  “protect my boundaries”. The more she pushed me, the more I felt like I had to dig-in and not budge: my sense of self felt like it became firmer in the face of attack, I needed it to protect me.

Now, here in NY, again I feel like I need MY STANDARDS, MY SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG, MY INDIGNATION. When someone honks, or liters, I need MY ANGER, something that I can hold onto, a sense of who I am and what I am willing to accept in the face of attack. I make the situations and environments around me, about me, and myself grows in the process. But without this sense of self, in this case who I am not and what I won’t accept, how can I keep myself safe?

But if this self of mine is so fragile that it needs the rigid packing materials of standards and indignation and anger, wouldn’t I be better served –safer –if I had a more yielding sense of self? If the self I have chosen could bend like a reed in the wind rather than snap like a tree, wouldn’t that protect me better?

Without a sense of self what is it, who is it, that Eric would love? Like me without a green purse, would I be recognizable to him? So self is necessary to be loved. But, does Eric really love me, or does he love his own idea of who I am?  I already know the answer to this (see Livin the Single Life Blog) — what Eric and I really love is the future we imagine we share together. A future we don’t even know will be real. This is no reason to cling to a self.

Good person Alana, the Compassionate Vegetarian, the Hugger of the Homeless, The Super Buddhist, she clearly needs a self.  How else can I make myself the ‘right’ kind of person, the collector of good qualities and traits. And if I am not a good self, how can I escape negative karma? How can I guarantee good rebirths and fun-filled lives? Self must exist to create standards of behavior and then evaluate (with one eye closed) whether or not I meet these self-created criterion for karmic cookies. But does this really even work? If so, why is this Alana suffering so deeply in this NY re-birth?

My whole existence seems to be about trying to confirm some set of qualities/characteristics that I dub, ‘Alana’. Qualities that will protect me by defining the bounds of what I think are acceptable, and therefore keep me safe from the dark forces of ‘the unacceptable’. Qualities that will make me loved and, by extension, protected by those who love me.  Qualities that  keep me squarely on the side of righteousness, so that I have a life of good stuff that I am so convinced righteous individuals deserve. But, this all does beg yet another question – if I am really looking to avoid suffering (the suffering of the unacceptable, the suffering of being unloved, the suffering of being unsafe and the suffering of having a crap life), shouldn’t I be trying to end the self that brings me into this suffering-filled-world  instead of trying to ‘game the world, on my terms, once I am already here?

 

 

Immediately after I wrote the blog post Sand Drawings I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here:

After I wrote the sand drawing blog I started thinking — how am I changing, decaying, just bits of matter, aggregated together, subject to decay like other bits of aggregated mater that exist in the world? Don’t my teeth wear away like kitchen knives? Doesn’t my skin dry and crack and sag like the old leather chairs? Doesn’t my hair grey like the leaves that change in the fall?

I think of kid Alana, how could I assume this adult Alana is the same? The forms are so very different from each other, and yet I called that ‘me’ and this present body ‘me’.  Just because I remember a series of moments (some not even all) between now and then, is that really my only justification for assuming Alana continuity?

What has decayed, broken, can I internalize further? My house has leaking window like my bladder has begun to leak. Years ago, when windows and bladder were ‘young’ the seal held perfectly, but now, not so much.  The padding and fluff in my favorite jacket is worn, like my body, both are losing shape, growing stretched and  saggy. Still usable, but not the old springy form of yesteryear.  I look in the mirror and see a face that has grown puffy, old, worn — when did that happen? I think back to the kitchen in my old house — slowly getting scratched, cabinetry gashed, drawers sagging; just like with my face, I don’t know exactly when the worn out look started, but somehow, overtime, it became dated.

I went to the drawer and pulled out some old pics of my family. So many  folks dead and gone already — dad, grandma, grandpa, the dogs. For those of us still alive,  Seth my mom and I, we all look so different now. The pics don’t lie. The change in form has begun already. I remember my dad’s corpse. It looked so different than when I saw him during his last visit to San Fran, before he had gotten sick. So why don’t I think I will hit point death the same way as dad, grandma, grandpa,  and the dogs?

I looked at pics of my dad again– I know that I loved him so much. I know. I know it hurt when he died. But I can’t exactly remember the moment of his death. I can’t feel it now with the same acute sense of loss that I felt then. By now, that pain has sorta gone away. And yet, when I experience the moment of loss, the knowledge that in the future it will go away/diminish, just the way my feelings of loss of my dad have,  it is no help at all.  It doesn’t eliminate the pain. I know that when I next lose someone I love, my brother perhaps, or Eric, the pain will be extreme.

I keep thinking being a good Buddhist is about being a good person, via my standards. But the truth is that a ‘good Buddhist’ is  just someone thoroughly fed up with the pain of loss. Someone who is fucking done. And someone who sees the obvious — that form will keep shifting, change will keep coming, loss and decay and death are unavoidable. Why isn’t that perfectly clear to me yet? The evidence is everywhere.

Last night, I went to a workout class. My teacher kept criticizing me, “Your spine isn’t aligned Alana, you don’t use the right muscles in your back, why are you moving from your quads instead of your hamstrings?’ It was such a hard, emotional sessions, I almost cried. I thought to myself, “for fuck’s sake,  if I could do better I would do better, I surely would, I want to move perfectly, I want to be successful, I want a teacher who is  proud of me.” But the thing is, right now, I can’t feel correct alignment, I don’t have the nuanced body awareness required to turn certain muscles off and engage other muscles instead. The force of my habitual movement patterns are too strong.  And that right there is the same exact reason I can’t see the truth of this world — the force of my habitual patterns of thinking are too strong. The thing is, after decades of yoga, body building, pole dancing, I know, the way to change movement patterns is through practice. Guess I know how to change habits of thinking then too…

 

I already had rupa on the brain, so it wasn’t surprising that I found myself on a bit of a rupa roll.  Sitting in my apartment one day, I started looking around at my stuff and I asked myself, “Do you really understand these items? Do you know what they are and what they do?”

My eyes fell on my favorite stuffed animal — Grux — a real fur bunny toy that Eric had bought me, for a small fortune, at Loro Piana. I got to thinking, what is this thing? It is a dead animal skin, stuffed with cotton and wool, tagged with a luxury brand tag. When I got it, I was sooooo excited. I believed it somehow represented Eric’s love for me, the endurance of our relationship together, that I would be cared for and safe. Its a bunny, our token animal, soft and cute. I imagined a clear future with the two of us cuddling- up and watching TV with Grux nestled between us.

To be sure, the thing is rare and expensive. But does that fact, alone, explain my love and attachment to Grux? The answer is of course no — to become attached I needed a strong dash of imagination: The fact that Eric gave it to me suddenly meant it ‘proved’ Eric’s eternal love. It helped that I could lean into my habitual belief that money = care/love. My mind had to make it a symbol of more than the sum of its fluffy parts –pricey bunny represents tasteful and refined, the way I see Eric and myself, together, as a couple. I had to see a fun future with the stuffy, Eric and I lived happily together. And in all this, a simple little stuffy got bound up with who I think I am, who I am loved by, what my future will look like. The process of mine-ification was complete.

The problem, of course, is that for all I imagined that stuffy to be, its rupa bound nature was inescapable — Grux was sitting in my apartment, on a high shelf, because I lived in constant fear that his fur would get dusty and dirty  and stiff and eroded; change and degrade like all rupa items do.

What is more, if I was being honest, Grux wasn’t even doing what I thought he did, he wasn’t living-up to his imagined function. NY had been hard on Eric and I, it was a period our relationship was strained. So did this little stuffy do anything to abate that? If I took it off the shelf, would it make our love of one another stronger? Had it really been able to guarantee the ‘happily ever after’ future I was so sure came along with its fluffin and stuffin? If that little animal did its job, making me loved and safe, why was I sitting in an apartment, in NYC, feeling so alone and vulnerable?

In all my contemplations about my ‘shield of special’ and my little bubble world — fabrications of my mind that let me imagine an Alana who is safe and comfortable and exempt from the suffering of the world — it was hard to ignore the obvious: My bubble world is full of stuff.  I pin my ideas of what is ‘safe’ in my environment, on my belongings like houses and money and a husband that will shield my from unwanted fates. My uniqueness is built on a body that is fit, a diet that is’moral’, on cars and clothes that make me (in my mind alone) ‘on top and in control’ of this world. There are configurations of rupa that are chill, SF like places, that are so me, and then there are configurations that are mellow-harshing  loud and mean, like NY, that are so not me. So it seemed like a perfectly good time to again revisit the world of rupa and do some thinking about my self and my belongings.

My head already knows damn well that the idea of ‘mine’ lives in my head alone, that there is no necessary relationship between the reality of an object (its form/rupa), its rules and its ‘mineness’, the task at hand was to gather more evidence to convince my heart.   Below is just a little exercise I did  considering my objects and what I think makes something’mine’. It has no conclusion, it was, and still is, an ongoing contemplation, but this was an evidence gathering effort that I have re-written here right from my notebook:

Proximity: The city of SF  house is still something I considered ‘mine’ even though I had moved. Clearly proximity is not the sole criteria for mineness

Legal Ownership:  My NY apartment was something I considered mine as soon as or bid was accepted, even though I did not technically own it. Now, contract signed, and all moved in, I do not consider it mine because I hate it so much, though legally I am the owner of record. Clearly legal ownership is not the sole criteria for mineness

What comes from my/that of which I am the cause:  I consider my dad mine, even though we was born long before me, so I could not have been his cause. In fact, he was my dad for fewer years of his life than he wasn’t my dad (i.e. years prior to my birth) and yet, he was, from my perspective, always mine.  Even now, after my dad has died and left me, a part of me still views him as mine.

What I desire, or what was once mine:   An old family friend and I once considered ourselves ‘sisters’ we were so close. Now that we are grown-up and haven’t seen each other in many years, I don’t consider her my sister any more. She however still calls me and treats me like we are ‘sisters close’ on occasion. She was once mine, but because I have changed, my life has changed and what I want has changed she is no longer mine anymore. My belief in her belonging to me is totally independent of her belief about me belonging to her.

I still consider my old office mine, even though I haven’t been there in nearly a year, even though before I got to my orgaziation someone else had sat there and now that I have left someone new likely sits there.

Exclusively Mine:  I consider my home and my car mine, even though I share it with Eric. I consider items I bought on re-sale as mine, even though they had a previous owner. And yet, when I go on and sell those items at the resale shop I stop considering them mine.

Still in my Possession: I still imagine being ‘Porsche Alana’, the feeling that driving that car brought me is still so visceral, even though I sold it months ago. Even though, in the end that car disappointed me, made me feel foolish, I still cling to the idea of myself driving it, owning it, during the good times. This all leads me to ask a question: How do these objects like my dad, the Porsche, SF still shape me when they are no longer in my possession. When their physical absence means I can’t actually shape them anymore?

How can I be my dad’s daughter when he is gone? How can I still be a fundraising professional when I am out of a job? How can I still be an SFer when I have moved away, sold my home, cut ties with the community? How do I still consider myself a yogi when I haven’t done yoga in years? Am I ‘athletic’ even when I am out of shape?

How can it be when there are also things that I don’t do/don’t ‘own’ anymore and I absolutely don’t consider those me/mine? For example, I don’t consider my ex still my boyfriend, I don’t consider my identity to be that of his girlfriend.

Not Under My Control: I have money in an investment account that I am legally unable to control, but I still consider the money mine, I imagine I can use it at sometime in the future, so simply controlling something is not a sole criteria for mine.

My Body : Then there is the whole crazy issue of my body.I think it is mine even though I watch it continually change. Even though it changes in ways I don’t like. Even though it controls me sometimes, it makes me get up in the night to pee, it causes me pain and it forces me to eat. Even though it is a collection of parts and its not like I consider any given part me, I am not an ear or a nose, but they are still mine. And yet when a part leaves me, my baby teeth, my gallbladder, my dead skin, I don’t care, those are not me or mine.

If I understand that mine is only something in my head, maybe I need to look at all the times I have tricked myself before.

Present Day Note: The line above ended my contemplation back in 2017. I do however want to add a present day note to offer a bit further insight. I spent months and months in 2019 and 2020 strictly pressing on the topic of self and self belonging, and I kept wondered what makes something MINE (and therefore something I cling to) when it is clear that this idea lives no where in the 4 elements of the object. I wondered how exactly the definition of mine could keep shifting and changing, just like what we see in the contemplation above: Every time I thought I figured it out, it seemed like the criteria changed; its mine because I legally own it, only that Manhattan loft felt like ‘not mine’ long before I actually sold it. It is mine because I pay for it, but what about the outfits that feel like mine in the dressing room before I hit-up the cash register? It is mine because I have had it,  because it is my birthright, but how do I reconcile that with a body that keeps getting older and fatter and sick, is it really expressing my will, acting like my ‘right’? I realize now the problem…delusion is a slippery fuck, in truth, mine=desire+some arbitrary rationalization I use to justify/claim mineness in my mind. Its just a rationalization that changes to suit my needs, all it needs to be is ‘defensible’ to my delusional brain and its good enough to go on.

Interestingly I realized this is how a slaveholder could call a slave ‘mine’ (their memories made it defensible where as in this day and age my own memories think its insane to own another human). How missionaries could use their treatment of the non-christian natives. How  wars over disputed territory start. Some seriously ugly ass shit in this world is born from this here process of mine-ification.  Its not just mine-driven ugliness that is borne out in the world, I have plenty of examples of it filling my personal life — what about how nasty I was to the girl I thought was trying to steal my boyfriend, what about how snarky I can get at staff meetings when I think a co-worker’s ideas will harm my organization, what about all the drivers I flick off because they are pushing into my lane? And what happens when it is something even dearer to me at risk — how will I react if someone tries to steal my life? My body? What karmic seeds will I sow then?