Alana's Dharma Blog

In April 2022, after spending a lovely winter in Miami with my family, I was making the drive back to Connecticut when my brother called: My mom had been hit by a car, she was in critical condition at the hospital, the situation was life and death.  I turned the car around and started driving back to Miami right away.

The next few days were a bit of a blur and I wasn’t really able to contemplate in those early moments.

I had reached out to Mae Neecha to apprise her on the situation and ask some advice; I considered it could be the last opportunity I had to speak with my mom and I wanted her thoughts.

A few days later my mom had stabilized enough for surgery; it was a risky brain operation, but the doctors thought it would help. While I waited for my mom to come out of surgery, I had some time to think.

The thing that had stood out to me most was the image of my mom writhing in a hospital bed in pain. My mom is such a strong woman, she has had numerous accidents and sicknesses in her life, she lives in chronic pain. To see her pain reach a pitch so unbearable was unfathomable to me. To see a body that she had seemingly been in tight control of, which she had learned to manage, to endure, to use so functionally, refuse to allow her to perform basic functions – move, pee, shit, eat, sleep – hit me hard.

This is the cost of having a body. We take up a body imagining the pleasure it will bring, the fun things it will let us do, the fantasies we can play out in it. But the very same neural pathways that allow us to experience pleasure ensure that we will also feel pain. Can anything with a cost so steep really be sukkah? What I see in front of me is so clearly dukkha.

A long time ago I had seen an episode of some supernatural show. In it, the main character was in a hell. Each morning, he woke-up to a beautiful wife and family, he was so happy, but when he went to the garage to get his car and go to work, he encountered a demon. All day the demon would burn him, pull teeth, physically torture him. This, essentially was the main character’s ‘job’. Then, at 6 pm, the character would forget it all and head back up to his family. The next morning, it was rinse and repeat, back to the torture chamber.

We run around life, in this breakable, painable body ignoring the unavoidable torcher that lays in wait just down the hall, around the corner, ready to pounce at any time. We have discomfort constantly – a body that gets hungry, cold, tired, that needs to regulate in changing environments, often its in the background. Sometimes discomfort inches up to pain. Sometimes, as in my mom’s case, to agony. This is part of the physical, rupa nature of bodies. But we forget.

When the pain isn’t too bad, when the worst passes, we head back ‘upstairs’ to our ‘normal life’ and we go on pretending that physical pain is somehow the ‘exception’. But it is the rule. Its is a continual, unavoidable state that comes hand-in-hand with having a body.  If you don’t notice it now, just watch and wait, I promise, it is coming.

That character in that TV show lived in a hell state, he just didn’t realize it. He forgot the pain that had been, that was coming. But the pain was characteristic of the state he was in. Pain is characteristic of being in an embodied state. What is characterized by pain must be dukka. Even if we forget, even if we ignore, it doesn’t change what this world, what having a body really is.

I spend so much time stressing and fearing, arranging and hoarding, I cling to this tendency for vigilance because of this over inflated sense of self. I can’t put down the idea that this time might just be about me. I MIGHT, in any given circumstance, be able to do just the right thing to cause the effect I want. Be damned all those times that the opposite has been true; I was a cause all right, in getting things I definitely did not want (the root canal, the onset of rosacea, the garden dig that fucked the house foundation). And be damned the fact that what I want at any given time is sorta arbitrary: Something I imagine will fulfill a fantasy, and then which I build a fantasy around, clinging to, and getting saddened by losing the thing I imagined the value into in the first place. And be damned that all of this vigilance, the effort and stress of it, hurt me; I foolishly think it’s worth the cost to carry around a safety blanket, no matter how heavy, no matter how warm I get, no matter that it may put me in danger, just because one day it may help when I am cold. Even though — no matter what I believe — if the causes and conditions for my being cold, for my dying of freezing, get met, I will freeze with or without a blanket.

MIGHT is not an affirmation of anything except for the reality that there is also MIGHT NOT. A while back, when I was considering, I told Mae Neecha that the fact that my yellow purse SOMETIMES makes people think I am awesome is why I cling to it. But later I reflected, the only thing sometimes proves is sometimes not, ie NEVER ALWAYS. Clinging to a purse because I think it makes people think I am awesome sometimes is stupid; if the purse’s nature was that of a tool to make people think I am awesome it would work for everyone always.

Might/Maybe/Sometimes are symptoms of a world where the matrix is true. And why is the matrix true? Because everything is circumstantial, conditional, occasions when the proper causes/conditions/factors have been met for arising and occasions they have not. In this word, what happens proves the causes for it happening were met, and nothing more. It certainly doesn’t prove a purse will prove my awesomeness. It also doesn’t prove my awesomeness. It doesn’t even prove me.

Myopically, I measure my worth, the worthiness of my efforts, on a case-by-case basis. On those occasions that it doesn’t strain credulity to assume my vigilance gets me what I want, I put a feather in my hat, feel proud, confirm this idea that it tis I, Alana-The-Great, who maybe can’t pown the world, but can at least have dominion over what I have named and claimed as MY CORNER. In those cases, when circumstances land in the favorable corner of the matrix, I get the outcomes I want, so yay, a point for me and for my vigilance. But before I tally my points, before I brush under the table all the stuff that didn’t land in the corner of the matrix I had hoped for, it’s worth asking another question: Are my victories really even victories? Am I really ever getting what I want? What I have come into this world to achieve? These crumbs that keep me sustained, but perpetually hungry and willing to fight for more, what are they really? Which brings me back to anxiety in the sauna…

When the pandemic started, vigilant monitoring of the news got me lots of masks and toilet paper ahead of lockdowns. I patted my own back for my prowess staying informed, for my power to protect myself, I called this victory to justify further vigilance. I used it to fuel my hope that I might just be able to effectuate the outcome I want, some of the time. Enough of the time to make it worth it… but masks and toilet paper is a pretty shitty prize. What I really want is a world without disease, where I don’t have to worry about viruses or bacteria consuming me. A world where I need masks and toilet paper hoards at all is a world that is not going to let me win. I am not going to get what I want here, or at the spa, or in the cabin in the woods, they are the same, there is disease here, there is decay.

When I got long covid, I patted myself on the back for doing all the research that helped me isolate the likely cause, and the right drugs to cure me. Never mind btw the crumb I brush under the table, that I figured it out on my second guess, after the first guess led me to take medication that made me much worse. Right alongside my research/preparation prowess, I credited my bank account balance with being able to afford the drugs (off label) and the doctor willing to prescribe them. Sure I had become subject to disease, but I kicked it right back in the hole, by bringing the brute force of ALANA to bear on the situation. Here was proof the tools I had amassed could protect me.

But really — what I want most in this world is to be safe. All the preparation, all the knowledge, all the willpower, all the wealth, these are what I have cultivated as a means to the end of being safe. Is a world where I got sick in the first place — where my stressing at the spa shows that I am fully aware could happen any time again — actually safe?

And if wealth and qualities could really have kept me safe, why didn’t they prevent me from getting covid? Or at least long covid? All that I claim and then cling to because I hope they will protect me, at best seem to do so SOMETIMES. Which is to say, NEVER ALWAYS. Which is also to say, not on my terms. Which is all an indication that its not my actions, my preparations, my blahblahblah, that determine my health or sickness, if they did these would reliably do so all the time.

All these conditions require a cause to be helpful. They require my having the karma to not get sick at that time, if that karma is lacking, or alternatively if the karma for illness is ripe, I get sick no matter what preparations I put in place. How do I know? All the preparations I took to avoid long covid didn’t work. I had stockpiled Paxlovid, took metformin, washed my sinuses, put every bit of science, every paper I had read, every action I had know at the time that might prevent long covid, into effect and still long covid came. Besides, how can I be protected in a world that offers no shelter?

At the beginning of the pandemic, Mae Yo sent me a picture to contemplate, it was a prize fighter holding his hands up in victory, but his face was all swollen and bruised. The text below said something like if this is the winner, imagine the loser. It made me reflect: Here I was a Covid lockdown winner, I had a cushy job I could work from home, a bank balance that allowed me to get everything delivered, a ton of toilet paper and masks…but then is that really winning? Nothing about my life in lockdown felt like a win. Sitting in the spa today, I realized that my ‘post pandemic’ life doesn’t feel much like a win either. Whether you are up or down, if you are in a dukkha world, what you get is dukkha.

Here is the part that fools me: I do get what seems to me to be wins some of the time. As I said before, clearly my actions/abilities have a palpable impact; sometimes that impact is in accord with my wishes, with what I envision myself to be, what I think my life ought to be. For years I had both the sheer force of will, plus the financial wherewithal, and the general circumstances to covid isolate. Because I was never exposed to covid, I never caught it in that time. WIN! But as soon as I came out – I felt like I had to come out and live — covid got me. Actually, to be more specific, on our first trip, Covid got Eric. And then my partner, who in my mind exists to keep me safe, is one of those tools I have stockpiled in the name of safety, ended up getting me sick. Just a wait, a duration before I lost.

And another example: For years I worked-out vigorously, I brought the sheer force of my will to the task of being fit and supremely fit I was. WIN! I trained my body to control it, to force its shape to my will, to prove to others I was on top and in control. To prove it to myself so I could convince myself I had a modicum of safety. Afterall, I can’t control everything, but at least myself, my body…if I can’t master that what can I expect to have mastery over? What can I depend on? What will be the proof of my exceptionalism, or of the qualities I value and identify with? For all those years of training, for all the crazy fit shit I could do, 1 bout of covid gave me long covid that literally laid me out flat. I had all the will in the world to exercise, to get back to who I had been, but my body simply wouldn’t obey, it just kept collapsing in exhaustion. Just a wait, a duration, before I lost.

I lost my fitness, I also lost the fantasy of my body to prove my control — if this body could prove my control of shit, then duh, I would have been able to actually control it. It couldn’t have been circumstantial, conditional, dependent on a disease-free state that vanished after just a week battling a microscopic virus. Dependent on something other than my actions, my secret sauce.

I am fooled by the sometimes; I take a duration of time that I seem to be affecting outcomes more-or-less in line with my desire/imagination and I think it proves me, proves my efforts ‘WORK’. Again, this is myopic. The big picture is that I go from circumstance to circumstance trying to get the outcome I want instead of seeing any ‘victory’ in this world is a pyrrhic one. All I need to do is peek at the time outside of the duration –a duration btw that I don’t dictate –and I will see the truth: If some shit I did or I was actually ‘worked’ it would work ever fucking time. But every object, every effort, everything is just like that yellow purse; if it in and of itself had the power to effectuate some outcome, it would do so all the time. If it proved anything, it would prove it all the time. And actually, it does prove something, the thing I quickly brush under the table, that I desperately want to ignore. It proves that everything in this world is conditional, arising only when the causes are ripe. Causes are ripe some of the time. All of the time they become exhausted.

None of this proves anything about me. It just proves the nature of the world. And yet, in my ignorance, I think it proves that my vigilance, my sadhana, my efforts are worthy, that there is hope, that if I can just adjust and recalculate and figure out how to do better next time then I can find my refuge, then I can have the life and be the me I want to be. But this thinking, this view, will never ever EVER get me that happy haven I desire. That is literally not the nature of the world, that is not the nature of the body I use to be in this world. What this thinking does get me however is suffering: More rebirths, more tries to try and accomplish what is impossible. In the end, there is only duration because there is arising and ceasing. What arises and ceases, all of it is conditional, and what is conditional can’t prove me. It can’t be me. It’s just what arises based on circumstances, circumstances that arose based on other circumstances, ad infinitum. This isn’t special, no part of it, no moment, no cause and no effect, its just the mundane process of the world.

So where to next with all of this? The scaffolding is laid, I see the contours of how this world works, of my wrong view, of karma. Now is the task of sticking it to my heart. More evidence, different words, more angles, more internalizing, more examples. More and more till my heart can’t refuse the truth. More and more because for lifetimes I have sought refuge, it has been my raison d’etre, I have hustled and suffered on this refuge hunt and all this time I have been searching in the wrong place. All this time, I have looked outwards, bringing the force of my will, my vigilance, my parami, to try and mould the world, my corner of it anyway, into a shape that –at least temporarily – looks like refuge to me. But refuge isn’t out there anywhere. I need to bring my force to change my heart, my hope, my expectations. Real refuge, a real cessation of dukkha, is to change myself, to develop right view.

Now Dear Reader –cliff hanger –the tasks have already begun, but you will need to wait a little while till that story gets told. It’s not complete yet anyway… Next week, we get back to 2022 where we left off.

All righty Dear Reader – I am once again going to mix things up and get a little out of order for this sorta-temporally-linear blog; I am adding in a contemplation from this past week, late Sept. 2024. Why? Well for starters, it is so clearly rooted in the topic of ‘the world offers no shelter’, it is almost a natural extension of the last blog. An extension that shows how my dukkha contemplations have progressed, and how the topic of dukkha continues to be a strong scaffolding for my post-dukkha-aha-moment contemplations.

But mostly, it is because while I spend a whole lotta time thinking, it’s a rare contemplation that really squeezes my heart, that feels as emotionally powerful as it does logical. This contemplation hit me hard and has prompted me to reconsider, and gain more clarity on another critical topic, karma…

I went to the spa today, mid-day on a Monday, I expected it would be quiet. Instead, it was a zoo. I did my usual dance to duck and dodge the crowds, aka the disease carriers, but it was impossible, there were too many people. As I sat in the sauna – vigilantly listening to detect any cough, any sniffle – I started thinking about how stressed out I am all of the time …

I have so much money, but I continually stress on how to keep it, whether it will be enough, how to invest and if we need more. I pour over spreadsheets, calculating, adjusting, making ‘sure’ we are on track. I fear every unexpected expense will push us out of budget. I wonder whether everything I buy is worth the risk to my bank account, to my future in which I need money to survive. In my mind, I am supposed to have this money to enjoy life with, to be safe, but it turns out to be a source of constant stress. And as for safety…despite all the money, I see peril everywhere. Proof: Here I am sitting in a sauna worrying about Covid instead of relaxing.

I have this lovely vacation home in Montreal, also something I bought to relax, enjoy, take refuge in to escape the Miami summers, but I worry about it constantly too. I worry about how to preserve it, about humidity levels, and floods when I am away. I stress when it breaks on how we can fix it rapidly enough to prevent it becoming damaged past the point it is habitable for me. I fear that that mold will be my evictor. Or the government will be my evictor; geopolitical instability could make American tourist visas scarce. Or the property taxes will become prohibitively expensive, and we will need to sell. And is someplace really a refuge if you worry about it being ruined, or it ruining you all the time? If at any moment you can be evicted — or at least denied pleasurable use — by the elements, or naughty neighbor, by governments and geopolitics?

I have this body – I am sitting here trying to give it sensual pleasure, to find relaxation at the spa, but here I am worried about disease. Continually, I worry about disease. I think this body is ‘my ticket’, to the future I imagine, to the freedom to do what I want to do, to go where I want to go, to write my unparalleled story of awesomeness and love and wealth and adventure. To prove and manifest who I am. But just look at Covid — I spent over a year isolated and alone, afraid to go out, to meet other people, to travel, to go the places I wanted to go and do the things I wanted to do, all to protect this body. Instead of being an instrument of my will, instead of being in service to my story or to my enjoyment, this body was something I felt intense need to protect, to preserve, even at the expense of my story or enjoyment. There was no pleasure from this body during that time, only constant stress.

I started thinking back to my contemplation of fear. How in the yoga room I came to realize if I could ‘breathe through’ fear, it must not be in a yoga pose, not in a situation, fear lies with me. Stress of course does too. Here I am at the spa, which in the past has been a place I go to decompress and relax, only the last few times have been overcrowded and stressful. The stress though isn’t in the situation, it’s not at the spa, it lives with me, in my heart. This is stuff I already ‘know’, its rote platitudes at this point.

I had left the sauna and was walking toward a cold pool when I saw a guy with a big wound on his leg – it really looked like a MERSA infection. Here he was, wandering around the spa, going in shared pools and saunas. At first, I wanted to get angry at him. At the woman who was coughing in the sauna too. At all the people who come to public places sick, endangering others. But are they really the problem? If I think these people are the cause of my stress, I am dead fucking wrong. This is a spa. A place humans go in droves, they intermingle, share water and facilities. This is a place where disease spreads.

Everyplace humans gather is a place disease spreads: A school, a hospital, a concert hall. Even my own home is a place disease spreads – I caught Covid from Eric at home, not some grand public gathering. Even in isolation, disease spreads, in my pandemic cottage – purchased to protect me from disease, away from all those covid spreaders – a bat put me at risk for rabies and sent me to the hospital, mid pandemic, for shots.

This is the nature — the fundamental rupa — of bacteria and viruses that consume human bodies and use them to replicate and spread. This is the fact of human bodies, that are subject to disease, to being consumed by these viruses and bacteria. That are consumables, that one way or another will become consumed, used up, changed past the point they can continue to support what I call an Alana, or the life I imagine she has/will have. I am getting stressed out by the WAY THINGS ARE, HOW THEY ARE MEANT TO BE, HOW THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

In my head, I’m affronting these coughers and sneezers and open-wounders asking, “is the spa really a place for sick people?” But Alana,” is the spa really the place for people worried about being sick? Is this world? You seriously showed up to the wrong party girrrrlll, why the hell are you still here?”.

Fear, stress from the spa, that lies in my heart, but so too did the sense of relaxation and comfort I have gotten there in the past. Neither of these reflects a proper understanding of reality. To see this as a haven misses the danger innate in the circumstance, in the world. To see it as a continual threat misses something even more subtle –that being in this world, no matter where I am, is a risk. Threats abound ALWAYS. Whether or not this body is consumed, made sick, or dies in any given circumstance, by any given threat, is about whether the causes and conditions for this body being sick/consumed/dead have been met, not about whether someone sick comes into the sauna.

That right there is truth of karma, the truth I just don’t quite get. That right there is also the key to solving all this fucking stress: What the world is, karma, they are one in the same — shit that arises when the causes and conditions for arising are met and ceases when the causes and conditions for cessation have been met. My problem is that I want all that arising and ceasing to be on my terms. Clinging to the hope I can somehow achieve that (some people beat ‘the house’ some of the time after all), and resultantly to the things that have arisen, and that will cease, that is my suffering. I see the problem. I see the solution. And yet I still can’t seem to get there.

I can’t get over the idea of my own power, my faith that my own abilities/actions will be the causes I want them to be and manifest the effects I want to manifest. I mistake agency (that I can act in ways I think will impact my future positively) for control. I mistake the fact that of course I do have an impact on my life, on preserving my health, and my wealth, and my belongings, as proof that the things I do at any given moment determine whether I get the outcome I want. But, as Mae Neecha has said, and I still foolishly don’t believe, our actions now matter, but how much? Aren’t they just a small trickle of the whole gushing stream of causes, conditions and factors that come together to forge an outcome?
Afterall, I bought a plane ticket to get to retreat in 2023, I took time off, I RSVPed, I had a body, I mentally prepared myself. Then I caught Covid and couldn’t go – going to retreat was not within the scope of ‘permitted activities” for this body at that time. Later, when I talked to Mae Yo, she said something that I still can’t completely understand, but that is the crux of all of this: I didn’t have the causes to go to retreat. I had factors — like sunlight and water and soil — but there was no seed, no cause, so no tree could grow.

I have spent many hours over the years contemplating the Four Dhamma Summaries, I have read and re-read the Ratthapala Sutta, which goes into a beautiful explanation of the summaries. These short, pithy truths have always deeply resonated with me. None more so than the second Dhamma Summary – The world offers no shelter, there is no protector.

The truth is, I am desperate for shelter, for protection. When I look at my sandan, those niggling tendencies, beliefs and resultant behaviors, that continuously underpin my stories, there is probably none more prevalent than my desire for safety. I come into this world seeking shelter. But over and over I have been disappointed. Over and over I find insecurity and danger.

The world offers no shelter … nothing made this more clear than covid, after all, where could I hide from disease? Believe me, I tried, I holed myself up and used my massive resources to stay safe: I worked from home, had everything delivered, avoided all human contact, till a medical emergency sent me to the hospital, ground fucking zero for sick people, in the middle of a pandemic.

As covid progressed, and I watched governments repeatedly fail to pass policies that kept people safe, my mind just kept coming back to the words there is no protector, there is no one in charge.

Later, once I had emerged a bit from my bubble, I would go to the store and see all the anti-maskers, defying the law, endangering everyone around them. Ensuring there was no shelter, no safety, even in a state that had mask ordinances. There was a law, but no one was able to enforce it… The world offers no shelter, there is no protector.

Before Covid, I truly used to think there were things – states, institutions, law enforcement, social norms, human decency – that could be counted on to protect people, but Covid, people’s behavior during Covid, decimated that belief. It showed me that there can be places of relative safety, of temporary comfort, but those can change at anytime.

An apartment that once gave me a quiet space turned into a construction zone. A city – SF –that once made me feel emotionally whole, became a smoke ridden health hazard to my asthmatic self. A relaxing day at the spa became a hellscape as I watched my beloved collapse to the ground from overheating and I feared for his life. I may not have been an essential worker, forced into the world during lockdowns, but my time for risk of illness and danger still came. It will keep coming right up until the time my death comes.

There is no place to hide from these things, there is no one who will avoid them or make it so that I can avoid them. The world offers no shelter. There is no one in charge. One morning, while I was chanting the Dhamma Summaries, it dawned on me – A world where there is no shelter and where no one is in control must be a dukka world.