So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part four in my blog about hate.  Last week, we left off with a real shift, a lightening of my hate load brought about by my seeing it for what it really is — a feeble, delusional, poorly functioning, attempt to hide my own ugliness by  distracting myself with the ugliness of others.. Somehow, just seeing hate for what it is took away the sting. This then will be the last instalment in my ‘Hate Interruption’, I will share just a few more follow-up thoughts directly from my notebook.

On Karma:

For the last year or so I have been caught by a simple paradox: Everyone reaps the fruit of their own karma, so I know moving to my own hellish NY arose from my karma. But, I just didn’t get-it — how did I end-up in a city filled with such ugly,  angry, vengeful, inconsiderate people? How did I come to occupy a ‘ hell’ for these types? Maybe karma is broken….

After my hate contemplation I understood: I sometimes behave in ugly, angry, inconsiderate people ways, I am one of  ‘those’ people too . My karma drew me here just like it drew all of ‘them’. Karma worked just as it should, my own delusion is what kept me from understanding the cause of my experiences.

On Alana the Avenging Angel:

In my mind, the violence I would bestow on the honkers and litterbugs and shovers was justice. It was punishment that they deserved and it was my job to make sure they got it. But, even if someone ‘deserves’ punishment, is it my role to dole it out? Is this how the world works; if there is an injustice done, Alana needs to be there to avenge it or else the law of karma will break and people won’t experience the effects of their actions?What does this really have to do with me anyway?

Clearly, at the heart, this is about me only because I make it about me. I have rules, standards, I create and then in my own mind I judge people according to them. Since they are mine alone, who else would enforce but me. But that is not really karma, karma is a universal law, the law of cause and effect, and it operates just fine without me.

And in so far as any ‘punishment’ is due to all the ugly, angry, vengeful, inconsiderate people out there (myself included), aren’t we already experiencing the some of the effect of our hating? I know the burning, searing pain in my heart that comes when anger and impatience arise, I am guessing the honkers and huffers and pushers and shovers feel the burn as well. Does Alana really need to do anything to help someone else have their moment of hell? The only one  my hate and my vengeful is ‘paying back’ is myself.

On Compassion:

When I get frustrated and speak harshly to Eric, I want to be forgiven. When I am inattentive to my mom and  Seth, I want them to give me a pass. When I am a neglectful student, I want my teachers to still teach and believe in me. When I am ugly, I want my friends to still support me. Each of these times, I want my loved ones, everyone really, to see these moments are not who I am. I want another shot, a redo. And, surprisingly, I so often get them. Despite so many flaws, I still have folks who love, care for, believe in and teach me.  

So why can’t I give a pass to the honkers and pushers and eyrolles and litterbugs? If I don’t believe my ugly moments are me, if I think I should get a pass, forgiveness, why am I so fast to want to punish these transgressors? Why do I think I am so special, so much more deserving?  In fact, doesn’t my harshness make me a little less ‘special’ and worthy in the end?

Final Thoughts:

So much of my energy is spent trying to confirm my goodness, i.e. the qualities I value. When it comes down to it, these are really just qualities  I  value because I have been taught them or they have been useful to me. My friends and family help affirm my goodness, my lovableness. My job affirms my usefulness and skill, my city (SF) affirms my chillness, my clothes and body affirm my beauty and in-controlness, my wealth affirms my safety. So much effort and does it work? If SF could really affirm my chill, how in the hell did I find myself Alana- Angry-Avenging-Angel of Fire and Doom?

So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part three in my blog about hate. We left off last week with a moment of realization: Hate is not built into the situations where I feel hateful,  the seed of hate lies in my heart. So, the question DeJour is a repeat of last weeks question, asked again, with greater wisdom, as the starting place:

If it hurts so bad, why do I gotta be such a hater?

Once I saw it was me, myself, that was creating the hate, it was time to go back and re-ask, why oh why do I do this hating when it hurts soooo bad? What are the hidden benefits?  What is my self thinking?

So, one of the problems of getting all out of order in this Interruption of Our Regularly Scheduled Program is we have skipped over a few big contemplations that serve as building blocks for this hate clarifying moment. So we do need a little pre/re-cap:

A while back I was contemplating a question: Why do I create a self anyway? What does it accomplish? I decided that my sense of self helps me sell a lie, smooth the narrative of this world over a bit, it whitewashes, chooses what  facts to include and which to ignore.  The self is like a storyteller, and it is usually telling stories where I am the hero…

How is my storyteller self making me a hero this time?

I started thinking about those stories you hear sometimes — about gay people who are homophobic, black people who are racist; I feel like they must hate something in themselves to tell these types of stories. I live in this city, I am a New Yorker, but I hate New Yorkers. I am in the same boat. Maybe something I hate in myself is at the root of my hate for this city and its inhabitants.

I see this city, and its people, as rude, careless, inconsiderate, violent, vengeful, self absorbed. All those traits on clear display at just one traffic light, with 100,000 horns a’blaring. But what happens if I look inwards? If I internalize?

The truth is I am way worse than those honkers.  Honkers hurt strangers and passerbyers, for a fleeting moment, with their carelessness, inconsideration, violence, vengefulness and self absorption. I have been careless and inconsiderate with my flesh and blood (see blog about my brother or this one about my Mom ), family who feel the sting of my actions so acutely. I have been violent to neighbors (I once locked my nextdoor neighbor in a rabbit’s cage for trying to steal my brother as a playmate, blog to come) and vengeful with friends (see this story about Candy and our cycle of abuse), people who have cared for and supported me. I have been too self absorbed to see the pain of people in my own community (see this blog about a store owner in my old hood), shirked responsibility in the most intimate corners of my life (see blog about my ex lover).

This is my darkside, the Alana I don’t want to be, the stories I rather not tell myself. So I tuck these personal tidbits away and I do the easy stuff from day-to-day.  I act cool and friendly in shops, always give cars ahead the right of way, I never ever honk; self ignores the little nasties and builds ‘evidence’ of that sweet, kind, go lucky Alana, the hero I want to be.   Hero needs an anti hero, and who better than the pushers, honker, litterbugs, ya know all the stuff I’m not. They are the monsters — the careless, inconsiderate, violent, vengeful, self absorption fuckers out there. No need to look inside, to scratch the veneer off Hero Alana.

But this city puts a spotlights on those traits in myself, the dark ones I hate. When I am in SF, surrounded by warm, considerate, easy going people, it’s easy to be those things myself. That is the Alana I want, so I act the result, put myself in circumstances where I can be hero Alana. But here in NY, with  each shove, honk, sneer and eyeroll — each perceived slight —  my heart burns with thoughts of vengeance, destruction, and punishment. And as I imagine publicly whipping the the offender, it’s hard not to catch glimpses of carelessness, inconsideration, violence, vengefulness and self absorption in myself.

The mechanics are so simple really, how could I have hidden the truth from myself for so long? I create standards of hero-ish behaviors that flatter myself at the expense of others. But, my storytelling self needs more punch to sell the hero alana pitch. Enter hate, to really punctuate the difference between myself and the villains, to make sure I don’t become one of those villains myself. But, don’t my murder/whipping/fire from the sky fantasies prove I have become the villain? No, no, my mind, my self, can’t handle that story, so I add another dash of hate, it has worked before. Then I  add a pinch of delusion, that my rage is righteous, to protect the city, and others, I am a punishing angle not a violent, shoving thug…

As much as it hurts, hate’s deep, dark, hidden benefit is that is hides the truth about myself, of my own darkside that I don’t want to see. But, I do see. Like a bully that has been stood-up to, like a night light to illuminate the shadows, somehow with just a glimpse of the truth, my chest became lighter and I could literally feel the weight of my hate beginning to subside.

So is it over? Hate-filled alana dead and gone? I don’t know, really only time will tell. I still want to go home to SF, I still rather not live in NY, but the hate, for the moment anyway, seems to have lost its bite.  Afterall, even if I have a long way to go, I actually do want to be a ‘good person’, and in the cold, harsh, light of day, can I really believe being a hater is going to get me there?

So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part two in my blog about hate. We left off last week exploring all the pain and suffering that comes with being a hater. So, the question DeJour:

If it hurts so bad, why do I  gotta be such a hater?

I’m going to give a shout-out to LP Nut. At the last retreat he gave me a new tool, a new question to ask myself to help me better penetrate my wrong views: If I know a belief  is grounded in a wrong perception already, if it causes me pain, why do I do it? What do I gain? And is that perceived gain actually real –i.e. do I get what I want from the wrong view I cling to? If so, to what degree and at what cost? Whats the data points that the view is helpful/true? Here we go…an insight into my stream of consciousness dharma practice…

1) I hate to protect my self: I need to draw a line in the sand, between things that I hate (that’s you fucking litterbugs) and me, my self-righteous self.  I am a woman of boundaries, of strong standards (see the last blog on this), there is right and there is wrong. To protect my values, my sense of self as a person who maintains those values, I hate. To ensure that I never accept the standards of NYC (the filth, honking, rudeness), I never become a New Yorker, I put up my magical shield of hate.

Where is this self I am so busy protecting? Is it homeless alana self or compassionate alana self? Is it SF alana self or NY alana self?  When I was vegetarian alana I had one set of moral standards and as meat eating alana I have another. So both self and standards changed. And…once I changed from vegi to meat eater shouldn’t old vegi Alana hate new meat-eater Alana?

What are the mechanics by which hate protects me anyway?  Perhaps it is like how I saw fear (see blog Killing the Crazy): Hate motivates certain protective actions, teaches me what to avoid and what to embrace. But, if it worked, how did I end up in a place I hate anyway? If hate really worked to protect me, surround me with things that I value, — why do I have to keep flying back to NYC and facing a place I hate — why don’t I live safely back in SF already? F-You Hate, you are doing a piss-poor job at  keeping me safe!

2) I hate to keep my body safe. At least hate can help keep my physical body safe right? To be a warning against things and people that might do me harm, Rupa (form) I have learned is dangerous.

But, here is the crazy thing, just the other day I read an article about how NYC is actually the safest city in the country. My belief, that all the things I hate here are a big warning sign to run for my life, is contrary to all actual evidence.

3) I hate to protect my karma. I seek to surround myself with good rupa (form), good people, good circumstance to prevent getting used to, learning to accept, lower states. But the hate, the anger, the standards I use to build my bubble world of ‘good’ are actually making me murderous (see the last blog for details). And  seriously, can I really prevent lower rebirths with hate? I don’t need a Buddhist book to tell me the answer to this one — if hate actually worked to keep me from hell states, from circumstances I find repulsive, I could leave NY for good. Trust me, I have enough hate in my heart, if it were the ticket to escaping my NY hell, I would be outta here already!

The Money Moment

I was deep in thought  when something happened, I notice that despite being on the streets of NY, with filth and blaring horns, I wasn’t feeling hateful. But, as I started thinking more about my hate of NY, that hate began to grow again in my heart. Just like with fear (again see the blog Killing the Crazy ), in that moment I saw the truth: Hate is not fixed, it can come and go, it is not built into the situations where I feel hateful.

I know I have said it 1000 times, I am the cause of my hate. But, for the first time since I moved to NY I finally got it. If the hate were outside me, built into a walk on the streets, I wouldn’t have had a moment of freedom from that hate. Moreover,  the fact that the outside circumstances remained the same, but my own thoughts turning to hate caused hate to arise point to the TRUTH: the seed of hate lies in my heart. A lightning strike only starts a fire when there is something on the ground to burn. All the lightning in the world, all the honking, all the filth, can only set my heat on fire if the the fuel is already there waiting to burn. Obvious right? I knew that already, but my heart only believed  after I watched lighting strike.

And so Dear Reader, with a moment of clarity, a penetrating understanding of the truth, it was time to play my favorite dharma game: Lets do the same thing over and over again — Stay tuned for next week’s blog  Why Ya Gotta Be Such a Hater? 2.0. Where I go back and ask myself the same question again: Since it is clearly me, why exactly do I do it?

Well Dear Reader, it is once again that time when we need to put some of our ‘Interruption In Our Regularly Scheduled Program” Blogs — entries that were written’ real time’ and out of the order of this orderly (ish) blog that tracks the progress of my practice since its inception — back into their chronological place. The next few entries will be about my big ah-ha moments surrounding the cause and costs of my hate for New York. 

It is funny, at the time I had these very powerful, very raw, contemplation, it felt like, BAM, they came from nowhere. I remember, just walking down the street and feeling like a ray of Dharma clarity had struck me from above. Now, with several years of time and distance between myself, and these very emotional contemplation, I see so much more clearly the progression of practice –of contemplation and understandings — that led me to these BAM-AH-HA moments. Perhaps you, Dear Reader, will see it too? The traces of my Bubble World understanding, the analysis of hidden costs and beliefs, the more nuanced rendition of rupa, that underpin these thoughts that ‘fell from the sky.’

Hate Hurts Me and the People I Love: For any of you who have ever experienced all-consuming-rage-induced-murderous-hate, you know, it’s not really a walk in the park. Seriously, the feeling of burning hate is its own kind of suffering. I want to be a joyful person. I at least want to be a calm, content person. I want to be the person I feel like I am when I walk down the streets of San Fran, all chill and positive vibing, but this hatred is getting in the way.

And as I ball my fists and huff and puff at the driver who honks, my husband, standing next to me also feels my rage. He sees a hate-filled wife so different than the woman he loved  back in San Fran and he hurts. I grow short, raise my voice, lose my temper so easily when I am already so angry, and who else but the folks close to me, like Eric, is there to get the brunt of my attacks?

But I can’t help it … NY is filthy, loud, people are inconsiderate and self absorbed. I have standards, rules, for how cities and people in them should be. If a standard is failed, a condition of mine goes unmet, I don’t like it. When I encounter a beast like New York, which violates every one of my standards to the extreme, I have hate hate hate. Humm…maybe it’s my standards that cause hate not the city…maybe my standards hurt me and the people I love…

My Hate Inducing Standards are Risky Business: I have such tight standards, rules and a need for order, it bears asking the question –what happens when those standards don’t get met? What happens when Alana moves to NYC? Clearly, as we saw before, one unpleasant consequence is hate. But what risks come along with that?

When someone throws trash on the street (i.e. every 2 minutes) an image flashes in my mind of my murdering them by  tearing open their jugular. Of course,  I would never actually kill, of course, of course, right? But I have hurt people before — when they erode my happy world, fail my standards, take whats mine — as a kid I locked my neighbor in a rabbit cage because he took my little brother away from me as a playmate. I have left spiteful reviews on yelp,  thrown away valuable belongings of an ex, ‘accidentally’  elbowed or stepped on feet in a subway.

Each of these acts is different from murder in their degree or severity not in their nature or kind.  The cause, the hate/need to ‘defend’ myself, remains, and the risk of ‘karmic crime’ lurks with it. I am just waiting for a breach in standards big enough, a violation unforgivable enough, to turn my murder fantasy into reality. Where oh where did compassionate alana run off to?

But wait, there is more. These standards have perils on both sides. When someone is on the ‘wrong’ side of my standard I hate them, I want to punish them. But I use these same standards to shelter my own guilt, to cloak my wrong behaviors and call them  ‘right’ just because they fall on the ‘right’ side of my standards line. When I was in highschool, I had a ‘rule’, I would never mess around with someone else’s boyfriend. There was a guy I liked, already dating another girl, I didn’t ‘mess around’ with him, that would have been wrong. But I flirted, almosted, made him desire me so ultimately he broke-up with the other girl. Still, I did no wrong, I never broke my rule or my standard.  

The honking here is by far the worst offence in my mind. Honkers allow their frustration to drive them to hurt everyone around them, to wildly assault thousands of ears just because their commute takes an extra 2 minutes. I quietly seethe. I plot my imaginary revenge in  my head. That driver and I actually have a lot in common — anger and hate, frustration and broken expectations are what animate us both. But I am on the side of right. I am good, I keep it to myself. I don’t hurt thousands of people around me… I hurt just me, and the people I love, with my hate.

Arbitrary Standards: Clearly, not everyone hates Manhattan. If they did, this city would clear-out and I would finally have some peace and quiet. But alas, it is me. There is something in me that is ruffled by NY. Something about the rupa, the way the form of this place is arranged, that pushed my particular buttons. It violates my particular standards and rules. But here is the thing — these rules and standard are arbitrary. Why is making-out with someone else’s boyfriend wrong, but flirting is ok? Why is littering wrong but getting my stuff from Amazon, which over packages everything, ok? Why is hurting 1000s wrong but hurting 1 or 2 ok? Why is piles of trash on the sidewalk wrong but a messy underwear drawer ok?

In the end, I make my rules, based on what I value, and then I use them to  carve up the world and my own behaviors into rights and wrongs. But these rules, are not the rules that govern the world. If they were, Manhattan would be ¼ the size, sparkling clean, quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Shit as long as I’m at it, fluffy friendly dogs would roam the streets here just waiting to be pet…I make rules that will always be broken and then I suffer the hate, the perils, the misery when things are not the way I want. It begs a question, to be explored in next week’s blog — if it hurts so bad,  why do I gotta be such a hater?

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?

I was at the hot springs and there was this woman there who was so obese. I tried to internalize what it would be like to be so fat, but my heart refused to accept it. The contemplation was shallow, going through the motions, but feeling nothing. I realized the reason why: I don’t believe I can ever be that fat — I am different, I work-out and mind my diet, that won’t happen to me. But the truth is, compared to a few years ago, I am super out of shape. Weakness and pudge that was unfathomable to me just a few years back was my ‘today body’. Sure there was some laziness, depression from the move, but there was also aging — its not nearly as easy to stay fit and thin as it used to be. So how can I say I am so special, so sure that I am protected for obesity ever happening to me?

 I am always putting distance between myself and the things I don’t want to have happen. Fatness, illness, poverty, death, loss, failure — these things are not me/mine. As soon as I see tragedy or suffering my mind leaps into action, creating a ‘shield of special’, to justify why bad things that are so obviously plaguing others, simply can’t/won’t happen to me. Clearly, it is a trick of my mind, to believe that I have the power to ultimately decide what I can and can’t/ will and won’t suffer.  I base it off my past experiences. I  base it off of what I think I ‘deserve’. I base it off some collection of characteristics/belongings that I think are uniquely mine and will uniquely protect me. All I need to do is snap on my ‘shield of special’ and I’m safe, able to avoid all the stuff other people around me suffer, unless…maybe…just possibly…I can’t.

A few years ago, a friend fell to financial ruin. She had a good job and her employer loved her, but she got bored and decide to quit. Several jobs later, her house was forclosed on and she had to declare bankruptcy. I  supported her as best I could, but in my mind I always thought, “I would never do something so foolish, I would never just throw away a job and a life that was working fine just because I wanted to try something new.” Fast forward and now I am in NY, miserable. I had a great life in SF, but I was feeling restless, I thought I could have more, so I threw it all away only to find myself in emotional ruin. How am I better than my friend?

My dad was my hero. In my eyes, no one was more warm, kind, loving and special, if anyone deserved immortality, it was Dad. But, despite how special my dad was to me, he died. Despite his money, his loving wife and kids, his success, his intelligence, his frequent workouts and careful diet, his top doctors and his sense of humor, he died. All my life I have tried to be like my dad: Even as a kid, I ate the foods he ate, enjoyed the music he listened to. I have tried to have his success, his humor, his intelligence and adoration. Even if I had all those things, can I escape his fate –death? And not just death, disease, suffering, and the loss of a life he loved?

Back when I went on safari in Kenya, I was a vegetarian. I truly believed that my karma with animals was good, that I did them no harm and that they would do me no harm in return. I believed I was special, I was safe. But then I was run down by a rhino that easily could have killed me. Just because I thought I was special and safe it didn’t make me protected.  In truth I think all sorts of things make me exceptional and  ‘justify’ my safety: Goodness, effortfullness, Eric, beauty, money, fitness, planning and preparation. But I have seen countless examples of people, endowed with all these very characteristics, who fall victim to suffering:

• There was the actor in Sparticus, he was so fit and talented, he was just beginning to achieve success in his career after so much hard work. Rare cancer diagnosis at 40, dead within a year.
• There was Eric’s co-worker who planned carefully and retired in Carmel, she and her husband were close and adoring, like Eric and I. 6 months after retiring her husband died suddenly of a heart attack.
• Eric had a friend who he always did right by, he was generous and adoring with him, patient and loving. One day, the friend decided to stop being Eric’s friend even though Eric had done his best to be a good friend and person with him. Eric was heartbroken by the loss.
• Money was supposed to make life in New York easy and enjoyable. I am miserable and the reason we can’t leave is money — fear that Eric will ruin his resume, and won’t get another good paying job, if he leaves after just a few months.
• LP Thoon died after a struggle with cancer — who would I presume is a more ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ person?

These are the stories that stab my heart a bit. They have each stayed with me for years, by virtue of their details hitting a little too close to home. Now I know why —  they are an indictment of my shield of specialness, real live proof that such a shield won’t really work to protect me at all. I guess imaginary shields don’t do much to protect in the real world.

A final thought came to me that day at the hot springs — what if I didn’t have to be so damn special? What if all my struggle to acquire objects and traits that make me so unique, in my mind alone, was to come to an end? Why am I willing to trade fake protection for real burden?

One of the key themes the exercises on uncovering hidden benefits and beliefs kept coming back to was that I continually quest for/seek to build a ‘bubble world*‘ — the kind of place where everyone lives in harmony, according to the rules and standards I think are ideal. In my bubble world, people are respectful and considerate, they are laid-back and peaceful, they are community-oriented and friendly. After living in Cali, fairly happy, for so long, my bubble world had come to look a lot like chill-Cali  and decisively not New York.

The problem, which my new NY home proved by its mere existence, is that my bubble world is a fantasy that the real world simply doesn’t abide by. Which brings me to a pretty shocking self discovery that arose directly from the hidden benefits and beliefs exercises– I continue to strive for, to be reborn for, something that is impossible to achieve. Below I am going to share a raw, unedited, page from my notebook in which I grappled with this newfound, and pretty shocking, realization.

I get reborn for something impossible. How fucked-up is that? WHY CAN’T I STOP? Because I don’t really believe it is impossible; or because what little I have, what few moments I can spend in my bubble world are worth it;  or because I have already invested so much, I just can’t quit.  I used to think I had earned the comfort that I had back in San Fran, so I should just get to enjoy it, I could worry about practice and enlightenment later (hidden wrong view that enlightenment will be uncomfortable).  But now that I am in NY and I don’t have comfort, all I can think about is how to get it back. I am engrossed in worldly schemes, still not worried about practice or enlightenment.

Because I had comfort and happiness for a while, I know it is possible. Now I need to preserve what comfort I have and get back what I lost. This is why Mae Yo has taught to pretend to be others, to feel and experience all the options of this world — to know discomfort is possible just as I know comfort is possible from my time in SF. All the possible good stuff motivates my hope, my worldly schemes, my bubble world quests. But what about the possible bad stuff– shouldn’t it be motivating my practice, my plan to escape (rebirths)? Instead I just look away from the bad stuff, I try to avoid it.

I look away from disease, from homelessness, from broken families and ugliness of all sorts. In my head, I make those things ‘not me’, ‘not mine’. I come-up with reasons in my head that those will never be me or mine, why I am special. In my bubble world I am always healthy, fit, rich and loved. But I already have evidence from my move to NY that I can slip out of my own bubble world so easily. ONE MOVE and I feel like SF Alana is slipping away, yielding to cold and bitchy, unlovable,  NY Alana. I fight back, I flail, I seek to retain myself and my identity. But I have already lost control, I have already exited the bubble. So why do I create/strive for  something that is so impossible to attain  that even I can’t do it perpetually? Even I can’t live up to my own bubble world standards and rules.

It is time to practice the truth, to internalize what makes me so uncomfortable — I am not special, I am subject to impermanence, there is no special bubble world where I can live exempt from the rules of the world. There is only so long I can keep moving my bench into shady spots. In the end, I am subject to loss, death, to discomfort and to existence in a world that doesn’t meet my ‘just so’ standards.

* I want to note that this concept of my wanting to create and live-in a bubble world, was an idea that got fleshed-out more thoroughly at the retreat with a friend who was generous enough to share her own reflections and conversations with LP Nut about the tendency to try and create harmony  –‘a bubble world’ — in her workplace. She was a massive help to me in recognizing my own similar tendencies, to try and create and environment and surround myself with things and people I felt were considerate and ideal. I have borrowed the term and concept of bubble world from her, but don’t feel comfortable sharing more about her story or situation on my blog.  I am however immensely grateful for the conversations we had which brought so much clarity to my own deep and mistaken beliefs.

Dear Reader, today’s blog is a direct continuation of last week’s, LP Nut’s Alana-fied Technique to Uncover Hidden Benefits and Beliefs Part 1, so please do read that one before continuing on here.

In the last blog, we began an exploration of an Alana-fied version of a technique LP Nut taught at the 2017 retreat to uncover hidden benefits and beliefs. The premise behind the technique is a simple one — if we do stuff that we know hurts us, there must be a reason why we do it since no one likes being in pain. By bringing the ‘why’  — i.e. hidden benefits and beliefs — to light we can begin challenging their logic and alignment with correct view.

In last week’s example we used a series of ‘what-if’ questions to uncover some of the hidden beliefs that under gird my extreme anger at people who honk their horns. Here we will continue the exercise by taking a slightly broader concept — the benefit to my view that people should be considerate (not honking is just one form of consideration) — and digging into the pros and cons of holding that standard/view.

Exploring the Pros and Cons of  my Belief: Everyone Should be Considerate/Follow Social Standards* 

Pro 1: If people follow rules/standards then I feel the world is predictable and I am in control

Challenge 1: Am I really in control? I have a standard that people shouldn’t honk and the streets of NY are blaring anyway. Does my rule actually allow me  to be or prove my control? 

Con 1: I am miserable when people honk. I am angry and disappointed whenever I think rules/standards have been broken.

Pro 2: I can follow rules/standards and by doing so I can prove that I am a good person and that people will love and accept me for it

Challenge 2: What about all the times I can’t even follow my own rules? Eric is supposed to clean-up after himself, but don’t I sometimes leave dishes in the sink? And do people love me for upholding these standards? My stepmom used to complain all the time of how difficult I was as a vegetarian, she certainly didn’t love me more for the standards I upheld.

Con 2: This gives me a false sense of superiority and safety. 

Pro 3: I can define my vision for a ‘bubble world’ — my ideal setting that is harmonious and rule abiding. 

Challenge 3: My bubble world is a a fiction that does not exist in reality. In reality, people break rules and undermine my standards all the time. 

Con 3: I feel enraged when my imaginary bubble world is threatened, in New York I have fantasies of punching, or shooting or killing the honkers. In this life, the harm to others is in my head. But can’t I envision the risks of clinging to the idea of ‘bubble world’  in another life/circumstance?  It is possible I would kill for it or go to war for it? Then I would reap the karmic consequences on such actions, all because I am a person who holds so firmly to a belief the world should be according to my standards.

Pro 4: These standards, when they are followed, nurture my hope that with time or effort I can ultimately  find a perfect world that is worth living in.

Con 4: Over and over I am reborn because of the false hope that my perfect bubble world exists. Each time my standards are met, I save that example in my memory of prof that birth, this world is worth it. That I will ultimately be able to game the system and have a rule abiding/ standard following universe where I can abide in comfort. And until that time, because my standards are so rigid and high, my conditions so numerous, that I rarely find a place that I am comfortable being in.

* Something I really love about this technique is its round-about way of getting to hidden wrong views. Typically, I would ‘challenge’ the permanence of a view like’everyone should follow my standards’ upfront. But instead of doing that, the hidden benefit approach lets such wrong views stand for a little while so that we can get at the deeper wrong views that underlie this one and start exposing those to scrutiny.

It was  the 2017 KPY Retreat, I was on a nature hike out in the woods with a small group of attendees and I started talking to L.P. Nut: “I can’t stand New York”, I said, “I hate it so much. The people are so rude, they make so much noise, especially the hoking, it is unbearable and the the filth, the way people litter and trash stuff, it is overwhelming…I don’t know what to do, being there makes me so angry.” L.P Nut nodded. A few moments later, he asked me, “Alana do you hear that noise?”  There was a chorus of birds loudly tweeting so I replied, “The birds? Of course.” We walk a few more paces and then L.P. points to a pile of decomposing leaves, “Do you see that pile? Isn’t it dirty?” “Well yes,” I must admit that it is. “Do these things bother you?” L.P. asked me. When I said no, he asked me why? “I guess it is because these birds and leaves are a part of nature.” At which point LP asked me one final question: “Aren’t humans part of nature too?”

In my mind, New York was an abomination, an ABSOLUTE affront to the natural world, to the way things should be and people should live.  This was a ‘fact of life’ that had nothing to do with me; I was just an observer of  NY’s obvious faults, OF COURSE I was perturbed by needing to live with them, who wouldn’t be? But LP’s questions forced me to acknowledge that I was a biased observer, that I was filtering my view of New York through the lens of my own standards.

For me, a car honking is unbearable noise, but a bird tweeting is a soothing lullaby. An overflowing trashcan is filth but a decomposing pile of leaves is ‘the circle of life’. A naturescape and all its animals are good and wholesome while a NY cityscape and all its people are some kind of perversion. These are my arbitrary standards, not innate truths of this world.  Before my conversation with LP, on some level, I was seeing myself as a passive victim forced to live in a state of continual hate and anger– but afterwards  I got the first inkling of understanding that I was in fact the cause of my hate and anger.

I was sitting on the bathroom floor of my Manhattan loft, engaging in a-now-typical-ritual — crying my eyes out. I was miserable. I was so depressed. Above all else, I felt lost and trapped. The circumstances were this:  Eric and I were in debt for a house we hated. He had a 2 year contract at work that, if broken, would require a significant sum to pay back our relocation expenses. Besides, Eric worried about his career, his resume, and what it would look like if he ‘washed-out’ of a new job so quickly. I was so miserable, even though I loved Eric dearly, for one of the only times in our marriage,  I thought about leaving him. About going somewhere else, doing something else… only I didn’t even know where I would go…

In my hysterics, I started thinking about how I got here. Not about the decisions of the last few months that brought me to NY, I had already turned that particular set of mistakes over and over in my mind. What I couldn’t figure out is how I got myself so trapped. How I ended up in a life I despised despite all of my careful planning and effort. Despite having so much going for me: I had good health, plenty of money, a graduate degree with honors, an accomplished career with plenty of folks to vouch for my skills.  I had a husband who loved and supported me, a close-knit family and a handful of good friends who would take me in if I asked.  I felt like I should have choices, options. After all,  these are the things I always believed would prepare me for the world, would guarantee a good life. So how on earth was it that I felt so utterly trapped? Helpless? Armed with all these ‘weapons’, yet I struggled to find a move, a plan for attack, a way out of my situation. All I could do was wait.

Obviously, nothing stays still. Over the coming months, my situation shifted — I found comfort in an out of town retreat, new possibilities when my old job invited me to come back and I could split time between SF and NY, my hate tapered, my perspective changed. But I can still viscerally remember the extreme feeling of being trapped, immobilized, on the bathroom floor that day. The power of that feeling has made me realize something else … I can prepare all I want. I can stack-up every advantage I can muster. I can imagine that the skills, personality, favor, etc, that I build will allow me to control my life. That it will give me options and freedom. But, in the end, I am not the master of my life. And, if I am not the master of my own life, can I really expect to be master of anything at all?

I was out for a walk and I saw a swirl of leaves blowing around in the wind. I decided to try to use it as an Ubai, a metaphor for my own confused and upended life. I closed my eyes and began to imagine my own objects, details of places and people, from my Cali and NY life, swirling around me. All out of my control, moved by forces beyond myself.

Suddenly, I opened my eyes and realized I had made a huge mistake…the leaves out in nature were swirling around each other, moving this way and that in the wind, a constant changing mass. But in my own mind, I twisted the scene, I ‘internalized’ everything, those ‘metaphorical leaves’, swirling around me — I was the sun, the gravitational force around which these objects, people and places all revolved.

My little Ubai exercise had unmasked ego, the lie of alana-centricism quietly lurking beneath even my most ardent efforts to contemplate my limited control. This, I realized, was the deep extent to which my view of myself and this world are poisoned. At the time, I didn’t press any further. Now, years later, I frequently get a flash in my mind of swirling leaves and it reminds me to double check on that ego.

And … because sometimes suffering and delusion  just don’t end overnight … a second pestering email, written several weeks after the first, to Neecha, and her skillful response.

Alana’s Second Email to Neecha

Hey Neecha —

After about 2 month down in the dumps I finally decided to reach out to Neecha  for some advice on how to deal with the extreme stress and sorrow of my new New York life. When I think back on it, I realize that her advice was some of the best anyone has ever given me. SPOILER ALERT –Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, death, death, death.

Its funny because now, almost 3 years later, I see my hatred of New York fading and I can trace the reason for this reduced hatred to my Dharma  contemplations: I have come to realize that all circumstances are temporary (on loan) and they don’t prove who I am. Had I understood that back when I moved, when I tried to make NY mine (or rather rejected it as ‘not mine’, i.e. a threat to myself/the identity I wanted to build) I would have suffered so much less. I would have made my loved ones suffer so much less. But, this is now. In the next two blogs I will share my exchanges with Neecha back then…

 Alana’s Email to Neecha

Hey Neecha —

Neecha’s Reply to Alana

Alana,