Alana's Dharma Blog

Eric and I have been in negotiations to purchase a vacation home in Montreal. Finally, we feel like we are making progress on the two home dream; a winter home in Miami and a summer getaway in Montreal. Only this morning, we got news there might be a glitch in our plan, the deal on the Montreal place looks like it may fall through.

We don’t even own the Montreal apartment yet, but already we have built up this dream in our head of what life will be like there. The news this burgeoning dream might die in the cradle feels like a devastating loss. Eric and I are so depressed.

Isn’t it the same with my body? One of my big fears when I think about an impending auto immune disease, or covid, or cancer, is that with the death of this body –or its crippling frailty – my dreams of the future die too. I cling so tightly to the fantasy of a future life that I don’t even have yet. And even though I know that my future fantasy doesn’t dictate what happens, that the world doesn’t give a damn about my desires, I still do. I feel so stuck that I can’t get past this…

A major reason I cling to the body then is because I cling to the Alana story. The body is a necessary condition for an Alana future; only with this body can my Alana story persist. Memory is tied to the body. The body is how I am recognized by loved ones. The body is how I get the accompaniments that society has attributes to it — the degrees, bank accounts, resume, etc. The body is foundational to my imagined future –a happy 2 city retirement life with Eric, even as the second city, Montreal, seems threatened.

Without this body, there is no way to accomplish my dream. Without Montreal I’ll find another dream. I assume, without this body I will also find another dream, this I suppose is how rebirth happens. Still though, its so hard to see with bodies, that they are as fungible as cities and houses.

It has dawned on me that a huge question for me now is how to stop being attached to my body at a sotopana level, when the attachment to the future story that requires this body is so much deeper than a mere attachment to a physical 4e body-object. So how do I move past this?

Maybe it is gathering the evidence that this body is like every other, not at all special. There is no identity from it, or in it, it is a tool. One way it can function, a way I can use it, is to move toward and accomplish dreams/goals. But the accomplishment of those isn’t dictated by the body, that is driven by my karma.

Still, this isn’t quite enough…I still feel motivated to protect and preserve this body, I am overly concerned about it as long as I see it as a necessary tool for my dream fulfillment.

Or maybe this is 2 separate issues: One is to see the body is just 4e, subject to 3 common conditions, not special or unique, not under my control, and not who I am. But two is that identity, 3s and 4s, are also not under my control. These are also subject to the common conditions. The world is too, whatever circumstances arise — whether they align with my fantasies or not — are states, with state-dependent characteristics that I do or don’t prefer. That do or don’t align closely enough with my goals/dreams, they will arise based on causes and conditions and cease based on causes and conditions. They will be temporary, they will be dukkha, and there is nothing meaningful in them. They don’t prove anything about me, or my identity, they are, by definition, anatta -not self.

Or maybe it simpler than all this: Maybe I just need to see that even in the fulfillment of my dreams, even if I could ‘accomplish’ having exactly the future I imagine with this body, the duration will not be satisfactory. The details on the ground, that I face in reality, not fantasy, will always, only, be dukkha.

A while back I went to visit a 6.5 acre sculpture called Opus-40. The artist, Harvey Fite, spent 40 years living and working at the sculpture site, hewing stones from the land, carefully carving them and laying them into a massive, towering labyrinth. It was his life’s work, a reflection of his artistic vision, his sense of himself as an artist. It was also his death: At 72, Harvey, fell into a quarry while trying to haul up more stones to expand his work.

The story really got me thinking about the seeming irony that ‘our objects’ can kill us. My dad died of pancreatic cancer, his own cells consumed him. My doctors told me I have blood markers for an autoimmune disease, my body, at any time, can literally begin attacking itself. Cancer, autoimmune disease, really those are just details, particular ways particular bodies kill people. By definition though, every body will kill everyone.

Death is a direct result of birth into this body (and as a happy bonus it also guarantees aging and sickness along the way); every body is anatta, cessation is fundamental to its nature, as soon as a form aggregates it begins its continual, shifting march toward disaggregation; the seeds of destruction arise with arising.

Whatever entity/identity I think Alana to be, I certainly don’t imagine she just anticlimactically –pointlessly – ends. The last thing that my sense of self, that came into this world to spin the tales I believe allow me to be/become, wants is anatta/entropying/de-clumping/shifting outside a state I can still credibly call myself a ‘me’.

And yet, this body, by design, promises that ending. How is it I mistake my body as a tool to become, the scaffolding upon which I can build a me, when its true nature is to cease. Its true nature is to 100% ensure the cessation of any story I graft onto it because it is a fragile, shifting, breakable, 4e form crumbles. Isn’t it better to reject this thing as me and with it reject all the disappointment that arises each and every time it proves damn well not to be me, not to have my interests, agenda, stories, at heart? Probably, and yet, I cling, and invite the world of dukkha that comes for the clinging and inevitable disappointment…

My mind needs further evidence that this body is not mine:

Its not mine because it defies my sense of who I am:

I was a yogi, but my SI joint kept coming out of place, causing me intense pain and eventually forcing me to quit yoga. For so long, I felt like practice was disciplining my body, forcing it to take a form, to have characteristics and abilities I wanted. It was proof I was in charge. That if I set my mind to doing something I could do it, I could force rupa into my control.

But ultimately, the very forms I forced my body into caused it to hurt, to break, to prevent me from continuing the activities I had used to shape and define it–to define myself, to prove my supremacy of my will. In the end the body defied my sense of self. It destroyed the identity of Alana the yogi and undermined the very supremacy of will over body I was trying to prove with that identity/set of activities.

Because of the body I had to quit the activity, loose the shape I loved, felt was ‘me’, leave the community I had grown close to. In almost no time, the body lost the ability to perform the poses, it lost the strength and flexibility that I had put so much effort and practice into. Wasn’t all that work meaningless if the results I identified with faded as soon as I stopped?
I claimed to be yogi-alana, I used the shapes I meticulously trained my body to make as the proof that I was diligent, in control, supreme in my force of will. But can my body ‘prove’ that meaning when my will/my control could be overridden by something as trivial as a little joint? Isn’t this body meaningless if by dying it erases the entire narrative I think is me, my Raison d’être to write?

Its not mine because it shames me:

After walking a whole summer, my first real foray into ‘fitness’, I thought I was so fit, invincible, I had a new power, a new ability and I was proud. Right until I was in Africa, fresh off my summer of walking, and we got to the sand dunes. All my friends poured off the bus, and a few of the fitter ones went to run straight up the dune rather than walk with the older, weaker folks up the meandering path. I ran to follow the fit folks, I identified as a fit Alana, only to quickly begin slipping and sliding in the sand, unable to make it to the top. I was so embarrassed. My body had failed me.

The ability I had been so proud of was no match to the dune. Instead of just walking up the meandering path, which would not have drawn attention, I got stuck in the sand and had to backtrack, making my humiliation deeper. Worse than the body not sustaining my identity privately, it shamed me publicly.

I think body is a reflection of self, a physical manifestation of the traits I ‘own’, that I define myself with. So how do I reconcile that with regular humiliation? Humiliation of farting, smelling. Humiliation of cold sores. Humiliation of sunspots and red spots. Humiliation of fat. Humiliation when I can’t keep up on a run in a group fitness class. Humiliation of my jowls and double chin. Doesn’t humiliation prove my body isn’t reflecting the self I imagine, that it doesn’t perfectly embody some traits, like fitness or beauty, that I ‘possess’, better yet the meaning I ascribe to these traits?

It’s not mine because it changes into states I hate:

Before I gave it away, I tried on my wedding dress one last time. A dress that 15 years before had made me look thin and fit and radiant, didn’t zip. It made me look like I was bulging in all the wrong places, soft and doughy.

I had been so proud of the figure I cut in that dress, I so keenly remember my sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when I looked in the mirror at my final fitting and imagined my big day, everyone looking at me, seeing in that dress – that figure that I had worked out hard to achieve – what a catch I was. Women would be envious of me, men jealous of Eric. I believed that figure/dress proved something about myself, my value, my desirability.

I have always imagined beauty to be a physical reflection of value, a proof of goodness, the great sign of special. And for a moment, my body had taken a shape I thought of as beautiful, and I had used that shape as evidence that I myself had a particular meaning — valuable, good and special.

But here I was, in a dress unchanged, that now made this body look ugly and undesirable. If old body proved my greatness, then new body must — by extension — prove my failure, my lack of value, naughtiness showing in my ugliness.

Of course, that not what I thought: Sure, I was a little disappointed, but I quickly comforted myself with the logic ‘no one’s body stays the same over 15 years’, ‘ compared to my peers, I still look good’. I let the benchmarks slide, re-defined my standard for beauty enough that I could retain my sense of self as valuable. One day, when no stretch of the imagination will allow me to call myself beautiful, I will just change the ‘rules’ again, find some other characteristic to attach my sense of value to.

If I were being honest, I would have to ask myself how 2 totally different bodies, forms of radically different shapes, can both be a confirmation of the same value and specialness? The answer is they can’t be. But I am stuck with this body, and my need to define myself with it means I need to make allowances, shifts in expectations, excuses. But these shifts, they betray the truth that this body’s continually shifting states, that its ultimate cessation, is antithetical to having some special meaning or identity. This is just ideas I project onto them.

Its not mine because it can go from tool to liability:

For my whole life I have identified as a traveler, an adventurer, an explorer. I crave seeing what is just beyond the horizon, I want to explore what is new and different; not just to amuse myself, but to be, to become, to find new things and places to identify with. Where I am has never been enough, part of my story –the narrative I envision for myself – is something new, something better, ‘over there’.

My life has been punctuated by moves to new cities, vacations to exotic locations, even just explorations of new cities, new neighborhoods. And then the lockdowns came. Suddenly, a life punctuated by exploration was confined to my tiny Greenwich apartment. For 18 months I was grounded. The body that was a tool to explore the world, to find new details of the narrative of self and future, was suddenly not a tool. It was a liability. The body that ventured out could be stricken by a new mysterious disease.

To accommodate risks to my body, I had to stop doing what I loved, I had to stop being the me I wanted to be. For most of my life, the meaning I have assigned to this body is an instrument of my will. It is there to be used as I see fit, to actualize the story and self I imagine. This is body as tool. But that a single change in circumstance –a pandemic –can make this same 4e a liability proves the meaning isn’t in the rupa.

LP Thoon’s definition of anatta: “Nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Had really stuck with me and I once again turned my attention to trying to prove my items don’t belong to me. I figured the more clearly I could see that, the more clearly I could also answer his question, “meaningless how?”.

I got to thinking back to an old contemplation on puberty. I was so disturbed when I hit puberty and my body started changing, I was not at all keen on trading my stick figure for curves. I realize now that the root of my deep despair was that I didn’t feel like the new body was mine, it didn’t reflect me, it didn’t align with my vision of myself.

Of course, after a few weeks moping (eternity in teenage time), I ‘got over it’; I accepted my body changing by adjusting my sense of who I was, my future expectations, to fit this post-puberty body, and I was back to worrying over normal teeny-bopper dramas, rather than having extreme body distress. In fact, now that I am edging toward the peri-menopause years, oh what I wouldn’t do to cling to this post-pubescent-pre-menopause body just a little longer…

The truth is, over and over again, our bodies (and other belongings) don’t just fail to live up to our expectations, they actually defy our sense of who we are.

Another example: When I was first diagnosed with asthma, I was at my peak fitness level — I worked out 4 hours a day, obsessed over my reps and maxes, I lived and breathed to be fit — and yet there I was huffing and puffing 5 minutes into a light run. For all my efforts, for all my self-proclaimed fitness, my body was non-compliant; this body didn’t care what I wanted to be, who I thought I was, or even the work I put into promulgating that identity, its elements shifted into a state of disease and all the training/willing/imagining in the world wasn’t allowing me to finish my run.

If possible, I try and ‘fix it’, to force my body into states that feel reflect who I think I am: I buy spanx for the muffin top, botox to the brow, engage in extreme workouts and diets, take those daily asthma meds, even knowing full well how painfully temporary these ‘fixes’ are. Often though, like with puberty, or disease, there is no ‘fix’, and I have to go through the agonizing process of shifting my sense of self to align with reality.

Why not stop to ask myself the obvious question: If my body can defy my sense of self, sabotage my dreams for the future, can it really be mine? Or how about the question: How can a body be ‘who I am’ if it doesn’t actually reflect who I think I am, or who I want to be?

At the end of the day, I want to be born in this world to actualize the story of self. The desire to be and become is what drives me forward. But even my body, the thing closest to me isn’t, actually actualizing my story of self. If it were, then all the efforting, all the imagining, all the curating of a fit-alana wouldn’t be gasping for breath 5 minutes into a run.

I curate memories of past, solidify current characteristics that I value, and imagine future fantasies, to create a continuous narrative I can claim as ‘me’. I use rupa as props, to sell my story to myself, to augur signs of my success/ failure meeting the benchmarks of ‘the me I want to be’. If an object, a body, can undermine my story, if rather than confirming me it shouts the erroneousness of my assumed identity, that object isn’t me, it is ‘against me’.
The objects can’t be mine because they don’t do what ‘I hired them to do’, what I so desperately want and need them to do –these objects don’t confirm me. These objects don’t buy me the future I imagine. I cling so tightly to them, I suffer for their ‘option value’, but over and over they prove that having them doesn’t get me the future I want. In the case of a body, having it gets me a future I decisively don’t want: Aging, sickness, death.

What is more is the very fact that I need to re-adjust my sense of self, as I did with puberty, proves that my identity isn’t inherent in the body at all, it’s just a self-created construct I overlay onto the 4e object. The fact that my muffin top pops back as soon as the spanx come off and that botox wears off in lockdown, is a blatant testament that my ‘fixes’ are temporary, ‘my objects’ are like every other object, bound by the law of impermanence. And maybe this is part of what LP Thoon means when he calls these objects ‘meaningless’ – if the only meaning in an object is the one that we superimpose onto it, that shifts as we shift, isn’t it devoid of any inherent meaning. Meaningless.

And how do I reconcile the idea that I am ‘author’ of my story, master of myself and my narrative, when I can’t even force my body to be what I want it to be? Instead, the body forces me to adjust, I had to adjust my imagined sense of self with puberty, I had to adjust my workouts to asthma. Since Covid began, my whole life revolves around protecting and preserving this body. Instead of being a tool to actualize myself and my dreams, to maximize my pleasure and satisfaction, this body is a hindrance to me doing what I want to do; it is the cause of story-interruptus, my 18 month lockdown devoid of humans, and hobbies, and the fulfillment of my dreams.

It’s not just that this body isn’t me, does not affirm me, if I look closely this body betrays the idea of the free and powerful me I want to be. On this body I am reliant, I am bound, I am forced to yield and to compromise, and with its cessation, this chapter of the story I so carefully curated, was born and suffered to write, comes to a whimpering close.

I was driving from Connecticut to NY to get a laser treatment for my rosacea. The day before I had put the new luggage box on the car roof. Now the car drove sluggishly, lagged, gas mileage was way down. When I got to NY, I couldn’t find parking, the box meant I didn’t fit the overhead clearance in most garages. Clearly there were some serious downsides of the box I bought while imagining all the convenience and extra room it would bring me. Always there are unintended consequences that come with any benefit I receive.

I got to thinking about my rosacea, what if it is the same way? The unintended consequences of some benefit I chose, some circumstance I worked towards?  Rosacea after all is part of the ‘allergic trinity’, folks who have diseases like asthma, allergies, skin conditions because they are overly sensitive to their environment. But aren’t there boons of being extra attuned and sensitive to my environment? Isn’t that a way to ‘stay safe’, tune into dangers before they are perceptible to others? Isn’t my sensitivity a strength for my dharma practice?

I have always thought of disease as some kind of punishment. Karma whammies for being a bad person. But what if this view is overly simplistic? What if disease is just a consequence, a downside paired with an upside? I result of a choice or action we made? Isn’t this the truth of the world, two sides, causes and results, not Alana’s simplistic good/bad, naughty/nice, cookies/whammies.

Everyone has disease after all, its the human condition, only timing and details diverge. So how can I call health ‘proof of goodness’ and illness ‘proof of badness’?

Anyway, part of what triggered my rosacea was my brief obsession with 12 step Korean beauty regimen. Products that maybe in moderation help beautify, but which can sensitize as well. And is it this consistent with my gung-ho personality: When I do something I do it fully, moderation isn’t really my thing.

But is this bad or is this just consequential? The results I don’t like that I trade-off for ones I do? Maybe  my simplistic calculations of cookies and whammies don’t really reflect the world.

I was re-listening to a retreat talk on the 3 common conditions and an offhand comment from Mae Neecha really hit me. In response to a student asking which branch of a decision tree she should choose, Mae Neecha replied it wasn’t about choosing, it is knowing that any possible branch ends the same way, happiness or suffering. Which, of course I know, is just code for more or less suffering.

She also said that when we suffer it is because we have an inflated sense of self: We think we are so important that our actions, the choices we make along a decision tree, dictate the result. But it’s not true: For example, we can study a lot for a test and still fail, there are always all these possible outcomes we ignore, possibilities we can’t even fathom to consider. Then we suffer the stress of making a decision thinking we can control the outcome and we suffer the stress of outcomes we don’t like because we think they reflect us. Of course, for outcomes we do like, our ego gets puffed, and we get the delayed suffering that comes the next time that extra inflated ego goes pop.

This all struck me because the other day I was thinking: I want this country home in Connecticut that I am staying in right now. I know just because I enjoy it now, it doesn’t mean I will later. In fact, I KNOW Circumstances ARE CHANGING — one reason Eric is reluctant to purchase the house is climate change: Will summers, which are getting hotter by the year here, still be enjoyable in CT in 10, 20 years? And what if Eric dies and I am left with a remote country home, won’t I be lonely then? So much can and will change, those changes will affect my enjoyment. But still I’m unconvinced. Still, like this student I am weighed down by the stress of making a purchase decision. I am weighed down by the stress of wanting a particular outcome because I imagine what it will be, what it will make me.

I realize when I want something, when I want to cling to it/own it, it is because I want the ‘option value’. The house may or may not give me happiness in the future, but if I don’t have it there is no way I can get the happiness that I hope it provides the future. It is a necessary ingredient in the cake I want to bake later. Even knowing I may not bake a cake, or the cake may not be delicious, or it may come with bad parts, or I may not even want it later. None of that is enough right now to let go of my clinging. I want the option value of future cake.

Then I thought more on it and realized that I have moved so much and it hasn’t ever been the way I expected. I clung to the house in Houston, was devastated to leave it, but it was moving on that gave me my life in SF. My wealth. the job I enjoy. So much stuff I now consider ‘better’ required the loss of the home I had clung to. I want option value, but I never consider the cost of holding the option.

I feel I must cling, collect, hold onto the things I need for the future I imagine (never mind the world doesn’t give a damn about whether I actualize my fantasy) without ever considering that some other future may be preferable. Or, that I don’t need to cling or fixate in order to manifest a future, a future will manifest with or without me, the causes I put in place will have effects, but not necessarily the ones I intend. And other causes, past causes put in place by past ‘selves’, also do the steering, not me, not my wishes or intentions.

The stress really is an over inflated sense of my importance; of the belief that my vision, my direction, my future fantasy is what SHOULD manifest and everything else is less preferable. And that what is ‘less preferable’ to me is SHOULDN’T. I get the stress of that belief, without even the benefit of a guarantee that my vision will manifest anyway. And with the guarantee that even if it more or less does, it will still always be, as may Neecha pointed out, different degrees of dukkha.

I really did for a second see so clearly how ‘I’ is just my obsession with self, that brings me the suffering of stressing about how a situation unfolds. Or the stress of what to cling to and claim to try and get the self/future I want. And how, this is a version of atta, a sort of solidifying or clumping together –a solid version of the future. Anatta goes hand-in-hand with realizing that the future isn’t solid at all.