Alana's Dharma Blog

I have been watching the show The Walking Dead. For those of you who have not seen it, it is a zombie apocalypse show: The premise is simple, if you get bitten by a zombie, you turn into a zombie. The show follows the humans who are still left, as they try to navigate a world with more and more Zombie (and fellow human) perils.

This whole season has followed a main plot point: Sofia, one of the children of the group whose stories we are following, has disappeared. Her mom, the fellow adults in the group, all fear the worst – but still with no body to prove her zombification/death, everyone holds out hope and tries to find her. In the final episode of the season, she zombie-walks out of a barn a townsperson has been imprisoning zombies in. From her state of decay, it is clear she has been dead/zombified a long time, possibly the whole time/season her group has searched for her.

As she zombie-walked out of the barn, it had the sudden thought that hope and fear arises in, and exists in us; these are not in the world, and they are not strictly correlated to the actual facts/circumstances of the world.

In the show whenever something looked ‘promising’ there was hope – when her doll was found her mom took it as a sign she was still alive. When a group member found a hideout, that looked recently inhabited, small enough for a kid, they had hope –they came to believe –the kid who had been hiding there was Sofia. Even a flower growing in the field, associated with a native American myth of a lost and found child, was given meaning that Sofia would be found. There was hope.

Whenever signs seemed to point to not finding the girl, there was despair: When the first 72 hrs passed the policeman in the group assumed the worst because that is the police ‘rule’ of when you start looking for a body not a child. When a zombie seemed to be coming from an area the girl might have gone, the group feared it had eaten the girl and gutted it in search of her remains.

The season is a rollercoaster of emotion –fear, hope, fear, hope, fear, hope – and then the big barn reveal, and the realization that all the fear and all the hope didn’t correspond to reality: In fact, the girl had been dead the whole time. The emotions, the meaning read into all the ‘signs’ the group found, didn’t change the reality, it just drove the rollercoaster of emotions. It became clear to me that the whole emotional rollercoaster, even the moments of hope, is actually dukkha.

Us humans cling to hope, we are led to believe it iso great, it, it is what makes even the shittiest situations bearable. Hope is why we are born. I have often reflected that the past is gone, the present flits by so quickly I can’t even cling to it, what I live for is hope of the future. Hope that the story I imagine up for myself – that sail-into the sunset retirement with Eric, 2 homes, travel galore — is coming my way, making all the moving, his crap jobs, the time apart all ‘worth it’.

But when I zoomed-out in this season’s storyline, I thought again about the story of the drug addict Bubbles (blog here): Hope is like the moment he gets high, that hit of drugs, or of imagination, seems so pleasurable for a second, but it is actually poison. Hope drives the cycle of striving, of enduring, of laboring. Hope is how we are reborn. It is how Eric and I tolerate his terrible/ stressful jobs that keep us constantly moving, how my mom, writhing in pain in the hospital, endured for the ‘cure’ on the other side.

Hope seems so sweet, something so other than hopelessness, loss, fear. But as I watched episode after episode of reading tea leaves—group members finding signs to fuel hope, all while also finding signs that fuel despair, it as clear hope is as bad as fear, it is just the high to fear’s low. There is no way to separate the two, and the whole rollercoaster we all ride through our lives is dukkha. The striving for highs in a world in which we can’t separate them from lows is dukkha. The fact that we need hope at all, the belief that things will be ok, be better, in a world that is constant struggle and danger, proves the dukkha nature to the whole thing.

I realized that just like getting high, hope itself arises from hunger. It is the desire that things will go as you want, the desire to get what you want, to avoid what you fear. It is the craving for a particular future. And we already know, hunger is dukkha. Hope gets such a good rap, but it is really a Hallmark of our desperation.

Because of hope, the characters in the show risk their lives, endure injury and pain, to look for Sophia. Hope drives them forward, the way seeking the next fix drives Bubbles.

A long time ago, LP Nut taught about dhamma practice as ‘killing the hope’. When I watched the show, I saw the wisdom there: When we kill hope we kill the suffering of the rollercoaster. We kill the effort. We kill the disappointment when it is crushed. We kill the hunger for one future, one outcome, above others.

In LP Nuts exercise, he talked about how everyone gets sick sometime. He went around a group of people and asked everyone if they had managed to avoid illness: Of course, everyone, be it the cancer survivor or the diabetic, answered with a list of their ails. His teaching was for me — my hypochondria, my fear of illness, it was actually fed by the hope that I could have a different outcome than sickness. That I was somehow the exception. Ironically, I now see killing the hope, not trying to control my body in order to stave off every disease I think is coming for me, is actually the anecdote of fear. With acceptance of the inevitably of sickness, with understanding that its timing and type align to my karma, there is at least the opportunity for equanimity to arise.

I have been thinking a lot about karma these days, it is in the blog chapter I just finished writing. I have been considering how everything that happens, it couldn’t have been any other way. When there is a result, it is the exact manifestation of the exact causes they were in play to give rise to it. I just think it could have been different. I have incomplete views that leave me shocked by outcomes, which if I really saw all the causes in place wouldn’t be shocking at all.

A long time ago, Mae Yo was talking about the practice of female genital mutilation. Mothers would take their daughters to be circumcised. They would tie their ankles to theirs, to spread their legs apart and then a midwife with rusted razor blades would cut the girls’ clitoris off and sew their labias together. On their wedding night, a new husband would cut the girls open. Girls often got infections. Some died. I struggled to understand how any mother that loved their daughters could do this to them.

I was so revolted. It took years actually for me to even begin contemplating this gruesome custom in any meaningful way. I had thought it was just SO WRONG I wouldn’t get anywhere. But as my practice progressed, and I started thinking about how conditions of this world shape us, our choices, our lives, then I started making some progress…

It dawned on me that, considering the circumstances, what else could mothers do really? In a society where women depend on husbands for sustenance and husbands reject wives who aren’t circumcised, isn’t a mother just helping protect her child? It’s a wiggle, a move to keep the girls as safe as they can be within the constraints provided by their culture. By the constraints faced in their actual lives. In the end, this only ‘freedom’ this world affords us.
Because I don’t understand karma, I am indignant when mothers circumcise their children. When seemingly nice John Wicks get beaten, when sick people expose others –me – to their illnesses. When illness threatens me and the body I love, I worry about, I fear falling into (conditioned) states that kill my hopes for a long, happy, healthy life: That pie-in-the-sky, kinda amorphic 2-home-travel-filled-retirment-happily-eever-after-with-Eric.

But just like with my mom, when she came to visit after lockdowns, promising to be super covid cautious and then dancing with a germy toddler…Like all the antimasker, the less than 6-feet gatherers, the antivaxxers…we all have our own reasons, out own education, our own beliefs, our own health profiles and risk profiles and backgrounds and politics and new sources and experiences. There are always reasons that forged the results. But me, I don’t see all the reasons, I ego-centrically believe every reason for everyone and everything is the same as it is for me, and so I struggle to accept things as they are. I have the cray cray belief that not only should things be different, the can be different.

And so, hope is born. Hope I will be different, I can avoid sickness. Sofia will be different, she isn’t subject to death, at least not yet, not when none of the adults in her group could see any reason her time might be up. And with each ‘sign’ I can auger from the tea lives, like finding some flower from Native American mythology, hope is nourished, it swells and grows, independent of the reality of circumstances.

My wrong views, my belief that things can be different then they are, can be in accord with my rules, can be as I hope them to be, can at least be brought to pass with the strength of my supreme effort and willpower, block my acceptance of reality. And so, in ignorance, I fight, fight, work, stress, endure. I normalize dukkha.

Eric and I stayed in a hotel that, despite a high price point, and a luxury brand, was truly a dump. Throughout my stay, I reflected on the business practices that I observed that clearly led to such crappy customer service, crappy maintenance, crappy follow-through on promises made. The cause and effect was so clear. I didn’t particularly enjoy the stay, but when I considered the property and the guest experience as a whole, I didn’t really take it personally, this is how a company with this particular set of practices treats all customers.

But when I wrote an honest review of my terrible stay, so others could steer clear, I was surprised when the company wrote a personal reply back that clearly missed the point and reflected, once again, the terrible communication and customer service that had led to such a bad stay in the first place. In truth, I wasn’t just surprised, I was indignant.

As I sat and fumed at, feeling unheard and disrespected by this company, I got to thinking… why should I have expected anything different? Why was I so much angrier, now, weeks after the stay, when the reply I got to my review was totally consistent with every other aspect of my experience with the company?

I realized that before, I had more or less made abstract observations of the business. But when I got the reply, it felt personal, it was directed to me, it felt like it was about me…

On some level, I think I am exceptional. That is a known blind spot for me. Alana the special snowflake — I have studied and observed it over and over. Now, in this context, it is a barrier to my seeing the complete picture. The natural effects that arise from the causes this business put in place in this situation.

Secondly, I believe things should operate according to my standards. I believe that things will behave according to my expectations, my past experiences with this very hotel brand. But the truth is, everything is exactly as it should be, results arising in accord with the reasons that put them in place.

Not understanding karma is just one more, albeit exceptionally deep, wrong view, because it is a failure to see that everything is exactly as it should be. Anytime I feel insulted, indignant that shit isn’t how it should be, I have a wrong view that things could be any other way. Even just shock, mild surprise, arise from this common wrong, incomplete view, that things will happen according to my expectations, my limited experience. It’s a hope that shit in this world can ever be other than what it actually is. Just because I don’t see all the causes and conditions that give rise to something, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or they could yield a different outcome. Ego is blinding me.

A while back, I had seen the first movie in the John Wick series. It opens with a guy, living a quiet suburban life, mourning the loss of his wife, clinging to hope and comfort in a new puppy she had bought for him before she died. The set-up is so tender. The guy seems so sweet. So when thugs come to his house and beat him down, kill his puppy, it felt so unfair. A random act of violence a guy like this doesn’t deserve. Fast forward a few minutes into the movie and we learn Mr. Gentle is a retired hitman…

The story and set-up has really stuck with me over the years. I was so sure someone didn’t deserve bad stuff they got, but I made that judgment before I had all the facts. Once I knew he was a hitman, his fate didn’t feel so unfair. But this is a core problem for me – I believe karma has to follow my beliefs, shaped by my own ignorance and lack of seeing the whole picture, but the world, it doesn’t revolve around me. Karma works just fine whether or not I approve, my terms are not relevant at all.

If shit happens, it should. If someone gets something, they deserve it. There is only dukkha and disappointment for me in expecting anything else. In expecting my preferences to ‘be heard’.

I got lip fillers. Afterwards, I bruised and got weird little bumps I worried would take months to go away. 

I get the fillers to control my body, to prove that I can force it into a shape I find aesthetically appealing. But what does it say that, in the act of getting these fillers, I actually trigger the opposite effect than the one I desire? Thanks to the fillers, now I end up with bruises that are outside of my control, embarrassing ugly little bumps that surely do not reflect how I want my body to look. alana the ugly duck(ling) lips… ughhhh… 

Of course the bruises are expected to fade, the bumps, fingers crossed, go away; these are a short-term side effect I trade-off for the fuller lip look, a little dukkha hump I accept to get me to what I imagine will be the sukkha of a perfect pout. A pout that, ironically, is also temporary (6 to 9 months says the dermatologist), just a little longer lasting than the side effects. I hope. 

For every cosmetic procedure, I dismiss the side effects. I ignore, I normalize, I just put on a little cover-up and move on. But why ignore this aspect of cosmetic procedures that clearly tells me something: Even in the act of trying to force, mould, control, the signs of the futility of this effort are manifest. As soon as the needle slides into my lips, and the bluish bumps start to form, the truth I don’t control the lips is on full display.

The truth that these lips, that I claim and identify with, are 4e lips that behave like every other 4e lip is abundantly clear. 

The fact that, these 4e lips, which I have attached so much meaning to, fell into states I find ugly/ don’t feel represent me, to begin with prove this body doesn’t reflect me, or who I am. All I can do is react to the lips, to the body, to the world -- fillers and patches – all of which belie the true ‘problem’ that the world won’t abide by my imagination of what it is or what it should be. All I can do is wiggle within the confines I am delt. Only a fool can pretend this is mastery.

Lips are just 4 e objects, they will become plumper when a gel is injected, they will also bruise when pierced with a needle. This is a normal way that 4e lips respond to 4e stimulus. I use a particular look, a 4e arrangement to define myself, reflect myself, prove something about my mastery of my body, my life, this world. But does a 4e object doing what any 4e object does --with aspects I find appealing and aspects I find unappealing --really prove or say anything about me? How can it? 

It doesn’t prove I am special --this is how any 4e lip responds. This doesn't prove my control, duh, bruises. It doesn't prove anything about my nature as master of a body-look. It only proves the nature of the 4e lips in reaction to 4e gel and a 4e needle. Just because I find the short-term results displeasing, the long-term results pleasing, does that say anything about me other than my arbitrary beliefs --3s and 4s --that give rise to certain forms registering as pleasurable? Where is the identity in that? What does it prove other than my preferences and pleasures and the fact that sometimes 4 e objects in this world pass through states that align with those preferences and pleasures. Other times --more frequent times -- they pass through states I find displeasurable.

Which brings me to the fact that if I zoom outwards it is clear that the reason I am in this situation in the first place of needing to fill my aging, wrinkling, wizen lips, is that this body --against my will, my preferences, my self-imagination -- is shifting into arrangements I find displeasurable. I feel such a sense of accomplishment, victory, when I look in the mirror and I see a thin alana, a pretty alana, a full-lipped alana. I weigh the results of my efforts to diet and primp and inject, and I am proud. But needing to get fillers should prove my defeat, not victory; it is the result of my inability to stop the ravishes of age and time, my inability to keep this form I claim into shifting into unpleasant states in the first place. 

Plus, even if I can imagine this as a victory, it is a pyrrhic one at best --like a tent continually collapsing in the wind -- all I need to do is wait and the lips deflate again. 

Why do I want these plump lips in the first place? It is my arbitrary notion of what is beautiful. Why do I want to be beautiful? It is how I see myself, an arbitrarily chosen 'essential' trait that reflects the Alana I imagine myself to be. 

All of us try to build identity by trying to shape the world (trying is the operative word in this sentence): A musician shapes sounds, a writer stories, a politician their civic body, a parent their children, etc . A beautiful body represents me, it is the physical manifestation of my abstract sense of identity. It is one of the things alana sees as critical to shape.  And if I can’t even shape this one, most intimate object, what does that prove about me? That’s the dumb question I ask myself, staring in the mirror at sunken lips, a sagging face, feeling low and defeated. That’s the question that keeps me trying to “solve” the problem of fading beauty, to primp and lip plump. 

The smart questions however are these: Is there any hope I can shape the world, that it will ultimately bow to my efforts? 

Why should I place so much value in the small, temporary, influence I have – sure someone can smack at the waves on a beach with a stick, sure some of them will break a few seconds short of the shore, but is this really making any meaningful impact on the ocean? 

Why should I value the shapes I make? Does this body, or any shape, really say anything about me? Do 4e objects, marching through various states/shapes, brought about by shifting arrangements of the elements, actually reflect any meaning at all? Better yet the meaning ‘alana’? Is there identity in conditioned physical clumps? 

And what can I glean from the fact that the shapes I choose to value, and the meaning I assign them, are totally arbitrary? There was an experiment where kids were told those with brown eyes were smart and blue eyes dumb, then the kids started believing it, brown eyed kids bullied blue eyed peers, blue eyed kids developed inferiority complexes. The trait of eye color is real, but the trait was arbitrarily given some meaning it clearly doesn’t have. And yet, the children acted-out based on the belief alone. Am I similarly deluded by the meaning I have assigned arbitrary traits/ arrangements of rupa?

And of course, what’s the cost of my inevitable failure to shape the world, to shape even just a single body in it? Am I really going to find sukkha somewhere in my endless struggle to create and maintain arbitrarily chosen arrangements, just for them to come crashing down and me needing to start anew. Work to build, to tend, sorry to lose, work to build again. Dukkha. 

Anyway, what is beauty-what is any shape we make? It is just a particular state, an arrangement, that 4e objects (and nama too) pass through for a time. Think of a flower -- beauty is just the peak of the flower arrangement, plus some number of clicks of the arrangements before and after peak state. A green bud, not beautiful. A rotting wrinkled petal, a wizen stalk, not beautiful. If beauty is just a state can it bestow an identity? Worse – If I choose an alana body to identify with, to claim as representative of me, how royally fucked am I that I don’t even want to identify with all of its states? Only the peak ones will do…

And so, I ice my lips. I hope the swelling goes down, the lumps disappear. For the latest slug of pain, I hopefully get 6 to 9 months of worrying about my next biggest problem, some other aspect of this body’s shape –this life’s shape -- that blatantly defies my will. Like a scarlet letter testifying to me, to the world, of my failures to keep this aging, decaying lump of flesh in line.

A few days after I began the antibiotics for strep, my angry, red, raw throat began to subside. Now it was my vagina’s turn. Ugghhh, the familiar burning, itching, angry pain of an antibiotic triggered yeast infection was upon me. As I waddled over to the Walgreens to get myself some Monistat, I started thinking…

Even when I can take actions to seemingly control this body, i.e. take antibiotics to cure strep, there are consequences, in this case a yeast infection. So…is that control?

I take so much pride in the moments I can make this body do, or look, as I see fit. How much joy did I take in the shapes I could make in yoga? Oh how my pride swelled looking at my beautiful self in the mirror on my wedding day. And boy-oh-boy is there sorrow, despair, embarrassment and disappointment when the wrinkles and sagging defy my botox and filler regime. Would I take such joy, or suffer such embarrassment, if I actually understood this body wasn’t in my control?

Only an idiot tethers their sense of pride to an object they can’t actually control. There is no way to build identity in something that is, for all intensive purposes, random*; wayward; that we ought to have no belief can readily show our will. It’s nonsensical. Over and over I gather evidence I don’t control this body. First strep, now yeast infection. Why don’t I learn?

As I consider this question of not learning now, in Aug. 2025, I see more clearly that I mistake influence, the ability to be a condition –even sometimes a cause – as an affirmation of self. Sure, I don’t control – I covered that topic years ago, but OBVIOUSLY, LOOK AT REALITY, I INFLUENCE. I can take antibiotics and clear an infection. Shoot shit in my face and combat wrinkles and sagging. I can work out and practice yoga everyday and the progress, the increase of strength and flexibility, is undeniable. Can’t I take pride in that? Isn’t that WHO I AM –the woman who wiggles within constraints, who overcomes obstacles, who can’t p’wn the world, but maybe can briefly hold back the ocean of entropy in my little corner of the forest?

I allow having these effects on objects to act as evidence to feed the delusion of mine-ness. But, let’s look closer about the reality this yeast infection actually illustrates: The infection is evidence that even as I am a condition effectuating an outcome I want from my body, i.e. eradication of bacteria, I still don’t control. Even as I influence, I am still subject to the nature of bodies, i.e. killing bacteria in bodies, while a boon for strep healing, leads to overgrowth of fungus and the curse of a yeast infection.

No matter what stories I tell myself about the “deep meaning” of influence on these objects has, the reality is ultimately lack of control. No matter what delusions of grandeur I allow being a cause of these objects, or the direction they take, to stir in me, reality IS cause and effect, everything is always the product of cause and effect, the seeding of further causes for further effects. This is not special, this is not identity, this is just the mundane fabric of this world. This is karma. It is meaningless.

“NOTHING BELONGS TO US EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS.” THIS IS HOW IT IS MEANINGLESS.

Back in the early days of contemplating self and self belonging, I stumbled upon a bit of language, a parallel I really liked: For every object I had, I claimed, there was always fine print. There were limits and liabilities. I can use this body –but it is limited by breakability, by being subject to infection. I can take antibiotics, but the script comes with liabilities, a yeast infection. Limits and liabilities are part of a contract that dictate the use of an item. I have a rental car, I can use it within the limits and liabilities the company sets-out. I have an apartment, I can use it with the limits and liabilities my lease sets out. If every single object has these fine print limits and liabilities, then it really is like LP Thoon says: The objects are here for use, I borrow them. This is not ownership, this is a rental bound by time, bound by rules.

And of all the rules (i.e. common conditions)these objects are bound to, the most relevant here is dukkha. An angry red throat, followed by an angry red vagina, this is dukkha. The stress of illness. The stress of spreading illness. The stress that illness interferes with my life, my plans. The stress that this illness portends the next, that it proves the vulnerability of this body. Dukkha, dukkha, dukka.

I run around claiming objects I don’t control, that cause me stress, that disappoint me, just for the ‘feel-good-hit’ that I get from influence. From deluding myself that influence is meaningful, that because I can be a condition or a cause, that condition-setting/causality can prove who I am, that it allows me to be, to become. This is a fool’s trade Alana: What is conditional is not self, it is not who I am. And yet I somehow think that BEING a condition can prove who I am? Being a condition is after all, in and of itself conditional. For this flimsiness I accept, invite, wallow in life-after-life of dukkha.

LOOK AT REALITY: I can be a condition, or a cause, to the extent that karma – other and past conditions and causes allow. This is the limitation in use. This is my ability to use antibiotics to treat if I can access them, if the bacteria isn’t resistant. This is my ability to heal my body, if its elements are in an arrangement where the particular antibiotics I have will return it to an arrangement that is strep infection free. And even if I am a condition or cause of getting the strep healed, I face liabilities of the cause I set to heal the body – antibiotics can trigger yeast infections. Just as there is no ownership, there is no owner either.

*I say “for all intensive purposes random” because, of course, nothing is random, everything arises based on causes. Karma is real. But from my deluded perspective, the direction objects take SEEMS random in that they don’t adhere to my desires or expectations. They don’t affirm my control