Alana's Dharma Blog

A few months back I had sat-in on a zoom class at the Wat. The class was shown a cute little animation film that you can see here and then asked to contemplate on it. Mae Neecha shared a technique, an approach to identifying a core issue in a story, that she had been using recently. She advised you could strip out a lot of the details of a story, of our emotions and reactions to that story, and try to see what was happening in terms of the elements and natural processes.  

I found the idea deeply compelling for a few reasons: 1) If I can take a situation and understand it at a core level, see how it relates to overarching themes in nature, I can learn to apply it to many stories, to my own dramas and wrong views, and more easily identify the patterns in the stories that strike or plague me.

2) If I can distill the stories I get caught-up in, that I am emotional about, to a basic idea prevalent in nature, I can see that there is nothing special about me, or my stories. The suffering and struggles I experience, and personalize, are just normal parts of this world. In many ways, this was at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching to Kisa Gotami and that has always been a powerful teaching to me.

During the class, folks –including myself — struggled a bit on how to apply Mae Neechas’ technique. Now, as I was sitting in an airport, waiting to board a flight, my mind went back to the teaching and I decided to consider the video again and see if I could strip out the details and characters, identify the core issue and find that issue in nature and the elements.  

As I was considering, boarding was getting started: The flight was clearly nowhere close to full. I was in boarding group 5. I kept moving up as the line was progressing, but there was a handful of passengers being what I thought was super self-righteous, not wanting to move forward as 5 hadn’t been called yet, and they didn’t want to skip in line. Only there was no line, they were just holding up boarding processes for everyone…

Worse, they asked my group. Since I was in 5, like them, they kept questioning if I should be moving forward, they kept trying to make me feel bad for breaking the order. I was so annoyed. When I got on the plane I started to think: 

What is the stripped-down issue: Adaptation to an environment. And what is the truth of nature? Sometimes nature adapts quickly — Animals will move to new environments when they run out of food, they migrate. Sometimes things in nature adapt slowly, new genetic characteristics can come to species after many generations. Even death, cessation is a form of adaptation, the elements, if they can no longer be sustained in a certain form, they return to the earth so a new form can be born. The banks of a river slowly adapt to the movement of water through erosion. Or a river can adapt quickly to something like excess rain and flood. Everything adapts at its own rate, so why be so annoyed, slighted, at these folks at the boarding gate who were slower to adapt to a mostly empty flight than I was? 

I thought back to the goat story too and realized I could apply this concept of adaptation there as well. Adapting walking stye to suit the environment. I considered when I was like the small goat –reluctant to change my style: When I got to NY, folks interacted more curtly, more quickly, but I didn’t want to adapt. I identified with my way, the slow, casual, open San Franer way that I thought it proved something about me, about my identity. By resisting, refusing to adapt, I was avoiding the assumption of the identity of NYer and clinging to the identity of an SFer.

In fact, when I really consider that time in my life, I realize I felt like I had to hate NY –despite all the pain it caused me — in order to resist ‘becoming’ a NYer and losing my SF identity. The truth though is that NYers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. SFers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. If the environment changes, isn’t it normal for behavior or state to change? Why is this adaptation upon changing cities something I feared, why is this something I made into a referendum on myself and who I am

I put myself then in the shoes of the old goat now, feeling slighted, lesser, that my way, that worked so well for so long was no longer effective. How it made me feel brought low. While I lived in SF, I had thought I had figured out my life, I was calm, chill, equanimous. But faced with a new environment, I was slow to adapt and I felt a combination of pains: Hate for my new environment because it was an affront to who I thought myself to be and hate for myself for not being able to adapt to this new environment the way that a chill, equanimous, SFer SHOULD be able to do. Talk about a no win: I feared losing my SF identity and at the same time feared that the inability to adjust, and ultimately lose that identity in favor of a NY identity made me a failure as well.

Now, when I think in terms of adaptation, I think, “why should I have refused to adapt when adaptation is the course of nature?” “And why should I feel low, ego beaten, when I find I am not the master of my ‘life walk’ like the old goat, when faced with a new environment life NY?” Its normal to need to adapt, this isn’t about me, or my ego, or my identity..

 Back when I was in the throws of NY depression, I reflected that the wrong view that prompted my move from SF to NY was not seeing I was just like an orchid: I could thrive in one environment, like SF and moved to a new one, like NY, and I could wither. It had been egotistical to believe that there was something innate in myself that made me a thriver/survivor in every situation.

Now I realize this is true, but I still didn’t get the point; after I moved I felt so defeated, like such a bad Buddhist and bad person that I couldn’t keep my equanimity and cool. I felt it was all about me, an indictment of me. If I really understood the orchid though I would realize there is nothing so special about being unable to adapt quickly. Somethings adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Somethings, unable to adapt die and then their elements are recycled –adapted –into a new form.

I considered the boarding process again. I realized there were actually 2 issues at work:

1) I was upset at the fellow passengers for not adapting at my pace, to my standards. But everything adapts according to its causes. A fire will move and adapt to fuel or wind far more quickly than a river bank that slowly erodes/adapts and takes new shapes based on the water that flows over it over a long time. Its just the circumstances, the character of the form, the specifics of its particular state.

2)I felt the reluctant boarders were indicting me. I considered why it bothered me so much and I realized: I want to be a considerate person. I see consideration as a lynchpin of my identity and a key element in having a ‘safe’ world; consideration, in my mind, proves that everyone is regarding one another and that helps keep the world an orderly and not violent place. In this instance, my identity as a considerate passenger, as an upholder of a value I cling to, was challenged. I saw the reluctant boarders as failing to adapt, but I felt self-conscious that they saw me as inconsiderate –that I saw myself as inconsiderate and they were affirming that. 

Now, I started seeing a pattern: This is not the first time 2 competing issues, 2 competing senses of self had created discomfort for me:

As I said, in NY I was an angry-ny-hater alana to protect myself from losing my SF chill identity, but then I was also disappointed with myself for being a bad buddhist, a bad alana whose hater ways meant I  couldn’t remain equanimous.

At the boarding gate, I was an alana trying to keep the boarding process smooth so that I could protect my time from boarding  delays, and so I can protect my bag from getting confiscated because the boarding time is running low. But I felt a challenge to being able to protect my identity as a considerate alana.

This all brings me back to the story that launched my practice, homeless alana. I wanted to be a kind compassionate alana, but I also want to keep this physical body safe.

So is there a theme I can now see in my stories? I want to protect, preserve, maintain my identities and my belongings. But can I maintain? Preserve? Not lose? If I am continuously put in a position of trade-offs, needing to let go of one thing I cling to in order to ‘keep’ another, it proves to me that nothing can be kept. If it could, there would be no choices to make –all the things I grap and cling to, rupa and nama alike, would just stay with me.

But, in truth, as circumstances change, as the causes for losing this thing, or that thing, or both are met, the loss will occur. This is inevitable. I struggle and suffer these deep internal conflicts, impossible choices, as I weigh what I imagine are tradeoffs to loose one thing to keep another. To lose consideration to keep my stuff. To lose my good Buddhist identity to keep my SFer identity. To loose compassion to keep health.  I stress, and suffer as if it really were me, the choices I make, that actually had the power to preserve at least one of these things I value.  Again ignoring the fact that if it were up to me, there would be no choice, I would have it all.

The sun is the sun, the center of the solar system, till it burns out. A tree can have all its leafy glory, till chill comes in the fall. A glacier can hold on to all its mass of ice till global warming melts the ice. A river can keep all its water till excess water causes an overflow. The earth can keep all its magma till excess pressure builds and forces it out as a volcano. As soon as the circumstances change, the state changes. Even the greatest and mightiest things in nature lose. It is foolish to think I can cling and keep.

A move to NY, the threat of a swine flu pandemic, these were both new circumstances. Is it reasonable to think that under new circumstances I should, I can, keep old behaviors (regardless of the identities I convince myself those behaviors prove in me)? This is just me being guilty of the very trait that annoyed me about those reluctant boarders in the first place. I was exhibiting failure to adapt quickly. But even ending this blog here, internalizing a message of my own failures, my own swiftness to throw stones in glass houses misses a deeper point. Some things in nature adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Neither state can be taken as a point of identity. Neither can be a mark of alana’s specialness, either in awesomeness or in failureness.

I guess I am finally seeing the power of Mae Neecha’s technique…

I finally rescheduled my visit down to see My uncle in New York. As I waited in line to cross the border from Canada into NY, I started thinking: This line, with all these fences and guards, it’s an arbitrary line, a conventionally agreed upon demarcation that makes one side America and one side Canada. Of course, those lines weren’t always there, once the land was open, roamed by people and animals that migrated place to place. It won’t always be there either, countries change, borders change, one day there won’t even be humans at all…

This is the kind of evidence I look for to help myself consider impermanence — borders can change, or along a border there is one thing on one side and another on the other. But this is all just evidence, SYMPTOMS. What is the evidence really showing me…?

The truth here is that what I construe as permanent: An identity, of a place, a person, or thing, exists only in the mind. Its arbitrary — though conventionally agreed upon — to call one side of a line Canada and another America; those clumps aren’t really real. Over and over it is becoming clear that fixation is happening with me, in my heart, perhaps in our collective hearts, but not in the world.

And yet, for something not even really real, nor actually out in the world, I suffer real pain. I suffer when my friends leave early. I suffer when I can’t go see family. I suffer when I can’t work out anymore post covid — losing part of the fit alana identity I have clumped up over so many years and given so much meaning to. I suffer when I am too sick to do the things I wanted/planned, the stuff I clumped up in my imagination as the fun future I would have.

Early on in practice I learned to see things aren’t as certain as I thought — hugging a homeless person doesn’t necessarily mean swine flu, and then death. Even if what I worry about comes true, it may turn out for the better. Or at least for the different. This is all true. But back then I felt like part of the puzzle was missing, these were half measures to sooth, they weren’t full understandings. But now I sense I am getting closer to seeing the bigger picture. All the clumps — the worries and the hopes, the imagined future and the curated past –they aren’t how the world really is. All my worries and all my hopes, are based on a fabrication, not on reality.

I spin, I suffer because I cling and fixate, but that’s on me –that isn’t how things actually are., I want things to be fixed when I like them, or to hurry up and un-clump, to move along, to flow away, when I don’t like them. But this isn’t how the world works. The world won’t change, so the only choice is for me to figure out how to.

For weeks I had planned a trip to drive down to visit my uncle at his cabin near Lake George. With Covid, I had locked down so tightly, refused to travel, I had missed seeing so many family and friends. This was my favorite uncle, and I delighted in the idea that, after so many years, we could reconnect. Then, the fires in Quebec broke-out, air quality all the way from upstate NY to Manhattan was in the red, with my asthma, and now long covid, I feared the car, and then an old cabin in the woods, would not give me enough protection from the smoke. In the end, super disappointed, I canceled my trip.

Stuck at the Montreal home, in a small windowless room, with an air purifier going full blast, I started thinking – just like with retreat, I had made plans, fixed them in my head and my heart, gotten excited and then, bust. Something as small as airborne particles, as viruses and ash, could dictate my life.

Weeks ago, when I made these plans, the idea of a wildfire on the East Coast of Canada, effecting air quality down into the US didn’t even cross my mind –in fact, this is not something that had ever happened before. But here I was, facing conditions not just outside of my control, but outside of my wildest imagination, that had ruined something I had so deeply wanted to do.

I have reflected before that the past is gone, I never really ‘live in the moment’, for me my whole life comes down to living for my future. That isn’t just what I want, what I look forward to, it is a critical part of the story I curate about WHO I AM. Alana atta is deeply bound-up with the story I tell myself about my past and the fantasies I have for my future. The future that I will plan and then manifest, through the force of my will, my effort, my preparation. I will forge my destiny, achieve my goals, fulfill my desires…except when I can’t. Except when the unimaginable, when the microscopic, when the seemingly trivial conditions force a totally different outcome…

The fires continued several days and we get a call from 2 very dear friends: Greg and Ellen’s flight back from their honeymoon in Japan was scheduled for a short layover in Montreal, but with the fires, their connection back to Virginia had been delayed for 3 days. I was delighted when, out of the blue, t they show up at our door to stay with us. Finally, the fires had given me something instead of just taking away…

It was Sunday night, when they showed-up and Greg, a chef, and Eric were already planning-out all our meals we were going to have, all the markets they would go to. And then, Monday morning their flight was rescheduled again for later in the afternoon. Again, I found myself disappointed.

Even through their visit had been a complete and total surprise, even through I hadn’t planned it at all, my mind quickly fixated on them being there for 2 days. Then, when things shifted and changed, it made me sad to loose the imagined future I had made solid and real in my mind. But the irony is, it is the very flux, changeability, that landed them on my front steps in the first place. To then be surprised, upset, that they were ‘taken from me early’, is crazy.

I pretend to be the architect of my life, but in fact, I am just responding, yielding, caving, replanning and rehashing in response to a reality I can’t change. Reality doesn’t adjust to me, I must adjust to reality. Sometimes, that adjustment is a happy one, like when friends turn up at my door, and in those cases, I am quick to claim victory, to unthinkingly add this latest twist to my narrative about my life and who I am. But frequently, I face disappointment, and in those moments, I react, try to recover, try to make the best out of the cards I am delt. I wiggle within the confines reality has dictated. But never do I stop and reflect on what these unexpected deviations from my plan are actually telling me about the nature of the world and who I am.

If I live my life reacting to the world, subject to circumstances, battered about by conditions, then I am not the master of my destiny. And this brings me to a question that really gives me pause: Is there self without self-determination? Or maybe more practically, is it worth being born if I don’t have self-determination? Without self determination, how can I use my experiences, or objects, or skills, or story to prove who I am? How can I expect that I can navigate a world filled with perils in order to find pleasure? Should this not be grounds for disillusionment?