Alana's Dharma Blog

A dear friend was visiting and talking about how much her daughter is struggling in school—she is downright depressed– and yet she is super reluctant to change, to do something else. As my friend spoke, I considered the daughter’s position and thought her misery and struggle seemed odd, after all, the daughter has choices: There are other schools to which she could apply, she has plenty of financial support, emotional support as well. Still, she feels stuck.

My friend and I chatted about how hard it is ‘at that age’, the expectations we have for ourselves, the fears of how others will judge us, that create such a trap. Eric said, “It’s like being locked in a room with the lock on the inside, having locked it yourself, and yet believing you are stuck”. His comment really hit me, and I remembered a video Mae Neecha sent a while back.

In the video there was a cute little dog with a box on its head. As a result of the box, the dog just kept running around running into things around it. Neecha asked me, “Why don’t you just remove the box?” Easier said than done I had thought. But Eric’s comment really got me thinking about this question again, about how we create our own traps.

Our traps are born in our minds, from our wrong views. Obviously being born, continuing to strive and cling in samsara is the ultimate trap of our own making. Still, starting a little smaller…

I have another friend, with a newly born obsession with sending her kids to private Jewish school. A few months ago, she and her husband were fine with their life, with the way things were going and the school choices for their kids. Then suddenly, in the wake of the Israel Palestine conflict, my friend became convinced the kids needed a Jewish education.

With no easy options in her small town, the struggle was on: She had to look at schools further away, try and dig-up the money for them, move to a totally new place, buy a new house. It pains me to see how much stress her and her husband are taking on. How they are tossing away an old life that they seemed to enjoy, for something new, uncertain, and much more difficult. All because of ideas in their mind about ‘Jewish identity’ , ‘what it means to be a good parent’, ‘what will make children successful’. 

These are ideas and beliefs, they aren’t fixed  — in fact, in my Jewish friend’s case,  they can change almost overnight, in response to a geopolitical conflict thousands of miles away. Still, as they foment in the mind, these ideas, these identities and visons for the future,  begin to feel solid. A new Atta is born, we get stuck, blocked by them.

Trust me, COMPASSIONATE ALANA knows all about this.

If there is such a thing as being a “compassionate person”, I have to determine the value, the reward, of becoming such a compassionate person myself. As soon as I assume that being a compassionate person is both possible and desirable/rewarding, I have to try and become one.

To do so, I have to first create criteria of what the identity actually entails and then I need to imagine the qualities and behaviors that will prove that I am on the right track, that I can look to in order to measure and mark my success. In essence, I need to define compassion –some one who is willing to sacrifice desire, pleasure, self, for others –and then create markers, qualities and behaviors of said ‘compassionate person’ and follow them unwaveringly.

 Compassionate Alana doesn’t eat animals, never mind the hardship that puts on herself and her care givers. Compassionate Alana pretends she can just endure difficult relationships, stressful moves, for the love of others. Never mind that the endurance is grudging, imaginary really, considering the hurtful temper-tantrums she throws in those relationships, new cities, burdening those very same loved ones the whole time. Compassionate Alana hugs homeless people, till for fear of disease she doesn’t, and she melts down at a retreat, crying about her failures to be the compassionate person she wants to be, she said herself was worth it to be, she grew stuck on becoming and proving, till of course she wasn’t…

This here is a trap. This is the locked door I locked for myself, from the inside, bag over head hitting shit. Looks like its not just a problem for those of a ‘certain age’…

Never mind that, in addition to being a self-created trap, this is also utter nonsense. Like the blue eye/brown eye experiments,  in which kids simply started to believe that eye color corresponds to intelligence and worthiness, just because they were told so in the service of some sociology study, it is totally arbitrary, devoid of meaning outside of the minds of people who believe it.

My beliefs about being a compassionate Alana, a strong willed Alana, a healthy Alana, a good Buddhist, or wife, or employee, or student Alana, a beautiful Alana, a cultured Alana, a deserving Alana, a wise Alana, a worldly Alana, etc. Those beliefs are based on nothing substantial or absolute at all. Arbitrarily decided qualities ‘proven’ by arbitrarily decided actions. This is just shifting 3s and 4s, fabrications.  It is not a path to meaning or identity, it is just a path to suffering. Once I affix these ideas, these absolutes, in my mind, I become slave to them. 

Several years ago, I committed to chanting a little bit every day. For years, I have upkept this commitment flawlessly. And then yesterday, I simply forgot. I woke in the morning, embarrassed, ashamed, that something I had promised to do, I had stuck to with such steadfastness for years, simply slipped my mind. After I chanted, I thought a bit about my slip-up.

I realize I am, in general, a person who is diligent in upholding my commitments, this is a point of pride for me. This is a trait which I have honed, and which I have chosen to identify with. In fact, I often consider my willfulness as my own personal superpower. ALANA WHO CAN BEND THE WORLD WITH THE SHEER FORCE OF HER WILL.

Even still, last night I forgot to chant. I forgot and failed in upholding a commitment I held so strongly I had managed to fulfill it unwaveringly for years I wasn’t sick. Eric wasn’t hospitalized. There was no excuse, or big reason to explain my slip, I just forgot.

Even this small thing, taking a few minutes to chant a day, a commitment that seems so obviously in my control, isn’t. It can’t be if a random slip of the mind is enough to derail both my commitment itself and the identity of my so-dearly-held-self-view of ALANA THE GREAT PROMISE KEEPER.

Even bringing the ‘superpower’ of my will and persistence to bear on this simple task wasn’t enough for me to avoid slipping-up and forgetting. So much for bending the world with the force of  my will, I couldn’t even bend my own actions to my will. I couldn’t  bend my memory to will.

How can I be this trait, how can I define myself by it, when it simply stops, fails, can’t be counted on at all? No one would call it a superpower to be able to do something some of the time, assuming the circumstances to do that thing were in place. That’s not power. That is not an identity.  

No these traits, they are just habits I have deluded myself into honing for the benefits I believe they afford me. For the identity I think it grants me. I never even consider the costs. I never think twice about the busted hip I have from my yoga days forcing my will on this body. I don’t like to dwell on the many hearts I broke forcing my will on my lovers. I don’t like to think too much about what it means to be the kind of wife who is always asking her husband to bend to her will, her desires and preferences.

Oh and the sheer effort, the work of mustering so much will, and the disappointment, self-loathing, when it fails to have the effects I want. Self-loathing, as though this trait of willfulness, this habit of keeping commitments was ever about me, was ever who I am, when a simple slip of the mind is all it takes to nullify them.

I opened up a message this morning and saw a quote from LP Thoon. It said, “Once your parents’ four elements have arisen, their elements are subject to aging, sickness, and death. You have been born from elements subject to death. You have been born from elements subject to impermanence. The entirety of your elements must be subject to the impermanence your parents were subject to. However your parents are, that is how you are.

If your parents cannot cling to the notion that their bodies belong to them because everything must transpire according to the impermanence within itself, then you who have been born must also be just like them. If your parents are something that is not-self (anatta)–there is nothing that is their ‘self’–then how can you cling to the notion that you are their ‘self’? You must be just like your parents are. You must see how reality is in this way.”

I started thinking a little about this quote. My dad got pancreatic cancer and died. He is gone. There is no more Floyd, that atta has totally un-atta-ed. In the end, his body, that he had counted on, betrayed him. It got sick. Cells were triggered by something to mutate, to become toxic and cancerous instead of helpful for a body to function and live. This was the truth of my father’s body.

My mother had a terrible accident, she is still alive, but her body no longer functions as it did before, she has been crippled, had her mobility compromised and limited. Not just by the accident itself, but by the surgery she had to fix the damage done from the accident. At one point, in the hospital, she stopped being able to pee by herself, she had to be catheterized multiple times a day to pee. She was so desperate to just pee on her own. She told me she tried so hard to force it, to will her body to do this simple task that it had always effortlessly done before, but no amount of force or will could get the urine to come out on its own.

My own body has betrayed me just like my parents’ betrayed them. It does so on the regular: I want so badly to breath, but the asthma has gotten worse. A body I have honed to fitness with years of effort, one day was as breathless as an out of shape septuagenarian, mid run. 

In my last apartment, I wanted so much to stay, I had already signed a contact, I was on the hook for the rent. I wanted to just tough it up, but my environmental sensitivities simply wouldn’t allow it. I had  developed crushing chest pain, difficulty breathing, I feared staying in the apartment would kill me and I was forced to move.

 After covid, I was so exhausted, couch locked: Just like my mother, doing simple things I had done effortlessly before were past my will. I was so sick. The muscle built by all the years of fitness, training, were gone within a few months. My last body scan showed me weak, skinny fat, in the wake of post covid post exertion fatigue. Like my mother, I tried to make it better, her with her surgery, me with steroids, that ultimately made it worse.

 It really made me see, sure, I can act with this body, I can act on it, and those actions have consequences. Sometime consequences I like, like getting fit, sometimes ones I don’t, like getting sick and weak. But in the end, none of my actions, or their consequences, change what a body is, what it has always been. That’s the point of LP Thoon’s quote: The body is of this world, it is 4 elements, it shifts and changes according to causes and conditions as do all elemental objects. I can call it mine, sure, but what does that mean really? 

In my mind, I mine-ify this body to exempt it, to convince myself it is different somehow. I mine-ify this body so I can used it to differentiate myself. But it’s not different at all, it is like my parents’ body, like every body, so how can it differentiate me?  This is the thing to see about 4es: If these things I claim, believe are under my dominion, don’t obey me, what will? If my body can’t confirm my version of the world, or confirm I am somehow valuable, special, important, what will? This sick and breaking/breakable body can’t even stay healthy, it can’t even do the shit I want it to do, I can’t be special at all. I can’t be in control. This is a lie that exists in my mind alone.

The other day I was sitting in French class, the other students’ sniffles making me shift in discomfort. I don’t want to get sick. I got home and reflected on how often I am uncomfortable, afraid of illness these days. Sure, I go about my daily life, but always with caution, always with the fear in the back of my head that someone around me is going to give me a disease.

I eat in restaurants, but rush my meals when I hear coughing. I go to the store, but squirm as I decide if I should deal with the risk of being unmasked, or the social humiliation of masking. Before covid, there were at least times I felt comfortable, unworried about my fragility and tendency to get sick. Since covid though, I realize I am always on edge.  

It is exhausting to worry all the time, my hyper vigilance is draining me.  Long ago, LP Nut used to talk about enlightenment as putting down a burden. I remember one time I read a talk from LP Thoon, he said at the moment of death, a person feels relief to be free of their body. I am suddenly starting to see how this overwhelming obsession with my body could be a burden to be put down. How I could find relief in not being so overly concerned.

This clinging to a fragile, decaying, uncontrollable object, my body, this body, is the source of my suffering. I AM THE SOURCE OF MY SUFFERING. But I believe I ‘need’ this body. I am so enamored with the future fantasy I have created –a fantasy contingent upon this body, that I endure definite daily stress today over some future maybe life I can have, as long as I have this body, tomorrow.

I am so tired. I don’t want this suffering of worry about a breakable body breaking anymore, and yet I am so attached to what I imagine it to be, what I imagine I need it for, I can’t put down this burden. The problem however though is that all I ever buy is duration. I pray, I make merit and dedicate it, I work hard at health, I try to avoid disease all for what –the hope that this breakable body will endure just a little longer. I suffer so blindly for some extra days. How is it that I see this as worth it? How is this a tradeoff I am willing to make?

Obviously, my mind knows damn well what this body is; a temporary thing, so fragile, prone to illness and death. If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t be so constantly worried about it. And yet, I can’t stop worrying because I still love it so much. Despite the fact that I hurt, because of my obsession with my body, my heart can’t accept what it is, the inevitable impending loss. I am so committed to this body because my heart won’t accept any version of a future reality without it.

On some level of course, I am forced to admit that any given future I have imagined, planned for, is and will be mooted by reality. The future, this body, the are not under my control; I am subject to the flowing narrative of the world, not the architect, the sovereign,  the great arranger.

Here in Paris, I am largely enjoying myself, at least in so far as stress about, and the real pains of, this body allow. My asthma though has been super aggravated. I had to reconcile myself to the fact we may need to go home early so I can get additional meds and treatment. It’s not what I want, and it hurts so bad to imagine a different future than the Paris adventure I have concocted in my mind, that I have become so attached to, even though the fantasy is only a few months old.

 But here, in my disease is the truth that this body I view, I cling to, as a tool for achieving the future I want, can in fact be what drives me to a future I do not want. Actually, it inevitable does drive me to a future I don’t want –sickness, aging, death, that is the future this body guarantees. It does not guarantee whatever adventures I have fantasized, in fact, it frequently acts against those, forcing me to adjust, to wiggle, to accept loss and work to build again. Maybe losing this body, is just like losing my plans to stay in Paris, something I adjust to, wiggle, accept the loss and build again. Everyday, over and over, this same pattern repeats. So much stress, so much mourning, simply because I can’t put down what I am attached to and let this world keep ticking on without me.