All righty Dear Reader – I am once again going to mix things up and get a little out of order for this sorta-temporally-linear blog; I am adding in a contemplation from this past week, late Sept. 2024. Why? Well for starters, it is so clearly rooted in the topic of ‘the world offers no shelter’, it is almost a natural extension of the last blog. An extension that shows how my dukkha contemplations have progressed, and how the topic of dukkha continues to be a strong scaffolding for my post-dukkha-aha-moment contemplations.

But mostly, it is because while I spend a whole lotta time thinking, it’s a rare contemplation that really squeezes my heart, that feels as emotionally powerful as it does logical. This contemplation hit me hard and has prompted me to reconsider, and gain more clarity on another critical topic, karma…

I went to the spa today, mid-day on a Monday, I expected it would be quiet. Instead, it was a zoo. I did my usual dance to duck and dodge the crowds, aka the disease carriers, but it was impossible, there were too many people. As I sat in the sauna – vigilantly listening to detect any cough, any sniffle – I started thinking about how stressed out I am all of the time …

I have so much money, but I continually stress on how to keep it, whether it will be enough, how to invest and if we need more. I pour over spreadsheets, calculating, adjusting, making ‘sure’ we are on track. I fear every unexpected expense will push us out of budget. I wonder whether everything I buy is worth the risk to my bank account, to my future in which I need money to survive. In my mind, I am supposed to have this money to enjoy life with, to be safe, but it turns out to be a source of constant stress. And as for safety…despite all the money, I see peril everywhere. Proof: Here I am sitting in a sauna worrying about Covid instead of relaxing.

I have this lovely vacation home in Montreal, also something I bought to relax, enjoy, take refuge in to escape the Miami summers, but I worry about it constantly too. I worry about how to preserve it, about humidity levels, and floods when I am away. I stress when it breaks on how we can fix it rapidly enough to prevent it becoming damaged past the point it is habitable for me. I fear that that mold will be my evictor. Or the government will be my evictor; geopolitical instability could make American tourist visas scarce. Or the property taxes will become prohibitively expensive, and we will need to sell. And is someplace really a refuge if you worry about it being ruined, or it ruining you all the time? If at any moment you can be evicted — or at least denied pleasurable use — by the elements, or naughty neighbor, by governments and geopolitics?

I have this body – I am sitting here trying to give it sensual pleasure, to find relaxation at the spa, but here I am worried about disease. Continually, I worry about disease. I think this body is ‘my ticket’, to the future I imagine, to the freedom to do what I want to do, to go where I want to go, to write my unparalleled story of awesomeness and love and wealth and adventure. To prove and manifest who I am. But just look at Covid — I spent over a year isolated and alone, afraid to go out, to meet other people, to travel, to go the places I wanted to go and do the things I wanted to do, all to protect this body. Instead of being an instrument of my will, instead of being in service to my story or to my enjoyment, this body was something I felt intense need to protect, to preserve, even at the expense of my story or enjoyment. There was no pleasure from this body during that time, only constant stress.

I started thinking back to my contemplation of fear. How in the yoga room I came to realize if I could ‘breathe through’ fear, it must not be in a yoga pose, not in a situation, fear lies with me. Stress of course does too. Here I am at the spa, which in the past has been a place I go to decompress and relax, only the last few times have been overcrowded and stressful. The stress though isn’t in the situation, it’s not at the spa, it lives with me, in my heart. This is stuff I already ‘know’, its rote platitudes at this point.

I had left the sauna and was walking toward a cold pool when I saw a guy with a big wound on his leg – it really looked like a MERSA infection. Here he was, wandering around the spa, going in shared pools and saunas. At first, I wanted to get angry at him. At the woman who was coughing in the sauna too. At all the people who come to public places sick, endangering others. But are they really the problem? If I think these people are the cause of my stress, I am dead fucking wrong. This is a spa. A place humans go in droves, they intermingle, share water and facilities. This is a place where disease spreads.

Everyplace humans gather is a place disease spreads: A school, a hospital, a concert hall. Even my own home is a place disease spreads – I caught Covid from Eric at home, not some grand public gathering. Even in isolation, disease spreads, in my pandemic cottage – purchased to protect me from disease, away from all those covid spreaders – a bat put me at risk for rabies and sent me to the hospital, mid pandemic, for shots.

This is the nature — the fundamental rupa — of bacteria and viruses that consume human bodies and use them to replicate and spread. This is the fact of human bodies, that are subject to disease, to being consumed by these viruses and bacteria. That are consumables, that one way or another will become consumed, used up, changed past the point they can continue to support what I call an Alana, or the life I imagine she has/will have. I am getting stressed out by the WAY THINGS ARE, HOW THEY ARE MEANT TO BE, HOW THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND ALWAYS WILL BE.

In my head, I’m affronting these coughers and sneezers and open-wounders asking, “is the spa really a place for sick people?” But Alana,” is the spa really the place for people worried about being sick? Is this world? You seriously showed up to the wrong party girrrrlll, why the hell are you still here?”.

Fear, stress from the spa, that lies in my heart, but so too did the sense of relaxation and comfort I have gotten there in the past. Neither of these reflects a proper understanding of reality. To see this as a haven misses the danger innate in the circumstance, in the world. To see it as a continual threat misses something even more subtle –that being in this world, no matter where I am, is a risk. Threats abound ALWAYS. Whether or not this body is consumed, made sick, or dies in any given circumstance, by any given threat, is about whether the causes and conditions for this body being sick/consumed/dead have been met, not about whether someone sick comes into the sauna.

That right there is truth of karma, the truth I just don’t quite get. That right there is also the key to solving all this fucking stress: What the world is, karma, they are one in the same — shit that arises when the causes and conditions for arising are met and ceases when the causes and conditions for cessation have been met. My problem is that I want all that arising and ceasing to be on my terms. Clinging to the hope I can somehow achieve that (some people beat ‘the house’ some of the time after all), and resultantly to the things that have arisen, and that will cease, that is my suffering. I see the problem. I see the solution. And yet I still can’t seem to get there.

I can’t get over the idea of my own power, my faith that my own abilities/actions will be the causes I want them to be and manifest the effects I want to manifest. I mistake agency (that I can act in ways I think will impact my future positively) for control. I mistake the fact that of course I do have an impact on my life, on preserving my health, and my wealth, and my belongings, as proof that the things I do at any given moment determine whether I get the outcome I want. But, as Mae Neecha has said, and I still foolishly don’t believe, our actions now matter, but how much? Aren’t they just a small trickle of the whole gushing stream of causes, conditions and factors that come together to forge an outcome?
Afterall, I bought a plane ticket to get to retreat in 2023, I took time off, I RSVPed, I had a body, I mentally prepared myself. Then I caught Covid and couldn’t go – going to retreat was not within the scope of ‘permitted activities” for this body at that time. Later, when I talked to Mae Yo, she said something that I still can’t completely understand, but that is the crux of all of this: I didn’t have the causes to go to retreat. I had factors — like sunlight and water and soil — but there was no seed, no cause, so no tree could grow.