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2020 Retreat Part 5 — A Peace Lily/Body That Are Reliant on Their Requisites Can’t be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 5 — A Peace Lily/Body That Are Reliant on Their Requisites Can’t be Mine

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Day 5: Part 1: My Peace Lily (Plant)

My peace lily is not under my control (it is not mine, it is reliant upon its requisites).
If my peace lily were under my control its leaves would never yellow and get brown spots, its stems would never become flaccid and sag. If my lily were under my control it would always be perky and erect and bright green and smooth, the way it looks when it is well watered and getting a good amount of sun, when the soil is packed with nutrients and at the right level in the pot.
If my plant were under my control, I wouldn’t need to find it a plant-sitter when I travel, it would just patiently wait for me to return, still healthy and perky and bright. And at the least, if my plant does need a plant sitter, it wouldn’t look even better, with new buds and new leaves, after leaving it in someone else’s care than it looks when it is in my own care.
If my lily were under my control when I talk to it (and yes, I do talk to it) and gently say,”Hey there little peace lily, you are looking sad and saggy and brown today, how about you perk up for me and look all green and fresh blooming today?” And, silently (because duh, plants can’t talk back) my little lily would go full, thick, foliaged bloom.
But the reality is that my little lily is not under my control. The lily is dependent on its requisites — water and sunlight and soil nutrients — in correct proportions to live and thrive and grow. Any imbalance of these has an effect, sagging stems and un-greening leaves and thinning foliage, too much imbalance and the plant will die.
The lily is affected by other 4e objects in its environment, bugs can attack it and consume the leaves, fungus can attack it and consume the stems. A plant-sitter can change its environment or proportion of requisites and it can bloom and grow in response, even if I think, “its not fair my plant thrives so fully when someone else cares for it.”
The lily’s own, internal composition of 4es — its nature — drive it to form flowers at a certain stage of its life, to bloom, to wither and eventually to die, independent of how much I (or my so slightly-too-skilled plant sitter) provide it with its necessary requisites.
“OK Alana — lets do the questions then”. “I’m ready to go Great Lord”
1) Is your little lily changeable or unchanging? “Lord, the way may little lily changes –not just every day, but even over the course of a day — are plain for anyone to see. I can watch it droop when it needs water and perk up again within a few hours after receiving it. I see leaves grow through phases of green and yellow and even brown, I see soil levels decrease and the plant grow taller and wider. I see new leaves form and fall off, new bugs grow and wither.
2) Is a plant that changes stressful or easeful? ” Here is the thing Lord, I love that little plant, it makes me so happy when it looks full and fresh and healthy. When it begins to sag though, as it changes, it makes me depressed to see a limp brown thing sitting on the corner of my desk. But, as it freshens and perks again, I am happy (though a little less happy if it perks under my plant sitter’s care instead of my own) — my emotions are dragged around, pulled-up and down, by this little plant, that is the most stressful part of all.
3) Is a plant that is not under your control, that is changeable and causes stress something you ought to, something that you logically are able to, call your own?
“I hear you Lord, it’s a great qq that I still can’t give a flat-no to yet, but I can say this much:  That lily ticks along, growing, blooming, sagging, perking, yellowing, greening all according to its nature rather than my wishes. It is dependent not on me, but on its requisites. It lives and thrives dependent on these requisites and it ultimately dies independent of  how perfectly or thoroughly it has acquired them.

 Day 5: Part 2: My Body is Like My Peace Lily (Plant)

My body is not under my control it is not mine, it is reliant upon its requisites.
If my body were under my control my hair would never gray, my skin would never get red and brown spots, my muscles wouldn’t go flaccid and my skin wouldn’t sag. If my body were under my control it would be perky, bright and smooth, the way it looked back when I was fit and firm and radiant at 25.
If my body were under my control, I wouldn’t need doctors to prescribe meds, stylists to cut my hair, facialists to clear my acne, parents to care for me when I am young, or Eric to care for me when I am sick. This body would not rely on no one but myself.
If my body were under my control, my will would be its command. The word — the mere thought — to be perky, bright, fit, healthy, alert, strong, raring to go, would result in perkiness, brightness, fitness, health, alertness, strength and ability to go go go till the cows came home.
But the reality, that I so hate to face, is that my body is not under my control. My body is dependent on consuming requisites — food, water — in correct proportions to live, thrive and grow.
My body is affected by other 4e objects in the environment, bugs can attack it and consume its blood, fungus can can attack it and consume its skin. Animals can eat it, cars can crush it,  bacteria and viruses can enter it and shift its state and composition creating illness.  Excess cold can freeze tissue causing frostbite and excess heat can raise body temperature causing brain damage.
The body’s own, internal composition of 4es — its nature — drive it to grow, to go through puberty and menopause, to deplete collagen and sag, to age and wither and eventually die, independent of how much I offer it requisites or protect it from other 4e objects in the environment. When the conditions for gray hairs, skin spots, flaccid muscles, fractured bones, brittle nails, wounds, reflux, worn joints, thickened arteries and altered hormones have been met, gray hairs, skin spots, flaccid muscles, fractured bones, brittle nails, wounds, reflux, worn joints, thickened arteries and altered hormones will ensue no matter how much I don’t want them to.
Are there things I can do to alter the arrangement of 4es in my body? Sure, I can pluck gray hairs, bleach skin spots and moisturize dry skin. But these alterations do not prove my control — if I were in control my hair would not gray, my skin would not spot or dry in the first place. And at least, if it did, my fixes would be permanent, not temporary, and I could ultimately decide and dictate the fate of this body.
“OK Alana — lets do the questions then”. “Copy that Great Lord”
1) Is your body changeable or unchanging? Clearly this body changes Lord. Not just every day, but even over the course of the day, I can watch skin get dry and flaky and then plump and moisturize after I apply cream. I can feel alert in the morning and unable to fight sleep that same night. I have watched it change from child to teen to twenties, 30s, and now 40s: weight has changed, body shape has changed, face sagged, joints have stiffened, sun spots have darkened and esophagus has eroded. Change has been unceasing.
2) Is a body that changes stressful or easeful? My body is my number one cause of stress My Lord. I love it so much, I depend on it, it brings me such joy when it is pretty and fit and healthy — when the skin is spotless and the hair all brown, when the muscles are taunt and the fat at a minimum, when the joints don’t catch and the brain feels alert and awake. When it sags and fatigue and grows blotchy or feverish though it makes me so depressed and afraid. I feel loss. I feel anxiety about future loss. But after I lose weight from a diet, after my rosacea meds heal skin spots, after biopsies return normal, my sense of elation and ease soar. I live  a painful  emotional rollercoaster because of how I react to this body.
3) Is a body that you clearly don’t control, that changes and stresses you the hell out something that you  ought to, something that you logically are able to, call you or your own or representative of you?
I desperately wish I could just say no and be done already, but I know I can’t deceive either you Great Lord nor to myself. Here however is what I can say:
This body ticks along, growing, blooming, sagging, perking, coloring, thickening, thinning, fatiguing, waking, pained and sickening and healing all according to its nature rather than my wishes. It lives and thrives dependent on requisites, its form depends on elements. Nothing about this body exists ‘outside the system of the world’, there is no way to exempt it from being impacted by the process of shifting and changing configurations. Even if I could guarantee optimal nutrients and environment for this body it will die. Its journey ends in the same exact termination point as plants and cars and clothes and homes and every other body.
2020 Retreat Part 4 — A Cabin/Body That Doesn’t Keep Me Safe Can’t be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 4 — A Cabin/Body That Doesn’t Keep Me Safe Can’t be Mine

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Day 4 Part 1: My Vacation Cabin is Not Mine 

My Vacation Cabin is not under my control (it is not mine, it cannot guarantee safety or protection).
If the cabin were under my control, I would feel comfortable there all the time — there wouldn’t be dust everywhere, the hot water wouldn’t take forever to heat, the pipes wouldn’t creak and there wouldn’t be mold that aggravated my asthma.
If my cabin were under my control the power wouldn’t just spontaneously go out, especially not when I am busy and need it to work and get stuff done.
Most importantly, if the cabin were under my control it would do the ‘job I hired it for’ and keep me safe, away from people, socially distanced and guaranteed covid free.   There would be no incidents or accidents — like rabies exposure from bats in my bedroom one night — that forced me out into the scariest of places in a scary covid world: The ER for rabies shots.
If that cabin were under my control I would be able to say: “Damn it cabin, be the cabin I thought you were from the listing photos — all clean and modern and convenient. Have easy hot water and no dust and shouldn’t there at least be power? Cabin, oh cabin, even if you can’t keep me comfortable do your most critical job and keep me safe!” And of course, if the cabin were mine it would brightly, cleanly, comfortable and safely reply, “Your wish is my command.”
The fact that the cabin is not mine to control is plainly evidenced by the dirt and the creaking and the mold induced coughing and, above all else, by the 6 hours I spent in the emergency room last week for rabies shots post bat exposure.
“So Alana, is that cabin of yours constant or changing.” Well clearly it is changing My Lord — the dust seems to get thicker, the power flickers and the bats just  appeared out of no where.”
“And Alana, is something that keeps changing stressful or un-stressful” “Lord, the lights and the dirt and the cabin noises, those are a little bit stressful, they are not the peaceful vacation ‘add-ons’ I would have chosen. But going to the ER during Covid was one of the most stressful experiences of my entire life: I have been so careful, so disciplined about Covid, I hadn’t seen a soul up-close, besides Eric, in months and there I was in an ER where ever patient could have been the vector of the covid infection I had worked so hard, sacrificed so much, just to avoid.”
Before I signed the lease, I looked at the pictures, I visited the cabin, I read reviews online. By all the evidence I could uncover this looked like a comfortable and safe place to ride out a covid summer. After all, I did all my home work, I was prepared, I KNEW exactly what to expect once we arrived. The problem, the root of  my suffering, is in the vast difference between my cabin expectations and my cabin reality.
 “Alright then Alana, do you think it is sane or rational to call a cabin that you don’t control, that is changeable and stressful and precipitated a trip to the ER during a pandemic ‘yours’?
Lord, I do admit that I am still TBD on this question, but ere is what I do know and can say so far:
Rupa is constantly changing. If there had been a bat in the house on the day of my viewing I would have never rented the place. I became attached to the idea of a bat free house, but the situation changed, the arrangement changed and voila, enter bat.
What is more is that over and over I have proven myself to be piss poor at ‘interpreting the rupa’ . I look at an arrangement of rupa and I start reading tea leaves — well decorated means clean and comfortable, remote means safe. But the truth is, time and again my ‘rupa predictions’ fail and I am left with the disappointment, dangers and consequences of living in a rupa world that reflects the nature of rupa itself  (impermanent, stressful, not self) not the meaning I assign it.
I know cabins can be dirty, and not comfortable, and not safe. That is a normal part of the world. But once that cabin became ‘mine’, at least for a little while, I thought it would be a super cabin, special and different and, at least, free from danger. The fact that my cabin is just like every other cabin in its inability to keep me either safe or comfortable does make me question the grounds on which I go about claiming it as mine.
  Day 4 Part 2: My Body is Like My Vacation Cabin.

My Body is not under my control (it is not mine, it cannot guarantee safety or protect me).
If my body were under my control I would feel at ease, pain free and comfortable in it all the time. There wouldn’t be dirt and filth that accumulate on my skin, my  joints would never feel stuck and would always feel ready to move, my body wouldn’t make annoying sounds like farting and burping and I wouldn’t have microscopic bugs that live in my skin and cause rosacea.
If my body were under my control, it wouldn’t just stop from exhaustion, it wouldn’t need rests and sleep and breaks, especially not when I am busy and need it to get stuff done.
Above all, if this body were under my control it would keep me safe, it would shield me from stabs or gun shots or car accidents or falls, bacteria and viruses and parasites and animals that seek to consume me,  and it would absolutely not begin attacking itself with cancer cells and autoimmune diseases and allergies.
If this body were under my control I would simply be able to say, body, body, please don’t get hurt, please don’t get sick, be comfortable and clean, be quiet and stop embarrassing me with your sounds or worrying me with your growing moles or forcing me to sleep when I feel so desperately that I need to stay awake.  And my body, clean and firm, silent and alert, pain and disease free would say, ” Your wish is my command!”
But I know for a fact my body is not  under my control because it couldn’t repel bats in my sleep. I needed emergency care and shots because the body’s elements on their own are unable to repel rabies, they require the consumption of a 4e rabies vaccine in order to shift into a form that will prevent the rabies virus from consuming me. A body I control would be absolutely self protecting, always able and prepared to fight off disease.
I know this body is not mine to control because sounds and scents and stiffness and pain that I do not want plague me constantly. I know this body isn’t under my control because I can’t count on it to protect me and to keep me safe, not just from outside forces, but even from itself — I know my own skin cells may have turned cancerous and be trying to consume me. I know my body is not under my control because it follows its nature, shifting and decaying, dirtying, expelling waste and getting sick instead of following my rules and desires about what my body should be.
“So Alana, is that body of yours changing or unchanging?” “Clearly Lord it is changing all the time. It goes through cycles of dirty and clean, of pain and no pain, of sleep and waking.” With age my joints have stiffened and my movement restricted in ways unimaginable in my youth and with passing years new illnesses arise, or threaten to arise, that reduce my sleep even further.”
“Alana, would you say a body that keeps changing is stressful or un-stresful?” ” Great Lord, this shifting, changing, body is a world of stress. There are small annoyances like increased flatulence and filth and there are panic-attack or pain inducing changes like asthma attacks and mole growth. I have spent my life working so hard to take care of my body, to keep it healthy and safe from harm, but for all of that effort, decay and disease keep stepping in, trumping all my will and intention and sovereignty over this body. It makes me so sad and scared. I feel helpless.”
‘Alrighty then Alana, do you really think it is sane or logical to say that a body you don’t control, that is stressful and changeable, that gets dirty and tired and worst of all sick, is something that belongs to you?
Well Great Lord, I still can’t issue that super solid no that the text books tell me is correct. But this much I can say –On some level I realize that I must just expect that if my body was healthy yesterday, it will be healthy today and tomorrow, because each new illness or new pain is a shock and surprise. I think, no not me, it simply couldn’t be… But the truth is that  rupa is constantly changing. Skin that was healthy before can become irritated or cancerous when the conditions for irritation or cancer have arisen in its arrangement of the 4es. This is normal.
What is more is that over and over I have proven myself to be terrible at  ‘interpreting the rupa’ . A lifetime of hypochondria tells me that just because I think new lumps mean cancer and chest pain means heart attack these things can be, and have been in the past, fungus and acid reflux. Just because I thought the new spot on my foot was a wart it doesn’t mean it is not skin cancer.  Knowing I am so terrible at ‘reading the rupa’, makes me suspicious that my reading of the rupa of this body as ‘me’ or ‘mine’ may in fact be incorrect.
I know other human bodies get dirty, flatulent, tired, pained and diseased. I read the news, I see the lives of folks around me, this is normal, common, everyday  stuff.  But  when it comes to my body, I seriously think things will be different, it will stay young, it will stay fresh and it will stay healthy. My body, at least in my mind, is special and different, it is safe and comfortable. The problem is that all the evidence in my real life refutes this idea of specialness that exists in my mind — my body acts like every body, aging, changing, causing stress and pain. If my body is exactly the same – in substance and behavior — of absolutely every body, then what is the logic, or the use, of claiming this particular one as mine?
2020 Retreat Part 3 — That Pair of Jeans/Face That Change in Accord with Their Nature, and Can’t Be Stopped From Disaggregating, Can’t Be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 3 — That Pair of Jeans/Face That Change in Accord with Their Nature, and Can’t Be Stopped From Disaggregating, Can’t Be Mine

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This contemplation is part of a series of exercises, derived from the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutra, that I did during my 2020 personal retreat. For more details please see the blog  titled Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat.

Day 3: Part 1: My Jeans 
My jeans are not under my control (they are not mine, they change in accordance with their nature and not my rules, no alteration I make to them will  avoid their final state of disaggregation).
If my jeans were under my control they would never get thinning spots or areas that become piled and bumpy. If my jeans were under my control they would stay that same smooth, tough, easy to care for fabric that they were when they were new.
If my jeans were under my control they wouldn’t have started sagging, stretching and loosening, especially not when when I use them according to their purpose, without being particularly rough or abusive to them.
At the very least, if my jeans were under my control they would accept the repair patches I apply without complaint. They would stay repaired, at least a little while, before starting to abrade and errode again, or tear in some new spot.
If my jeans were under my control, I could curse them, or coax them, or implore them or berate them, some word or action of mine would convince them to stop wearing and tearing. And, if they insisted on wearing and tearing, at least honoring my repairs and giving me a little while before I needed to worry about patching again.
But the reality is that my jeans are not under my control. The texture and shape change because the nature of the fabric makes them susceptible to texture and shape changes. Dirt and particles and surfaces in the environment or my body that come in contact with my jeans can shift the composition (the balance of 4es) of the jeans — they can become abraided, piled or stretched. Spills, or wash water, or detergent that come in contact with the jeans can also change their texture making them feel stiffened and thickened rather than the smooth they were when I bought them. Heat from my body or the dryer or the air can weaken the fabric of these jeans (again, shifting the balance of the 4es of the threads) making them even more susceptible to texture change or stretching/saging.  This is normal.
Now, to be clear, I can definitely apply a patch to these eroding jeans.  I have done it before, used my 4e hands to apply a 4e patch, altering the 4e balance of the  jeans (by adding new 4e material) and achieving a repair. But soon after, my patch began to fray and peel up, so I know the repair is temporary.
So long as it is within the nature of the object to be repaired, it can be repaired. But because the nature of these jeans is ultimately to disaggregate, no effort on my part will ever, ever ever ever ever, ever prevent their ultimate demise because that demise is in their nature. So much for control Alana!
When the causes and conditions for this abrading/sagging/stretching/ stiffening/ patching/ patch peeling have been met,  the jeans will shift and change no matter what my preferences, no matter how embarrassed I may be that my butt is hanging out..
“OK Alana, are your jeans constant or inconstant?” “Lord, they are clearly inconstant, they have a totally different fit/look/feel now then they did when I got them.”
“Alana, is something that is inconstant, as you described, satisfying or dissatisfying?” “Lord, I gotta go with dissatisfying on this one. I really would like for my jeans to stay in the like new state — that was the state I bought because that was the state I believed would be satisfying. To have it change like it has, is super disappointing, it makes me feel a little angry, a little bait-and-switched, I am not at all satisfied.”
“So Alana, if you don’t control your jeans, you can alter them temporarily but sure as heck can’t alter their march toward their final destination of demise, they are inconstant and unsatisfying, does it make logical sense to call these jeans ‘yours’? Are these jeans who you are? Are these jeans something you can count on to represent you? I mean really Alana, does your butt hanging out really represent you?”
“OK Lord, I swear I am working on getting to firm no. In the meantime, I will say this: These jeans are just a collection of elements, they aggregate into the shape of jeans, they change and shift their arrangement in accordance with their nature and then they ultimately shift into the state of jean demise. I can use these jeans for some period of time, I can alter them within the limits of their nature, but I have no hope at all of forcing them to alter beyond the bounds of their nature. I have no hope of keeping them. I will admit, to call something I can’t hold on to, I can’t control and I can’t ultimately rely on ‘mine’ is growing a bit challenging.
Day 3: Part 2: My Jeans are Like My Facial Skin
My facial skin is not under my control (it is not mine, it does not represent me, it changes in accordance with its nature and not my rules, no alteration I make to it will avoid its final state of disaggregation).
If my face skin were under my control I would not have rosacea. My skin wouldn’t get thin and crepey in some areas and thick and bumpy in others. It wouldn’t turn red or itch or burn. My skin would be smooth and pretty and perfect like it was when I was younger.
If my face skin were under my control, it wouldn’t sag or wrinkle, it wouldn’t stretch or loosen, especially not when I am diligent about facial exercises and sunscreen and moisturizer and facials.
At the very least, if my skin were under my control, my ‘fixes’ would actually ‘fix’ not temporarily patch, or do nothing visible, or make things worse. One botox shot would last forever, that pricey new moisturizer would have gotten rid of that under eye bag that is driving me nuts, and that first med my doc prescribed for rosacea wouldn’t have made the peeling and burning worse.
But, alas alack, I cannot prevent my skin from assuming arrangements I despise, and I cannot ultimately keep those arrangements, and far worse, at bay. At best, maybe, sometimes, possibly (with the risk of making stuff worse),  I can temporarily alter the state of my skin — within the bounds of its nature — to sometimes/temporarily achieve a look/feel that runs closer rather than further from my imagination/desire. To call such temporary-maybe-sometimes-better-sometimes-worse alterations ‘control’ would idiotic: At the end of the day, no matter my will, my action, my speach or my desire, my facial skin’s elements will shift and adjust in accord with it’s nature and not according to my rules.
Therefore, it is totally normal when my rosacea flares up and my skin looks like a bumpy beat and burns. Afterall, microscopic insects that live on my skin (4e objects) can absolutely consume my skin and alter its balance of elements such that the resulting state is dry, burning, bumpy and red. Gravity and sun and the natural tendencies of aging and shifting in my own body can cause and contribute to my skin shifting shape and becoming saggy and laggy and droopy.
When the causes and conditions for this burning/red/bumpy/thinning/sagging/stretching/wrinkling/peeling and at last, total decay or consumption have been met, Alana can bet her booty (that is hanging out of her patch peeling jeans) that burning/red/bumpy/thinning/sagging/stretching/wrinkling/peeling and at last, total decay or consumption will ensue.
“OK Lady, lets do the questions then”. “You betcha Great Dharma Lord”
1) Is your face skin constant or inconstant? Oh its so obviously inconstant. I had the best skin as a kid, even a teen, no acne, smooth and pretty. Trouble didn’t start till 20, when the acne began, and then the rosacase, and then the eczema, and then the aging. And even each of these things are sometimes a little better and sometimes a little worse. My skin reflects its changing and changeable nature.
2) And is changing and inconstant skin satisfying or unsatisfying?  I am so so so so deeply dissatisfied with my skin. I loved it when I was younger, but each change — in the direction I consider ‘wrong’ is a deep disappointment. It is an embarrassment. I look in the mirror and I cry sometimes at the loss of youth, at the unwillingness of my skin to cooperate. I itch at it and I ice it in the hope to reduce the pain.
Any, momentary satisfaction I had in it when I was younger is now long gone. Any satisfaction I feel when something ‘works’, the rosacea calms or the lotions and potions smooth, is just the grounds for future dissatisfaction when the skin again shifts out of an arrangement I prefer. More sorrow, more drama, more disappointment when what worked for 1 moment fails to work for 2.
3) If you don’t control your skin, it is inconstant and totally unsatisfying, can you really say that it is ‘you’ or ‘yours’ or ‘represents you’? This is a work in progress My Lord, but here is where I am at:
My Jeans, my skin, and every object in this world is just a bundle of elements marching through shifting states of rupa. Rupa objects interact with each other, with the environment, they can shift course (though never go back), but the final destination is always the same, disaggregation or consumed (or some combination of the two).  When the arrangement of skin necessary to manifest rosacea arises, rosacea will arise. I (my nama) can scheme a plan to call the doc, get a script, and my hands can apply the meds (another 4e object). In this regard I can be a cause for a change in my skin, but I can not guarantee a result.
I have used rosacea drugs that didn’t visibly do crap . I have used rosacea drugs that helped and I have used rosacea drugs that made my skin worse. Because any cause I put in place does not ensure the result I want, I am not in control.
The problem is, when I sometimes get a result that is more, rather than less, in line with my imagination/desires, I convince myself I am lord and master of my skin. It is those moment, when the med actually works (at least temporarily) and my skin looks clear and smooth, that I preen in front of the bathroom mirror thinking that there is me, it is mine, it represents me, its current state is in line (ore or less, with one eye closed if I squint kinda hard since 41 is clearly not 21) with who I think I am (ohh the me I wanna be). Unfortunately, it is also those moments that feed both the delusion and the hope and set me up for a world of hurt later on.
Later on will come. A few days after I achieved ‘clear skin’ from my latest meds, I was greeted in the morning mirror with a big new bump. Suddenly my skin wasn’t me, it didn’t represent me, it was aberration — an alteration away from what my mind, in just a few days’ time, had convinced me was normal. But the real normal is 4e skin shifting according to its nature, changing form when stimulus for change has been reached.  Sometimes that is bumpy form. Sometimes it is smooth form. Always its end form is disintegration.
So I guess the real questions for me to consider are these: Can I really find anything of substance in a shifting mass of elements that inevitably, ultimately, c
ease that I can call ‘me’? Especially when I actually only want to call certain states along that shifting set of elements me/represent me/mine? At the very least, I should claim the whole thing in all its states.
And if an object, or my skin, or my body, is just a shifting mass of aggregated elements does it really represent anything other than itself — either its momentary trail marker or perhaps its entire march along the entropy parade path?  I know, I know, my mind likes to imagine that I can superimpose myself, my reflection, onto that shifting mass, but  the efforts seem a bit hollow when I can’t, not even temporarily, guarantee it’ll assume or hold that shape I am seeking (out damned spot).  I mean I would never send my crazy, loud mouthed, unpredictable, totally disobedient, employee to represent me at a conference…
As for something being mine, I’ll admit this is the hardest for me to see right now. Afterall, objects have utility, I can in fact sometimes use them…until I can’t. Which brings me to the question of whether or not I can claim an object that, by its very nature, is a ‘loaner’? Each and every item, even my body, has a rental period when it is up, it is up, whether I want it to be or not.
 A part of me just wants to admit that I can call something mine, or I can call it “Bessie the Cow” , but at the end of the day each object and I will part ways, march away from each other on separate courses. Now, or sooner, or later my time with my skin will come up. Now, sooner or later, my time with my body will come up. Despite all I imagine this body to be, despite the future I have fantasized for it, despite how desperately I feel/think I need it, we will part ways.
2020 Retreat Part 2 — A Fish Tank/Body That Doesn’t Conform to My Expectations Can’t Be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 2 — A Fish Tank/Body That Doesn’t Conform to My Expectations Can’t Be Mine

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This contemplation is part of a series of exercises, derived from the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutra, that I did during my 2020 personal retreat. For more details please see the blog  titled Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat.

Day 2: Part 1: My Fish Tank 

My fish tank is not under my control (it is not mine, it does not conform to my view of it, it doesn’t act in accordance with my imagination or fantasies).
If my fish tank were under my control the glass would not be so fragile — it wouldn’t so easily scratch or chip and I wouldn’t have to worry about it shattering.
If my fish tank were under my control then I could just set it up and it would be easy to maintain–  a little cleaning, a little feeding, and it would keep a steady state equilibrium where the PH and the lighting and the plant load and fish load existed in perfect balance.
If my fish tank were under my control one fish would never attack another, the plants would never grow unchecked, and an algae bloom wouldn’t starve the fish and plants of oxygen. At a minimum, that fish tank would accept and appreciate all my ‘fixes’ and ‘maintenance’ without creating further problems in return.
If that fish tank were actually under my control, I could say, ” Oh fish tank, when I bought you I imagined you would be just an easy, pretty thing. Please be the tank of my imagination and stop being so fragile. Stop with the algae blooms that kill the plants and the PH adjustments that harm the shrimp, and the aggressive fighting catfish and please, please, please just stay in a balanced state so that I can sit back, relax and enjoy you.”
Alas, my fish tank was never the fish tank of my imagination. Dozens of scratches and huge chip in the corner prove it was never under my control. Glass by its nature is fragile, easy to scratch or chip or shatter when a solid of sufficient force encounters it.
Keeping my tank maintained and in balance was a fight of epic proportions. When I went too long without changing the water, ammonia levels rose and my test strips condemned me with dire warning akin to:  ‘Red alert you fish murderer.’ When I changed the waster too frequently chlorine levels rose and my test strips condemned me with dire warning akin to:  ‘Red alert you fish murderer’.
Just a slight excess of food, the same amount that had worked fine for weeks, led to decay that led to bacteria that deprived the tank of oxygen that started killing my plants.  When algae became a problem I bought a ‘cleaner catfish’ to eat the algae, only the catfish was super aggressive and started attacking my other fish. When I put rocks in the tank so my other fish could hide from the bully cat fish the rocks changed the tank PH and my test strips condemned me with dire warning akin to:  ‘Red alert you fish murderer.’
I thought that tank would be a fun toy, but in reality tanks are a complex, interdependent system where components continually shift and impact one another. This is natural — four element objects continually shift and change, they interact with each other and the environment precipitating further change. They act in accordance with the rules of rupa, not the fishtank fantasies of Alana.
“So Alana, is your fish tank constant or inconstant?” “Great Lord, that darn tank was constantly inconstant: chemical balances changing, fish dying, shrimp breeding, plants spreading…what worked perfectly to care for it one day lead to massive disaster and die off the next.”
“And Alana, is something that is inconstant stress full or easeful?” “Stressful!  The irony Great Lord, is that I was so sure that my tank was going to ease my stress, that it would be the relaxing ‘moving picture’, that all the tanks in the mall and the fish store looked to be. But those mall/ fish store moments were just that — brief moments — where tanks appeared to be balanced and harmonious. Once I got the tank home the full picture became clear, constant work to upkeep, continual fear that any given shift –totally out of my control– would destroy the thing I loved.
“Alright Alana, here is the biggie question — do you really think it is fitting to be calling something you don’t control, that is inconstant and stressful ‘you’ or ‘your’ or representative of you’?
Well Great Lord, I still can’t give you a firm, exuberant ‘hellz no’, but I will say this…When I desire something, and therefore seek to claim it as ‘mine.’ I am only really seeing one side of it. I want the pretty, flashy, relaxing, fun bits. I either ignore the ugly, stressful, difficult, decaying parts or I ignore the pain and suffering that getting those ‘dark-side’ parts will bring me. But with glass I get breaking. With fish I get death and loss. With a mini ecosystem I get a ton of upkeep and work. If something is ‘mine’ it has to be mine in all its states, not just the ones I want.
Day 2: Part 2: My Fish Tank to My Body

My body is not under my control (it is not mine, it does not conform to my view of it, it doesn’t act in accordance with my imagination or my fantasies)
If my body were under my control it wouldn’t be so fragile — my skin wouldn’t scratch, my joints wouldn’t chip and bones wouldn’t break.
If my body were under my control then I could just do the basic care and feeding, add in a little working out and sleeping, and I would be good to go. This body would just hit a stride of steady state equilibrium — my blood sugar, cholesterol, vitamins and hormones all in perfect balance.
If my body were under my control I would never worry about cancer cells attacking healthy cells, about a mole growing unchecked or that a fungal infection that would kill off my ‘good bacteria.’ At a minimum, my body would let me ‘fix’ it without spiraling into further diseases and decay.
If my body were under my control, I would damn well know it by now because I have spent many nights pleading with it. I say, “body, please just be the thing I imagine you to be, be healthy and dependable, be beautiful and ageless, be mobile and fit and pain free. At least, be a little more like the body I had in my 20s, or I’d even settle for 30s…”But alas, my body doesn’t respond, it is not the body of my imagination.
Instead I live with constant fragility — nails that chip and hair that breaks. Joints that are already wearing down and a fractured toe that will attest to the fact that with sufficient force, a hard jagged pavement can break a bone.
Keeping this body maintained and in balance is literally a struggle for my life. I started taking green coffee supplement to manage my blood sugar but it irritated my bladder, causing incontinence. I started eating meat to manage low blood sugar, but the saturated fats have made my cholesterol too high. I apply sunscreen to protect my skin but as a result my vitamin D levels are too low. I use a steroid inhaler to keep my airways from constricting, but the very same chemical that opens my airways leads to fungal overgrowth in my mouth. I took up running to increase my cardiovascular health, but stripped my hip joint in the process. I await lab results from every check-up with bated breath — always afraid I will find some new, lurking, imbalance that endangers my life.
From my perspective, it feels like my body is constantly faltering and breaking, but in truth its behavior is completely natural, not broken. This body is a complex, interdependent system where components continually shift and impact each other. In this body, the 4 elements are constantly shifting, interacting with each other internally and with other 4 element objects externally: Aggregating, re-aggregating/shifting/changing proportions, disaggregating, consuming and being consumed. This is the cycle of Rupa. No matter how much I fantasize it were otherwise, this is the cycle to which ‘my’ rupa body is enslaved.
“Allrighty Alana, you know the questions by now.” “Yes, Great Dharma Lord, shoot”
1) Is that bod of yours constant or inconstant? — this body is constantly inconstant. Every year, every day, hell every minute is something new. Last year my cholesterol was alright, now it is through the roof. A few months ago my rosacea was fine and then suddenly I had a horrible flare. I go through cycles of hot/cold, hungry/satiated, tired/alert. It changes so frequently, and sometimes so subtly, I can’t keep up, I’m not even fully aware, even if it is something like a growing cancer or blood clot that imperils my very life. Above everything, I wish I could go back to a time when I was healthier and prettier. At least I would feel at ease if I could ‘keep what I have now’, but my body keeps changing.
2) Is something that is inconstant stressful or easeful? I could literally write volumes about my fear, stress, sorrow and loss — just focused on my body — and still it wouldn’t cover the half of it. Right this moment I await results of a skin biopsy, nervous that my long standing ‘spot’ morphed before my eyes, unbeknownst to me creeping from benign to malignant. The thing is, My Lord, in those moments I get a clean bill of health, in those moments I feel fit-as-a-fiddle and oh-so-pretty, I relish in this body: I primp it, preen it, travel in it and peacock around, and all the stress and anxiety of its sick/aging/loss side are nearly forgotten…
3) Drum roll please….Is something that is clearly not in your control, mega inconstant and epicly stressful fitting to be called ‘you’ or ‘yours’ or ‘your representative’? I don’t know Great Lord, it’s my body, it is so so so damn hard to see it as anything but ‘self’ or ‘mine’ or ‘me’. But I will share this…
The other night I was in the shower, looking down at a body that, let’s face it, has seen fitter and perkier days. It made me depressed to think about the loss of that old body and even more depressed to know that this new one –assuming I live long enough– would likely give way to something even more atrophied.  Sure I had a few good years of being at a physical prime, but relative to sub/post prime years how many were truly prime? How did I agree to sign-up for this sometimes-satisfactory-form, but more-time-unsatisfactory-form? And even if I signed-up for a ‘body rental’ for utility sake, why did I grasp at this body, and claim it ,and mine-ify the thing? Why did I get so bound-up, make it the foundation of a ‘fit/hot’  identity that couldn’t possibly last? If I am going to claim this body as mine, I should at least be claiming it in all its shifting, decaying, disaggregating states. If I am healthy Alana I am sick Alana. If I am pretty Alana I am ugly Alana. If I am baby Alana and teenage Alana and 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, …..Alana, don’t I also have to be corpse Alana? Maggot eaten Alana? totally disaggregated Alana?
2020 Retreat Part 1B — A Body that Disregards my Rules, like My Night Guard and Like My Teeth, Can’t be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 1B — A Body that Disregards my Rules, like My Night Guard and Like My Teeth, Can’t be Mine

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This contemplation is part of a series of exercises, derived from the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutra, that I did during my 2020 personal retreat. For more details please see the blog, Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat.

To ‘celebrate ‘ my first day of retreat and to really make sure I had a through grasp on my homework assignment, I decided to do a little bonus work: In addition to comparing my bite guard to my teeth — 1 part of my body — which we saw in the last blog, I decided to also compare my bite guard to my whole body. So below is my HW from Day 1 Part B: My Body is Like My Bite Guard 

My Body is not under my control (it is not mine, it doesn’t act according to my rules and desires).
If my body were mine it would not become filthy and grimy or begin to smell. I wouldn’t need to spend a ton of time showering or brushing my teeth or washing my hair, I would simply always be clean.
If my body were under my control it wouldn’t soften and loose its shape, my skin would be firm, my body would be taunt my muscles wouldn’t atrophy and my boobs wouldn’t sag. Especially not from regular daily life, when I watch my diet and keep active and wear sunscreen.
If my body were under my control, my esophagus wouldn’t erode from reflux, I wouldn’t attract insects and viruses and bacteria that lead to my decay, the cartilage around my joints wouldn’t tear and crack. At the very least, my body would ‘hold-on and hold-out’ as long as I think I need it, so long as I want it, so long as I hope and expect to have it live.
If this body were under my control I could simply say, “body, please stop with the sagging, the smelling, the dirtying, the fattening, the atrophy — you are embarrassing me and taking up so much of my time with care and maintenance.”And upon saying that –upon ordering that– every part would be perfectly perky and clean and the right kinda plump. If this body were mine, it would listen when I implored it, “please, at the very least, live — don’t break, don’t die, don’t leave me high and dry. The least you can do is survive, if not thrive, given all the fitness and feeding and care and medications and vitamins…”
Body however is all, “Honey Badger Don’t Care…”, body makes it abundantly clear it is not under my control. My body requires regular washing because it lives in an environment filled with dust and dirt. My skin and body have begun to sag because the tissues of the body, can shift in composition (they can become more rigid/ softer, they can become more bloated and wet/drier, they can become hot and inflamed/they can cool, they can become more flexible and fluid/ fixed and immobile), change form, in this case becoming less solid and taunt.  This body is subject to being consumed by viruses, insects and bacteria because all four element objects are subject to being consumed. My esophagus can erode and my joints can tear all because the  the force of the liquids in stomach acid, a solids in bone can act on, and break, body parts. This is all totally normal.
“So Alana, is your body there a ‘forever-fixed-steady-state-kinda-thing’ or does it change and dis-aggregate and degrade?” Obviously Great Dharma Lord, it changes and dis-aggregates and degrades, if I just open up a photo album, or my medical chart, it has all the evidence I need.”
“And Alana, is something that changes and dis-aggregates and degrades stressful or easeful?” “So, so, so stressful My Lord. The care and feeding is time consuming and unpleasant. The sagging and the aging and the de-conditioning is an embarrassment. I stand in front of the mirror and lament the loss of my plump skin and thin/fit bod. I work to cover it up with clothes and make-up; I try to regain what I lost with workouts and botox and facials. Whatever small gains I can make give me momentary pleasure– hope– that is dashed when, inevitably my body shifts again. “
“The worst though is the fear, and the pain, and the fear of pain. I live in fear of the day that, just like my night guard, my body will break beyond repair. That a the force of a car bumper will crack open my body as the force of my jaw has the guard. Or that a bullet will pierce my body, as bone already has done to my joint.  I worry that a day may come that the tissues in my body shift into a cancer. Or that the plaques in my arteries block blood from flowing to my heart and cause a heart attack. I worry and worry, all while I hurt from the injuries already there. Hurt from the investigative colonoscopy and the mole biopsy. Fearing more hurt is to come.
 ” OK Alana, the qq I know you have been waiting for, ” If something is so clearly not in your control, if it is a changing, dis-aggregating, degrading, dying thing, if it is the source of your greatest suffering, can you actually regard that thing as ‘you’, or ‘yours’ or representative of you’? Seriously, can you say that body is what you are?”
 I’m sorry Great Lord, I’m still not totally at the ‘no’ yet, but I will say this much…This body doesn’t dirty or sag or break or die when I desire it to. It dirties or sags or breaks or dies when the conditions for dirtying/sagging/breaking/ dying are met. The result is that I suffer the pain of losing something I desire or the pain of getting something I don’t desire. The more I desire the harder I cling. The more I cling the harder I suffer. So perhaps it sin’t super smart to continue to cling so hard to something I clearly cannot keep. And in truth, I am clinging to a four element object, a composite of shifting components that, like all four element things with die and decay and return to the earth. How can I regard something empty of all but elements as me, as who I am, of representative of me, or anything else at all?
2020 Retreat Part 1– A Disobedient Bite Guard/Teeth That Disregards my Rules Can’t be Mine

2020 Retreat Part 1– A Disobedient Bite Guard/Teeth That Disregards my Rules Can’t be Mine

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This contemplation is part of a series of exercises, derived from the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutra, that I did during my 2020 personal retreat. For more details please see the prior blog, Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat.
Day 1: Part 1: My Bite Guard
My bite guard is not under my control (it is not mine, it does not obey me, it doesn’t act according to my rules and desires).
If my bite guard were under my control it wouldn’t get thick with slime, or get plaque stuck in it, or begin to smell. If it were under my control, it would simply stay fresh and clean and I wouldn’t need to slave away, scrubbing at it each day.
If my bite guard were under my control it wouldn’t  have begun to soften and to loose its shape, structure and fit, especially not just from ‘normal and prescribed use.’
If the bit guard were under my control,  it most definitely wouldn’t abrade and crack. At the very least, that bite guard would wait to crack at a convenient time, not during a pandemic when going to the dentist to fix it is so hard and dangerous.
If that thing were under my control, I could just say, ‘listen up bite guard, do my bidding already” and it would stop with the slime and the smell and the loosening, abrading and cracking. It wouldn’t be so darn impervious to my pleading, “just hold together a little longer before you break please please (seriously, pretty please with sugar on top)”.
But the reality is that bite guard isn’t under my control. Every morning I pull it from my mouth and, no matter how deeply I wish it weren’t so, it is stinky and slimy. Because it ‘lives’ in an environment –my mouth — that make it prone to have the bacteria and plaque stick to it.
It is abraded and saggy and it has a crack that continues to grow and  spread because it is a object that, when exposed to a certain combination/amount of heat from my body and saliva from my mouth and rubbing from my teeth and  pressure from my jaw will begin to wear and stretch and crack. Its normal.
When the causes and conditions for this abrading/sagging/cracking have been met, it will degrade no matter how darn inconvenient the timing is for Alana.
“So Alana — is your bite guard permanent or impermanent?” ” Obviously, Great Dharma Lord, the thing is impermanent: I remember when it was clean and shiny and new with absolutely no sign of cracks or abrading. Now, it is clearly decaying and eroding. Frankly I think the thing is about to split in half.”
“And Alana, is something that is impermanent, like you described, stressful or easeful?” “Oh Great Lord, I am hella stressed! I feel like I need this guard to protect my teeth, to prevent them from cracking and eroding. At the same time, I am so afraid to go to the dentist right now and have it replaced — I don’t wanna catch covid. I have taken such good care of it, used it as prescribed, all I want is to be able to depend on it when I need it and here it is breaking when arguably I need it the most (to stay out of the dentist’s –during covid — needing a root canal for cracked teeth).”
“Alrighty then Alana, do you think it is fitting to call something that is out of your control, changeable and stressful ‘who you are’, ‘yours’ or ‘representative of you’? “
“Honestly Great Lord, I ‘know’ the correct answer is supposed to be ‘no’, but the truth is, this is something I struggle with. I suppose though, when I think about it, it is clear that I can’t rely on this bite guard. It is not dependable because it doesn’t subject itself to my rules and my commands. It acts in accordance with its nature (4 elements), shifting in response to its environment and its interaction with other objects  — like my teeth and my saliva and bacteria (other 4 element objects). It does not act in accordance  with my desires or my ‘needs’, not even during a freaking pandemic. So I suppose it is in fact hard to claim this thing as my own.

Day 1: Part 2: My Teeth are Like My Bite Guard

My teeth are seriously not under my control (they are not mine, they do not obey me, they don’t act according to my rules and desires).
If my teeth were under my control they wouldn’t get grimy, they wouldn’t get covered in plaque, they wouldn’t get food in them,  and they wouldn’t smell. If they were under my control I wouldn’t need to brush them and floss them and get special cleanings at the dentist, because they would simply be, and stay, fresh and clean.
If my teeth were under my control they wouldn’t soften from decay, losing enamel and loosening in my mouth. Especially not when I take care of them and use them in a ‘normal’ way to chew on food, not anything crazy like wood or metal.
If my teeth were under my control they wouldn’t be worn down and for sure they wouldn’t be cracking. At the very least, they could wait to crack and break for when I am not on vacation, traveling away from home, or afraid to go to the dentist because of a pandemic.
If my teeth were actually something I could control, they would listen to me when I asked them to stop dirtying and decaying and breaking and hurting. At least, they would take into account all the hard work — brushing and flossing and oil pulling — I do to care for them and return the favor by waiting to break for a time that wasn’t an inconvenience to me. “I mean seriously, come on teeth…”
But the truth is, my teeth quite simply aren’t under my control. My teeth decay and stink because they hang out in an environment — a mouth — where bacteria, that cause odor and decay, fester and grow on anything they can find to consume (like teeth and bite guards).
My teeth are weakened, eroded and cracking because they are an object which, when exposed to the right combination/amount of heat from my body and food/drink, saliva and imbibed liquids, crunching and friction against solid foods and one another, and pressure from my jaw or from food or foreign objects, will begin to wear and crack. It is normal.
When the causes and conditions for decay or cracking or falling out or pain have been met, decay or cracking or falling out or pain ensue. My teeth clearly don’t give a darn that I may be busy, or on vacation, or afraid to go to the dentist.
“So Alana, are those teeth of yours steady-state or are they changeable?” “Obviously Great Dharma Lord, they are changeable — they go through states of dirty and clean. They have had states of being less decayed and more decayed. There was a time when they weren’t worn or cracked at all,  but these days it’s crown city up in my mouth.”
“And Alana, is something that is subject to change, like your teeth, stressful or easeful?” Seriously Great Lord, almost no body part has caused me more stress over the years than my teeth. For decades I was afraid to go to the dentist, so I worried constantly what would happen if a tooth broke and needed care. When my teeth did break, I was in terrible pain, because of the lack of dental care. I have had teeth break at the worst possible times, had to drop everything and rush to the dentist. I literally have nightmares about my teeth falling out. Teeth for me are like the definition of stress.”
“Soooo, do you think it makes a whole lotta sense to call something that you don’t control, that keeps breaking and decaying and that is super stressful ‘who you are’, ‘yours’ or ‘representative of you.'”
“I don’t know Lord… But, I guess, when push comes to shove, it is pretty clear, that for all of my hope and all of my effort, my teeth ultimately do not bow to my bidding. Even though, under the right circumstances, I can cause my teeth to be brushed and fluorided and crowned, I can’t guarantee that I will achieve the results I want for my teeth. Even when sometimes an intervention can help, there are times when that same intervention fails (I have had some crowned teeth get ‘saved’ and others get ‘killed by the crowning process), underscoring the truth — I am no master of my teeth.
My teeth break and erode and decay in accordance with their nature (4 element objects). Any influence I have over them is bound  by their nature, which — like all 4 element objects — is impermanence. To think I can possess/hold onto/keep an impermanent object is pretty  fishy thinking…by that logic, I guess I can say these teeth do not belong to me.
Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat

Introduction to Contemplations From 2020 Personal Retreat

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In August 2020 I decided to do a personal, self-guided, week-long retreat because I was unable to join the Temple’s Zoom retreat several weeks prior. I had learned from a friend about one of the exercises taught at the temple retreat and it deeply resonated with me, I decided to focus my own contemplations for the week on doing a deep-dive into this same exercise.

The exercise was quite simple, a series of questions, framed as a conversation between the Buddha and the practitioner, to guide contemplation on the nature of self in regard to our bodies and our physical belongings. The contemplation begins by taking an object that we own and considering whether or not that object is really under our control. It then imagines the Buddha asking the following questions to which one must formulate a reply:

  1. “Alana, is your ____ (object chosen for contemplation) constant or inconstant?”
  2. “And Alana, is something that is inconstant stress full or easeful?”
  3.  “Is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: ‘This is mine’. ‘This is my self’. ‘This is what I am’?”

The same considerations and questions are then internalized and applied to one’s body. Rinse and repeat.

I had already been hot and heavy on the topic of the 4 elements, self and self belonging for over a year, so this new ‘take’ on my old contemplations was deeply appealing. But what really moved me about this ‘exercise’ is that comes straight from the Anatta-lakkhana sutra (literally translated the characteristics of not-self sutra): These are teachings straight from the Buddha’s mouth, and damn are they juicy ones!

The Anatta-lakkhana sutra  methodically and brilliantly lays out the evidence for why the 5 aggregates are not ourselves; each of the aggregates are subject to dis-ease, they do not abide by our orders/rules, they continually change, and they cause a shit ton of suffering, so what business do we have regarding these as self? Each aggregate, is subject to the 3 common conditions (suffering, impermanence, no-self), what we regard as ‘self’ (i.e. the 5 aggregates) is not exempt, not different or special.  At least for the OG listeners of this sermon, when they really saw these aggregates –everything in the world — for what it was (suffering, impermanent and not-self) they became disenchanted. “Disenchanted he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion he is released.”  This sutra is literally a how-to-guide for enlightenment!

The first level of enlightenment deals specifically with correcting our wrong views vis-a-vie rupa, the aggregate of physical form. This is the focus of the exercise,  a deep dive into the nature of rupa/4 elements to understand whether or not objects can really be ours. Can they follow our rules and meet our expectations if they arise and cease based on, and are bound to follow, the rules of rupa (the rules of the world, i.e. the 3 common conditions)? Can things made of elements, that predictably come together and then disintegrate into their elemental parts, be with us forever?  Will they be there when we want/ or need them? If not how do we justify calling these items ours? Doesn’t the indisputable nature of these objects (to change, to not do our bidding) stress us the fuck out? Don’t we feel loss, disappointment, pain, distress and despair on account of the nature of these objects (or rather on account of our desire for them to be other than what they are)? Can we really say that something that causes us suffering and stress is us/ours/represents us? Spoiler alter here: The answer of course is NO, the sutra tells us as much. But the exercise is about more than just saying no, it is about PROVING NO, to ourselves, finding no in our hearts. That was my goal for my retreat, and the next few blogs will share my own efforts at the exercise from the Anatta-lakkhana sutra to get there.

Afterall, when in doubt, the Buddha’s own words are the perfect guide to practice!

 

Video Sent By Mae Neecha Part 8

Video Sent By Mae Neecha Part 8

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In July 2020 Mae Neecha sent over a video for me to view to aid my practice and fuel my contemplations. I am going to share the video below as well as  and my reply to Mae Neecha (edited a bit for clarity) and her comments back to me. Though this video came from Mae Neecha, as opposed to Mae Yo, I am going to use the Mae Yo  sequencing and tag in order to enhance searchable and organization of these blog types.

The Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnshlMG6eBI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnshlMG6eBI

Alana’s Response to Mae Neecha: Unusual beauty: As the video went through the series of beautification practices across the world, it felt like the message was ” look at these freaks, doing these extreme, painful, frightening (using traditional tools, no anesthetic, etc) things to achieve a look that, from a western perspective, isn’t even beautiful at all” when my mind followed that narrative, I came to the conclusion that it is so much pain for nothing, it is crazy.

But then, none of beautification rituals we do here in America, ones I have certainly done, show up in the show. Botox, surgery, fat loss machines and dermarolling. Even less invasive — how about ‘stinging lip glosses that make your lips plumper, diet pills that make you feel like a pixie on crack but make you thin, extreme workouts, starvation diets…These things are so painful, some dangerous, hard, time consuming. But these, familiar Western beauty rituals, to achieve Western beauty standards, these I think are “worth it” somehow. At least these make sense to me, they don’t seem freakish or grotesque like the rituals shown in the video.

But what is the difference really? If those folks filing their teeth or putting rings on their neck are crazy for their beauty enhancements, so am I for my botox and fillers and extreme workouts. It is my delusion, my desire to achieve some ideal, identity, advantage that I think a particular look will provide for which I so freely suffer. The kicker of course, which the video makes clear is the ideal –like beauty standards across cultures — is constructed anyway. Not absolute. And certainly not enduring because time will undo any efforts anyway.

Sometimes it’s longer duration, but sometimes it is sudden or unexpected duration…all it took was a lockdown order and now my botox has worn off; wrinkles I never thought I would need to contend with, never thought I would need to face, are appearing on my forehead. Why can’t I put down this obsession with beauty? What is the benefit I think is so great that I am willing to keep enduring my own beauty rituals for? Enduring when their effect is only temporary anyway.

The other night a scene from a show I was watching popped into my head: In the show, an adult son, is literally being whored out by his parents for money. The son is given an opportunity by a friend to leave, he would be given a job and a home and a new life away from his crazy parents that whore him for money. But the son won’t go. He says he can’t leave his folks because they can’t make it without him.

It was a scene that really bothered me, I couldn’t figure out why the hell the son wouldn’t just leave — I would. I contemplated on it for a while and finally I realized for the son, the identity of being the person who was needed, depended on, was the reason he endured actual torture, even when given a way out. That is why he didn’t just put down his old life and leave. Same as I can’t put down my own torturous beauty rituals and be done.

Even when there is a steep cost, the need to affirm ourselves, who we think we are, is so profound we persist in the arbitrary activities we believe will affirm us. Even through the dividends I get from any painful efforts are temporary, I persist. So the question is – how do I stop? How do I stop if I already know climbing up the mountain sucks, being on top is short ( and distracted by thoughts of preservation of the high and climbing higher next) and the down sucks even more?

Response from Mae Neecha: More Tuk Tot Pie (suffering). Stopping comes from seeing enough Tuk Tot Pie, in both the worldly and dhamma senses

Further thoughts on the topic of beauty and self: I realized the other night that the reason I care about beautifying the body so much is because it is a litmus test for my desirability. Like a fish tank strip — the strip itself isn’t acidic or basic, it doesn’t have an innate acid/base quality, but it ‘proves’/reflects those qualities in the water. It is what makes them visible and knowable.  So I know  I am not my body, but the body –all my belongings– are a required tool to prove something about myself.

At the end of the day, for something to reflect me I need to be able to control it don’t I? How can I take pride in and depend on something like a body to represent me if I can’t even make it do what I want? If my ability to mold it is constantly superseded by reality, time, rupa rules and circumstance?



							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		No More Than The Sum of Its Parts

					

				No More Than The Sum of Its Parts
			

		
				

			
 
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I had been watching the Marvel movie, Dr. Strange: At the start of the movie, he is a sucessful surgon –he has status, respect, fame, wealth — he is on top of the world and its worldly conditions. But then he is in an accident, he injurs his hands and he is unable to continue performing surgery, he loses his fortune, his fame, status and respect, he falls low in the world. When he was at the top, he collected watches and though he sells most of his stuff when finances get tough for him, he holds onto a single watch that holds meaning to him.  One day, he is attacked in the street and the attacker tries to steel his watch, Dr Strange cries out that it is “all he has left”, and though he is able to fend off the attacker, the watch is broken in the process. Dr. Strange’s heart is clearly broken as well.


This one scene, it deeply moved me. Afterall, I can relate — just like Dr. Strange, I assign meaning to my objects. For him, that watch was more than glass and gears, it was an object that represented his whole past life, his former fame and fortune, it was part of an identity that he had lost, though continued clinging to it nonetheless. But the truth is, a watch is just rupa, there is nothing more to it than its parts, there is no meaning tucked in and hidden amongst the springs. The meaning, the value, is something external, something that we apply, the meaning isn’t in the object, it is in our heads alone.


When I consider my beloved stuffed animals, I can see the truth that their value is not innate: These objects, so precious to me becasue they were gifts from Eric or my dad, wouldn’t raise more than a few bucks at a garage sale. Afterall, objects are only 4 elements that, in certain states, under certain circumstances, and for certain times, have utility, not value, not meaning.  But me, I am moved by each item in my home, by the stories they conjur in my head. I am moved by mineness.


The real question is, why am I so moved minenss? Isn’t claiming (the process of making something mine) just the process of arbitrarily picking an object to be me/mine/represent me? It could be a watch, a house, a city, a car — it really doesn’t matter what bundle of 4es I choose– I assign value to them, value and meaning, that I use to curate my sense of self, just like Dr. Strange’s watch represented his identity as the prodogy surgon.


When I watched Dr. Strange, I got myself carried along by the story, began to identify with the character, the meaning that watch held, it felt real and relatable. But when I stepped back, I saw it is simply not true, a watch can’t possibly be all you have left of who you are, becasue a watch is not in any part who you are. A watch is no more than the sum of its physical parts, there is no identity to be found there.


Our beliefs about these objects may be untrue, but the dukka we experience over them is still vivid and real.  As those robbers came creeping onto the screen, I felt fear; as Dr. Strange cried out when his watch broke, I felt his shattering loss. But just like meaning, the pain of loss is not in these objects, it exists only in our hearts and our hearts are in our power to change.


 






							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Some Final Thoughts on Everything is Dukka –The Cause of Suffering

					

				Some Final Thoughts on Everything is Dukka –The Cause of Suffering
			

		
				

			
 
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After I had sent Mae Yo and Mae Neecha my uber-long synopsis on everything is suffering, they send back a reply that had a  a simple question: “The Buddha said that there are two kinds of suffering – physical suffering that we cannot avoid and mental suffering that we can avoid. In order to avoid that suffering, we need to know the cause of it. Mae Yo asked, do you know what the cause of suffering is?”


On the tail of so much in-depth investigating into the whys of suffering, its fundamental presence in this world, the answer to its cause, at least in my own life, was immediately clear to me — I am the cause of my own suffering.  Here is my reply to Mae Neecha:




In short, I’m the cause of my suffering. My desire for the world to be how I want it to be ( as opposed to how it actually is) and then my continual schemes and efforts to force it to be as I want. To try and force it to confirm who I think I AM.




 The cause of my desire however is ignorance; I don’t REALLY understand what the world is, so I don’t really understand the impossibility of trying to force it to follow my rules (instead of its own, the rules of cause and effect, the 3 common conditions). I am so blind, that my imagination  takes the isolated moments the world is sorta-kindda-if-you-squint-real-hard close enough to my desire/view as ‘evidence’ that all I need to do is hang on to what I have,  try harder/more/luckier/better and maybe this time ( or at least some time soon)  I will finally pwn the world. So more “turns”, and the accompanying dukka, ensue.




This is why the heart of the 8 fold path — the way out of suffering– lies in changing my view. So I can align my understanding with the reality of the world ( since the reality of this world is sure as hell not going to be the one to align to my understanding/ imagination). Only when the cause for desire, ignorance, is removed can desire be removed. Only when the cause for suffering, desire, is removed can suffering be removed.




But seriously, thats all a little technical. Watching my 3 year old niece have a tantrum because shit isn’t the way she demands pretty much exemplifies the cause of suffering — the world doesn’t revolve around her, but she thinks it does. It doesn’t revolve around me when I think it does, when I so desperately want it to: So it’s all sorrow, lamination, pain, distress and despair till we stop expecting this world will confirm us, be as we imagine, or give us what we want. Till we stop clinging to the hope that we can keep what we love, avoid what we hate and have everything ( or even just most things, or enough things) as we want it to be.




 I am the cause of my suffering, not just because I want the world to be how I want it to be, but because I want myself to be what I want to be — I want to become. Not only am I ignorant of what the world is, I am also ignorant of what I –self — is. I suspect this ignorance is actually more primary –first I need to misunderstand self before I can believe there is a world that will somehow obey and conform to self. I think this is why the rest of that passage from the morning chanting , after re-articulating the noble truth of dukka, continues on to speak specifically about the aggregates and what they are — stressful, inconstant and not self (subject to the 3 common characteristics like everything else). If ya wanna fix stressing ya gottta fix ignorance of self.




The more I considered my reply, the more I realized it may be time for me to turn my attention to the last of the 3 common characteristics,  annatta, or no-self; if belief in a self is fundamental to causing my suffering — for motivating and propelling my births and becoming — then understanding the truth of no self, of the inevitable cessation of all forms and processes, of the illusion of identity I imagine in the aggregates, seems like a natural next step in my path to eliminate my suffering (aka Buddhist practice). Plus, I started this practice with impermanence, dug deep on dukka, it seems only fair to give the characteristic of no-self a little air time. That all brings me to my practice today.  Right now, annatta is a slow faucet drip, I grope around, feeling mostly lost. But I have been here before, I have a plan: Each day I try and find a few examples of annatta, I gather evidence, I analyze to try and begin seeing patterns from the evidence, try to begin to consider the why everything in the world must be annatta (just as everything is impermanent and dukkha). Slowly, I suspect it will come…if and when it does, perhaps you Dear Reader will get yet another interruption in our regularly scheduled program. Till then though….I end will draw this little side-track to a close and return us to our Regularly Scheduled Program with the next blog.


							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 3

					

				Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 3
			

		
				

			
 
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Dear Reader, this blog is a direct continuation of the last two, Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 1 and Part 2: Seriously, this is not one of those to try skipping ahead to get to the punchline. If you haven’t already done so, go back and read the last two blogs prior to reading the continuation here.


Just a a little refresher for those of you who have read the past blogs, below is yet more evidence to support my contemplations on the topic that everything is dukka. The evidence is organized into themes, based around the best examples I found to help prove to myself an assertation I had heard many times from my teachers — that everything is suffering. Moreover, I sought to understand not just the conclusion, but the WHY: Why everything in the world must be suffering, what it is about the nature of the world and everything in it that guarantees that every leaf I turn, every rock I look under, every new corner I turn, I will always find the suffering innate in this world.




    

  • If the things we love are the source of dukka, where can we possibly hope to find sukka? : A few years ago, my friend’s husband gave him an ultimatum: Adopt the kid they had always planned on or divorce so that he could find another partner to raise a kid with. My friend was torn, he really didn’t want a child, but to save the life he had and loved with his husband, he acquiesced. Fast forward a few years and this friend is quite unhappy, the child he adopted has developmental issues, and has been a huge burden, especially during the pandemic. Watching him it is so clear that we invite, and then endure, tremendous suffering for what we love. In fact, nothing else other than what we love could possibly motivate us to endure the kind of suffering we do, if we didn’t love the thing we ‘do it for’ we would say “fuck it” and be done. If I didn’t love Eric I would have said fuck it and left NY. If Eric and I both didn’t love the life we imagine money will buy we would say fuck it and be done with his abusive jobs. It’s not only present suffering either — how many times do folks commit crimes to give their kids a better life, kill to protect themselves, seek revenge to protect a wounded ego — we regularly invite future suffering for the stuff we love.  Just imagining that we have something we love, even for a moment, is the seed for all the suffering we endure in this world as we seek to cling to that thing.  But if the things we love are what brings us dukka, where should we look to find sukka?
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  • The only thing keeping me here is my bondage — I was watching a play about slavery and in it a slave man decides he is going to runaway. In a scene where he goes to tell his sister about his plans he says, “out there is freedom, the only thing for me here is my bondage, there is nothing else keeping me here.” He invites his sister to join him in the escape, but she refuses, she has two young children –too young to be on the run– and she feels she can’t leave them. Her children are her bondage. In that moment, I got a brief understanding that the things and people we love are our tether to this world; it is because of Eric, my family, friends, enjoyments of various hobbies and places, my comforts and the joys I take in being loved, having the things I believe make me a me, that I can’t just flee to freedom like that sister in the play. The thing is, if all that is here is my bondage isn’t everything dukka? Just because someone with Stockholm syndrome begins to empathize with, love and depend on their captors, it doesn’t mean they aren’t in captivity. Any “sane” person looking at someone with Stolkholms realizes the patient is just deluded, that in fact they are in bondage,  and of course bondage is dukka.
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  • Waiting to suffer is suffering — My mom was hit by a car and my brother was so angry at the man who hit her. He said it wasn’t fair that man walked away with just a ticket while my mom had to endure so much injury and pain, while the family had to suffer to help her. I told him it was fair, the world is fair, everyone has to suffer injury, death, struggle for their families; the only difference was the timing and the details. We take turns, this was my family’s turn to struggle, another time will be that man’s turn. The more I think about it though, the more I see that waiting for a turn at suffering is suffering in and of itself. Afterall, I started this practice motivated by the deep distress of being a hypochondriac: Even when I wasn’t ill, I was stressed and afraid of my eventual illness, of “my turn”. Though we can sometimes ‘put it out of our heads’, ignore impending suffering, on some level we all know it is coming. The thing we don’t necessarily notice is that it is already here. It is here because if everything were candy canes and rainbows, we wouldn’t need to do so much ignoring and fantasizing and hoping and striving and planning for something better. It is here because the fear and stress of waiting to suffer is just another kind of suffering, a suffering that differs only in degree, not kind.
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  • There are no happy endings in this world, only stories that haven’t finished yet: I was rewatching Westworld and I came to an episode where some of the characters –bandits — have successfully stolen a safe and are trying to get it open. Here is the thing, in this show, the characters are reborn countless times, each life is just a variation on their last, small differences, but for these bandits the story line, the thing that drives them, is always the same, get and open the safe. This life, they are finally able to open the safe, inside it is empty. The scene hit me really hard, and I realized it is a powerful ubai for life: So often we struggle, labor, fight for what we want and we fail to get it, it is instant tragedy, spending lifetimes trying to crack a safe only to have it be empty. Of course, there are times the safe is full –we strive and struggle and are ‘rewarded’ with just what we want, it’s a happy ending with boku bucks. The problem though is that the story isn’t over; with a bunch of money, a host of new problems arise. For bandits, there is the consequences born of stealing money. Even if it was well gotten, with money (with anything) comes the fear of loosing it, the need to protect and preserve it. Ultimately it will be used up, and then there is the need to find at least as much as you had before to keep up the lifestyle that you had become comfortable with. When you play it forward –past the fake happy ending — it seems like whether the safe is empty or full, it is functionally the same;  neither temporarily getting ,nor not getting, quenches my thirst or stops the efforting. There is no happy ending, there is a pause –at best — and then more struggle. Stories without happy endings are called tragedies (no matter how many comic relief moments they have), and this world is an endless story without a happy ending, it is a tragedy, it is dukka.
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  • The world doesn’t give a fuck about what I want or ‘need’: Long ago I was reading one of the Buddhist comics and there was a single line in one that hit me: Ananda and his pals decide to leave behind their worldly life and join the Buddha. On the way, they take off their finery and leave it in the woods because they “won’t need it anymore”, which got me thinking what it really means to ‘need’ something: When we say we need something, what we really mean is that without this object, our imagination of what the future will be can’t come to pass. Since those pals envisioned a future as monastics, they didn’t ‘need’ finery. When I envision a fun road trip, I ‘need’ a car. When I imagine the delicious cake I will bake, I ‘need’ flour. Because my deepest desire is a long, happy life with Eric I ‘need’ Eric, I ‘need’ this body and I ‘need’ all the other ingredients I think will make life long and happy. The problem is that the world doesn’t give a fuck about what I need.  Every object I think I “need” is the same as every other object –it dies/decays/fades/parts ways  — and yet time keeps ticking, the future keeps coming.
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The truth is that what I don’t have I clearly don’t ‘need’ for what happens next: If I don’t have a car, I simply don’t get a road trip, I do something else instead. If I don’t have flour, I don’t get a cake, I eat something else instead. If I don’t have an Eric, or an Alana, I don’t get an Eric/Alana happy future, I get some other future instead.  My future doesn’t depend on  what I think I “need”, or want, therefore nothing obliges the world to deliver these things to me (i.e. they are necessary in my mind alone). Over and over the world proves it doesn’t pander to me, it doesn’t care what I want; How can a world that doesn’t bend or bow to me, that doesn’t give a damn about my ‘needs’ or wants be anything but a continual source of pain and disappointment –i.e. dukka — to me?














A further note on this topic: Though the world doesn’t necessarily give me what I “need”, I suffer continually to try and get it, and I suffer when I don’t get it or I lose it, because I predicate my happiness on the stories I tell myself coming true. At my last mammogram, I felt such relief (lessening of dukkha) when I got an all clear. But then I considered why I felt that way, what a clear scan had really bought me, and I realized it was just a longer time clinging to my imaginary future that “needs” this body. It’s not real happiness at all, it is just another moment in which my dream goes un-dashed. I get to live another day, to stress more about how/if/for how long I can wrangle that future I strive for. If the shit I think I  need so much could really give me sukka, how is it I am not happy now? I still have this body, I still have Eric, I have money, health, so many ingredients I imagine necessary for that happily ever after, and yet I live in a state of perma-stress only momentarily lightened (not eliminated) by an all clear scan.  Getting to that happy ending I want isn’t the way to eliminate dukka (because there is no ending, there is always just some further future fantasy), giving up my obsession with how the story ends, with chasing one ending or another, that is the way to eliminate dukka.












    

  • If getting what I want really made me happy, why the hell am I so damn stressed and sad: Back in early April, when it was time to head home from a fairly pleasant winter in Miami, all I wanted was to stay and enjoy more time here. As we were driving home, my mom got into an accident and I turned right back around and have been in Miami to help care for her since. I got my wish, more time in Miami with family, but this has been one of the saddest, scariest and most stressful periods in my life. It got me thinking that I frequently get exactly what I want, and yet, rather than being satisfied, I am stressed. Foundational to birth and becoming, to every action, is want, followed by belief that fulfilling said want will lead to sukka. But over and over I get what I want, and I suffer just the same. In fact, in many cases I suffer because of getting what I want…
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Back, after we left SF and before we touched down in NY, Eric and I took 3 weeks off to travel Europe.I remember, we were so happy, excited, planning our new NY life and all the fun adventures we would have. I had wanted to move, and that brief period of relish in having gotten what I wanted, plus the fantasy of what it would be like, was joy. But as soon as we landed at JFK — with the noise, filth and smog — my imagination was forced to face the reality on the ground, and stress (that eventually turned to crushing anxiety/anger/depression) arose.  When my heart concots its wants, it consults imagination rather than reality. But I live in a world of reality, wants are fulfilled (or not) in the world of reality: In reality everything has two sides, there are always consequences and trade-offs,  I don’t see the whole picture, everything shifts and changes, tomorrow doesn’t look like yesterday or today. Even when I get what I want in reality, it isn’t the way I imagine it ( often, if it had been, like with  NY, I never would have wanted it, worked so hard, uprooted my life, made irreversible changes to get it  in the first place).  The delta between imagination and reality is an endless well of disappointment and pain, and there will always be a delta between imagination and reality, so there will always be dukka. The belief that satisfying my wants will satisfy me leads me to perpetuate a cycle where I invite even more dukkah chasing wants and dealing with the disappointment and consequences of sometimes getting, sometimes not getting, them.










    

  • A world where every activity is a risk is a world of dukka — I was getting ready to go meet my brother and some family friends for dinner the other night. It was a gathering I was really looking forward to, a way to destress a little from a very intense week dealing with mom stuff. In the shower, I did the quick ‘new normal’ risk calculation: These friends had recently recovered from Covid, so the chance they were carriers was low, my brother and his wife tested that AM. It was safeish; I could enjoy. Then I thought more about it and realized that everything I do, all the activities I enjoy, the stuff that brings me comfort and delight, it comes with risk. Covid makes this so clear, but its always been this way, it is a product of having a fragile body, clinging to breakable things, of everything we do having 2 sides, coming with unforeseen consequences. I read about a study that shows that the human brain actually tries to shield us from the reality of our deaths, categorizing information about death as something that happens to others, but doesn’t relate to us. The researchers hypothesis that humans need to be desensitized to our own mortality to function in life. Folks are hardwired to to ignore risk and to believe it doesn’t apply to them. If we were truly cognizant of the risks of an activity, it wouldn’t be fun anymore; enjoyment requires ignoring, closing our eyes to ever present risk, or assuming a situation –a life –that is safe and comfortable now will continue to be so as long as we are in it. But just because we ignore stuff it doesn’t make it untrue, just because we believe we are exempt from mortality, risk, it doesn’t mean we are. We live in a world of omnipresent risk, and omnipresent risk is just another way to define dukka.
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  • Easier doesn’t mean easy, it proves degrees of hard: I was reading the news and there was an article about a study that concluded that having more money makes people happier in their day to day life. There is no threshold either, more money = more day-to-day happiness. The reason being that money tends to solve problems, it makes life easier. The story hit me because I so obviously agree, money makes life easier in many ways. Which got me thinking… Since my mom’s accident, having money has certainly made stuff easier; I have a flexible salaried job (and savings), I don’t have to worry about lost wages taking care of her. I have used money to free up time on day-to-day stuff, a meal service so I don’t need to worry about cooking, a laundry service so I don’t need to worry about cleaning. Mom has a concierge doctor, so she got immediate referrals for a pulmonologist when lung issues arose last week and the doc was super fast communicating prescription and med history to the hospital and rehab facilities. Money has definitely made some stuff in this situation easier, but  things are still exceptionally hard. Now, finally I understand your answer so many months ago, ” hot and cold are on opposite ends of the same temperature scale. Or how 0 and 100 are on opposite ends of a number scale”. If you need to demarcate stuff on a scale of how hard they are — if sometimes it is relatively harder/easier — it doesn’t mean stuff is easy, it actually proves that degrees of hard/difficulty are what define living in this world. It can be more hard, it can be less hard. But the scale is the scale of struggle, degrees of dukka is what the world slides along.
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Anyway, as I said, this isn’t exactly done, but it has certainly gelled into a pretty comprehensive contemplation. What is crazy to me is that when I started this line of thinking it was such a struggle, I really had to do some serious mental gymnastics to see how examples of suffering or stress from my daily life actually proved everything is dukka. At the start, I think this may have been the most difficult contemplation I have ever undertaken. But I kept on, collecting 5 examples a day and considering what each could tell me about the why question –why everything must be dukka. Soon it went from being a faucet I struggled to get a few drips from to one gushing so hard I couldn’t turn it off. I guess that is why this took me so long to finalize to send –the evidence of dukka as the nature of this world is everywhere I look now.




Recently, my contemplations have taken a bit of a turn/flip –I have been evaluating what I think happiness is. Afterall, this email is filled with data points that just because I find something pleasurable, it doesn’t mean it isn’t dukka. Pleasurable stuff is hard to get, stressful to keep and worry about loosing, comes with risk as well as after effects I’m not so keen on…At some point it dawned on me that what I call sukka may just be a misunderstanding of the world, arising from my imagination of what things are and what they will be, versus the reality of what things are and what they will be. I suppose that is what I am  considering now. That and the fragility and suffering that comes with a body, which is so front and center as I watch my mom struggle to recover post accident.




My mom by the way, despite some snags and scares, is doing pretty well.  Considering how terrible the accident was, everyone is talking about what a miraculous ‘happy ending’ this is all likely to have; it really is so easy to mistake an easing of dukka for sukka if you aren’t paying attention. It is so easy to forget what just happened and pretend that the happier, brighter future we imagine is what is actually ‘normal’ . I am not ignoring or forgetting so easily though, there is still plenty of struggle and stress to be had, and the memory of her crying out in the hospital bed that first night I arrived still feels pretty raw to me. And hey, the ‘good news’  is if I do forget, all I need to do is live long enough, and I’m bound to get a refresher soon enough when I face something similar — or worse — with her again, and/or Eric, and/or Seth…my beloved toggle bolts.








							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 2

					

				Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 2
			

		
				

			
 
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Dear Reader, this blog is a direct continuation of the last, Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 1: Seriously, this is not one of those to try skipping ahead to get to the punchline. If you haven’t already done so, go back and read the last blog prior to reading the continuation here.


Just a a little refresher for those of you who have read the past blog, below is yet more evidence to support my contemplations on the topic that everything is dukka. The evidence is organized into themes, based around the best examples I found to help prove to myself an assertation I had heard many times from my teachers — that everything is suffering. Moreover, I sought to understand not just the conclusion, but the WHY: Why everything in the world must be suffering, what it is about the nature of the world and everything in it that guarantees that every leaf I turn, every rock I look under, every new corner I turn, I will always find the suffering innate in this world.








    

  • Where there is desire/craving there is stress and there is ALWAYS desire: I had read the news about Omicron and I was stressed (another word for suffering), specifically I was stressed because I so desperately desired to go on a planned trip to see my family, but I also desperately desire to stay healthy and avoid Covid. So I stressed to come-up with a plan where maybe I could do both, private flight, driving to Miami, better masks, etc. All this stressing going on in my mind on my drive to Pilates class, where I paused my family/omicron stress, to stress about hitting each red light and getting stuck behind a slow driver because I was also stressed about making it to class on time. Stressed about what the teacher would think of me if I was late, etc.
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I realized I live in a state of constant stress and the reason is my constant desire.  Afterall, if I didn’t give a damn about seeing family, or protecting this body, or what folks think of me, I wouldn’t care about canceled trips or Covid or being late to class. The continually shifting sand of this world (impermanence again) wouldn’t bother me at all.  But because I do want to acquire what I desire, protect what I desire, and avoid what I feel threatens those things I desire, I live under constant stress. Everything in this world is bound-up with desire, it is literally the cause of my entering this world and remaining in it. Therefore everything in this world is also bound-up with dukka –so long as my heart desires, there is absolutely no freedom from stress.




    

  • A burden is a burden, even when you pick it up without noticing its burdensomeness, or are reluctant to put it down: Recently my employee quit and I have been covering his administrative tasks, tasks that I hate, tasks I find stressful and burdensome. As I was dreading another day ‘at the office’, I considered the fact that this is just my duty, my responsibility, the obligations that come with my role. What else is a job after all, but a duty, an obligation? For years, I have focused on the benefits I enjoy from my job –enrichment, mental stimulation, a sense of belonging, a building block of my identity. Distracted by these benefits, I shut my eyes to what a duty/role really is — a responsibility, a commitment, a burden that I have assumed. But it is only a matter of time, a shift in circumstance, before the dukka side of each role/object/relationship show themselves and by then, both worldly norms and my own imagination/ sense of self/sense of obligation make it difficult to put them down. I would like to quit my job, but I feel like I ‘owe’ my employer. I feel like I would be a bad employee, create bad karma by quitting now when they are so understaffed. Plus, I worry about who an  Alana without a title, a job, would be, where my value would come from, how hard it would be to find a new job that allowed me so much flexibility. Everything I take up in this world is a burden, a tether, an obligation –no matter the benefits I perceive myself to enjoy from it — and burdensomeness is just another word for dukka.
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  • There is no such thing as a happy memory: After several months of lockdown I had noticed I was beginning to have intrusive memories of bygone times. I would be doing zoom pilates and have an image of my last pre-pandemic vacation in Japan. Walking around the block and recalling a time I ate with friends in a restaurant. Reading emails and recalling an amazing concert I had attended. These were all happy memories and one day I started considering them more closely. I evaluated dozens of happy memories–trips, meals, times with family and friends and I watched my heart as I recalled each one. I realized that when I recalled happy times, there was always a sensation of nostalgia that arose. And what is nostalgia but longing? Missing something that is already gone, that can’t be retrieved. The happier the memory, the more tinged it was with nostalgia. If happiness now is the cause of suffering later, isn’t it just delayed suffering? When we ingest poison, even if it tastes delicious going down, don’t we still call it ‘poison’ based on its harmful effects?  It seems to follow that even happy times are dukka.
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  • Imagination is how you end up in bed with a vampire: At the start of one of my favorite shows, True Bloods,  the main character, Sukkie, has never had a boyfriend because she is psychic and can hear everyone’s thoughts, she knows exactly how sleezy all the men in town are and she has no interest in dating them. Then she meets Bill, whose thoughts she is unable to read because he is a vampire, and she quickly falls in love. It’s not that Bill is so great, it’s just that she can imagine him to be whatever she likes because she can’t read his thoughts. The reality of dating a vampire though is a life –or at least 8 seasons –of constant struggle, disappointment, death and danger. Imagination lulls Sukkie, it lulls all of us, into danger; we willingly march toward dukka because imagination feeds the hope that we will get sukka. But the real story of this world is a reality of dukka while chasing the fantasy of sukka. This world, like Vampire Bill, isn’t so great, but because we imagine it to be whatever we like, we just keep diving in –this imagination we love so much, identify with so closely, is our all-you-can-ride ticket on the dukka rollercoaster that is this world.
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  • A body that facilitates pleasure is the source of all pain: After my mom’s accident I walked into the hospital to find her moaning in agony, a drip of opiates doing little to numb her pain. The problem with having a body is its a guarantee to pain: Sometimes its the little stuff: lungs aching from asthma, eye burning from allergies, the continual throb from a nagging shoulder injury. Or just the daily discomforts: Hunger, too cold/ hot, enduring unpleasant sounds and smells, even just sitting still too long makes me uncomfortable. But one way or another bodies are the root of all physical suffering, suffering that simply ebbs and wanes by degree. Which made me stop to consider why anyone would sign-up for a body in the first place… at least part of the answer is pleasure of course (the other part is our belief that rupa can help us build and prove our identities  –we long ago established you need a rupa suit to play in a rupa world).
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Back when I was contemplating on the 4es a lot, I came to realize pain is mostly excess pressure (though at times it can be too little/much heat). The problem, that any massage shows us, is that it is a fine line between pleasurable pressure and pain. We come into this world to experience worldly delights, but the same mechanism by which we experience pleasure (an arrangement of 4es that can sense pressure or heat) ensures we will inevitably experience pain. The organs we use to hear/smell beauty guarantee we will hear/see things that make us uncomfortable. But this body is not just a mechanism by which we experience physical pain, it is the cause. Physical pain is a result of embodiment. Having a body is painful, having a body is dukka.














    

  • If not having is dukka, and having is dukka, where is sukka? Eric and I are in Miami seeing family for 3 months and we are staying at a lovely Airbnb overlooking the ocean. Waking up to such beauty is so delightful and after a few days being here I already began to worry about going home, about losing the experience of such beauty. A few days after that, a super stressful quest to buy a condo in the same building had commenced (there were fights with Eric, a bidding war, a super shady realtor, etc.)Ultimately, I decided a home in Miami, particularly when we need to get back to CT when Eric’s office opens in April, is not worth the stress. It isn’t worth the burden of buying, or caring for it, or worrying about during hurricane season when we can’t even use it right now.
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Still though, as I looked out at the ocean again this morning it got me thinking: Not having something is suffering, otherwise we wouldn’t chase, we wouldn’t work so hard to aquire. Desire is deep and the urge to fulfill it is primal. Hunger, as we have already established is dukka. But having this ocean view is suffering too. Just as enjoyment dawned, so too did the impulse to keep and preserve what I already have. The fear of loss, the effort and drama to make it mine, just so I can buy the option of an (imaginary) future with this ocean view.  But what I leave out of that future vision is the truth that even when I have something I need to work to preserve it (dukka), and I will fear losing it (dukka), and I will ultimately actually lose it (more dukka)  — a deed won’t change that anymore than a 3 month rental agreement.  Which brings me to the point that if having something is suffering, and not having something is suffering, isn’t everything Dukka?






    

  • Things that shift out of states I want are stressful, and everything shifts out of states I want: Yesterday I went to pick-up a special sweet treat to give to my brother for his birthday. The treat had both hot and cold components, so once I left the restaurant with the to go order, I felt like I was ‘on the clock’ to get over to Seth’s house. I was looking for shortcuts, trying to get ahead of traffic, speeding a bit –I didn’t want the treat to either get too cold or to melt. It dawned on me that this treat, that was supposed to bring enjoyment, was bringing me stress, and I got to thinking about why. The answer is that while perfectly warm and cold may be  the peak state for the desert, I know damn well that the desert can’t possibly stay in that peak state for very long. The reason for this is that the perfect balance of crispy fried bits and frozen custard are not the NATURE of the desert, it is just a single state. The actual nature of the dessert is an arrangement of 4es that continually shifts according to the causes and conditions of this world — custard exposed to Miami sun melts and fried bits exposed to ambient temperatures cool.
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Of course, this phenomenon doesn’t end with sweet treats. Everything has a peak state, and nothing ever remains in that state, because the nature of this world, and everything in it, is flux. The problem is more than just the fact that I want ice cream, but have to accept that it melts because there are two sides (that was my old conclusion that life entails both sukka and dukka and they come together). The deeper problem is that the very NATURE of ice cream is meltability, but I falsely imagine its nature to be my preferred perfectly frozen state. Blindly I seek satisfaction in objects and circumstances because I don’t understand what they are, but the length of time they remain in states that I find satisfactory is brief (or at least it is never long enough), and even while they exist in that state I stress over the impending shift. No matter how delicious a perfectly peak desert may be, it is clearly stressful, because what shifts and fades and moves out of states I like is stressful and disappointing.  But the nature of everything in this world is to shift and fade and move out of states I like, therefore everything in this world is stressful and disappointing (aka dukka).




    

  • A no-win world is a dukka world: I was listening to an NPR story about the obesity epidemic, about how even smaller amounts of excess weight, particularly around the midsection, are bad for our health and it dawned on me: Back in the day, food was often scarce, so humans evolved in order to store fat. Fat storage enabled humans to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. But today, in our society, food is abundant and the very mechanism –fat storage — that enabled us to survive for so long, is now a physiological feature that puts us at risk for death and disease. Again here, the problem is circumstances are always changing, there are so many angles and aspects to life’s complex processes, the very same thing that is a blessing in one circumstance is a liability in another. There are always two sides. My apartment in San Fran that brought me so much joy when I was traveling for work, was the source of extreme stress when I had to either keep paying the rent, or figure out how to organize a long distance move during the pandemic lockdown. My old Porsche made me feel awesome in Carmel, but super scared in Soma. With the basic truth of continual change, it is hard not to see that there is really no way to win in this world, because all you need to do is wait and a win will become a loss. Worse, the very quality/object/trait that helped you win will become what ensures your loss. Take it from a former Candy Crush Master, something may be fun for a while, keep you busy, makes you feel clever, but ultimately (in my case at about level 900), playing a game there is no way to win comes to feel like sheer torture. Isn’t an unwinnable world a world of dukka?  My only problem is persisting in the delusion I can win.
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  • The things I love are like toggle bolts — They go in so smoothly, but it’s all sorts of hell when it is time to pull them out.  A friend did something that deeply hurt my feelings. As I was contemplating on the situation it dawned on me: This friend and I weren’t always close. We were as students, but we drifted apart as adults. It wasn’t until in my 30s, after I decided I wanted to BE a better friend to my old cohort, after I decided there was virtue to be had in the identity of being a good friend to this group, that I embarked on acting, and eventually feeling, the part. I used my friend, our relationship, to bolster my identity, but doing so was a double edged sword — as our relationship came to symbolize my virtue, his disapproval/rejection took on the power to deflate me. The pain I was feeling was something I did to myself, it was a consequence of the satisfaction I seek in the identities I  build.
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The problem is we hunt for sukka in the identity we build with relationships, jobs, stuff, but when we lose these things –or they behave in ways we view as an affront to the identities we cherish — we suffer a massive gut punch. As soon as we fall in love with something (the instant desire turns to clinging), that thing sinks little claws under our skin, claws that go in smooth, almost unnoticed like a toggle bolt into drywall. But when that thing is yanked out, its hooks catch, pulling against the grain and it is sheer suffering to have them removed. Suffering that we welcomed with open arms by letting those claws sink in in the first place.




There is an old song about a woman who sees a sick snake on the side of the road and decides to nurture it back to health. She feeds it, warms it, loves it and then is shocked when, fully recovered, the snake bites her. The song ends with the snake saying, “you knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in”. These things we seek sukka in, props for our identity and imagination, aren’t actually sukka, they are toggles waiting to be ripped out, snakes waiting to bite…a coiled cobra waiting to strike looks a lot like dukka to me.




    

  • Everything nama touches turns to dukka: Eric and I were driving down to Key West and it was a beautiful day — the perfect mix of humidity, wind, warmth from the sun — as I soaked it in, I realized there really is comfort in this world, i.e. there are physical circumstances a 4e being, with a particular 4e arrangement, finds comfortable. Just so, there is beauty, deliciousness, etc. The problems however arise as soon as Nama enters the scene: The moment Nama senses something, it goes into overdrive, if it likes it it clings and begins to scheme ways to maximize, to prolong, it plots to recreate and obtain more, it stresses over loss, it is saddened by loss and the future imagined without what we claimed/cling to. If nama dislikes it rejects, schemes ways to avoid, to disclaim and disassociate with what it doesn’t like and stresses to be near that thing, enduring suffering until it can disassociate. Nama is basically a dukka factory, it consumes everything around it and regurgitates dukka. Nothing is left unconsumed and unturned. So no matter what is actually in the world, as soon as our nama touches it, it turns to suffering. And there is nothing we experience untouched by nama, so functionally (at least till we stop craving and clinging) everything must be dukka.
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  • Enjoyment is just turning a blind eye to suffering:  I was thinking about my love of travel and realized that one of the things I love the most about it is that I see vacation as a time when I can put aside my daily worries and burdens a bit. I can relax, enjoy, de-stress. The thing is, just because I put aside my to-do list for a bit, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there; in fact, it seems to grow with every email that piles up while my ‘out of office’ is on. With vacation there is food indulgence which I tell myself to  ‘worry about later’,  all while engaging in the very eating, and weight gain, that causes me shame and stress and that will require vigor and effort and sacrifice to ‘repent from’ when I get home.  Since the tasks required to tend to a breakable, decaying, body are endless and routine, there always seems to be a mammogram, or broken crown, or some other painful, anxiety producing procedure/ appointment on the calendar for just after I get home. All through the trip I try to put it out of mind, tell myself to worry later, though the worrisome stuff lies in wait for me upon my return. When I look at my vacation habits, I see that enjoyment requires, in fact may fundamentally be, the act of closing my eyes tight and pretending –pretending what is effortful is fun, pretending the world will go as I want it to, pretending that struggle/burden/difficulty isn’t always lurking. Enjoyment is just times suffering doesn’t intrude on my imagination. Which must mean that suffering is the ever-present reality of the world — it never disappears — my imagination just lulls me into a fantasy world, and I shut my eyes,pretend, at least until that ever-present dukka intrudes forcefully enough for me to notice.
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Once again, I am going to cut this off at a somewhat arbitrary point. There are just so many examples/themes and thoughts it feels like cutting it up into more ‘bite sized chunks’ is the best approach for this blog. So stay tuned till next time …








							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 1

					

				Yet Another Interruption in Our Regularly Scheduled Programming — Everything is Dukka Part 1
			

		
				

			
 
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Well Dear Reader, it has been a while since I have interrupted this here nice, orderly(ish), temporally linear(ish) blog, meant to chronologically share highlights of my dharma practice. Things have been going so well, staying on course, so naturally, I am thinking, “what better way to celebrate my birthday than to fuck-up this whole regularly scheduled programing with — yup, you got it — yet another intrusion of contemplations from the present day.”


Kidding aside, I do like to share this blog in order because contemplations build on each other; growth, though meandering, happens in linear time, there is an order to practicing and to deepening my understandings through practice. And yet, sometimes there are just those mind blowing realizations, the kind that shake and shape my practice, and I feel the deep desire to share those ‘real time’. This here is one of those contemplations, which was summarized and written-up to send to my teachers Mae Neecha and Mae Yo, so hopefully, you will indulge the birthday girl and forgive me for skipping ahead, and sharing this while it is hot off the press.


In reality, while this topic is certainly ‘deep’, it is also surprisingly simple and straight forward, after all it is just a super sobering investigation of 1 f the 3 Common Characteristics of the world (suffering, impermanence, no-self) . I think it can stand on is own without all the backstory of how I got here. So, without further adieu, everything is dukka ( in 3 parts, because it is super-duper loooonnnnggg and dense).




For years, when I considered the first noble truth, I translated it as ‘life entails suffering’. This shaped my view of the world, of practice: Life has joyful parts, but it also has suffering parts. You can’t have one without the other. Case closed. But after reading LP Thoon’s biography, I was struck by how often he said “Everything is suffering”. I had heard this in Phra Arjan Dang’s sermons too. I realized how different these takes were from my own, which basically sees happiness, delight, and joy, abundant in the world, just with a “side” of suffering.  I asked Mae Neecha about it and she said:










” Happiness is relief from suffering, or just less suffering. They are on different sides of the same scale… the scale of suffering. Just like how hot and cold are on opposite ends of the same temperature scale. Or how 0 and 100 are on opposite ends of a number scale.”






I “heard” her reply of course, but my heart really balked at it , so I realized that I needed to really consider this issue. I set about gathering daily evidence in my life, not just of instances of suffering (which I have done for years), but evidence from these instances that everything is suffering. Moreover, I began considering what this evidence illustrated about WHY everything is suffering. What it is about the nature of the world that means it is, and always will be, suffering?




I quickly realized that I was getting tripped-up on the word suffering, I had a fixed, narrow view of what constitutes “suffering”. But the word dukka itself has a very broad meaning and lots of possible translations. I started by trying on different words, and the examples and dynamics of dukka became much more clear quickly. Afterall, I certainly feel stressed out a lot, I get disappointed and anxious. I can see how any satisfaction I get from a meal quickly fades, or how if  a vacation were truly satisfying I wouldn’t be planning a new one as soon as I get home. And then there is burdensomeness, the weight of my obligations and belongings as well as the effort I put into gaining and maintaining them.




So, at long last, after many many months of consideration (I spent over 8 months fixating on this topic),  I am ready to share just a bit of the evidence I have collected and some of my thoughts on this topic of everything is suffering. Over the months I have been weighing this topic, I have noticed there have been themes –basic types of suffering and reasons for its existence — that keep coming up. So my examples will be the best ones I can come up with to demonstrate the specific ‘themes’/types of suffering/reasons everything is suffering. This contemplation is clearly not done. For starters, new themes, nuances, examples just keep coming the more I consider this topic, this just seemed like as good a point as any to sum-up and share. Also, obviously, I don’t yet really fully believe or understand the deep truth that everything is dukka or I would just give up the gun and lay down my burden already. But, I see the contours of this truth, I am not just smiling and nodding when I hear folks like Mae Neecha and LP Thoon say “Everything is Dukka”; this is an assessment of my own now, something I believe and understand I need to grow in my conviction/clarity of more deeply. In other words, this is all a work in progress, but at the same time there has been real progress. My examples/themes are below:




    

  • Enjoyment is just the temporary relief of suffering: I was on a 5 day fast (recommended by my doctor), looking forward to getting to finally eat the next day, and I realized that pleasure was just a relief of deprivation. If I wasn’t already hungry –if suffering wasn’t a preexisting state — there wouldn’t have been extreme delight at the prospect of eating. This is true not just of physical needs/comfort, but of non-physical craving as well. I am happy to have found a husband only because of the pre-existing husband shaped hole in my heart. I was already uncomfortable, I already felt something missing.
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The truth is hunger, craving, these are uncomfortable states –dukkah in and of themselves. If they weren’t we wouldn’t always be running around, exerting so much energy trying to ‘solve’ them. Relief of hunger, and the ensuing sensation of relief — which we register as happiness —  is just the temporary dampening of our hunger (after all, I get hungry again soon after I eat. Thanks impermanence.) Dukka is the foundational state. All we need to do is wait for any comforts, any sense of fullness, to pass and we return to the base state of dukka.




    

  • We are never actually satisfied/there is no satisfaction to be had in this world: When I sent a short Line to Mae Neecha a ways back, with a bit about my progress on this everything is suffering topic, part of her reply made me start thinking of a different angle. She said, “if while you feel happy, it could still be better somehow (if only _were here, if only there was_instead) that already indicates it is suffering not happiness.” This got me to begin considering a different definition for dukka — ‘dissatisfaction/not satisfactory’; no matter how much I am enjoying something, in the back of my mind I am always thinking of the thing that could make it better, or the way to repeat it, or how to enjoy it for longer. Implicit in that thinking is a basic truth — the thing I am enjoying is not satisfactory. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t be trying to change it. If it really were satisfactory, I wouldn’t need to find a way to prolong or repeat it. I would simply be satisfied with what it was. But every single vacation I have ever been on, no matter how magical, left me wanting more vacation time. Never have I finished a trip and said, that is it –I never need to travel again. That was perfect, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I always want more/different. We are born into this world desiring satisfaction. We are born to satisfy desire. But this is impossible because impermanence dictates any delight we get is fleeting. So yes, we can enjoy a trip, we can momentarily fulfill our desire to travel or see a beautiful place, but there is no endurance in that delight. Instead, like the hit of a drug, the tiniest bit of enjoyment leaves us craving for more –worse, it feeds the hope that we can have more/better — and I am already calculating and planning and efforting my next trip. Why? ‘Cause everything in this world is unsatisfactory i.e. dukka.
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  • If you have to pick your poison then you get poison either way. I was dragging myself out of bed for an early workout. I didn’t feel like working out, I don’t really enjoy the process, but I do it to try and stay healthy. I hedge, trying to endure what I see as the smaller suffering of working out now to stave off the bigger suffering –heart disease — that can come later from a sedentary life.  Or, another example: I was sitting at a restaurant the other night, a toddler next to me screaming. I considered my options, moving to a table closer to road noise or staying with the screaming child. I moved, trading off what I considered the greater discomfort for the lesser discomfort.
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The truth is, no situation is perfect, there are always these compromises, trade-offs. The reason is that there is always dukkah, just in different shapes (toddler versus road) and in different degrees (workout versus heart attack). I like to think to myself, “yes, life entails suffering, but I got this, I can try and control my life, my fate,  by picking the suffering I prefer, that I think I can live with.” Of course, there is no guarantee I can get my wish –that workouts will stave off heart disease. There is no guarantee that even if I do get the ‘lesser evil’ it really IS the lesser evil — traffic noise may annoy me less than a toddler, but road smog can irritate my asthma. The only real guarantee is that when you have to pick your poison you get poison –dukka — either way, so of course everything must be dukka.  In fact, even the act of picking my poison –the effort, the sense of uncertainty — is in and of itself dukka. So I guess I get a dukka shot with a dukka chaser.


    

  • 

    If a little less sucky feels like sukka, I must be livin’ in a dukka world. Just as I started my dukka contemplations, Eric began pissing blood. Blood in urine is presumed cancer till proven otherwise, so I was deeply afraid (dukka). A CT scan showed kidney stones and the doctor recommended surgery to remove them, but no sign of cancer. Suddenly I was overwhelmingly relieved –my mind registered this less bad news as sukka even though, lets face it, needing surgery is certainly not good news. Happiness in this case was just less suffering, less of a bad outcome than I had feared.
    

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The problem with this situation is that in order to really feel happy, we are required to know sad; any sukka I experience is really relative to the dukka I suffered before/after it.  The pandemic isolation is another perfect example: For almost a year, Eric and I remained quite locked down. We avoided any indoor activities, even having groceries delivered. I was so lonely during that time, I longed for a return to ‘normality’, to the simplest things I had known and done before. After I got vaccinated, my first trip to Whole Foods felt like ecstasy, but I needed the extreme loss and isolation of my long lockdown to have the extreme joy of that first trip to the store.


We have already established that the world is unsatisfactory, continually stressful, that dukka is in fact the pre-existing/foundational state. Which means that it can’t be  that ‘suffering is just less happiness’ –life doesn’t bear this out: I would never say my dad’s death, or my move to NY, or my fear of Eric having cancer is ‘less happiness’. So it must be that happiness is just less suffering. Everything is just more or less dukka.


    

  • Comparison is the thief of joy (i.e even a little less sukka feels like dukka, which means I live in a super sucky world) . Throughout most of my life, a trip to Whole Foods was just a chore, but after my looooonnnnggg lockdown, my first Whole Foods adventure was a slice of heaven.  With each subsequent shopping trip, as I returned to more and more pre-pandemic activities, my delight waned, until a few weeks later when the grocery store became just another chore again. The reason for this loss of enjoyment in the same exact activity is that enjoyment is not in the activity, an object, another person or a situation. Enjoyment exists in my heart. And my heart is always changing, judging what meets the threshold of enjoyment using past experiences and my own fantasies as a benchmark. So Whole Foods may have been pinnacle joy at one point, but  once I had started doing more and more public stuff again, including museums and outdoor concerts –which I like way more than the store– Whole Foods felt lackluster and boring.
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The problem is that if what I find to bring me joy is relative, based on standards derived from past benchmarks, I need to at least  maintain the same “level” of everything, preferably “level-up” to feel a sense of sukka. Eric often reflects on this with coffee drinking: Back when he started drinking coffee, a cup of joe from anywhere would do. But over time his tastes became more refined and he needed finer and finer roasts to drink. Before it was easy, everyplace has a gas station to grab a coffee, but once it had to be fancy we had to hunt down a rarefied coffee shop each AM. And when there really is no choice but the gas station, Eric suffers, finds it bitter and terrible on his new pallet even though back in the day gas station coffee was the norm. In other words –the very things that cause momentary happiness — like a fine cup of coffee– end up causing even more dukka, dukka to maintain according to that standard, dukka to preserve/repeat and, worst of all, dukka when you have to suffer something lesser. And the higher you go, the more there is in the world that is ‘lesser’ and the harder it becomes to find what is equal or greater than that super fine thing you are used to. Today’s joy becomes both tomorrow’s taskmaster and joykill, which makes every bit of joy I feel the seed of later dukka.




    

  • Entropy is the law of the cosmos and entropy makes life HARD: I was reading an article that was explaining the second law of thermodynamics, entropy. To illustrate the concept in simple terms there were 2 little pictures embedded in the text: The first was a wall of bricks and then an arrow, labeled “time”, that pointed to a disorganized pile of bricks. In a closed system, what is organized and orderly becomes less organized and orderly over time. In the second picture there was a jumbled pile of disorganized bricks and an arrow, labeled “work”, that pointed to a constructed wall of bricks. In an open system, things can move from disordered to more ordered, but only with the introduction of energy, work.
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 A few days later I was shaping my eyebrows, frustrated at how quickly they grow, at the time, and painful plucks, and effort it takes to keep them in a particular shape and I realized entropy rules my life, rules this world, and it makes everything so damn hard. Left alone, buildings will crumble, eyebrows will grow bushy, rooms become dirty, bodies and objects will decay. Orderly arrangements of 4es will naturally shift, eventually disaggregating altogether. To build an orderly state, to maintain that state — even just temporarily — in the face of entropy (aka anatta) requires work, it requires effort. This effortfulness, this continual need to exert energy to obtain and maintain, this is the cause of dukka and it is literally a consequence of the law of the universe. Simply trying to live in this world, at the most basic level trying to provide requisites to a body, to acquire things and maintain them, requires herculean, regular, daily effort, not to mention overwhelming, omni-present risk (thanks Covid for making this one so obvious). For all that effort, all we buy is a little time because ultimately the law of impermanence reigns supreme. What is hard is dukka and life in this world is hard, therefore life is dukka.


This is already a lot to read and consider so more examples to come next week…to be continued…








							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Throwing Stones in Glass Houses

					

				Throwing Stones in Glass Houses
			

		
				

			
 
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I was reading an article in The Atlantic, I have linked it here, but in short it was about how it is tempting to shame and blame individuals for their reckless actions in this pandemic (not wearing a mask, going to a crowded places, etc.) when we should really be a blaming the institutions that put us in this place: “Don’t blame people making bad choices, look at the fact that all they have are bad choices.” The pandemic creates psychological murkiness for humans and in the face of that murkiness the process of making ethical decisions, or judging risks, becomes murky as well.


Later in the article a point the author makes really hits home: “Most people congregating in tight spaces are telling themselves a story about why what they are doing is okay. Such stories flourish under confusing or ambivalent norms.”




I am the first to play the blame/shame game. I am so angry at all the folks out there whose action put me in danger, who are only prolonging this pandemic. And yet, if I am being honest with myself, a younger, healthier Alana –a collage or highschool version of myself — would be telling similar stories, making similar justifications for cramming into a club like a sardine: The government said this is ok…I am not breaking rules, if I am not breaking rules, my actions must be ok. 




This mentality, transcends pandemic logic, it  permeates my whole life: I like to think of myself as a ‘good Alana’, protected by my goodness from punishment and pain, from low births and hardships. In my mind, I justify all my actions, tell stories about how all I do is okay, how I maintain my Alana goodness. When I used to use people for sex, I told myself it was consensual, they agreed to keep it casual, of course what I did was okay. When I would emotionally cheat on partners, I would avoid physically cheating –there was a ‘line’ I wouldn’t cross (a line of my own creation and definition, but nonetheless a line)  so of course my behavior was okay. When I push Eric to endure his terrible jobs to support me, our lifestyle, I tell myself he is willing, or we all need to rely on someone, or its not using someone if you love them, so of course I am A-Okay. 






From my own side, my reasons are always justified. I am above reproach. But this world, it doesn’t operate according to my side, my stories and justifications are not the arbiters of consequence. Calling myself a ‘good Alana’ doesn’t protect me from the consequences of my actions any more than the stories those folks cramming themselves into small spaces tell protect them from catching Covid, or prolonging the pandemic for all. We all tell stories, but no matter the story we are subjects to karma, we are subjects of a world that offers no safety.






							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Delusion is in the Details

					

				Delusion is in the Details
			

		
				

			
 
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Bored and restless in lockdown, I had started remembering old road trips to Napa, Vermont, Carmel, Northern CT –all the little towns I loved to go and visit before Covid. My imagination would take over and I would fantasize about going back to these places, plus other, as-yet-unexplored-hidden-gems, just as soon as Covid was over… 


The more I fantasized though, the more I noticed that there was a pattern to what I remembered of my road trips, each was more or less, largely the same: I’d roll into some town, I jump out of the car so eager to explore. To find something new and exciting ( which, for a peril call out, is how I ended up in NY).


But every town is basically the same, a grocery, bank, shops that sell gifts/clothes, restaurants. I zoom in so hard to each town, I get lost in details, I get intoxicated by the promise of something new. When I get to the end of a main street strip, when the cookie cutter houses begin, I have this palpable disappointment –I want more. I wanted more from the town. Another block, another ‘find’, something new and different than the last town.


It dawned on me that a major mechanism my mind uses to keep deluding myself is distraction with the details. If the details were always the same, then I would be bored and burned-out by life and rebirth already. It would be 100% clear to me that I had already ‘been there done that” and I could simply give up the quest for something new and different, something truly satisfying and enduring in this world.


But it’s the slight variations –a different shop, unique architecture, some ‘special’ tourist attraction, that feed the desire to keep heading to little towns to find something new and different to entertain me. It is details that feed my hope that a treasure is just around the corner. Hope feeds desire to quest, and desire feeds the entire continual cycle of born, do, die, repeat.


Now though, I am bored, nothing changes in this Covidverse, where I do the same stuff, see the same 1 person, live in the same 4 walls day-in-day-out. Details here are all the same and I am ready to be done. But details of yesterday, of past trips and future plans – crumbs – are enough to continue feeding the hope that one day will be different. And even if today sucks, tomorrow will be new, it will be different, it is worth hanging on for. Delusion is in the details.


							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		The Four Nobel Truths Again (and Again and Again and Again…)

					

				The Four Nobel Truths Again (and Again and Again and Again…)
			

		
				

			
 
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I tend to like to keep my practice simple, basic even, but profound; In Buddhism, there is probably nothing more basic — foundational — than the 4 Noble Truths. I suppose that is why I return to them over and over again in my own practice, checking in with them, seeing what I have learned, what additional layers of meaning I can find in these simple but profound teachings. Sitting at home one afternoon, pandemic bored, restless, I decided to give them a re-read and re-exploration. I went to access to insight for translations, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.than.html. At the time of this blog (Spring 2020), I saw 2 slightly different readings/interpretations/ ways to approach the path to enlightenment, and I will share them both below.


I do however want to note that by now, May 2022, I have a fresher take on the First Noble Truth, The Origination of Dukka: Recently,  I have come to explore the idea that everything is suffering, rather than that stress and enjoyment come as a pair or that life entails dissatisfaction. This is an evolution in my thinking that we will get to at a later entry in this blog. But I do want to mention it here, first off  to say that this entry is hardly the end-all-be-all of Alana’s deep understanding of the Four Noble truths (or anything at all for that matter). It exemplifies the fact that this blog, my practice, is a work in progress, it is shifting and growing, no entry is, or has been, the final say on a topic, especially not Buddhism’s first, most foundational, topic of the Four Nobel Truths.  Secondly, I wanna fess-up that present day Alana, reading these 2 year old notes, sees they are lacking a perspective that I have recently understood to be essential for practice — everything is stressful, the fact we don’t see it that way is a function of our delusion, not the nature of the world. It is a key culprit in our bondage.   Yet, I still want to share these older thoughts to reflect the stepping stone they are, and to as authentically as possible share the evolution of my practice. Afterall, I wouldn’t have gotten to today’s understanding without yesterday’s.




When I read the Nobel Truths now,  I see 2 possible readings at the same time, and with it 2 slightly different thoughts on how to approach enlightenment:


In the first reading/interpretation I see:


1. Life is stressful


2. Craving is the reason you have life, you crave the good parts, the things you want and so we are born and we perpetuate continual becoming for what we want. But, everything has 2 sides, which means the stuff you want comes with stuff you don’t want, and the don’t want part is super stressful.  In other words life itself, that folks desire so much, comes with stress baked-in.  If you want to avoid stress, you gotta give up the good parts, the stuff you want and like, in order to avoid their shadow side, the stressful parts you don’t want. Seeing the 2 sides, the tuk tok pie in all = getting exhausted by this crap and not wanting any more.


3. Get rid of the craving and get rid of the stress


4 Enter the 8 fold path. ie the tactics of letting go of stress




It is a fair assessment of course, straight forward; good comes with bad, if I don’t want bad forgo good. Done. But in practice, I see my own tenaciousness can be a trap with a perspective like this. The reason is that, even if I know something will be a  lot of work, may suck, may hurt, may cause suffering,  I will do it anyway to get the outcome I want. I don’t give up easily, I will take the bad with good. But as I reread these basic truths I saw a second option/ interpretation as well:




1) Life entails dissatisfaction. The un-satisfactoriness is woven into every aspect of life. Its a basic truth of this world.


2)The cause of dissatisfaction is desire for satisfaction in a world that is fundamentally dissatisfying. Therefore, the intermediary cause of dissatisfaction is the reason I want satisfaction to begin with; I have a wrong view that something I do will enable me to achieve satisfaction in a fundamentally unsatisfactory world.   I don’t understand truth 1 –dissatisfaction is baked-in — and so I have hope, born from my misunderstanding of the world. From hope springs desire. The desire for the illusive (actually impossible) white whale of satisfaction.


3) If I can change my view of the world, if I can understand those 3 common characteristics and give up hope for satisfaction I will give up desire for this world. Afterall, I never really hope for things that I believe to be utterly impossible. I only hope for thing I have seen glimmers of, or had momentary experiences with in the past (in other words, imagination relies on memory).


4) Enter the 8 fold path






With this reading of the Truths, my job is to kill the hope that I will be able to find satisfaction in a dissatisfactory world, I need to convince myself to stop striving for the impossible. Ultimately satisfaction is impossible because:




1: My desire changes — Example: First I wanted the NY home, and then, with more information  about what it was like to live in NY (terrible), I no longer wanted it but was burdened by it. It caused me dissatisfaction.




2: Objects change –Example: When it was working I wanted the Porsche, but when it had to sit in the garage for months and cost me a ton of money to repair I found it dissatisfying.




3: The circumstances change — Example: an SF apartment was great when I can go spend time there, but come the  pandemic and suddenly it was a stressful burden to get rid of.




At the end of the day all it takes is time, inescapable impermanence,  to move anything that is momentarily desirable into a state that is undesirable. And momentarily desirable is simple not satisfying.






							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Videos Sent By May Yo Part 7

					

				Videos Sent By May Yo Part 7
			

		
				

			
 
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On May 25, 2020 Mae Yo sent over another videos for me to view. Unfortunately, the link to the video is no longer active so I will proceed to describe the video and the below will share my thoughts/comments back to Mae Yo:


The Video: The video was a short clip that showed folks using one of those aging apps for the first time. The app shows what the viewer’s face will look like as it ages, quickly fast forwarding from their present day self to an elderly version of themselves. Many of the people shown the app are in pairs, folks that look like couples, or relatives; something that stood out to me was how people as they watched themselves wither and wrinkle and age seemed almost subconsciously to move closer to the person they ere with, grab a hand or clutch an arm. I discuss this feature of the video in the second response.


Alana’s Response to Mae Yo: Since I was a kid, I liked to watch those “makeover” shows: a makeup job, a cosmetic procedure, a haircut or weight loss that makes people look younger/prettier/ thinner. When the before/after pics are dramatic I ooh and ah. I feel satisfied. On some level, it gives me hope of “beating” decline myself. But this video shows the opposite: the before and after shows the aging and decline. I watch each couples’ face– the shock and pain that seems to register–I feel it myself: disgust.


My satisfaction, my belief in what is acceptable only goes one way. I desire one side (youth and beauty) not aging and uglifying. But the reality of this world is the aging video: that is the direction that everything ultimately moves in. Those makeover moments are, just that, moments: small “battles won” in a “war” none of us can ever hope or expect to actually prevail in.


Here in lockdown for 3 months already, my Botox has worn off. I have always taken for granted I can just keep subjugating those wrinkles — a smooth forehead as “proof” that I have this aging thing under control. But I have been focusing on the wrong side — the momentary ‘wins’ — instead of seeing the bigger picture: If I have to keep fighting, if I am constantly plucking and plumping, only to lose ground and sag and wrinkle again, if just a few months kicks me back to the beginning, doesn’t it prove the opposite –I am not in control. I am always just reacting. I am forced to cling to small moments of “hope” instead of zooming out and seeing the truth — I am aging. Everyone of the people in that video aged. Northing I do is going to give me a “pass” or make me an exception. I am just clinging to little blips upwards, single makeover snapshots, to ignore the general trajectory of the line — downwards.


A Second Response From Alana: Same video, different topic — protection from a partner: In the video, I noticed that the pairs, when they see the aging set-in, seem to cling to their partner for support  and comfort in the face of a reminder of their inevitable decline.


When I feel vulnerable, I turn to Eric for support. I call him when I get dressed-down at work. When I feel guilty for losing my temper with my Mom. When I am afraid I am sick. On some level, I think he can save me.


But the truth is, when my Dad died Eric could do nothing to save me. He wasn’t even there since he had to be at work. Back in March, as Covid spread, Eric kept having to go to work in Manhattan. Training in. I was terrified he would get me sick. Why do I think Eric, can save me when he hasn’t before? When in some cases he is a risk?


Could any of those couples spare their partner aging? Then why do I think Eric can help save me?


							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Videos Sent By May Yo Part 6

					

				Videos Sent By May Yo Part 6
			

		
				

			
 
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On May 20, 2020 Mae Yo sent over another videos for me to view. Unfortunately, the link to the video is no longer active so I will proceed to describe the story and the below will share my thoughts/comments back to Mae Yo:


The Story: The video was a comic clip about two friends who while walking down the street see  a wallet fall out of a a guy’s pocket. Friend A picks up the wallet and catches up to the guy who dropped it to give it back. But Friend had wanted to keep the wallet for himself, so Friend B scolds Friend A for returning it to the owner. He says tells him that there is no need to return something that is found, its finder’s keepers, and that he should have kept the wallet.


A few minutes later Friend B is ready to head home but when he looks in his pocket for the keys to his motor bike they’re no where to be found. He asks Friend A for help and together they push the bike many miles, on a dusty road, on a hot day, uphill to get home. After they arrive Friend A reaches into his pocket to get something, and Friend B’s motorcycle keys fall to the ground. Friend A had found them earlier in the day when they had fallen out of Friend B’s pocket.


Friend B starts scolding Friend A, asking how he could have kept the keys the whole time they were walking the bike all the way home. Friend A looks at Friend B and said he thought Friend B had said “finders keepers”, he didn’t want to be scolded again, like he had been with the wallet, so he followed Friend B’s advice and kept the keys for himself.


Alana’s Response to Mae Yo: The story is a classic double standard: in one case (or for a certain person) a behavior, like returning a lost item, is desirable. But in other cases that same exact thing is undesirable.


The other day, I was craving attention from Eric. He was busy working, and I was upset I was being ignored. We ended up having a conversation about it. A few days later, Eric, trying to be a better husband and improve his behavior, was fawning over me. Only then I had work to get done and I felt annoyed to get too much attention.


It got me thinking about why Dukka is inescapable in this world ( I have been doing an exercise every night before sleep where I think of examples of suffering in my day and try to understand the cause). I realize impermanence is key. Things can never be ultimately satisfying because:


1) My desire changes — first I want Eric’s attention and then I don’t. First that guy in the clip wants his friend to keep lost items then he wants his friend to return lost items. If our desires keep changing, how can we stay satisfied in this world?


2) The objects themselves change, when it was working, I loved  the Porsche, but when it had to sit in the garage for months, costing me thousands of dollars in repairs,  I wasn’t so keen on that car. But items themselves break and change, why do I expect to stay satisfied in them?


3) The circumstances out in the world change — having an SF apartment was something I took joy and comfort in just a few months ago, because it made me feel free, I could come and go as I pleased.  But come pandemic time and suddenly it is a stressful burden, it is a shackle not freedom. It is something I had to figure out how to rid myself of, lest I keep paying and paying a monthly rent for a place I can’t even safely get to and use.


At the end of the day all it takes is time to pass and what is satisfying will become unsatisfactory.


What is more, my desires are always limited to one side, to one snapshot of what something is: I want a body, but only a young one, a healthy one. Not a sick or aging one. I want a kitchen, but only in a clean state, not when it is a mess. I want a partner, but only when he is paying attention to me not when I need to pay attention to him. But there is no way to only get one side in this world, both come together. So again, how am I going to ultimately find satisfaction?


I realize everything I do in this world is a quest for satisfaction. So to stop, I think I need to kill the hope that satisfaction is something I can own and achieve.


A Second Response From Alana: Another angle on the same story: The thing that does stay the same is “what’s good for me”. In the video, keeping is good if it’s good for the guy. Keeping is bad if it is bad for him. Eric’s attention is good when it is good for me, bad when it annoys me. The Porsche was awesome when it ran smoothly for me, and it sucked when it broke and I had to pay money and take the bus everywhere while it took months to repair…


But each story is proof the world doesn’t revolve around me. Eric gives attention on his time, for his reasons, in accordance to his ‘rules’ . The Porsche worked not when it was convenient for me, but according to the rules of its rupa, when the parts were all in a state that made the car run. In the video, the guy’s friend returned according to his own beliefs and understanding, not in accordance with what the guy thought was best.


If ‘satisfaction’ equals ‘ what works for me’ where can it be found in a world that doesn’t operate on the rules of what works for me?


A Third Response From Alana: One more thought on this topic: if “what is good for me” is my definition of satisfaction, and this world is not going to just do “what is good for me” then, on some level, the ME is the source of my dissatisfaction.  Me/mine is the standard that keeps being the cause of my disappointment. Put more succinctly: if Alana wants what Alana thinks is good for Alana all the time. All the suffering that comes when Alana doesn’t get what she thinks is good for her is Alana’s fault. The cause of my suffering is me.


A Forth Response From Alana:   Ok one more one more, but on a totally different topic: unintended consequence monster –when the guy scolds the friend for giving back the cash he obviously thinks he is doing the right thing, the best thing for himself and his buddy. But then, the unintended consequences monster rears its ugly head when his friend doesn’t return the keys.


This monster plagues my life — in small stuff: the face product that was great till the breakout, the car that was great till the garage bill, the chairs that were great till they required an entire room resign to fit. The monster comes with the big stuff too — a move to NY that was so great, so ripe with promise and adventure till I was utterly miserable.


I’m always acting. Always calculating the best outcome for Alana. But the problem is I don’t ever see the shadow side of my choices till the unintended consequences monster comes along. Even if I had the absolute control I dream of, I couldn’t escape the unpleasantness that comes along with getting exactly the thing that I want.


 




							


	

			




						
							



	
		
	
	
	
		Videos Sent By May Yo Part 5

					

				Videos Sent By May Yo Part 5
			

		
				

			
 
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About a month and a half into Covid lockdowns Mae Yo again sent over a series of videos/images for me to view. I will once again share the media she sent (or descriptions in cases  I am unable to find the videos again) as well as my thoughts and replies.






 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDFu5M__xvw


Thoughts on the Fighter: Even at the top of the worldly conditions, life is a struggle. A struggle to get to the top, a pain to be there and a struggle all over again at the next round of fighting.


Just yesterday I was contemplating that during this pandemic, I have it “as good as it gets” — Eric and I have jobs we can safely do from home, we are financially secure, we aren’t trying to care for small children or deal with too many additional health issues. Still, I live in fear that I will get sick. Fear that Eric will need to go back to work in Manhattan and get sick. Daily errands have become a struggle. I am stressed, restless at home, feel helpless to support my friends and family in their struggles. And this is ‘ as good as it gets’.


I have persisted to this point. Where is success? Where is a world, even a little corner of it, that will bow to my control?


Which brings me to the oxen: It seems to be strolling along easy, painted beautifully, but it is still clearly tethered, leashed or nose ringed, bound by someone outside the video frame.


It makes me think of my own subject-hood. The fact that I am bound by the rules of Rupa, even if those are outside of the “frame” I pay attention to on a day-to-day basis.


As a human, I am subject to viruses. To disease and death. Even at the top, striding easy, or beautiful, I am still bound. None of these things protect me from the rules of this world.


For lifetimes I have worked to get to the top. To have ease, to have beauty, to have success. What measure I have of those things, temporarily, is still not a refuge from disease and death.


Mae Yo’s reply: Excellent Alana! Keep thinking along these lines. Look outward and internalize inward. Scold and teach yourself, but also comfort yourself that being born a human it is the only realm where we have a choice. Having already been born in the human world, take advantage of it.




							


	

			




						
							
	
					
					

				


				


			

			
             
        

        
	

	
	



		
		


		
	

		
		
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