Immediately after I wrote the blog post Sand Drawings I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here:

After I wrote the sand drawing blog I started thinking — how am I changing, decaying, just bits of matter, aggregated together, subject to decay like other bits of aggregated mater that exist in the world? Don’t my teeth wear away like kitchen knives? Doesn’t my skin dry and crack and sag like the old leather chairs? Doesn’t my hair grey like the leaves that change in the fall?

I think of kid Alana, how could I assume this adult Alana is the same? The forms are so very different from each other, and yet I called that ‘me’ and this present body ‘me’.  Just because I remember a series of moments (some not even all) between now and then, is that really my only justification for assuming Alana continuity?

What has decayed, broken, can I internalize further? My house has leaking window like my bladder has begun to leak. Years ago, when windows and bladder were ‘young’ the seal held perfectly, but now, not so much.  The padding and fluff in my favorite jacket is worn, like my body, both are losing shape, growing stretched and  saggy. Still usable, but not the old springy form of yesteryear.  I look in the mirror and see a face that has grown puffy, old, worn — when did that happen? I think back to the kitchen in my old house — slowly getting scratched, cabinetry gashed, drawers sagging; just like with my face, I don’t know exactly when the worn out look started, but somehow, overtime, it became dated.

I went to the drawer and pulled out some old pics of my family. So many  folks dead and gone already — dad, grandma, grandpa, the dogs. For those of us still alive,  Seth my mom and I, we all look so different now. The pics don’t lie. The change in form has begun already. I remember my dad’s corpse. It looked so different than when I saw him during his last visit to San Fran, before he had gotten sick. So why don’t I think I will hit point death the same way as dad, grandma, grandpa,  and the dogs?

I looked at pics of my dad again– I know that I loved him so much. I know. I know it hurt when he died. But I can’t exactly remember the moment of his death. I can’t feel it now with the same acute sense of loss that I felt then. By now, that pain has sorta gone away. And yet, when I experience the moment of loss, the knowledge that in the future it will go away/diminish, just the way my feelings of loss of my dad have,  it is no help at all.  It doesn’t eliminate the pain. I know that when I next lose someone I love, my brother perhaps, or Eric, the pain will be extreme.

I keep thinking being a good Buddhist is about being a good person, via my standards. But the truth is that a ‘good Buddhist’ is  just someone thoroughly fed up with the pain of loss. Someone who is fucking done. And someone who sees the obvious — that form will keep shifting, change will keep coming, loss and decay and death are unavoidable. Why isn’t that perfectly clear to me yet? The evidence is everywhere.

Last night, I went to a workout class. My teacher kept criticizing me, “Your spine isn’t aligned Alana, you don’t use the right muscles in your back, why are you moving from your quads instead of your hamstrings?’ It was such a hard, emotional sessions, I almost cried. I thought to myself, “for fuck’s sake,  if I could do better I would do better, I surely would, I want to move perfectly, I want to be successful, I want a teacher who is  proud of me.” But the thing is, right now, I can’t feel correct alignment, I don’t have the nuanced body awareness required to turn certain muscles off and engage other muscles instead. The force of my habitual movement patterns are too strong.  And that right there is the same exact reason I can’t see the truth of this world — the force of my habitual patterns of thinking are too strong. The thing is, after decades of yoga, body building, pole dancing, I know, the way to change movement patterns is through practice. Guess I know how to change habits of thinking then too…

I already had rupa on the brain, so it wasn’t surprising that I found myself on a bit of a rupa roll.  Sitting in my apartment one day, I started looking around at my stuff and I asked myself, “Do you really understand these items? Do you know what they are and what they do?”

My eyes fell on my favorite stuffed animal — Grux — a real fur bunny toy that Eric had bought me, for a small fortune, at Loro Piana. I got to thinking, what is this thing? It is a dead animal skin, stuffed with cotton and wool, tagged with a luxury brand tag. When I got it, I was sooooo excited. I believed it somehow represented Eric’s love for me, the endurance of our relationship together, that I would be cared for and safe. Its a bunny, our token animal, soft and cute. I imagined a clear future with the two of us cuddling- up and watching TV with Grux nestled between us.

To be sure, the thing is rare and expensive. But does that fact, alone, explain my love and attachment to Grux? The answer is of course no — to become attached I needed a strong dash of imagination: The fact that Eric gave it to me suddenly meant it ‘proved’ Eric’s eternal love. It helped that I could lean into my habitual belief that money = care/love. My mind had to make it a symbol of more than the sum of its fluffy parts –pricey bunny represents tasteful and refined, the way I see Eric and myself, together, as a couple. I had to see a fun future with the stuffy, Eric and I lived happily together. And in all this, a simple little stuffy got bound up with who I think I am, who I am loved by, what my future will look like. The process of mine-ification was complete.

The problem, of course, is that for all I imagined that stuffy to be, its rupa bound nature was inescapable — Grux was sitting in my apartment, on a high shelf, because I lived in constant fear that his fur would get dusty and dirty  and stiff and eroded; change and degrade like all rupa items do.

What is more, if I was being honest, Grux wasn’t even doing what I thought he did, he wasn’t living-up to his imagined function. NY had been hard on Eric and I, it was a period our relationship was strained. So did this little stuffy do anything to abate that? If I took it off the shelf, would it make our love of one another stronger? Had it really been able to guarantee the ‘happily ever after’ future I was so sure came along with its fluffin and stuffin? If that little animal did its job, making me loved and safe, why was I sitting in an apartment, in NYC, feeling so alone and vulnerable?

In all my contemplations about my ‘shield of special’ and my little bubble world — fabrications of my mind that let me imagine an Alana who is safe and comfortable and exempt from the suffering of the world — it was hard to ignore the obvious: My bubble world is full of stuff.  I pin my ideas of what is ‘safe’ in my environment, on my belongings like houses and money and a husband that will shield my from unwanted fates. My uniqueness is built on a body that is fit, a diet that is’moral’, on cars and clothes that make me (in my mind alone) ‘on top and in control’ of this world. There are configurations of rupa that are chill, SF like places, that are so me, and then there are configurations that are mellow-harshing  loud and mean, like NY, that are so not me. So it seemed like a perfectly good time to again revisit the world of rupa and do some thinking about my self and my belongings.

My head already knows damn well that the idea of ‘mine’ lives in my head alone, that there is no necessary relationship between the reality of an object (its form/rupa), its rules and its ‘mineness’, the task at hand was to gather more evidence to convince my heart.   Below is just a little exercise I did  considering my objects and what I think makes something’mine’. It has no conclusion, it was, and still is, an ongoing contemplation, but this was an evidence gathering effort that I have re-written here right from my notebook:

Proximity: The city of SF  house is still something I considered ‘mine’ even though I had moved. Clearly proximity is not the sole criteria for mineness

Legal Ownership:  My NY apartment was something I considered mine as soon as or bid was accepted, even though I did not technically own it. Now, contract signed, and all moved in, I do not consider it mine because I hate it so much, though legally I am the owner of record. Clearly legal ownership is not the sole criteria for mineness

What comes from my/that of which I am the cause:  I consider my dad mine, even though we was born long before me, so I could not have been his cause. In fact, he was my dad for fewer years of his life than he wasn’t my dad (i.e. years prior to my birth) and yet, he was, from my perspective, always mine.  Even now, after my dad has died and left me, a part of me still views him as mine.

What I desire, or what was once mine:   An old family friend and I once considered ourselves ‘sisters’ we were so close. Now that we are grown-up and haven’t seen each other in many years, I don’t consider her my sister any more. She however still calls me and treats me like we are ‘sisters close’ on occasion. She was once mine, but because I have changed, my life has changed and what I want has changed she is no longer mine anymore. My belief in her belonging to me is totally independent of her belief about me belonging to her.

I still consider my old office mine, even though I haven’t been there in nearly a year, even though before I got to my orgaziation someone else had sat there and now that I have left someone new likely sits there.

Exclusively Mine:  I consider my home and my car mine, even though I share it with Eric. I consider items I bought on re-sale as mine, even though they had a previous owner. And yet, when I go on and sell those items at the resale shop I stop considering them mine.

Still in my Possession: I still imagine being ‘Porsche Alana’, the feeling that driving that car brought me is still so visceral, even though I sold it months ago. Even though, in the end that car disappointed me, made me feel foolish, I still cling to the idea of myself driving it, owning it, during the good times. This all leads me to ask a question: How do these objects like my dad, the Porsche, SF still shape me when they are no longer in my possession. When their physical absence means I can’t actually shape them anymore?

How can I be my dad’s daughter when he is gone? How can I still be a fundraising professional when I am out of a job? How can I still be an SFer when I have moved away, sold my home, cut ties with the community? How do I still consider myself a yogi when I haven’t done yoga in years? Am I ‘athletic’ even when I am out of shape?

How can it be when there are also things that I don’t do/don’t ‘own’ anymore and I absolutely don’t consider those me/mine? For example, I don’t consider my ex still my boyfriend, I don’t consider my identity to be that of his girlfriend.

Not Under My Control: I have money in an investment account that I am legally unable to control, but I still consider the money mine, I imagine I can use it at sometime in the future, so simply controlling something is not a sole criteria for mine.

My Body : Then there is the whole crazy issue of my body.I think it is mine even though I watch it continually change. Even though it changes in ways I don’t like. Even though it controls me sometimes, it makes me get up in the night to pee, it causes me pain and it forces me to eat. Even though it is a collection of parts and its not like I consider any given part me, I am not an ear or a nose, but they are still mine. And yet when a part leaves me, my baby teeth, my gallbladder, my dead skin, I don’t care, those are not me or mine.

If I understand that mine is only something in my head, maybe I need to look at all the times I have tricked myself before.

Present Day Note: The line above ended my contemplation back in 2017. I do however want to add a present day note to offer a bit further insight. I spent months and months in 2019 and 2020 strictly pressing on the topic of self and self belonging, and I kept wondered what makes something MINE (and therefore something I cling to) when it is clear that this idea lives no where in the 4 elements of the object. I wondered how exactly the definition of mine could keep shifting and changing, just like what we see in the contemplation above: Every time I thought I figured it out, it seemed like the criteria changed; its mine because I legally own it, only that Manhattan loft felt like ‘not mine’ long before I actually sold it. It is mine because I pay for it, but what about the outfits that feel like mine in the dressing room before I hit-up the cash register? It is mine because I have had it,  because it is my birthright, but how do I reconcile that with a body that keeps getting older and fatter and sick, is it really expressing my will, acting like my ‘right’? I realize now the problem…delusion is a slippery fuck, in truth, mine=desire+some arbitrary rationalization I use to justify/claim mineness in my mind. Its just a rationalization that changes to suit my needs, all it needs to be is ‘defensible’ to my delusional brain and its good enough to go on.

Interestingly I realized this is how a slaveholder could call a slave ‘mine’ (their memories made it defensible where as in this day and age my own memories think its insane to own another human). How missionaries could use their treatment of the non-christian natives. How  wars over disputed territory start. Some seriously ugly ass shit in this world is born from this here process of mine-ification.  Its not just mine-driven ugliness that is borne out in the world, I have plenty of examples of it filling my personal life — what about how nasty I was to the girl I thought was trying to steal my boyfriend, what about how snarky I can get at staff meetings when I think a co-worker’s ideas will harm my organization, what about all the drivers I flick off because they are pushing into my lane? And what happens when it is something even dearer to me at risk — how will I react if someone tries to steal my life? My body? What karmic seeds will I sow then?

I was at the hot springs and there was this woman there who was so obese. I tried to internalize what it would be like to be so fat, but my heart refused to accept it. The contemplation was shallow, going through the motions, but feeling nothing. I realized the reason why: I don’t believe I can ever be that fat — I am different, I work-out and mind my diet, that won’t happen to me. But the truth is, compared to a few years ago, I am super out of shape. Weakness and pudge that was unfathomable to me just a few years back was my ‘today body’. Sure there was some laziness, depression from the move, but there was also aging — its not nearly as easy to stay fit and thin as it used to be. So how can I say I am so special, so sure that I am protected for obesity ever happening to me?

 I am always putting distance between myself and the things I don’t want to have happen. Fatness, illness, poverty, death, loss, failure — these things are not me/mine. As soon as I see tragedy or suffering my mind leaps into action, creating a ‘shield of special’, to justify why bad things that are so obviously plaguing others, simply can’t/won’t happen to me. Clearly, it is a trick of my mind, to believe that I have the power to ultimately decide what I can and can’t/ will and won’t suffer.  I base it off my past experiences. I  base it off of what I think I ‘deserve’. I base it off some collection of characteristics/belongings that I think are uniquely mine and will uniquely protect me. All I need to do is snap on my ‘shield of special’ and I’m safe, able to avoid all the stuff other people around me suffer, unless…maybe…just possibly…I can’t.

A few years ago, a friend fell to financial ruin. She had a good job and her employer loved her, but she got bored and decide to quit. Several jobs later, her house was forclosed on and she had to declare bankruptcy. I  supported her as best I could, but in my mind I always thought, “I would never do something so foolish, I would never just throw away a job and a life that was working fine just because I wanted to try something new.” Fast forward and now I am in NY, miserable. I had a great life in SF, but I was feeling restless, I thought I could have more, so I threw it all away only to find myself in emotional ruin. How am I better than my friend?

My dad was my hero. In my eyes, no one was more warm, kind, loving and special, if anyone deserved immortality, it was Dad. But, despite how special my dad was to me, he died. Despite his money, his loving wife and kids, his success, his intelligence, his frequent workouts and careful diet, his top doctors and his sense of humor, he died. All my life I have tried to be like my dad: Even as a kid, I ate the foods he ate, enjoyed the music he listened to. I have tried to have his success, his humor, his intelligence and adoration. Even if I had all those things, can I escape his fate –death? And not just death, disease, suffering, and the loss of a life he loved?

Back when I went on safari in Kenya, I was a vegetarian. I truly believed that my karma with animals was good, that I did them no harm and that they would do me no harm in return. I believed I was special, I was safe. But then I was run down by a rhino that easily could have killed me. Just because I thought I was special and safe it didn’t make me protected.  In truth I think all sorts of things make me exceptional and  ‘justify’ my safety: Goodness, effortfullness, Eric, beauty, money, fitness, planning and preparation. But I have seen countless examples of people, endowed with all these very characteristics, who fall victim to suffering:

• There was the actor in Sparticus, he was so fit and talented, he was just beginning to achieve success in his career after so much hard work. Rare cancer diagnosis at 40, dead within a year.
• There was Eric’s co-worker who planned carefully and retired in Carmel, she and her husband were close and adoring, like Eric and I. 6 months after retiring her husband died suddenly of a heart attack.
• Eric had a friend who he always did right by, he was generous and adoring with him, patient and loving. One day, the friend decided to stop being Eric’s friend even though Eric had done his best to be a good friend and person with him. Eric was heartbroken by the loss.
• Money was supposed to make life in New York easy and enjoyable. I am miserable and the reason we can’t leave is money — fear that Eric will ruin his resume, and won’t get another good paying job, if he leaves after just a few months.
• LP Thoon died after a struggle with cancer — who would I presume is a more ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ person?

These are the stories that stab my heart a bit. They have each stayed with me for years, by virtue of their details hitting a little too close to home. Now I know why —  they are an indictment of my shield of specialness, real live proof that such a shield won’t really work to protect me at all. I guess imaginary shields don’t do much to protect in the real world.

A final thought came to me that day at the hot springs — what if I didn’t have to be so damn special? What if all my struggle to acquire objects and traits that make me so unique, in my mind alone, was to come to an end? Why am I willing to trade fake protection for real burden?

One of the key themes the exercises on uncovering hidden benefits and beliefs kept coming back to was that I continually quest for/seek to build a ‘bubble world*‘ — the kind of place where everyone lives in harmony, according to the rules and standards I think are ideal. In my bubble world, people are respectful and considerate, they are laid-back and peaceful, they are community-oriented and friendly. After living in Cali, fairly happy, for so long, my bubble world had come to look a lot like chill-Cali  and decisively not New York.

The problem, which my new NY home proved by its mere existence, is that my bubble world is a fantasy that the real world simply doesn’t abide by. Which brings me to a pretty shocking self discovery that arose directly from the hidden benefits and beliefs exercises– I continue to strive for, to be reborn for, something that is impossible to achieve. Below I am going to share a raw, unedited, page from my notebook in which I grappled with this newfound, and pretty shocking, realization.

I get reborn for something impossible. How fucked-up is that? WHY CAN’T I STOP? Because I don’t really believe it is impossible; or because what little I have, what few moments I can spend in my bubble world are worth it;  or because I have already invested so much, I just can’t quit.  I used to think I had earned the comfort that I had back in San Fran, so I should just get to enjoy it, I could worry about practice and enlightenment later (hidden wrong view that enlightenment will be uncomfortable).  But now that I am in NY and I don’t have comfort, all I can think about is how to get it back. I am engrossed in worldly schemes, still not worried about practice or enlightenment.

Because I had comfort and happiness for a while, I know it is possible. Now I need to preserve what comfort I have and get back what I lost. This is why Mae Yo has taught to pretend to be others, to feel and experience all the options of this world — to know discomfort is possible just as I know comfort is possible from my time in SF. All the possible good stuff motivates my hope, my worldly schemes, my bubble world quests. But what about the possible bad stuff– shouldn’t it be motivating my practice, my plan to escape (rebirths)? Instead I just look away from the bad stuff, I try to avoid it.

I look away from disease, from homelessness, from broken families and ugliness of all sorts. In my head, I make those things ‘not me’, ‘not mine’. I come-up with reasons in my head that those will never be me or mine, why I am special. In my bubble world I am always healthy, fit, rich and loved. But I already have evidence from my move to NY that I can slip out of my own bubble world so easily. ONE MOVE and I feel like SF Alana is slipping away, yielding to cold and bitchy, unlovable,  NY Alana. I fight back, I flail, I seek to retain myself and my identity. But I have already lost control, I have already exited the bubble. So why do I create/strive for  something that is so impossible to attain  that even I can’t do it perpetually? Even I can’t live up to my own bubble world standards and rules.

It is time to practice the truth, to internalize what makes me so uncomfortable — I am not special, I am subject to impermanence, there is no special bubble world where I can live exempt from the rules of the world. There is only so long I can keep moving my bench into shady spots. In the end, I am subject to loss, death, to discomfort and to existence in a world that doesn’t meet my ‘just so’ standards.

* I want to note that this concept of my wanting to create and live-in a bubble world, was an idea that got fleshed-out more thoroughly at the retreat with a friend who was generous enough to share her own reflections and conversations with LP Nut about the tendency to try and create harmony  –‘a bubble world’ — in her workplace. She was a massive help to me in recognizing my own similar tendencies, to try and create and environment and surround myself with things and people I felt were considerate and ideal. I have borrowed the term and concept of bubble world from her, but don’t feel comfortable sharing more about her story or situation on my blog.  I am however immensely grateful for the conversations we had which brought so much clarity to my own deep and mistaken beliefs.

Dear Reader, today’s blog is a direct continuation of last week’s, LP Nut’s Alana-fied Technique to Uncover Hidden Benefits and Beliefs Part 1, so please do read that one before continuing on here.

In the last blog, we began an exploration of an Alana-fied version of a technique LP Nut taught at the 2017 retreat to uncover hidden benefits and beliefs. The premise behind the technique is a simple one — if we do stuff that we know hurts us, there must be a reason why we do it since no one likes being in pain. By bringing the ‘why’  — i.e. hidden benefits and beliefs — to light we can begin challenging their logic and alignment with correct view.

In last week’s example we used a series of ‘what-if’ questions to uncover some of the hidden beliefs that under gird my extreme anger at people who honk their horns. Here we will continue the exercise by taking a slightly broader concept — the benefit to my view that people should be considerate (not honking is just one form of consideration) — and digging into the pros and cons of holding that standard/view.

Exploring the Pros and Cons of  my Belief: Everyone Should be Considerate/Follow Social Standards* 

Pro 1: If people follow rules/standards then I feel the world is predictable and I am in control

Challenge 1: Am I really in control? I have a standard that people shouldn’t honk and the streets of NY are blaring anyway. Does my rule actually allow me  to be or prove my control? 

Con 1: I am miserable when people honk. I am angry and disappointed whenever I think rules/standards have been broken.

Pro 2: I can follow rules/standards and by doing so I can prove that I am a good person and that people will love and accept me for it

Challenge 2: What about all the times I can’t even follow my own rules? Eric is supposed to clean-up after himself, but don’t I sometimes leave dishes in the sink? And do people love me for upholding these standards? My stepmom used to complain all the time of how difficult I was as a vegetarian, she certainly didn’t love me more for the standards I upheld.

Con 2: This gives me a false sense of superiority and safety. 

Pro 3: I can define my vision for a ‘bubble world’ — my ideal setting that is harmonious and rule abiding. 

Challenge 3: My bubble world is a a fiction that does not exist in reality. In reality, people break rules and undermine my standards all the time. 

Con 3: I feel enraged when my imaginary bubble world is threatened, in New York I have fantasies of punching, or shooting or killing the honkers. In this life, the harm to others is in my head. But can’t I envision the risks of clinging to the idea of ‘bubble world’  in another life/circumstance?  It is possible I would kill for it or go to war for it? Then I would reap the karmic consequences on such actions, all because I am a person who holds so firmly to a belief the world should be according to my standards.

Pro 4: These standards, when they are followed, nurture my hope that with time or effort I can ultimately  find a perfect world that is worth living in.

Con 4: Over and over I am reborn because of the false hope that my perfect bubble world exists. Each time my standards are met, I save that example in my memory of prof that birth, this world is worth it. That I will ultimately be able to game the system and have a rule abiding/ standard following universe where I can abide in comfort. And until that time, because my standards are so rigid and high, my conditions so numerous, that I rarely find a place that I am comfortable being in.

* Something I really love about this technique is its round-about way of getting to hidden wrong views. Typically, I would ‘challenge’ the permanence of a view like’everyone should follow my standards’ upfront. But instead of doing that, the hidden benefit approach lets such wrong views stand for a little while so that we can get at the deeper wrong views that underlie this one and start exposing those to scrutiny.

It was  the 2017 KPY Retreat, I was on a nature hike out in the woods with a small group of attendees and I started talking to L.P. Nut: “I can’t stand New York”, I said, “I hate it so much. The people are so rude, they make so much noise, especially the hoking, it is unbearable and the the filth, the way people litter and trash stuff, it is overwhelming…I don’t know what to do, being there makes me so angry.” L.P Nut nodded. A few moments later, he asked me, “Alana do you hear that noise?”  There was a chorus of birds loudly tweeting so I replied, “The birds? Of course.” We walk a few more paces and then L.P. points to a pile of decomposing leaves, “Do you see that pile? Isn’t it dirty?” “Well yes,” I must admit that it is. “Do these things bother you?” L.P. asked me. When I said no, he asked me why? “I guess it is because these birds and leaves are a part of nature.” At which point LP asked me one final question: “Aren’t humans part of nature too?”

In my mind, New York was an abomination, an ABSOLUTE affront to the natural world, to the way things should be and people should live.  This was a ‘fact of life’ that had nothing to do with me; I was just an observer of  NY’s obvious faults, OF COURSE I was perturbed by needing to live with them, who wouldn’t be? But LP’s questions forced me to acknowledge that I was a biased observer, that I was filtering my view of New York through the lens of my own standards.

For me, a car honking is unbearable noise, but a bird tweeting is a soothing lullaby. An overflowing trashcan is filth but a decomposing pile of leaves is ‘the circle of life’. A naturescape and all its animals are good and wholesome while a NY cityscape and all its people are some kind of perversion. These are my arbitrary standards, not innate truths of this world.  Before my conversation with LP, on some level, I was seeing myself as a passive victim forced to live in a state of continual hate and anger– but afterwards  I got the first inkling of understanding that I was in fact the cause of my hate and anger.

I was sitting on the bathroom floor of my Manhattan loft, engaging in a-now-typical-ritual — crying my eyes out. I was miserable. I was so depressed. Above all else, I felt lost and trapped. The circumstances were this:  Eric and I were in debt for a house we hated. He had a 2 year contract at work that, if broken, would require a significant sum to pay back our relocation expenses. Besides, Eric worried about his career, his resume, and what it would look like if he ‘washed-out’ of a new job so quickly. I was so miserable, even though I loved Eric dearly, for one of the only times in our marriage,  I thought about leaving him. About going somewhere else, doing something else… only I didn’t even know where I would go…

In my hysterics, I started thinking about how I got here. Not about the decisions of the last few months that brought me to NY, I had already turned that particular set of mistakes over and over in my mind. What I couldn’t figure out is how I got myself so trapped. How I ended up in a life I despised despite all of my careful planning and effort. Despite having so much going for me: I had good health, plenty of money, a graduate degree with honors, an accomplished career with plenty of folks to vouch for my skills.  I had a husband who loved and supported me, a close-knit family and a handful of good friends who would take me in if I asked.  I felt like I should have choices, options. After all,  these are the things I always believed would prepare me for the world, would guarantee a good life. So how on earth was it that I felt so utterly trapped? Helpless? Armed with all these ‘weapons’, yet I struggled to find a move, a plan for attack, a way out of my situation. All I could do was wait.

Obviously, nothing stays still. Over the coming months, my situation shifted — I found comfort in an out of town retreat, new possibilities when my old job invited me to come back and I could split time between SF and NY, my hate tapered, my perspective changed. But I can still viscerally remember the extreme feeling of being trapped, immobilized, on the bathroom floor that day. The power of that feeling has made me realize something else … I can prepare all I want. I can stack-up every advantage I can muster. I can imagine that the skills, personality, favor, etc, that I build will allow me to control my life. That it will give me options and freedom. But, in the end, I am not the master of my life. And, if I am not the master of my own life, can I really expect to be master of anything at all?

I was out for a walk and I saw a swirl of leaves blowing around in the wind. I decided to try to use it as an Ubai, a metaphor for my own confused and upended life. I closed my eyes and began to imagine my own objects, details of places and people, from my Cali and NY life, swirling around me. All out of my control, moved by forces beyond myself.

Suddenly, I opened my eyes and realized I had made a huge mistake…the leaves out in nature were swirling around each other, moving this way and that in the wind, a constant changing mass. But in my own mind, I twisted the scene, I ‘internalized’ everything, those ‘metaphorical leaves’, swirling around me — I was the sun, the gravitational force around which these objects, people and places all revolved.

My little Ubai exercise had unmasked ego, the lie of alana-centricism quietly lurking beneath even my most ardent efforts to contemplate my limited control. This, I realized, was the deep extent to which my view of myself and this world are poisoned. At the time, I didn’t press any further. Now, years later, I frequently get a flash in my mind of swirling leaves and it reminds me to double check on that ego.

And … because sometimes suffering and delusion  just don’t end overnight … a second pestering email, written several weeks after the first, to Neecha, and her skillful response.

Alana’s Second Email to Neecha

Hey Neecha —

After about 2 month down in the dumps I finally decided to reach out to Neecha  for some advice on how to deal with the extreme stress and sorrow of my new New York life. When I think back on it, I realize that her advice was some of the best anyone has ever given me. SPOILER ALERT –Impermanence, impermanence, impermanence, death, death, death.

Its funny because now, almost 3 years later, I see my hatred of New York fading and I can trace the reason for this reduced hatred to my Dharma  contemplations: I have come to realize that all circumstances are temporary (on loan) and they don’t prove who I am. Had I understood that back when I moved, when I tried to make NY mine (or rather rejected it as ‘not mine’, i.e. a threat to myself/the identity I wanted to build) I would have suffered so much less. I would have made my loved ones suffer so much less. But, this is now. In the next two blogs I will share my exchanges with Neecha back then…

 Alana’s Email to Neecha

Hey Neecha —

Neecha’s Reply to Alana

Alana,

With the boxes all put away and the final design elements being put on our new home I remembered an old plant that I used to have that would have looked nice in the house, it was an orchid. An orchid that had thrived so well in a sunny spot on my desk and then died, quite quickly, when it had shifted just a few inches to the left, out of the direct sun.

Suddenly it hit me, one of the deepest wrong views underlying my decision to move in the first place: Alana is a special little flower. You see, my orchid had shown me a deep truth of this world — everything single thing is subject to its environment, its circumstances, its factor/conditions/causes.  But, I ignored that plants’ great teaching moment. So, when Eric got his job offer in NY I simply took for granted that happy, cheery, settled and stable Alana could move (a hell of a lot more than a few inches mind you) and things, I, would be exactly the same. You see orchids may be subject to their environment but I believed I  was a special little flower, exempt from the influences of this world.

Had I actually understood this great life lesson before I moved, I can’t say for sure we wouldn’t have gone, but I certainly would have thought about it a lot more critically. I wouldn’t have been so blind in my decision making and blindsided by the result. The truth is, I had evidence way beyond botany; I had moved almost 10 times in the past and each one was a struggle to adjust, a loss of my sense of identity, some were downright despairing. But I ignored so many warnings, the basic truth of this world (impermanence), and I skipped off into a sunset that ended-up leading to many long and dark days in Gotham.