Alana's Dharma Blog

I had been having a Line exchange with Neecha about how I am always trying to avoid ugliness and dirtiness in this world. About how I try to make the ugliness that does exist  ‘over there’, i.e. not in my life. I gave the example of restaurants: I always check health code scores before I eat out and I am unwilling to go someplace ‘dirty’. Even still, I don’t ever want to sit facing the kitchen. I am afraid to get a look inside and find a level of dirtiness I just can’t handle.

Neecha asked me a simple question: “Alana, is your own kitchen always perfectly clean?”

Since it’s obviously not, how exactly can I expect it from a restaurant? I started thinking about if I was getting what I expect out of my life. And, if I am not (since I am not) what it means. My  conclusion: My expectations about this world, about what I will get and what I can avoid, are wrong. Dirtiness is a state that quite simply can’t always be avoided, not in restaurants and not in my home.

As you, Dear Reader, already know, I love to travel. But part of traveling is the reality you never really know what you are going find at your destination.  Since I don’t know what I will get, since my expectations are sometimes wrong, doesn’t it follow that just going through my day-to-day life — even doing what I enjoy — I can’t really escape that ugliness and dirtiness that I keep trying to relegate to a place ‘over there’ behind the fence?

I had been thinking about this a bit  following my Line exchange with Neecha when I saw the most perfect — the most totally captain obvious– commercial ever. I will give the link below and let the commercial, which sums up my contemplations wayyyyyy better than words ever can, speak for itself. To this day, when I consider the topic of my expectations versus my reality, this little clip comes to top of mind.

Because I have totally booked this hotel before…https://www.ispot.tv/ad/7KY6/hotels-com-obvious-lies

I was walking down the street, a few days after New Years, and I saw tons of discarded Christmas trees on the curb. It occurred to me that just a few days ago, these trees were precious object. People went to a lot of work to buy their trees, hurl them home, set them up and lovingly decorate them. For a few weeks they were assigned such deep meaning — they were about family, celebration, traditions and joy.  Now, they are trash.

I couldn’t help but start thinking about my own body, it is something I work so hard to shape and decorate, with the workouts, the clothes, shoes and jewelry. I am just like a perfectly decorated Christmas tree. I give my body so much meaning — my body is me/ I am my body; my sense of self and this body of mine are totally intertwined.  But what happens when my season passes? What happens when, like all trees I rot, decay, break down?

The truth is a Christmas tree is just like every other tree in the forest. It is not special, it has no deep hidden meaning lurking inside it. Its value, its specialness, lives only in the mind of its owners and then only for a short time.

Growing up Jewish, I never had a Christmas tree of my own and I always have wondered why people would go through so much fuss over the thing.  And yet, look at how I struggle for the sake of my body just because I imagine it is somehow special and different than other peoples’ bodies. The time will come when this body will be trash. Is all the fuss over the thing really worth it?

I’m general, I do hate to ‘over-share’, but I’m afraid I have to kick-off this blog with a mighty personal detail about my life — I have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It’s a disease with no known cause, no cure, and a not-so-fun set of symptoms that include surprise attacks of uncontrollable diarrhea that always seem to come at the most inopportune times.

For example, when I’m walking through one of SF’s shadiest hoods (Tenderloin), already late for work, and that first, telltale, stabbing stomach pain strikes. Oh crap. Literally, oh crap the crap is coming… I run for the first open restaurant and beg to use the bathroom.

Alana: “Please, please please can I use your restroom, its an emergency.”

Waitress: “sorry customers only.”

Alana: “I promise I will buy something when I get out.”

Waitress: “No, you need to pay first, no credit cards by the way”

Ughhh, no time, no cash, I run out, and manage to stumble into the public library just in time. Whew, the crisis was averted, but I felt so slighted. I mean who denies someone something as simple as a bathroom in their time of need? That waitress had no compassion; I would never do something like that…but then my thought was interrupted by a homeless guy asking for change. Out loud I explain, “sorry I don’t have any cash on me.” In my head I am thinking, “what the hell did you do to deserve my money?”

To me, that homeless guy didn’t meet my criteria for a ‘hand-out.’ On some level, I looked at that guy and thought he got himself into his mess; he did something to deserve a life on the street.

But wait – dharma whammy – wasn’t I literally just in this situation 15 minutes ago? When I needed a bathroom, I thought it was something so simple, so basic, a small request. I thought I deserved it, I was entitled to it, I had a basic human need and I expected it to be understood and accommodated. But the restaurant had a standard, a criteria for use of the bathroom – you needed to be a customer, which I was not.

The restaurant standard seemed so arbitrary to me. The waitress so compassionless. But was my standard for a homeless guy  deserving a hand out any less arbitrary? Was I any more compassionate? I mean really, where did my own standard come from anyway? Dharma practice 101: When in doubt, a problem, a wrong view, an arbitrary standard must be coming from me.

Which got me thinking… I am someone who takes handouts all the time. First I was supported by my father and now by my husband.  But I can’t live with the fear of being someone who is needy, someone subject to a harsh life on the streets. To sleep at night, to feed my illusion of safety, I need a reason, a standard –an imaginary line in the sand– that makes me and my handouts different from, better than, that homeless man. So I conjure up this idea of ‘deserve’. I think of what a wonderful daughter and wife I am while I imagine the terrible things he must have done to land on the streets.  

But the truth is, that homeless guy and I had much more in common than I am comfortable admitting.  That man was at a low point in the ups and downs cycle of life (lives). But don’t I go through those same cycles? Wasn’t stabbing abdominal pain and the desperate need for a bathroom just such a low point? Wasn’t being denied the place to perform a basic bodily function with dignity pretty damn low?

I managed to escape my low pretty swiftly thanks to a public bathroom at the library. But does that mean I should forget? Ignore? Pretend that I am somehow better than that man— somehow magically exempt from the high/low cycle (8 worldly conditions) that affects everyone?  Do my imaginary standards really protect me from the conditions of this world? Just by not looking can I avoid what is over the fence? Is it my beliefs about deserve, or is it karma, that will ultimately determine what I get?

I had been contemplating a question from  LP Thoon for a few weeks — what techniques does  desire use to persuade me? — admittedly, I wasn’t making a whole lot of progress. Frustrated, looking for something else to contemplate, I ‘tuned-in’ to the KPY Facebook page and saw a post from LP Anan: It was a video of a group of people preparing a meal of grilled octopus, only the octopus was still alive as they were grilling it.  

A picture is worth 1000 words, so here is the video. Warning 1: The video is graphic. Warning 2: the rest of this post will not make a ton of sense unless you watch the video.

OK , if you are back from watching the video, perhaps you can understand — I  watched that video and I WAS HORRIFIED. I was so shocked, I was so upset, it literally jolted me right into one doozy of a dharma contemplation.  So, with all that set-up, here we go…

Thought #1 Why why why on earth would someone do this, what could make it worth torturing another living being. Answer: Desire. Hunger. It is persuading these people.They see the squid as a tool to accomplish their desire, the have no concern for its feelings, its pain. They don’t see the hurt the squid’s experiences and they are blind to the consequence for themselves.

Thought #2: Who the fuck would ever ever ever do something so deeply horrible as to grill a squid alive as it squirmed around a hot plate in pain? Answer: I have done this same thing before. No, to be clear, I have never grilled a squid alive, but I sure as hell have hurt others while I was blinded, tricked, persuaded by desire.

You see, back in the day, I was a player. I seduced countless lovers: men, women, friends and strangers. I was hungry. I desired affection, attention, affirmation, so I used people without concern for their feelings or pain.

There was one guy, I literally can’t even remember his name, but we spent a few months ‘dating’ at the end of my senior year of college.  To me, it was a fling, a way to pass time, to amuse myself, to feed my ego. But that guy fell in love with me, and when I got bored and threw him away, his pain was as real as the octopus’.

Which brings me to Thought #3, consequences:  If that octopus could sting or bite or shoot poison darts, folks likely wouldn’t be trying to cook it alive. But since the costs, the consequences, of that tasty torture aren’t  immediate, they are super easy to ignore. But, in the long run, what happens to people who are so callous to another’s life and suffering? What kind of positions do they put themselves in? What kind of people do they surround themselves with?

I was someone who manipulated people sexually, used them and left them.  In my mind there was no harm; and despite the high drama and hard work of my beleaguered love life, worth it to me. But now I’m starting to see a very dark side to such behavior… Do I want to be someone that breaks people’s hearts? Who wants to be friends with a person like that, who will want to be my next lover? Do I want to be someone that manipulates people? If I signal to my partner that its ok to manipulate, to be in a relationship with no regard for the other person, am I not setting myself up for someone to manipulate and use me right back?

There is always a reason, a justification that we tell ourselves to makes our actions OK: A squid is food, not human, it can be tortured. Those POWs, from the book I was reading, are enemy combatants, they can be worked to death. These people I used, they were adults, they consented to the sex, their feelings are on them so I did nothing wrong. But I am the one who is creating the justification and then I am the one using that justification as a benchmark  to judge my actions as right, moral, and acceptable. This is crazy circular logic and in it is the key to desire persuading me: I figure out what to tell myself to make my actions ok, how to live with them, how to ignore their impact on others (that is their fault, their problem) and on myself.  

But, though I try to  ignoring consequence, lie to myself about the okness of my actions, let desire blind me, truth has a tell — it has been more than a decade since I saw that forgotten named guy, and a video of a frying octopus was enough to stab my heart with the guilt of my actions and the sorrow I feel for the pain I caused. It looks like karma is catching-up with me despite all my crazy circular logic.

I was reading a book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about a group of WWII POWs who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to work hard labor in the jungle. They were tortured, beaten, starved — the details of their treatment were shocking to me; the fact that humans endure such horrors and that other humans inflict them…

Anyway, it was one of those books that really made my heart raw. I was reading it in the mall food court when I saw someone throw away half their order of fries. In the book, the characters are so hungry they eat anything: Twigs, leaves, egg shells, their own refuse — because of their condition they don’t waste anything. The guy in the food court though, he has enough, he is full, so he can easily waste. The contrast really hit me; I am used to living in a world where food can be tossed, where resources are abundant, where I have more than what I need. But there is also a world of starvation, a world where there is not enough, where people scrape to get by and many don’t survive. Actually, abundance and scarcity, over-fullness and starvation, they exist in the same world, affecting different people at different moments in time.  

My own life was at a period of relative scarcity. My husband was uncertain about his company’s future and his other job prospects so we were ‘livin lean.’ Before, when things had felt more secure, we didn’t really budget, we bought what we wanted, we didn’t worry about saving a lot. But in a the face of job uncertainty, we were being more careful, we weren’t being so wasteful. In just 1 year, my life had gone through a swing from flush to lean.

So why is it so hard for me to understand that the same mechanism that took me from ‘livin large’ to ‘livin lean’ is at work in the contrast between someone throwing away fries and someone starving — things change, circumstances change. The soldiers who became POWs in the book had a life beforehand, a life where they had enough food. But then, circumstances changed and they starved. To close my eyes, to refuse to look at the ‘downer’ side of the 8 worldly conditions, means I miss 50% of the world. It means I am going to be shocked and confused when my own downer times come. And nothing in this world causes greater suffering than ignorance –then shock and confusion at how things in this world, in my life, actually are and work.

A few years after my uncle had died of cancer my aunt began dating again. She met a guy she really liked, a fun companion and a good partner, and for around 2 years they were happy.  And then, in less than 2 minutes, it was over. She had gone-out on a short errand and returned to a crime scene — her boyfriend had committed suicide by shooting himself.

I felt utterly devastated for my aunt and I was utterly dumbfounded myself… this was not some random story in the paper, not something happening to that stranger over there. This was in my life, this was my family, this was tragedy so close to home.  

I spoke with my aunt, tried to find words of comfort in a situation impossible to find comfort in. As we spoke, a little voice in my head was whispering… When was she going to ‘recover’ from this? Would she be able to move-on, escape her sense of pain and guilt? Is it worth it — 2 years of happiness for how many years of pain?

Is this really what life offers us? Me? Mine? Is this really what I keep coming back for?

So I want to offer a  bit of a caveat, a prenote, before I launch into the first few blog posts in my “Peeking over the Fence Period”. You see, usually, the KPY method takes stuff external to ourselves and immediately internalizes. We put ourselves in the situation and run from there. But my Peeking Over the Fence period started off a little differently.

My goal was to start seeing the world, the ugly parts of it that I tend to turn away from, for what they actually are — real and unexceptional.  When I look back over my notebook from the time, I see the first few entries were mostly observations, with internalization being more of an afterthought; it is like my eyes needed to adjust to seeing things in a new light before I could move forward. In the interest of being honest to this project of setting out key highlights from my practice, I will share these observations. So dear reader, just hang in there and rest assured, we are only a few blogs away from some ass kicking internalizations ;).

A dear friend from grad school was in town and I invited her, her husband and their little 2 year old son over for dinner. The truth is, I knew my friend’s kid had some ‘disciplinary problems’, but nothing could have possibly prepared me for what I witnessed over dinner. No sooner had my friends stepped in the door then the 4 hour temper tantrum began. Nothing we could do would placate my friend’s son, we sang songs, played games, sent him for time-outs, but he just ran around screaming non-stop.

I looked at my friend and the anguish was plain on her face; she had told me before she felt trapped in her life, trapped by her responsibilities as a parent, but still, I know, she loves her son. Yet, in this moment, it looked to me like the suffering was so much greater than the joy and I couldn’t help wondering how many more moments were like that (alot, by my friend’s own account). Or how many moments in my own life were like that…

The thing is, this wasn’t one of those ‘horror show’ events in life, there was no rape, no devastating disease, divorce or financial ruin. This was a dinner amongst friends, an unruly child, a day in the life of a  parent — it was plain old, mundane, super ordinary life. And yet, 5 people in a room were living what felt a lot like a four hour hell.

If I weren’t preparing to peek over the fence, focusing my attention on life’s little (and big) unpleasantnesses, I bet you anything I would have ignored, or at least forgotten, the feeling of that night. I would have closed one eye to the whole thing, remembering only the good food or the fact that I got to see a friend I hadn’t seen in years. But with both eyes open, the look on my friend’s face that night was seared into my memory.   

The main character of a book I was reading (The Orphan Master’s Son) was part of an elite unit of North Korean soldiers stationed to guard the country’s border. Other members of the unit used to like to go peek over the fence and peer into South Korea, to see what life was like there. But, the main character never looked:

“He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it—he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy (to his death) instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.   

When I read this paragraph it squeezed the hell out of my heart and I started wondering  what there is in my own life, my own experience, that I shut my eyes to? When do I refuse to peek because I am afraid what I see will make me question my life, myself, and the way I see the world.

Shortly after I finished this book I was cleaning the house and came across a calendar with quotes from Luang Por Thoon. One quote in particular really stood out, “ignorance of reality is the cause of becoming.” And in that moment I realized, it was time to toughen-up, to open my eyes, to start really looking more closely at all those things in the world that I have been trying to ignore. The next phase of my practice is when I decided it was time to start peeking over the fence.