Alana's Dharma Blog

In the context of so many lives, none is all that meaningful. And yet I cling…

I have been reading Mae Neecha’s autobiography and her recollections of her own past lives really struck me. From them she is able to reflect on her tendencies and views that keep her coming back, for example returning to the world to ‘fix’ others she judges. She sees the perils of these habits of view so clearly: She talks about a friend staying with a loser husband because she thinks she owes him; even in one life it is clear how her friend’s belief causes her to return to that husband  again and again, despite the suffering he causes her. This is what we are all doing over countless lives – returning again and again, despite the suffering it causes us. Rebirth really is the ultimate peril.

I can’t recall my own past lives, but I decided to start thinking just about the many Alanas of my current life: Hippy Alana, Beloved by my Father Alana, Miss High School Goody Popular Alana, Yoga Alana, Hipster Body Building Alana, there was Prove my Worth With Many Lovers Alana, and then Prove my Virtue as Good and Dutiful Wife Alana…In one lifetime I have changed so much, assumed a sequence of identities that are not just changing, but are sometime diametrically opposed to other, older, versions of myself.

 And as I further consider all these Alanas, it is pretty clear their identities don’t lie ‘out there’ anywhere. They are in my head. They are my stories, my fantasies, my curations. I start with views about what I value, what it would be ‘good’, useful, desirable to be, or not be. Then I am the choosy narrator, curating particular ‘proof points’, memories, actions, belongings and relationships to help me assume and prove these many alanas.

All the while, I am not even honest with myself about what or who I am: I assign so much value to the image of someone on top and in control of my life, I can’t even control my body aging, I can’t even control my behaviors, growing agitated with my mother, or angry in NY, even while trying to claim myself a virtuous daughter, an equanimous, unflappable Buddhist.

These identities, they are forged by forces of habit, what I value based largely on what I am used to, what has proven useful in the past, what I have been exposed to. It’s really just arbitrary values I have picked up over the course of lives, norms dictated by the norms of the circumstances of my births. And for these identities, that are nothing but passing moments,  meaninglessly  dictated – by what I am exposed to, what I choose from habit – I work, I suffer, I mourn the loss of. Oh the hours of struggle to get the body shapes I needed for each identity, the time squandered on collecting and caring for objects, outfits, relationships that proved the particular me de jour.

There is a scene in the show The Witcher that hit me so powerfully when I saw it that it has stayed with me for years:  A girl, Yeniffer, is abused by her father, forced to live in a pig pen, and yet, when a stranger comes to take her away Yennifer is despondent.  As the viewer, we already know this stranger is actually someone who ultimately helps Yennifer find a better life.  I have often considered why it is that Yennifer is so reluctant to leave when she has such a shit life.

It’s a shit life, literally, filled with pig shit, but its ‘HERS’ what she is accustomed to. In the end, no one wants to lose what they have, no matter how meager it is. Human tendency is to cling even when letting go may offer us something better. I rather keep trying to be some rotating version of an alana than lose my sense of self, even through those identities, those births keep me mired in a shitty, painful, world.

Ever since I caught covid, my long-time health problems have gotten worse. After exams, and extensive appointments with specialists, I was finally diagnosed with an immune disorder –Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. It is an illness mediated by allergic pathways in the body; in short, my body overreacts to low levels of toxins in my environment. Even short exposures to everyday substances like mold, smoke, cleaning products and fragrance can trigger my immune system to ‘protect me’  with the release of chemicals that cause symptoms from eye issues to breathing problems, chest pain to vertigo.

I was talking to Mae Neecha about my illness and she said that we are all just heir to our karma. She talked about her own health, mentioning that she has hives a lot. She knows she is the kind of person who secretly curses others, with a common curse wishing for others discomfort, or having their skin crawl. To her it is no surprise that now her own skin crawls. She talked about Mae Yo too; she is the kind of person who doesn’t silently curse, she is more direct ‘bonk on the head’, she has the kind of personality –and the ensuing behaviors – that explain the terrible car accident she suffered.

I thought more about my own disease. My body ‘thinks’ it is protecting me against bad stuff in the environment, but it’s made me too sensitive, it has made me sick. I realize that, in this one lifetime I can think of example I have done this same thing to others…

I once adopted a stray cat that came to my door regularly looking for food I took her in, I brought her to the veterinarian, and I learned she was diabetic. Needing shots, special food, I forced this outdoor cat to be an indoor cat, for her protection of course. That cat would cry at the door to get out, but I self-righteously kept her safely locked away, ignoring her unhappiness as I stoked my ego with stories of compassionate-alana-the-cat-rescuer.  

Not long after the cat died, never having the pleasure to go outside again. Now of course, I regret my behavior. I see the wrong view, the self-identity I was so determined to bolster that I did not care that the cost was another being’s suffering. But, this is so my personality…

This tendency of mine appears in the story that launched my practice: Homeless Alana. I was so fixated on being compassionate that I didn’t ever stop to consider that the homeless man I regularly hugged and gave food to may not want my hugs, may have not wanted my attentions at all. I assumed because I would want to be treated a certain way if I were homeless, I should treat him the same way.  In my mind, my behaviors protected him, not just with physical food, but protected his dignity; but again, for my own ego and self-aggrandizement, I gave someone what I thought they needed/wanted without ever actually considering them.

In fact this is a deep and troubling pattern has created ongoing stress in my marriage.  Over and over, I try to be a good wife to Eric by acting in ways I think protect him, that I think benefit him, despite Eric telling me this is not what he wants, despite the fact that I hurt him with these behaviors. The examples are too many to innumerate here, but one biggie comes to mind…

Back when we moved to NY I was so depressed, angry, miserable and melt-downy, I thought Eric would be better off without me. I didn’t want him to have to sacrifice his career by leaving NY with me, but I also didn’t want him to continue to be exposed to toxic NY Alana. To protect him from both fates, I offered to leave him. To go back to San Fran alone. In my mind, I did this out of love. In reality, Eric felt abandoned and devastated. Though our relationship has ‘moved past’ this point, I know it still haunts both us, and him. It is one of the moments I most deeply regret in my life.

Snowflakes have long been a powerful ubai in my practice. When I consider this illness, I see that, sickness is universal, a necessary result of any birth. It is just like the fact that rain that hits 32 degrees will turn to snow, it is the result of the nature of water and the freezing temperature. But, like a particularly shaped snowflake, the specific shapes of each person’s disease is unique. I am clearly suffering a disease of my karma.

I heard a really interesting news piece on NPR. It was about how plants have agency; they use information from their environment, mixed with past experiences, to shape their behavior for the future. They seem to have an active stake in the outcome of their life and they have the tendency to, and the means for, shaping that future. They are able to change how their bodies look, they can change conditions that they create for their offspring, change the direction they grow or the way they allocate nutrients.

As I listened to the article, it dawned on me that I have held a mistaken view: I have been mistaking agency for control. Afterall, even if you buy that plants have agency, no one would believe a plant, tethered to the ground on which it grows, fully dependent on the elements for its ultimate survival, is in charge of its fate, no matter how invested in it the plant may be. And I have a strong level of suspicion that self, without self-determination, is utterly meaningless. I mean really –arising, existing, continually changing, dying, buffeted by circumstances outside of my control, if that is reality, then what do I think ‘I’ am?

But me, I assume my ability to make educated plans for the future, and then act on those, is part of who I am. I build pride, ego, based on the degree to which I am successful in achieving the outcomes I plan for and desire. Here’s the thing though, even plants can do this, so how special is it? Is this really the grounds upon which to build an identity. This is who I am, and the animals, and the plants, and the viruses…

A few weeks later I was talking to another practitioner about a problem she was having. The details aren’t critical; the main point of the problem is that over and over again she felt hurt when her kid did something she didn’t like and proud when he did something she liked. She was stuck in a loop of identifying herself with, building her identity off of, her child.

 As I thought about it, I saw that this is really the plant problem. Just because she is invested in the kid’s future, she can, and has, acted in ways that have impacted his future, it doesn’t mean she controls her son. Even more subtly though, it doesn’t mean her son reflects who she is as a mother, or as a cause: It just means that like so much else in this world, she can want an outcome and in so far as situations allow ( i.e. sometimes) be a factor, or even a cause, of temporarily achieving that outcome. Her and me and the viruses and the trees…This is what is natural. Or, in terms that resonate with me even more, this is what is conditional. How do I know?

An effect can die and/or change independently of the cause and a cause independently of an effect. This is pretty obvious: My friend’s kid could die and she live on. Or going the other way: A tree can thrive after its seed is gone. Even if a tree, or a child, is dependent on a cause for arising, after inception, it continues rolling along based on its own causes and conditions. Its own karma.

This is proof an effect doesn’t belong to the cause. Can not define the cause. Proves nothing at all other than that at one point, the causes (and conditions) for achieving that effect were met. A tree proves there was once a seed. A child proves there was once a mother. The shape these things twist and grow into, or if they grow at all, is due to countless new arisings of circumstance –causes and conditions—some of which may, or may not be, due to the continued influences of what birthed it.

Being a cause is normal, everything in this world is both a cause and an effect. It’s not special at all. I love to ignore all the shit I cause that I don’t like – my own shit is in fact a literal example: I don’t look in the toilet after every bowel movement taking pride it that poop. I don’t believe it defines who I am. Why not? I’m the cause. If I want to claim the fit body I think I caused by the workouts, the A+ I caused by my studying, don’t I need to claim everything I cause as who I am?  

I claim what I am proud of, use it to boost atta, just by being a cause to effects I adore. But it’s arbitrary. Back when I lived in San Fran, I took so much pride in knowing the city like the back of my hand. I was an SFer, how did I know? I could point to every secret staircase, each hidden gem restaurant, all the public bathrooms, and feel pride, proof of ownership. But isn’t that all just an effect of walking the city, of time spent there, of priding myself in getting to know the city because I am already inclined to identify with places? This is not identity, this is just my tendency to build atta, on the causes and effect I am already drawn to claiming.

Conditionality shows why being a cause doesn’t equate to ownership.  Why It can’t prove self. Because everything that is conditional arises based on conditions, and as those shift, so too does the effect. When those dictate the effect ends, it ends. Even I  cause something, that cause itself, and the effect, are continually subject to conditions. Conditions always shifting, not under my control.

When I lived in SF, I had agency in relation to the city: I was able to work towards a future living there, to work towards knowing it, to adjust myself to the environment, to plan and react and try to shape my fate vis-a-vie this place. The only difference between me and the plant, however, is that I  was foolish enough to begin to take prided in that agency. To begin to believe that happens naturally, based on causes and conditions, could somehow be WHO I AM. With agency I stoke atta and yet the nature of agency, and its limitations, are the proof that it can’t be who I am

I was again doing a 5 day fast. Already on day 4 and, as you can probably guess, super-duper hungry.  I walked by a burger joint and the smell wafting from the shop was soooooofrigginnndelicious. Desire, hunger, snapped-up in me in an instant.

Committed to the fast, I kept walking, thinking to myself how desire doesn’t really NEED to be addressed or satisfied, I could just let it pass. And as I let it pass, I started considering what this desire really is: My physical form, a nose, meets with a physical phenomenon, the burger and I smell. Then my consciousness sorta registers it as food. Then my memory recalls my love of burgers, my imagination comes up with some fantasy of what it will taste like/ be like to eat it and voila, I have desire. Desire made even sharper by the physical state of a body unfed for 4 days. Burger craving, just the output of the process of the aggregates. There is nothing special or meaningful about it at all. 

I thought back to my last fast, to countless fasts before, the moment I break fast with that first bite of food…I have reflected before that actually, that break fast moment isn’t really the moment of delight. The delight comes as I near break fast, the anticipation. The fantasy about what I will eat, how it will taste and feel. Each time I actually eat though, I fill-up fast. It’s over before it starts, never quite as tasty as my fantasy. Only to be hungry again a few hours later. I have reflected before that fullness is fleeting, hunger, that is the basic state. In such a world satisfaction can’t be found.

Now though, as I consider the role of the aggregates in the arising of my hunger, my desire, to begin with, something else is abundantly clear: : That burger is not ever going to be capable of satisfying me because a burger just feeds me, it doesn’t extinguish the process by which desire pops-up in the first place. Hence why am I always hungry again a few hours later. Hence why, even as I eat the physical food, my aggregates continue to wander and weave stories of side dishes, and other burgers, and other restaurants, and future fasts and break fasts, a 1000 twisting and turning tails before I have finished chewing the first bite.

Obviously, to stop this process, it is easier said than done. But I suppose the first step is to see the dukkha of hunger. And then to kill the hope that the object of my hunger, my desire is going to satisfy me. And as I see the mechanics of hunger arising, I am also just a little starting to seeing the hopelessness of trying to quenching it with chasing, consuming, claiming, holding.

With no direct flights from Tokyo to Miami, Eric and I decided to fly through San Francisco, taking a few days to see folks, on our way home. I made an appointment for us to stop by the temple and visit with Mae Yo and Mae Neecha.

During our conversation, something Mae Neecha shared about karma really hit me. At the time, I wasn’t fully able to fully digest it, but retrospectively her example had a deep impact on my contemplations about karma and anatta over the years since. As the example was so clarifying, I do want to go ahead and share it here –through it wasn’t my own contemplation – so that this context has been established as I continue to share my own ongoing practice and contemplations.

Mae Neecha explained how at the end of Game of Thrones, one of the characters, Theon, went out to face the Dark King (villain), sacrificing himself to protect his adopted brother Bran, and buy the family more time to survive and fight back. Mae Neecha said that she got a little teary eyed from the scene and reflected that this idea, of self-sacrifice, always gets her. She felt it was brave, but also a little unfair that Theon had to be the one to die so others could live.

But then, she through more about the whole story. Theon had for much of the series been a real dick. For a while, there he had turned against the family that raised him, trying to overthrow them. From this perspective, it made sense to her that now Theon needed to be the one to sacrifice, to protect that family, it was a balancing of his previous role and actions. This was karma. When she saw it was about karma, it didn’t seem so unfair anymore. Nor did it seem so extraordinary. This was, after all, the natural order of things; cause and effect playing itself out. Then Mae Neecha said something that really blew my mind, what is karma is by definition anatta…

Later that night I got back to my hotel and considered it a little more: I had been using Mae Neecha’s technique of trying to strip situations down to their elemental basis, to see themes that I felt were unjust/unfair/troublesome – like my neighbor the obstacle – as consistent with how things play-out in nature. The power of this was already clear to me, it lessens my own ego, forces me to see that a situation that is just about nature playing itself out can’t actually be about me.  

But with her story about Theon, Mae Neecha named ‘karma.’ As I thought about it more, it dawned on me – what happens in nature, the way elements behave, this is karma in its most observable form. This is absolutely everything acting according to its causes and conditions, and that is the definition of karma. Karma, nature, these are two ways to look at the same exact thing. And now, I am hearing –just starting to see the glimmer of –how these must also be not self. Karma, nature, anatta, different faces of the same dice.

Fast forward a bit, over the next few weeks I started considering another way to frame this same idea. Over and over my practice had kept coming back to (and, spoiler alert, will for years continue to get back to) the idea that what is conditional is not self. Afterall, where is a self in something that arises bases on conditions, subsists based on conditions, ends based on conditions; conditions that are not owned or controlled or tied to any one thing, conditions for conditions that are conditional in and of themselves. And Isn’t what is ‘natural’, the flow of nature, just the arising of circumstances based on conditions, cessation based on conditions?

A tree that blossoms and grows because the conditions –water, sun, soil are there –which dies in drought, or when overshadowed by another bigger tree, or uprooted from soil? A riverbank shaped by the flow of water, which changes and fills back up with soil again when the water dries-out? An island born from volcanic magma, only to be swallowed by rising oceans? What is in nature, this is not special, it is not self, there is nothing self-determined or unconditional about it. To say everything is natural, is to say that everything is subject to karma, it is to say it is conditional. So many ways to say –to see – this final, most elusive of the 3 common conditions: Everything is anatta. And, suddenly I had so many more places to look for the evidence to really prove this to myself.  

After Paris, Eric and I decided we really wanted to travel in Japan. Why not we figured, we had the time, the freedom, we always dreamed of a life of unfettered travel and now we can actually do it. We bought a one way ticket Paris to Tokyo and off we went.

In truth, we had already been on the road in France for 3 months. It had started to get a bit tiresome, but we did love Japan and at first, the thrill of a new place, the freedom to go, do, see, whatever we wanted outweighed the downsides.

But as the weeks drew on, us going from one town to the next, the glamour began to wear off. For me, with my asthma and environmental sensitivities, not every hotel will work. With my digestive problems, not every food is going to be OK. I started to become hyper-aware of how much of my time, every single day, my research, my stress, revolves around meeting basic needs – everyday I need to find safe shelter, food. I go to sleep, only to wake-up and need to do it all again.

The truth is this is the reality of life all the time. Meeting our basic needs is a daily struggle. It is hard. It takes time and care. It’s not ever guaranteed.  But when you are settled, in a home, and a daily routine, it is so easily obfuscated – the roof is already over our heads, we have a closet filled with clothes and a fridge filled with foods we enjoy. We forget that raw survival, just managing and caring for our body, is a chore to be endured.

On the road though it was so clear what a crushing burden this body, these needs, simple survival really is. And what is more, is how clear it is that this reality is the same everywhere; in each new place, the food may change, the language, the architecture, the customs, but in the end everyone everywhere is consumed with doing the daily tasks necessary to survive.  

Eric and I had dreamed so long of this early retirement. This period of our life when we could actually be free. We labored so long for that freedom, delayed gratification, did the hard stuff…now that I am here though I have to wonder, if each day is a struggle to meet basic bodily needs, is this really the freedom I had dreamed of?

The insurance on my condo building was coming due, but before our insurer would issue a policy renewal, they needed some information from each unit owner. Most of the owners replied immediately, but, as usual, there was one unit’s owners – we will call them ‘the trouble owners’ – who failed to respond.

Multiple times, the insurer, and other owners and I tried to reached-out to these people, multiple times they ignored communication. Finally, a day before our policy was due to lapse, I got a hold of the trouble owners and was able to get the information the insurer needed to prevent our entire building losing insurance.

I was so angry, these people are slum lords that regularly ignore their apartment, ignore their responsibilities as owners. The are constantly an obstacle: Delaying the entire building’s ability to react to emergencies, preventing routine maintenance, seriously, they  almost left all of us uninsured.

As I sat, trying to decompress after days of stress, worrying we would lose insurance, I decided to try using Mae Neecha’s technique of bringing everything back to nature, to the elements, to consider this situation.

 In fact, I had been using this technique a lot lately;  I have found it a very powerful way to think about anatta, because by realizing some situation is perfectly common in nature, it helps me see it can’t really be about me, it can’t confirm me. It proves that my views, my expectations, are against what is actually perfectly natural. It is my views that must be wrong.

I’m upset at the trouble owners because I believe there are appropriate behaviors – ways owners are SUPPOSED to act, responsibilities they are SUPPOSED to fulfill. They are an obstacle to the condo building running smoothly. But this theme, creating obstacles is a perfectly natural state: A lake creates an obstacle for a forest fire. Land creates an obstacle for the ocean. So it’s normal. I should feel better, right? But as I sat, still fuming, it’s clear, I don’t.

I thought about it more, these trouble owners aren’t just an obstacle to the building, they are an obstacle to something much dearer to me — my number 1 hot-button issue – these owners are an obstacle to my safety. Over and over, their behavior has put me at risk. Losing insurance, that’s just the most recent danger. I can’t help but think that these trouble owners are the one thing that stand in the way of my perfectly safe home. Without them, I would be happy, I would win. I could have my dream place, free of the dangers that come from delinquency and neglect.

But the truth is, if I am being clear-headed, the trouble owners are PART OF THE HOME. They were there before I even bought the place. They aren’t some obstacles to overcome, they are an actual part of the system. Now, I can feel my heart loose a little as I consider the absurdity of my hope that if I could just separate out this part of the home –a part that is obviously integral, these are neighbors in a condo building, that’s part of condos – I’d be ‘safe’.  

When I zoom out, it gets even more clear: Land isn’t an obstacle to the ocean, look at the globe and there is water and land. Both are part of topography. Sometimes water overcomes land, like in a flood, and sometimes land pushes back water, like in a land slide, in either case, these are both just temporary states in a system. What is consistent is there is always both. Wishing for only one part of a system, the one I like better, is holding a fool’s hope. There is nothing there but suffering.

More broadly though, I always want safety. I want an environment that is safe, so that I can protect this body. I want a home that is safe so I can protect this body, and not endanger the resources I use to protect this body i.e. I don’t want a total loss of a home without insurance coverage as that would be financially devastating. I want Eric to have a job that is safe, so I have the resources to project this body. I want freedom from disease, so I can protect this body. I want a society that is predictable, polite, stable, because I associate those things with safety for my life, for my body. I struggle with lack of safety, loss, insufficient resources. This is over and over again my theme.   

Taken to the logical extreme, on some level I think I can be safe, avoid loss of life, of belongings, like there is actual some move I can make, some state of affairs in which I can finally one up this whole system that is shifting states, impermanence loss. But dropping dead is part of life. Losing is part of having. It’s not a thing anyone can just overcome or escape. I can’t be alive and then just ‘be safe’ from those states, they are part of life. Being ‘safe’ from those things is meaningless. Me, I am holding a fool’s hope. There is nothing there but suffering.

On another level of course, I know all of this. We all know all of this. Which is why we are all playing for duration. Just a little longer with what I ‘have’, with what I love. A little more heath, a bit better functioning. Just slightly more responsible neighbors.  I want a little less suffering, or to only have the kinds and degree of suffering I feel I can carry and accept. I want a little more water, or a bit more land. Enough to create an environment that suits me. I want that, hope for that, try to optimize for that. I try to navigate in tiny wiggles against the forces of this world’s currents  without actually having any final say, any true control, of floods or landslides, ocean currents or volcanos.

 Knowingly, I came into a world of suffering, of loss, of impermanence betting on the fact that I can ‘beat the house’. Such a fool’s errand just to try to have as much comfort/time/safety as I can, as long as I can. Lifetime after lifetime I get myself re- born trying to ‘solve’ the wrong side of the equation. I spend so much force, karma, efforting, just to get a little more – a little more time, a little more pleasure, a little more stability. This is stupid. The best way to avoid suffering, loss, instability is to get out of situations, out of a world in which those features are woven into the fabric of the place. At least, its not hopeless, an impermanent  world offers a gift –the fact that I don’t have to stay here for ever.

After my first, and to date only, battle with covid, I suffered long covid for around 8 months. The infection itself wasn’t bad, but I rebounded and simply never really recovered. In the wake of the infection I had extreme fatigue, dizziness, post exertional malaise. For someone who had been strong and fit before, it was a blow.

 I was, as I always am, impatient to heal. I did some research and decided, based on a few case studies and my own medical history with allergies and asthma, to try high dose antihistamines. I had started these about a month post infection, and they were clearly helping, but then the fires came, and with them an exacerbation of my asthma and environmental sensitivities that made it feel like I was backsliding in my recovery. Worried that I had inflammation that was going to worsen, I contacted my doctor and she agreed to put me on steroids.

Two days into my 5-day steroid pulse I knew I had made a big mistake. I felt floored. What had before been easy exhaustion before, turned into total couch-lock. There was no mistaking the fact that I had made my situation much worse. I quite the steroids, with my doctors blessing, before I finished the box. I waited, but the new worse baseline seemed like my new normal.

And then, a few weeks later, after doing more research, I decided to try taking the antiviral medication Valtrex. This is a common medication for cold sore outbreaks and I had a stash that my dermatologist had written for me just in case I felt a cold sore coming on. I took the drug and within minutes started feeling better. It wasn’t a full recovery, but it was noticeable. After trialing the Valtrex a few times a day, I spoke with my GP –shared my experience and research — and she agreed to write me a prescription for a high dose protocol that I had found in a  trial study for patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. She simply required me to keep up regular blood work to keep an eye on my kidneys.

It was pretty quickly obvious the protocol worked. Over the course of weeks, my symptoms got better and better and I was ultimately able to fully titrate off the medication after 7 months. My chemical sensitivities, environmental illness and asthma remained much more easily triggered, but overall –as long as I could avoid environmental toxins – I was able to get back to a full life, including exercise. Considering where I had started, and how many folks simply never recover from long covid, it felt like a small miracle.

I say that ‘miracle’ part mind you, but in reality I felt a lot like I had won, like my research, my quick action, my retaining such a flexible and open-minded doctor, my diligence in doing all the right labs and self-care, had been rewarded. While it was never a given in my mind that I would recover, I definitely took a lot of credit for the ultimate recovery. I wasn’t just relieved, I was proud. Sure the world had walloped me with disease, but I brought the force of my resources that allowed me to wiggle out of it. Overall, it was a point for Alana.

But now, sitting in my Paris apartment, worried that I might have again been exposed to Covid by one of those sneezers or coughers in my French class, I got to thinking about my long covid misadventures again…

With the long covid, I am so self-congratulatory I ‘got on it’ self-medicated with the antihistamines and the Valtrex, used my research ability, my stock piling meds, to ‘win’, to persevere. But I ignore the part that the same tendencies, the same exact set of traits and biases and resources is what got me to take steroids that made my situation worse, requiring the Valtrex in the first place.

A few more thoughts on what I can learn from my covid misadventures:

1) Even if everything is ‘perfect’ and I can p’wn, and I am able to bring a ton of resources to the table to effectuate outcomes I want, all I buy is a little duration. During early covid times, I brought my wealth, my willpower, to the table and with endured strict isolation, measures that allowed me to I avoid covid longer than most. But after 3 years. that life was unsustainable and ultimately I did get covid. All I bought was duration, not the ability to avoid decay and disease altogether. Here I am, worried about again catching covid a second time and it is obvious that even after so much work that went into recovery, all I have bought was some duration of health before sickness comes again. This frailty, this susceptibility to disease is the unavoidable nature of bodies.

2) When I had covid, I brought years of prep and research to the table. I had stockpiled every preventative drug and supplement that modern science had credibly hypothesized might help battle infection and prevent long covid.  I had a plan, nose sprays, hot baths, sleep schedule, post care, Paxlovid, Metformin, vitamins, herbs, etc. I did everything ‘right’ to avoid long covid. I got it anyway. Why? Because all the preparation in the world doesn’t guarantee the outcome I want. Preparation isn’t some salve that protects me from what the world is, or from the karma I have built. Sickness, death, hell states and suffering are not just possible, but guaranteed no matter what preparations take place ( save those that prevent rebirths).

In fact, some part of my  ‘preparation’ may well have contributed to my getting long covid. Its really hard to say if the Paxlovid rebound, which can entail higher viral loads than initial infection, may have tipped me into LC.

3) That in the very same incident, ie getting long covid, the tendencies and resources I relied on to ‘beat’ the disease ended up both helping and hurting.  The Valtrex and antihistamines made things better, but the steroids made things much worse. In a single instance, all the tools in my tool bag were able to both get me ahead and behind, so doesn’t it mean the tools are not really tools of advantage? All these lives I have built these tools, collected traits and resource I think will keep me safe. But can they possibly be the tools of safety when they are equally capable of putting me in harms way? And if the tools I have believed in, invested in for so long, don’t do what I think they do, don’t keep me safe, what will? Where is safety in this world?

4) Which brings me to a final question: Who is Alana without the possibility of safety? Afterall, this is such a deep sandan for me, coming into this world, winning, proving my prowess/ power/worthiness, by finding the ever-elusive safety. In my mind, a good Alana is a safe Alana. A beautiful Alana is a safe Alana. A prepared/virtuous/willful/wise/etc. Alana is a safe Alana. But what if there is no safe Alana at all? What does that mean about who I am?

I pretend being a good alana, amassing what I believe to be good karma, got me these advantages. That these advantages prove who I am. But if these advantages can turn disadvantage based on the situation, can I still use them to prove my goodness, my safeness, my worthiness.

Maybe an even better insight is this: All my advantages, or disadvantages, prove my past actions, prove that the causes of those things I see as advantage/disadvantage were put in place. But this is just conditionality, the arising of effect based on cause, there is no identity here. There is just the flow of karma, the flow of this world. Nothing is identified. Nothing is proven. Nothing is portended. This is meaningless (this last remark is also an addition of a 2026 Alana, getting here took some time).

Last night Eric and I were talking about health, strategizing our fasting and longevity plans going forward. I told him long covid had really shifted my view: Before I thought I could optimize my body, my health, that this body was something for me to p’wn with my will. But once I had LC, my goals became more modest: I just hoped for a body that would let me function, that would allow me the ability to do at least some of what I wanted to do.

In effect, ‘I had settled’. Now, I feel sort of like it’s hard to decide what to do, where to push and where to simply accept that I live in a breakable body that limps along till it dies. Not to be fatalistic, just to understand that I can’t just enforce my will. And that even if I can, the effects are limited. Plus, there are always unforeseen consequences: Helping one thing may hurt another.

This new view of my body though, it feels a little like giving up. Like a self-betrayal given that  I have always had a bias towards acting. I will do, I will fix, I will pre-empt and prepare. Clearly this is my MO, or I wouldn’t have been having a conversation with Eric about my fasting and longevity plans to begin with. And nowhere is this tendency, to plan, to act, to do, more obvious than with my body. And yet, this tendency has had a number of unintended and undesired consequences. My health is ripe with examples:

I had a leep procedure back in my early 20s to remove precancerous cells from my cervix.  When the cells were discovered, I was given a choice, wait and see if the dysplasia goes away or have the surgery. The idea of waiting, doing nothing, was unbearable, I wanted to act, to do, not ‘sit around a wait’ to get cancer. But the surgery left a scar and I have had cervical issues since. Ironically, now adays, guidelines have changed and women under 25 aren’t even recommended to get screenings– apparently dysplasia at a young age is super common and generally goes away on its own. If only I had ‘done nothing’ and waited…

Then of course was the case of the unbroken teeth that I decided to have crowned in order to prevent future cracks. The procedure itself cracking a tooth that ultimately needed a root canal and worse, exposing me to mercury that is likely at the heart of many of my current breathing issues and environmental sensitivities.

Even with long covid, I couldn’t just wait, give myself time to heal. In fact, I had been getting better, but not fast enough, not the NOW I wanted. I was worried I shouldn’t just wait and let the disease take its course, I worried I had excess inflammation I should SOLVE. The steroids I took to solve it ended up making things much worse and were really what kicked me into LC as opposed to just prolonged healing times. 

Eric pointed out that I am an anxious person. Acting NOW sooths, me. It is an outlet for my anxiety. I pointed out however there is a deeper underlying view, otherwise I wouldn’t just find the act of acting soothing. The fact that I do points to my belief that my actions will effectuate good outcomes, at least better ones than doing nothing at all. At the heart of it is a mistaken belief of my own control, my own prowess, my own ability to p’wn — if not the universe than at least my own body.

Its hubris, grounded in my blind faith in myself, in my belief that I am special and that I can bring some resource –smarts, money, will, preparation, knowledge –to the table that gives me an advantage, that lets me one-up the world. One-up this breakable 4e body.

Yesterday, I was reflecting on how easy it is to see other people’s blind spots, the places they lock themselves in, put boxes on their head, trap themselves with their own beliefs. Isn’t this yet another example of my own? I am so convinced my actions have the power to bring about good outcomes, so convinced that not acting is a risk, that I trap myself into acting without regard for the consequences and risks. I almost always see waiting, not acting, as the worse option even though my own life shows me ample cases where waiting probably would have had better outcomes. This is again me, locking myself in, my sense of identity, the need for control, throwing away the key.

Why do I do this? Why am I so deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty, with the wait and see, with the actual nature of the world, that I am always trying to get ahead of it, find some way to mitigate the impacts of uncertainty, of impermanence that I find unpleasant. The real reason is that I fail to understand karma. I have the mistaken belief that it is somehow I, The Great Alana, that is in the driver’s seat of this body, this life, this ‘fate’ (i.e. continual stream of happenings) I call my own. Until I see karma for what it is, the absolute law of this world, I will always be trying to beat it. Afterall, I believe it is something beatable. And so, whether it is with action, or inaction, I will always be trying to game, to win, to fix a world that isn’t broken anywhere but in my own mind, expending energy and suffering trying to force that which will never yield to me.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust me, COMPASSIONATE ALANA knows all about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was tossing and turning in bed, half asleep and half awake. Worrying. I want Eric and I to start building the Miami place, I want a real home, that we own, to call our own. I want a permanent place, where I imagine my future, so I can feel safe.

Eric rather wait to start building, he wants to be sure all the final payments from his former employer come-in as expected. He doesn’t see the threats I do – what happens if bird flu breaks-out? If my long covid comes back? If we hit financial distress and need to declare bankruptcy –FL protects homestead assets from creditors. Won’t we be better off with our own home then?

In my semi dream state I am saying to him I want a place that makes us safe. But then I woke more fully and remembered something Mae Neecha had asked me, “when have I ever been safe?”  I just want something that makes me ‘feel safe’. But does something actually make me safe?

Long ago, I got a jury summons and I did everything right responding, sending proof that I was not eligible at that time to serve. I felt in my heart I had followed the rules, sent the right paperwork, I was safe. Only to get a call later that I had been in violation. They said they never got my paperwork, or they lost it. Either way, I was so upset. I felt so vulnerable. I believed I had done everything right to guarantee safety, to avoid violations. But some issue with the mail, some clerical error beyond my control, was all it took put me in danger.

I have an arbitrary criteria, this set of 4 walls – not the ones elsewhere – they will make me safe. Keep me on the side of housed and not homeless. As long as I am there, no one can ‘get me’. It’s like kids playing hide and seek or tag –just designating over ‘this line in the sand ‘safe’. Touching this tree ‘safe’. It is just criteria of my own creation. It is a balm to what worries me, the particular obsession I have at this moment, over this thing or that. None of which are able to actually keep me safe.

I look at all the times I thought my home made me safe and in reality it made me the opposite –it put me at risk. My place in Greenwich was a safe haven from NY, till it poisoned me with the construction across the street. My apartment in SF was meant to be safe from becoming a NYer, but it put me at risk trying to figure out how to move out of it in the middle of covid. I bought the mami place to make me safe –from inflation, from not having a place to stash our wealth, only to now worry we will lose money on it as I bought it at such a market peak.

Where or what is safe in a world where situations and circumstances change all the time? How can I be safe when I don’t have control – not of my body, my home, my fate. I expend so much  work and stress worrying about securing safety , but when have I actually been safe?

I was at an event and there was a guy there who was coughing- sneezing- looking like hell- clearly sick. I was angry of course. I am thinking, “I hate him, I think he should burn in hell for knowingly exposing everyone around him to illness, just to go out and do something fun.” But even as I silently cursed this stranger, I turned my critical eye inwards and, of course, realized I have done the same thing…

It weighs on me quite heavily now, but when I was sick with covid, I had an original infection, then a rebound. After the initial illness, I test myself 2x with rapid tests and with a second negative, I went about my life mask free. Even after I started getting renewed symptoms, I wrote it off as allergies. Even though Eric had actually rebounded before me, I kept thinking, it can’t be me too, there can’t be two rebounds in one house. And so, feeling a little scratchy-throated and worn down, I went out to a performance and sat for hours, sans mask, exposing everyone around me to what, 1 day later I realized, was a covid rebound infection.

And that wasn’t even the first time recently I had done something like this…there was also the time I had strep and couldn’t quite get my head around it in time to avoid exposing my in-laws. Blog here.

Of course I don’t want to get other people sick. I DO CARE. If I had known I had covid again, or strep, I never would have exposed people. But clearly there is something wrong with me, with my view, otherwise it wouldn’t be such a struggle for me to see and accept when I am sick. Why believe, when symptoms so clearly point to the contrary, that I am exempt?  Aren’t I human? Don’t I have a 4-e body? Its nature is to get sick, to shift into states of harboring viruses and bacteria. Diseases that I can pass on.

Today I was thinking more about it, and I recalled a time when I insisted we go on a long-planned camping vacation even when Eric was super sick. Or a time I insisted I go camping with friends even when I was sick. The problem is I cling. I fixate on ideas of the future I planned for, so sick or not, the plan can’t change. I fixate on a state of this body, it was healthy before, tested negative for covid just a day ago, so it can’t be sick now.  I am, from Mae Yo’s powerful example, that person that tries to put a stick in the water –suffering –as the river flows by.

Circumstances have changed, reality flows, but I am stuck. It is me clinging to my imagination of how things are, and are going to be, even as reality – sickness, symptoms – are hitting me right in the face.  

And this level of delusion is, of course, not without consequence. How terrible do I feel about exposing others to covid at that performance? Now I carry guilt and fear of the karma I will need to pay back. How bad do I feel I dragged Eric on vacation while he felt terribly sick? It haunts me, an example of being a bad and selfish partner. How shitty did I feel camping in the woods with friends instead of being home in my bed when I was sick?

This same tendency is at the heart of so much of my suffering… Why do I work so hard to get the things I want?  Because I cling to the imagination of what it will be like to have them in the future. Why stress over losing what I have?  Because I cling to any joy or comfort I get from those things in the present. And why am I so angry at the guy who showed-up to an event sick? Because I cling to this body, stress over losing it because without it I don’t get any of the futures that that have imagined, that I fixate on.

But even as I curse the sick stranger, hope he reaps the suffering he sows, I am suffering too. Suffering because I can’t let go. And because I can’t let go, I have done the same exact thing as he did. If he belongs in hell, so do I. And doubtlessly, I will end up there again as long as my delusion, my fixation, is guiding my actions.

The other night Eric and I had another serious conversation, the upshot of which was I have not been being a good partner. He said something that really stung me, he asked if I was always so rough on him? Had he only now started to notice that he has more time  not working? He gave a simple example and as soon as I heard it, I saw he was right, I had been being rough on him:

 The example is we had gone out for a walk, it looked like it might rain, he expressed concern, but I told him not to worry. As we walked it turned to a light drizzle, he wanted to get somewhere with cover, but I pushed us to walk longer to get to exactly the brewery I wanted to go to, even after we had passed a few others where we could stop. Then when we left, and it was really coming down, I didn’t want to pay for an uber cancel fee, so even though we were caught in the rain, the uber further than he wanted to walk in the rain, I was hesitant to cancel it. Eric doesn’t like to get wet. He had said he wanted to stay dry several times. I ignored him. Why? Because getting wet is no big deal to me. I think he is being a pussy.

Since it getting wet isn’t important to me, I figure it’s not important at all. This is a pattern I have already observed in myself past, and it’s a wrong view that yields very ugly behavior. Still, I persist with it. The problem however is just because I don’t think something is important, it doesn’t mean it isn’t consequential — obviously, if I have angered Eric because of my trivializing /ignoring what is important to him, there are consequences. There is a fight, a strain on our relationship. The truth is, we have been here before, having the same sad, stressful conversation. Eric angry, me hearing him, knowing I did wrong, feeling like an asshole, a bad partner. I apologize, say I will try harder, but the truth has always been, I don’t know how to fix it. At least I didn’t until now…

I started thinking a bit about how this is actually the same issue I was having with my mom when I got angry she wasn’t being strict, to my standard, with her covid precautions when she came to visit me. What I at last saw was that each person has their own reasons for the level of precaution they take –their own health, their own information sources, their own politics, their own beliefs, their own risk tolerances, their own previous experiences with covid or disease, their own education levels — When I saw that, I realized there is no way everyone can have the same level of precaution, they all have their own unique causes and conditions going into the mix of determining their precaution level. If there is no reason anyone else would share my same covid precaution standards and practices, why should I expect it of my mother?

Mom is just like everyone else, each with their own causes and conditions coloring their risk tolerance and practices. It arbitrary to say just because she is my mom, she should follow my standards. My perception of her mineness is not one of the causes/conditions of her risk tolerance. When I saw this clearly, my anger at my mom just passed immediately. In fact, I was able to see that my mom, who doesn’t share my risk assessment of covid, was trying really hard to meet me on my terms. She had come to visit, she had masked the whole time. In this world, few people care enough to even bother trying, don’t I owe her gratitude for the effort, isn’t it worth appreciating on of the few people that would try to adapt to my level of crazy? With my mom, this was a turning point in our relationship. I no longer expected her to follow my standards, to meet my expectations of how she should be. The fuel for our long cycle of bickering was just gone. Since we have had a good relationship.

Back to Eric, I realized much like covid precautions, there is no reason why he should value the same things as me. No reason why what I find important and what he finds important should be the same. He, like everyone, has his own reasons –his own education, karma, family background, priorities, politics, visons, physical condition, goals, hobbies, friends, influences — that shape his values just as I have mine. There is no reason to expect that these should be the same. Its arbitrary to say that since he is my partner we must have shared values. I could just as easily say because the Dali Lama is the Dali Lama we should have shared values. Just fill-in any other person but ‘my’ partner/family/friend and its so clear this is nonsensical bullshit.

 These expectations that I have –these arbitrary assignments of who should be the same as me and who should be different –exist in my head alone. Are made up by me, do not reflect the real causes and conditions that shape one’s values. In fact, the partnership itself is arbitrary –any number of other people could have been my spouse — over lifetimes any number have been. Would I expect all of them also to share my values, especially across all time and subject?

When I let go of the expectation that he and I will have the same values, something else becomes pretty clear too — By dismissing his values, by belittling what he thinks is important  just because I feel it is unimportant,  I am actually failing pretty hard in my duty as a partner. Afterall, the role of partner is ego stroker in chief, that is the prime duty. Trivializing what he thinks is important basically does the opposite, it makes him feel small, unheard. Of course he is angry and hurt. Of course I feel like an asshole. I am. 

Back when I had considered dukka, I had an example of when I had to take on an employees responsibilities at work after he left: I saw that a job is a duty. A duty is a burden. And a burden is a burden even if you don’t see it as such when you pick it up. Even if you enjoy benefits from it. Even if you are reluctant to put it down. My problem –above and beyond being so self-centered as to believe that only the things I think are important are actually important – is that fundamentally, I have been seeing the relationship all wrong. I thought it was a fun, not a duty. I thought it was supposed to affirm me, the things I value and think are important. So of course, I didn’t know how to fix being an asshole to Eric, how could I when, at the end of the day, I thought he was supposed to agree with my sense of what is important, he was supposed to fluff me, validate me, and cater to me.

But in reality, is that his is a job? Even when I like my boss, I don’t expect that she exists to cater to me, I don’t think my important automatically is the same as hers and I sure don’t think it supersedes hers. My role is to meet her needs, to fulfill the duty I was hired for. To do otherwise endangers my position. So why would I treat my marriage – which has so much more importance to me than my job – any differently?

A few days later I considered it further. Eric actually took me on as a partner to have his ego stroked. Not to pander to me and stroke mine. He wants to be fluffed as important, and to him, I am important only in so far as I am able to do that. I look to him to confirm me, to make me feel special, but the behaviors of his I interpret are about me are only really about whether he is feeling himself being proven by the relationship. Its not actually about me at all.  And yet, by pretending it is, it should be, all I can confirm is I am being the asshole here.

The other night, I was having dinner with a dharma friend and she made a comment that really struck me, she said that trying to control is just atta. Intuitively, I felt like she was correct, but I decided to really consider her point, see if I could find examples, to better support and understand it.

A few days later, the electrician came to my house to do a little work and left a mess in his wake. He destroyed the house, moved furniture, left the rug disarrayed, trash and even nails everywhere. I was angry. I felt so violated. I got to thinking why I was so upset, especially because this kind of violation of my personal space has really ticked me off before.

For example: My in-laws had made a mess of our apartment, even inviting guests without our permission, when they came to stay a few years back, I was livid. A friend had invited herself to move in with me in at my new apartment after coming over to see it, I felt violated. I considered whether or not I could use Mae Neecha’s technique and distill the issue into a truth of nature, something elemental. As I weighed each of these examples I thought, “overtaking territory.”

Overtaking territory is of course something that happens in nature all of the time: Planets that have fixed orbits can be pulled off their course by a moon, or other celestial bodies issuing a gravitational pull, as they creep off their path, they move into other territory. A river overflowing overtakes the land. A landslide overtakes the land. Invasive plant species can overtake an ecosystem/environment. Magma flows from a volcano and overtakes the land. Its normal.

When the causes for overtaking are met, when there is excess movement of a planet, excess water in a river, excess heat in the volcano, excess earth for the mudslide, there is a shift to new territory. Why would I think that my home is different than anything out in the world? Why would I think it could be exempted from being overtaken when the circumstances are ripe?

I see that I want, desperately need, for my home to be special, exceptional. I can’t control, preserve, hold onto territory beyond its walls, that much is obvious, but in the narrow boarders I arbitrarily circumscribe — a home, a space, a body, a belonging, a relationship–I want, I actually believe it is possible, for things to be different. My belief that it is possible to control my belongings is in fact a central component of their mineness. Without this control, how could I expect these worldly, elemental items would conform to my desires and expectations?

Places that are mine are ‘supposed to’ conform to my expectations, reflect my beliefs, my aesthetic, my cleanliness standards, my sense of who I am and what I believe is important. Most importantly, these spaces are safe, a refuge from the dangers that lurk ‘out there’ in the world. But looking at the mess left by the electrician is glaring evidence this house isn’t mine at all. It will take on the shapes and arrangements that are dictated by this world, not those dictated by me, my rules, my expectation, my standards.

A while back, a show I was watching depicted a pretty graphic scene of rape, at the time, it had really struck me as deeply compelling evidence that this body isn’t mine. Afterall, it can be used, against my will, by anyone with the strength to overtake it. Isn’t rape just an invasion of territory?

In nature, territory is constantly overtaken. It’s normal. In fact, the only reason I see these phenomenon –rivers overflowing, magma spreading over land, etc. – as overtaking in the first place is that I have made an arbitrary demarcation: This here is the river, this here is the land. This here is the land, this here is the magma. I take a snapshot, a moment frozen in time when land or river is in a particular state and in my mind that state is WHAT IT IS. But my own example gives me evidence to the contrary…wasn’t all land once magma?

With ‘my belongings’ I have another arbitrarily chosen demarcation. I have what is in, mine, and what is out, not mine. Again, I ignore the evidence, ignore that what I claim and think of as mine/not mine are objects continually shifting between the 2 categories. 

With a body it is so hard to see it is arbitrary. I forget the time before I had it, deny the future when I will leave it. But with a home, it is a bit easier to see. I have had so many over the years of moving. And for each home, across different times, where I draw the boarders of my control, my mines, shifts and changes. I didn’t consider the yard mine, till I started gardening, then it reflected me, my labor and aesthetic. I stopped considering the apartment in CT mine after I was forced to move getting sick from the construction across the way, never mind that I still had months left on the lease. I stopped considering the NY apartment mine, even while I lived there, as soon as the fantasy of a NY happy adventure was popped by the reality of a loud, filthy, city that my apartment did little to shield me from.

In all cases, control and minification go hand-in-hand.  My home, my stuff, my body, these are territories where I can exert control. And I expect, I use, these things to reinforce my sense of control. It’s no wonder I was so upset by the electrician’s mess, it forced me to confront the basic truth that even my most intimate spaces do not obey me.

Anyone can overtake the territory I claim as my own at any time, the reason why is simple, I don’t control it. Without control, my space –my belongings –just act like everything else in nature, 4es, acting in accord with their causes and conditions. 

LP Thoon has said that anatta is that nothing belongs to us, everything is meaningless. How is it meaningless? It is not under my control, it doesn’t act as I see fit, what traits and qualities it has are dependent on the state of the object, and states are always in flux. What meaning I assign to objects exists only in my mind, not in the object. What is subject to its own causes to arise, sustain and cease, is by definition not subject to my control, it is conditional. And what is conditional can’t be mine, it can’t be about me, it can’t prove me, it can’t be who I am.

A few months back I had sat-in on a zoom class at the Wat. The class was shown a cute little animation film that you can see here and then asked to contemplate on it. Mae Neecha shared a technique, an approach to identifying a core issue in a story, that she had been using recently. She advised you could strip out a lot of the details of a story, of our emotions and reactions to that story, and try to see what was happening in terms of the elements and natural processes.  

I found the idea deeply compelling for a few reasons: 1) If I can take a situation and understand it at a core level, see how it relates to overarching themes in nature, I can learn to apply it to many stories, to my own dramas and wrong views, and more easily identify the patterns in the stories that strike or plague me.

2) If I can distill the stories I get caught-up in, that I am emotional about, to a basic idea prevalent in nature, I can see that there is nothing special about me, or my stories. The suffering and struggles I experience, and personalize, are just normal parts of this world. In many ways, this was at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching to Kisa Gotami and that has always been a powerful teaching to me.

During the class, folks –including myself — struggled a bit on how to apply Mae Neechas’ technique. Now, as I was sitting in an airport, waiting to board a flight, my mind went back to the teaching and I decided to consider the video again and see if I could strip out the details and characters, identify the core issue and find that issue in nature and the elements.  

As I was considering, boarding was getting started: The flight was clearly nowhere close to full. I was in boarding group 5. I kept moving up as the line was progressing, but there was a handful of passengers being what I thought was super self-righteous, not wanting to move forward as 5 hadn’t been called yet, and they didn’t want to skip in line. Only there was no line, they were just holding up boarding processes for everyone…

Worse, they asked my group. Since I was in 5, like them, they kept questioning if I should be moving forward, they kept trying to make me feel bad for breaking the order. I was so annoyed. When I got on the plane I started to think: 

What is the stripped-down issue: Adaptation to an environment. And what is the truth of nature? Sometimes nature adapts quickly — Animals will move to new environments when they run out of food, they migrate. Sometimes things in nature adapt slowly, new genetic characteristics can come to species after many generations. Even death, cessation is a form of adaptation, the elements, if they can no longer be sustained in a certain form, they return to the earth so a new form can be born. The banks of a river slowly adapt to the movement of water through erosion. Or a river can adapt quickly to something like excess rain and flood. Everything adapts at its own rate, so why be so annoyed, slighted, at these folks at the boarding gate who were slower to adapt to a mostly empty flight than I was? 

I thought back to the goat story too and realized I could apply this concept of adaptation there as well. Adapting walking stye to suit the environment. I considered when I was like the small goat –reluctant to change my style: When I got to NY, folks interacted more curtly, more quickly, but I didn’t want to adapt. I identified with my way, the slow, casual, open San Franer way that I thought it proved something about me, about my identity. By resisting, refusing to adapt, I was avoiding the assumption of the identity of NYer and clinging to the identity of an SFer.

In fact, when I really consider that time in my life, I realize I felt like I had to hate NY –despite all the pain it caused me — in order to resist ‘becoming’ a NYer and losing my SF identity. The truth though is that NYers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. SFers are just folks who have adapted behavior to a certain environment. If the environment changes, isn’t it normal for behavior or state to change? Why is this adaptation upon changing cities something I feared, why is this something I made into a referendum on myself and who I am

I put myself then in the shoes of the old goat now, feeling slighted, lesser, that my way, that worked so well for so long was no longer effective. How it made me feel brought low. While I lived in SF, I had thought I had figured out my life, I was calm, chill, equanimous. But faced with a new environment, I was slow to adapt and I felt a combination of pains: Hate for my new environment because it was an affront to who I thought myself to be and hate for myself for not being able to adapt to this new environment the way that a chill, equanimous, SFer SHOULD be able to do. Talk about a no win: I feared losing my SF identity and at the same time feared that the inability to adjust, and ultimately lose that identity in favor of a NY identity made me a failure as well.

Now, when I think in terms of adaptation, I think, “why should I have refused to adapt when adaptation is the course of nature?” “And why should I feel low, ego beaten, when I find I am not the master of my ‘life walk’ like the old goat, when faced with a new environment life NY?” Its normal to need to adapt, this isn’t about me, or my ego, or my identity..

 Back when I was in the throws of NY depression, I reflected that the wrong view that prompted my move from SF to NY was not seeing I was just like an orchid: I could thrive in one environment, like SF and moved to a new one, like NY, and I could wither. It had been egotistical to believe that there was something innate in myself that made me a thriver/survivor in every situation.

Now I realize this is true, but I still didn’t get the point; after I moved I felt so defeated, like such a bad Buddhist and bad person that I couldn’t keep my equanimity and cool. I felt it was all about me, an indictment of me. If I really understood the orchid though I would realize there is nothing so special about being unable to adapt quickly. Somethings adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Somethings, unable to adapt die and then their elements are recycled –adapted –into a new form.

I considered the boarding process again. I realized there were actually 2 issues at work:

1) I was upset at the fellow passengers for not adapting at my pace, to my standards. But everything adapts according to its causes. A fire will move and adapt to fuel or wind far more quickly than a river bank that slowly erodes/adapts and takes new shapes based on the water that flows over it over a long time. Its just the circumstances, the character of the form, the specifics of its particular state.

2)I felt the reluctant boarders were indicting me. I considered why it bothered me so much and I realized: I want to be a considerate person. I see consideration as a lynchpin of my identity and a key element in having a ‘safe’ world; consideration, in my mind, proves that everyone is regarding one another and that helps keep the world an orderly and not violent place. In this instance, my identity as a considerate passenger, as an upholder of a value I cling to, was challenged. I saw the reluctant boarders as failing to adapt, but I felt self-conscious that they saw me as inconsiderate –that I saw myself as inconsiderate and they were affirming that. 

Now, I started seeing a pattern: This is not the first time 2 competing issues, 2 competing senses of self had created discomfort for me:

As I said, in NY I was an angry-ny-hater alana to protect myself from losing my SF chill identity, but then I was also disappointed with myself for being a bad buddhist, a bad alana whose hater ways meant I  couldn’t remain equanimous.

At the boarding gate, I was an alana trying to keep the boarding process smooth so that I could protect my time from boarding  delays, and so I can protect my bag from getting confiscated because the boarding time is running low. But I felt a challenge to being able to protect my identity as a considerate alana.

This all brings me back to the story that launched my practice, homeless alana. I wanted to be a kind compassionate alana, but I also want to keep this physical body safe.

So is there a theme I can now see in my stories? I want to protect, preserve, maintain my identities and my belongings. But can I maintain? Preserve? Not lose? If I am continuously put in a position of trade-offs, needing to let go of one thing I cling to in order to ‘keep’ another, it proves to me that nothing can be kept. If it could, there would be no choices to make –all the things I grap and cling to, rupa and nama alike, would just stay with me.

But, in truth, as circumstances change, as the causes for losing this thing, or that thing, or both are met, the loss will occur. This is inevitable. I struggle and suffer these deep internal conflicts, impossible choices, as I weigh what I imagine are tradeoffs to loose one thing to keep another. To lose consideration to keep my stuff. To lose my good Buddhist identity to keep my SFer identity. To loose compassion to keep health.  I stress, and suffer as if it really were me, the choices I make, that actually had the power to preserve at least one of these things I value.  Again ignoring the fact that if it were up to me, there would be no choice, I would have it all.

The sun is the sun, the center of the solar system, till it burns out. A tree can have all its leafy glory, till chill comes in the fall. A glacier can hold on to all its mass of ice till global warming melts the ice. A river can keep all its water till excess water causes an overflow. The earth can keep all its magma till excess pressure builds and forces it out as a volcano. As soon as the circumstances change, the state changes. Even the greatest and mightiest things in nature lose. It is foolish to think I can cling and keep.

A move to NY, the threat of a swine flu pandemic, these were both new circumstances. Is it reasonable to think that under new circumstances I should, I can, keep old behaviors (regardless of the identities I convince myself those behaviors prove in me)? This is just me being guilty of the very trait that annoyed me about those reluctant boarders in the first place. I was exhibiting failure to adapt quickly. But even ending this blog here, internalizing a message of my own failures, my own swiftness to throw stones in glass houses misses a deeper point. Some things in nature adapt quickly. Some things adapt slowly. Neither state can be taken as a point of identity. Neither can be a mark of alana’s specialness, either in awesomeness or in failureness.

I guess I am finally seeing the power of Mae Neecha’s technique…