Alana's Dharma Blog

I kicked off the new year of 2023 with a bad case of strep. Given the ‘tripledemic’, the myriad of flu-covid-strep plague of diseases the news says is going around, it really shouldn’t be a huge the surprise that I got sick. The problem is, it was….

A few days into the new year my throat started to really hurt. Naturally, I took a PCR test, it was negative. Since I didn’t have any other respiratory disease symptoms –no runny nose, aches, or fever — I decided it must be acid reflux from a particularly indulgent New Year’s meal. To be fair, I do get acid reflux on occasion, it has in the past involved a sore throat. But even as my symptoms grew worse, and I started getting tell-tale signs of infection (ie. a swollen throat, raised lymph nodes, fatigue), I continued to go about my day-to-day, taking Tums and waiting for the effects of a meal, now well in the rear-view mirror, to subside.

Finally, when I woke-up feeling like I had been swallowing glass, I decided it could be something other than reflux. I took another covid test, negative. Flummoxed how it was possible that I could feel so sick and not have Covid, I decided to seek out a strep test. The thing is, for no particular reason, I was super ‘sure’ it wasn’t strep; still I wanted to be a ‘responsible’ adult, get treatment quickly if it was bacterial so it didn’t cause further complications, and stop exposing others in the case I had a contagious disease. Put another way, I got tested to BE something –a good alana, a responsible adult — not to find out if I had strep, which ‘clearly’ I didn’t have.

Even as I awaited my results, I was making my evening plans, so sure nothing would need to be put on hold. When I got my results ( positive obviously) my first thought –despite my burning throat — was to check the false positive rates of the test. In the face of clear evidence, both symptomatic and empirical, my mind wouldn’t readily accept the truth. I was so committed to my own beliefs, to my alternative theory of reflux, I couldn’t quickly pivot and face a reality different than what I assumed.

Eventually, I yielded, I called my doctor and got a prescription for antibiotics. Even on my way to the pharmacy I had called my mom explaining how ‘good’ I felt, how normal everything was, save for the sore throat.

Within a day, on the antibiotics, I started feeling better. In fact, I suddenly realized it hadn’t ‘just’ been the extremely painful throat, I had been fatigued, lethargic –twice I had nearly fallen asleep in public places — but my denial of my disease, of a possibility that I had anything other than reflux, was so strong I was able to fool myself about symptoms I was actually, physically, experiencing.

I realized, all of this is a as a powerful analogy for all my births and becoming — My power of self deception is so damn strong, I can block out pain, suffering, dukka, in the service of preserving my view of myself, the world, and what is actually going on. The situation is actually pretty scary, it is such a red flag to the extent of my own self-delusion.

But it also brings up a big question –why? Why was I so attached to 1 version of reality over another, what was my view/beliefs that blocked my ability to assess evidence in a balanced way, to pivot when it made sense to do so?

Years ago, I left this journal entry standing with this open question. Now (July 2025) when I think on it again, I think I have an answer. In short, I have an over-inflated ego, I am so sure the world will act in accordance with my views and expectations, I can’t even entertain another possibility, even faced with overwhelming evidence.
The issue isn’t just about clinging to the identity of a healthy alana, or being in denial that I am subject to sickness, after all, I tested for covid several times. Back in early 2023, when I wrote this blog, this was a sticking point for me that I couldn’t see past. Now though, I realize I had resolved myself to covid, I was willing to “accept it” as a reality. Strep however, that was something different. For whatever reason I had arbitrarily decided what kind of sick I can get, completely denying other possibilities. Completely denying that the world doesn’t give a damn about what illnesses I can accept, what circumstances I believe myself to be subject to, or not.

Even as I acknowledge my powerlessness in this world to avoid sickness, I still am blind to the fact that any sickness, at anytime, can fell me. Sickness, in my mind, happens on my terms. Of course, this is not the truth. When the causes and conditions for a particular sickness, whatever it is, are met I will be subject to just that sickness. The surprise I felt, this is a failure to see impermanence of the world–that I am subject to any illness anytime. It is a failure to see the permanence of my views – that what results, in this case an illness, that I am subject to are not conditioned by my beliefs, my preferences, my expectations of outcomes.

I know this world is perilous, on some level, we all know this. But part of my hope, the way I justify accepting the risks of birth in a perilous world, the way I offer myself false comfort that ‘I got this’ I can ekk out safety and comfort here, is with the delusion that I can know what is coming, I can prepare. I prepared for covid, but not for strep. I can accept illness –I have learned to self-talk my way into accepting this as normal, but unexpected illness, proof that I can’t really prepare, that I can’t ‘beat the house’ of this world, that is too much for me to bear. Better to deny…

Better to deny my physical pain. Better to suffer longer than necessary and subject the people around me to the suffering of a communicable disease. All better then facing a very dark truth: I am not the architect of my fate, there is no amount of planning or preparation that is going to save me. I am, like everyone else, a subject of cause and effect. All I can do in this world is wiggle, react to the cards I am delt. And those reactions are even more limited by my wrong views, by my denial that I am subject to this world, not –not even in a little and limited way — a master of it. All I did was compound the dukkha of illness with the dukkha of extra pain, delayed treatment, and karma of getting others sick while I tried to fight reality with nothing but my mind.

Recently, I had been re-watching the show The Wire. In it, there is a character Bubbles who is a drug addict. Bubbles suffers for his addiction, he lives in poverty, he is estranged from his family, he faces danger and violence, a part of him wants to quit, but over and over, the drugs draw him back in.

In the show, there is a scene where Bubbles and his friend are getting high. A smile of intense pleasure crosses his face as the drug needle slides into his arm. Sure, he experiences that as pleasure, but when you look at the whole context, it is so clear that it is nothing but dukkha. The malcontent of his life that led to wanting drugs in the first place, the daily craving to get them, the striving and scheming and scamming to afford them. The toll it takes on his body, on his life and relationships…even he wants out.

And still, that moment seems like such pleasure. It is moments like that that lead all of us to believe there is pleasure, but no matter how we feel, no matter how we perceive those moments, the case of Bubbles and the high make it so clear it’s just dukkha that we misunderstand to be delight.

It wasn’t terribly long ago that I had done my big write-up on Everything is Suffering. As I was watching this scene in The Wire, I realized that I had actually missed this really big point about suffering: The moments that I think of as delight are actually dukkha too; it’s just my delusional thinking –myopic blindness that comes from being too zoomed into a single moment, when the needle slides into my vein – that allow me to see what is actually dukkha as sukkah.

A little later, I had finished a particularly hard workout and noted that after doing something so difficult, I felt proud, accomplished. I felt delight. The truth is, I do hard shit all the time, extreme fitness, fasting, throwing big events for work. Neither the effort, nor the result is particularly delightful, and yet I take delight in completing these tasks. Like Bubbles, I hone-in on a particular moment and think sukkah instead of looking at the struggle so apparent in the bigger picture.

The truth is though that I train myself, I trick myself into this. This is a technique I use to convince myself to do what is hard in the first place. But why…

It dawned on me that I foster this delusion, that doing hard things, things that are actually dukkha, is sukka because I believe that doing hard shit is virtuous. So by doing hard things, I am virtuous. I use these acts to prove myself, to build identity, and as a result, I see them as worth it. I convince myself that doing these things is in some way delightful in order to convince myself to do these hard things. Never mind that doing hard shit to prove something about myself only proves my ignorance. It proves my myopic delusion.

Long ago at KPY I found a perfect bench, in the perfect balance of sun and shade, at the perfect time of the day to yield a perfect temperature. I sat there feeling delight. But it wasn’t long before the sun shifted in the sky and I found myself having to move the bench, or put on/take off a jacket. I considered that if I sat there long enough, it would grow too hot, no shade to be had at high noon and if I sat even longer it would grow too cold, no sun to warm me at night.

After having such a perfect moment, I found myself working/striving/chasing to extend that moment, and as soon as I got too hot or too cold, I was laboring, wiggling to get back to that perfect temperature state again. Now I had a problem to solve: I was subject to less than perfectly comfortable states as soon as circumstances shifted. I needed to figure out the effort, resources, patients, that would allow me to win back such a comfortable moment again. In that brief moment of perfection hope was born. Turns out, hope is a hell of a burden…

Thinking back on this little example now I see how it really catches this angle of everything being dukkha, even the things I find pleasure in and convince myself are sukkah. The comfortable moments in my life, they have consequences. In this case, me striving, working to achieve it again, acting as the seed of my struggles and efforts. In Bubble’s case, Striving, working to achieve each high again, no matter the costs, the fall-out that comes from being a drug addict. For both of us, these brief moments of comfort would have us endure even more hours of stress and pain. It’s a long and cold night I would need to wait on that bench before the sun came-up to warm me again.

Zoom-out and my moment of pleasure, its dukkha. Dukkha that I am in a body that is comfortable only in such a narrow temperature band. Dukkha that once I experience a taste of delight I must strive to keep it and ultimately find it again. Dukkha to lose the paltry moments of pleasure sitting out in the elements can bring. Dukkha needing to wait out even the possibility of getting that moment again. Only myopathy would have me mistake a warm sunny moment on the bench as delight. Only delusion would have me believe that what arises from dukkha, and leads to even more dukkha, could possibly be sukkah.

Recently, I finalized my move down to Florida. In Connecticut, there are still some people who choose to be Covid cautions and when I go to the grocery, or the salon, or the theatre, I am not the only person there wearing a mask. Florida is different, no one else seems to mask here and when I go out I feel super self-conscious. It doesn’t help that I can see the stares, have heard the murmurs, have actually been directly confronted by anti-maskers demanding I answer them, complete strangers, for my choice.

Last week, I had an appointment to get my hair cut at a fancy salon in Miami. I dug a good-looking outfit out of my closet, and I put on fancy jewelry as well. I wanted to look nice, like I fit-in, like I belonged. I wanted to use my clothes to define myself, to express the me I want to be; I wanted the clothes to be an offset to my mask.

The mask after all isn’t who I am, it doesn’t speak for me or announce my values, when I am accosted in the streets or in stores about my mask, my first thought is “you don’t know me, my life, my health, who I am trying to protect. This mask isn’t a political statement, I don’t want to wear it, it’s just what I need to do to be safe”. The mask is a practically, nothing more. It is meaningless…

A few days later, I got to thinking about LP Thoon’s definition of annata: “These things don’t belong to you, they are meaningless.” I was thinking of examples in my day-to-day to prove it and the mask/outfit came to mind.

What is a mask? It is a piece of cloth I wear over my face to protect this body. I completely reject the idea that it reflects me, that it has some deep meaning, in fact I feel wounded when others, who presumably read meaning into it, accost me. Aren’t clothes — the fancy outfit I picked for the salon, the same? Clothes are just pieces of cloth I wear over my body to protect it from elements, from insects, from the consequences of nudity in our society. I am so frustrated with the meaning folks around me read into my mask, but I read meaning into my clothes. How do I not see these too are meaningless like the mask?

The cloth of a mask, the cloth of my favorite outfits, they are the same in both form and function. How can I understand one to be meaningless, a practicality I use, and not see the same is true for the other?

A long time ago, I was talking to Mae Nee about rupa and I used my favorite yellow purse as an example: I loved it so much because I thought it made me look cool, I thought it made other people look at me and think I was cool. Every time I got a compliment on it, I took it as affirmation that the purse had the desired effect. In my mind, the function of my purse was to make me look cool.

But Mae Neecha asked me if it worked all the time? Later I reflected and realized it worked only some of the time, and the only thing that something that works some of the time proves is it doesn’t work all the time. If there were actually meaning in the purse, in the mask, in the clothes, that meaning would be plain and true, for all to see, all of the time. But this is not the case.

If I insist cloth in one circumstance has some meaning, but in a different circumstance it has none, all it proves is some of the time, to some people. All of the time, cloth, whether on my face or on my body, holds no innate meaning at all. Its just something I use. And one of the ways I use it is to demarcate meaning, to define myself with –or against. And just like I can use it, so too can others. I call my cloths mine, think they can say something about me, but the very fact that everyone is pouring their own meaning into the same object proves this is not what these objects do, not the meaning they have at all.

Recently, I had an old friend reach-out to me, she emailed –knowing I am a practitioner– looking for ‘Buddhisty advice’ on her troubled marriage. I did my best to help her in accordance with the dharma. And in my explaining it to her, in recounting a number of my own old ah-ha moments, I was able to see a few points so much more clearly. Here I will recount a bit of what I wrote her, and then my re-reflections and deeper understandings of the stories I shared:

In my response to my friend, I also emphasized LP Thoon’s teaching on yielding, and re-told a story Mae Yo had offered me:

“The wife came to the wat distressed about her relationship, she and her husband were always fighting, divorce seemed near. Mae Yo told the woman to go home and, for a week, say absolutely nothing to her husband when he spoke to her except คะ (ká); that’s it, no reply, no fight, no self defense, just a super polite yes. Apparently the marriage was saved.

For the longest time, I didn’t really understand that story, or how just a polite yes to every comment or question could have such an impact; nowadays I am starting to see how much our egos, our need to self defend, our inability to yield, challenges our relationships. Obviously, again, I don’t know the particulars for you guys, but I do know the power of yielding can go a long way in our relationships”

Having retold this story to my friend, I understand it so much more deeply now; it is a permanent view that someone else SHOULD act as I think is best, that the world follows my terms, and it is also a misunderstanding that when it does follow my terms it turns out for the best. This wrong view is why yielding is so hard, and the correction of this view makes it so much more natural a response to conflict or differences of view.

I thought about my relationship with mom, the turning point at that concert where I saw there is no reason to expect mom should follow my terms for appropriate Covid precautions (see this blog). Everyone has their own levels of precautions and comfort, I know that, I grudgingly accept it. But I saw it is because she is mine -my mom– that I think she will/should be abiding by my terms.

I think about a story of a woman at KPY that started pruning trees to her view of perfection with a chain saw. How ultimately, she stopped when she looked up and realized there was no way she could prune the whole forest. That story always touched me. Now I see we all understand the whole world can’t bow to us or operate on our terms. That is why we minefy– we seek out some small corner of the forest and try to control that, we seek out a few belongings, a few loved ones, a few hobbies and roles to identify with/by – just a few trees that can affirm me, can be asked to/coaxed into operating on my terms. We get so myopic, it’s the only way we can delude ourselves as to our own impotence. Why not see the truth: If I have to eke out a few trees, a little plot of forest to call my own, to be my stomping ground for proving myself, I have already lost. The very act of carving out ‘mine’, my little sphere of influence, is a concession to the truth that the world doesn’t follow my bidding or act on my terms.

But, instead of just admitting that truth, that the very act of a carve out was an admission of my failure, I get so sad and angry when the trees over here in my plot act exactly like the rest of the trees in the forest. They also fail to do my bidding or act on my terms. I look to what is mine to affirm me, but what I call mine and what I consider other are all exactly the same. I know other won’t affirm me, so why expect it of “mine” when what I call mine is the same in both form and function as other? Why get so stressed when my face sags, my garden gets overgrown, my body exhibits symptoms that portend disease? It doesn’t bother me when these things are happening to you/yours after all.

I was writing a Dhamma blog about trees. How in one autumn I had been so excited for the leaves to change I had maligned the evergreens and still greens for holding up the show. Then after everything had gone brown I was so happy to still have the evergreens to add color to my landscape. It was so clear from the example these trees don’t follow my terms, they act according to their nature and that nature is not to bring me enjoyment or satisfaction. And yet I constantly look for that in rupa objects when that is not their nature or job to do.

In the original contemplation I had been comparing the stress of decorating of the Redding house ( which ironically I didn’t even keep) — the arranging of rupa to create some little micro environment of comfort when the whole fucking world — the forest outside my patch — was a deeply uncomfortable cesspool of Covid disease and risk. Somehow though I realized I wasn’t really convinced of the parallel — with trees changing color, I really have no hand in their change, but a home, I can arrange and decorate. But I thought on it more, what if I could use some fertilizer, hell a magic wand, to change the rate of trees doing their autumn thing. Even still, in the end the ones with a nature to be green would be green and the ones that go brown would go brown.

Long ago Mae Yo had talked about the imagination process that created refrigeration, the ability to see there is duration of a particular form and there are interventions that can effect duration. Still though, in the end, food we put in the fridge spoils. And shit — from the very beginning, the refrigerator was the solution to a problem, food spoils.

We take so much pride in the in between spaces — the duration a grape goes unspoiled if we fridge it, the time we could fix the broken fridge, the temporary arrangement of a room that suits my tastes — I let these things affirm me, build my sense of ego and accomplishment. But, it’s just like looking only at a single patch of forest — it misses the bigger truth plain to see, the world doesn’t follow my rules it’s not about me. Impermanence reigns supreme and the ego boost I get from intervening in duration, or ‘temporarily solving’ problems that arise from the nature of this world –its dukka and impermanence– is delusional.

From the start the world shows what it is: Why do I feel so happy at a new dress? With the new dress, I imagine I –at least temporarily – solved a problem: The need for clothing to protect a fragile body. The need for something new because what I had before was worn, or my body got fat and it didn’t fit, or style changed I must be a slave to craving what is new and fashionable to maintain my identity as a fashionista. The need to have a body that is beautiful, represents me, takes a shape that is in alignment with how I see myself and want to be seen.

If it is a struggle to maintain the body-look I desire from the start, a struggle to protect myself from the elements, a struggle to preserve the fabric of a beloved skirt, to preserve a body that fits into that dress, to keep up with ever-changing-fashions, then the truth of the world is struggle, not my self-imagined victory at the moment I bring home a new dress home.

If it is like food in the fridge and it goes to decay. Then the world is showing me it’s annica.

Whether or not I have a fridge, or a dress, or a body that fits into a dress/looks a certain way is entirely dependent on conditions: Do I have electricity to run a fridge or is the power out? Did my cat pee on the dress and ruin it? Did famine cause body to go thin or endocrine disruption cause fatness? If something arises based on conditions beyond my control, it endures based on conditions beyond my control and ends when conditions for cessation are met independent of my action/wish/desire then it proves that everything in the world is conditional (put another way, it is subject to karma). What is conditional is not about me, it can’t prove self; the world is showing me anatta.

If every tree, both insider and outside the patch of forest I claimed, acts the same then it proves the world is always acting according to it’s nature, in all places, impervious to my terms and claims.

Just zoom out and it becomes so clear there is nothing here to confirm me. I am settling for identity built in the hot fucking second between solving a problem that arises from the nature of this world and the cessation of the solution, according to the nature of the world, that I ignorantly take such pride in.

There is just arising and ceasing, the only question is duration. If I am locked into finding identity in duration, I am screwed before I start because identity requires staying power and I can only, at best, influence duration. And even then, that influence is predicated on circumstance, conditions, constraints set in place by rupa, by the common conditions, by society, by my karma. Is there really anything for me to claim here? Anything that proves me, my self-determination, my story, when even the imaginary identity I craft is shaped by wiggling within all these constraints?

Now I understand why LP Thoon says we are deceived by duration: Its just a state, like a bubble of anatta, held long enough for us to name and claim. That we can influence it, sometimes and for a short while, are the seeds of hope, of delusion, that this world will obey us. That this world – with just brief moments of sustained states –can identify us. That the state itself is our identity.

If I were being intellectually honest, I should be thanking the gods for all the problems I see in this world, no matter the suffering they cause me, because to feed the delusion of atta I require an ‘enemy’, impermanence, to slay with my great problem solving skills. I need confines to wiggle within and define myself by. Otherwise I would just be, like everything else, subject to the endless flow of cause and effect. I am clearly a dukka junkie…

Recently, I had an old friend reach-out to me, she emailed –knowing I am a practitioner– looking for ‘Buddhisty advice’ on her troubled marriage. I did my best to help her in accordance with the dharma. And in my explaining it to her, in recounting a number of my own old ah-ha moments, I was able to see a few points so much more clearly. Here I will recount a bit of what I wrote her, and then my re-reflections and deeper understandings of the stories I shared: 

First, in the context of suggesting the practical value of trying to fix ourselves –our views, our actions – rather than trying to fix our partners, I shared one of my own early dhamma stories about my relationship with Eric as an example. Here is an excerpt from my email to her: 

“I know in my own relationship, this idea of fixing myself and stopping my effort to fix Eric has been a huge boon. For me, it started with changing a particular view...here is a story: years ago, I had a birthday coming up and I asked Eric to plan a murder mystery party for me It was no big deal --order the game  (it comes in a box) and invite over 8 friends, just 4 couples, to play. I asked him, I pestered him, I begged him, but in the end he didn't do it, I did not get a murder mystery birthday and I was super angry/hurt. Afterall, this was not the first time I asked Eric to do something really important to me, and that he ignored me/failed to do it.
 
I went to talk to my teacher, Mae Yo, about it. She asked me to consider what my wrong views were in the situation --the ideas/thoughts I thought were permanent /absolute/unchanging that lay at the heart of my being so upset about not getting a murder mystery party (FYI: our wrong views are always our beliefs that things are permeant/1 way/ 1 sided/unchanging because the TRUTH of the world is อนิจจัง, anicca, impermanence). I thought on it for a while and I realized a few core permanent beliefs: 
 
•	If Eric doesn't plan a party for me, he doesn't love me. This is permanent. Afterall, it is also totally possible that someone who doesn't plan parties for you still loves you. Or someone who plans parties for you doesn't give a shit about you
•	I believed that because I would plan a party for someone I loved if they wanted one, they/he SHOULD (anytime you think should, look for a permanent thought) be willing to do it for me. In other words, my way is the only way (permanent) what I would do is the rule, it is what everyone should do (permanent).
•	That the way I express love --doing what my beloved asks -- is the only way to express love ( permanent  ) and if someone doesn't express it in my way than they don't feel it (compounded permanence)

The more I thought on it, the more my heart softened and I realized how silly I was being: Eric does all sorts of things to ‘prove’ he loves me: He cooks for me, he supports me financially, he encourages me to learn and grow, he emotionally supports me in pursuing what is important to me, he buys me pretty things, he listens to me and tolerates me, he spends time with me, etc. Because my view was so fixed –do what I ask or you don’t love me –I ignored all the other ‘proof’ of love. I realized then that love didn’t have to be expressed on my terms to be expressed and to exist in Eric’s heart.

 My anger basically ceased as soon as I saw this and my behaviors changed too: I stopped pestering Eric to do all sorts of stuff I had wanted him to do – no more laundry lists, errands, etc. I would ask, if he didn’t get to it, it was fine, because I knew it didn’t say anything about our relationship, or if he loved me or not…” 
 
Now, years later, after sharing this old story with my friend, I see a much deeper element: Eric not doing the party planning was never about me. It was about his priorities, his personality, his beliefs about what actions do and don't prove love. Afterall, if Eric loved me, and he thought it was important to show that love, and he thought planning a party would show that love, then he would have planned the party. And that party would have been planned not because of me, or my wants, but because of him and his wants. 

Or alternatively, he could have planned it just because he knew I wanted, and he believed that doing what I wanted, what I asked would express his love. This was what I had hoped for years ago. But in truth, even this rational for planning -- because I wanted – would still only proven something about him: He values/identifies with/ expresses love to someone by trying to fulfill their wants.  

Over and over I seek validation, reification, from the way other people behave towards me. But in truth, other people’s actions never really prove anything about me. Other people’s actions just prove their views and values 

I was watching the trees outside my window, now that it is nearly winter, and the leaves mostly fallen, the evergreens seem more exciting. Just a few weeks ago, when most of the other trees were in the full glory of their fall colors, I maligned those same evergreens, boring trees, that wouldn’t change color and that blocked the view of all the splendid foliage across the lake. Now though I am grateful to have the evergreens…

It made me see, these rupa items, they really don’t bow to me. Considering the trees, MY TREES, it is so obvious that none of the rupa in this world exists to give me satisfaction or do what I like. Even if I buy them, or care for them, or plant them with my own two hands, these trees — if they take a form I like — do so only because it is in their nature to do so, not because either my effort or desire rule them. And trees will change to a different form, according to their nature, I can neither prevent this nor force it to happen more quickly/slowly than their nature allows.

I got to considering dukkha: I want an evergreen tree to become orange, or at least to get out of the way of all those other pretty trees putting on a show. Then I want those once-pretty-tress to go from being brown back to having leaves and colors. I see a single state of trees, possible for just a moment when the conditions are ripe, and I get attached. Even intellectually understanding that seasons change, trees change, I still find myself hoping for a little more, a late start to winter this year…it’s the old search for sukkah by clinging to duration. A search which will end in dukkha, now or later, either way.

I had recently purchased a face tightening machine that uses ultrasound technology; the company that makes it claims it will help regenerate collagen and diminish sagging. I used it and I gave myself a painful, ugly fat lip. Even this body, the most mine of all my belongings, does not exist to give me satisfaction. Despite my efforts, in fact sometime because of my efforts, it takes on shapes I despise. It transforms according to its nature, which in this case, was to get battered and bruised and to start swelling on account of the ultrasound waves. With evidence like this, why the hope? Why the continued obsession with dragging duration — just a bit more beauty, a fresh face a few years longer than my peers? Even if the suffering of sagging is coming for me one day or another… can’t I just be pretty today?

And why is pretty so important that I am willing to endure the painful treatments, the deprivation diets, the hardcore workouts? This is just a small slice of the suffering that arises from calling something mine. This is the effort to avoid the unavoidable: The devastating disappointment that comes from my preference for, identification with, one state of an object – a face, a tree – that by its nature continually shifts through changing states. Seasons always change…

Recently, I have been trying the technique of ‘disowning and not claiming’ that LP Thoon recommended to his student Singh. The advice is to see objects as not mine, existing for the communal use of my family, something I will depart the world and leave behind for my heirs. But as I worked on the technique, I came to see that claiming, ‘mining’, these are just one variety of misunderstanding rupa.
When I consider those trees, I see that my error is about more than just what I call mine. Deeper is that I don’t really understand what physical objects are, how they behave, how no amount of claiming them, or trying to control them, is going to make them fundamentally different than what it is their nature to be. Like my now bruised lips, I don’t have a full picture of how they will change in the future, what the causes and conditions that influence them are, and what the ensuing result will be. Otherwise, obviously, I would never have used ultrasound on my lips.

Try as I might to use objects to bring me satisfaction, to define me, that is not in the end what they do. Objects are impervious to me. No matter how enamored I am with them, they do not love me back. This makes me start to understand why Mae Neecha once described being a sotapanna to me as understanding the world doesn’t revolve around me. How could it, objects –both those I claim and those I acknowledge are ‘of the world’ – don’t do my bidding.

I was thinking about the Mahājanaka Jataka again: In it, The Bodhisattva is a king who, strolling through the royal gardens comes to two mango trees, one with fruit and the other barren. He pulls a mango off the fruited tree and eats it, it was delicious, and he made a note to himself to hit-up the tree again after his walk so he could have some additional fruit before he headed back to the palace. At the end of his walk, the king comes to the same trees only now, the barren tree remains pristine and green, but the fruited tree has become battered, leafless, broken and devoid of all fruit. He asks the Royal Gardner what happened, and the Gardner explains, out of respect, village folks wait for the king to eat the first fruit of a tree, but after that has been had, it’s a free-for-all. The once fruited tree had been damaged by the villagers coming to pillage the fruit. The barren tree, with no fruit to be taken, remained undisturbed. The king, seeing this decides to renounce the world: If you don’t have shit to take, you don’t have to worry and stress about your shit getting taken.

Recently, I had moved to a new place in CT, only it hadn’t worked-out and I quickly moved out. It had been so difficult, a short-succession move-in/move-out, and it made me start considering this Jataka, considering the worry and care I have for my belongings and how that stress could be solved by not having, not wanting, belongings at all.

For a moment, I really thought about the relief it would be to just walk on all of my stuff. The freedom it would be to not worry about rupa anymore. Then, for a second, I understood that you don’t need to walk from the stuff. You just need to stop being attached to it. This, I understood, is the letting go, the becoming a Sotapana. Knowing the costs of the stuff. Knowing what it is, and what it does, doing your duty by it and not being overly concerned.

I thought back to a trip I took to Hawaii decades ago…back them was my fashionista days, I dressed to the 9s each morning, boots and belts and hats galore. But in Hawaii, it was just shorts and a tee, and after a few days I started fantasizing about a move to Hawaii: I was desperate to escape the self-imposed burden of needing to dress-up each day. I had the keen sense that I couldn’t escape that burden of that self-created identity as long as I lived in SF. I feared what the people who knew my fashionista-self might think of me, the status I would lose. In Hawaii, where no one dresses-up I could be ‘free’. This of course is not freedom: This is just binding myself to a new identity I imagine will be somehow better and easier. Another becoming…

Years ago, at a retreat, Mae Yo and Neecha had a session on becoming a sotapanna. Something they taught came to my mind again, it got much clearer: They were saying that if you aren’t really a sotapanna, you can be not greedy all your life, but if circumstances change, you are greedy again. Like someone who has plenty of food, and is always willing to share, but then famine strikes and they stop sharing. The cause for greed is not uprooted, its just that the circumstances don’t support the manifestation of the greed, at that moment. Circumstances change, and back comes the greed, because the seeds of it had been there all the time.

As I considered the new house again, I considered the stress: Stress over moving to it. Stress over decorating. Stress over having it too long. Stress over maintenance… I realize I am so absorbed, so stuck on my stuff, it is a source of unbounded stress. I say I understand these things do not belong to me, do not define me, but I obsess over them. All to make an environment I like. For sensual pleasure. Even despite the temporariness, the accompanying pain. This is the stress of greed.

The Mahājanaka Jataka is actually the story in which the Bodhisattva perfects the parami of renunciation. In truth, I am not much of a renunciation fan (I do like my creature comforts after all) and this particular story has always felt a bit uncomfortable, like an indictment of my own insufficiency. Still though, the sense of it, the allure, the promise of less suffering by going the way of that barren tree has begun to weigh on my mind a bit. Perhaps renunciation is less about sacrifice and more about freedom.

Years ago, I was watching a TV show: There was a monster had taken over the town. She excreted a venom that lulled the whole town into a mass delusion; instead of seeing her as the monster she was, they were deluded into seeing her as a beautiful and benevolent ruler. Everyone was happy and got along, but the venom was just to pacify the people, a drug to keep them mollified while she ate them one by one. Only 2 characters in the show, who by virtue of having been exposed to her blood, a sort of antidote to her poison, saw her for the monster she truly was and were able to ultimately escape.

That story has stuck with me many years now, an ubai for how I see the world. I imagine my old car, my wedding dress, as these beautiful things, because of how I imagine them, I feel happy, I am lulled by delusion to believe they make me special. But in the end, I feel wounded by these objects. Why? Because like the town’s folk, I am blind to what these things really are; I have intoxicated myself and in self-inflicted blindness I put myself in peril, I endure suffering.

For a long time, I have done the exercise from the Anatalakata Sutra (link here): All the evidence I have gathered that shit is inconstant, that it doesn’t obey me, that it causes me suffering, it has softened my heart, sure, but it has never been the final blow to claiming these items are me/mine. Now I understand why it has failed to sufficiently touch my heart: It’s because the evidence that these objects change and cause me suffering is insufficient to convince myself that these objects aren’t mine.

Whether I claim objects, or not, their changing and dukka is simply their nature. I mistake ‘my’ objects as having some other nature, or at least, some additional nature; I think they hold the meaning I impart on them and that, in return they can impart the meaning I desire on myself. Even if they change. Even if I hurt myself with them. Even still, I cling to the notion that at least for a little while, despite the suffering they cause, they are an instrument I can use in my mission of making myself, telling my story, of self-becoming. My imagination has made me intoxicated with these objects, intoxicated by the feelings I have as a result of what I imagine these objects mean about me.

Which is, I think, LP Thoon’s point when he defined anatta as, “these things don’t belong to us, they aren’t meaningful.” That is the last part of their nature (3 common characteristics) there is nothing meaningful about these objects, they don’t confirm or affirm me as the me I want to be, they don’t confirm or affirm anything at all about me – or anything else – they are meaningless. They march along their entropy path, holding a named form till the causes and conditions for their exiting the named state arise. Then they disaggregate, un-clump, anatta. Thats all.

And that’s the final clincher — long lasting or short lasting, fun or suffering, it doesn’t really matter how I imagining these objects, because its not my imagination of them that matter. They are what they are and that is decidedly not me, not a secret coded confirmation of me that only I see. They are just 4es. Shifting through states according to causes and conditions. Atta is my mistaken belief that the car, the dress, prove something about me. That they can help make the me I imagine myself more solid and real.

I started considering my old Vajrayana shawl , a wrap that my former teacher had instructed all his followers to wear when they mediated. It had given me a sense that I was connected to the community, to my teacher. I felt such pride putting it on for the first time, I basked in a sense of my own piety and buddhistiness. And then, how it became just a cloth when I quit the religion. All these secret meanings of these objects eventually dissipate as we disassociate from them, they just become more of the junk we used to hang-out with while the circumstances allowed.

Of course, just cause I separate from shit, it doesn’t mean I immediately disassociate. And there is the crux of the suffering of parting ways with what I hold dear. Sometimes, like with the shawl, I stop holding dear and then part ways, sometimes, like with the Porche, I part ways and only later stop holding dear. And it does seem there is extra dukkha when I am confronted with the fact –like I was with the Porsche – that the car can’t be both evidence I am on top and in control and also be sold at a deep discount because I didn’t even recognize the item I claimed had engine issues. The delusion about it meaning something about me holds strong, even when I need to go from believing it says something good to something embarrassing and painful.

Still, for me, I continue the cycle of delusion. Why? Because I still foolishly believe it is worth it to hold onto the idea that some object can say something about me that I want, can help me build the future I want, tell the story of the me I want to be and become, rather than just admit that none of these objects ever say anything about me at all.

When I considered the scarf more closely, it dawned on me the traits I thought it proved –piousness, connection to a community I no longer give a shit about, a good student to Rinpoche — aren’t even traits I am consistently trying to prove. I considered different objects more closely and found even more evidence: A little Chevy Cavalier to prove I wasn’t just a rich trust fund kid. A not-fit body in high school to prove I was more invested in my mind. An apartment in SF to prove I was an SFer even if my driver’s license was from NY. It became obvious, I am not actually even trying to prove one thing, or the same thing; like everything, the me I want to be changes…

No, objects don’t prove some specific Alana, I use them to reify the alana de jour. I don’t even care about being pious, or a leader in the Vajrayana community anymore. It’s just some arbitrary identity I wanted one day, some arbitrary trait, proven by some arbitrary action and object. Today, tomorrow, as the stream (of causes and conditions and their ensuing effects) shifts, I want to be and become something else. In the end, all I consistently want is to be, to become, to feel me, even though what that me is is even more slippery and changeable than the objects I try to use to prove that identity.

It’s funny, a while back, when I was thinking about what justifies my making something mine, back then I reflected:

“For a long time, I have wondered what makes something MINE (and therefore something I cling to) after all it is clear that this idea lives nowhere in the 4es of the object. But every time I think I figure it out, it seems like the criteria changes; Its mine because I legally own it, only that Manhattan loft felt like ‘not mine’ long before I actually sold it. It is mine because I pay for it, but what about the outfits that feel like mine in the dressing room before I hit-up the cash register? It is mine because I have had it, because it is my birthright, but how do I reconcile that with a body that keeps getting older and fatter and sick, is it really expressing my will, acting like my right? I realize now the problem…delusion is a slippery fuck, in truth, mine=desire+some arbitrary rationalization I use to justify/claim mineness in my mind. Its just a rationalization that changes to suit my needs, all it needs to be is ‘defensible’ to my warped brain and its good enough to go on.”

The me that I think something mine makes me is as arbitrary as the process by which I claim that thing in the first place. Just some justification that a certain identify can be claimed –an activity I do perhaps, a belief I hold, a group I belong to, a future I imagine, a relationship I assume. Minenes, as it turns out, is just a concept in support of an agenda: The agenda to be, to become, to forge the story of self that I endured rebirth to try and tell.

I have been thinking about atta a lot lately, using various angles, but especially considering it from the perspective of my body and belongings: How I ignorantly try and use rupa to reify my sense of self and the reality, which LP Thoon says so clearly, that “anatta is that nothing belongs to us, it is meaningless.”

I have been homing-in on the feelings I have gotten from objects which, in the past, I considered to be mine; I have been really trying to re-connect with the feelings, to understand what beliefs drove the feelings and when/if those beliefs were proven wrong.

First, I considered the Porche: When I learned of a lurking engine problem, which resulted in my needing to sell it for a fraction of what I had believed it to be worth, I felt brought so low. I was ashamed. How had I so sorely misjudged my own item? It was like someone who had believed themselves to be special because they were beloved of their lover, only to find they were one of many consorts.

The car had always made me feel on top and in control. An affirmation of the me I saw myself as, the me I wanted to be. I can remember long drives, hugging curves, the sense of elation. Sure, it was fun to drive, but so much of the fun was me feeling the rush of being confirmed while driving the car. Though the confirmation was just me imagining the qualities, that I imagined in the car, were being reflected back at me. It was a circle jerk, an ego stroke of my own creation. Fun though it was when I could imagine the car broadcasting my awesomeness, the cost was that later, when I went to sell it, I felt like it broadcast my foolishness. All I needed to do was to understand the car doesn’t broadcast anything about me, doesn’t reflect anything about me, and I would have been spared both the false elation and the deflation.

In the end, with the sting of the sale experience, the car showed me what it really was: A decaying 4e object, not the thing of my imagination. And it showed me the suffering of trying to locate self in 4e elements that will decay, will fail us, will part ways from us. Which never existed to prove me special in the first place.

I fed imagination with the object, got high on the thoughts of the imagination, then got low on the thoughts of the imagination…but it was all just an imagination trip: The car was just the 4e object it had always been.

I thought about my wedding dress. The elation of trying it on at the last fitting, feeling so beautiful. A shining object of desirability, a catch to be coveted by all I walked past on the aisle. But years later the same dress made me look like a cow. The dress, so clearly unchanged, proved my body –squeezed-in to a dress that now looked like it might burst at the seams, itself had changed. Both a former body I had been so proud of, and a dress that had once fit it light a glove, proved my failing: It proved my inability to maintain a body that was firm, peak.

As I looked at the fat body-self in the dress, I felt a moment of shame; it was the cost paid for the moment of pride I had felt on my wedding day, all those years ago. Like the car, in the end, the dress told me both what I was (not special, not in control, not on top of this world and my life), as well as what it was — a piece of cloth that was stitched together and would be unstitched by time, helped along by a fat girl trying to squeeze into it.

In the end, all these objects that I claim and cling to part ways with me and, often, before they do, I am forced to a reckoning: Since I let the object feed my imagination in a positive way, it will feed my imagination in a negative way. I get forced to admit this object was never what I imagined it to be, it never confirmed what I wanted it to confirm. And me, still hungry for confirmation, feel the sting of disappointment before I go out in search of some new object to try and feed my imagination with.

The question I have for myself is why not fast forward a bit? If I can see these objects for what they really are now, I don’t have to end up in the moment of pain when the object makes me feel small by proving it is not mine, it does not confirm who I am.

I started contemplating on a pile of clothes that I had set aside to sell at the consignment store. Each item had a story about why it no longer fits in my wardrobe, or my body, or my lifestyle: So many reasons I was parting ways with each item. Details. But the overarching story is the same – the item goes when circumstance changes. When the circumstances change, the item no longer hangs out with me.

I have long thought of my wardrobe as some testament to me. To my fashion, my aesthetic, each ornament there to make my snowflake body seem unique. Or at least to hide its fatness and failings. No single shoe or necklace was the one that conveyed my identity, but all together… I just can’t shake the idea, that these items that I pick and choose when and how to wear reflect who I am. Why though? Each dress or top is the same in form and function. Each is with me while the circumstances allow and then gone to the trash or the consignment store or the good will. Why would the whole wardrobe be somehow more meaningful than its parts? Why would a whole body be more meaningful than its parts?

Shit even the meaning I assign to each object, or the whole, changes: What identity I am trying to convey and confirm with a wardrobe? Once upon a time it was a pretty, but professional Sexy Librarian. Then there was the edgy but, still sophisticated, High Fashion Punk with her Moschino hearts and studded leather jacket.

And nowadays, I accept anything slimming and flattering — like he losers in high school using each other at the table – some outfit to make my body seem less little, less undesirable, less out of my control. The reality is the clothes don’t do that anymore for me than the other kids sitting at the table. The clothes just hang with me. The loser table kids, we all just hang together. Looking for solace and comfort and acceptance in things that don’t really give those, that just hang with you for a little due to their own reasons, their nature, their circumstances, convention.

I want my wardrobe to help me to be accepted, to be more than a same-same like every other body. To have some control, some autonomy over my body through how it looks, to dictate my identity through the ornamentation I choose for this body. With a wardrobe, I seek to convince the world, to convince myself that I am somehow special. With the shape of a body, and its ornaments, I seek to confirm that I am ON TOP AND IN CONTROL. But that pile of clothes heading to the consignment store, this body with its chub, this face with its sagging, they belie the truth that I am not in control, I am subject to karma, to conditions, to the changes that occur to objects and bodies and circumstance in the world. Too bad for me that uncontrollable objects can’t possibly confirm my control of all the other rupa, and nama, that I am equally not in control of.

I got to considering further examples of how all ‘my’ objects/people and I are only hangin’ temporarily: We are brought together by circumstance, and parting ways based on circumstances. I decided to dive a bit deeper into what this really proves. What it can show me about my continual exercise of identity building vis-a-vie ‘my’ objects. Let’s again review data of the wedding ring:

Before I had the ring, it meant nothing to me, it reflected no identity, meaning or value. Now that it is long gone, the same is true. So, what is so special about the short time it was with me that makes me believe that then, and only then, that elemental ring, could convey some aspect of my awesomeness? On my finger it means one thing, on another’s something else? That makes no sense, it basically proves that the ring never had any innate meaning, just meaning I read into it. Otherwise, it would have the same meaning before and after I had it on my finger, and on any other finger it was ever on.

It would have also conveyed that meaning to anyone seeing it, there would be no room for interpretation in the mind of the viewer: ring=beloved-special-alana would simply be true, a tautology. But that is clearly not the case, if it were, the person who found the ring would have returned it, it would have been useless to them: Who wants to claim an object that so clearly speaks to someone else’s identity?

No, what the ring points to is the truth I have been trying to convince myself of for so long: There is no meaning in a ring, meaning can’t exist in a 4e object, its only in my head. I read into it. And when you strip my beliefs, my imagination out of it, it’s so clear a ring just hangs with me while circumstances allow. Then it goes its way and I go my way. The end. There really is nothing to get bent out of shape about.

But mostly it is like with Abby, who used me when she needed friends, and tossed me when she found better ones: It was never about me. It is like all the losers in high school that hung together — looking for acceptance from each other because they need it from somewhere — as soon as they had better options to feel accepted, the opportunity to climb the social rungs, to sit at a more popular table, they took it. I did.

I used the loser ‘friends’ to feel less little. And they used me to feel less little. Any warm body would have done. We all just hung till circumstances changed. That ring would have hung with any ‘warm credit card’ what could take it out of the store. Even shit I make with my own two hands would hang with anyone who could make or take it. Even this body, which I hold so dear, take to be the most me of all of the things I consider mine, can be taken by any rapist, murderer, slaver, etc. who can overpower me.

I went to a beautiful public garden once, I met the gardener who was giving a talk. It was so clear that the garden was a source of pride for her, the hours and toil she put-in rewarded by a beauty she took credit for, she identified with. She let, in her mind, identify her. I remember thinking how odd her pride was, after all, the trees and flowers, if the circumstances were ripe for their growing, would have grown for anyone who planted and cared for them. Who really cares that the roses, situated 2 feet from the hydrangeas, the lilacs placed in alternating color bushes, reflected her ‘vison’ and aesthetic? We use the silliest things to fabricate our identities…Besides, wasn’t her vison constrained by the soil and space, her aesthetic shaped by other influences and conditions…everywhere, everything we claim and name as ‘ours’ is proving it’s just conditional.

But, like a garden, that perks with a little water and fertilizer, my wrinkled face will perk up from a syringe of Botox and fillers that are shot into it. Anyone with a needle and some training can have this effect. I don’t even have the training to acquire this effect on my own, just the credit card and the delusion-seeded vanity to find a dermatologist…how silly is it that I would identify with the freshly perked-up face?

I didn’t cause the face, nor did I cause the sagging. And even if I did cause any part or moment of this face, it is just a 4e face that passes through a series of states, changed by circumstance beyond my control. Like that woman’s garden my face is constrained by bones and sinews and skin, it is shaped by conditions from my genetics, to my human form and the shared samutti of such a form, by its necessary functions, by environmental impacts over the years. I am a fool in finding this face some point of pride. By identifying with it. By –in my mind—letting it identify me.

These objects –gardens, and rings, and faces – don’t confirm us. We seek identity in the shit that hangs with us as circumstances allow. Always seeking to control the circumstance, or at least effect them, or at the very very least trying to extend the hang time with states, objects and people we love. Or to shorten the hang time with states we despise, making sure that dermatology appointment is on the calendar well before the botox wears off.

I am always seeking to change circumstances, to order and beautify my objects, so they better reflect my imagination of who I am. But just like a firm body doesn’t prove my extreme will power, the perfectly manicured garden, or face, just reflect the efforts born from the delusion that these things somehow prove something about me. The mistaken view that they are more meaningful, more important, than objects that hang with others, or that hang with me for a little time while circumstances allow.

I have frequently contemplated on people who have kids. I look at family members with children and the evidence is so clear to me, their kids can’t be theirs because those children are constantly failing to do what their parents want. So how do the parents persist in their belief that the kids, their kid’s behaviors, reflect them? Kids reflect themselves, their own influences and circumstances. I watch the adults in my fam get so upset when their kids embarrass them, or don’t live up to their expectations of who they will be. But what they are really upset with is being confronted with evidence of the truth that was always true — these kids aren’t theirs, they don’t bow to parental control, they don’t represent their parents, they don’t prove what a great or bad parent they are. Kids have their own karma, their own agendas and influences. Parents are just one of those influences.

Physical objects are the same as kids: They have their own influences, their own shifting of their elements, they follow their own rules based on the nature of their 4es in their environment. They don’t confirm me as their ‘owner’, they don’t obey me, they have their own path and nature. They hang with me for a little while as circumstances allow and then everything goes their own way. A face the sags is the ultimate proof, pulled down by gravity over time, how can I believe this reflects me any more than those kids do their parents. My botoxing and facercizing, its just one influence. An influence that weakens as I age anyway.

A ring that I buy and that sits on my finger for a while is the same way, it was just hanging there till circumstances changed and it moved on. A house I rent, or buy, is with me till circumstances change. An outfit till it wears, or I change body shape, it was never a thing that lauded or lionized me, it was something that hung, that I could use, till circumstances change. And circumstances always change.

I was in Zumba class, and I heard a song about a guy peering in the window of his ex's house; he was heartbroken that she was busy fucking someone new now. As I danced along, I started to think, “if someone can fuck someone new, was them fucking you ever really saying something about you? Did it make you special?”

I continued contemplating after the class ended. I landed on my beloved wedding ring, which I had lost decades ago: It ran off on someone else’s finger, so how is it that I ever thought, while it was sitting on my finger, it was saying something about me? About how loved I was? How precious? 

Obviously, on the new person's finger it didn't continue to attest to my beloved status. And, in my mind, sitting-on the founder’s finger, it attested to a morally degenerate person without the decency to turn in a found ring. The ring was a marker of ‘thief’ on the new owner’s hand. How can the ring mean different things depending on whose finger it’s on?  In short, it can't.

I have thought before about how people wanting me for sex didn't really prove anything about me, it proves only their own needs and desires that they are trying to fulfill with me. They are using my body. They are assigning their own meaning to it. 

It’s not just this physical body either: In the past I have watched Eric dotting on our little nieces. It has made me reflect that he, by his nature, is a caregiver, so naturally he wants someone to care for. I take it as some marker of my excellence, my worthiness, my specialness, that he has chosen to care for me. But this is temporary, when we part ways, he will likely find someone new to take care of. 

I had a friend, Abby, in our first year of high school, we were inseparably tight. But after a summer away from each other, I returned to her hanging with a new group of girls, not having the time or desire to spend time with me anymore. She had hung out with me because of circumstances, her wants and beliefs, what she perceived me to be -- at a given time. When circumstances changed, so did her attention and affection.  

Everything in our life just hangs with us due to circumstances: My ring hung with me due to circumstances, and when my finger shrunk in the cold, circumstances changed, and off it fell. My beloved Porshe, was my sweet, sexy ride in Cali, but when circumstances changed, and I moved to a cold climate, I felt like I had to sell and it no longer hung with me. My SF home, when I moved to NY, no longer hung with me...my money, once spent, no longer hangs with me. 

Its not just the fact that stuff that is with us can only be 'ours' temporarily. That is true, but it doesn't clear up the misunderstanding that shit can temporarily say something about us, it can confirm us at least for a little while. Like while I have the ring it says “I am beloved”. While I drive the Porsche it says “I am on top and in control”, while someone is fucking me it says “I am so hot and awesome.” And then it all changes and dissipates.  But what that assumes that even for a moment these things are ‘about me’, speak to me, rather than speaking to the circumstance in which we are able to hang out together temporarily.  It never was, and never is, actually about me; it is always that circumstances lets these objects, and people, be part of my life and then circumstances dictate the time and ways in which we part. 

Because I am attached, temporary though it may be, to the benefit these items accrue to me. Because I believe I can control the duration during which that benefit is accrued. Because I imagine the benefit outweighs the cost, or portends some desirable future.  I am stuck in an endless cycle of trying to obtain and replace. The result: Endless rebirths of dukkha. 

And if these things convey some identity unto me while they are temporarily there, their departure must also be an ego blow, a loss of the value and identity that I believe they confer. More dukkha. But if we are just hanging out, based on temporary circumstances, then no dukkha needs to ensue when circumstances change and we part ways. Coming together was meaningless, and so too is drifting apart.

I have been thinking more about being a woman. It is a characteristic, a state, that I identify with deeply. However, if didn’t have a vagina I would struggle to claim the identity of ‘woman’. For me, the meaning I give to a particular body part, vagina, is so strong, its absence would create too much mental discord for me to also claim the identity of woman.

Of course, this isn’t some universal truth – many cultures, across history, have assigned gender identities not tied to penises and vaginas. Plenty of trans folks are born with a penis or vagina and still have a sense of identity different than my own tightly coupled vagina=woman. This all begins to hint at the deeper reality that no matter how profoundly I ascribe meaning to particular 4es, no matter how much I may feel those meanings are supported by social convention, the meaning really never is in rupa.

Still though, I use rupa to build identities. I may only have this body temporarily, it may change states continually, but I cling to it because in my mind, my body is the scaffolding, the substrate, for the story of self I tell. I am woman-alana. You want proof? Check-out between my legs…

I had been watching a TV show, in it a main character is a successful editor. She is also a woman, in a time that few woman were successful anythings, better yet editors at important NY publishing houses. For the character, being an editor is her life – no family, few friends, few hobbies, just professional success. And then, her vision starts to fail. Just like that, her career –her identity—is ruined by something as small as inoperable cataracts. You can’t BE and editor if you don’t have eyes that can read.

Me, the editor, we rely on our bodies to build our identity. As I have said before, I cling to this body precisely because I view it as the necessary condition –the scaffolding – upon which I build my sense of alanahood. But if I rely on a body to build my identity, and the body isn’t under my control, the identity cant be under my control either. I can say, think, wish, imagine, that I am fitness alana all I want, if asthma prevents me from running more than a few steps then I can’t BE fit alana, at least I can’t anymore.

A body that can run, or read, or even have a vagina, these are states. This is not what bodies ARE, it is what they can do/the shape they can have, under certain circumstances. Can I run? Only if the pollen count is sufficiently low. If I am on my meds. If I haven’t been sick. Etc. If it depends on a bunch of stuff that I can’t force, or count on, that depend on a bunch of other factors and conditions beyond me, then why do I imagine that these states are going to prove who I am?

Over and over, I try to use the body to prove my identity, but in fact, the body dictates the limits of the identities I can ’build’. The rupa I cling to so tightly as a necessary condition for me telling the alana story, creating self, is a condition I must yield to; my story is at the mercy of this body, which makes it a pretty crappy tool with which to build identity. In short, it doesn’t do what I want, so how can it prove I am who I want to be?

This body — the state it was in, is in, it will be in — is just one of many circumstances that dictate the self I can imagine. What is circumstantial, conditional, can’t be who I am. The body’s states are conditional, so they aren’t who I am. But the identity I imagine, that is conditional too; the identity I imagine can’t be who I am.

Eric and I have been in negotiations to purchase a vacation home in Montreal. Finally, we feel like we are making progress on the two home dream; a winter home in Miami and a summer getaway in Montreal. Only this morning, we got news there might be a glitch in our plan, the deal on the Montreal place looks like it may fall through.

We don’t even own the Montreal apartment yet, but already we have built up this dream in our head of what life will be like there. The news this burgeoning dream might die in the cradle feels like a devastating loss. Eric and I are so depressed.

Isn’t it the same with my body? One of my big fears when I think about an impending auto immune disease, or covid, or cancer, is that with the death of this body –or its crippling frailty – my dreams of the future die too. I cling so tightly to the fantasy of a future life that I don’t even have yet. And even though I know that my future fantasy doesn’t dictate what happens, that the world doesn’t give a damn about my desires, I still do. I feel so stuck that I can’t get past this…

A major reason I cling to the body then is because I cling to the Alana story. The body is a necessary condition for an Alana future; only with this body can my Alana story persist. Memory is tied to the body. The body is how I am recognized by loved ones. The body is how I get the accompaniments that society has attributes to it — the degrees, bank accounts, resume, etc. The body is foundational to my imagined future –a happy 2 city retirement life with Eric, even as the second city, Montreal, seems threatened.

Without this body, there is no way to accomplish my dream. Without Montreal I’ll find another dream. I assume, without this body I will also find another dream, this I suppose is how rebirth happens. Still though, its so hard to see with bodies, that they are as fungible as cities and houses.

It has dawned on me that a huge question for me now is how to stop being attached to my body at a sotopana level, when the attachment to the future story that requires this body is so much deeper than a mere attachment to a physical 4e body-object. So how do I move past this?

Maybe it is gathering the evidence that this body is like every other, not at all special. There is no identity from it, or in it, it is a tool. One way it can function, a way I can use it, is to move toward and accomplish dreams/goals. But the accomplishment of those isn’t dictated by the body, that is driven by my karma.

Still, this isn’t quite enough…I still feel motivated to protect and preserve this body, I am overly concerned about it as long as I see it as a necessary tool for my dream fulfillment.

Or maybe this is 2 separate issues: One is to see the body is just 4e, subject to 3 common conditions, not special or unique, not under my control, and not who I am. But two is that identity, 3s and 4s, are also not under my control. These are also subject to the common conditions. The world is too, whatever circumstances arise — whether they align with my fantasies or not — are states, with state-dependent characteristics that I do or don’t prefer. That do or don’t align closely enough with my goals/dreams, they will arise based on causes and conditions and cease based on causes and conditions. They will be temporary, they will be dukkha, and there is nothing meaningful in them. They don’t prove anything about me, or my identity, they are, by definition, anatta -not self.

Or maybe it simpler than all this: Maybe I just need to see that even in the fulfillment of my dreams, even if I could ‘accomplish’ having exactly the future I imagine with this body, the duration will not be satisfactory. The details on the ground, that I face in reality, not fantasy, will always, only, be dukkha.

A while back I went to visit a 6.5 acre sculpture called Opus-40. The artist, Harvey Fite, spent 40 years living and working at the sculpture site, hewing stones from the land, carefully carving them and laying them into a massive, towering labyrinth. It was his life’s work, a reflection of his artistic vision, his sense of himself as an artist. It was also his death: At 72, Harvey, fell into a quarry while trying to haul up more stones to expand his work.

The story really got me thinking about the seeming irony that ‘our objects’ can kill us. My dad died of pancreatic cancer, his own cells consumed him. My doctors told me I have blood markers for an autoimmune disease, my body, at any time, can literally begin attacking itself. Cancer, autoimmune disease, really those are just details, particular ways particular bodies kill people. By definition though, every body will kill everyone.

Death is a direct result of birth into this body (and as a happy bonus it also guarantees aging and sickness along the way); every body is anatta, cessation is fundamental to its nature, as soon as a form aggregates it begins its continual, shifting march toward disaggregation; the seeds of destruction arise with arising.

Whatever entity/identity I think Alana to be, I certainly don’t imagine she just anticlimactically –pointlessly – ends. The last thing that my sense of self, that came into this world to spin the tales I believe allow me to be/become, wants is anatta/entropying/de-clumping/shifting outside a state I can still credibly call myself a ‘me’.

And yet, this body, by design, promises that ending. How is it I mistake my body as a tool to become, the scaffolding upon which I can build a me, when its true nature is to cease. Its true nature is to 100% ensure the cessation of any story I graft onto it because it is a fragile, shifting, breakable, 4e form crumbles. Isn’t it better to reject this thing as me and with it reject all the disappointment that arises each and every time it proves damn well not to be me, not to have my interests, agenda, stories, at heart? Probably, and yet, I cling, and invite the world of dukkha that comes for the clinging and inevitable disappointment…

My mind needs further evidence that this body is not mine:

Its not mine because it defies my sense of who I am:

I was a yogi, but my SI joint kept coming out of place, causing me intense pain and eventually forcing me to quit yoga. For so long, I felt like practice was disciplining my body, forcing it to take a form, to have characteristics and abilities I wanted. It was proof I was in charge. That if I set my mind to doing something I could do it, I could force rupa into my control.

But ultimately, the very forms I forced my body into caused it to hurt, to break, to prevent me from continuing the activities I had used to shape and define it–to define myself, to prove my supremacy of my will. In the end the body defied my sense of self. It destroyed the identity of Alana the yogi and undermined the very supremacy of will over body I was trying to prove with that identity/set of activities.

Because of the body I had to quit the activity, loose the shape I loved, felt was ‘me’, leave the community I had grown close to. In almost no time, the body lost the ability to perform the poses, it lost the strength and flexibility that I had put so much effort and practice into. Wasn’t all that work meaningless if the results I identified with faded as soon as I stopped?
I claimed to be yogi-alana, I used the shapes I meticulously trained my body to make as the proof that I was diligent, in control, supreme in my force of will. But can my body ‘prove’ that meaning when my will/my control could be overridden by something as trivial as a little joint? Isn’t this body meaningless if by dying it erases the entire narrative I think is me, my Raison d’être to write?

Its not mine because it shames me:

After walking a whole summer, my first real foray into ‘fitness’, I thought I was so fit, invincible, I had a new power, a new ability and I was proud. Right until I was in Africa, fresh off my summer of walking, and we got to the sand dunes. All my friends poured off the bus, and a few of the fitter ones went to run straight up the dune rather than walk with the older, weaker folks up the meandering path. I ran to follow the fit folks, I identified as a fit Alana, only to quickly begin slipping and sliding in the sand, unable to make it to the top. I was so embarrassed. My body had failed me.

The ability I had been so proud of was no match to the dune. Instead of just walking up the meandering path, which would not have drawn attention, I got stuck in the sand and had to backtrack, making my humiliation deeper. Worse than the body not sustaining my identity privately, it shamed me publicly.

I think body is a reflection of self, a physical manifestation of the traits I ‘own’, that I define myself with. So how do I reconcile that with regular humiliation? Humiliation of farting, smelling. Humiliation of cold sores. Humiliation of sunspots and red spots. Humiliation of fat. Humiliation when I can’t keep up on a run in a group fitness class. Humiliation of my jowls and double chin. Doesn’t humiliation prove my body isn’t reflecting the self I imagine, that it doesn’t perfectly embody some traits, like fitness or beauty, that I ‘possess’, better yet the meaning I ascribe to these traits?

It’s not mine because it changes into states I hate:

Before I gave it away, I tried on my wedding dress one last time. A dress that 15 years before had made me look thin and fit and radiant, didn’t zip. It made me look like I was bulging in all the wrong places, soft and doughy.

I had been so proud of the figure I cut in that dress, I so keenly remember my sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when I looked in the mirror at my final fitting and imagined my big day, everyone looking at me, seeing in that dress – that figure that I had worked out hard to achieve – what a catch I was. Women would be envious of me, men jealous of Eric. I believed that figure/dress proved something about myself, my value, my desirability.

I have always imagined beauty to be a physical reflection of value, a proof of goodness, the great sign of special. And for a moment, my body had taken a shape I thought of as beautiful, and I had used that shape as evidence that I myself had a particular meaning — valuable, good and special.

But here I was, in a dress unchanged, that now made this body look ugly and undesirable. If old body proved my greatness, then new body must — by extension — prove my failure, my lack of value, naughtiness showing in my ugliness.

Of course, that not what I thought: Sure, I was a little disappointed, but I quickly comforted myself with the logic ‘no one’s body stays the same over 15 years’, ‘ compared to my peers, I still look good’. I let the benchmarks slide, re-defined my standard for beauty enough that I could retain my sense of self as valuable. One day, when no stretch of the imagination will allow me to call myself beautiful, I will just change the ‘rules’ again, find some other characteristic to attach my sense of value to.

If I were being honest, I would have to ask myself how 2 totally different bodies, forms of radically different shapes, can both be a confirmation of the same value and specialness? The answer is they can’t be. But I am stuck with this body, and my need to define myself with it means I need to make allowances, shifts in expectations, excuses. But these shifts, they betray the truth that this body’s continually shifting states, that its ultimate cessation, is antithetical to having some special meaning or identity. This is just ideas I project onto them.

Its not mine because it can go from tool to liability:

For my whole life I have identified as a traveler, an adventurer, an explorer. I crave seeing what is just beyond the horizon, I want to explore what is new and different; not just to amuse myself, but to be, to become, to find new things and places to identify with. Where I am has never been enough, part of my story –the narrative I envision for myself – is something new, something better, ‘over there’.

My life has been punctuated by moves to new cities, vacations to exotic locations, even just explorations of new cities, new neighborhoods. And then the lockdowns came. Suddenly, a life punctuated by exploration was confined to my tiny Greenwich apartment. For 18 months I was grounded. The body that was a tool to explore the world, to find new details of the narrative of self and future, was suddenly not a tool. It was a liability. The body that ventured out could be stricken by a new mysterious disease.

To accommodate risks to my body, I had to stop doing what I loved, I had to stop being the me I wanted to be. For most of my life, the meaning I have assigned to this body is an instrument of my will. It is there to be used as I see fit, to actualize the story and self I imagine. This is body as tool. But that a single change in circumstance –a pandemic –can make this same 4e a liability proves the meaning isn’t in the rupa.

LP Thoon’s definition of anatta: “Nothing belongs to us. Everything is meaningless.” Had really stuck with me and I once again turned my attention to trying to prove my items don’t belong to me. I figured the more clearly I could see that, the more clearly I could also answer his question, “meaningless how?”.

I got to thinking back to an old contemplation on puberty. I was so disturbed when I hit puberty and my body started changing, I was not at all keen on trading my stick figure for curves. I realize now that the root of my deep despair was that I didn’t feel like the new body was mine, it didn’t reflect me, it didn’t align with my vision of myself.

Of course, after a few weeks moping (eternity in teenage time), I ‘got over it’; I accepted my body changing by adjusting my sense of who I was, my future expectations, to fit this post-puberty body, and I was back to worrying over normal teeny-bopper dramas, rather than having extreme body distress. In fact, now that I am edging toward the peri-menopause years, oh what I wouldn’t do to cling to this post-pubescent-pre-menopause body just a little longer…

The truth is, over and over again, our bodies (and other belongings) don’t just fail to live up to our expectations, they actually defy our sense of who we are.

Another example: When I was first diagnosed with asthma, I was at my peak fitness level — I worked out 4 hours a day, obsessed over my reps and maxes, I lived and breathed to be fit — and yet there I was huffing and puffing 5 minutes into a light run. For all my efforts, for all my self-proclaimed fitness, my body was non-compliant; this body didn’t care what I wanted to be, who I thought I was, or even the work I put into promulgating that identity, its elements shifted into a state of disease and all the training/willing/imagining in the world wasn’t allowing me to finish my run.

If possible, I try and ‘fix it’, to force my body into states that feel reflect who I think I am: I buy spanx for the muffin top, botox to the brow, engage in extreme workouts and diets, take those daily asthma meds, even knowing full well how painfully temporary these ‘fixes’ are. Often though, like with puberty, or disease, there is no ‘fix’, and I have to go through the agonizing process of shifting my sense of self to align with reality.

Why not stop to ask myself the obvious question: If my body can defy my sense of self, sabotage my dreams for the future, can it really be mine? Or how about the question: How can a body be ‘who I am’ if it doesn’t actually reflect who I think I am, or who I want to be?

At the end of the day, I want to be born in this world to actualize the story of self. The desire to be and become is what drives me forward. But even my body, the thing closest to me isn’t, actually actualizing my story of self. If it were, then all the efforting, all the imagining, all the curating of a fit-alana wouldn’t be gasping for breath 5 minutes into a run.

I curate memories of past, solidify current characteristics that I value, and imagine future fantasies, to create a continuous narrative I can claim as ‘me’. I use rupa as props, to sell my story to myself, to augur signs of my success/ failure meeting the benchmarks of ‘the me I want to be’. If an object, a body, can undermine my story, if rather than confirming me it shouts the erroneousness of my assumed identity, that object isn’t me, it is ‘against me’.
The objects can’t be mine because they don’t do what ‘I hired them to do’, what I so desperately want and need them to do –these objects don’t confirm me. These objects don’t buy me the future I imagine. I cling so tightly to them, I suffer for their ‘option value’, but over and over they prove that having them doesn’t get me the future I want. In the case of a body, having it gets me a future I decisively don’t want: Aging, sickness, death.

What is more is the very fact that I need to re-adjust my sense of self, as I did with puberty, proves that my identity isn’t inherent in the body at all, it’s just a self-created construct I overlay onto the 4e object. The fact that my muffin top pops back as soon as the spanx come off and that botox wears off in lockdown, is a blatant testament that my ‘fixes’ are temporary, ‘my objects’ are like every other object, bound by the law of impermanence. And maybe this is part of what LP Thoon means when he calls these objects ‘meaningless’ – if the only meaning in an object is the one that we superimpose onto it, that shifts as we shift, isn’t it devoid of any inherent meaning. Meaningless.

And how do I reconcile the idea that I am ‘author’ of my story, master of myself and my narrative, when I can’t even force my body to be what I want it to be? Instead, the body forces me to adjust, I had to adjust my imagined sense of self with puberty, I had to adjust my workouts to asthma. Since Covid began, my whole life revolves around protecting and preserving this body. Instead of being a tool to actualize myself and my dreams, to maximize my pleasure and satisfaction, this body is a hindrance to me doing what I want to do; it is the cause of story-interruptus, my 18 month lockdown devoid of humans, and hobbies, and the fulfillment of my dreams.

It’s not just that this body isn’t me, does not affirm me, if I look closely this body betrays the idea of the free and powerful me I want to be. On this body I am reliant, I am bound, I am forced to yield and to compromise, and with its cessation, this chapter of the story I so carefully curated, was born and suffered to write, comes to a whimpering close.

I was driving from Connecticut to NY to get a laser treatment for my rosacea. The day before I had put the new luggage box on the car roof. Now the car drove sluggishly, lagged, gas mileage was way down. When I got to NY, I couldn’t find parking, the box meant I didn’t fit the overhead clearance in most garages. Clearly there were some serious downsides of the box I bought while imagining all the convenience and extra room it would bring me. Always there are unintended consequences that come with any benefit I receive.

I got to thinking about my rosacea, what if it is the same way? The unintended consequences of some benefit I chose, some circumstance I worked towards?  Rosacea after all is part of the ‘allergic trinity’, folks who have diseases like asthma, allergies, skin conditions because they are overly sensitive to their environment. But aren’t there boons of being extra attuned and sensitive to my environment? Isn’t that a way to ‘stay safe’, tune into dangers before they are perceptible to others? Isn’t my sensitivity a strength for my dharma practice?

I have always thought of disease as some kind of punishment. Karma whammies for being a bad person. But what if this view is overly simplistic? What if disease is just a consequence, a downside paired with an upside? I result of a choice or action we made? Isn’t this the truth of the world, two sides, causes and results, not Alana’s simplistic good/bad, naughty/nice, cookies/whammies.

Everyone has disease after all, its the human condition, only timing and details diverge. So how can I call health ‘proof of goodness’ and illness ‘proof of badness’?

Anyway, part of what triggered my rosacea was my brief obsession with 12 step Korean beauty regimen. Products that maybe in moderation help beautify, but which can sensitize as well. And is it this consistent with my gung-ho personality: When I do something I do it fully, moderation isn’t really my thing.

But is this bad or is this just consequential? The results I don’t like that I trade-off for ones I do? Maybe  my simplistic calculations of cookies and whammies don’t really reflect the world.

I was re-listening to a retreat talk on the 3 common conditions and an offhand comment from Mae Neecha really hit me. In response to a student asking which branch of a decision tree she should choose, Mae Neecha replied it wasn’t about choosing, it is knowing that any possible branch ends the same way, happiness or suffering. Which, of course I know, is just code for more or less suffering.

She also said that when we suffer it is because we have an inflated sense of self: We think we are so important that our actions, the choices we make along a decision tree, dictate the result. But it’s not true: For example, we can study a lot for a test and still fail, there are always all these possible outcomes we ignore, possibilities we can’t even fathom to consider. Then we suffer the stress of making a decision thinking we can control the outcome and we suffer the stress of outcomes we don’t like because we think they reflect us. Of course, for outcomes we do like, our ego gets puffed, and we get the delayed suffering that comes the next time that extra inflated ego goes pop.

This all struck me because the other day I was thinking: I want this country home in Connecticut that I am staying in right now. I know just because I enjoy it now, it doesn’t mean I will later. In fact, I KNOW Circumstances ARE CHANGING — one reason Eric is reluctant to purchase the house is climate change: Will summers, which are getting hotter by the year here, still be enjoyable in CT in 10, 20 years? And what if Eric dies and I am left with a remote country home, won’t I be lonely then? So much can and will change, those changes will affect my enjoyment. But still I’m unconvinced. Still, like this student I am weighed down by the stress of making a purchase decision. I am weighed down by the stress of wanting a particular outcome because I imagine what it will be, what it will make me.

I realize when I want something, when I want to cling to it/own it, it is because I want the ‘option value’. The house may or may not give me happiness in the future, but if I don’t have it there is no way I can get the happiness that I hope it provides the future. It is a necessary ingredient in the cake I want to bake later. Even knowing I may not bake a cake, or the cake may not be delicious, or it may come with bad parts, or I may not even want it later. None of that is enough right now to let go of my clinging. I want the option value of future cake.

Then I thought more on it and realized that I have moved so much and it hasn’t ever been the way I expected. I clung to the house in Houston, was devastated to leave it, but it was moving on that gave me my life in SF. My wealth. the job I enjoy. So much stuff I now consider ‘better’ required the loss of the home I had clung to. I want option value, but I never consider the cost of holding the option.

I feel I must cling, collect, hold onto the things I need for the future I imagine (never mind the world doesn’t give a damn about whether I actualize my fantasy) without ever considering that some other future may be preferable. Or, that I don’t need to cling or fixate in order to manifest a future, a future will manifest with or without me, the causes I put in place will have effects, but not necessarily the ones I intend. And other causes, past causes put in place by past ‘selves’, also do the steering, not me, not my wishes or intentions.

The stress really is an over inflated sense of my importance; of the belief that my vision, my direction, my future fantasy is what SHOULD manifest and everything else is less preferable. And that what is ‘less preferable’ to me is SHOULDN’T. I get the stress of that belief, without even the benefit of a guarantee that my vision will manifest anyway. And with the guarantee that even if it more or less does, it will still always be, as may Neecha pointed out, different degrees of dukkha.

I really did for a second see so clearly how ‘I’ is just my obsession with self, that brings me the suffering of stressing about how a situation unfolds. Or the stress of what to cling to and claim to try and get the self/future I want. And how, this is a version of atta, a sort of solidifying or clumping together –a solid version of the future. Anatta goes hand-in-hand with realizing that the future isn’t solid at all.

I was walking around the mall yesterday and I went to the American Girl store to look around. For those of you, Dear Readers, who don’t know what this is, google it. Seriously, it’s amazing, a vast store with nothing but huge, pricey dolls and doll accessories. There is even a salon and make-up counter where your doll can get a makeover. Each doll comes with a book, a story about who they are, and a starter kit of accessories unique to her – an equestrian set for the cowgirl, a surfboard and lay for the Hawaiian girl, Native American ritual objects for the American Indian Girl. Add on items at a charge, of course.

I marveled about how these pieces of plastic were given these elaborate identities. How it’s so natural to build identities with objects that little kids who get these dolls instinctively believe. Become invested. Are able to build ever more stories, with ever more accessory packs.

Its easy to wistfully shake my head at the naivete of children, but doesn’t adult Alana do the same? With just a few wardrobe adjustments didn’t I sell myself the ideas of being (and try to broadcast to the world) Free-Love-Hippy-Alana in college. Smart-Sexy-Professional Alana at my first job, then there was Early-SF-Hipster-Alana, followed by Aspiring-Wealth-Designer-Alana…More recently, this tendency of clothes for identity has loosened a bit. Maybe I have come to understand a little mor clearly, maybe I’m just getting older and it feels harder. But isn’t my body just the same?

For my whole practice, its been easier to consider the clothes, the homes, the car, and see how I use those 4e objects to tell my story. They are the accessory packs. But the body, that seems so much more me, who I actually am. It’s still there when I strip off the clothes after all.

But after seeing Dark Sister abandon her lightsaber (see the last blog post), a new perspective is dawning on me: The body is like the lightsaber, its just something I pour meaning into, and the meaning I pour into it is self –Alana. Since the body stays with me for the entire course of my memory, for one life, it seems more permanent than the clothes and books and homes that come and go. It seems more basic and primal. But the truth is they are the same: Same 4 es, same process of meaningfication.

I imagine my body to be what holds together my narrative, my identity, my imagined future. But are those things in this alana body any more then those storys and narratives are in the doll bodies? If they were, we sure as hell wouldn’t need accessories and books to sell the tale –it would just be who we were.

Meanwhile, if Dark Sister had understood the lightsaber didn’t mean anything, she could have just used it practically for as long as circumstances allowed her to use it. It wouldn’t have to have the heavy, aching meaning, we assign things. It wouldn’t hurt to have, to use and then to loose. But weighing 4es with meaning, it makes them extra burdensome. Even as I sit on a plane, typing this blog, I stress about every sniffle and sneeze I hear, the threat of illness to this beloved body. This is the dukkha my ignorance of objects causes me.

Back at the American Doll store, I had looked at the Hawaiian doll and wondered, with her whole story built around being Hawaiian, what happens if she had to move to New York, who would she be then? Who was I when SF Alana left for NY? Not knowing, feeling lost, it crushed me. Made me hate my new NY life. Over and over I am building my identity off where I live. A New Orleans Alana, an SF Alana, A Miami Alana. Like knowing the streets, or feelin the vibe, or having the neighbors know my name really proves something about myself. Then I have to move. So many times, like 15+ I have moved. Each time has sucked, each left me with a sense of losing my narrative, myself.

It’s not just my attachment to the objects I use to tell my story that pains me, it’s my attachment to the story, the self, that is the root of all this dukkh. Over and over I build identities, and then they are torn down. Never do I stop to consider these identities are fabrications, like the stories crafted by the doll company, to sell the product, get us invested in the tale, claim it, own it, want more of it.

And because I want more, I want to be and become, I am always building anew. New stories, new objects to sell those stories, fresh losses when it falls apart. And the clincher is, its totally arbitrary. I tell the story of an SF Alana because my life circumstances brought me to SF. If I had moved to Hawaii, I would have just as easily become a Hawaiian Alana.

What is arbitrary, what is circumstantial, can’t be who I am. Because what is arbitrary and circumstantial arises based on conditions, sustains based on conditions and ceases based on conditions. And if I am only ever, at most, one in the sea of conditions; part of, and shaped by that sea of conditions; arising, sustaining and ceasing based on a sea of conditions; subject to, not in control of that sea of conditions, than what is conditional can not be me, myself or who I am. This last thought however is a current day reflection. Keep on reading to see how I got here…