Yup, I admit it, Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Charmed … I have a slightly unnatural love for the teeny bopper drama. The thing is these shows — rife with the undead, the supernatural, the witches, zombies, werewolves and end times — do double duty: 1) they are easy and fun to watch and 2) they make for excellent dharma contemplation. Seriously, the characters are so flat, the themes so black and white, the dharma lessons pop-out in the contrast. Which…
Well Dear Reader, if you have followed even a few of my 100+ blogs to date, you will know one thing about me for sure –I am a worrier. ♪ I worry in the morning, I worry at night, I worry when it’s dark and I worry when its light. ♪ Sing it with me here ♪..I worry about my marriage, my beauty and my wealth; I worry when in sickness and I worry when in health. ♪ When life…
So the last blog began with a conversation about ‘mess’ at the Wat and ended with an ah-haaaa moment about me understanding(ish) a path to make my heart neutral; to see not mess but a pile of stuff without judgment or bother. But, there is a bit more to the story. A few contemplations, conversations and inputs that really helped me get there. So, although this a twist and turn in my timeline, in this blog I will share an…
I was at the Wat and a friend was talking with Mae Yo about an issue of hers: She had asked someone to go to the store and pick-up a case of Coke, they came home with Pepsi. Over and over she asked them to go and make and exchange and she grew more and more frustrated when they didn’t. The thing is, she already knew her wrong view: when someone fucks something up, they should fix it. She already…
Why Do I do all this? It is so hard to peel back these tendencies and beliefs and find the why. Still, I think I have found at least a few reasons that play out in my tendency to imagine and seek “zones of comfort”, as well as in so many other wrong views: One: As I have already reflected in past entries, my self seeks safety. It creates narratives and interprets the “data” of my experiences in order to…
Dear Reader — this blog is a direct continuation of the last entry, Wrong Views on Suffering and Happiness —What, How, the Lie and Why Part 1 and Part 2 — if you have not yet read that post yet please head back there and read it before you continue. The Lie: The problem is that my 3s and 4s (memory and imagination) –my self — is a liar. I know this because I have watched and gathered so much evidence of it….
Dear Reader — this blog is a direct continuation of the last entry, Wrong Views on Suffering and Happiness —What, How, the Lie and Why Part 1 — if you have not yet read that post yet please head back there and read it before you continue. How: My 3s (memory) and 4s (imagination) plus self and self belonging give rise to my sense of happiness and my quest for it. Me and the Bench –a recap of the aggregates: I remember…
Without further ado: My homework on my wrong views about ‘suffering safe zones’, the two sides of suffering and happiness, and whether I can really call something sukka if what is outside of it is dukka… This contemplation around the topic of suffering will be divided into 4 parts: What suffering it really is /looks like, how my wrong views about it arise and why they arise/the purpose they serve . Much of these thoughts actually started in response to…
Mae Yo once told me to go look at the idea of preserving, to contemplate on refrigeration, because us humans are always trying to preserve. I’m no different, I’m always trying to either preserve a particular space/time/self, or– as my recent NY life has shown me– get back to the good stuff I failed to preserve. But thinking about the women and the wine glasses, the interdependent nature of suffering and comfort, was starting to make me suspect, I was…
Mae Yo’s homework always sounds so simple, “go and see the two sides of comfort and suffering.” But seriously, what does that even mean? I understood that I was supposed to be having some deep penetrating insight into the relationship between Sukka (happiness) and Dukka (suffering) but I was stuck. It was time for a tool, not just any tool either, but the big guns…I needed an Ubai. For days and days I racked my brain and then I remembered…
When I returned from Hawaii, my mule encounter fresh on the brain, I made an appointment to talk to Mae Yo. I had, after all, identified a huge tendency of mine, a deep wrong view in which I divide the world into neat little partitions: areas of suffering and areas of comfort. I live for those corners of comfort, my spaces of refuge from suffering — that peace, that joy, that comfort is part of my life, if only I…
Eric and I were on vacation again, Hawaii’s Big Island, sitting on a mule drawn carriage taking us on a tour of the Waipi’o valley. It was impossible not to enjoy a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, as the mules plodded along the path. But then, we hit a rough patch in the road, slippery from mud and puddles, and the mules began to lose their footing. They struggled and slipped, unable to pull the carriage any further until…
If self is the storyteller, self belongings are the props that help make the story believable. They are the accessories that make the outfit, that make the whole thing pull together…Enter, the pink skirt: With my organization’s big annual gala in mind, I start trolling ebay looking for the perfect outfit. As soon as I saw that neon pink, silk, Oscar De La Renta skirt, I knew it was mine. In my mind, I was wearing it before I even…
This blog is a continuation of the previous blog — Some (More) HW on Self and Self Belonging. As I began to understand how the process of creating self and self belonging works, I struggled with my usual question: Why do I do this — prop-up a self and continue to fuel it? What purpose does it serve? My contemplations so far had gotten me to see that my sense of self and self belonging help sell a lie about…
Mae Yo, once again, offered me her favorite homework assignment — “go contemplate self and self belonging.” This time around, she gave made it a little harder — “go contemplate self and self belonging in the situations of your life and pay special attention to the relationship between self, self belonging, the aggregates and the arising of suffering.” Somehow, I never seem to get those easy assignments….Anyway, here you can take a peek at my answer and see how…
Up until now, my practice had, of course, considered suffering and self; after all, they make the obligatory appearance in most of my stories. But, they had always been an appetizer, maybe a big kale salad, sometimes the all important desert (I have a sweet tooth). But they were rarely the main course. That honor generally went to impermanence or other interesting Buddhisty stuff like karma and aggregates ( had I been paying close enough attention, I would have noticed…
As a recap: This blog is a continuation of the last in which I discovered gratitude for my mom after re-considering my memories of her. It was an exercise in which I made an effort to recall Mom’s good qualities as an antidote to my previous perspective which was to focus on negatives only. With my heart all mushysoft with gratitude for my mom, a troubling question came to mind — How do I pay her back? I mean really,…
A recap: In the last blog I described how I used a simple tool ( A is better than B, B is Better than A, etc.) to begin considering some of the wrong views I held about my mom, particularly in comparison to my dad. I came to see that I had built an ‘image/memory’ of my mom that was based on my biases (of what characteristics are most valuable), in service of my agenda (to hero-ize my dad and…
Click here for My Mom and I part One: It was the 2014 retreat and we were reviewing one of my favorite Dharma tools*, the one where you take 2 objects and compares them as follows: A is Better than B B is Better than A A and B are essentially the same, are they even worth comparing? A and B are so different from each other, are they worth comparing? L.P. Anan decided to turn study into a game,…
