We’ll begin this entry with a little civics lesson about the San Francisco jury selection process. Basically, everyone eligible to serve on a jury can be called on once a year. If summoned, you don’t necessarily need to go to court, you get place on stand-by. Each day you call in and see if you were selected to serve on the jury pool, if not, you simply need to call in the next day. If you make it a whole…
I love my mom, but I’m ashamed to admit, I haven’t always given her a fair shake. I haven’t always appreciated her. I haven’t always yielded to her. Frankly, I haven’t always viewed her with the soft, forgiving, eyes I offer to other loved ones in my life. I have my reasons. I have my beliefs. I have my agenda. I always have me me me my my my. And the result of all the me and my, in this…
Note from the present day: This story was one of my early contemplations on the slights and discomforts I face in my everyday life. The slights and discomforts I invite on in, in exchange for those sweet, snowy, moments I desire. As suffering goes, these little blips are barely perceptible and so easily forgotten. But it is actually their normality, their pervasiveness, that make them such compelling evidence of the trade offs, the sufferings for enjoyments, I chose. Because the…
On the tail of so much travel — India, Hawaii — it’s wasn’t terribly surprising that my To Do list was insanely long. Doctors visits and taxes to pay and calls to make, oh my. What did strike me as odd though was the feeling in my heart as I looked at the list, it might as well have said “lions and tigers and bears oh my.” I sat at my desk, carefully writing out each to do, creating sublists…
As a great lover of all things lovely, I couldn’t resist going to my local museum for a special butterfly exhibit when it came to town. Part of the exhibit featured glass cases where cocoons were carefully pinned at the tip so that the butterflies inside could hatch and then fly away. One butterfly however wasn’t so lucky, its cocoon had been pinned too far down and its wing had been caught. I watched the butterfly struggle to free itself,…
The following is a homework assignment from around this time that I turned in to LP Anan. The content was about how I had used multiple KPY tools in a contemplation of my own. Because tools and techniques have been an important theme in this blog, I wanted to include the homework here: ___________________________________________________________________ One night a friend was over talking to me about some drama that was going on in a social club she had started — she felt…
In my Buckle-up Buddhisty period, I strengthened the foundations of my practice by building a scaffold to support my future contemplations. I took specifically Buddhist ideas and applied my experiences to understanding them. Thanks to this effort, I got a glimpse of the the inner workings, the systems, my own mind uses to keep me deluded (Alana’s 2s and 3s) and stuck suffering (Where my Mind Visits HW series) and the process the Buddha outlined to set myself free (the…
Just a reminder, this entry is the final section in an email I sent to my teacher, Mae Yo, outlining what I see as a road map to practice. If you have not done so already, do go back and read the Last Blog before continuing: _______________________________________________________________________ Part 3: A Few Words on Ideas From the Buddha At risk of this email turning into a multi-volume desk set, I will try to keep this short. But here we go…before I…
Dear Reader, this right here is a biggie Buddhist moment –Don’t miss this and the next blog!!! Around late 2013/ early 2014, I practiced with an acute fear that I would somehow fall off the dharma path and end-up wandering in the weeds for countless more lifetimes; not exactly a comforting thought for a practitioner whose great aspiration is to reach enlightenment now, as quickly as possible, preferably in this life. My greatest fear was that I would lose my…
Back in Dec. 2013, my teacher, Mae Yo, began a Youtube Q & A series to answer questions that students submit about life, the universe and everything Buddhist (you can check-out her videos here https://www.youtube.com/user/KPYproductions/videos). Since my own knowledge on these topics could use a little work, I compiled a hefty list of questions. Generalized/public versions of these questions and formal answers can be found amongst the videos linked above. However, in this post, I would like to share my…
As a kid my greatest Disney World love, the thing that filled me with anticipation before each visit, was the ride 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I remember climbing down to take my seat on the submarine, watching out the window as we traveled deep under the ocean seeing mermaids, and giant squid, and other sea wonders. As soon as the ride ended all I wanted was to get back in line and do it again. As I got older,…
This next story features our old friends Rupa (form, stuff) and control. It’s not so much that I ever stopped contemplating these topics, in fact I am currently contemplating them with renewed vigor, but they slipped into the background of a number of these stories. So here we have it front and center once again…. I was at the Wat shortly after the India trip and Mae Yo asked a group of us the question, “Why do we have so…
On Karma On the first day of the trip, Mae Yo asked us to consider what kind of karma folks have to be living in a place like India, to be born into the conditions of poverty we see on the streets around us. (Present day note: a much more complete entry on Karma is coming-up, these are just a few thoughts from my trip). As I looked out the window of the buss I noticed that folks live in…
On Standards Last night we stayed at a hotel that was super dirty. The sheets were stained, there was hair everywhere, a peek in the kitchen revealed all kinds of creepy crawlies, the toilet was brown, as was the faucet water. It stank. I was soooo very uncomfortable. As I lay in my bed, I had no choice, no where else to go so I tried to fall asleep. I realized that there is a difference between ignoring the dirty…
Back in Nov. 2013 my temple took a group trip to visit the Buddhist holy sites in India and Nepal. In the next few entries I will relate some of my notes and observations from the trip. I will go ahead and copy these directly from my notebook and make edits only for the sake of context and understandability. More Trash There is trash in the tour bus, empty water bottles on the floor, food wrappers stuffed in seat pockets….
I am waiting for a table at a cafe and when one opens-up the waiter tells me to have a seat and he will be over to clear the table in a few moments. I sit down and look at the last patron’s trash piled on the table and I feel disgusted. What a mess these folks left behind at my table. Of course, the waiter comes and cleans everything up, sets my heart at ease, and before I know…
Aspirations are one of those ‘Big Buddhisty Things’; they cameo in all the liturgy, we are instructed to make them whenever we do something good, they even managed to make it onto the Buddha’s critical stuff shortlist (often poorly translated as ‘right thought’ in the the 8 fold path). So, naturally, I obsessed over my own. I crafted it, word-smithed it, revised it over time. But at around this point in my practice (late 2013) I had come-up with a…
Since Dharma Practice Day One, Mae Yo has repeated one homework assignment to me over and over — “Alana, look at your stories, go and prove that all your problems really start from your sense of me and mine.” Somehow, I kept ignoring the assignment; just an empty space in my notebook again and again. Even though I had sort of figured-out that I was the one causing my problems (see the last section, Whoo Wait a Sec its Me…),…
So, a little reminder, this entry is the third part of my homework assignment to use snippets of my life/experiences (a biopsy) to start evaluating what happiness is and if it’s worth it. Specifically I was told to: Figure out where my mind visits often, my memories/fantasies. See the suffering. How long is the suffering versus happiness? How do I repeat the cycle? ___________________________________________________________________________ A Slave to Fashion You see, I am a Fashionista it’s one of the places my…
