Aloha Sangha

ancient wisdom for crazy times

Category: impermanence

shine on, you crazy diamond
Wellbeing, peace and happiness are hidden in plain sight, in the ever-present flow of experience itself, always right here and right now.
I recently completed an intensive, 30 day silent meditation retreat in California following a very strict Burmese Buddhist lineage, with formal sessions totaling sixteen and a half hours per day.
Each day began at 4am with the gentle sound of a bell signaling the start of another day of meditation. Each day was another opportunity to delve deep into the intricacies of my own mind.
When people ask “how was it?” I struggle to come up with an answer that seems to satisfy the person asking. “The water pressure was excellent” feels more genuine than any of the other responses I’ve come up with.
Flippant, you say? Yeah, maybe, but I’m good with that. Would I do it again? Absolutely!
This experience allowed me to appreciate not just the act of meditation itself, but also the subtle experiences of life that often go unnoticed. Even the act of drinking tea became a ritual, filled with moments of mindfulness. The aroma rising from the cup, the warmth against my hands, and the taste that lingered on my tongue became sources of joy and reflection.
As I get older, and meditate more intensively, I’m just blown away how every tiny little piece of what’s happening in this moment right now is an absolute miracle; this tapping of this keyboard and this upcoming sip of tea- ahhh.
The happiness of well-being
This line of thought leads to a deeper understanding of why we seek out such retreats. Meditation, at its core, is not merely an escape from our woes, but a way to confront and understand them. Many people join retreats with the hope of achieving clarity on pressing issues, emotional turmoil, or existential questions.
Yet, what I discovered was that clarity often arises from letting go of the need to control or understand everything. It is about surrendering to the flow of experience.
Surrendering into the wellbeing of every moment.
To say my time in retreat was somehow more powerful or more special than this moment right now really misses the mark.
So why did I go there, if the water pressure in this bathroom here is just as excellent?
Many of us are attracted to meditation to get over something, like anxiety, or to explore altered states for all sorts of reasons. We all have all manner of issues that at times can seem really heavy and serious, unbearable even.
But when I take a close look, whatever shows up in awareness is always dissolving and vanishing, constantly shape-shifting like some Marvel character.
Furthermore, this understanding leads to the realization that the challenges we face are often transient. They come and go, much like waves in the ocean. Each emotion, each thought, is like a wave that rises, crests, and eventually falls away. By observing this process without attachment, we cultivate a sense of spaciousness within ourselves.
The wellbeing of every moment is dripping with contentment.
When I try to hold on to something to seemingly deal with it, it feels like I’m trying to pin a tail on a space donkey.
can you pin a tail on this space donkey?
The historical Buddha appears to never tire of emphasizing that no-things ever actually form long enough to even be impermanent.
Yet, here we are, often feeling stuck. But stuck in what?
The experience was also a reminder of the importance of community and shared practice. Each participant in the retreat was on their journey, yet we were all interconnected through our shared silence and intention. The simple act of sitting together in silence created a powerful energy that was both comforting and enlightening. We were each like threads in a larger tapestry, contributing to a collective experience of healing and growth.
It’s precisely because nothing survives even for an instant, when we really look with focused awareness, that we’re never actually ever stuck. No matter how complicated and difficult our circumstance feels, it’s always just this.
I love Pink Floyd’s song from their 1975 album “Wish You Were Here” – Shine On You Crazy Diamond. No matter how complex and difficult, it’s always just this crazy diamond of reality as it is right now, shining a light that seems solid and real …
My time in the retreat grounded me in the present moment. Each second felt like a precious gift, and I learned to appreciate the subtle nuances of existence. It became clear that joy doesn’t always need to be flashy- sometimes, it’s found in the stillness between each thought, in the breath that nourishes our being, in the appreciation of a gentle breeze or the sound of rustling leaves.
The lessons learned during those long hours of meditation extend far beyond the retreat. They seep into daily life, influencing how I interact with challenges and how I perceive joy.
The practice encourages a gentle inquiry into the nature of suffering and happiness, inviting us to explore both with compassion. In this exploration, we often find that the answers we seek are already within us, waiting to be uncovered.
but is actually more like our beautiful Hawaiian rainbows, never staying the same, even if we gaze at it a second later.
What did I come away with from my long, often tedious hours of silent meditation?
Well, since you asked, it’s that phenomenal well being, peace and happiness are not the product of meditative huffing and puffing, but are always just right here, shining like a crazy diamond in plain sight, in the ever-present flow of experience experiencing itself, always right here and right now.
and that a good long, hard meditation retreat was just the thing to re-mind me of this incredibly beautiful state of affairs.
How wonderful, how marvelous!
Shine on you crazy diamond, not just in meditation, but in every facet of your life. Let this practice of mindfulness illuminate your path, guiding you toward a deeper understanding of yourself and the world.
11/28/2024
chocolate comes, chocolate goes
Impermanence is the fragrance of my life just as it is. This notion brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a couple strolling down the street, one saying to the other:
These are the ‘good old days’ that someday we won’t be able to remember.
I think a lot about when the kids were little, and how great it felt to be a new dad, and now that both kids are adults, and living in an empty nest… Well, I feel sad sometimes.
Like the cartoon, I know there are so many memories that aren’t easily accessible anymore. That “someday we won’t be able to remember” is here. I guess memory itself is impermanent, uncertain, imperfect, fading.
At least mine feels this way.
One of the Buddha’s most significant teachings is to really examine our life and our world as impermanent and changing all the time, disappearing even as it arises.
There is a chant in the Pali language I used to chant daily as a young monk in a monastery in Sri Lanka (before kids):
Anicca vata sankhara/ Upada vaya dhammino/ Upakituva nirujihanti/ Tesang vupasamo sukho
One translation would be:
All conditioned things are impermanent/ Their nature is to arise and pass away/ To live in harmony with this truth/ Brings the highest happiness.
How do we live in harmony with the way things actually are when I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday?
But I can appreciate the point here. The chant suggests our discontent comes from wanting things to differ from how they are. Like trying to push a river in a different direction with our bare hands.
Femme prenant du chocolat (1912) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Take my hair, for example (yes, please take my hair!) As many of us get older, the hair thing comes up (or off in my case).
what happened to my hair?
When I look in the mirror, it’s like I am seeing a photoshopped version of myself. What happened to my hair? Sure, there’s not much left, but I catch myself quarreling with nature herself that what little she left me with is all white.
Our son came home for the summer yesterday after finishing his 2nd year in college. It is truly magnificent to see him again. And I really can’t wait for him, as my dedicated hair trimmer, to cut off this sparse outgrowth of white partially covering my scalp.
how to live in light of impermanence?
The question I turn over a lot in my mind is how do I live as I let the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence soak into my rickety bones?
That Pali chants suggest the answer rather obliquely: To live in harmony with the reality of impermanence brings great happiness.
How do I live with what little time I have left that feels in consonance with the way things are?
Shortly before he died, William Butler Yeats wrote:
If I had to put it in a single phrase, I would say that one can live the truth, but one can really not know the truth, and I must express the truth with the rest of my life
This helps immensely. It takes the burden off trying to get a deeper insight into impermanence through my practice of insight meditation.
I got it enough already. I just need to be mindful of not wasting time, and expressing the truth of impermanence with the time I have left.
I love how the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke expresses this:
The knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.
The fragrance of impermanence IS the fragrance of my life just as it is. This brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
And the fragrance of impermanence is sweet.
I think the late, great Tibetan Lama Yeshe should have the last word here:
Chocolate comes
Chocolate goes
Chocolate disappears
All such transient pleasures are like this.
But take heart!
There is another kind of happiness available to you,
a deep abiding joy that comes from your own mind.
This kind of happiness is always with you, always available.
Whenever you need it, it is always here.
This is why I keep meditating. This joy just gets deeper and more meaningful every day.
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06/03/2023
the courage to grieve, and to sing
We realize everyone is experiencing the same impermanence that we are. This is one Buddhist insight I hang on to. It feels comforting.
These are not my words. They were written by Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the deeply moving Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness, which explores grieving her father’s death.
Reading just a few pages of her book moved me the way Hawai’i’s own Iam Thongi did as I watched his make-or-break audition for American Idol three months ago.
It was good enough to advance him into the competition, which he went on to win this week.
Just like Kathryn does in her touching prose, Iam does with his voice and genuine presence. They both miss their dads and have the courage to lay it all out for us to witness.

Iam Thongiʻs American Idol audition brought tears to judges
I canʻt help thinking about the historical Buddha, who again and again emphasized the importance of “seeing” impermanence, which he defined simply as:
the changing nature of all conditioned phenomena
In a well-known teaching, he said that living just one day clearly seeing impermanence is more spiritually uplifting than living a hundred years not having even a glimpse.
It’s a doorway to liberation, he claims, to the deepest peace and happiness.
Listening to Iam sing and reading Kathryn’s words- well, they may know nothing of the classical teachings on impermanence, but that just attests to the universality of the teaching.
Here are a few Kathryn’s words:
Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories; the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.
Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness,
Iam’s dad, Kathyn’s dad, my own dad long gone, and the dad I am to my kids; well, my words start to trail off here.
I need a moment…
Really getting this in our marrow helps us to develop compassion for others. We realize everyone is experiencing the same impermanence that we are. This is one Buddhist insight I hang on to. It feels comforting.
The city is coming, 1927, Väinö Kunnas; from Finnish National Gallery
We may understand impermanence intellectually, as in a high school physics class, but when I listen to Iam sing, I realize it’s a matter of the heart, not the head.
And as Kathryn writes:
Nothing about that is strange or surprising; it is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in the being here. It is the turtle in the pond, the thought in the mind, the falling star, the stranger on Main Street.
Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness,
Yes, the astonishment is all in the being here… in the listening here. In the tasting and smelling here. Maybe even in the reading here.
This liberation the Buddha talked about comes from a direct seeing of change as it’s actually happening on a moment to moment micro-scale in our bodies and in our mind.
This is the “insight” part of insight meditation.
I canʻt get enough of Kathrtyn’s words, speaking here about loss:
Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness,
Iam Thongi melted my heart this week. My path is to watch for all that tries to harden it, to stiffen it, to make it conform.
In the words of the feminist writer Rita Mae Brown:
The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself
I think Iam, Kathryn, and the Buddha would agree.
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05/26/2023
on aging and humility
If I’m going to explore aging and humility I need to remember we older ones are no longer as energetic, or slim, or good looking.
The other day I received an interesting catalog in the mail. My wife thought it was a medical scrubs catalog, but when I looked closer the company’s about us page was all about “adaptive clothing” for a clearly older demographic.
Opening to a random page I find a grinning couple sporting comfortable “adaptive” flannel nighties.
For the non-elder-attire-informed reader: adaptive clothing is apparel designed for people “who have difficulties dressing themselves due to age, disability or general lack of mobility.”
I had to sit with this for a few minutes to let this settle in.
OK, I just turned 67; any inner turbulence caused from receiving this mail-order catalog is clearly my issue.
OK, let me own this.
Theravada Buddhists monks and nuns chant The Five Remembrances every morning, one of which is “I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.”
A few deep breaths…
Calanque des Antibois (1891–1892) by Henri-Edmond Cross
Our culture is so crazy focused on youthfulness I confess I catch myself feeling left out.
A couple of weeks ago, the nurses I work with threw a fellow nurse a party celebrating her 28th birthday. Everyone was talking about it.
They did not invite me. They call me the old man. But the moniker comes with lots of respect, which, I confess, is very cool.
I get it, we older ones are no longer as energetic as we once were. Or slim, or good looking. Or into Instagram big time.
As the “older” poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes:
All this focus on stopping aging implies somebody made a big mistake in the universe. It’s as if we should be getting younger instead of older.
The Jewish mystical traditions, as Fischer observes, have a direct and radical answer: just because we are born incomplete and need to bear a certain amount of suffering does not mean the universe is flawed.
Rather, bearing disappointment, hardship, and suffering with grace is profoundly healing. And necessary.
From the ancient teachers of Judaism as recorded in the Talmud:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, nor are you free to abandon it.
Let the media bombard me all they want with their longevity pitches; I am learning not to bite, thank you adaptive clothing catalog.
It’s just more false advertising, and the media is no dummy–it has our number! We bite on the false messages to avoid going through our fundamental discomfort, which the Buddha called dukkha.
We can call it in English stress, pain, despair, sorrow, disappointment.
The incredible power of our meditation practice is simple and direct
You experience dukkha with intimacy and grace. Then, it’s no longer dukkha.
(Substitute disappointment, stress, pain, sorrow for dukkha, if you like).
In our efforts to avoid distress, disappointment, boredom and fear we can get a little numb and withdrawn. And it’s really this that feels most awful.
Carl Jung observed:
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
If we just give up and feel the dukkha in our life moment by moment mindfully, with curiosity and equanimity. It may or may not go away, but that’s not the point.
It’s the ungraspable beauty of change, the indescribable peace of impermanence we learn to embody in our simple practice which is the most profound.
Instead of seeing adversity, disappointment, fear, anger, the whole cosmic nine yards as some Huge Existential Error, let’s hear Rumi’s response:
Pretend the universe is rigged in your favor.
This is a liberating secret our meditation reveals.
03/26/2023
not knowing is most intimate
Relaxing into not-knowing is a key to the present moment. When you don’t know, all possibilities are open.
How do we live our life knowing that it’s temporary? We have this opportunity to live this life, and we don’t know for how long. And we don’t know what will happen next. I am guessing most who read this blog, like myself, would say nothing happens next.
But let’s agree we don’t want to waste this life. We don’t want to sleepwalk through it. Or just endure it.
I recently read a poem by Kay Ryan titled The Niagara River:
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
The last line was a kick in the gut. We know this is temporary, but we don’t remember what that means. We don’t know if anything happens after we die (to us) but that doesn’t mean the issue is put to rest.
Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplant, by Pierre Bonnard, French (1867-1947)
I think what meditation brings to the table is how to meet our death not with fear, but with curiosity. And to relish this not-knowing of death.
A well-known Zen koan
The monk Fayan was going on pilgrimage.
Master Dizang asked, “Where are you going?”
Fayan said, “On pilgrimage.”
Dizang asked, “What sort of thing is pilgrimage?”
Fayan said: “I don’t know.”
Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
Fayan suddenly had a great awakening.
from The Book Of Equanimity, Case 20:
So this monk, Fayan, when asked why he is going on a pilgrimage, realizes he doesn’t really know why.
His directness is fresh. Master Dizang recognized this and encouraged his answer, understanding how not-knowing helps you stay open and curious. It allows you to see life as it is, not as you are.
Not knowing is most intimate.
And it is precisely this not-knowing that allows the most profound intimacy. We can open up because we don’t know. When we fully open to our not-knowing mind, there’s curiosity, and potential.
This “not-knowing” is a big deal in certain Buddhist traditions. You cannot meditate, they would say, if you are stuck in “I know.” To be mindful is to not-know.
Relishing this not-knowing is key to discovering the beauty and the peace of the present moment. When you don’t know, all possibilities are open.
You are clear and unobstructed.
We live in a dynamic world about which we know very little. A virus changes everything. A drought, an entire continent. Science is about wanting to know more. We think we have to know. We can get very OC around knowing, missing the relief not-knowing.
This is from Tao Te Ching, a Chinese Taoist text written around 400 BC.
In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped.
Chapter 48, Tao Te Ching
From around 400 BC in China, let’s move to the same time in Greece. Socrates is speaking, let’s listen in:
To fear death .. is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not, for it is to think that one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may turn out to be the greatest of blessing for a human being. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest of evils.
Reading the Painting ‘The Death of Socrates’
There it is again, our not-knowing; relishing not-knowing.
Can we let our limited grasp of this life encourage us to not waste this precious opportunity?
Buddhism would even ask if we could live our life in a way that makes it a gift not just for ourselves, but for everyone?
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08/25/2022
and yet, and yet … nothing but Buddhist impermanence
When we come home to who we are in our entirety, as we are here and now in the dynamic flow of impermanence, we discover we never left this place of true refuge and peace.
I spoke on the phone the other day with a dear friend I had not seen in 40 years. We talked about how similar we are– we both suffer from spiritual yearning. Then she told me of her stage four breast cancer.
She asked about teachers and online meditation groups. When I confessed feeling incompetent because I didn’t know what to say about her diagnosis, she made me feel at ease. There’s an urgency here, she said.
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud
I was struggling with how to address that urgency in a helpful way. Yes, we all die, it’s all temporary, everything eventually falls apart. As the Diamond Sutra so pithily states:
So you should view this fleeting world –
Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.
The Pink Cloud by Henri-Edmond Cross (French, 1856-1910)
and yet, and yet …
Yes, of course, but as the 17th century Buddhist poet and priest Issa wrote after his first-born child died shortly after his birth:
The world of dew —
A world of dew it is indeed,
And yet, and yet . . .
And yet … there is a longing for stability, for protection, for refuge.
Buddhist impermanence
We all get the Buddha’s radical teachings on impermanence. But I feel for Issa at that moment, impermanence is not just a philosophical concept, but a real feeling of sadness and longing. The poignant voice of “and yet, and yet…” also seems to suggest there is something else, something waiting for him to discover, something he feels is missing.
But that something else can’t be nailed down. As Ajahn Chah would say:
You can’t make a permanent home in a sankhara
your real home
There is no place to settle down in conditioned patterns. But you don’t really need to worry about it, he retorts, because it’s not your real home anyway. Ajahn Chah continues:
Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but that sort of home is not our real home. It’s a home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external material home may well be pretty, but sooner or later we’ll have to give it up. It’s not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn’t truly belong to us, it’s part of the world.’
we discover we never left this place of true refuge and peace
When we come home to who we are in our entirety, not to some borrowed or imposed image, but to who we are, as we are here and now in the dynamic flow of impermanence, we discover we never left this place of true refuge and peace.
We have been pining for something that has been there all along — a silent wakefulness that allows all our experiences to pass through effortlessly.
a spiritual homecoming
My yearning to come home, for this grand spiritual homecoming, was just a lot of craving that only led to more stress and confusion. Yet we need a modicum of skillful yearning to get the Dharma wheels turning.
This yearning is skillful as long as it doesn’t pull you out of the present moment and point to something that’s supposed to happen in some other moment.
As one of my teachers said, stopping me in my tracks:
There is no future enlightenment.
a song the human heart sings
The poet Mark Nepo writes that this spiritual homecoming is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light, and the journey of becoming who we truly are never ends.
We don’t really arrive anywhere new; we just keep growing out of the flow of peace that’s already here.
As we blossom out from the timeless loving awareness we shift smoothly into what Ajahn Chah called the witness to all things.
It is a world of dew indeed. And yet, and yet…there still is a blooming in each passing moment.
the bloom of the present moment
As Thoreau tells us in Walden and Civil Disobedience:
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life.
Our simple mindfulness practice reveals an ever-blooming peace within, just waiting for you, my dear friend. A loving and comforting flow beyond the clutch of the thinking mind, untouched by any diagnosis or personal history.

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03/06/2022
a peaceful, uneasy feeling

I feel that I should be above it all, but mostly I’m not.
I struggle with my emotions.
Practicing mindfulness of emotions helps a lot, but sometimes I am just plain sad or overcome by all that is untenable in the world, borrowing a line from Brother Steindl-Rast.
I feel that I should be above it all, but mostly I’m not.
Reading lines from ancient Zen stories, ones that say meditation is about discovering “the happiness not based on conditions,” doesn’t help much. I just get more depressed!
Some folks find happiness in the smallest acts: watching a sunset, or getting their errands done before it’s time to make dinner. Others I know struggle to find happiness in even the most ideal circumstances.
thriving on unhappiness?
Some folks even seem to thrive, in an odd sort of way, in their own unhappiness. I am sure you know people who find reasons to be miserable, dwelling on the past or creating problems when clearly there aren’t any.
I am sure you know of at least one person in your life who struggles to put things behind them, or who seems to relish in playing the victim.
Or for whom dissatisfaction seems to be second nature.
emotions
In these cases, as well as in my own, emotions emerge from sensory inputs that last but a fraction of a second. They seem to well up out of nowhere. But we grab on to them as defining a part of who we are in this world.
And we propagate them, creating a story-line explaining or justifying our feelings to ourselves. I notice this in my own meditation practice. It’s at the crux as how I experience meditation as a life-saving activity.
yeah, I’m depressed
I struggle with depression at times. Not feeling a little blue every now and then. I mean full-on clinical depression. And that’s how I mean meditation saves my life.
What exactly does meditation do for me that other interventions cannot?
Butterflies and Moths of America series
It enables me to experience a sometimes strange yet simultaneously very familiar happiness in the midst of feeling unhappy.
a real happiness
Not the happiness of the victim or the secondary gain of the neurotically unhappy. A real happiness, which, well, is not based on conditions at all, I’ll admit.
Let’s call this a peaceful, uneasy feeling.
Or perhaps, being happy with feeling unhappy.
I know, I know; this doesn’t make sense. But little does when you get deep with this stuff.
we can’t stitch moments together and call it happiness
I’ve discovered the hard way that real, deep happiness is not a series of fleeting states we try to stitch together into a happy life.
Hedonic adaptation dampens even the best of them.
Meditation has shown me this happiness is with me when my boss publicly shames me at work, when my kid is sick, when the rent check bounces, and when my partner gets on my case for leaving the freezer door open for the fifth time this month.
acceptance
We talk a lot in these mindfulness circles about accepting your emotions rather than pushing them away. In this practice, you feel what you feel, and you let go of the urge to make everything okay. You’re not pretending that everything will be alright.
Because, maybe, it won’t, and that’s the bottom line sometimes.
This is at the heart and soul of our mindfulness practice: seeing what is, being with it, and not trying to change it into something else.
right now, it’s like this
The US-born Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho, who trained for decades in Thailand and is now 84 years old, has a very simple saying that sums up the whole point of meditation:
Right now, it’s like this.
Let’s say I am having a challenging night at work. Maybe I started my night shift a little sleep deprived and not really wanting to be there. Then a patient who always seems to know which of my buttons to push finds just that right button. I take a breath and remember “Right now, it’s like this.”
I’m not saying it’s okay, or that I’m suddenly cool with what’s happening. No, it really sucks, and I feel I don’t have the energy to deal with him.
The phrase re-directs me to feel what this feels like, and realize I can be with it without freaking out.
I like what the phrase doesn’t say. Sure, dealing with this patient right now is a drag, but the phrase discourages me from creating another story-line, like–he needs to calm down, this always happens when I’m on, I should just quit this ridiculous job.
No, the phrase simply points out it’s like this, end of story.
impermanence
The phrase works well also because it has the central Buddhist notion of impermanence built right in. Sure, this job is nuts (I work in a psych hospital), but it pays the bills; but more importantly it isn’t always this crazy of a place to work.
I realize that most nights I actually enjoy this job!
One of my favorite meditation teachers, Cheri Huber, reminds us that
It’s not so much what happens as it is how we are with ourselves regardless of what happens –that makes the difference in our lives.
How are we with ourselves throughout our day? It helps to check in and see.
Emotions well up, yes; we can’t stop this from happening. But meditation reveals how we keep the emotion going through our thoughts. And meditation gives us that blessed pause between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl famously described:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
This is the profound blessing of our simple mindfulness practice.
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10/16/2020
letting go of wanting happiness
Folks who meditate in order to feel better often find the opposite. Eventfully they see that it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it!
I can begin to answer by sharing a haiku I recently found:
Since my house burned down
I now have a better view
of the rising moon.
This moving haiku was written by Mizuta Masahide, a 17^th century poet and samurai. It has spoken to me deeply many times.
I am often asked why I meditate.
Depending on who asks, I answer something like – To clearly see why I suffer, and with that understanding to cultivate peace of mind and a kind heart.
I have personally found mindfulness practice does just that.
After his own spiritual awakening, the Buddha distilled his understanding of our human situation into three insights, traditionally known, in an awkward sounding translation, as the three marks of existence.
The three facts of life
Let’s just call them the three facts of life:
1. Everything is temporary;
2. We habitually react to our world with resistance, felt as tension and suffering; and
3. Nothing solidly happens by itself, everything is contingent on causes and conditions.
There is a cool feeling of relief when I acknowledge these facts for myself. They help me appreciate what’s truly important in this fleeting world.
They wake me up as I move through my life in a kind of daze, checking email on my phone, going from one task and one distraction to another.
Because everything is changing, a flower has poignancy. When I realize this, I pause.
And because everything is evanescent, everything is precious. Our obligation is to spend this moment well, with wisdom and compassion
Because I suffer at times, “the sure heart’s release” is more appealing.
And because everything is contingent on something else, I appreciate my interconnection and responsibility to everyone and everything.
The Korean monk Haemin Sunim, in his lovely book The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, expresses the third fact in this way:
The whole universe is contained in an apple wedge in a lunch box. Apple tree, sunlight, cloud, rain, earth, air, farmer’s sweat are all in it. Delivery truck, gas, market, money, cashier’s smile are all in it. Refrigerator, knife, cutting board, mother’s love are all in it.
Everything in the whole universe depends on one another.
The Buddha taught that deeply experiencing these three facts with mindfulness in our daily life brings about wisdom and compassion, and greatly eases our distress and anxiety. I love Sylvia Boorstein’s line:
Life is like a continuous quiz show where the only question ever asked is:
“How are you going to manage whatever is happening now without confusing yourself and creating suffering?“
And daily life is the best place to practice releasing needless suffering and growing in love and compassion. Our everyday lives serve up unending opportunities that catch us, triggering our habitual reactions of “liking and disliking.”
Mindfulness allows us to catch ourselves before life does.
The issue is we find ourselves wanting to have a different experience in other than the one we are having.
For example, folks are often drawn to meditation out of a desire to feel better in some way. But if we meditate with this desire to feel good, we selectively internalize that meditation is all about feeling good, calm, and peaceful.
And when we don’t feel calm or peaceful, we can get frustrated, even agitated.
Despite repeated encouragement to relax and let go of our ideas about meditation, and our fantasies of how we should feel when it works, it can take a while for this to really sink in.
it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it.
letting go of the notion of self-improvement
Crucial to the practice is learning to be radically OK with ourselves just as we are in the present moment. In doing so, we also let go of the notion of self-improvement.
Mindfulness meditation often starts out by working with an uncooperative and rebellious mind. You know this mind-it’s the one that spaces out, goes into la-la land, feels anxious, and wants out.
It’s the mind that opens its eyes during group meditation, looks at the clock, and says “Ugh, ten more minutes!”
Mindfulness takes us right up to the boundaries of our physical and emotional discomfort. But it allows us to be OK there, to settle down, and lose the fear.
Folks who meditate in order to feel better often find the opposite. Eventfully they see that it’s the letting go of the wanting of happiness, that actually brings it!
Sayadaw U Tejaniya of Burma writes:
Don’t practice with a mind that wants something or wants something to happen. The result will only be that you tire yourself out.
In time you will delight in ordinary mental presence, and you forget about extraordinary anything. Extraordinary experiences are not the goal of meditation. They do come and go, as side –effects of your practice.
This is a huge turning point in your practice – the more you let go, the happier you are. You clearly see that ultimate liberation is the ultimate letting go of everything.
I will leave you this week with the words of the Thai forest teacher Ajahn Chah.
Do everything with a mind that lets go. Don’t accept praise or gain or anything else. If you let go a little you a will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace.
Hey, is that a moon I see up there?
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10/19/2018
the lychees, or letting go of thinking
The work of meditation is finding a home in the present moment and letting go of anything that tries to pull you away.
The lychees didn’t fruit much this year. In fact, barely at all. I thought maybe it was something I said? Some freaky karma thing?
Two years ago, our family was excited to see the tiny new buds of incredibly young lychees like a slow-breaking wave of green on the venerable tree in our backyard.
Of course, not all of the tiny, incredibly young buds would make it to full lychee-dom. But I hadn’t expected so many not to make it. I remember getting out the rake and gathering all the incredibly young casualties of nature.
In time, we would see the first tinges of red in the young lychees, like an adolescent blushing at an awkward remark, spreading through the branches and scraggly canopies of leaves in the old tree.
anticipation leads to expectation, which leads to grasping
We would hear remarks from the folks who come to meditate on Thursdays at our home – “any day now” as they would glance at the tree in the last rays of the Manoa evening sky, some relishing the sight in their post-meditative glow.
Then came the days when our family would pick so many lychees we could not possibly eat them all, even after giving some away, and having the Thursday meditation crowd savor them, post-meditatively.
So we peeled and froze them for the smoothies and ice cream toppings of the future.
lychees, 18th century China
All the while I kept raking up the ones that didn’t make it, landing on the ground under the ree after being half eaten by birds, or wrenched from their homes by the occasional gusts of Manoa Valley wind, breaking open when they reached the ground, their white flesh exposed like glistening bandages under their red, spiny skins.
But that was then, and now, it’s hardly worth raking lychees, there are so few. There was a sorrow that would come over me as processed this letting go and all the memories and anticipations arund the lychees.
impermanence again
I think about impermanence, and all the different projects I have going on; many won’t last past the conceptual stages, more letting go.
I ask myself what does it feel like, letting go of the lychees? And what does it feel like, letting go of everything that isn’t arising and passing in the present moment?
Can I drop thinking about my life over and over, and all that’s left undone, like so many unborn lychees?
can we le go of concepts?
We tend to taking a simple moment of experience—a sensory experience, a thought, or a feeling—and spinning a web of concepts around it.
It’s not that simple to observe a thought without getting involved in its orbit. We tend to follow, resist, or judge our thoughts.
Before you know it, what began as the thought “Where are they lychees this year?” becomes a swirling mass of intertwining concepts and ideas along with eddies and tide pools of emotion and reactivity.
Rather, we easily get sucked into a vortex of thinking about the practice, comparing and contrasting meditation practices, resisting doing it, and, of course, judging our practice against a perceived ideal.
letting go of anything that tries to pull you away
The work of meditation is finding a home in the present moment and letting go of anything that tries to pull you away- intentions, schemes, expectations, projects, and grasping.
Lisa Dale Miller, Ph.D., in a recent talk, commented:
When we practice letting go again and again, a spacious quality of mind that is naturally open and free emerges from the background of our consciousness into the foreground of our experience. If we can stay with the freshness of what is unfolding, aspects of our being conditioned by grasping and reactivity are gradually able to release.
Can we stay in the freshness of now, even when we contemplate all that hasn’t even happened yet, like so many unborn lychees?
07/10/2017