Lynn J Kelly offers another helpful blogpost on how and why we might meditate. I encourage you to check out her link below for all of her mindfulness offerings.
Remembering and Realigning
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Category Archives: health
Helpful Reminders from Lynn J Kelly
The article below reminds me of the scouting practice to “always leave a place better than you found it,” meaning that we treat our environment and those around us with respect and care.
May your day and this holiday season be filled with joy and wisdom.
The Magic & Mystery of Aging: Excerpts
I’m approaching a milestone birthday, and my thoughts today are about aging. Synchronistical, there’s an archived Tricycle article that offers much reassurance on this very topic.
See excerpts below from Douglas Penick’s article. For the full article see: tricycle.org/magazine/buddhism-aging/
The Magic & Mystery of Aging
Old age as preparation for perfect awakening
There are many discussions of how the young should manage the old, but there is not much discussion of how it feels for the old to find the same mind continuing, its clarity and curiosity.
Buddhaghosa, the great 5th-century Theravada Buddhist investigator of mind, wrote:
Aging has the characteristic of maturing (ripening) material instances. Its function is to lead on to death.
Aging is the basis for the bodily and mental suffering that arises owing to many conditions such as leadenness in all the limbs, decline and warping of the faculties, vanishing of youth, undermining of strength, loss of memory and intelligence, contempt on the part of others, and so on.
Hence it is said:
With leadenness in every limb,
With every faculty declining,
With vanishing of youthfulness,
With memory and wit grown dim,
With strength now drained by undermining,
With growing unattractiveness to spouse and kin,
To [spouse] and family and then
With dotage coming on, what pain
Alike of body and of mind
A mortal must expect to find!
Since aging all of this will bring,
Aging is well named suffering.—The Path of Purification, trans. Bikkhu Nanamoli
If you are reading this, your chances of ending up in a nursing home are just short of 50/50. That is to say, 4 out of 10 of Tricycle’s readers are likely to end their lives in institutional care. But as Meg Federico wrote, people have to make the most difficult decisions, plans concerning the last years of their lives, at a time they are least capable of doing so. Nonetheless, we will age, and something will happen to us. Atul Gawande, a distinguished surgeon and commentator on the care of the aged, describes the likely situation in which we who live in the Western post-industrial world will find ourselves:
The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies of a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimens, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.
—Being Mortal
“Old age. It’s a secret, a kind of hidden magic. It’s right there, this practice, and no one sees it. We’re being shown, given. It is how our lives actually work. What we are told we should not cling to is actually naturally being stripped away. . . . Resistance is not possible or only creates more confusion, pain.”
We see our body as a noun, an entity with fixed properties and functions. And because we tend to look at ourselves this way, when various qualities of our body change during the aging process, this is unpleasant; when our body cannot function as it used to, we are distraught, lost. If, however, we see our body as a verb, a combination of properties and functions constantly in motion, then it’s very different.
Dogen Zenji said: “When the world ends, and the fires blaze unobstructedly through everything, and all falls to ruin, we just follow circumstance.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)
Like light in air, we cannot stop,
Every instant dissolves.
Awakening is not something we make happen
Awakening happens without reference point
Without boundary.
Like light in air
Moments do not stop in one self or an other.
Dissolving
Reforming
Awakening breaks open in the experience of whatever and all.
Here’s Dogen again:
Greatly awakening has no beginning or end, returning to confusion had no beginning or end. Why? It just goes off everywhere, while the worlds are being destroyed.” (Trans. Kidder Smith)
Douglas Penick is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and has published three Gesar of Ling episodes. His books include the recent essay collection T The Age of Waiting, adapted from Tricycle articles, and the upcoming The Oceans of Cruelty.
Never Enough? Abandon Craving One Day at a Time
“mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.“
Below are highlights of a recent Tricycle article on Cutting the Roots of Craving. I have three of Gunaratana’s books now and the provocative excerpt below comes from his latest book co-written by Veronique Ziegler.
May the words below offer some helpful advice to overcome our addiction for “more.”
Cutting the Roots of Craving
Desire is beginningless. Yet through right mindfulness we can learn to abandon it. By Bhante Henepola Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler Jul 18, 2024
Everything we do pivots around craving and Its insatiability is such that it yields more craving
whenever we ask ourselves the question “Am I satisfied?” we always get the same answer: “Not yet.”
There is no point in time before which a state of desirelessness can be found.
in dependence upon feeling, there is craving.
Everything happens in your mind. When you talk, write, perform any deed whatsoever, watch your mind at all times in order to guard it against defilements and prevent craving from invading it.
Look at your own mind to see the invisible greed, anger, jealousy, and all the other defilements that are the real cause of your suffering.
If you end greed now, you attain liberation now. If you end greed one minute later, you attain liberation one minute later. If you end greed tomorrow, you attain liberation tomorrow.
Craving can be found in our very own mind. Understanding it is a personal exploration that must be undertaken individually, for the solution to abandon it is also in our own minds.
How to Abandon Craving
there is a great danger in sensual pleasures—not that they cause immediate harm or risk to one’s life (although some sensory pleasures can definitely be lethal) but that sense enjoyments are impermanent. And because they are impermanent they can never be satisfactory.
to live a happy and healthy life. We must use our senses, but we must do so with wisdom,
Mindfulness is a means for overcoming craving.
© 2024 by Bhante Gunaratana and Veronique Ziegler, Dependent Origination in Plain English. Reprinted by arrangement with Wisdom Publications.
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana is a Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka and the author of Mindfulness in Plain English. He is president of the Bhavana Society in High View, West Virginia, an organization that promotes meditation and monastic life.
Veronique Ziegler earned her doctorate degree in experimental high-energy physics from the University of Iowa working on the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. She then took a research assistant position at the same lab and later a staff scientist position at Jefferson National Laboratory in Newport News, Virginia, where she currently works full time and is involved in the lab particle spectroscopy experimental program. In 2018, she started attending Bhante Gunaratana’s dhamma classes. She has been an avid dhamma student ever since.
Not Unmanly to Cry – Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday of Daily Stoic has a great new book that just came out: RIGHT THING, RIGHT NOW. He also continues to share his Daily Stoic message free to all. Today’s message can be found here: dailystoic.com/are-you-allowed-to-cry/
Yes, it’s not unmanly to cry. Here’s Holiday’s pearl of wisdom of today:
“A Stoic is invulnerable. A Stoic is tough. A Stoic is emotionless. A Stoic doesn’t—can’t—cry, right? Well, Marcus Aurelius sure seemed to think otherwise.
Here we have him weeping over the death of a beloved tutor (let the boy be human, Antoninus said when someone tried to stop him). Here we have him breaking down at the thought of becoming emperor. Here we have him crying over the loss of so many during the plague. Here we have him tearing up at the assassinated body of his rival, Avidius Cassius, mourning the murdered opportunity to grant the man clemency.
The point is: Marcus Aurelius didn’t see any contradiction with these shows of emotion. He didn’t think it was unmanly to be sad or to mourn. In fact, the only time we do have Marcus talking about an emotion not being “manly” is in reference to losing your temper. (We have a great Daily Stoic course on “taming your temper,” by the way).
Besides that, the Stoics would say it’s OK to let it out sometimes. Don’t feel bad if that’s what you need. Life can be a bit of a pressure cooker at times, and like an actual pressure cooker, you’ve got to hit the release valve every so often so that the whole thing doesn’t explode in your face. You’re only human. So be human—not just once, but all the time—and let yourself feel.”
The Grace of Powerlessness
Richard Rohr and Rami Shapiro offer more inverted wisdom about radical freedom and addiction recovery below.
The Grace of Powerlessness
cac.org/daily-meditations/the-grace-of-powerlessness/
Monday, July 15, 2024
I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the very things I want to do and find myself doing the very things I hate … for although the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not. —Romans 7:15, 18
Admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
—Step 1 of the Twelve Steps
Father Richard affirms the essential and difficult task of admitting our own powerlessness:
As many teachers of the Twelve Steps have said, the first Step is probably the hardest, most denied, and most avoided. Letting go isn’t in anybody’s program for happiness, and yet all mature spirituality is about letting go and unlearning.
Jesus used the metaphors of a “grain of wheat” (John 12:24) or a “branch cut off from the vine” (John 15:2) to describe the arrogant ego. Paul used the unfortunate word “flesh,” which made most people think he was talking about the body. Yet both Jesus and Paul were pointing to the isolated and protected small self, and both said it has to go. Its concerns are too small and too selfish. An ego response is always an inadequate or even wrong response to the moment. It will not deepen or broaden life, love, or inner peace. Since it has no inner substance, our ego self is always attached to mere externals. The ego defines itself by its attachments and revulsions. The soul does not attach, nor does it hate; it desires and loves and lets go.
What the ego hates more than anything else is to change—even when the present situation isn’t working or is horrible. Instead, we do more and more of what does not work. The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W. H. Auden wrote, “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” [1]
Rabbi Rami Shapiro names the paradox of powerlessness and surrender to God:
The fundamental and paradoxical premise of Twelve Step recovery as I experience it is this: The more clearly you realize your lack of control, the more powerless you discover yourself to be… [and] the more natural it is for you to be surrendered to God. The more surrendered to God you become, the less you struggle against the natural flow of life. The less you struggle against the flow of life, the freer you become. Radical powerlessness is radical freedom, liberating you from the need to control the ocean of life and freeing you to learn how best to navigate it.…
We are all addicted to control, and it is to this greater addiction that I wish to speak. The deepest truth of Step 1 requires us to admit that we are powerless over our lives, and that life itself is unmanageable. [2]
References:
[1] Selected from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 5–6; W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 105.
[2] Rami Shapiro, Recovery, the Sacred Art: The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2009), 3, 6.
A Counterintuitive Wisdom
What’s your addiction?
Anne Wilson Schaef introduced the concept of societal addiction in her book When Society Becomes an Addict first published in 1987. Then came Richard Rohr in his book Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps first published in 2011. Together they help us understand how we can all benefit from identifying and addressing our addictions.
Check out their book covers and excerpts from today’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation below.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1431703.When_Society_Becomes_an_Addict
http://www.amazon.com/Breathing-Under-Water-Spirituality-Twelve/dp/1616361573
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation
“A Counterintuitive Wisdom
I am convinced that, on a practical level, the gospel message of Jesus and the Twelve Step message of Bill Wilson are largely the same message.
Here are four assumptions that I am making about addiction:
We are all addicts.
“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction.
All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency.
Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from the addicted self and from cultural lies.
Let me sum up, then. These are the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of AA are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
We suffer to get well.
We surrender to win.
We die to live.
We give it away to keep it.
We are all spiritually powerless, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments.
Read this meditation in full at cac.org/daily-meditations/a-counterintuitive-wisdom/
Selected from Richard Rohr, introduction to Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), xix, xxii–xxiii, xxviii, xxix–xxx, xxv.
NO BONNET SONNET
NO BONNET SONNET
not ev’ry itch need be scratched,
not ev’ry egg need be hatched
not ev’ry thought need be spoke,
not ev’ry dream need be woke
colors seen on judgment day,
practice or pose your one way
no aura, no tonal vibe,
no ritual, ‘gyptian scribe
which of us doesn’t belong?
wrong question, don’t sing along
let go ego before burst,
don’t forget that she comes first
deep bow to Wilda Tanner
hat tip to Ian Kerner
ETTA PEARL & IT ALL BEGINS WITH UNION
her blindness and his ignorance
her deafness and his magical thinking
her dementia and his futility
our connection and our rescue
Here are two different topics that totally connect for me.
First, Etta Pearl was the first rescue dog I adopted. Found near a dumpster, lost or abandoned, she needed and received help. Unfortunately, she was blind and deaf and very agitated. For some convoluted reason, I thought I was ready to take on this challenge.
I’ve since learned that there’s a term for when a rescue shelter wants to help an animal but knows they are extremely medically challenged AND they don’t want to hurt their statistics for being a “no-kill facility.” The term is outsourced euthanasia.
If a private individual adopts an animal and then proceeds with a vet-recommended end-of-life procedure, then the animal is “liberated” from their suffering AND the rescue shelter does not record the death on their records.
In Etta Pearl’s case, her extreme agitation led to obsessively walking in tight circles and biting anyone who tried to comfort or feed her. The vet said it was a clear case of canine cognitive dysfunction aka “doggie dementia.” My first rescue adoption lasted less than three weeks.
Second, is …
Richard Rohr‘s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Forty-Eight: The Prophetic Path: Motivated by Love
It All Begins with Union
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
—Romans 8:38–39
This week we focus on people who call us to act out of loving union with God for the sake of others. Father Richard considers union with God as something that has already taken place, whether we experience it or not:
We are already in union with God! There is an absolute, eternal union between God and the soul of everything. At the deepest level, we are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) and “the whole creation … is being brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The problem is Western religion has not taught us this. For most Christians that I’ve worked with as a priest, God is still separate and “out there.” Most people are still trying to secure God’s approval. Our ego over-emphasizes our individuality and separateness from God and others. We limited God’s redemption to the human species—and not very many individuals within that species! [1]
Daily contemplative prayer helps us rediscover our inherent union and learn how to abide in Presence, trusting that we are already good and safe in God. We don’t have to worry about our little private, separate, insecure self. Jesus taught, I am one with you and you are one with your neighbor and we are all one with God. That’s the gospel! That’s the whole point of Communion or Eucharist; we partake of the bread and wine until they convince us that we are in communion. It seems easier for God to convince bread and wine of their identity than to convince us.
Believe it or not, we’re not here to save our souls. That’s already been done once and for all—in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, and as Christ (see Ephesians 1:3–14). By God’s love, mercy, and grace, we are already the Body of Christ: the one universal body that has existed since the beginning of time. You and I are here for just a few decades, dancing on the stage of life, perhaps taking our autonomous selves far too seriously. That little and clearly imperfect self just cannot believe it could be a child of God. I hope the gospel frees us to live inside of a life that is larger than the one our small selves have imagined. The larger life of the Body of Christ cannot be taken from us. It is the very life of God which cannot be destroyed. [2]
As Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” [3]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for “Happiness” (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2011), webcast. Available as MP3 audio download.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “There Is Only One Suffering; There Is Only One Happiness,” homily, September 13, 2015.
[3] Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, ed. Naomi Burton, Patrick Hart, James Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1973), 308. Rohr’s emphasis.
Life Matters 