Category: Creating intention

Be Yourself. Everyone Else is Taken

May 26, 2020

Busyness, Choice, Creating intention, deep listening, Everyday mindfulness, Intention, Simplicity, Slowing down, Uncategorized

Bluejay in Appletree, Photo by Celia

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ~Heraclitus

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” ~Haruki Murakami

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~ Khalil Gibran

Dear Friends,

I hope you are all well and enjoying this spring. It’s hard to believe that we had a snow squall a few weeks ago seeing the apple, peach, and cherry trees in bloom. In Connecticut we are starting to cautiously re-open businesses. I’ve seen a traffic jam on the major highway and full tables at open-air restaurants. Life can seem normal, by which I mean, pre-COVID, and sometimes it can seem very not-normal as I find myself never wanting to touch a doorknob with an ungloved hand ever again, or harboring a mistrust of lettuce. One thing which is true always but seems more dramatic and novel is that none of us has been here before. This changing time in the world is new for all of us.

And, there’s lots of advice…so many things to read. I have well-meaning friends who send me articles from different viewpoints about the “best” strategies we should take, about the failings of the government to keep us safe and how to keep ourselves safe. One person tells me about herd immunity and that we should be emulating Sweden. A medical doctor tells me I need to stay isolated…another medical friend says, “no we don’t need to do that, only certain people do.” A practitioner sends me a sign up for another webinar. I am told to treat this time as a retreat…Meditate four hours a day…Garden…Play your flute…Make a commitment to write each day…And when all else fails—bake.

In Zen, we have gathas, practice poems to keep us anchored to our intentions as we go through the day. Several years ago when I began graduate school online, I was overwhelmed with anxiety around the technology, the updates, the daily check-in on the school platform…all of it stretched me thin with worry that I would miss out. Entering the online world, I would get swept up in anxiety and find myself holding tension in my shoulders and in my mind. I was afraid I wouldn’t see a critical piece of homework; I’d post a reply in the wrong place or I couldn’t open the attachment from the teacher, my computer would crash, the internet would go down…and so many more. During my time as an online student, all these things happened—and I managed to survive.

After a few semesters of computer aversion, I wrote a gatha that I taped to my computer keyboard. Turning on my computer, many voices are calling to me. I promise to listen to myself and remember that caring for my body and mind is my highest priority. I aspire to be a presence of compassion for myself and everyone I encounter. While this reminder was not an instant cure-all for my feeling of overwhelm, it was a reminder that I could choose how I wanted to respond. Remembering that I had a choice allowed me to prioritize what was truly important to me.

When I remembered what my priority was, not being perfect, but taking care of my true home, my body and mind put things in perspective. I could take breaks. In one class, my teacher sent the class a link to the lying down desk which made my body so much happier for long hours of keyboard work. I worked when it was the right time for me. I listened to what was right for me…and I respected my capacity.

When we listen to how we are and what we are looking for we can create our own path. We can make our practice our own. Our practice does not look like everyone else’s. Even for those who live in a monastery and follow the same schedule of sitting, walking, eating, and working…their practice is not simply transferred to them from an outside source. Spiritual maturity requires we take responsibility for our own practice and make it our personal.

What I have found to be true is that our practice is made of what we do…and how we do it. It is a patchwork of our honest looking at our habits, the hurts that have healed and those which are still raw, our willingness to try and make mistakes, our ability to find soothing in our distress and our willingness to sit up with ourselves and hold our own hand when we can’t be comforted. It is made of celebrations when we don’t do the same thing, when we take a risk, are brave and vulnerable and we can see we have changed. Our true path is stitched together from all our woundedness, our celebrations, our ability to choose, authenticity, and failure…all of it create the path and the way we walk it. The two are not different. Our practice creates our practice.

The energy we invest in looking and clear seeing creates the foundation for how we practice. The essential ingredient is you. How do you want to be? What are you willing to do to commit to your own awakening? No one can answer these questions for you, nor can anyone do your practice for you. When we recognize that living with our own truth is more powerful and transformative than looking like a good practitioner following form without differentiation. We can start to make our practice our own. This is when things get exciting. This is when the practice of stopping and deep looking, making space for all our emotions can become integrated and truly support our life. This is not a dress rehearsal. As our teacher Thay says, This is it.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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The Guardian of Myself

August 6, 2019

compassion, Creating intention, Equanimity, Everyday mindfulness, Healing our society, Healing Ourselves, Loving Kindness, Meditation, Metta, Mindfulness, Neuroscience of compassion, Transforming emotions, Uncategorized

Venerable and friends, Bantam, CT. Photo by Celia

“Strive at first to meditate

Upon the sameness of yourself and others.

In joy and sorrow, all are equal.

Thus be guardian of all, as of yourself.”

~Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

Dear Friends,

I was saddened—to see my former classmate and mindfulness colleague on the news this week. He’s the Police Chief in Dayton, Ohio and when he’s on television it means there’s a tragedy—and according to the New York Times, the Dayton shooting was the 32^nd mass shooting this year. As I watched the reports of the three major shootings this week and read the news, I felt an overwhelming weight of pain and collective suffering. I remembered what contemplative neuroscientist researcher Tonia Singer said in her Ted talk, “watching suffering, [ie.] the news, activates the limbic system.” The limbic system is the emotional enter of the brain responsible for the sympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight response to stimuli. It is also activated by trauma and watching the news can give us vicarious or secondary trauma from contact with images and accounts of violence and hostility.

We are processing and receiving information all the time and we unconsciously take on the emotional state of others.

Researchers compare the activity of the brain between those who are suffering and those who are witnessing the pain. In fMRI scans display the activation of the insula, the locus of the pain activates when we witness someone who is suffering. Contemplative neuroscientist, Tonia Singer tells us that this emotional response is “unconscious, the insula fires in a millisecond—we are processing every second of our lives. We unconsciously go into emotional resonance of others.” This is the emotional resonance of empathy, or the ability to understand what another is feeling. This feeling of pain and despair is part of the response of empathetic contagion. In the face of so much collective suffering and loss, we can be thrown off-center and become paralyzed and powerless in the face of hatred and destruction.

Neuroscience researchers Tonia Singer and Olga Klimenki wanted to study the different qualities of empathetic contagion and compassion. Using distressing film footage from the BBC news, they found that participants who focused on the pain of those they viewed reported negative feelings of hopelessness, despair, and depression, agitation, and frustration, while those who trained in compassion, the wish that suffering is relieved, experienced feelings of solidity, of reward, and even happiness faced with the same news that others found so distressing.

Neuroscience learned from monks who individually have over 40,000 practice hours of compassion meditation, that encountering suffering, these monks fully comprehend the pain of the other and shift into the practice of compassion. The neural circuitry of compassion activates the body’s own powerful analgesic system connected to oxytocin and opiate production for relieving pain. The monks practicing compassion reported feelings “positive affiliation, love, reward, of concern, strength and warm feeling” according to Singer.

Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that “compassion is a verb.” Compassion is the desire to remove suffering and the impetus to do so. Compassion is doing something.

In loving kindness meditation, there is the intention to transform suffering. This intention is an action. Neuroscience shows us the dramatic shift that can arise from changing our thought pattern. Using fMRI technology, the intention for others to be well and happy completely shifted the neural connectivity and the emotional state of the practitioner.

When we are steady and balanced in our lives, we are capable of meeting the suffering of others. In neuroscience this is called the caring affiliative system—Singer explains the importance of this system in bringing about the end of suffering in oneself and another, “If a child cries, the mother cries, you know the child will cry even more. This caring affiliation system what it does naturally is soothing the child, getting calm and pouring out this concern and love.” Research demonstrates that the same person who experienced empathetic distress at another’s pain, and experienced suffering and distress could activate the care and affiliation circuitry after compassion training. The evidence is very clear, and Singer acknowledges, “We need compassion—which is the system of affiliation and love—the positive feeling of strength and concern for others.” This shift in our mind creates resilience and the ability to transform our own suffering and when we can show up with a calm and balanced presence, we have much more capability for wise and sustained action.

This week my compassion prayer is, May I not close my heart to my suffering. May I not close my heart to your suffering. This is how it is right now–for both of us. May I remain balanced and at ease in the middle of things. May you find peace in the midst of this and may all of us realize the end of suffering.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

Calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh

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The Care and Feeding of Intention

April 2, 2019

Basic Goodness, Big mind, Busyness, Changing habit patterns, compassion, Creating intention, Detached Action, Good Heart, Mindfulness, Uncategorized

Biddeford, ME, Photo by Celia

“The quality or purity of any spiritual practice is determined by the individual’s intention and motivation.” ~ H.H. The Dalai Lama

“If you were at the end of your life looking back, what would matter about today?” ~Tara Brach

“Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

Dear Friends,

More than twenty years ago, I was driving home from a writing class late at night. After years of creating my own business and being someone in the eyes of the world, I was overworked and unhappy and looking to change directions. I was searching for my path that would keep me from falling into the sea of nothingness, where I would flounder and let my life ebb away in meaningless flailing towards a new identity. The class was my floatation device. I remember that very unpleasant fear that if I gave up what I knew, even with all its stress and pain, reaching towards the unknown would be a worse—some sort of soulless, bland existence. Without putting a name to it, I was looking for something bigger than my business, bigger than my own self, I was looking for an intention.

I don’t remember the radio show I was listening to that night, but the topic was about creating a framework for your life—it was nothing new in the world, but new to me. Listening, the interviewees gave examples of big intentions. For example, if your life’s work was to bring beauty to the world, you could garden, paint, write a book, raise a child, become an environmental activist, all things in line with your intention, or life’s purpose. Up to that point, my life’s goal as a designer was to make enough money to live and to be respected—which was something I could not control. The respect and recognition I longed for would come from outside myself and gauging my worth according to my approval rating effectively gave away all my own power for happiness. I could see in my writing class that I was merely transferring this small goal to another discipline. My life’s work was not money or fame; it needed to transcend myself. As the poet, David Whyte writes, “Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anyone or anything that doesn’t bring you alive is too small for you.” What I recognized was that I had mistaken the smallness of a goal for the intention of a lifetime.

There is a knowing in the body that resonates with a true intention. You can feel it—guaranteed. Getting 10,000 followers for your blog or find that one perfect partner and living a fairytale romance is not a true intention, but a mark of achievement. This is common in our culture that looks to financial success and power as the worthy aims of our lives. When we assign ourselves a task—even a noble one, such as raising children or reversing climate change, we can tend to focus on the outcome and transfer our habits of busyness and achieving onto a more wholesome scaffolding—but we can still be tied to our judgment and evaluations of how well we are accomplishing, still caught in desire for rewards and praise and lose touch with what connects us to our larger and more selfless nature.

A true intention must also be large enough to hold everyone we encounter, including ourselves. I can’t be passionate about clean water and air and ignore the suffering in my relationships that pollute my own life—that is not integrating my intention. My intention to be a presence of care for others must also encompass myself and my family. An intention to be peace cannot thrive in a house where there is fighting and hurt. Intentions do not overlook any relationship, any moment; they are a magical size that can enfold all experiences and conditions of life.

The Buddha is recorded as saying that all mindstates and mental qualities require food. In the Food Discourse, Ahara Sutta, SN 46.5, the Buddha described the nutriments that feed both the “skillful and unskillful, blameworthy and blameless, gross and refined.” There is a type of attention that feeds the desires of greed, anger, and the belief that I am separate from the world, and there is that the food that feeds the intentions that connect me to the truth of living in the temporary housing of a body that is part of a much larger interrelated world. The food the Buddha spoke of is the “appropriate attention” to the goodness that is arising and sensitivity to the experience of the wholesome when it is manifesting. Through attention to how we are already living in alignment without our intentions—and using this experience as our food to create energy and persistence, we nurture our own goodness and commitment through appreciating our own efforts. In short—we strengthen our own commitment through experiencing our own good heart.

For a while now, I have had the intention to be a presence of care in each moment, for myself and others. This is a big intention and one that can sound theoretical and live in the mind. When we commit to our intention, there is an inquiry into sustaining it—giving it the necessary nutriments to keep it alive. We also notice what starves our intention. In my experience, there is nothing so deadly as time pressure to make me forget my true purpose.

When we are rushing and filled with deadlines, the world can become very small. We forget we are connected to others. In my life, I know that more I am rushing, when others are an obstacle instead of an opportunity, I lose my intention. Intention is made of Attention. One simple thing I do each day is to recall my intention. When the Buddha used the word remembering, sati [mindfulness], his message was that through remembering the path to liberation and the four steps leading out of suffering, we all could become ennobled. Our worth was not determined by birth, but through the goodness of our actions, our thoughts, and words…and the way we made ourselves noble was by remembering how much choice and power we do have over our habitual thoughts and actions. So, remembering our larger intention is a daily practice.

Peace activist and Buddhist teacher Donald Rothberg suggests writing out intention on a piece of paper and looking at it before a meeting or having a difficult conversation. Some days, I have written my intention on my arm in pen and am contemplating a tattoo, but things keep changing, don’t they? This week you may want to consider your larger intention in the world. Ask yourself, what is the thing that brings me alive? Leaning back into the gifts of the ancestors, the kindness we have received in our lives, the wisdom teachings, what do we want to continue and bring forth into the future to bless ours and other’s lives? How do we make our beautiful dreams into the scaffolding of our lives? If your intention is to bring healing to the world, how are you manifesting that towards yourself? Towards this moment? Are we willing to nourish our intention with appreciation for the moments that our intention is manifesting? Aligning our work, and our life with our truth and intention that can infuse the whole of our lives with purpose and the nourishment of appreciation gives us strength to continue.

May we all trust our light,

Celia

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Category: Creating intention

Be Yourself. Everyone Else is Taken

The Guardian of Myself

The Care and Feeding of Intention