wild radish

Radish Goes to Work

2006-09-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned previously, I've been feeling that this blog has gotten a little too solipsistic. And since I've become more and more fascinated and concerned with issues of work and labor from a Buddhist perspective, I am going leave this venue, and have created a new blog in which I can more deeply explore these issues. You will find me here, at Buddhism, Work & Labor. Please visit!

P.S. Just because I'm focusing on work/labor doesn't mean that I will ignore the arts in my new blog. In the best of worlds, work is an art and also play; and art is often our most serious work.

Buddhism, Mindfulness, Labor

2006-08-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

OK, I think this subject of Buddhism, Mindfulness and work, is a subject that I can sustain for a long time (plus I want to blog about things that are not always so Self-focused), so I'm going to start a new blog, and end this one. The new blog will focus on Mindfulness and work, from the most individual and personal issues of work (housecleaning, dealing with mail, art work) to the more public realm of labor issues, diaspora and work, slavery, ethics and labor, etc.) Might take me a few days to get this going, but I will announce it here and link to the site. I will be switching to Wordpress.com

Buddhism and Labor

2006-08-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

I was driving to work today, past the agricultural fields in the Central California area where I live. As always, I drove past hundreds of fieldworkers. And I was thinking about the hiring practices in the company where I work. I started wondering about Buddhism and Labor. How, when we think of Buddhism and human rights, it always seems to be in relation to war & peace, or perhaps to caregiving and hospice services, or charitable help to the poor or imprisoned. But why not in relation to labor? There are numerous books about mindfulness and work, but they focus on the individual in his or her workplace.

Is it that labor issues seem intrinsically oppositional? (Well, so is war and peace). Do they not fit in with Buddhist aesthetics? Is it not a "sexy" topic for Buddhists? But the issue of work is really quite huge; it can extend from individual work at home or in the sangha, to working in offices and boardrooms, to blue collar positions, to labor rights issues in universities or in the agricultural fields, to corporate globalization, to diasporic laborers, to the increasingly burdgeoning new economy of indentured servitude and sex traffiking. Yes, folks, the slave trade is alive and well on this suffering planet.

On 23 August, the world marks International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

Self-unconsciousness

2006-08-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

Photo by Roy Schatt, via The Official Site of James Dean

I was reading something that made me anxious today and simultaneously indulging in some conditioned reflex action, and just watching it play itself out, upon a deeply embedded assumption that my core self was or should somehow be threatened. But in watching that process, I'm no longer so sure who or what that "Self" is. Surely, the body can be at risk, and our lives. And one should respect that, the life we've been given. But more and more my sense of Self seems fleeting and illusory, a product of habit and conditioning. More and more, I catch myself at these moments, and wonder who or what on earth this self is, that's so worried, so reactive to all these things. While I was sitting there, reading, my James Dean screensaver ; )) came on, caught my eye, and started flashing pics across the screen. All those poses (I'm reminded too of Rufus Wainwright's CD, Poses). Beautiful poses of a young man flush with life, so fleeting, seemingly so real, and then gone. We are so obsessed with Self in all its manifestations, constantly making up stories about it, trying it, testing it, defending it, pumping it up, trying to catch it in pictures and words; hypnotized by these dreams of Self.

Greco-Buddhism

2006-08-08T01:05:00.000-07:00

"Nothing really exists, but human life is governed by convention"
"Nothing is in itself more this than that" (Diogenes Laertius IX.61)

--from Greco-Buddhism (this is a fascinating article).

On Pain and Awareness

2006-08-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

I had a migraine that lasted a couple of days, most likely due to several rough weeks at work, which means ignoring physical signals of stress, lack of healthy exercise, limited sleep (a friend of mine has also suggested that I tend to "somatize," in other words, I tend to absorb other people's stress and pain into myself, physically -- but without the healthy release that practices like tonglen provide). Yesterday the particular project I was working on ended, and I felt a sense of freedom, and release from the headache. But today, with some disappointment, I can feel a bit of the familiar pain and sick feeling returning; it's unusual for that to happen so soon. I don't get "killer" migraines like others do (I suspect this is because I don't take any painkillers at all, which I believe tend to produce rebound migraines that increase in intensity); so I remain somewhat functional, but still - I'm not a happy camper.

Shinzen Young's techniques for dealing with pain and compulsion have been incredibly helpful, but over the last few weeks, I've sunk back into my conditioned ways of dealing with pain. In other words, not! Perhaps this weekend, I can slow down a little, become more aware, and attend to my complaining body.

One nice (more than nice) thing: my sangha has moved in to the building next door to my house, and they have built a beautiful meditation space therein, with lovely hardwood floors and warmly painted walls (the space may also be used for yoga and chi kung). Yay!

2006-07-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

"our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men."

--Martin Luther King

Work: Rafting the Rapids

2006-06-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

With an expansion of duties and responsibilities at work, I've been scrambling about for the last week, with little attention to what's going on internally (it would seem that it's because I'm attending to external events -- but am I really?). And yet of course, emotions, thoughts, contractions, all arise and flow, albeit with the force of river rapids (as my aching head told me this morning).

Richard Shankman's talks at the sangha for the last two weeks have been on "intention." For the first week, I did start with a certain intention for a couple of days, but when things started to "speed up" at work, that went out the window -- or to continue the metaphor -- I lost my oar. All the "stuff" (shenpa, kleshas) I've been carrying around about work for the last 40 + years, like mud at the bottom of a river, has risen to the top, along with all the little emotional/mental whirlpools that go along with it, and rather than keeping my eye on the horizon and the direction I'm going, I've been getting fixated on the whirlpools, and going round and round a big rock.

Well, going round and round is OK, I needn't feel bad about it. But I do have a certain intention. There happens to be another oar in the boat, so I can start again. It's a big beautiful river, in fact, and everything is moving along (a little slower today), and in fact it's exciting and ever-changing, and I don't want to miss a minute of it, even if I do occasionally get drenched. If I just push off from this big rock (thought it was blocking my way, but just realized I can use it for leverage), maybe I can get back into the stream....

Everything is colored by what we are thinking about it. Everything. Our ability to love, to forgive, to embrace, to support is influenced by the things we carry in our minds. Meditation helps us to clear out the cobwebs and approach life with a fresh perspective. Otherwise, we are just pushing along... driven by complaint, judgment, self-indulgence and other unhelpful states of mind. Things can be difficult simply because we perceive them to be difficult... but when we allow ourselves to shift our perception just a little, we can see things differently.
---Zen Under the Skin: Reflections of an African American Practitioner

Mindfulness places us where choice is possible; the greater our awareness, the greater our freedom to choose.

-- Gil Fronsdal (via The Buddhist Blog)

Also, as Jack/Zen, notes, humor is important in work. And I'm blessed to be working with a group of people who can laugh....

Trusting the community
When leaders don't trust the community, they feel compelled to control it, missing opportunity after opportunity to discover my latest version of the principles of open space:

The right people always show up for the conversation
We always talk about and do what we’re prepared to
When we interact in dialogue, we are smarter together
The conversation always begins and ends when it's supposed to

--Jack/Zen

The Abstract

2006-06-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

Notes/rough draft of my abstract for a chapter in an anthology:

As a Filipina born and raised in the United States, I don't feel particularly qualified to report on the indigenous babaylan tradition of the Philippines. Scholars speak of the systematic, colonial erasure of the Filipina [female] shaman, the babaylan, from the history and even the dictionaries of the Philippines; exposure to "primary" babaylans is unusual in the Philippines, and almost unheard of in the U.S.

However there is no doubt that over the past few years, the word, babaylan, has been increasingly invoked in many different contexts. And, perhaps because I’m a writer and poet, the word has entered my life through literature, visual art and poetry. It also emerges as a "new" and recovered ongoing dialogue about spirituality, philosophical values, ethics, healing and communities. I have noticed a ripple effect as the word resonates through the work of other artists, writers, activists, healers, and people involved in social justice movements in the United States, the Philippines, Europe, Australia and the Middle East—-in fact wherever there are Filipinas in the diaspora who are artistically creative, interested in Filipino spirituality and the healing arts, and in cultural and social activism.

It may seem that there is little to compare between Buddhist and indigenous Babaylan spirituality. The Buddha's teachings on the nature of reality have been disseminated through carefully preserved texts as well as through oral transmission (as an online continuation of this, see Dharmastream); it has highly visible and recognizable artistic, architectural, and cultural markers.

Filipina Babaylan traditions, on the other hand, have been heavily suppressed through many decades of Christian, and later, secular domination; their values, beliefs and healing practices were passed on covertly, primarily through oral transmission, although in recent years encounters with primary babaylans has begun to be documented, and one might even say that a kind of oral transmission of knowledge about babaylan traditions is now being disseminated via the internet.

As a Filipina born in the U.S., Buddhism reached me long before I heard the term, Babaylan. When I was a teenager, a friend gifted me with a copy of a book about the Diamond Net of Indra. Many years later, the Buddhist teaching of inter-being and mutual causality resonated with similar indigenous Filipino values, such as kapwa, pakiramdam and kagandahang loob.

In my case, Buddhism and the concept of the Babaylan (especially in the poetic arts) seem to overlap in fascinating ways. Example: recently I co-edited the First Hay(na)ku Anthology of poetry, based on a tercet poetic form developed by Filipina-American poet, Eileen Tabios, that acknowledges an influence from Buddhist-influenced Japanese haiku. Furthermore, both the hay(na)ku form and haiku tend to encourage a poetics of presence. Yet, unlike the haiku's focus on local and seasonal elements, the hay(na)ku is a product of the Filipino diaspora, the internet, and Eileen Tabios' sense of her poetic vocation as drawing from the concept of the babaylan healing modality.

My exploration of the differences and overlaps between Buddhism and indigenous Babaylan spirituality will be channeled through a discussion of language arts (especially poetry); I'll be using several or more FilAm texts, including the Babaylan anthology, Leny Strobel's A Book of Her Own, Pinoy Poetics, and The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, along with some American Buddhist poetry, including haiku from the Japanese internment camps, and American Buddhist social-activist poetry.

Finally, given the increasing interest in Buddhism among westerners over the last several decades, both as an ethical/spiritual grounding for social activism, and as "meta-cosmic worldview...that has already been linguistically elaborated, rationalized, and codified in doctrine and textualized in...[print],"(1) I hope that my chapter in this anthology can begin to sort out not only differences and overlaps, but also some of the ramifications of this growth of interest in Buddhism for primary indigenous spiritual movements still in need of careful nurturing, that are closely linked to preservation of land, ecosystems and cultures.

1) As elaborated by Jim Perkinson.

WhatWeb

2006-05-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Online Mindful Poetry Zone.

Footwork

2006-05-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

Haven't written for awhile here, partly because of my new job working for a publishing company. It's a fairly high pressure, corporate atmosphere, and after about 1 1/2 weeks of taking things WAY too seriously, I woke up one morning realizing I could loosen up a little. Boy, did that help. One has to keep light on one's feet.

Rain

2006-04-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

There’s a space and a breathing around everything that comes into being, whether it’s rain, the sound of birds, pain, fear, the sense of being overwhelmed. I think that my attachment to something is diminishing. I think another moment that it returns. Feelings of loss. Feelings of desire, grasping. Writing to gain attention. Writing out of habit. Writing to know something, to observe (writing is practice too; a flashing into being). Rain. Around all this, silence and tenderness.

2006-03-28T21:52:00.000-08:00

When I first got "serious" about meditating and started doing it regularly, after about a month, I got one of those fleeting "tastes" that experienced meditators warn you about. That weird and delicious feeling of spaciousness and freedom; a sudden shift of perspective, so that even the worst of my problems ceased to feel so oppressive; a feeling of unequaled happiness and humor.

Then of course, the grasping set in. Depression, etc. etc. It slipped away, or seemed to.

Lately, there's a sense of it coming back just a little, even in the midst of some very difficult things happening in my life. But I'm careful now to hold it ever so lightly. And yet, today, as I observed my emotions in their habitual round of anxiety, there was behind it a fleeting sense of space, and a feeling like distant laughter...almost.

Been Awhile

2006-03-19T09:06:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I have blogged here, as work work work has been on my mind. I missed my sangha meeting and meditation last week, the first time since I began going there. On a parallel to that, my meditation at home has been most irregular, too, since I took a temporary job with an educational publishing company, and had a forty mile commute. And when I DID sit down to meditate, I was alarmed at how difficult it has gotten for me to concentrate and focus. I feel as though I have lost ground...

But I am making excuses, no?

So now what? Start all over again: "Beginner's Mind" as Suzuki Roshi said (is the best mind).

Speaking of losing ground:

"With practice...we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with a desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment--over and over again."
-- Pema Chodron

Not the Chocolate

2006-02-13T20:32:00.000-08:00

I think I temporarily lost my sense of humor last week. To be honest, there's a lot to be grim about. Last week I felt the dropping away of my past, which is pretty scary. But it was accompanied by the feeling that, within certain limits, just about anything could happen. I don't necessarily have to be stuck in those patterns I've been so used to, although certain progressions need to be played out. I could even lose my addiction to chocolate! But still, my life is pretty amusing, I have to admit. Never a dull moment.

The Soap Opera

2006-02-11T22:45:00.000-08:00

The last few days haunted by a feeling of my own distancing from experience, the daily meditation feeling at times like drudgery. Whoever characterizes meditation as something that relaxes you, brings you peace – must crazy. It's like watching several TV soap operas all at once. And yet I persist.

My occasional migraines trigger waves of a specific kind of emotion that I won’t describe here. It brings up these feelings, and so much more. And the body habitually resists, jerks, like someone going cold turkey. Which in fact I suppose I am. She is. Whoever she is.

I applied Shinzen Young’s technique (which seems to work best when I am desperate), and the pain and the resistence, too, melt away -- surprisingly fast. “Empirical evidence,” if only through personal experience. In its wake is a sensory being. I remember picking up a tiny crab shell on the beach, thin and pliable as paper, bleached white by the sun and emptied completely of its contents. I feel as if an ocean wave has washed right through me, scouring me with salt and sand; I feel the fragility and impermanence of the body and its emotions, carrying within it the seeds of change, death, life, even as I clean house, type, edit, work, drive, sleep.

Young is right, as is Emily Dickinson. Pain approached in this way feels strangely purifying; in surrendering to it, one realizes that pain flows, and there is a lightness in letting go...

I remember almost drowning as a small child when an ocean wave carried me off, then eventually dumped me back on the beach. The surprise, the salty taste filling my mouth, sudden awe at the strength of the water, and utter surrender. No fear.

More and more I realize that the body is a sensitive organism upon which can be written so many things. It's absorbant; so much history inscribed into the skin, the muscles, the neurons. Every cell a memory.

Terrorism

2006-02-11T22:43:00.000-08:00

The terror of believing my work, moment by moment, has no value.

The terror of not having the usual comfort and ego coddling of relationships.

The terror of feeling & believing I am small and overwhelmed.

The terror of believing there is no one and no love for me.

But these, too, are illusions.

Sangha

2006-01-26T23:10:00.000-08:00

Today I meditated for the first time with the local Vipassana sangha. These are the folks that are going to move into the warehouse adjunct to my house and property. Everyone was very friendly. It felt good being there, despite the fact that I was in pain for much of the time I was meditating. Muscular tension and pain in my back that I didn't even notice just sitting around, became evident when I had to sit still for 45 minutes. It just sort of got magnified. Although it also moved around, so that pain that seemed to stretch all across both shoulders finally migrated over to the right side only. Interesting.

Paper Dolls

2006-01-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

OK, will somebody pleeeze explain this to me??? And what's with the ball attire???

Warrior

2006-01-22T18:07:00.000-08:00

Clarity's blog (a Slovenian Shambhala Buddhist) mentions that "The warrior draws his strength from his aloneness." I'm trying to understand that, especially in light of the relational concept of alaya/alay I posted about recently. I understand aloneness in the sense of the actual groundlessness of all being, that one ultimately can't depend on anyone or anything, because all life is change. In that sense, one is alone. At the same time, it would seem that only by maintaining an open heart can one know that one is never alone. Or something like that... Call it "beginner's mind!"

Alaya / Alay

2006-01-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

Pema Chodron on Alaya: "In Buddhism, there's this idea called the alaya. It's similar to Jung's theory of the universal unconscious. Alaya is a Sanskrit word used to describe a personal storehouse of consciousness. It contains the essence of how we perceive the world and the experiences of our individual lives, and everything that happens to us arises from it. The seeds of everything you think and say and do are buried there. And if the causal conditions come together, certain seeds will ripen. That's what happened to me that night." [She's talking about how her solitary meditation on a painful situation came to fruition in understanding, and how that understanding related to a kind of ego "death."]

In my Tagalog English dictionary, there is the word, "Alay," and a number of words stemming from alay, and they all have to do with the idea of an offering. alay n. 1) an offering. 2) offering of flowers during month of May to the Virgin Mary. 3) oblation; an offering to God. "alayan": v. to offer someone something (emphasis on the person).

Alay as an offering (I would think) assumes that the "seed" of something, power, consciousness, etc. is within, otherwise, what have you to offer? In all the variations, whether alayán, mag-alay, pag-aalay, etc. there is a strong connection with the month of May. I am reminded of the term, bayanihan n. 1)mutual aid; cooperative endeaver; cooperation; community development. While Pema Chodron's definition focuses on the "storehouse" of consciousness as an individual thing (although I understand that she also has a larger perspective not mentioned in this paragraph), in both of these Filipino terms (which I suspect are related to the sanskrit), the emphasis is strongly relational, with an emphasis on the word as an action (even when it's a noun).

Again, I'm just observing what kind of interpretation Filipinos might put on sanskrit terms often used in Buddhism (especially alaya). I assume, then, that whether the influence is Buddhist, Hindu, Christian catholic, or Christian protestant, when Filipinos take up a word / concept and utilize it in syncretic fashion, there is already some underlying world/spiritual view that inevitably shapes that word. In this case, there is some force within Filipino spirituality that shapes the concept to a more relational, communal understanding.

A common way of relating Filipino spirituality to other religions, is to see it as derivative of the "larger" or "older" spiritual traditions, and the general perception of an "older" tradition is often related to our valuation of its "technology." For example, Tibetan Buddhism is often highly valued because it has recorded much of its teachings in print -- which after all is a communication technology. Tibetan Buddhists are also valued for the cultural "complexity" surrounding their spiritual teachings, for example, their abbeys and temples, and spiritual education system.

Filipino spiritual practices, on the other hand, have been passed on orally for centuries. Who is to say that this method of transmission is actually any less complex, for the fact that the teachings are interiorized and memorized, and passed on? The problem, of course, with orally transmitted teaching, is that Western, Eastern or other cultural and spiritual values imposed or influencing through colonization or trade can easily obscure and overlay oral transmission. While many prescriptive and moral tales, spiritual and community values, healing rituals and practices can be forgotten or warped into something negative -- is there yet some essence; are there yet substantive spiritual beliefs and values that can be passed on?

Diva Mindfulness

2006-01-21T00:50:00.000-08:00

Have had a rather trying day, and in the process of "mindfulness" focused on how my internal dramas come up. There's thinking, and then there's drama, which seems to combine strong emotion + thinking, images and dialogue -- my own little film, in which I'm the star. Hmm. Do I really want to mention this online? Oh well. The point is, I get lost in internal drama far more often than I do with "just thinking." I need a label for just "acting out," or maybe a "diva" label.

The other thing I notice is that the body seems to have its own reactions, regardless of whether or not I'm mindful of thinking, dramatizing, feeling, or whatever. I feel my stomach knotting up in response to some general drama, and there doesn't seem to be much I can do about it except to watch it happen. Actually, though, noticing it does seem to keep it from getting worse, at least.

Aloneness/Oneness

2006-01-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

This business of mindfulness has been very difficult and painful for me, although there have been some beautiful moments indeed. So why do I go on with it? I have no place else to go, nobody else to go to. Tears come. There lingers the assumption of some essential aloneness. Although my readings suggest that the flipside of that is actually essential oneness with all beings, all things, which is the opposite of being alone, or perhaps it is the larger "sea" within which the sense of aloness is just a passing wave.

Yet the body believes in aloneness, and in so many things; the ideas have been etched into the body for many years. This ideology; the body has taken on so much. Does it have to?

""Although we have no actual communications from the world of emptiness, we have some hints or suggestions about what is going on in that world -- and that is, you might say, enlightenment. When you see plum blossoms, or hear the sound of a small stone hitting bamboo, that is a letter from the world of emptiness." If we can see every moment that way, we have all the communications we need." -- Shunryu Suzuki

A Question of Witchcraft

2006-01-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

Reading Barbara Andaya Watson's "Old Age: Widows, Midwives and the Question of Witchcraft in Early Modern Southeast Asia." On pdf.

Babaylan

2006-01-12T22:10:00.000-08:00

"The babaylan in Filipino indigenous tradition is a person who is gifted to heal the spirit and the body; a woman who serves the community through her role as a folk therapist, wisdom-keeper and philosopher; a woman who provides stability to the community’s social structure; a woman who can access the spirit realm and other states of consciousness and traffic easily in and out of these worlds; a woman who has vast knowledge of healing therapies." In addition to this, a babaylan is someone who "intercedes for the community and individuals" and is also someone who "serves." Any study of the Babaylan must take into consideration the suppression of the babaylanic practices since the onset of European and American colonization in the Philippines.

However, because I am strongly drawn to Buddhist (Theravada - the southeast Asian branch) meditation practice, I keep considering a question: "How does one reconcile babaylan (identity or practice) with being a Catholic or Buddhist, or some other religious practice?"

That might seem to answer the question right there: I don't have to reconcile Buddhist practice with Babaylan practice, because I'm not a Babaylan -- certainly not in the sense of a "primary" Babaylan. On the other hand, because I'm a published writer, because I have a voice in the community, because I feel a responsibility to attend to Filipina/o matters, and even to "defend" Filipinos when I think we have been misrepresented by others; and even because I am getting a few grey hairs, which in the Filipino community seems (conveniently!) to confer upon me a tiny bit of automatic respect -- sometimes the role of "Babaylan" seems to ever so slightly echo around the edges of my non-babaylan status.

More on this later...

Buddhism in the Philippines

2006-01-12T21:08:00.000-08:00

I've been curious, but haven't found much on Buddhism in the Philippines. Wouldn't you know that it would be found on Wikipedia:

"Buddhism arrived in the Philippines during the existence of Srivijaya empire from the 7th to the 13th centuries. This was followed by the arrival of Chinese immigrants and traders from the 14th to the 20th centuries who brought also with them Buddhism. The country has one of the world's 20 largest Buddhist populations, with two percent of national population.

Buddhism in the Philippines gained foothold with the rise of the Buddhist Srivijaya empire in Malaysia in the 7th century and lasted until their decline in the 13th century. Centered in Palembang, Sumatra, active trading by Chinese and Indian merchants with native tribes brought Buddhist knowledge and iconography to the country. Archeaological finds in the Philippines unearthed priceless Buddhist statues and other artifacts dating to this era. Linguistic influence also left its indelible mark, with Buddhist concepts such as dukkha (suffering) and bodhi (knowledge) entering everyday speech. The Buddhist community in the Philippines today makes up about two percent of the population. All the major schools are represented, but they are predominantly of the Mahayana sect, as it is practised mainly by the Chinese and Filipino-Chinese community, and by Vietnamese refugees that settled in the country. Buddhism, however, is growing in other sectors, with the arrival of other schools from Japan (see Nichiren, Soka Gakkai), Thailand and Sri Lanka (see Theravada) and Tibet (see Vajrayana)."

Indeed, the word, "dukha" is in my Tagalog dictionary, as "the poor; the destitute; the indigent; the needy." Now my other question is this: If the Philippines, like Mexico, has made of Catholicism a largely syncretic religion, weaving in their own indigenous rituals and practices, how have Filipinos transformed the practices and rituals of Buddhism?

Muddy Water

2006-01-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

This morning awoke to a mudslide of emotions & thoughts, all coming too fast to identify; all roiling like a river; then the body takes over in its habitual attempt to "manage" it -- headache, upset stomach, muscular tension. The strawberry has floated off somewhere down the river, and I didn't even get a bite.

Go to Bed

2006-01-11T00:55:00.000-08:00

Things have not been so great lately in my little corner of the field. I'm scrambling for work, scrambling to pay the bills. Continually feeling like I'm standing on the edge of a chasm. Perfect metaphor for groundlessness, I suppose. Tiger above, chasm below; eat the strawberry.

Meditation slips into the background. My sleep schedule has gone from fairly reasonable hours to sleeping at 1:30 am and waking early to job hunt, and then the worrying about the bills starts up, like an obnoxious radio station in my head.

I do practice mindfulness during the day, though I can't say it makes me feel better. I see and hear all kinds and forms of anger rise up, all kinds and forms of sadness, melancholy and resistance, and physical aches and pains. Tonglen seems to help, although I sometimes wonder if it's just the physiological release of taking deep slow breaths. One thing that's changed a little is that I no longer worry myself to death trying to find the perfect solution to my problems. Or rather, the worrying and the habitual attempts to discursively solve everything still go on; it's just that they don't seem to carry so much weight anymore. It's as if the problems -- well, they get solved when the time comes to solve them. Or they don't.

What to do? Nothing. It's 1:15 a.m. Eat the strawberry. Go to bed.

2006-01-07T20:48:00.000-08:00

This is an amazing zen website. There are two version, both wonderful. The second version is accessible after you visit the first.

No Excuses

2005-12-31T10:19:00.000-08:00

The local Vipassana Center has bought the warehouse and corner property next to my house and corner lot. They are renovating the place, putting in a garden, and setting up their sangha there. This is going to make it probably one of the largest Buddhist community centers in the Bay Area.

Wow!

Feeding the Hungry Ghosts

2005-12-26T11:53:00.000-08:00

I wake up on the other side of Christmas, and there are my hungry ghosts as usual, clamoring to be fed. I really don't want to deal with them. I've become very good at putting them off. In a similar way, I resist waking up to the suffering of the world around me, too.

"In this culture, we don’t know how to open our heart to ourselves. The more we do zazen, the more we realize we don’t do zazen. In the same way we realize we don’t open our heart, it opens of itself.

Are we willing to be exactly the being we are without distortion or fabrication? Am I willing to be an irritated fearful person? An anxious person? Not do I simply endure difficult feelings and wait for them to pass, but am I truly willing to be a person who has such feelings?

Our alienation from unacknowledged, rejected parts of ourselves is addressed in a ceremony we recently performed called the ceremony of nourishing the hungry ghosts. In Buddhist cosmology, a hungry ghost is described as the state of mind of lost, wandering beings absorbed by endless desire.

When we are in this state of mind we look outside ourselves to be satisfied or confirmed. In this ceremony we invite all these hungry ghost parts of ourselves to come forth and be nourished. The enactment of the ceremony makes vividly real the turning to the dark, rejected parts of ourselves as well as to the rejected parts of society, and helps open our hearts, inviting those parts into our Consciousness. We have to return to earlier states of innocence to do this practice of inviting forth the despised parts of ourselves. But it can be done. We never know when our practice will touch our own innocent heart." -- Katherine Thanas (Abbess of Santa Cruz & Monterey Zen Centers).

The Net

2005-12-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

Wishing you happy and holy days and nights.

Indra's Postmodern Net, an essay by David Loy.

On Pain

2005-12-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

Charles Tart interviews Shinzen Young. They discuss mindfulness and pain:

Charles: But I wonder about "unnecessary" pain. For instance, Shinzen, you don't have us wear hair shirts when we meditate. Hair shirts, as were used in medieval Christian mysticism, would definitely add to the pain. You don't have us lean sideways ten degrees, which would considerably increase the muscle strain and consequent physical pain.

Shinzen: Pain does two things. If it is experienced in a "skillful" way, the energy in pain will break up the knotty, hard parts of one's being. This is true whether the pain is of physical or psychological origin. On the other hand, if pain is experienced in an unskillful way, it does just the opposite, creates more knots, making a person brittle and rigid.

Therefore, there is nothing whatsoever to be said in favor of pain per se for meditators. It can just as much create new blockages as it can break up old ones. Everything depends on one's degree of skill in experiencing it. Very little depends on the intensity of the discomfort itself. A small discomfort greeted with a large amount of skill will break up old knots. A small discomfort greeted with a large lack of skill will create new knots. The same is true with respect to big discomforts. The trick is not so much to endure massive doses of pain, but to develop that skill which will allow you to get the maximum growth out of whatever happens to come up.

For example, sometimes I'll do a practice where I'll lie in bed and be completely motionless for several hours. Somewhere along the line I feel that I'd like to move part of my body in some little way. I get subtle pressures here or there. I find that if I can detect and open up to those subtle pressures completely, I really get somewhere. These minor irritations are likely to come up at any time, so if you can greet each with great skill, they are opportunities for growth.

"Skill" with sensation means to be relatively more clearly aware of the sensation and relatively more accepting of the sensation than you would be otherwise. When a person greets a minor pain with great awareness and great acceptance, then it has a much more powerful growth effect than to greet a major pain with grudging endurance. This was nicely summarized by Thomas Merton. Merton was a Christian monk with a great appreciation of the Eastern meditative traditions—-not an uncommon combination nowadays. I'm paraphrasing, but somewhere I remember him saying something like "I did not become a monk to suffer more than other people, I became a monk to suffer more effectively."

White Flag

2005-12-23T18:23:00.000-08:00

Miguel Arboleda has this moving post on racism. HERE.

Benguet

2005-12-23T18:09:00.000-08:00

Who is my visitor from Benguet, Philippines?

Just curious...

Hard to Grasp

2005-12-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, anger was very difficult for me to handle; it seemed something that would threaten to go out of control; same thing with sadness or grief. But after certain turning points in my life, they no longer have such a strong hold on me. Nowadays, I almost welcome those strong feelings because they are easy to recognize, and relatively easy to be mindful of. Now, it seems that what really throws me are feelings that are more dispersed, difficult to "grasp": malaise, vague anxieties and impulses, depression, and sometimes - just the desire to escape from awareness in some mind-dulling activity.

Jumpy

2005-12-19T14:49:00.000-08:00

It's been a very busy, jumpy day. Got a query from representatives of a television producer, asking me to quote a fee. "Please make your quote as aggressive as possible." Gad, they really talk like that! Excitation, distraction, anxiety, etc. I've been jumping around ever since; the energy level transmits into my seemingly more mundane tasks, and into my body. Equanimity, where are you?

Matthew Dallman on Ken Wilber

2005-12-18T20:59:00.000-08:00

Right here.

"...too often it is not clear from what context Wilber speaks. Chomsky has this same problem. Wilber's own philosophy says that truth is context-bound, always and everytime. Well, for example, what is the context of his famous four quadrants? What is the occassion that these four perspectives, by his own design, illuminate? On what ground does one stand to see, by turns, the four spectrums installed in this famous diagram? What are these four sides of? I ask because I see no discernible context (outside of "evolution" or "consciousness", or "the big bang", all of which it would be absurd and impossible to prove possible to "map") and thus, less and less I see truth in his four quadrants. This is no small thing. This is the cornerstone of his work. (I instead use the quadrants as a general "concept" in ways that Wilber hints at, but in my estimation, doesn't really explore in any meaningful way, and suffers as a result.)" -- Matthew Dallman

Waking Up

2005-12-17T00:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I realized that I’d have to drop the “lazy” meditation (in corpse position in bed), which got me through the first few weeks of fooling myself into returning to a meditation practice. Now it’s not enough, because my mind has become bored with it, and wanders off too much. So yesterday I sat finally using the zafu on the floor, without the heater on or warm blanket around me (it's cold in this room in the early morning!), the tight tendons in my legs "complaining" and boy did that wake me up!

I've been doing mindfulness practice during weight lifting, and it’s been surprisingly helpful in relieving aches and pains. I’ve stopped listening to music on the treadmill because it distracts me from focusing on the breath, and on the pain (when it happens). Now I turn awareness to the aches and pains, as they arise. The point, though, is not really to get rid of the pain, but to be aware of it in all its qualities and “flavors”. For some reason, this seems to release resistance or something, and despite myself the pain doesn’t linger on as it usually does. It may sound masochistic or something to observe the pain, instead of trying to forget it by listening to music or something. But actually it's a pretty interesting process. When you're not all caught up in the whole "suffering" drama, it's fascinating to just see how pain moves around the body, how it emerges in one place, and disappears in another, and to realize that it has all these different qualities.

The other challenge I have is to stay mindful in work and when focusing on bill-paying and other tedious business matters – always some resistance in those areas, in the form of distracting myself with time-wasters like browsing the internet. But I still need to be aware enough of the flow of editing work to PACE MYSELF, get up, move around on a regular basis, institute some physical balance, because editing is so strongly tied to sitting and glaring at the screen. Even this journal can be a distraction.

Yesterday, a flurry of opportunities for freelance work presented themselves – none of them immediate, unfortunately – and it was hard to keep equanimity, hard to “stay in the saddle” as Sakyong Mipham would say.

Dark Mother Kali

2005-12-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

Compelling images at Vibrata Chromodoris; see especially the aeon diptych, featuring the track of Kali.

Anger Revisited -- Ken Wilber

2005-12-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

Heh. OK, almost as if in challenge to what I just mentioned in my post below, my reaction to Ken Wilber's latest video lecture on Integral Naked ("God is a Blogger") is: Pissed off!!! Angry!!! Hurt!!! Wilber's claim that "God is growing up...from an infantile little twit to...an ethnocentric vengeance son of a bitch" to a more mature world-centric God, mimics too closely the language of evolutionary pride we see in "The White Man's Burden." Granted, he is referring to the Christian God of vengeance, or, actually, to a certain stage of God consciousness, but he is using the same polarizing language of evolutionary pride to criticize same. For all of his "pandit" erudition, Wilber seems strangely unconscious of how the language of evolution has been used to harm others, and to forestall spiritual growth. It's a language that carries with it a lot of baggage: alienation, separation, violence, grief. I do not want to "harden" around my anger. Still, anger happens; it's connected to a feeling of pain and disappointment, which I feel both physically and emotionally.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote:

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go send your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child

Take up the White Man’s burden

In patience to abide

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple

An hundred times made plain

To seek another’s profit

And work another’s gain

Take up the White Man’s burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah slowly) to the light:

"Why brought ye us from bondage,

“Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden-

Have done with childish days-

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers!

Source: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands, 1899.” Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929). Link: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/

Thinking About Anger

2005-12-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

Pema Chodron speaks of the hardening processes we go through in order to escape the “tender” pain, the sore spots of our life. She speaks of the necessity to remain fluid.

“We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us, and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society. It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others. Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground. Blame is a way in which we solidify ourselves. Not only do we point the finger when something is ‘wrong,’ but we also want to make things ‘right….Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there’s a middle way, a very powerful middle way…This middle way involves not hanging on to [our] version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Equally when we make things right, we are still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and who’s wrong?’” (When Things Fall 81-83)

This helped me immensely when I recently felt a sense of abandonment. Often I start feeling angry and resentful, and start running off a series of inner dialogues fueled by my anger, which sometimes emerge to become "outer" rants. And if these rants get "picked up" by others, it can continue on into a full-scale argument. But I realized that behind all that, and at the core of it was just a very painful feeling of separation; so I simply felt the pain, stayed with it. Realized that all that other stuff, the anger stuff was extra.

I’m thinking about the angry/blaming posture that many writers and scholars in ethnic studies have. The fencing off that we do around our ethnicity makes us feel tough. But I wonder to what extent we subvert ourselves? How do we deal with and point out the real problems of racism and the commodification (as in the sex trafficking trade) of women and Filipinos and NOT get hung up in the blaming and anger? It's necessary to feel the anger. But also important not to get lost in it. Survival requires fluidity, openness to change. Too much hardening makes one brittle, or routes one into a habitual round of conflict.

In terms of people making stupid remarks about one’s ethnicity or race, or worse, instituting legislative policy based on conscious or unconscious racism and ideology, I see how we harden around the initial pain, and even fetishize that hardening effect as a way of shoring up our confidence against the pain of feeling that maybe one doesn’t really measure up to dominant standards. There’s a kind of ganging up action that I see (which I think is a common way to deal with anger on the group level -- but I see this as different from, say, grouping together to participate pro-actively to deal with a problem). I'm not saying that this hardening effect is bad in itself, but rather that its effectiveness only goes so far. It’s one thing to point to something and say “this is wrong” and it’s another to get off on the feeling of righteousness, which, inflated, seems to me to just distract from the core problem: both the personal pain, and the larger collective pain and grief of a people who have been forgotten, marginalized, abused.

In the U.S., anger tends to be encouraged, over expressions of grief.

Vipassana and Kali

2005-12-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

I'm curious to compare some aspects of the Southeast Asian Vipassana practice (which is essentially meditative) and the practice of Kali, the Philippine martial art which, it seems to me, incorporates a kind of meditation-in-action. I'm not very knowledgeable of either of these, to be honest. But I'm curious, partly because of the emphasis that Vipassana puts on one's relationship to and awareness of physical experience as a path to enlightenment. I'm wondering to what extent Kali cultivates a meditative awareness, especially since it appears to be such a combative form. Is Kali a path that leads to other "places" besides combat? Is there a clearly spiritual aspect to Kali?

Woke Up This Morning

2005-12-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

There's a song by Alabama Three; the lyrics say, "Woke up this morning, with a blue moon in her eye..."

Woke up this morning full of doubt about my capabilities, fearful, not sure if I can do what needs to be done; worried about getting older; resentful of having to do certain kinds of work, while what I consider the meaningful work languishes. If nothing else; my body tenses up around these thoughts and feelings.

When there's multiple layers of worries and fears, it's hard to deal with. The impulse is to tense up. I feel it. I think it, the confusion. The feelings course in waves and pulses around the body. I feel it, I feel it.

Woke up tired, and not quite able to hold up the walls between me and the world. That is the problem with tiredness. So when feeling happens, when the hurts and soreness, the tenderness of the world is felt, one struggles to resist. One is less able to resist, and thus there seems to be more likelihood of headaches, stumbling, muscle soreness.

The End of Suburbia, the Glut of Christmas...

2005-12-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

So here we are, once again in the Holiday season. How are you feeling? Do you feel compelled to spend money on gifts, to run to the supermarket to cook the expected feast? Or have you found a different way to approach this season? Leny Strobel has been contemplating acts of giving, generosity, and community, against the backdrop (or is it now the very ground we stand upon?) of our disturbing times. Check it out on her website, Kathang-Pinay.

Mindful of Racism

2005-12-01T11:04:00.000-08:00

Bell Hooks and Pema Chodron on When Things Fall Apart.

Good Medicine

2005-11-30T16:22:00.000-08:00

Alice Walker and Pema Chodron discuss the practice of Tonglen and "Awakening Compassion" in this lengthy and interesting interview, "Good Medicine for This World." Via Shambhala.

Dogen Sangha Blog

2005-11-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

Brad's teacher, 86 yr old Gudo Wafu Nishijima just started a blog, Dogen Sangha Blog, to which I have linked.

Breaking Through Pain

2005-11-29T14:37:00.000-08:00

A useful essay on using mindfulness meditation to work through pain. By Shinzen Young. Although Shinzen advises that this type of mindfulness will not necessarily get rid of your pain, and could even temporarily make it worse (!), in fact I focused on the (migraine) pain and accompanying sensations and resistances as advised, and it did help -- a lot! Especially when I focused on the resistance. What I like about Shinzen Young is his practical knowledge of the subtleties of body experience, and how to deal with them mindfully. There are a lot of good articles on his website, Meditation in Action.

Positive is Negative

2005-11-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

In relation to what I just posted below, the other thing I've discovered in my journey to whatever, is the negativity associated with positive thinking. They kinda go together, you know? As Brad says in Hardcore Zen:

"Take positive thinking, for example. It sounds real nice, but what really happens when you try and concentrate on supposedly positive thoughts or images? We create our image of "positive" things by contrasting them with those states we consider "negative." So each time we envision some positive state, we are really envisioning all the negatives that contrast with it at the very same time. The negative stuff appears in our mind somewhere below conscious level, but is has to be there because without it, that which we consider positive cannot exist."

I Like Being Irritated

2005-11-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

Joko Beck's message (below) reminds me of my realization, recently, that despite all my protests, sometimes I do detect a desire to be irritated, angry, pissed. I kind of enjoy it, or get some satisfaction from it, even though it's bound up with other things not enjoyable -- which eventually makes anger tiresome and weary. But in a way, anger and irritation is good, because at least it's closer to the underlying sorrow or fear. Distance or coldness makes it harder to be aware of that, making it harder to let go of it.

Hard Words

2005-11-27T09:37:00.000-08:00

...Let's look at some sentences: "I feel irritated. I feel annoyed. I feel happy." What we omit is: "I feel I am hurt by you. I feel I have been made happy by you."

Actually, the fact is not that you irritate me, it's that i have a desire to be irritated. You may loudly protest, "oh, never, I certainly don't want to feel irritated or hurt..." Well, just for a few years (intelligently, in the second pool). The first and uncomfortable years of sitting make it clearer and clearer that my desire is to be irritated or angry (separate). That's almost all I have known as a means to preserve and protect what I think is my identity. With continued avareness, it dawns that there is only one person who can irritate me or make me feel lonely and depressed, and it is myself -- myself as a false identity.

We begin to see a strange and lethal truth: contrary to our beliefs, our basic drive and all our life fore goes into a struggle to perpetuate our separateness, our touchiness, or self-rightoeousness. -- Charlotte Joko Beck, The Pools.

Train Wreck

2005-11-26T11:21:00.000-08:00

Opening up my mail feels like going to the site of a train wreck and looking for survivors. The horror! What bill (or more than one bill) will appear that I can't pay this month? This is probably the best mindfulness training I could possibly do. I will become the Mother Teresa of my mail. I wonder if it all doesn't start at that moment of simply not wanting to look, not wanting to feel the pain. So you cover it over, forget it, deny it. And all the while the hole in your life becomes bigger, deeper, scarier looking.

I’d like to get to know my mail better. The task of moving mail. It's housekeeping. Service, even. I suppose it's like moving dust (as Gary Thorp reminds me in Sweeping Changes). There's a little cosmos in the bits of dust that I sweep or vacuum. There are bits of lives attached to the mail that comes to me. People working in offices, trying to pay their own bills. My life and theirs. Much of the paper mail I receive is as needy as I am. Much of it makes demands on me. I have somehow entered into a relationship with my mail—a very close relationship. So I attend to it, allow it in through the door, and sweep it out again. But not without fear and trepidation, I must admit.

The Urge to Graffitti

2005-11-26T11:05:00.000-08:00

What I like about Wilber's work is that it makes me want to go back and read Habermas, Hegel, Saussure, all those guys and more -- where previously, the thought of re-reading these theorists just made me feel tired and hopeless. Just another round of hopeless thinking to be thinking, arguing to argue. Nevertheless, I do occasionally feel like hacking into his website and drawing a mustache on his mug, and fringy toupee on his head. Hah!

Destabilizing

2005-11-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

The PROBLEM with my reading of Wilber is that his work destabilizes a lot of the thought patterns, and even emotional patterns that I’ve depended on for the last decade or more, particularly the pluralistic and what he calls the "ethnocentric" positioning of my academic studies and writing. To be honest, I’ve been moving out of that position now for the last few years, but haven’t really SEEN that until now. Early in my graduate studies I went through a brief period of wanting to counteract some of the contradictions and prejudices I saw among my own friends and colleagues; especially the hypocrisy of the [pseudo] empirical approach embedded in postmodern studies, and even in ethnic studies, the contradictions of denying hierarchies even as we create and maintain them. My writing has gotten less bound up in my ethnic identity. Yet, it’s still important, the Filipino experience; I think there is something of value there, in the way Filipinos express value, relationally, in what Filipinos can say about colonial and post-colonial experience.

I like the idea of coming at my work from a position that integrates the (empirical) senses, intellect, spiritual practice and social practice. I don’t quite understand (remember) all of Wilber’s voluminous theories, though, I have to admit [have been reading Marriage of Sense & Soul]. But I love the idea that each mode of human cognition does not have to exclude the other.

There are aspects of Wilber's work that disturb me, though. Aspects that I guess would categorize me as being squarely in the Green Meme.

On Ken Wilber, meditation and a few other things...

2005-11-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

I started out writing all this in a diary on my computer, when I realized that I was starting a meditation practice again, although at this time it's not formal, I mean, I am not associated with a specific sangha. Then realized that the blog form would make it easier for me to keep track of my thoughts, and that I wouldn't mind a little feedback. Maybe. So I'm downloading some of it here, and then will continue to put parts of the diary here.