Thoughts Happen

Harry Potter and the Bleary-eyed Writer

Care to guess what magical object from the world of Harry Potter I most wish was more than a figment of J. K. Rowling’s imagination about now? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the Invisibility Cloak, flying Quidditch broom or Sneakoscope.

Here’s another hint: I was particularly wishing I had one after the third night this week of waking up with a start at oh-dark-thirty in the morning with a stream of tumbling thoughts and ideas that kept me from falling asleep again for god knows how many hours.

 Give up? It’s the Pensieve, that magical apparatus that lets you siphon thoughts and memories out of your mind into a vial to store until just the right time to retrieve them again. To remember the stored thoughts you pour the vial’s contents into the Pensieve bowl and plunge your face in until it all comes back to you.

I’ve experienced multi-day middle-of-the-night creative episodes once or twice a year for the past several years now, so I know the pattern is that they eventually burn out and my life goes back to pretty much normal again, with the addition of several kick-ass new ideas and renewed inspiration for following them. In fact it was about two years ago that the concept of the Thoughts Happen blog came to me that way, right down to the color scheme and basic graphic elements, unusual for me as I am normally quite graphically challenged.

So I’m not knocking the creative energy, but what is it about the middle of the night that opens the floodgates? Could I maybe program myself to be that creative while, say, folding laundry instead? Because it sure wreaks havoc on my waking hours. But if I had a Pensieve I could keep on my nightstand, I could just siphon off all those exciting but sleep-depriving thoughts until the morning and wake up refreshed.

Wouldn’t it be awesome for meditation, too? Sit down to meditate only to immediately take off down some rabbit hole of the mind? Simply touch a wand to your temple and whoosh, off those troublesome thoughts go until later. I suppose that would be cheating, though. And the way some of my sittings go, I wouldn’t need siphoning so much as a drainage ditch.

But in the muggle world we’ve got to learn to do it the hard way — dealing with our thoughts as they come up one by one, hopefully attaining some clarity along the way and not taking any of them too seriously.

And I suppose going to bed a little earlier wouldn’t hurt either.

Photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/robotbrainz/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Salt of the Earth—Goodbye, Chelsea

A 17-year-old girl, Chelsea King, went missing last week after leaving on a run from a neighborhood east of here; her parents were on TV, pleading for any information. Search parties went out for days, and then the headline in the paper. Arrest made—man charged with murder and rape, although they still didn’t know where the girl was.

The more I meditate, the more I feel things. And it’s damn uncomfortable. No wonder more people don’t do it.

In the past few months I’ve noticed a shift in my perception. I think my boundaries are starting to blur, like the salt paintings I remember doing as a kid. We’d wet a piece of paper, sprinkle salt all over it until it stuck, dab a moistened brush into our watercolors and lightly paint onto the salt surface. Any design we made would instantly expand, the colors wicking through the salt for a blurry kaleidoscopic effect.

I feel like I’ve got too much salt on me.

 I’m sick to my stomach. The girl is a straight-A student, plays French horn, is on the cross-country team. “The kind of girl who wants to change the world,” her father says on TV. I think of my own daughter, and I just can’t take it all in. The parents aren’t strangers, Those Poor People, but for a few moments, they are me, and she is my daughter. My daughter missing. Not as if she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

Other people are seeming less Other to me lately. We watched the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver on TV, the day after the girl went missing, and a choir from Sochi, Russia, all tuxes and deep blue gowns, came out to sing their national anthem as part of the passing-the-flag ceremony. Before, I would have thought, “Look at those Russians,” but what went across my mind this time was, “Aren’t people interesting.” Their sapphire blue started to bleed all over me.

Yesterday, they find the body, buried in a shallow grave at the edge of a lake. Oh God, is all I can think. The Parents. But sadly, they have become Those Poor People again. My defenses have kicked in, and once again they are separate from me. What a loss.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/katietegtmeyer/ / CC BY 2.0

The Art of Being Human

 A little over three years ago, I downloaded an audiobook to my iPod shuffle, pushed Play, and heard the author’s reassuring voice saying, “This very moment is the perfect teacher.” It felt like she was speaking directly to me. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have this experience upon hearing the opening words of Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times,” but the book seemed to be a custom-made prescription for my own difficult times, and it was on steady rotation on my iPod for months. I also eventually picked up the hardcopy too in order to refer to specific passages.

Chodron is an American-born Buddhist nun in the Shambhala tradition who teaches about the very human aspects of the spiritual journey, and emphasizes developing lovingkindness towards oneself and a “fiercely compassionate attitude” towards the pain and the joys we all experience. She also talks a lot about bravery and the courage of the spiritual warrior.

I didn’t feel like a spiritual warrior when I started listening to Chodron. I felt like someone who was trying to make it through the next day without falling into a pit. But I was intrigued by her approach to meditation, which didn’t emphasize benefits such as lowering your blood pressure, but rather that meditation can be a method of consciously training the mind in developing a nonjudgemental attitude of unconditional compassion towards ourselves. This is a very powerful thing, because in order to have compassion for others, we must first genuinely experience it from ourselves.

 So I tried it, and began meditating on my own at home. But eventually I felt the need to reach beyond my own living room, so I turned to the almighty Google and found the San Diego Shambhala Meditation Center. I took the plunge (developing my bravery!), showed up for a Sunday morning sitting meditation and was given initial instruction from a senior member there. To my relief and delight, the people I met at the Center were welcoming and friendly without being (as I had feared) hippieish or just plain weird. In fact, they were refreshingly normal, and I felt right at home.

A few months later I attended my first Shambhala Training weekend, titled “The Art of Being Human,” and the rest, as they say, is history. The Shambhala path has been incredibly enriching to both me and my husband, without claiming any kind of exclusive rights to the one best way. Plus, nobody has ever expected me to wear a shapeless robe, become a vegetarian or give up my Christian affiliation.

For readers in the San Diego area (or those willing to travel to our fair city), the San Diego Shambhala Meditation Center is again offering The Art of Being Human as a weekend training on March 5-7, 2010. From the brochure:

The program is a secular meditation training that develops fearlessness, confidence and openness toward ourselves and others. By looking directly at our own experience, we discover a continuity of awareness underlying the changing conditions that make up our lives. Connecting with this wholesome, wakeful presence enables us to experience life fully and directly. In Shambhala this is referred to as “basic goodness” and is seen as our birthright.

Making this opportunity known is one small offering I can give to the Center in gratitude for the thoughtful engagement, gentle encouragement and genuine camaraderie I have found there. Click here for more details

For those outside the San Diego area, the Shambhala.org web site lists directories of centers around the world.

It's a Wonderful Path

I spent the past two days at a meditation training weekend, which basically means I spent a lot of time sitting with my thoughts. This is both easy (what could be easier than sitting around all weekend?), and hard (with no distractions, I have to face everything that’s going on between my ears).

 Fortunately, the sitting is broken up with periods of walking meditation, which I particularly enjoy. To me, walking meditation is more than just a break to get my circulation going and fend off drowsiness. I see it as a simple footbridge between sitting on the cushion and everything else, what we somewhat humorously call “post-meditation.” Walking is such a basic element of humanity that I figure if I can do that mindfully, there’s a smidgen of hope that maybe I can bring some of the calm, stillness and equanimity that I (sometimes) find on the cushion into the rest of my life.

Walking meditation also has a very strong connection to the path quality of practice, and life. Pema Chodron says, “The path ... is not prefabricated. It doesn’t already exist. The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience ... It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us.” We can’t see where we’re going, because it doesn’t exist until we create it. We can only see where we’ve been. I find this incredibly hopeful, particularly as I reflect on my own life over the past several years and see the path I have created simply by the choices I’ve made and the steps I've taken. I look forward to the unfolding of that path with each step.

Photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Meditation Marathon in New York City Today

via blog.beliefnet.com

"Why We Meditate: Sittin' In The Morning Sun, Sittin' When The Evening Come," comes from the self-described "Buddhist Blog for Everyone," One City. These folks are meditating 24 hours straight starting 7pm EST November 6—some in shifts, some for the duration, in a storefront in New York as a fundraiser for the Interdependence Project. The ID Project's blog, podcasts and videos available to anyone on the Internet are a wealth of incisive, thought-provoking discussion on meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism and related topics with an emphasis on what I would call "street-level dharma" based on how we really live right here, right now. A great resource for anyone interested in investigating our interdependence.   

Zen Mind, Vacation Mind

I recently meditated on New York City for a week. Technically it was a family vacation, but even though we hauled our asses all over Manhattan until our feet ached and we inhaled a year’s worth of secondhand smoke, I felt refreshed, and no wonder. I was practicing Vacation Mind.

There is no “Before We Left” in Vacation Mind. There is no “After We Get Back” in Vacation Mind. There is only Right Now, as in Right Now, I am completely immersed in the Arms and Armor collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and even though the sum total  that I have ever thought about Arms and Armor before now has probably added up to a few random hours while reading “King Arthur,” I can somehow find nothing so fascinating, at least for the next 20 minutes.

Ditto for Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, the view from the Empire State Building and the tacky glory that is Times Square. If meditation is placing the mind completely on one object, then I think I meditated plenty on subway signs, walk signals, maps and menus.

No wonder the root of “vacation” is “vacate.” We vacated our normal lives for six blissful days of Right Now, where the most important thing we had to worry about was which train do we take to get from the Lower East Side to Midtown, and our most pressing decision was should we do Tibetan, Turkish or Brazilian for dinner. The nagging minutiae of our Non-Vacation lives was left behind.

After we got back I thought about Vacation Mind, wondering if I could trick the ol’ mind into believing it was still on vacation, that worry-free state of contentment in the Now, for even a few minutes a day. But instead of New York City it would be — CVS! Could I manage to take a mini-vacation in the toothpaste aisle, meditating on the boxes of Crest and Colgate to the exclusion of everything else?

Not sure how well that’s going to work out, but if you’re in Southern California and see me at the drugstore staring entranced at stacks of toilet paper, don’t bother me. I’m on vacation.