When Things Aren't Going Your Way Change Direction

Lessons from travel:

Our trip to Ireland was loosely planned. We had general geographic locations, but no specific sites -- save one. The Aran Islands off the west coast. I'd been in love with them since I was a child and saw a photo essay in Life or Look or some other magazine I'd picked up some Sunday at my grandmother's house. They were desolate, spare, intriguing.

So the plan, then, once we got to Galway was to get up early and catch the first ferry at 10:30 to Inishmore. The second ferry didn't leave til 1.

We didn't make it. My traveling companion slept late and moved slowly, not feeling well. I miscalculated the distance. The drive was lovely, 80km an hour down narrow roads lined with stone walls, occasional ruins, and spare, bleak coastline. The clouds hung like a low ceiling so that you'd have to duck your head.

I assumed the ferry would have some touristy attractions, coffee shops, shopping shops, around it, basing my ferry experience on Cape Cod. The ferry from Ros a' Mhíl to Inis Mor is surrounded by fisheries and parking lots. We bought tickets and headed back to the main road, turning left (because left turns are easier when you're driving on the left), and heading into Connemara.

Connemara -- gorgeous word -- is in the Gaeltacht, where Irish is the language of everyday life. The signs were incomprehensible with words containing long strings of vowels and odd combinations of consonants, at least to our English-reading brains. We stopped in the first place that had more than two buildings and a bunch of parked cars. The best option was a coffee shop, where the vegan ate eggs and the gluten-sensitive person had fish and chips. The signs on the walls were in Irish.


The only other customers were a young family, father, mother, and round, potato-faced, happy toddler. He and I discovered we could play peekaboo around his mother's shoulder. He said something about me to his parents, who looked over, then laughed at him. (I'm guessing it was along the lines of "There's a funny lady." Look. "She's not funny -- you're funny!")

When we left, I said bye-bye. The family said something incomprehensible and long, that served as bye-bye.

We stopped in the grocery store for ferry snacks, and the clerk spoke to my companion in Irish. Companion apparently declined to get a bag for her purchases, walking over to me with full arms and a puzzled expression.

It was delightful, a step through the looking glass into another world.

The lesson? We could have been grumpy when things didn't go as planned. I was, in fact, wearing my cranky-pants as we parked the car, lamenting the short time we'd have on the island. "Well," my wise companion said, "There hours is better than not going there."

Aha.

And being open to what the moment offers brings you unexpected delights.

Life is an auspicious coincidence.

The zen of air travel

I am on a lonely road, and I am traveling
Looking for some thing. What can it be?
I hate you some I hate you some I love you some
I love you when I forget about me
(Joni Mitchell)

Serious travel takes me to a zen state. I say this knowing something about Zen -- not a lot, but more than marketers who talk about the zen of yoghurt, for example. Serious travel, involving airports and and airplanes and ground transportation, is best dealt with by letting go of expectations, dropping preferences, and abandoning the concepts of good and bad. Getting frustrated about missing or broken planes only leads to suffering. You are in this airport now -- and for an undetermined number of hours, and no one will tell you how many hours that might be. They will tell you only what you could observe for yourself: you are in an airport and you are not inflight, even if the sign at the gate says the flight is on time for a time that has long passed.

See what I mean?

You can't take it personally. There's no god or karma that's going to inconvenience hundreds of other people to get back at you for something you did.

So you sit -- or stand in line -- with whatever comes and observe your reaction. How does the mind that is angry see things? And how about the mind that is simply aware?

No problems so far this trip. I'm just being at the airport.

The bartender of your mind*

I've been working lately with the Buddha's Third Foundation of Mindfulness -- aka Minfulness of Mind/Thoughts/Mind States or Consciousness of Consciousness, all ways I've seen the term citta translated.

The first foundation is mindfulness of body. Know that you are in your physical form and how that feels.

The second foundation is feeling tones. We find what's going on pleasant or unpleasant, or we're neutral.

The third is, traditionally, mind states -- what are the lenses that color your view? The Buddha identified lust, hatred, contraction, ignorance, and other states that affect how we perceive things. The idea is not (in this teaching) to judge particular ones as good or bad or to cultivate certain states; it's just to know that they're there.

The way to figure out the mind state that is coloring your view is to look at the thoughts.

Here are the first three foundations in action: You smell a hamburger cooking. The smell is merely an odor picked up your senses. You react -- it smells good/it smells revolting/eh. The thoughts coming rushing in: Mmmmm, hamburger. I'm hungry. Seared flesh! The horror! What's going on up there? (Pleasant/unpleasant/neutral)

The sensation sparks the feeling tone which sparks the thought which leads to action. In the worldly, untrained mind.

But if you are trained to be aware of thoughts rather than pulled around by them, you realize that you can choose how to act. And you can avoid the poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion -- along with the ramifications of eating everything whose aroma crosses your path or walking around feeling cranky about flesh-eaters foisting their smells on the world.

Try this:
After doing some shamatha meditation, invite in the thoughts. Let your awareness be like a bartender* and your thoughts like the customers. You welcome the thoughts in, make small talk, take their orders, serve them, and move on to the next thought customer.

You take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts. They belong in the bar of your mind, as much as your awareness does. You notice things about them -- do they come in a large chatty group? Are they combative? Gossipy? Is there one sitting off by the side, repeatedly trying to get your attention? What's that about?

You don't get overly involved with any one of them because you have a constant stream of thought customers coming in. You note which ones are regulars (habitual patterns), and which are newcomers.

You're aware of them, engaged with them, but you are not them. And from this you learn that you are not your thoughts. They don't define you.

Oh, and thoughts leave good tips -- though they tend to subtle and informational. They won't buy you a drink.

*If making your mind a bartender raises resistance, try a clerk at an ice cream shop, bakery, juice bar, lunch counter, or anywhere that one being is waiting on others.

What are we practicing?

The painful thing is that when we buy into disapproval, we are practicing disapproval. When we buy into harshness, we are practicing harshness. The more we do it, the stronger these qualities become. How sad it is that we become so expert at causing harm to ourselves and others. The trick then is to practice gentleness and letting go. We can learn to meet whatever arises with curiosity and not make it such a big deal. 

-- Pema Chodron

Just be

One day, when Osel Rangdrol was a boy -- when he was still Osel Rangdrol -- his father called him over. "Come here," he said. The boy, who was around 10 then, hesitated, expecting that he would be drilled on homework or assigned work to do. "Come here," his father said again, with no hint of what would be asked.
The boy waited, then gave in to the inevitable and walked to his father's side.
"Let's just be," his father said.
Just be? the boy wondered, accustomed to being instructed. But there were no more instructions, just a boy and his dad sitting together with no tests, no pressure, just a moment.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche told that story at the Being Brave Shambhala Sangha Retreat at Karme Choling. He was the boy; his father was the venerable Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of the Shambhala Buddhist lineage.
The Sakyong gave many teachings during the five-day retreat, but I was especially touched by this one -- which he described as his first transmission from his father. He's received many more complicated transmissions, he said, but none more profound.
(The photo shows Chogyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham, date uncertain.)
Perhaps this struck me as particularly poignant because I think a lot of us received similar transmissions. I know I did. My dad used to sit on the front porch on summer evenings, smoking cigarettes and observing the world. Being. Sometimes my grandfather, who lived upstairs in the house where we lived downstairs, would join him. Maybe they'd talk politics or baseball. But the talk wasn't the point. Being was.
The neighborhood kids were part of the passing scene, rolling back and forth with the flow of our games. When the streetlights came on and we headed home, he would just be there.
Often on summer evenings, as the light begins to change, as the heat sinks into the asphalt, I wander out onto my front steps. My hands ache for the ritual of taking a cigarette from a pack, lighting it, and watching the smoke and the day dissipate. I don't smoke; my dad died from cancer that showed up first in his lungs -- I recognize the longing for what it is.
I sit, sometimes on the porch steps, more often on my cushion upstairs. The quality of light changes. The day dims.
Let's just be.

The benefits of loving-kindness meditation

"Eleven advantages are to be expected from the release of heart/mind by [the absorbed] practice of loving-kindness (metta), by constantly increasing thoughts of loving-kindness, by regarding loving-kindness as a vehicle and as something to be treasured, by living according to loving-kindness, by putting these sentiments into practice, and by establishing them. What are the eleven? The practitioner:

• (1) sleeps in comfort, 
• (2) awakes in comfort, 
• (3) sees no bad dreams, 
• (4) is dear to human beings, 
• (5) is dear to non-human beings, 
• (6) is protected by devas, 
•  (7) is safe from fire, poison, and swords, 
• (8) concentrates the mind quickly, 
• (9) is of serene countenance, 
• (10) passes away free of confusion, (
• 11) and if one does not attain full enlightenment here and now in this very life is reborn in a brahma world [a literal divine abode].

Mettanisamsa Sutta

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

John Cleese, one of the creators of Monty Python, outlines “the five factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative.” The first four, at least, are common results of a meditation practice:

1. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)
2. Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)
3. Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)
4. Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)
5. Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

Many meditators would argue that practice also inevitably leads to #5. When you watch your mind operating, sometimes the only appropriate response is laughter.

(Cleese is on the far left in the photo of Monty Python's Flying Circus from April 1976. From left to right: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones.