How We See Things

Earlier this week, there was an incident in the Tour de France between the two top guys that kicked up a lot of conversation and debate.  Amongst all the heated comments that folks were posting online, one person made the brilliant (and obvious) observation that everyone who liked the one guy to begin with was on his side and everyone who like the other guy was on his side.  Of course!  We all see things the way we see them because that is how we are looking at them. 

If you have never watched one of The Yes Men movies, I recommend it.  They are fantastic hoaxsters who tell the truth by impersonating people from gigantic corporations and saying things they would never say.  The amazing thing about what they do is that they are trying to shock people awake, but the people they are talking to are often so entrenched in their perspective that they don’t hear what they are saying (the way I hear what they are saying).  We watched The Yes Men Fix the World last night and it struck me that it is the same thing as the cycling fans.  People already know what they believe and what is important to them, so they hear what they hear based on that.

 I have been having the experience this week of feeling sad, sort of disappointed and frustrated, and have noticed that when I think something is a problem, suddenly everything that happens is evidence of what a problem it is.  I see everything in a way that fits into my view.  (If you really think about this it can make your brain feel weird).  I guess this blog post is about satya, truthfulness.  How can we even practice truthfulness?  How can I practice being in reality, when all I know is what my reality is?  It would seem like acknowledging that my reality is not everyone’s reality or even anyone’s reality is a good place to start.

I have only read a couple chapters of Daniel Siegel’s new book, The Mindful Therapist, and so far he has talked a lot about being able to move toward a place of possibilities.  (I don’t really need to say here that this is my own view at this moment in time of what I have read).  He’s basically saying that being present means being open to all the possibilities that exist in a given moment.  I think in Buddhism this is called emptiness—that any moment is full of infinite potential.

So, as a conditioned human, I am bound to take a limited perspective.  But knowing that allows me to step back and widen my view if I choose to.  And when I take that wider view, it seems I am closer to “what is” or satya.  One way of thinking about spiritual practice is that we are moving toward freedom.  Hanging on to my limited view clearly doesn’t provide as much freedom as infinite possibilities.

Where Nike and Yoga Meet: Just Do It

The topic of the month at The Samarya Center is shaucha (cleanliness or purity). This week, I have been thinking about the shaucha of not procrastinating. For instance, we have one of those pet fountains at our place, which I think is great and I hate to clean. Today, I looked at it and thought that it needed cleaning and just did it right then. It turned out, as it often does when I do things I “hate,” that once I was doing it, it really wasn’t that bad. And then I get that good feeling that comes with having done something that needed doing. When I am able to follow through on things like that, my mind-clutter definitely seems reduced—all the conversation about how I should do it, but I don’t want to, all the internal nagging is gone. Ahh, shaucha.

Something else that has been on mind is the fact that the Seattle to Portland bike ride is this weekend. My husband will be riding it (in one day!) for the second time. Last year after he did it, I decided I would like to do it this year (but in two days). Then, toward the end of the summer, I had an idea for a book and I got very excited about it. I started on it right away before the motivation passed and became more mind-clutter. Sometime in December, it dawned on me that it wasn’t realistic to work on the book and train for the STP at the same time—both would require a lot of time on my days off. I chose the book. And ended up doing neither.

Now I won’t say that I haven’t spent any time feeling bad about that (for more on feeling bad, see the last post), but I’m over that now—that’s what happened. But I am curious about how it happened. Here’s a brief synopsis: Early in the year, I lost momentum with the book—to be expected, I imagine, with a big project, energy and optimism ebbs and flows. Writing then became a “have-to,” which makes it considerably less likely to happen. When the weather started getting better (which was a non-linear progression this year in Seattle), I started having these internal battles between riding my bike and writing my book. Often, I would try to write first, because that was what I chose as my project (I had to), while simultaneously thinking both that I wanted to go on a ride and that I should go on a ride. I wouldn’t be making much progress on the writing and would wait so long to go on the ride that I wouldn’t have time or the weather would change. Eventually, I didn’t bother even going into the folder on my computer with all of the book-related stuff and by then I all I could think about was how out-of-shape I was and how hard it was going to be to ride my bike.

Basically, the mind-clutter was piled high. All sorts of lies and useless nonsense like making riding and writing an either/or, the shoulds, the procrastination rationalizations. Sorting that out is interesting, but when I look at the whole process, it seems to me that all the conversation, regardless of the exact content, was the thing that caused the suffering of inactivity. Which brings us back around to my original point about shaucha. If I want to create more clarity and cleanliness in my mind, then I can just do something instead of thinking and talking about it. It seems that as soon as I start “trying to decide” what to do, I may very well not end up doing anything. All of the debating and persuading and arguing does not create clarity of purpose or intention, it just creates mind-clutter and serves to keep me paralyzed.

I’ll end my story by sharing about my day today. I had committed to myself that I would work on the book because I wanted to, so I spent a couple of fairly productive hours on that and enjoyed it. Then I had a pause and looked up and saw how beautiful the day was and thought I’d go for a ride around the lake, so I got up, got ready and headed out. I can spend a lot of time on a ride with my mind-clutter, but I didn’t debate whether or not I’d go around the lake, I just went. And I didn’t look at my little gauge to see how fast or slow I was going, how far I’d gone, how long I’d been riding, I just rode. Ahh, shaucha.

Feeling Bad Just Leads to Feeling Bad

I’ve been wanting to post on my blog, but I have been watching the Tour de France.  Sometimes, when I am choosing that instead of writing something, I wonder if I should feel bad.  It suddenly seemed clear to me yesterday that the answer is no.  If I am practicing ahimsa (non-harming), then the answer is always no.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of disappointment or a realization that I didn’t use my time wisely or that I don’t look back and think, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”  Just that there are no circumstances that require me to be ridiculed, put down and made to feel bad.  None.  Now, I have heard this many times, but I feel like I am understanding it in some new way.  The process of feeling bad just leads to feeling bad—it doesn’t lead to making better choices (despite the fact that most of us believe that).

A couple of people in my life have led me to think lately about shame and what a powerful and devastating feeling it is.  That a person can be going through a really difficult experience and feel it is so horrible and embarrassing that she needs to hide it, which just multiplies the suffering exponentially.  We so want to be seen and loved and yet remove any possibility of actually being seen and loved by hiding who we are.  And the really awful thing is that when we expose these terrible parts of ourselves, we often find that we’re not the only one, that other people understand, that we are actually not a mutant freak.

My mom was adopted and as an adult found her biological mother, who was probably in her seventies by then.  Her mother was still so afraid that anyone would find out that she had had a baby some thirty years ago that she did not want to have any contact with my mom.  After she died, my mom did get in touch with some relatives who immediately said, “Oh, we always knew you were out there somewhere” and wanted to meet and spend time with her.  Everybody knew!  It makes me sad to think about this woman living in fear and shame for NO REASON.

So much of our suffering is caused by shame and the feeling that something about us is so terrible that it needs to be hidden.  Overcoming this requires ahimsa and develops ahimsa.  And a step toward accepting the unacceptable in ourselves would be to stop feeling bad about watching too much t.v. or eating too many french fries or smoking a cigarette or saying something mean.  I can recognize that it’s not what I want to do, that it’s not getting me where I want to go, that it’s not helpful or effective or healthy or whatever . . . but I don’t need to feel bad.  Real self-study can’t happen without non-violence toward myself, otherwise I hide, even from myself.

Here's a great quote by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:  "You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of!   That is the basis for telling the truth."  So I’m here to say that at work I never wash my fork, I just lick it off and put it in the drawer for the next time.  I also pick my nose and will spend a lot of time over the next couple weeks watching bicycle racing.  How about you?