Daily Dharma 02: Do Good Work

(Guest post by David from DailyDharma.net)

Day 2: Do Good Work.

“Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.” – Garrison Keillor

So many of my friends come to me from time to time and say, “I’m just so unhappy at work.” I understand. I sympathize with them, because at times I have been very unhappy with my job, too. But in order to lead a happy life, an unavoidable step is to put your soul into the work you do — even if it means learning to love an unlovable job.

Photo by Daquella Manera.

Today, Do the Best Job You Can

I used to commiserate with them, tell them I disliked my work too, discussed the possibility we had not found our callings, and fantasized with them about quitting.

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The Way of Unlearning

I read this post awhile ago on the blog “The Zennist” (not the dark zen newsletter by same name), and just came back to it tonight. I really feel that this touches on the point that I’m at right now. I need to unlearn alot of things in order to allow my mind to be open to many of the new concepts I’ve been studying and learning when it comes to Zen and Buddhism in general. My teacup is full so to speak, and I need to empty it.

Here’s a copy of the post…

Daily Dharma 01: Be Present. Live Here and Now

(Guest post by David from DailyDharma.net)

Day 1: Be Present. Live Here and Now.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – Buddha

How can we can we be conscious, enjoy living, or accomplish anything, if we are not aware of where we are, who we are, and what we are doing right now?

Photo by Stuck in Customs

Today, practice being present.

Focus your mind on your actions, whether you are brushing your teeth, eating a sandwich, or hard at work, and avoid daydreaming.

If you are driving to work, simply drive. Do not worry about Monday’s meeting, about last night’s fight with a loved one, or about what another driver is doing behind you. If you are breathing, simply breathe. Notice each breath coming in and going out. Feel the air that sustains you entering your lungs. If you are sitting, simply sit. Pull your mind back to right now. Notice your surroundings. Notice your feelings. Notice your suffering. Notice, but do not worry. Just be.

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Daily Dharma: A New Series of Posts

As I searched for Dharma in the sea of Google, I came across a site and instantly fell in love with the content. Although a relatively new blog (much like us), the content is excellent and I look forward to the many posts to come. The authors name is David and his blog can be found at DailyDharma.net

I thought that the posts would be an excellent addition to Blending Zen and so I emailed David and asked if he minded if I republished his articles here on our blog. He was kind enough to give me permission, and so I will be adding the first series of his posts over the next week and will then add them as he adds to his own.

I hope to get to know David better over time, and who knows, maybe he wouldn’t mind doing some guest posts here from time to time on related content that may not fit exactly with the purpose of his site. As he states, his blog is not intended to be a Buddhist blog per se, though it pulls heavily from the philosophies of Buddhism.

Here is what he says on his ABOUT page to give you a little info:

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912) received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said. “You are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Photo copyright: giovdim

Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation

Sattva brought to my attention a wonderful article that was written for Sunstone magazine titled “Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation” by Philip G. McLemore. She wanted me to share it with you all here as she felt that in this article he eloquently explained the differences between spirituality and Mormonism. I would have to agree with her. It was a wonderful read and very well written indeed.

It’s not a short article by any means (12 pages in magazine form) but well worth the read. Although I won’t post the entire article contents here due to it’s length, I will provide a link for you to download it directly from Sunstone. So please take the time, when you can, to give it a read and post your thoughts! Enjoy!

Click the link below to download a PDF copy of the article:

Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation

A letter to my yoga teacher…

After I wrote the below, it occurred to me that it addressed some of the why-have-a-teacher questions I raised in response to the Zen article Scotty posted. So I’m taking the liberty of posting it here to see if I can turn you all into my teachers, as well.

Dear [Teacher],

Thanks so much for yesterday’s practice.

I’m a little leery of binding the experience into the straitjacket of words, but I do want to capture a little bit of what happened and share it with you.

As we began by talking about prana and perception of it, there was a familiar feeling of basic honesty, of reality that I profoundly appreciate when I work with you. I think that that basic background makes a lot of perceptions possible that otherwise can’t happen. I think I remember that in our discussion, even though I was the one who brought up the topic of the jump forward from down dog to standing forward bend, I didn’t feel as though it was my idea. And when you suggested the jump-forwards be the focus of yesterday’s practice, I felt a little resistance arise in me. It started as a “this is just the same-old, same-old” response. But the basic orientation I have toward bhakti readily overrode the initial resistance to the practice.The important part was that shortly after I felt the resistance arise, I noticed it.

As we worked on position and jump-forwards, you described the flow from feet to hands to feet to hands, comparing it to those wave toys that some people have on their desks. That visual connected to our discussions about the experience of perception of prana. And so with a jump, there came the awareness of energy from feet into legs into buttocks, and what felt like the “end” of the energy at the spine, below the back ribcage. The energy sequence-flow just seemed to stop at that point, and the legs came back down to the floor, the hips never reaching alignment with the shoulders or the hands, the energy never reaching the palms. Through that practice I perceived the energy stopping, and the place where it stopped. I had not seen that before, though I’m not particularly sure why not, as once it was seen, it seemed obvious.

For reasons I don’t understand, there is a resistance that arises there. As we talked about it, instead of the word “fear,” you suggested the word “trust,” which resonated deeply for me. Here’s why: when I admitted to myself that I no longer held my the belief set of my religious tradition, I lost a lot of the experience of trusting. There seemed so many things that were not trust-worthy. That led, quite directly, to a kind of existential despair, suspicion, separateness. I lived that way for years. But during teacher training a couple of years ago, some experiences began to draw together.

At the core of those experiences seemed to be this: the more I looked squarely at my preoccupations and my obsessions, and my insistences, and my attempts to control – the more I pulled them into the light of day – the less solid they looked. But as I began to see past them, through them, what I found was not nothing, but a surpassing warmth. Love. Describing it, I wrote to a friend, “I have come to trust existence.” I no longer felt the fear, the need to try to control, existence. So yesterday when you said, “trust,” what resonated with me was a sensation that now, hours later, I can describe as the discovery of a residue of distrust.

Something else you said also fit into a slot my mind had open: talking about the energy stopping point, you said something like “once you’re aware of it, it isn’t a block any longer.” That sounded like a familiar idea to me when you said it, but my mind twisted it a little bit into an external description of my mind seeing resistance in my body. And once I did that with the idea, while I superficially agreed with it, I simultaneously made it not true. Not that what you said was false – rather, I took a statement about unity and turned it into a statement about duality.

Last evening, I was reading from Ken Wilber’s book, No Boundaries,” and he said the same thing you did:

What on the surface we fervently desire, in the depths we successfully prevent. And this resistance is our real difficulty. Thus, we won’t move toward unity consciousness, we will simply understand how we are always moving away from it. And that understanding itself might allow a glimpse of unity consciousness, for that which sees resistance is itself free of resistance. (p. 136)

And what I saw last evening is that your statement was right: a block seen is no longer a block, because the seer and the seen are not separate, and the understanding of the mind is not separate from the experience of the body. But then I constricted my perceptions from unity to duality, from a body/mind that dissolved a block by seeing clearly to a subject mind seeing an object body’s blockage. And once in that duality, the ego-stroked mind persuaded itself that it could “see” the body’s problem, as though it weren’t the ego’s own problem. And so it reinstated the block while deluding itself that it was superior to it.

What have I learned? I need to practice seeing the block while jumping forward. Drishti indeed.

[Teacher], thank you for guiding me. Sometimes it is easier for me to see clearly with your eyes than with mine.

Be well,
greenfrog

Quote Collection

Help would be helpful! Greenfrog is helping me with a little project and I thought it might be fun to extend it to everyone.

1. At the yoga studio, I have a big wall up high over a wall of windows that is perfect for a yoga quote or a word or two of inspiration. Imagine you’re in the middle of a very intense class and your mind is wandering. You’re holding warrior B and gazing at the wall. What words would help pull you back into your breath and body and out of your mind? …Breathe …Be Here Now …It’s not a big deal. Unless of course – you want it to be….. What would work for you?

2. I love quotes and words of wisdom. I keep a little collection tucked away and I know they will be useful as I produce newsletters, etc. What are your favorites?

This one is befitting to me at this moment in my life:

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” *Patanjali

Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer

Nothing Holy: A Zen Primer
By Norman Fischer

Most of us associate Zen with black robes and rock gardens, but do we really know what it is? Norman Fischer takes us through the principles and practices of the major schools of Zen.

1. A Zen Wave

Like ocean waters, intellectual currents are always in motion. They churn up organic matter from below, creating and extending powerful nutritional mixtures. When groups of people at a particular historical moment begin to experience the world in a particular way, naturally they meet and talk, ponder, read and write. They are open to diverse influences. Eventually the energy of their discourse crests and breaks like a sudden wave, and soon people around them find themselves affected. So cultures mix, dissolve and change.

In this way, a Zen wave broke on North American shores in the middle of the twentieth century. It probably didn’t begin as a Zen wave at all, but rather as a reflex to the unprecedented violence the first part of the century had seen. After two devastating world wars, small groups of people here and there in the West were beginning to realize, as if coming out of a daze, that the modernist culture they had depended on to humanize and liberalize the planet wasn’t doing that at all. Instead it was bringing large-scale suffering and dehumanization. What was the alternative?

In the early 1950’s, D.T. Suzuki, the great Japanese Zen scholar and practitioner, arrived at Columbia University in New York to teach some classes on Zen. Suzuki was a magnet for the yearning that was at that time still underground. The people who met him, attended his classes or were otherwise influenced by his visit constitute a Who’s Who of American cultural innovation at that period. Alan Watts, whose popular books on Zen were hugely influential, was there. So was John Cage, who from then on wrote music based on chance operations, on the theory that being open to the present moment, without conscious control, was the essence of Suzuki’s—and Zen’s—message.

Cage influenced Merce Cunningham, the dancer-choreographer, who in turn influenced many others in the performance art field. The Zen-derived notion of spontaneous improvisation became the essence of bebop, the post-war jazz movement. For Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and the other Beat-generation poets, Zen was a primary source, a sharp tool for prying the lid off literary culture as they knew it.

Within ten years, lively Japanese Zen masters who, from their side of the Pacific, had also been dreaming a Zen wave, were coming to America to settle. With the 1960’s and the coming of age of a new generation radicalized by the Vietnam war and psychotropic drugs, what had been churning underneath for decades broke out in a glorious and exhilarating spray. The first Zen centers in America were bursting with students willing to make serious commitments right away. It was an exciting and confusing time, perhaps unprecedented in the history of world religions.

I was part of this Zen wave. The cultural undercurrents I have been describing took place during my formative years. A student of literature and religion, I was sensitive enough to feel the brokenness that lay under the placid social veneer of the American culture I was raised in. So when I discovered Zen in the writings of D.T. Suzuki in the late 1960’s, I was dumbstruck. Here was exactly what I needed, a completely new way of experiencing the world. The compromising, experiential and immediate search for meaning that Zen proposed, without need of doctrine or belief, struck a chord in me. Like so many, I wasn’t looking for a new religion: I wanted a way to blast through the options that seemed available to me. I wanted real freedom. Zen promised this.

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The Story

Capital T, capital S. I was raised by an English teacher and taught how to love a good book. As the story goes, I finished Kindergarten, and came home crying because I hadn’t learned to read yet, and couldn’t ride a bike. My mom was due any day with child number 4, but she ran behind my bike anyway with her knees hitting her belly until I took off on my own. And every time she nursed my little sister I would climb up on the couch next to her, blankie in hand, to read. I became a voracious little reader and my baby sister fell in love with my special blankie.

Aren’t stories wonderful? I love listening to people, their history, their drama. I’ve come to realize though, that stories aren’t always necessarily real, or helpful. One of the keys of freedom is to put some space between you and your story! Staying in the present moment is a key to jumping out of the wheel rut of karma and into a new realm. You can’t do that if you’re attached to your story.

So, as I get ready to open this yoga studio, I’ve had so many chances to practice this. Friday I was tired, and stuck in my story. It was a pretty valid story. Can I share? I am the only experienced yogi on this yoga studio project. My intention is to set the studio apart from a spa experience or a gym, or even a pilates studio. I want the curriculum to be meaty and transformational. I also want to bring my own unique viewpoint of light-heartedness and joy into the space. So, in my mind, the literal space should reflect the funk that is Cosmic Dog Yoga. The studio Cosmic Dog Yoga should be a little, well - Cosmic.

Here comes the drama. I’ve worked hard on the design. I want it to have that hippie feel. Along comes my contractor (LDS guy, great friends with my non-LDS business partner), and he is one of these quintessential male-types. A nice enough guy, but doesn’t know how to listen and just does whatever he wants once you’re gone. (I know – labeling, but remember… it’s just a story…) He is a talented craftsman and a super reliable guy. Try as I might though, I just can’t convince him that the space should have an air of imperfection – a tacky bulletin board door, atrociously bright wall, or crazy wall mural of an elephant God. Now the story gets good. I wanted the door to my office to covered in cork so that it would be a community hub of personal notes, business cards and random bits of love. We had a fabulous discussion about doors. It went something like this.

Me: I want my office door to be plain and cheap because I’m going to cover it with cork.

Him: You don’t want that – it will feel like a cave.

Me: Perfect! Yogis love caves.

Him: A bulletin board will look horrible, it will be hoakie. Bad hoakie. Architecturally it doesn’t work.

Me: I love hoakie. I think you’re getting it.

Him: Ok, so I’m ordering the glass door in the morning.

Ahhhh! Isn’t that a good story? Then I add to it in my mind with a “he shouldn’t be this way” and a “he doesn’t get it” and a “he hasn’t even ever been in a yoga studio before!” and I have a complete drama going!

I’m aware enough of The Story to realize that I’m starting to get attached to it and replay it in my mind and I just can’t reconcile that I want the space to have a certain feel. To transport you to a new place just when you walk into the door. I have a vision after all, and it’s my job to manifest that vision! I called my mom (a recovered LDS member and life-coach/wise women) and admitted my frustration and attachment. I told her I knew it was time to leave the story within the situation, and asked her “what do I do with my desire?, my vision?” And then she helped me have a huge “a-ha” moment. I said, “I need to let go of my story now”, and she said “oh Sattva! I love stories. I love a good book, a good movie. I love listening to teenagers and friends tell their stories. I just don’t believe them.” And then she proceeded to teach me how to hold my space a little bit, to stay true to my higher consciousness while saying “No” in a loving way without engaging ego.

This little bit of knowledge has been so freeing for me. Friday it came in my mom’s words, but it has been coming at me indifferent forms for years. Don’t believe everything you think. Doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the story, just don’t believe it. Of course the contractor should be that way, he is. Of course I should stay true to my vision – that’s why it’s my yoga studio. (relative term of course)

Anyway, I was struck with how accurate that statement was when applied to how I’ve made peace with the LDS church. I love the story that’s told in church. I love the idea of Joseph being perfect and the pioneers crossing the plains as literal Saints. I love the story that the world is neat and tidy and that if we just stay on the straight and narrow path and don’t veer off, we’ll be saved from all of our sins. That story has an answer to most of the fears of humanity.

Eventually though, it just didn’t match up to the reality of life in front of me and the observations I made in the world around me. The LDS doctrine and story offered little help navigating the wilds of my mind. Truth has shown me that there just isn’t a straight and narrow, nor should I try to stay on one path. It takes many paths, many meanderings, and an embrace of jungle life to really find bliss and the perfection of what is. It’s taken a while, but admitting that I love the story anyway has helped me to make peace with the church. Great story. I just don’t believe it.

For me, not believing the story has given me liberation. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Anyone else?

*Sattva