Month: August 2018

It has been a difficult but deepening lesson in acceptance.    Once again, “The Other Shore” has been a help in sorting things out.    I think that I both understand better and accept what is possible in connecting with other people.  While I see limitless, formless possibilities,  I also  try to balance that with the realities of now.

I both have a clearer awareness of what is possible in my connections with people, and see better the persistent limitations.    My days of retreat both deepened my general awareness of reality and improved my insight into the kind of connections that are possible.    I am grateful for all the connections I experienced last week, and I am accepting that they are in my past.    They have shown me what is possible, and opened my own heart to those expanded possibilities.

It has been a difficult lesson in non-grasping, of not trying to make last what only happened in a ‘now’ I can no longer experience.   Actually, the ‘now’ that was there a week ago is still part of me if I can simply relax and allow it to be.   I think the dimension of time is sometimes fading for me.

Most of the connections I felt with people were with women, as is my general pattern.   I think most men seem incapable, unskilled in the kind of connections possible between humans.   It is mostly women that seem to be capable of allowing the kind of openness I experience, but only a select group of them as well.

When I think back to last week, the women I remember most were those who were not afraid to show an open heart.    The men I remember who showed the same open-heartedness were few, but there were some.

It is the same in my Sangha and the rest of my life.    The people who express the courage to go deep, to connect with awareness, are typically women.    There are perhaps two men in my life who are willing to meet me on a deep level.    They are far outnumbered by the women willing to do the same.

I lament that the women I know are mostly shackled by circumstances of their lives, including the customs of primary relationships and sexual preferences.    I often notice how cautious both men and women are about taking the plunge.    So I simply go on loving them as best we can.

Now, however, that I know what deep awareness may feel like, I am faced with figuring out how to integrate that experience into my life.    It is one thing to finally accept that the past is gone, but the present is with me.

I know that the deep connection is not something likely to happen routinely, but I am consciously open to it now.    I am also accepting of all the various plateaus that I share with my loving companions.

I know that it has been my mistake to try to capture closeness by choosing to live with someone.    I am not convinced that sharing pleasures is a favorable path, pleasant as that might be.    I am also not about to attempt to stabilize or preserve connections by setting up expectations.    Even while I am aware of what is possible, I am much more accepting of what is present now.

I am so grateful for those who have opened my heart to new levels.    Like Orpheus, I dare not look back but attend only to the now.     This is what I accept, knowing better now what is possible.

I release the past, and in that small gesture, I have become free.    But my heart has been forever changed.

As I look back over the past transforming week, I realize so well that I have not been walking alone.    There have been many others showing me the way and supporting me by their generous presence.    Some members of my Sangha have been a significant part of my evolving understanding and awareness.

A couple of individuals at the retreat have likewise helped me by showing me their personal presence and own vulnerability.    They encouraged me, even invited me to do the same.    Many others did so in a more generalized way.    The frequent bowing was an oft-repeated invitation to mutual awareness and shared affection.

It has truly been a joint effort, and I realize how much my home is in a community of supporting, loving people.   They too are on fire with awareness, each in their own way.    They show their own courage to let the fire take control, and in doing so give me support and encouragement.

A couple of retreat members have unknowingly been my teachers.    Their presence and open vulnerability have helped me reflect on how in the past I have allowed others to define me.   This past habit has been a source of great suffering for me.    I am slowly understanding how it is possible to invite another person to stand close, but not so close that we may appear as one.

Maybe it is also an intense lesson in not-grasping.  I now understand better how to allow intimate awareness while maintaining a separate presence.    I more easily see the balance of gleefully being aware of another’s presence while totally letting go.

There is great vulnerability in being more open-hearted, and so many of my companions have been there to support me this past week.

From time to time, I lose my sense of boundaries and separation.    It is as if I allow the felt separation to dissolve and yield to a felt connection with anyone or anything I come across.    This has evolved significantly during my 5 days of retreat.    The effect is that I feel an overwhelming  vulnerability and a consuming fire.

I have regarded this experience as open-heartedness  and open-heartedness  continues to be a portal that is open both ways.   I am recently intensely aware of the presence of others.    That includes people, plants and rocks.    I am aware in a deeper more penetrating way.    They seem to enter me without resistance and I consume them with my attention.    It feels like a fire that arises in me.    It consumes everything as it illumines.

At least it is from my perspective that the fire consumes.  I wonder if it is anything like that for others.    They must know that they can be consumed if they stand too close.    In fact, I can see that only a few stand close.    I suspect they are the ones familiar with fire.    They know its power and have learned to live in it themselves.

For me, this kind of felt awareness is producing an incredible level of vulnerability.    It is a level I have never experienced  before.    The fire seems to have the effect of increasing the tenderness I perhaps only slightly knew before.   Tears easily come with feelings.    I am wondering if they are already beyond my control.

I think it is a control I have surrendered, and do not intend to take back.

Perhaps it is this surrendering of control that has created, produced the deeper sense of open-heartedness.    I have released some of my sense of self and its related boundaries.   At least, I now know how to do it.    I have learned how to do it with the help of a few of my companions.

The felt experience comes and goes, but I know I carry it with me.   For me, this is the meaning of mindfulness, not an intellectual cerebral exercise but a full-body experience of what is around me.    It has become a burning fire that consumes me and has the potential of consuming anyone or any thing near me.   It is a new felt experience of reaching out and of being vulnerable all at the same time.

It is a strange thing that is happening to me.    It has come as a result of deeper opening to the woods and to people while on retreat.   It comes with a price of now knowing that only certain people can stand close to the fire, and they may be few.    I have a deep sense of potential aloneness while experiencing the power and force of being intensely close.    I will trust my companions.

My fire is consuming and powerful at the same time.   The energy of its source may be both my destroyer and my connector.     Just the same, I intend to fan the flames, in spite of the risk.   Stepping into the flames is becoming my way.    I am facing total loss and total oneness, all at the same time.    It becoming my way of fire.

I give back all the fears and constraints that have controlled and guided me. I release all that I have been taught about how to live.    I surrender all the norms handed to me by my ancestors.

I release all that I have been taught about what it means to be human.    I surrender all the norms of what it means to be male.   I give back all I have learned about how to love and be open-hearted with my companions.

I release the notion that there is just one other person that defines the expanse of how I live my life.   There is no more determined shape or form to my life.    All has begun again.    I surrender all I have been taught about how to be a close friend.     I release all I am told about how to be a gardener.    I give up all the arcane notions of growing old.

I surrender all the things I have been told about the need for security and possessions.

All my life, I have pulled the harness given me by my ancestors and my culture.     I release them all.

I have waited long enough.    I am finally free.

As I open up to deeper levels of experience, I wonder who will be accompanying me.    Already, I feel that there are only a small number of companions with whom I can openly walk side by side.    The kinship with these companions is palpable.   I am so glad to have them as companions.

I do not choose to have a partner, but I do invite companions.  I will not again allow one person to determine the framework of my life.

Where I am going is a solitary plane, but I clearly want companions to accompany me.    I do not want to go there alone.    I invite others to be with me, walk the same way with me.    Still, the reactions of others to me is so mixed.

I think there is a difference between being solitary and being alone.    I do not want to be alone.   It is often a struggle to find my steady bearings.

I take refuge in my companions.   They are the ones I truly love, with whom I share open-heartedness.    We support one another because together we know where the trail exists.   We walk a similar way, always aware of one another.

I now know what it is like, and I intend not to forget.   It is not like remembering my home address or what my car looks like.    It is more like remembering what it feels like to walk through the door of my home or sit behind the wheel of my turquoise car.

The memory of five days is known in my body, through my whole body.    It is the relaxed ease of feeling and has little to do with deliberate intellectual recall.     The memory is that of hands knitting effortlessly and not from following a remembered pattern but from a deep sense of just knowing what to do.

Five days of relaxing the tight constraints of learned habit  behavior  have taken me to a deeper ability to feel and know my world.    I was ready, I suppose, to take the dive and it happened almost effortlessly.    All I had to do was let it happen.

I now find myself in a place where knowing and feeling are one.    It is a knowing that flows naturally from relaxing and allowing my body to absorb.

I am aware that parts of me have finally awakened, and I have the joyful memory of what it feels like to be so open-hearted.    I intend to not forget.   I now know where that place is in me, and it seems so readily accessible now.   I know the familiar feeling of walking through the unlocked door of my home or engaging the movement of my turquoise car.

The wholeness that I feel is not only within me but includes whatever I touch.    It is easiest to know what does not resist.    For people, it is easiest for those in whom I experience a similar open-heartedness.   For trees, rocks and flowers, it is so easy because they so readily present themselves.    Unlike most people, plants and rocks know how to be fully present.    They have no resistance to being known.    Like me, people must first discover what it feels like to be open-hearted.

I am slowly learning how to know, how to be open-hearted and what it feels like.   I also can better recognize when it appears in someone else.     There is a kind of relaxed kinship that emerges and we see in one another what we have come to know and feel in ourselves.    People are different in that way from plants and rocks.    Unlike plants and rocks, people can decide whether to be truly present.

Consciousness is naturally present in plants and rocks simply by being.    I have had to learn to deepen my own consciousness by relaxing and then allow it to happen naturally.    I have had to undo a lifetime of constraints to be able to know and feel as deeply as I do now.     I am aware that there are more constraints yet to be relaxed.

I now remember, I know what it is like to feel deep open-heartedness.    This is not a memory to be deliberately repeated.   For me, the “how to” be open-hearted is already a knowing part of my muscle and bone.    All I have to do is allow it to flow.

I know that it is called a ‘Retreat’.    But for me it has been more of a deepening, not a lot about retreating.    That said, I am pleased that I just finished a five day retreat in the woods at Camp Courage, with approximately 150 people.    I have been deepened.    I am a bit surprised.

The experience was much more than I anticipated, and I am so pleased.   I had a bit of resistance going into the retreat, partly because of the emphasis on monastic engagement and because of the structured arrangement.    I was cautious of the monasticism because I am wary of repeating my own past experiences.   I found that I could be engaged with the monastics without being drawn into reflections on their life-style and comparisons with mine.    I benefited greatly.

Even though I rely on ritual, I am also resistant to being told what to do.    That resistance displayed itself when I learned that there were to be no shorts.    Humpf!     I found that wearing long baggy pants was not only OK for me but it added to my feeling of ritual.    How about that!

It took about a day, but I finally allowed myself to slip into a deeper way of thinking and feeling.    Actually the two amounted to the same thing for me. By being more attentive in a deep manner, I became much more relaxed at the feeling level.    Mind and heart were the same.    My heart gradually opened more as I was better able to focus on what was happening in and around me.

I learned a new and deeper level of open-heartedness, best evidenced by the uncontrollable tears on my cheeks during final songs.    This came on top of my recent practice of living more open-hearted on a daily basis, which means that I fall in love rather frequently.    This is not the arcane, sappy romantic love but one that comes from the experienced, felt presence of someone else.

As a friend of mine warned me, I was likely to fall in love if I went on a retreat, and of course I did.   The kind of openness I experienced with so many people was a perfect open-hearted path for falling in love.   The whole retreat  setting cultivated open-heartedness and the experience took me to a deeper level.

I know that I had been forewarned about this, but I was still surprised by the breadth and depth of my loving experience.    I was also surprised when I collided with someone that I felt a deep kinship.    There have been occasional people in my life that have felt to me like a brother or sister that I never knew I had.    I think I just found another.

On the first morning after my return from retreat, I am learning the lesson of not grasping.     I am attentive to the danger of my grasping for the retreat experience to continue.    I know that I cannot grasp and attempt to prolong the glow.

I remember well what it all felt like, what the relationships with myself and others were like, how I responded to my environment with such depth of feeling.    I am aware that grasping for that to continue will cause me suffering and provide little benefit.

Instead, I am feeling what it is like today.    I am beginning now.   Today is my new ‘retreat’, my new deepening.    I know what to do, I will simply allow it to happen again and again.     I remember very well but I am not focusing on what happened.    I am not about to retreat to the retreat.   Nor am I absorbed about the future and what might develop.

Today, I am absorbed in what is happening now.     The retreat has come and gone.    I am so glad for what it was.    I am so glad for what is now.    Today has a deeper feeling to it.

It is not easy for me to notice change when I am in the midst of it.     The accelerating rate of change is even harder for me to notice.   Occasionally I am stuck by the way the rate of change is speeding up.    I never know if it is my evolving sense of time, or if things are really going faster and faster.

It is easiest for me to see that we are all part of a changing world that is heading for an explosive crash.    The rate of environmental change took on new meaning, speed and direction when humans began changing the landscape by organized agriculture.    The rate of change has been growing ever since.   It has never been accelerating more than today.

A retired professor argued in the paper today for the presence of chemicals in our food.    Glyphosate is now part of just about everything we eat.    This is certainly different from when I was a child, and definitely not part of my grandmothers diet.      It is foolish to argue that the addition of chemicals like this has no biological effect.   The rate at which farmers have been adding them to our food has been accelerating since WWII.

Our ability to see the effects may be improving, but in no way keeps up with the growing presence of foreign and new chemicals in our body.   Our ability to see is highly influenced and prejudiced not only by our limited ability to understand the impact,  but even by our notions of what we are looking for.

With all other environmentalists, I abhor and protest the damage likely to be visited on nature.     Unfortunately,  all we may affect is the accelerating rate at which the environment is altered.   So much damage and change has already happened and has been happening at an increasing rate, that all we can hope to do is slow the change down.

Talk of reversal of environmental impacts such as climate change actually are a bit naive and uninformed.    The changes have already taken place, and are heading in a direction we can hardly predict.    We may be able to slow this train down a bit, but there is no changing where it is headed.

We have already so dramatically changed the ecosystem of the world that species have disappeared all around the world.    They are not being replaced.  The rate of evolutionary change is much slower than our ability to affect the viability of species and it will never be able to keep up with the impact of our destructive actions.

Population growth, of course, has a lot to do with the dramatic impact on the environment.     The population growth curve  is going upward at an exponential rate.    It’s not even a straight line.      At some point, it must crash or at least have a dramatic correction.     I’m not about to say that humans are doomed, but any honest biologist or sociologist will predict that   massive quantities of humans are doomed.    Maybe many of them already exist.

It is hard to remember what technology was like before 2007 when the iPhone arrived.    The rate of technological change has been accelerating so fast that everything more than a decade ago is a blurred lost memory.    Again, the exponential growth is something amazing to behold.     It is also impossible to predict where it is headed.

Environmental change, population change, technological change are all surrounding me.    Some days it is hard to keep my feet attached to the ground and have a reasonable perspective where I am standing.

For me, I sometimes wonder if my notion of time and change are accelerating, or if the actual changes in the world around me are accelerating.    Is my perspective speeding up, or is the world around me speeding up.     Is this what entropy is all about?   Is the world I have known rapidly dissolving into random chaos.

Or am I simply recognizing that all things are unpredictable and held together by my imagination?   Change is hard to understand.

As long as I can remember, I have struggled with how to love my body.    I have gotten so many messages from my culture about bodies, it is no wonder that it is difficult for me to sort it all out.    Now, at the advanced age of 77, I am trying to figure out how to handle messages that tell me that I am to cover my body parts like elbows and knees when I participate in a meditation setting.

My aversive reaction has deep roots, and I am profoundly weary of anything that even hints at body shaming.    It is a sensitive issue for me when anyone even obliquely suggests that there is something unacceptable about my body.   I can only imagine how women must feel this much more acutely than I do.

My skin is a lovely part of me, my body is something to celebrate and not obscure.    I enjoy the feel of open air on my body and that includes my face, hands, arms and legs.    Our culture has lost its ability to celebrate skin and has cultivated  perversion by its effort to keep skin secret.

One of the benefits of having my cabin is that I have always considered my beach as clothing-optional.     For me, optional means close to not-at-all.   I am happy that I have had that opportunity to enjoy that body sensation and celebration.  I am glad that I have been able to share that opportunity with friends.

I think that men and women should be able to enjoy, even flaunt their body. Circumstances may put some prudent limits.    But shame is not part of the evaluation.    It is regretful that we don’t know how to express our vibrant sexuality except in deceptive, disguised ways.    I certainly was never taught how to deal with this, and I think that there are few people who have a balanced view on how to respond or manifest their bodies.

I am still learning how to be relaxed around my body and around the bodies of other people.    It is so nice when I can simply be present to my body or the bodies of others.    No grasping, no aversion.    I love it when I am able to integrate bodies, including mine, in my deep awareness.

Those are the times that I experience and understand that bodies and minds are one.    It may only be a glance or a passing touch, but the spiritual connection  happens.    There is a celebration of bodies.