Haiku 4

I hear the flicker
For the fifth year, who's counting?
The flicker isn't

Matador

Refraining from internal monitoring could resemble the dance between Matador and bull. Internal monitoring and thoughts are the bull. The red cape is the sticky stuff of shenpa teasing the bull into action. The matador is the loving self gently and smoothy stepping aside with out getting gored watching the thoughts arise and fall. And the arena becomes the reminder to always remember to keep the space. One is not pinned in the corner by thoughts.

I've heard the true matadors fall in love with the bull.

Interesting play on word.

Letting Go

Heaven may close my eyes

so I need to build my bridges.

And the other voice said,

"Then let go."

Despite the Voices

As I lay awake this morning the message came from within me. Despite the voices in my head (Mara), despite the messages I thought I was getting from the outside world (Jesus), I always listened to the voice within (buddhanature, Christ within). If the moral of Judas' story is that he had a choice, it wasn't the choice of betraying Jesus for the money, it was that he had a choice to listen to that space of love within himself. That instead of running away from the pain and uneasiness we can choose to stay with it. To turn and face it, offer ourselves to it, to climb down the monsters throat and watch it dissolve.

We can let circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

~ Pema Chödrön

Judas and the Butterfly

The story of Judas as the betrayer had me riled up this last week. As Pema would say I was completely hooked. In the story of Jesus, from the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, I was pretty much enjoying the correlations I was finding between my learnings and understandings found in Buddhism and this Christian story. But as I read further, I became irritated and angry with Jesus. His insistence on faith, his abandonment of John the Harbinger and finally he actually told Judas to go kill himself. I know it is just a story, but too many people on this earth believe in this story. We have wars, discrimination and fear over this story; it is taken as absolute truth. I don't get it. How can people not question this story? Even I believe that God loves us all as his children and would not tell any of us that we are so wrong that we should go kill ourselves.

I too am feeling anger over my unanswered prayers as a child. A child's unanswered prayers, are an atrocity in my book. My prayers never made it past the ceiling. Reading this story made me remember my anger with God, with my parents, my teachers and doctors. No one was willing to step up to the plate and address the abuse. All turned a blind eye. This created a deep penetrating sense of abandonment and isolation...a sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This despair turned inward for me. I was not an exploder, I was an imploder. At the age of 12 I held a gun to my head but it was my brothers voice that brought me back. At the age of 20, razor blades but I was too drunk and passed out. And at 45 pills but collapsed in a heap and was checked into a hospital. To me Judas was the brave one. He did it. I was the coward. I never had the nerve to make the final cut (Pink Floyd song).

So this silly story really got to me. It brought up a bunch of stuff. Yesterday, I met with Bill and we talked a little bit about the cognitive side but we didn't really get the the emotion. Before I left he gave me the story of the young girl who finds a cocoon and sees inside a butterfly struggling to get out. She wants to help and tears open the cocoon to let the butterfly out. But it keels over and dies. He said you see the butterfly survives because of its struggle to get out. The fight to get out strengthens its wings so it can fly. This is the only way it can live. A very good story don't you think. But I left his office raw. Which brings me back to why Buddhism has become my source of inner strength. It has given me something I have never had or perhaps I should say I could not find. It is pushing me to reclaim my innate buddhanature within. I am seeing the habitual thinking patterns and I am gently practicing renunciation. And I am touching that love for the first time. I really really down to my toes am touching this love that is who I am. And I cry and let go and at the same moment I want to share that love but wonder why it is so damn hard to find and feel hopeless and angry. Why does it have to be so hard.

But I digress. What I wanted to say is that after leaving Bill's office I felt raw. I was still wondering why Jesus and God guilted Judas into killing himself. And then it came to me ever so gently. Not like a smack upside the head but this gentle settling in of a smile. Judas did kill himself. I didn't. I was saved by my own love for myself. What I have always felt was cowardice for not going through with my plan was really my buddhanature coming forth. I had chosen love each time. Living with suicidal thoughts is perhaps the most harrowing thing I have ever done and it came to me that this is the bravery that Pema and Trungpa talk about. That each time Mara presented me with doubt, fear and anxiety, I have been able to say "Mara I see you." And when Mara says, "Who do you think you are to deserve this love?" I have reached to the earth as my witness. The earth is my witness that I am worthy, I am brave, I am on the path.

Touching Love of Self

Soon after my last post and just before going to bed, I had the realization that my guardedness was a habit. A habit of thought, reaction, posturing. What was different with this realization was that I didn't beat myself up for this inbred habit, but down to my toes believed that through my practice I could change this habit. The positive spin Carolyn had put on my understanding of fear-that my sense of fear was really awareness with a guarded quality- again set in motion my yearning to want to learn to change. I went to bed wondering how I could relax this guardedness.

I awoke a bit before 3 am. Awoke myself with a start, I was in the midst of a lesson. This will be my third such lesson I have received from the dream state. I was being taken back, remembering when my mother had died and the guilty feelings I had realizing that in fact mom had died miserable and lonely and this sense of rage I had with God for letting this happen. I had known all my life that if my mom didn't get what she needed she would die before her time. I knew it. I had tried everything in my power to take care of her, but short of moving in to be her care taker and provider, this would not happen. So what I had feared probably from infancy had indeed happened.

And then I was pushed to a remembering of when Crystal died. From the moment we had learned of her terminal prognosis, I knew she would be afraid of death. Every week I would ask her if she was afraid and for almost nine months she would adamantly reiterate that she was not afraid. This insistence on her part had me fully coming to believe and admire her heroic journey through the death process. But a week before she died she lay in bed and I beside her. She turned to me and said "Patty I don't feel a thing, I don't feel God" My heart broke. I tried to console her but I had no words for I myself had lost that connection with God. I put my arm around her and we quietly cried. From that point on she suffered from what Hospice called "Terminal Agitation". It had gotten to the point where she asked me to kill her with an overdose of morphine. I was so empathetic with her suffering that I told her I would help. Hospice figured this out and was swift with intervention. They drugged her up, brought the chaplain in, and took me to the side to say that this was not the way. Crystal died but the thought of the fear she felt remained burning with me.

In the span of about five minutes, these rememberings put me smack dab in the middle of my most intense fears which in turn made me realize the guarded nature I had felt for most of my life. The sense of suffering we go through when we contemplate our mortality. I had even realized how this knowledge or groundlessness of not really knowing what happens after we die and the fear of losing our (ego) self was the basis of drive in my life. I had written a small poem about it.

Heaven may close my eyes

So I need to build my bridges

I got out of bed and had to go cry hard. I cried deeply at the arising of this old pain but as I cried and stayed with the pain I became gradually aware of my own beautifully deep sensitivity for others pain. And for a moment I felt my buddhanature, my bodhisattva and that indeed fear and love where two sides of the same coin. I experienced for the first time ever in my life a profound sense of love for who I was as a person.

For the next hour I sat, in and out of meditation riding the realizations I was having. I felt an acceptance of my intuitive self. I no longer saw myself as an emotional basket case. I began to get a sense of purpose and understanding about the happenings of my life and the dots began to connect and take shape as my path within the dharma of this my life time.

I became acutely aware I needed to share with my father the love I felt from him as a young infant when he would come home from work and hold me over his heart and rock me in the rocking chair for an hour each night. How he had saved me from my postpartum alcoholic mother who refused to hold me and give me love the first months of my life. I knew that my father felt really really bad for abandoning my brother and me. I needed to let him know that that love was his redemption. That he no longer needed to feel the guilt. That love he shared with me then was in fact who he is now. I could forgive him for leaving us with her, my mother, the raging, abusive, alcoholic, nightmare. As I sat I felt his suffering and knew it to be real and now. I needed to break through my fear and uncomfortableness and share this with him now. On February 1, he turned 72. I need to spend time with my daddy.

Finally, I felt the suffering and fear my partner feels about being alone. And I knew the burn of anxiety that races through her body when she senses her aloneness. I did not know what to do but to continue to meet her, to be with her in the moment and make her feel that I am her with her now.

I crawled back to bed about 4:30 and half dozed until the alarm went off at 5. I arose exhausted but relaxed. For the rest of the day I was teary eyed at this acceptance of self and love I had found beneath the waves of fear. That even though I have been ice, my nature is water. That even though I have been frozen with fear and guardedness my nature is of the Buddha... buddhanature. I am beginning to melt.

An Hour to Go

What will it be... the book? Is it a message for me. Or am I to be the messenger for my dad and brother? Shenpa!

Trust in the buddhanature... swim... feel that it holds me...feel the thoughts dissolve.

The Noble Leader

I just read an article online in the Shambhala Sun; a discussion between Pema Chödrön and her teacher, Dzigar Kongtrül. The article was written in January of 2006 but I found a correlation in Dzigar Kontrül words between the difference in self-centeredness verses buddhnature of mind and to the upcoming transition from President Bush to President Elect Obama.

"This innate love is a powerful force that is now being led by a completely noble, incredibly dignified leader. Before, this powerful force, an army with the richness of a whole kingdom behind it and the loyalty of the subjects, was being led by a crooked king, and that crookedness created a state of confusion that spread everywhere. When that crooked leader is replaced by a noble leader, with a genuine sense of dignity, everyone in the kingdom can reap the benefit of the positive qualities that are the basic nature of the kingdom in the first place.

The noble leader is altruistic mind, and the crooked leader is self-centeredness. Self reflection is what discriminates between the qualities of self-centeredness of the bad leader and the altruistic mind of the good leader."

While I don't like all of the analogies referencing battles and good verses bad, I do find a connection between the "battle" I have with seeing the good or noble basis of who I am and my ego's persistent effort to survive. My ego operates out of fear, reacting to external input rather than relying on my built-in internal buddhanature mind to find clarity. Further in the article, he talks about overcoming this ego-based self-hatred by directing loving-kindness to our mind not to self. This is a profoundly moving concept for me.

This weekend in particular, I have been mindful of our country's Presidential transition. I feel we are transitioning from a fear-based leader or as Dzigar Kontrül notes a self-centered crooked leader to an altruistic noble leader. I know he is not referencing Bush and Obama but I like being able to connect the feeling of what he is saying with a real life experience for myself. At no other time in my life have I felt such a perceptible difference in Political leaders as I have with this election. Obama is different. He is based in loving-kindness. He operates from that space. I feel I will be able to learn many lessons in the next four years from our noble leader. "Everyone in the kingdom will reap the positive qualities that are the basic nature of the kingdom in the first place."