Dead Letters

This last month I have been in a work situation that has brought up a lot of shenpa. Today I met with Bill and we talked about it. I am dealing with a co-worker who is creating a passive aggressive atmosphere and it is triggering my PTSD. My practice is allowing me to clearly see the breakdown of what is happening in my mind, my body and what is reality. He isn't really all that bad but my old defense mechanisms are kicking in full blast. I am really aware of how physically tense I am.

The gift Bill gave me today was that he said he wasn't really hearing my felt experience of what was happening. It was all in my mind. My logical mind was explaining the story, feelings, I was out of body. In my reading of Trungpa's "Glimpses of Abhidharma", there was a part in there about taking emotions all the way through. To finish them out. Bill was able to show me how I was not doing that. I would start to talk about how I was feeling (the felt sense) and then my mind would quickly negate it with a logical reality check of what was really happening. I know I'm being vague but I don't really feel like hashing it out here. But instead wanted to talk about how one tool in working with emotional issues may be the dead letter. Not stopping my self logically with my mind but instead tenderly proceeding to allow my body and emotions to flow freely. Go where they may. Run their course. This is an opportunity!

The key is gentleness and tenderness with myself. Know that I am a warrior to take this stand at my fear and jump into the shenpa space (being held by God).

Beginning

I am floundering again. But I trust that it is good. The whole thing of who and what I am. What I think, what I've done all that is melting away. I am trusting that I am the ice who by nature is water. I am dissolving to who I truly am (not). Today's link from the Tricycle Blog was just what I needed. An actknowledgement of how I am feeling and then a way to work with it. The teacher or spiritual friend is important at this point. I am hoping Bill will be that but I must look at the Sangha more I feel. My isolation must end if I am to move further on this journey.

Fear is what happens when reality collides with our personal fiction. Our practice is based on expectations—expectations about who we are, why we are practicing, and what our practice should be. As our hope disintegrates, it may be replaced by fear. Our characteristics, personality, all of our beautiful plans and ideas are like snowflakes about to fall on the hot stone of our meditation practice.
-Lama Tsony, "Facing Fear," from the Fall 2006 Tricycle. Read the complete article.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I have been thinking of my early recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous. I found my spirituality through AA, a higher power, God. I truly came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity. I have been having a resurfacing of doubt partly because my Buddhist rock has been shaken by the strong yearning to know God. The other part is that of my sensitivity to others suffering and doubt which makes me feel hopeless, which make me want to fix them and when I have shared in deep personal ways makes me think that the only way to connect with someone is through sexual intimacy. Desperation, turns to despair, which turns to hopelessness, which is now turning to sexual desire. Another level of escape. I am seeing too though how this is just another play of the ego. The urgency to fix the feelings. Finding the way, the answers. Always searching. Anyway, I remembered in meditation this prayer which I carried with me for a long time when I was introduced to it by Father Tom Weston at a LGBT AA Retreat in Los Gatos. It is called the Prayer of Trust and was written by a Jesuit priest to a young student:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God

We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something new;

and yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability -----

and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.

Your ideas mature gradually ----

let them grow, let them shape themselves,

without undue haste.

Don't try to force them on,

as though acting on your own,

you will make your own tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit

gradually forming within you will be.

Give him the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Isn't that just wonderful! Trust in the anxiety of feeling in suspense and incomplete. Trust in groundlessness.

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.