Author: joseph mauricio

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Taurus Winter

taurus_fotoStars exploded across the night sky. Among them the giant V, the horns and nose of the bull, an arrow pointing to the earth you’re heir to. Oh, Taurus slave to this winter, lonely, driven, dark and chained to your domain, even as you dream of Venus, ruled by her, but shunned, a beast of burden of the dirt and rocks and dust of the earth. Born in May, I was always lonely. And I carried a load as though I had to save the world itself. But no one knew. My burden. My story. And, yes, Venus always above me, just out of reach. My grail. My love unloved.

I had been assigned a tutor and a meditation teacher. Both patient, and hard working. I had left New York, and a girl to come to this place and find myself. All I found were fragments of a picture I couldn’t see. Images of someone I knew and glimpses of a stranger waiting in the shadows of a future that now seemed far behind. I ran a comedy club, and had some incredible roster of talent. I fell in love with the waitress there, and she and I dreamed of finding something deeper in our world than the canned laughter of that Greenwich Village stage. We read Kerouac, and the Dharma Bums thrilled us. She introduced me to the man who introduced me to the Dharma for real. I walked into the New York Shambhala Center and was given a tour. There were pictures of men on the shrine from a lineage of teachers who al had teachers back to the time of the Buddha. I wanted peace in my life. I wanted depth. I realized looking at the pictures that I would have to go to the source. If not, Tibet, then Colorado at least. And I knew as I stood there that my time in the city had closed. Only when I decided to leave, she balked. I’ll never move to Boulder, she said. What would I do there? Become a hippie? Sure, I said. Learn to relax. I imagined us baking bread, eating vegetarian, barefoot in the garden, drinking homemade wine. Only, she had other dreams. She moved to Paris to dance. I moved to Colorado to grow a beard.

I lied about my name when I came to the meditation center. I didn’t want hippies following me. I wanted no part of a cult. But, a hippie lady to take my pain away, and help me forget Joan, would be okay. That led me to a roominghouse. I lied about my tenure in meditation. Sure, for about three years now. Only, I had dabbled a bit here and there after seeing a demonstration from a Zen priest, but really knew nothing about meditation. I liked the idea, though. And, I wanted what those folks seemed to have. I became the kitchen manager for a summer and fulfilled a dream by studying with Alan Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa. But, I wasn’t long for Boulder. I was too restless. I needed something else. I lied again about how much meditation I had been doing, and got a job as a cook at a retreat center in the Rocky Mountains. Step by step closer to something. Step by step farther away from everything else. And, here now in this wild country far away from everyone I knew, from show biz and the wild streets of 80’s New York noise to this open and quiet, oh so quiet space high above the world.

Problem was I was asked, and agreed to, dong a “dathun” a month long meditation retreat. It was nine hours of meditation a day, very basic meals in held in silence, work in quasi-silence, with no drinking, or parties, except one day off in the middle.  I had joined that community right after a three foot snow fall in the worst winter they had seen in a decade, learned to work my wood stove, and where the spices were in the kitchen, and had to jump into the most challenging month of my life, where in that awesome silence, I learned how loud my mind could be.

Constrained and constricted by vows, rules, rituals and tradition my life became controlled by a pre-dawn  morning conch, the freezing 15 minutes walk down from my cabin to the shrine room in the main building, a calling gong inviting us to line up in silence outside the shrine, the gong that invited us in, the clack that invited us to sit, and then a series of conches, gongs, clicks and clacks that described the rhythm of the day. Day after day. I worked in the kitchen for breakfast and work period after lunch.   I tired to work in the near silence that was the custom, and to keep my eyes down and my heart open and attuned to my feelings. But, I hadn’t had the requisite training others had. I was still feral, and slumped around like a caged beast all day in that lonely frozen silence. Trapped in the rhythm of the routine and surrounded by mountains that b=eckoned but were still off-limits to me. Days were hard.

But,it was the nights that came alive for me.  Free of the relentless blue blanket of the colorado winter, the sky would open in an amazing display, star studded, as they say, from horizon to horizon.

The nights without moon were so dark here. Stars everywhere. Unbelievable in dimension. And like ancient mariners, I learned to wander away and find my way home by the stars. Taurus pointing the way. I was so alone then, only then I realized, perhaps for the first time, that I always had been. Searching the earth, one step after the next. Looking for home, for love, for a place I never found.

The truth of the seeker is that we will not find. If we found, we wouldn’t be seekers. The Buddha left his home, his wife his child and his country to learn and search. He moved through compounds, communes and communities, learning from each, but carrying on when he’d seen what he needed to see, knowing there was still more to learn. Finally, in exhaustion and hopelessness he sat. And, then he left himself.

Without the blanket of knowing, of “me” the Buddha finally understood. He saw finally that his seeking had led him to travel inward. And that travel inward led to the vastness of the open sky beyond.  Without himself, all that was left was everything else.

Seekers only stop seeking when they learn finally, there is nothing to find. And this gives them everything.

But, I was still looking. Still believing there was something there. The vastness of the night sky called, but I still fell prey to the shadows and the dim lights of expectation. Once, I was hiking in these woods in daylight and saw an eagle. That was thrilling beyond anything New York had shown me. I got excited and told my tutor, how I wished I could just move someplace in the mountains and just meditate until I knew the secret of an eagle. He laughed. I was insulted. What’s up with that?

“Where do you think you are?” he said.

Oh, yeah. I was so used to looking I hadn’t even seen that I was already where I had wanted to be. Of course it didn’t seem to be where I wanted to be, as I was here. And where I wanted to be was always someplace else. Even when all I wanted was where I was. Except a girl. But, when I was with a girl, I wanted to be free. So, I began to learn to love the loneliness. To love the sadness, and the darkness. I began to love everything about this wild land, which was loneliness itself. It was so dark on a moonless night here. And that Taurian arrow in the sky pointing home. Here. Only here. There is only this.

The teacher had been a lonely man. He had many loves, and many students, but in his heart his loneliness was always with him. He had said, enlightenment wasn’t a big deal, as we’d imagine it would be. In fact, it might be more of a cosmic shrug. “The lowest of the low”, he said, debunking, as he would do, all of our grandiose ideas about spirituality. Spirituality to Trungpa Rinpoche was right here, with all the hereness of right here. Here with all the shit and dross, and mud and dirt of the earth. Here with the gold and the greatness and the joy of the sky. Here with our actual experience, moment to moment in every breath. Nowness, he called it. Being in community with the present means nothing is excluded. And none of it means anything at all, except it is as it is. And that’s it. Here. Now. The ultimate sacrament is our own expectation. Once that is offered, the deity is revealed as quite ordinary, and here all along.

Here under the stars in the vast darkness of this wild land, shadows reveal all. I would love to walk this earth in the utter dark, without flashlight or device. Listening to the silence. Emptiness is the great equalizer. It removes the expectation and leaves only the shadowed reality of a becoming world, becoming on its own terms. How exciting to let go into this. To allow the world to become as it does and to find yourself in synchronicity with creation in each moment. In each breath.

And in the vast dark of the moonless night, its easy to see what’s beyond. And in the bright blue sky of a Colorado day, its easier still to become distracted and believe again and again the illusions that befall us. Believing somehow that we exist in a way that supersedes creation. To chase our own tail even as we chase the tails of others who elude us again and again. And to forget that beautiful sacred aloneness, and believe the lie of loneliness that somehow we are incomplete alone. And so grasp, rather than seek, and believe again in the blurring daylight the myth of our freedom as we sell ourselves into slavery on the wheel of samsara again and again.

I remember passing a town in the winter with a senior student. We were walking together and trying to fall in love for want of a better conversation. It didn’t really happen, as we both wanted to be in love with someone else. We looked into windows of the houses off the dirt road, all seemed warm and complete with families and furniture tucked inside.  “They are all trapped”, she said. And I looked at her. I had been thinking how I wished I lived in each of these places. Each home another fantasy of what my life might have been.Each fantasy another dim light of hope for a home I would never find.

“They are all trapped”, she said. And in that way these folks had, looked right at me and nodded her head without further explanation.

But, in the goddess darkness again, safe from the patriarchal oppression of logic and light, I learned to sense my way home under the exploding night sky. And the shadows reveal the truth. Everything is as it is. And there is nothing else, but here.

The cabin always appeared out of nothing sooner than I expected. I’d walk up the steps and open the door, and enter into the cold dark space.

Home.

 

 

 

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Across a Night So Wide

images-2Snow had covered the ground and frozen bright, reflecting trillions of diamonds in the night. The sky was clear, ringing into an aura of a full moon. Stars nonetheless stood out in that amazing black and completely ice lit sky shining above the glistening earth, reflections of a moon reflecting its sun 93,000,000 miles behind us.

The air was so brisk it seemed to cut. Clean and sharp and energizing despite my weariness. I stood in the doorway of the cabin, my back hot from the fire within. A fire I built, with only a little lighter fluid cheating. My mom and sister had cried when they dropped me there three weeks earlier. “He’s an actor from New York,” they tearfully told each other as they drove away leaving me to the worst winter the Rocky Mountains had seen in a decade. “He can’t build a fire.” But, I learned. I lost some facial hair and had my eyebrows singed together a few times, but I learned. I was determined. I had come to face myself in the ice castle of the sky at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. I had learned to build a fire, grow a beard, drink sake and hold my mind to the breath. And every day there I became not more enlightened, but more broken and raw.

I had moved to this small meditation outpost only months after the passing of the teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The community, a rag tag bunch at once harden and softened, sat around the wood stove in the common room of the main building trading swigs of sake, snippets of songs, anecdotes, teachings and stories about the master. Their hearts were torn and they were worn and tired from the winter. But there was heartiness to them, and a richness I admired. It was the first time I had ever seen adults cry in a way that seemed not only natural, but inevitable. It made me feel uneasy and very deeply settled.

Shivers bolted down my spine with each razor breath as I stood in my cabin doorway that night. It was hard to take in, and hard to take. Something stirred in me so deep I couldn’t stand still. I wanted to run into the cold. I wanted to roll in the crystal snow. I wanted to scream, to rip my heart open, to cry and to die right there in that endless night.

Danny sat drinking sake on the badly unstuffed couch just inside. I turned and tried to explain. It’s so beautiful, I said. Look at that. “Yeah”, he said. But really, it’s heartbreaking. What am I supposed to do? I feel like I must do something with all this. What am I supposed to do?

“You’re supposed to do nothing”, Danny said.

Can I cry, I asked. “Sure”, he said and filled another glass. But I couldn’t cry, as my face was frozen. Can I scream? “Sure” he said, “no one will hear.” And I yelled from the porch, but my pain was muffled in the snow filled emptiness. I felt alive and dying, virile and impotent, greater than myself and vastly unimportant. I stood shirtless in the below zero night, panting. This world was bigger than I was. I wanted to fill it. But I never would. I never could. I stood there ruined, sad and somehow happier than I had ever been. The knives of cold had become crystal swords down my back. I turned to Danny who sat in the darkness. He had been a model and actor heartthrob in LA. He was very smooth, and very processed in the ways of meditation. Patient, quiet, kind and, like all Trungpa’s children, cutting when need be.  I was a comic from New York, a brutally dull sword hacking through the world with little regard for my own sanity or other’s safety. I had been hired as the camp cook. But, I was more like a mascot to them, a wild beast in need of taming. Danny was the first of many patient teachers, themselves students, who took the time to sit by me, as I ranted through my paces, snorting and pawing the earth until I found my true teacher.  But, that night, I had little sense of that. I stood beneath the frozen sky panting. I turned to Danny, but it was so bright out, I couldn’t see inside the cabin. I felt a million feet tall and still not able to touch this night. His voice called from the warm darkness, “come back inside you idiot.”

I came in. My face was numb. My feet were numb. He poured sake. What should we do? I asked. Cards? “Do nothing”, he said.“And sit.”

Sit?. “Meditation”, he said and pointed to my cushion. It had to be three in the morning. Now?

“Of course now. Now is all there is.”

imgres-1And, I looked to him. He had to be joking. But, his eyes were like coals, dark and cold and even and looking right into me.  He looked for a moment like a picture of his teacher I had seen. So, I sat and turned my mind back to myself and the breath. And, I just sat.

The night was very still, save the occasional gust of wind and the hiss and crackle of the slowly dying fire.

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Waking Up To The Change

IMG_2570You wake up and its another day. Its beautiful, fresh, alive and a new start. Yet, you can sense the zombies out there, just beyond the fence. The asteroid approaching. The other shoe about to drop on the landing, the economy or the environment. Our egostasis is threatened and we gear up for battle, even as our hearts begin to soar. This odd dissonance between holding on and jumping off is the best of times and the worst of times.

Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the next of times. Liminal times. Changing templates of time. And, as uncomfortable as it is, these moments may be the perfect time to wake up and drop IN to our life. The key to understanding times of flux, when our view is skewed by fear of change, is to find balance and learn to ride the wave.  In order to do this, we have to find a strong, but flexible, stance and protect ourselves without defending our territory.  We need to know that as important as we are in the movie of our life, the movie is, ultimately, not about us. The movie of our life is created by shifting pictures that give the illusion of consistency. In fact, the defining theme of our movie is, well, movement. Change. And while each change demands an adjustment, its our nature to reagin balance and poise. But, then we grow roots and begin to cling. We are driven to create a nest protected from danger. The problem is, once invested in establishing the nest, we are reluctant to leave when the time comes.  But nests are, by definition, temporary. They are landing pads on our journey through life.

Yet, once we identify with the nest, we find it hard to let go. When we take ownership of the protective patterns we weave, they become more important than the life they are supporting. We dig in and foster an identity rooted in our neighborhood, home or friends. This happens with the places we live, but we also in the ways we think and the things we believe. We weave nests of thought and behavior in order to cloak ourselves in a protective robes of “ME”. We grip to this sense of ourselves with a tenacity that strangles the life from our life. Each time we are forced to leap, we feel the need to gather all our baggage for the trip. And, when we get there, we see how much stuff we don’t need.  As Stephen Wright said, “You don’t know what you’ve got until you have to move it.” All at once, our baggage defines us. We have become the burden we carry.

That’s why meditation master Chogyam Trungpa likened the psychological nest we create to a cocoon. Its an identity forged of patterns and reactions that we create to navigate a changing world.  Yet, each nest leads only to flight. Or, should. The only thing more painful than leaving the nest is refusing to leave the nest.  Remember that wonderful quote by Anais Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” In fact, the nest like, a womb or cocoon would become poisonous should the birth not occur.

Once we wake up, we see that our nest is actually a next. The ground of  our evolution. It is the next stage jettisoned. And while that moment of release is exhilarating, the moments before can agonizingly provoke our deepest defense systems. Even as we see the new dawn, we are pulled by the undertow to the perceived safety of stasis in our cocoons.Yet its these moments of change that are so bright, so clear, so crisp and new. When we think back on our lives, the times we recall are likely to have been challenging.  I’m not sure how much we remember that pizza, the beer or that pint of ice cream that seemed to compelling, unless we had them after a mountain hike, camping in the cold, or during a winter storm.So, if the movie of our life is not about us it is still OUR life. And, the irony is, by gripping to that life, we actually lose our ability to be part of it. The secret is to know that it is the best of times and the worst of times, the nesting time and time to fly. Stasis and change are part of the systolic and diastolic rhythm of creation. And creation is change. When we are aligned with that, we engage our warrior heart, fully awake to the danger and the joy. If we refuse to hurt, we refuse to love. if we diminish ourselves in fear, we diminish our ability to feel. If we fight the change, we limit our ability to land on our feet.

So, from a meditators point of view, we are talking about balance. And each time we fall, we learn from the fall. Each time we lose, we gain the next thing. And in this way, we live forever. If we let go of our life – and our self importance – and allow life to guide us, then we are part of the change of time and space that has always been. We are linked to the eternal. We are part of something so much bigger than our comfort. That is our Warrior heart. A heart strong enough to care for those in need. A heart brave enough to face the changes with dignity and poise.

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Welcoming the Wood Sheep

We’re well into winter. Its becoming brighter and colder. There is a confluence of energies as the days getting longer bringing a sense of hope and newness, as the temperature stubbornly clings, even drops in defiance. The old year grudgingly moving on, as a new one takes its place.  The tides of time.
And this brackish plane is at once unsettling and invigorating. Losar, the Tibetan new year, is Thursday. The energetic yang of the wood horse, succeeded by the gentle nurturing yin of the wood sheep. Our building has come to roost and rest. Its a time of creativity and family. Time to open to our experience with warmth and forgiveness.

The weeks preceding the new year are, by tradition, considered to be the energetic culmination of the passing year. This intermediate phase – or bardo, in Tibetan –  is a strange and dangerous time. Our defenses become compromised by these shifting seasonal, emotional and energetic templates. Its akin to the early morning, or late afternoon, liminal phases when our sensitivity is heightened and we become more receptive. Its considered a mystical time because of our receptivity. Its also considered a dangerous time. As the shifting exposes gaps in our defenses, we become open to any number of influences. We are more impressionable and vulnerable.

The best protection is awareness; paying attention to how we feel, what we are doing and applying precision to the details of our life.  It is naturally a time of conscientious prudence and reserve. But prudence is difficult when we are longing to fill our frozen hearts with carbs and wine, trying to find that serotonin buzz. But, temporary fixes only serve to swing the system wildly, exhausting us finally, into sadness and depression. It is important, instead, to maintain a stout body mind balance with exercise, long walks and meditation practice. The Tibetans talk of rousing “Lungta” – or windhorse – our inner life energy. The appropriate way to rouse windhorse is to open up to our experience and reduce the resistance and allow inner and outer movement to occur naturally. Flowing like water, we take the path of least resistance, filling up every crevice and valley. It is not aboutexaggerating the energy, or cranking anything up. To the contrary, windhorse is best cultivated by relaxing into our body so our life energy evens out and we are able to open into our experience with clarity and poise.

Our life force energy is already there. The work is simply to release blockages and re-align the system.  In this way, our “lungta” is sustainable.  It flows gently through us like a warm river on a frozen morning.Its February. We will be slower, stiffer and more cranky. That’s how the world is on the extreme latitudes. There’s no need to fight that constriction. Instead, we can relax into the flow of the coming spring, gently opening to our experience and perhaps open a new (or old) book.

So, welcome to the year of the WOOD SHEEP where warmth and safety is the culmination of your hard work.

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. .  read more blogs at my website …  http://www.josephmauricio.com/category/blog/

 

Posted on by joseph mauricio

A Bodhisattva of Our Time

ded8d20d-bc04-4ee5-b48c-ccecb670e50e Dr Martin Luther King was a Bodhisattva of our time, in real time. He was in the midst of the greatest change in the history of our society and remained true to his vision of nonviolence and liberation. Dr. King was an inspiration to all who long to inspire change. He was the perfect coach, motivator, orator, preacher and prophet. He saw the mountaintop. And, although he he never made it, he introduced all of us to the possibility of liberation of the human spirit. He saw the possibility of a promised land in his faith in human dignity.  Dr. King believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, despite knowing, all too well, the evil inherent in its ignorance.Today, I wish to recommit myself to nonviolent. Nonviolence of body, speech and mind dedicated to the benefit of the world. I will fail more often than succeed, but I vow to fight the injustice inherent in my own heart. I commit to begin there, and to return there. I vow to never fly higher than my heartbreak, or to outrun my fear. For, in doing so, I distance myself from my humanity. I vow to remain with the pain of the world, until all are liberated from suffering and ignorance.Our hearts are wounded, frightened and incomplete. Sometimes, they feel too much. But they are strong. So strong, We can resolve to love and bring love to a wounded world and have faith in the strength of our heart. Its invoking a change from the heart, and of the heart, sustainable change.

This is more than a resolution. Its a revolution.

One day, the world may recognize the inherent goodness in nature and life.One day it may respect the equality, dignity and sovereignty of every human who suffers here. The world may one day relinquish its drive to devour itself, and see all its parts as essential to the whole. That will take resolve, but that change will be a revolution, an absolute shift in the paradigms of imprisonment to an allegiance to liberation.  That will take courage, strength and patience. That will take the protection of modern day bodhisattvas – beings dedicated to the liberation of the world- who become the stewards of awakenment, working to wake up their own warrior heart for the benefit of their world.The revolution will take the  gentle insistent determination to remove the ignorance that binds us to hatred. But, as change is the nature of things, once we wake up, that change will happen naturally.

We don’t have to invent goodness. We need only remove the shackles that bind us and liberate its spirit.Here is one of the greatest speeches of our time. It was delivered the night before his assassination and it is apparent that he knew what was coming. You can see it in his face and his resolve. This is the face of courage and the most direct moment of truth I can imagine. It is the face of one who had seen the possibility of a world that he could only support, but would never live to see.
http://youtu.be/08rlDmVhkSc
Posted on by joseph mauricio

Working With Yourself

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(Who Else?)…

We want to get it done. We want to feel competent. We want to be functional. We think its time we finally became an adult. But, the child inside thinks otherwise. We keep the doubt hidden behind a veneer of competency, despite a nagging sense that we are not really up to the task. The bills, chores and to-do lists loom as our life takes a distant back seat. Fixated on the problems, we have forgotten the point. Yet, there seem to be obstacles to sitting down at the computer, getting to the gym, steaming broccoli or unrolling the yoga mat. The more we push, the more it all seems to pile in front of us.

Even as we charge to work with a smile, there might be a sense that we are damaged beyond repair and that no one else would want us. Or, that we don’t deserve to have what we want we want. Or, that we would certainly fail if we got it.

We search for someone or something to help us. Someone on TV with a new diet, or a new plan. As our problems grow, we feel the solution must be proportionate.  We assume the fix-it answer would have to be very large. We try any manner of self-helping, even as most of it seems to only help the self at the other end of the pay pal account.  It always seems effortful. And inside, we know its not really us. We feel we’re a fraud, that we’re fooling us into becoming an us we don’t really believe.

No wonder we sabotage our plans. They’re not really our plans at all.

 

Cultivating Peaceful Awareness

The more we try and fix things, the more things keep breaking. We work frantically to hold it together, but secretly tear it apart. We are working very hard here, just to stand still.

But, perhaps stillness is precisely the way out. The more we struggle the tighter it gets. Its like an emotional chinese finger trap. Only, I recommend sitting still. Just as the Buddha did when he became discouraged with all the forms of meditation and self-help he pursued. At some point, in complete hopelessness, he gave up on finding anything, and just sat. Once he stopped looking, he was able to see. What he saw were the basic constituents of existence. How we are and what we do. He saw what was there, simply and without apology. The Buddha saw how we create our own suffering by trying to run from what is actually happening. We do this by trying to script a different scenario. We run from ourselves. We turn our backs on ourselves, and abandon ourselves. And, frequently, we do this at the very times we need to sit down and stand up for ourselves.

Meditation affords an opportunity to see into situations. We’re not getting anywhere anyway, so we might as well just sit and take a gander at the cause of the condition of unhappiness. We might see how demanding we are. And how demand, expectation and pressure are not helping. If we could stop and be with ourselves, we might find out what we need. What if we could learn to simply be ourselves and learn to work with what is there?  And, what if learning to get done what we need to get done was not a matter of great effort, but simply learning to work more effectively with what we have? That would certainly be easier. And, my guess is, it would also be more effective.

Getting more life for less effort.

Learning to work with ourselves is key to our path. In fact, it is our path. Working with ourselves effectively might mean simply learning to treat ourselves as carefully as we treat others. Most of us are kind to those in need. Most of us try to be diplomatic and deferential to other people in our world. This is because we are generally aware of those situations, we pay attention because we have to. Unfortunately, our self awareness remains largely obscured. We just take this “me” thing for granted. We push ourselves at will and without thinking, simply demand compliance. If we could turn up the volume on our self-talk (as seems to happen with regular meditation practice) we might be shocked to hear how crass, dismissive, and even cruel, we are to ourselves. We would never speak that way to even the most annoying co-worker. Why do we do this to ourselves?

We are most cruel to ourselves when we are the most pressured. Ironically, this is precisely when we most need support. When we are pressured by the demands of our world, we often deny our feelings and push forward with little encouragement and care. This may be because the pressure, demand and societal compression inherent in our daily life frighten us on a deep psychological level. We are afraid to fail, to be rejected, ostracized or criticized. Our life is moving too quickly to process these feelings with any accuracy, so we push even harder. And, as we push forward our deeper psychology only gets more frightened. As we get mad at ourselves for not accomplishing what we set out to accomplish, we are actually hurting ourselves because we are frightened. The pain that we have suffered, and the fear of pain we will suffer, lay like land mines in our deep psychology waiting to explode when triggered. That blind fear threatens to move from the shadows and overwhelm at times of stress, including times of proposed ascension. Just when we try to fly, something inside blinds us and binds us to the wheel of punishment we’ve constructed.

No wonder we give ourselves the middle finger.

Its as though the child inside us was scared of the monsters under the bed, and we just yelled from our room for the child to shut up. We’d never do that to anyone else who was frightened. But, because we are not trained to take the time to listen, we do that to ourselves. I suppose I’m positing the opposite of the Golden Rule. Treat yourself as you would like to treat others. Its like the oxygen mask, right? Caring for yourself allows you to care for others more effectively. We can do this because we are more whole, but also because in the process of becoming whole we have learned to listen. We have learned to hear the wounded and weak places inside us that can relate directly to the wounded places in others.

We can work with this in psychotherapy, perhaps uncovering the narratives to these toxic psychologies. But, in meditation we learn to accept the pain points, and open up space around them. As we create room around our emotional pressure points we can actually get to see the triggers. Eventually, with the gentle application of awareness, we can turn trigger points into choice points. We regain control. And, as much as we can, retake our life.

This is why we refer to meditation as ‘shamatha” or the cultivation of peace. In time, with consistent practice, we deactivate the mines, by creating the space to acknowledge them and the courage to accept them, as we would accept anyone else’s. Why should we be without pain? Are we superhuman? Is that what we want? To be above the humble acceptance of pain and suffering and the willingness to work with ourselves? That would only separate us from the world. Is that what we want?

 

The Practical Application of Loving Kindness

I think we are really yearning for connection.  If that is so, then our pain is key to understanding our world. And, understanding our world is key to understanding our path to awakenment. As meditation practice cultivates a peaceful awareness that allows us to uncover our pain points and disarm our defenses, the practice of Loving Kindness allows us to enter in and heal by touching the wounds and offering acceptance and love. Not just in our minds with pretty images of hearts, and bears and angels and fairies, but by practical application of feeling the warmth of love in our bodies.  We use the power of a mind stabilized through meditation to hold the wounded places and offer love. We can learn to open past the clenching fear response and touching the child we have abandoned to the shadows.

With practice, the open space of meditation practice becomes the warm and healing embrace of loving kindness. We replace the clenching of the muscles in tension with the openness of awareness with basic meditation practice. Then, in time, we learn to infuse that with the warmth of compassion. Each time we open the body we accept the feelings and let the wounded child breathe and be. Each time we rise up in good posture, we tell the child there is now an awake adult here to care for them. And, in time we become the parent we should have had, but couldn’t have had, as our real parents were caught in the clenching panic of their own fear. It wasn’t their fault. They were young and unlearned. They lived locked in fear and blocked by guilt.

So, I recommend beginning at the beginning in order to give ourselves the care we need.

Beginning at the beginning is sitting in stillness and calm. Then when our mind is pacified, we can invite the child in and gently touch its pain. We can do this with no hope of change. Just listening. Accepting. Welcoming the wounded child.  Holding her with open arms, rather than abandoning her in clenching panic.  Opening to the pain, the fear, the doubt, the lack of clarity. Sitting up straight and being there for her in the storm. Sitting with her, up awake and open.

And meditation is a perfect tool for this reunion.

 

Learning To Work with Ourselves

With care, patience and love we can touch inside without detonating the emotional landmine. Its like a game of  concentration. We reach in through the hole for the affected bone without touching the sides and setting off the alarm.  We care for ourselves, as we would for anyone, learning to work with kindness and concentration. We learn to pay attention to the sore spots and frightened places so we can be aware of their triggers, tendencies and potential for disruption.

Working effectively with ourselves would be moving more slowly than our mind demands. So, its trading off some of the speed of aggression for a more integrated, and more sustainable, approach.  Its moving slow enough to move quickly. When we synchronize with our full self, everything we do has the authority of the present moment and our present sense.  By slowing down and working with ALL of ourselves, we not only have more chance of completing tasks that have held us back, but we also will have a deeper understanding of ourselves and a richer connection to our lives.

And isn’t that what we wanted in the first place?

 

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Primordial BFF (Best Friend Fear)

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The nature of experience is ever changing. Change brings a lot of feelings, deep emotions and fear. Fear need not be fearsome, however.  In fact, fear can be our friend.  Maybe our best friend. Fear is a natural part of our psychology.  Fear has roots  in a series of base level programs developed long ago to protect us from danger. Our minds, attuned to frequencies of fear, have enabled our species to thrive. Fear lets us know when a stegosaurus is approaching. Fear has been a staunch ally for a very long time.
However, as the design is quite old, it is a bit crude with regards to the subtleties of modern life.  And as this survival system is filtered through emotional patterning from childhood, we are essentially working with an archaic system programmed by a four year old.  Something triggers an age old pattern to avoid danger and the child at the controls suggests we eat a pint of ice cream and watch the iPad from bed.  It may be a beautiful day outside, but because we are stirred by the change in things, we have fallen back into our mind in order to protect ourselves from our life.

Its a curious irony that our survival instinct works to protect us from life.  But, the same energy that was originally intended to wake us up, has begun to shut us down. Once triggered, we shut off and check out into patterned reactions. However, if we hold our awareness and balance, we can open up to fear. In this way, we actually become more fully present, and alive. We are, in fact, more able to protect ourselves then if we had shut down behind a wall. Awareness is the best defense. In the same way, we can open up to joy and love and life and be more capable of enjoying ourselves.  We need fear. Fear keeps us alive, but it can also keeps us awake. It provides an edge to things that help us stay present. Athletes, performers and meditators all use fear to stay present.  Rather than shutting us off from life, we can ride fear to actually connect us back to life.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition looks at fear as a protector; a dangerous friend we can employ to actually help us stay awake. But, like a protector, we can employ it or, if we abdicate our authority, it can employ us. And, if we refuse to pay attention, it can actually become the enemy. But, if we take our set as the leader of our experience, it can be a friend.  Like a dog. Our best friend, maybe. If we learn to tame the energy and work with it we can lead the energy of fear into further waking.

The key is assertive kindness. I call it channeling my inner Cesar Millan.

When a dog barks, we are alerted. But, we generally don’t follow the dog out of the house yelling into the street or wrestle the postwoman to the ground. We wake up, pay attention and then, sussing the situation, calm the dog.  We settle the dog with assertive kindness, as further aggression will only agitate the animal. And passive acceptance will do nothing to calm the animal.  With awareness, we become familiar with the relationship and making friends with fear, know its only following the protector’s program. We might actually be grateful. We patt the its head and say “good dog.”  Then, we can open to the situation non-aggressively with confidence because we are awake. And, of course, if there was a threat, we always have the dog. So, we can actually have confidence in the reliable old system, as long as we learn to use it, instead of being used by it.

I’m not saying its easy. There probably won’t be anyone addressing our panic with a frisbee in the park saying, “Wow dude. Sweet fear. Its soooo cuuuute.”  But, of course, if someone did, it would be because we were being kind to the fear in the first place.

So, it really comes down to self care and respect. When we forget ourselves and lose our connection to our basic human dignity, gasping and grasping groundlessly through life, we scare ourselves and the fear takes over and controls our life.  However, when we are in touch with our basic human dignity, we regain authority over our life and fear simply alerts us to the present.

And for that, we can actually be grateful to the old beast.

 

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Opening The Present

christmas-present-300x233… and Receiving The Gift Of Your Life.

Welcome to spring! There’s people to meet, markets on the street, clothes to peel, and air to breath, again. Ahhhh…

Kind of scary, isn’t it?  Maybe we should wait till next week. Or, till we lose some weight, get some new clothes, or shake off the cottage cheese on our thighs.  Sometimes its easier to stay in bed on days the rest of the world seems to be living a Nike ad.

Sluggish patterns, in dissonant contrast to the burgeoning spring, seem hungover from winter. We heard a lot about seasonal affective disorder, or “sad” last winter. Yet, any change can trigger depression, including the longer days of spring. Its ironic to make it through winter just to find that we can be just as depressed in the spring.

At least we can still employ the acronym, as Spring is Also Depressing.

But, depression feels extra bad on beautiful days.  The rest of the world is flying and we’re chained to something that sinks us back into our room, and into our mind. The sadness is extra deep here.  Not only are we missing out on the life others are having, we have plenty of time to beat ourselves up over missing the life we should have had. As if it were over. But, in truth, its not. Its not over. If you’re reading this, I have news for you. IT’S NOT OVER. In fact, if you’re reading this, your life has just begun. Despite the stories we create to substantiate not showing up to the ball, we have so much to offer.  Our life is much richer and more rewarding than we have learned to see. Learned. That’s right. Learned. Avoidance, resistance, depression do not occur as a punishment, it as proof that we are bad, or unworthy. They are learned behavior that becomes seated in repetitive patterning.  Once we have a pattern, its very hard not to follow it, even if the outcome is the same dead end again and again. And few things create patterns as readily as negative input, as the mind is programmed to imprint negatives as a way of safeguarding the reproductive momentum of our species.  We are, therefore, much more receptive to creating patterns around negative, rather than positive, stimuli. We do this instinctively and our society conspires. Our parents, in all love and best intentions, act on their fear to guide us away from danger by supporting our minds of fearfulness.  We end up locked in our room, like bad children, comparing ourselves to mythical beings outside our window, who seem to have it all. We look at them with longing. Their lives seem so balanced, while ours fail on the balance sheet. We fixate on the things we need to change in order to find health, happiness and a life we deserve.

Only, we’re already living the life we deserve. Or, better said, we deserve the life we’re living.

You see, once we begin to see ourselves as worthy of the life we want, we might find that that is exactly the life we have. Because in order to believe we deserve goodness in our life, we have to find strength in ourselves. Inner strength comes from believing in ourselves and gaining a natural confidence that is not subject to other’s approval. Its belief in ourselves, that comes from ourselves and answers to nothing.  Once we have that, then anything in our life is workable because we don’t need any of it to complete us. In fact, because we are complete within ourselves, we can offer to our world, rather than continue to deplete it. In return, we gain sustenance from the exchange, rather than depletion.

In order to do this, we have to retrain the mind to learn to care for itself. Instead of habitually beating ourselves up, and waiting for someone else to save us, we can learn to stand up for ourselves.  If we stop the self-flagellation over a perceived lack of success in an imaginary world, we might have the energy to actually enjoy the life we have. We can begin by appreciating the fact that we are here at all.  We can commit to giving ourselves the gift of life, the life we deserve, the life we have, by simply going beyond our fear and opening to the present.

In order to do this, we don’t need to buy anything special, own anything special or be with that special someone.  We simply learn to be alone, with ourselves, mindful of the details of our life. Through manual application of mindfulness and self compassion, we learn to develop natural confidence.  In time, we allow our fear based mind to relax and lower the walls so we can come out and play.  By waking up to the present, we take hold of our life.  In order to do this, we need to work with the fear that triggers us into patterns that keeps us imprisoned in our own minds.

I’ve been thinking about Sakyong Mipham’s teachings on fear. How, in order to be fearless, we actually need fear. How we get into trouble, again and again, by trying to run from fear. I’ve been re-committing to the purpose of NOT abandoning myself simply because I get anxious. I’ve been thinking that every time I want to check out, I can retrain myself to instead check back in. Simply that. To stay with myself. My best friend. So, with the spring comes a new resolution: to stay and regain authority in my life. I want to lean in to how life feels and to learn to deepen the connection to myself.

And no, I’m not talking about building the ego. I’m suggesting that when we choose to remain in our own space, grounded in the actuality of our present experience, we are actually boycotting ego states. Ego states are predicated on denying our present experience in favor of a patterned scenario. Ego states are exit strategies for when the edges become too sharp and we feel threatened. The irony is, by retreating into these defensive states, we are not defending ourselves at all. In fact, as we lack awareness, we are far more vulnerable. We are cut off from what is going on and what is going in. And, like a country under martial law, our access to reality is seriously compromised; we hear only what we’ve been told many times before. This process actually erodes confidence.

And, by abandoning ourselves – our body and our present moment – we abandon the very link that connects us to our life.

Conversely, by staying present, we become more confident in our experience and actually reduce the need to retreat. We can actually lean in to the sense of being threatened. We can learn to train ourselves to look into the fear, as a way of working with our fear. So, rather than run from fear, I want to look into the mind of fearfulness with loving kindness. I want to become my own best friend and throw my arms around myself in encouragement. And, instead of abandoning my fearful mind, I want to take it with me into the present so it can enjoy this life.

So, I’ve decided to remind myself daily to come back to my body, and my present experience. Every time we want to run and retreat into some story, lock ourselves back in our room, or not show up for life, we can redirect the impulse and come back to the present. In this way, we are with actual feelings happening now.  In other words, we have opened to the present. Once we connect to the body and what it is presently feeling and sensing, we open to life simply and without expectation. Then we see life as it is, exhilarating, boring, challenging and scary as heck, but so worth the effort. And each time when we fail to check out, but instead, resolve to check in with ourselves, we can open to the world with natural confidence.

Then we may discover ourselves blooming in the light of another spring.

Posted on by joseph mauricio

Out of (Pine) the Box

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   (and Into The Fire)…

He finally had a paid gig out of the country. Professional. He was to leave in two days on his first tour. He had one day of work left before his trip to riches and glory. He was going to take that day off. But, his mother thought to teach him something of self-reliance. No one made money in a rock ‘n roll band.

Blues, he said it was. And he worked hard to learn the guitar. He was good.

Blues, rock, opera, what have you. She wouldn’t relent. You go into work, even if its your last day, she told him, and finish the job right. The next morning Tony went to work at the steel shop. That afternoon, he was rushed to the hospital with the tips of two fingers missing.