Days 21-25 of Busting Through 100 Fears in 100 Days

Where have I been all week? I've been here mostly. Genpo Rosh's Big Mind work is an elegant weaving of Zen Buddhism and deep shadow work. He utilizes a technique called Voice Dialogue to access aspects of the self. It enables you connect with aspects that have been mostly rejected by the self and therefore have become shadow elements. The amazing thing is with this work is that you not only access the dualistic voices, but you easily access the non-dual, transcendent ones too. You get to have an experience of the non-dual as easy as shifting in your chair. It turns out that all the "seeking" that we do to access this limitless, peaceful, and clear state of mind is the very thing that has kept us from it. The more you "try" the less you are IN it. I spent much of the week sitting in this space of clear, limitless mind.

And that is why this week has felt like: So Many Days, So Few Fears.

And then came Friday. A few weeks ago, I asked my manager for some help. I knew I needed an editor or agent to help me with my book outline. And he cam through. So Friday I had a conversation with a literary agent. It was a great conversation. She is smart, savvy and gets what I am up to. She was the editor of my dad's first book Brain Droppings.

Bottom line - during the conversation I claimed something that I know is what I have been avoiding claiming for a long, long time. It is about who I am and what I am really doing through all the work I do - finding a clear and consistent relationship with the sacred.

So, when it came to defining a genre that I thought my memoir would fit into, I knew where it belonged - in the spiritual memoir section. And although that word can be construed in a myriad of ways, most of which I hate, it is where I belong.

AND THIS WAS TERRIFYING. But here it is - I am writing a memoir - a spiritual memoir. I have been avoiding stepping into this label for a long time. I know ultimately it is what ALL of my work is about whether I am writing, performing, teaching or coaching, i am interested in my and the world's relationship with the sacred, the transcendent, the soul, the True Self, the Authentic Voice. Name it what you want, but it is it.

What a week.
Question for the week: What has your soul been asking you to claim for the last 10 years?

Days 18, 19 and 20 of Busting Through 100 Fears in 100 Days

I was still feeling a bit crappy over the weekend, but I laid low and took care of myself. I resisted the need to do things that would have pushed my body, and I let myself heal. An important lesson I learned years ago that ended poorly when I ignored my body/mind and ended up in bed with pneumonia for a full month.

Today, and all this week, I am participating in a free online retreat with my teacher Genpo Roshi. You can check it out here from 10:30 AM-12 noon and then again 2:30 PM to 4:30 PM PST each day. His work is profound and simple to access.

This morning we did some work around the "thinking mind." In particular, we explored ways in which our "selves" tend to shun and disown this aspect of ourselves having deemed it "monkey mind" and "chatter mind" (especially if you are a student of meditation), and then the ensuing consequences for the self. Although I feel that I am pretty in touch with my "thinking mind," I found that indeed there are ways in which my "self" has squashed this aspect in service of being loved in the world - at times I have felt that the world does not like a smart woman, or a child that has more clarity than the grown ups, and when that happened, I shut up and created a shadow aspect of this voice within me.

My lack of ability as an adult to put my opinion forward and out into the world through my writing, performing and general citizenship, I feel is very connected to suppressing my "thinking mind." Add to that the prejudice that we in the world of Feminine thought have put on the thinking mind by believing that it is only associated with the separation of the body/soul from life and thus the rape and pillaging of the planet and its peoples, and well, what's a "thinking mind" to do? Run and hide. And then show up in all sorts of pathological ways like - 4AM terrors about life, obsessive worry, over-thinking, confusion, the need to be right, and shunning others as thoughtless bastards and idiots.

Once we thoroughly examined this disowned aspect of "thinking mind," we then moved to the owned, embodied, honored and acknowledged "thinking mind," and wow! It was calm, in the moment, wise, clear, ready to be of use to the world and the self, and could actually hold space for others. It was like sitting with Sitting Bull - wise, ancient and all seeing.

It hit me that from this place, I could even listen to others that scare me with their thoughts. I immediately thought of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who either make me shudder and hide or take me to murderous rage. So I came up with an idea - to practice sitting in the fully owned, mature, healthy, honored "thinking mind" while listening to one of these people this week. I am doing it with a very curious heart AND mind - curious about what I will actually hear when I allow my wisest, most grounded thinking mind to encounter their views.

I am KelCar on the chat as we participate online with this retreat. Join in the conversation and work if you feel pulled to do so.

Later.

Day 14/15 of Busting Through 100 Fears in 100 Days; Five Hindrances

I was talking to a client the other day, and she mentioned the word hindrances, and I had an insight. In Buddhism, they talk about the 5 Hindrances that impede one's path to enlightenment.

They are:
1.Sensual desire (kāmacchanda): Craving for pleasure to the senses.
2. Anger or ill-will (byāpāda, vyāpāda): Feelings of malice directed toward others.
3. Sloth-torpor or boredom (thīna-middha): Half-hearted action with little or no concentration.
4. Restlessness-worry (uddhacca-kukkucca): The inability to calm the mind.
5. Doubt (vicikicchā): Lack of conviction or trust.

I think that "hindrance" might be a better word than "fear" to describe this 100 Day challenge I have embarked on. What keeps me from moving toward what I really want is something I am curious about everyday. What keeps me stuck in my status quo/comfort zone? I would say that on any given day or moment I could easily point to one of these hindrances and find the answer.

Certainly, most of the time it is doubt that turns into fear. But there are days when I would rather have the short-term pleasure vs. the long term goal. Or find that my lack of ability to move forward is based on an old story line of resentment and thus I will not move forward so I can "show them." And boredom is a HUGE reason for filling up my mind and body with crap I don't want and thus keeping me off track. And the inability to calm the mind often feeds my fears.

But then again, ideally what this challenge is about is DOING something that counteracts the hindrances, not analyzing them. So really, it is BUSTING THROUGH 100 Hindrances in 100 Days.

Report:
Yesterday I went to a dinner party, and someone was talking about the world through the filter of conspiracy theories. I normally just shut down and ignore these theories because they either make me depressed or enraged. No middle ground. But last night, I stayed with the person and just got curious - about them and how it feels to them to believe in such a thing. It felt risky to take this tact, and yet deeply fulfilling in the end because the discussion didn't become about truth or who is right, but about what it means to live in a world where it might be true.

Today - stepping through my torpor and doubt and getting back to the page. For a writer, everyday is a scary leap of faith into the unknown. Today is no different.

Zen and the Art of Web Spinning

These last few months I have receded from the world to my backyard deck spending hours each day meditating, journaling and then working the outline of my memoir. I have been here so much, I am now embedded and a part of my garden's ecosystem. My niche in this system is to be the amazed witness to the buzz and hubbub of it all - a young pair of Phoebes nesting and raising their fledglings, the daily feedings of hummingbirds, bumble bees and various shaped and colored butterflies, and the juvenile crows hanging out on my trees like bored teenagers at the mall.

And then this week I noticed, with excitement, the garden spiders are back - the spinners of the most magnificent webs.

Every day I watch as her (her because of Charlotte, because she is me? I do not know) perfect web gets battered by the wind and destroyed by insects too strong to be held by its delicate threads. And every evening I watch as she begins her delicate and beautiful spinning again, as if she did not face this herculean task only 24 hours before. She does not mourn. She only knows that she must spin if she is to hope of catching a meal to sustain her. But sustain her for what, a perfection, or stasis? No, there is none of that here or anywhere. There is only spinning so that she may spin again and again until all her days of spinning are gone.

Every day I too face the ways life breaks down my body, my mind, my carefully crafted stasis. But unlike her, I pout, whine (really, I have to wash my hair again?) and often mourn how life does this endless dance of creation and destruction. And at times I feel it dismantle my own resolve to push forward. I ask, "what is the point?", and ponder what could be so wrong with just lying on my bed watching reruns of Law and Order until my death.

And yet, like it or not, every day, like the spider, I am also caught up in an urge to move forward, make order and fix what has been undone by time. I am inexplicably given invisible marching orders to spin more tales and unfold more of my delicate webbing into the world, so that I may catch a morsel of something that will sustain me for another interval, another turning of the earth across the day and into the night.

There is no preserving this web of hers. There is no way to create it to withstand the ravages of time and preserve the precious and precarious nature that brings us its beauty. I, with my conscious mind, fight with myself daily over the need to have things last forever, and the need to face the reality that it all passes away, some slowly, some in the blink of an eye, but in the end it all goes.

I suppose that is how the beauty of life emerges - in the chambers of my melancholy heart where a constant sadness for what was is felt, and in the unknown territories of my hopeful soul where a constant joy of what might be is born again and again.

And then there are those moments in between the creation and the destruction of it all, when it is all just as it is to be. Here I see that no matter what, there is something that lives beyond death and birth: The very urge to push, participate, spin, eat, kill, create and survive. It becomes crystal clear in those in between moments that my personal participation in this urge will die one day, but not the urge itself. That was here long before me and will be here still long after I have gone.

And then I see all the beauty, the joy and the melancholy. I am the spider. I am the web. I am the wind destroying the web. I am that which has been caught in the web. And I am the urge to spin and spin and spin until I am all spun out.