Evening time –

meditating in the graveyard…

birds, bats, and thoughts

flitting…

father-in-law

dying 

from old age…

this world, from lack of love

from  lack of wisdom

All this confusion

breeds,  hatred,  greed…

and our pollution

from tensions, torsions –

all distortions and contortions 

stops

only when

we stop the conning and the fusion

and then… and then, and only then

in truth,

released

we can begin again.

In mid July I was in a little tent with some friendly faces talking about the view of dzogchen under the title ‘Who dies, who dances?’

Over the years I have taken different props with me, from crystal droplets to bubble blowers. This time it was to be a little box of sheeps wool collected from Dartmoor.
In the event I left it behind… things have been pretty busy lately… but it didn’t much matter because it’s fairly easy to imagine. So I thought I’d see whether the metaphor means anything to you.

If you take a piece of sheep’s wool and try to look through it… that may not be possible.
If you squeeze it and squash it into a little box then, of course, seeing through it becomes impossible.
Cold water washing won’t help but will stick the threads closer and hot water washing will felt it so that it will be quite impossible to see through.

But if you gently tease it apart so the little strands of wool separate, you can see the space that was always there and you can see right through it.

The mind is a little bit like that… (and  quite a lot not like that)!

It’s a bit like the mind because… when we as ‘subject’ focus our attention onto the thoughts, feelings and sensations – the threads – which arise (the movements of the mind) as if they were objects, we become mesmerised and lose touch with the spaciousness from which, and back into which they go. With this comes more sense of solidity, density, weightiness, certainty…which increases the sense of being a separate subject and decreases the ability to see what’s really going on.

A deception is played out so often it seem true… inflation of the ‘I’-thought, believing in it (and with that the thought-threads wrapped round it) as a true identity.  Then relating to other arisings depending on the perception of their impact upon our created construct.

Seeing how any trick is performed requires very close attention. There is usually a moment of created diversion, a distraction, and during that moment of slippage the sleight of hand is performed…

When you know how it’s done you can still be taken in…it’s a big habit, easy to fall into…but instead of saying ‘you got me (or got to me!) again’…you know you confused yourself!

There’s a great poem by Portia Nelson about how you can reposition yourself relative to the hole in the pavement. Meditation which allows the mind to move but does not follow the movements – is a practice which goes with that. ‘Oh..i’m tightening up, narrowing my focus, condensing, putting weight into story-line, falling down the hole’….relax, release…begin again…

The more we fuse and entangle with the tanglings the tighter things get.
Relaxing more into the spaciousness, holding a very wide-angle view… this allows the con-fusion with the tanglings to release, we don’t have to tease them apart. ‘Tanglings’ then move as the transient energetic display aspects of the mind itself…movements which awareness, or the mind itself, doesn’t grasp.

In an earlier life….  we had just started living on a farm,  everything was in a great muddle and I was exhausted as we tried to make sense of the existing arrangements and animals and work out what to do next…

The neighbours’ dog had just given birth to nine puppies… and we had a daughter, whose life also had been disrupted by the move, who really really wanted a puppy.

Thinking ‘dogs and farms go together’… as a guard dog a Jack Russell/ springer spaniel is really not at all scary but can give an alert!
Maybe in the long run for moving stock – and as a companion…
A teacher at a previous school had said she felt that children without a dog had been deprived…and how much more difficult can it make things  when they are beyond difficult I wondered?
[Quite a lot was the answer, but smiles too : )

…so next we bought a puppy.

My sister-in-law at the time trained dogs for competing at Crufts and helped our daughter choose The One. He was like a small Snoopy, big soft brown eyes, silky black ears, a white mottled body with a black spot on the side…and soon showed a very friendly lovable nature.
I just looked up this cross and it is seen to be loving of  both everyone… and their dogs… with an energy level high enough to be ‘mental’.
Fairly accurate I should say : )
Dog owners and their dogs often seem to have some kind of resemblance.

But we couldn’t just play with him, even if we had the time. This dog would, at the very least, need to come when called and leave the sheep alone. So ‘dog-trainer’ was a new, extra, role to take on.

Clicker-training – using a sound and food, then just sound, to reward and train good behaviour… and socialisation classes followed. However when chasing rabbits and pheasants (which I don’t think he ever actually caught) his interest in coming when called was non-existent… although he would turn around to look at you just to show he had heard!

As for the sheep… the thrill of getting a large number of these white furry things moving… and then going faster… so he could chase them faster… was worrying to observe; prior to our arrival dogs had been worrying/chasing neighbouring sheep.

As farmers see the distress caused to their sheep and lambs, and the profit lost in vets bill’s and the waste, their determination to catch and shoot the offender in the act increases. Their anger over this had been expressed to us… so I invested in an electric collar.

When later I told a vet’s wife that I had done this she was truly appalled, many dogs have been deeply traumatised by the mis-use of electric collars.
It is true that many are of too nervous a disposition to be suitable for this way of training, also the approach needs to be very thoughtful and systematic when it is being used for recall…and also with just the right amount of whack applied when training to leave sheep alone.

This particular cross breed – terrier/spaniel – tends to be pretty bombproof and irrepressible, and also I took my time and was very careful with the training.
For a month before ‘live’ use we would go about carrying the  device that sends a signal to the special collar around the dog’s neck.
Then, going ‘live’.
On a day in full sight of the dog starting to chase the sheep, press a button. The collar receives a signal and gives a shock strong enough to take the dog off its feet…
For him it was like a bolt from the Blue/Sheep in response to his behaviour. His respect for sheep and distance from them was maintained all the time that  he was at the farm and the lady who owned the sheep said ‘I would always trust your dog with our sheep’.

For any who are still unconvinced of the kindness of this shocking action, years later my heart quailed to hear that the traditional way of dealing with this common problem with farm dogs is to wrap the dog in a couple of duvets and put it in a confined space with a ram. The ram will try to kill it… but you rescue it after it’s taken a battering and hopefully learnt to be respectful!

He also learned to come when he was called but was pretty hopeless at moving the stock as he was a bit scared of cows and a bit bouncy for the piglets. He learned respect for the cat who settled his jumping up by planting claws directly into the top of his head… resulting in an egg shaped lump and a large veterinary bill…and was (mostly) a pleasure to have around, with his softness and zest for life.

Things changed for this dog after I left the farm and a new person came in with their dog.  Ball chasing was completely different – as the ball was thrown he chased the ball but this new dog chased him so he had to zig-zag. Life was less comfortable for him, no longer ‘top dog’, and he could be blamed for trouble rather than the newcomer.  But when after a few years the new dog died he was very sad and spent time looking for him, lying with his nose level with where this dog used to lie under a bed.

Then he re-located with his owners, they started to travel overseas and they left him with friends.
He started to wander… he started to chase sheep…
he returned with blood around his mouth so he was horsewhipped…
Maybe that helped with the sheep chasing but my understanding is that the correction has to be applied at exactly the moment of the mistake otherwise the dog can assume it is being punished for returning or some other behaviour.

Clearly the circumstances had changed, he was unsettled and unhappy and his behaviours naturally changed with that. Who would want to re-home him with that history, would he have to be put down?

This is a Christmas Eve story and it does have a ‘happy ending’ –  grandparents who knew him agreed to take him so he is now a good-natured companion dog for them and their other dog.
He does not go off the lead unless he’s in their paddock but now he’s an older dog this is nothing like the imprisonment it would have felt like earlier in his life.

Older, greyer, plumper, he has become more territorial and proprietorial – so his attitude towards other visiting dogs has changed – but he is warm, content, well-fed and well loved…unlike so many of the two-legged friends and other beings with whom we share this earth today.

so firstly a Christmas quiz

a) is this dog real… that is to say is it enduring through time, un-changed, independent of other factors?…

b) so could it be true that birds that live on a golden mountain take on the colour of the sun?

c) So although he had the same name… was the dog the same dog all the way through?

d) Did we each create our own dog from what was there or was the dog self-existing?

e)Did the sheep see him in anything like the same way as we did?

f)Is a puppy a small furry human? What’s it like to be a dog? Can you speak dog to dog or only human to dog.

g)  although I named, trained, fed, cared for, and protected this dog was he ever ‘mine’

h) in the same way are our children ‘ours’, entities which can be known, controlled and treated as possessions?

i) are you and i ‘things’ or manifestations?…driven by karma or arising responsively?

j) so if you say “i would never do xyz…” is this true…for ever?… how can you be sure?

Then, as for the awful circumstances others face… being alive to those situations brings us into mental connection and diminishes our own encapsulation and self-involvement. As we eat, others are going without food…. as we get dressed others may just be pulling on whatever old dirty clothes they have… as we practice the dharma others lack the freedom or understanding to do so…
This understanding helps drive the determination to find a way to be helpful which eventually goes beyond, as well as including, ordinary helpfulness.

Connection is a given… and if it comes with a light touch – no dogmatic assertions, directions or appropriations – it can be so beautiful.  I  found this link to the first reading from Letters from South Africa on Radio4   poignant and moving…maybe you’ll enjoy it too.

Merry Christmas!

In the talk – ‘Dissolving conflict in life and death’ James mentioned the limitation on openness which can result from tensions held within the body.

Sometime ago, on the radio, I heard someone saying they felt their jaw tighten in response to  some event.

It got me wondering whether my jaw had ever felt really loose… and I explored that a bit. Sticking the tongue out works well, so does rubbing the hands together ’til they are warm then gently softening the face and jaw into that warmth… but just imagining that area becoming  soft, like a cloud, from the inside worked best for me.

Shortly after this ‘noticing’ my whole jaw started to really ache – tension stored there from a long time ago when I had broken my back teeth through grinding them together at night-time.

The dentist had diagnosed ‘buxitis’ and made me a plastic plate to wear inside my mouth so that the teeth could slide over each other as my jaw worked away in my sleep… an activity which naturally also led to problems with the temporo-mandibular joints!

I was only in my twenties at the time and never thought to think that the tooth-grinding, along with other maladies, had causal factors… and did not realise how resulting tensions can be stored in the body… and that these can be released.

I think of these tensions as being a bit like like compressed springs… vibrating with the energy stored in them… maybe at a low level but even so, vulnerable to being amplified by identification with, and fusion with, the impact of situations which resonate with this particular patterning of energy.

For as soon as, as long as, we take ourselves to be things – entities which can marked and labelled and judged, wanting validation and expecting completion from external factors…suffering is woven with the story. So it was that one night, when I was very sad, I grabbed a thought which was so so dismal… and I felt the impact directly on my breath and the contraction in my body.

This led to some anguished howling as realisation of all the suffering, all the damage we do to ourselves and others as we fuse with thoughts, taking them as true and definitional, really struck home.

A few months back, listening to a radio programme – the Reunion, about the conflict between Rupert Murdoch and the trade unions around the move to computerised printing at Wapping in 1986, I was struck by the absolute contradictory convictions of the participants.

One (for whom the dispute had been all-consuming) was convinced that the heart-attack he suffered  at the time was caused by Rupert Murdoch… whilst another, on the opposing side, was equally convinced that this was completely ridiculous notion – that the heart attack was nothing to do with the situation, mere happenstance…

So an understanding of dependent co-origination – that within relative reality events occur due to a multiplicity of interlinked factors – is absent and, for them, that heart attack was either ‘just the luck of the draw’ or ‘all his fault’…. no middle way.

Also striking was the word used as Brenda Dean and Charlie Wilson  agreed that their oppositional, polarised, political views were – not informed by but – “forged” during the heat of that intense conflict. Attitudes, tensions formed and held, giving particular oppositional shapes to their lives ever since.

For myself… over time… as well as applying the ‘dharma massage’ – listening, reflecting, meditating/acting – over and over again, I’ve enjoyed releasing or being helped to release embodied tensions through qigong, tai chi, yoga, five rhythms dance, Rolfing, massage, drumming, sound healing, myo-fascial release, contact (and comedy) improvisation, art, walking, swimming, talking and so on… whatever I felt might be helpful and was available to bring some more ease and a different sense of the possibilities of my embodied existence.

As  one area loosens up it highlights the lack of looseness in other areas. Rigidities like the soldier’s ‘attention position’…back straight! shoulders back! stomach in! chest out! head up! do you want to wear a coat-hanger in your shirt? …and many further instructions about how to walk, eat, laugh etc ‘correctly’….are more than likely to have a somewhat negative effect on fluidity and embodied ease!

But every block has possible release and little by little things change. With meditation the facility to release any new snarlings increases as does sensitivity to the connection with the environment…so the amount of effort expended is more appropriate and attuned, more harmonious.

At first there’s the imagined ‘me‘ acting on the imagined ‘it’, with only partial connections to ‘it’ or me. Whatever I think I am is the main event…and there are these other ‘things’ – things that I make use of, often whilst i’m thinking about something else.

But, in thinking about something which isn’t there (in an on-going, random, fashion) – i’ve stepped out of embodied existence into mental-cyberspace – so, naturally, I can’t fully receive what is here.

At some point i noticed this – that when i was distracted there was a kind of snatching and clumsiness in the movements i made.

A simple example would be that I became conscious of opening the door a little roughly – I pushed the handle down a bit harder than i needed to in order to open the door.
Why was this?… Because, in my mind, I had gone ahead of myself…headed towards the end of my journey upstairs, pulled along by fusion with the thought of doing whatever it was. The door was just something in the way.

Ordinary mindfulness would give me an instruction to pay attention…to notice the coolness, the feel, the shape, the sound of the movement opening… so ‘I’ would be here and noticing something in particular…and that would be an improvement.

But by staying as presence in time, as time… when each moment of interaction is equal as experience… it is the whole of the journey and the entire field which is inviting the participation of inter-subjectivity.

And as the body softens from the inside there’s a softness to these cloud-like interactions which leads to more softness

….ahhh…easier breathing

…ahhh…just this

and this…ahhh….

‘Inch foot time gem’ – not twice ever does this precise moment arise…

but then.. as it’s coming and going however it is, you might think that this physical stuff is unnecessary activity for a meditator….and for some it would be, it’s not the main event.  But, already having ‘issues’ with my neck and shoulders, at one time when i did a lot of sitting meditation I found that things had locked up to the point that i could barely turn my head. Working on the lap-top is not comfortable….so remedial action is ‘working with circumstances’.

Feeling the body to be soft and light (as developed in practice) and rounded rather than tight and stretched offers a lovely alternative to twitchiness or rigidity.

Thanks to Julo for image of Polish soldiers (Wikipedia)

Some years ago someone who had been on Prozac for eight years came regularly to a group i was facilitating in mid-devon.

She was put on the drug following the death of her young daughter and at a time when she herself was in an unsatisfying job.
She had, since then, found more satisfying work and so we worked through things together – she slowly came off the prozac and is relatively happy in her life.

Her openess and ability to connect, with a care for the happiness of others, means that other employees in the store where she works feel able to confide in her…and she is able to pass on some of the benefits of her experiences.

One day someone she works with came into  the staffroom looking very subdued… this lady noticed and enquired… her colleague sheepishly admitted that having been to the doctors and put on prozac…

They had a conversation and then others in the room joined in…. and in this little store in mid- Devon there were four or five others on prozac.

This number…plus the others who did not share…multiplied by the number of large stores in the country…would be a staggering number in itself…then add in all the rest!

No wonder the birds have measurable levels of prozac in their bodies – they drink the water that runs into the rivers from the sewage plants…
which only remove some substances.

I can remember listening to a poet who had made a poem out of the ingredients of a shampoo which had a ‘natural’ marketing image.
The poem of the list of chemicals was extremely long… the small print can be very small… and I couldn’t imagine any trichological necessity for most of  them!
Anyway, i thought, they don’t stay on my head for long… but then I imagined them going down the waste pipe into the sewerage system and on…and on…and fish swimming in it, birds drinking it and..eek!

As i see it, to be able to be allow for the arising of sad feelings is part of being alive and connected with this world… however the egoic thought–structure feels that there is something wrong with this.
If you are in connection with this world and see and feel what’s going on around you, i think being sad is a completely natural experience.

When the thought that ‘I should be happy’ arises and links with another thought (thought of what I take myself to be)  there can be a sense that something has gone wrong and it needs fixing a.s.a.p.
‘I would like the world and myself to be the way I would like them to be’… so I am rejecting what is, i’m making a story about it and becoming oppositional to the arising thoughts and feelings and sensations… lumping them all together… either forgetting or not being unconscious of their transient nature.

Surely sometimes  a chemical intervention is appropriate… but it can become an automatic response to  ‘I don’t like these feelings please take them away’.

Anything that does that is not necessarily good… and they’ll go anyway if you let them…crying can be a great release, not a sign of failure. Stiff upper-lips are not indicative of health and ‘pulling one’s self together’ just tightens the knots.

To look at what’s going on rather than to mask it, or go for distraction, takes courage. To ask ‘what is the root cause of my suffering?’ is the question which set Gautama Siddhartha off on his journey… and he realised an answer which is the same for all of us….one we can experience…that’s a worthwhile journey!

But mostly it seems easier to try to sort out the external factors. Sometimes this is not so difficult, and it can be useful if it brings more of a sense of spaciousness into the situation. However these external factors are themselves impermanent and not the root cause of the problem…and the very busyness involved in changing circumstances may conceal this.
Also there is a big difference between satisfaction – being okay however things are – and the happiness of pleasure. Pursuing pleasure is to over-privilege the high points, the excitement around which is addictive and diminishes the enjoyment of everything in between…so much so that the in-between time can be just be filling-in-time between the highs.

There was a zen master who gave a teaching to an official who wanted to know how to be…how to practice within the constraints and the perceived tedium which went with his high office?
The master’s blessing translates as – ‘inch foot time gem’ – and its recipient was nonplussed until the explanation came….words to the effect that
Every moment is a moment of life – and, as  there are only so many moments in your life….why not be there for them all? – receiving and allowing them to go.  Turning your face away from any of them is life denying; with the ego calling the shots life becomes constricted and tensions increase.

I like James’s analogy of the ‘i’ as an empty wine glass for this…and if we can relax the desire… for the champagne or the happiness…whatever we might ordinarily feel would bring things to perfection…we can be momentarily full of rich burgundy, water, milk,  Orangina, urine or chocolate pudding …. many many different flavours….

a self emptying, cleaning and filling wine glass…. extraordinary!

btw… along with many other drugs, the use of Diclophenac , a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, is not compatible with the use of Prozac…. and if you read the warnings about NSAID’s in that Diclophenac link you might be quite slow to swallow them in any case!

…and then there’s that quote of Einstein  “Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig.” !

The self-referential nature of the above quest keeps the blindfold in place… and so the tail can lead the dog down many a cul-de-sac!