Manifest Spontaneity

Starting with how I feel right now, I feel afraid in a kind of heavy-dull limbs-in-concrete-jello way.  I don’t want to feel this too much.  Really at all.  This election result.  In one way, It doesn’t change much about how I’m going to be operating my life for the next 6-7 months.  I’m finishing my dissertation (actually finishing it this time).  That in itself means reduced interaction with the public sphere.  Politics, current events, music.  This election result, Trump/Pence elected and Republican control of House and Senate, feels like a wake-up call though.  I could make it about people like me collectively, but I’m mainly going to speak in my own terms so I can stick to my experience right now.   I really don’t know what to do.  I keep finding myself running down paths trying to explain how we got here.  There’s the sense that if I knew how we got here, I’d know how to feel.  In the Shambhala teachings we talk about ‘the cocoon.’  The cocoon is made of the layers or hab

It’s been a while since I’ve engaged writing here specifically as a practice.  The most recent posts have felt report-y.  So here I am.  I don’t know what I have to say, but I can trust this welling-up feeling.  Is it hope?  Hope that something good will come out of me?  Something helpful or insightful?  Yep, that’s definitely in here.   Relationships.  That’s where a lot of the juice has been for me lately.  Just writing that, it’s like blowing on a bed of coals glowing in my diaphragm.  Relationships are hard, and I love them.  I think I take refuge in an image of myself as successful in my relationships.  When I get really discouraged and hopeless about my research, I find myself trying to latch on to and shore up my relationships.  “I refuse to be a workaholic, because relationships are what will really make me happy and proud,” I say to myself.  I’ve been doing a contemplation recently on impermanence and the reality of death.  Every relationship I have now will dissolve.

        On Monday, August 1st, having been back for 5 days, this is what I woke up to: I’m going to try writing my way through this.  Paralysis.  Feel SO alone.  I replay my interactions over last week.  Only remember the ones that felt painfully disconnecting.  Think about the people I feel closest to.  They feel so far away.  This feeling like, “How can I even…?”  Tears roll down my cheeks.  Actually, I’m encouraged by the tears.  It’s the numb heart I fear.  What one little thing can I do?  I know that staying home and finding something to occupy my mind, avoiding this feeling, these feelings, won’t help.  What about all those who sob and don’t know why and come up with their own worthlessness?  Do I believe that I sob because of my own brilliance?  Honestly right now it sure feels like brilliance.  It’s very hard to look directly at.  Having relaxed some, there’s a monolithic quality.  Like the feeling of a rock on solid earth just after the single thud of it’s la

Sun Dragon submitted to Stanford Solar Center by Henry Roll.   I just got back from a 3 week program at Shambhala Mountain Center.  Re-entry into my midwestern PhD life has been anything but what I expected.  Being in a 3 week intensive meditation program surpasses any description, but it’s sort of like experiencing your whole life through both a microscope and a telescope at both 0.5x and 1.5x speed.  That feels like a pretty apt description, but I find myself frozen up, thinking I can’t possibly convey this experience.  And I can’t.  But I can share something with you.  This is what I want to share. One evening after a lot of processing with Maitri during the day, I really needed to be alone.  During dinner, I was thinking that I was going to go somewhere outside and just be with myself and settle into what I was feeling.  All I could do was go to the tent.  I lay down and I was overwhelmed.  Tears welled.  Tears streamed.  My thoughts leapt from the past 5 hours to

These are some thoughts I was rolling around in my head before going into retreat at the beginning of July.  They’re ongoing contemplations for me, and I feel like I’ll probably come back around to them in the future.   “No one’s perfect.” If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard this, I could have prevented 2 of Donald Trump’s bankruptcies.  I heard it a lot when I was younger, often followed by the exhortation to not be so hard on myself.  Good advice for sure.  Not that I ever took it.  The thing that I’m interested in now, though, is this seeming assumption that everyone knows exactly what ‘perfect' is and what it would look like personified.  For those of us educated in conventional school systems in the United States (and I would venture Canada and western Europe), perfect is a score that you can get on a test or a project.  It indicates that you made no mistakes.  This judgment comes from the teacher or other testmaker, who has indisputable objective access to ‘The

I’ve just come off of an all-too-familiar fiction binge.  This time it was the last two books in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam series followed by Octavia Butler’s Earthseed sequence.  I have a penchant for the semi-dystopian speculative writing of women, it would seem.   But what’s this feeling of fecundity? Of richness?  Of just-about-to-be born?  I don’t have XX chromosomes so the likelihood that I will go through labor to birth a child is low.  Maybe I’m not acknowledging the labor I need to go through to birth the progeny of my heart.  How many beautiful minds have I made love with to gather the genetic seeds of this child, these children (what if they’re twins or triplets?)?  So many.  Carse.  Butler.  Le Guin.  Atwood.  Trungpa. Mipham the Great.  Mipham the Sakyong.  Blake.  Choleridge.  Hayward.  Whitehead.  Wittgenstein.  Varela.  Gentner.  Rosch.  James.  James.  Linda Barry.  Bucky Fuller.  Rolling Thunder and Doug Boyd.  Faulkner.  Huxley.  Saul Williams.  Kran

Francisco Varela Looking back over my life, whenever I’ve tried to model myself off of someone else, either on their own recommendation or on my own hope of salvation, it has not worked.  I also see many times when I could have listened to someone’s advice and benefitted greatly, but through arrogance, stubbornness or good old-fashioned self-determination I ignored it as not applying to me.  Between these 2 poles, I suspect that there is a middle-way of being.  Being willing to listen.  Being willing to ‘hold myself the principal witness’ ultimately.  Open to outside interaction without being addicted to it.   William James In terms of my moods (and their dysorder), it seems like I listen too hard to my internal voices.  When I’m hypomanic, this results in an arrogance such that I ignore messages from the environment.  I know best, and I am responsible for enacting my unique vision for how my life should be which no one else could possibly understand, be

My own personal ecumenism.  Part of me feels disingenuous regarding the spirit of this blog, that my-own-personal-ecumenism is a little too cognitive, a little too conceptual, a little too wishful, a little too witty.  At the same time I’m reconnecting with the resonance I felt with the phrase, which occurred to me 4 days ago, as I write this.   Jamgon Kongtrul of Shechen, root teacher of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and one of the founders of the Rime movement within Tibetan Buddhism. I’ll say a little about the circumstances in which it arose.  I was cleaning my kitchen and listening to a talk by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche on his guru, Jamgon Kongtrul of Shechen (you can listen to the talk here ).  Kongtrul Rinpoche was one of the founders of the Rime (ree-may) movement within Tibetan Buddhism.  Trungpa Rinpoche was disparaging the western academic interpretation of the Rime movement as eschewing distinctions between the different lineages within Tibetan Buddhism.  My sense is