Manifest Spontaneity

I've been feeling like I should write for a few days (or maybe weeks) now.  Going back to the practice of 'manifest spontaneity', what arises? I'm tired, but not sleepy tired.  I'm tired of avoiding my experience.  And I've been doing a lot of that lately.  Reading lots of sci-fi and stuff on social-emotional learning, but not what will help me finish my dissertation.  Not emailing the people I need to email to get my data analysis rolling.  Cowering at fear is exhausting.  And so habit forming.  I have the itch to switch over to i-books and pick back up in my sci-fi novel right now.  There's something else down here too, though.  It's not just tiredness and avoidance.  Longing.  Longing for genuine connection.  Longing to be seen without the cheapness of having to confess everything I feel like is wrong with me or every stupid thing I've done.  Just thirsty for water, as opposed to a fancy cocktail, perfect latte or the IPA that gets that flora

Miss you.  Miss who?  Miss Yew, the well-bowed broadheart.   My heart swirls.  Head furls.  Sometimes I can just listen and write what I hear, but today, few words are heard. I need to get a picture of my cat.  Rather, I need to print one out.  He has died, and I am sad.  It happened moving across the country and though I’ve arrived here, in my new home.  I can’t seem to let it sink all the way in.   

I haven’t posted here in quite a while.  I’ve been trying to wrap up data collection for my dissertation before I move (3 weeks!!!). I keep thinking about how I work with my mood.  I call it my mood but it’s more than that.  It’s my physical energy level, sleep/wakefulness, gusto for life, breadth and engine of curiosity.  Not hard to see that all those things impact my relationships pretty directly.   This morning I’ve been thinking about movement and flow, momentum.  The most ready image being a river.  Only a fool would try to stop a river altogether.  Doing so would be ignorant of the immensity of force generated by the environmental conditions culminating in (or descending into) the river.   River in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  I found it here . How can I guide this mood-momentum in a beneficial direction? (I intentionally avoided using ‘productive’ there.)   Gentle firm pressure might shift the course, but no dams, no 180-degree course reversals.  

I’m often questioning the relationship between my mental illness and my practice path.  Sitting here I’m at the end of a pretty intense week.  On Tuesday I was sobbing like I’ve never sobbed before.  On Wednesday I was mostly anxious, Thursday I was getting hypomanic and I don’t know what’s been going on today.  I would say hypomanic because I woke up about an hour before my alarm, but I had to take a nap because I was so exhausted this afternoon.  So something other than hypomanic.  Maybe today was a transition day. Why am I writing about this right now?  Well, my mood has been as the forefront of my awareness, clearly.  The second thing is that I just read a sort of micro-memoir of a pretty famous dharma teacher in which he talked about experiencing clinical depression, viewing medication as the last resort, and left it ambiguous whether practice was sufficient treatment for his depression.  The feeling I got was that he did not in the end ‘resort’ to medication.  When I use th

The weather.  That’s how I refer to my moods. They tend to be all encompassing, filters that color my whole world.  The analogy feels so native to me, that I’m surprised when I need to clarify it for someone else. Right now the weather is threatening rain.  It has the feel of that 3-day all grey steady rain.  No real downpour.  No break either.  One of the differences between my moods and the actual weather is that how I respond to my mood influences the course of the mood.  Not in a one-to-one deterministic sense.  There’s no prescribed action that will get me out of a depression or preordained response that will prevent a hypomania’s spiral.  I know, because I’ve looked for those actions and responses.  Hard.  It’s like trying to engineer my mood.  But just like weather, moods are a chaotic system.  Chaos defies manipulation.  Which is ‘good news’, as my teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say.  Nevertheless, it’s hard not to feel demoralized.  It is neither true

Wow.  I really wish I had reread that sooner, that post that I wrote at the beginning .  That guy had some insight into how to practice.  On the other hand, he overestimated what goals were reasonable.  When I think back, especially after about 2 weeks in, I think I was trying to practice a whole dathün.  Part of this was built in.  I had to plan it as I went.  Which meant that I had to build my container, hold it, and relax into it.  That’s a lot for one person to do. Another thing leapt out at me. Namely, this sentence: "In the summer of 2007, I thought a lot about weeks in groups of 1, 2 and eventually 4.”  Not biting off a 4 week chunk all at once could have been really helpful.  Moving forward I’m going to try focusing on 2 week chunks, with a 1 week check-in.  It won’t be the same practice container as I had envisioned for Dissertation Dathun.  But when I look at it, Dissertation Dathun didn’t have the practice container that I implicitly envisioned.  And for whatever

Before Looking back on the intention I set at the beginning of the month: When I think back over the last month, I actually don’t feel a sense of failure or really even disappointment.  But I do have a sense of having missed the mark, having lost track of my intention  without really directly acknowledging it.  As I write this, I’m getting really excited about running the first week-long dissertation writing retreat.  Maybe a way of avoiding how I feel now.  What is it like to exit this period and move back to my house?  It doesn’t actually feel like a ‘.’ so much as a ‘;’ (those are a period and semicolon, respectively).  I don’t feel overly optimistic or fearful right now, or like I need to make up for my mistakes and ‘laziness’ of the last week especially, though I’ve definitely felt that in the past few days without acknowledging it.  I think in my painkiller induced haze, I bit off more than I could really chew.        I keep feeling a draw to analyze and troublesh

This morning, I found myself once again in the pressure cooker of innumerable projects.  Overwhelmed. Too many demands, too little juice.  I was thinking about my experience on my dathün and on the other meditation retreats I’ve done.  Ups and downs just as intense (sometimes moreso) than this one.  What’s the difference?   No questions about what to do next.   No choices about what direction to exert myself in.   Simplicity.  Oh. Simplicity.  With the mind of simplicity, what’s the most dominant feature of the landscape?  Health.  Wellbeing.  Once those are marked out, clearly, working on my neuroimaging experiment is what I need to do.  Simplicity.  Alone is simple.  Lonely is complicated.  

Last night, I stayed up too late.  I watched 3 episodes of Westworld, which weren’t particularly fulfilling.  But I stayed up too late anyway.  If my schedule is like my posture in sitting meditation, how does my response to recognizing that I’ve lost my posture inform what I do now that I’ve noticed that I’ve slipped in my schedule?  Altogether, I’m not really sure what I’m doing anymore.  I do know that I don’t feel connected to any sense of simplicity.  Or really clarity about my object.   As I write this though, I look up at the title.  Dissertation Dathun.  This is dissertation dathun.  I’m working with my dissertation and my habits around it.  I find some aspects of my environment supportive and others not.  But simplicity.  I think simplicity has to do with my own allegiance.  There are circumstances that I cannot simplify, like needing to go to physical therapy and get rides there and back, and figuring out how to start going back to the lab.  Deciding when I’m going

Here I sit on day 7 of dissertation dathun.  Today has been a hard day.  I feel pretty relaxed now, but that is not what it has been like for most of the day.  I realized that i was tightening up too much at the end of last week.  Not insisting that I meet a certain standard or quota of accomplishment, or even that I adhere to a schedule with minute-precision.  Instead I was insisting that I stay with myself and my experience every moment.  Speaking with my hostess, Joyful Garuda, she held the space for me to hear my own practice instructions for working with the mind in social meditation.  Bravery-vulnerability isn’t the act of staying open or present no matter what is occurring in your experience.  Rather it is the willingness to be open and present with whatever is occurring.  And that insisting on being present even when you cannot actually be vulnerable, you end up fleeing by hardening up.  So on Friday and Saturday, I decided to relax my hold and just go along.  Waiting t

Yesterday and today echoed and reawakened an insight that came to me for the first time in my initial dathun, summer of 2007: no day is all ‘good’ or all ‘bad’.  Everyday of that meditation retreat had ups and downs.  Even the most deep downs dissolved over the course of an afternoon or evening.  Even the most settled bliss dissipated into wistful discontent.  That has been the last two days.  Yesterday was a ‘good’ day.  I exerted myself, but didn’t overexert myself.  I had planned to write this entry at the end of the day but I was too tired.  And I allowed myself to be too tired. Then last night happened.  I was up every 2 hours with pain.  Suddenly, my doubts about my ability to adhere to my intended discipline (really my intended outcome though — steadily increasing accomplishment over the course of this and subsequent weeks) emerged in the foreground.  So this morning I was up with a little more humility, a little more tiger. The morning went well, I’ve started to sync in t

Today I’m beginning a project.  For the next four weeks, I aspire to engage my life as I would on retreat.  Today is Monday.  On Friday I had knee surgery with 2 possible outcomes: 1) Remove part of my meniscus: 2-7 day recovery and 2) Repair my meniscus: 4 weeks on crutches with no weight bearing, 6 weeks on crutches minimum.  When I woke up from surgery, my left leg felt large and amorphous.  It had a pretty serious brace on it.  I asked the nurse in the recovery room the outcome of my surgery.  I have no idea how she responded but I remember knowing, without much thought: 4 weeks without being able to carry out everyday life tasks unassisted. 4 is a magic number of weeks for me.  In the summer of 2007, I thought a lot about weeks in groups of 1, 2 and eventually 4.  These were weeks of meditation retreat.  In the Shambhala tradition we have a practice called ‘dathün’ which is a tibetan word meaning ‘month [long] session’ (edit: really it means 'moon session', which