Manifest Spontaneity

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