Introductions

Welcome to Manifest Spontaneity!  (It's an aspirational title.) I am Vajra Sun, and I'll be your narrator and navigator for my life.  If you'd like to read more about what I'm up to with this blog please hop on over to the Beginnings and Vision page. 

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Wearing out the shoe

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I spent this last weekend at Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont.  I was there for a leadership intensive with Shastri* Nick Kranz focusing on the practice of social meditation.  Already, I can feel myself being drawn into the role of the slightly detached explicator as I write this, wanting to explain the word ‘Shastri’ and what the practice of social meditation is.  That role is very comfortable to me.  I think I actually do that with myself as way to distance myself from difficult feelings.  Information and it’s accuracy is soothing to me; it’s how I get ground.   Last weekend was hard.  Social meditation is about creating a culture where the norms and customs nudge us toward being genuine and awake, in touch with our humanity.  Doing this practice and being around 55 other people doing it too makes any disingenuousness on my own part vivid.  Not always clear.  I didn’t always have a clear idea of what was going on, I just knew ...
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Dissertation Dathün: Day 1

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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’ (ed...
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Finding out how I actually feel in the wake of Trump's Election

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 t...
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