Matters of the Heart: Part 1


What. A. Weekend.  Began with rediscovering my inspiration to do science and is now ending with full and quivering heart.  

I realized that I had lost touch with my inspiration to pursue a career as a scientist last week.  I didn’t lose it last week, rather I discovered last week that I’d lost it sometime back in February.  Interestingly, instead of feeling harrowing or stomach-pit-dropping, it was a relief.  It suddenly made sense why I was having such a hard time working on my disseration research lately.  I’ve found that when the task is sufficiently well defined, I can be confident in my ability to overcome difficulties, so long as I can hold my mind to the problem in a firm and open way.  Meditation seems to help with that.  A lot.  
 
As I write this I’m not sure whether to talk about my process or the content.  One of my intentions for this blog is that it can be a place where I don’t have to think about whether this is the appropriate place to write what’s on my mind.  So, on the way up to <midwestern city> (more to come about the reason for the trip in part 2), I started talking to my anchor partner, Maitri, about my difficulty.  During a planning session a week or so ago, I was easily able to articulate intentions for what I want to accomplish the rest of the summer and the manner in which I’d like to go about said accomplishing.  Nothing on the inspiration front though.  As I’m filling in Maitri on this process I start to talk about what I was thinking that my inspiration couldn’t be.  It couldn’t be to be famous or recognized.  It couldn’t be to emulate some scientist I looked up to.  It couldn’t really even be to help humanity, society or the world.  The thing that these things have in common for me is that they are all based around the reference points of ‘self' and ‘other’.  Upon hearing these reflections Maitri brought up some advice she received from His Holiness The Karmapa during an audience we were fortunate enough to have with him while traveling in India.  The gist is that in contemporary society we tend to view discipline as something that is imposed upon us.  Whether we perceive the imposition as originating from inside or outside ourselves is probably immaterial.  This kind of discipline I associate with an evaluative frame of mind that feels intellectual and detached from my felt experience.  HH Karmapa said that we need to bring discipline down to the heart.  This connects with an aspect of the Shambhala teachings on the dignitiy of Perky.  Discipline and Joy emerge in tandem.  

I think about the difference between discipline arising from ‘because I said so’ and that arising from ‘because this feeling’.   The type of inspiration I’m looking to connect with is the idea that seems to ignite ‘This feeling’ spontaneously, without me needing to crank anything up.  I get a feeling of heat in the core of my torso.  The effort then comes along with the discipline that comes out of the inspiration.  My inspiration (since if I were you, I’d be dying to know after all this process talk) is to understand how experience happens.  Connecting with that inspiration, my anxiety about whether I can be a scientist or not evaporates.  

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