Wearing out the shoe

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 that I felt this pain.  I should also say that it wasn’t all pain and difficulty.  I made connections with people I just met, people whom I know nothing about other than their name (maybe) and where they’re from.  I didn’t have to lie about how I was feeling out of politeness.  

As I write this I’m actually getting frustrated.  It feels like I can’t communicate what happened.  Like a reflection in a pond, when I touch it, it becomes vague and inarticulable.  I wanted to share some of the poetry that I wrote, but I left my notebook in VT.  So, maybe I’ll post that when I get my notebook back.  

I know that this is depressed mind.  Depressed mind feels like when the sky is so cloudy in the afternoon that it actually feels like the sun sets earlier than it should.  Negativity is the sharpest experience, everything else is either blunted despair or just vague.  I can’t remember details as well.  I kind of feel like this is what happens when I suppress sadness (vagueness and blunted despair) or I feel the sadness but it picks up a story line (sharp hopelessness).  There is an unwillingness to feel how I feel.  

One of the dyad contemplations we did involved the question, — I can’t remember the question.  Which is so painful.  This is another feeling betrayed by my own mind situation.  I need to be able to remember that question because it pointed me toward something important.  And knowing the question is what I need to reawaken the insight.  I have a deep doubt about my own ability to contact insight.  I can’t even trust my memory.  In the teachings, we talk a lot about nowness.  Right now I’m trying to prove my worth to myself (and you, dear reader), by ____ ; that thought just ended with a gap.  I’ve said to myself that insight arises from space.  Why am I aware?  I want to tie this all up with an elegant bow.  It’s the justification for presenting you the manure of my existence.  If you don’t reject me without the bow tied up, just the manure, then what?  I have no excuse to hide anything from you, and I am not who I think I am.  The me that I think I need to be to succeed in this world.  A lot of times I try to make these kinds of observations into wry humor.  Not genuine humor.  

“When fear and doubt occurred towards the confidence which is primordially free,/ countless multitudes of cowards arose.”  

To the confidence which is primordially free, “How can I ever leave you?"

To make this career as a scientist happen, it will take my full wherewithal.  I can’t waste energy hiding from anything from myself or anyone else.  At the same time I have this fear that not hiding that will exclude me from scientific culture.  

Who am I?

Nobody.

Somebody must have said, “Nobody.”  (Why am I aware?)

Isn’t there anyone there at all?

Nope, Nobody. 

That sounds like Self’s voice.  Is that you Self?

 The purkhang, where Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's ashes are. KCL, VT Dec. 2015 

Grant your blessings so that my mind may be one with the dharma.

Grant your blessings so that dharma may progress along the path.

Grant your blessings so that the path may clarify confusion.

Grant your blessings so that confusion may dawn as wisdom.   

If I’m not willing to let go of the story about my own inadequacy and my fear about who I am, I owe myself an explanation for it, at least.  A real explanation.  Not those dismissive justifications I’m so good at making up to distance myself.  

Reading this 5 days after writing it, I’m struck with how true to my experience it was.  It feels cyclical but contains movement forward (East) as well.  Wearing out the shoes of samsara.

*One of these days I’ll actually write a glossary for the terms that pop up here and there.