Manifest Spontaneity

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 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. ...

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 con...

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.      ...