In other news, I banged the hell out of my right knee this weekend. It didn't bruise, but I must have done some kind of damage given how it aches.
Also, cold; still wearing my coat.
Tieday... Weds?
Compassion becomes a bridge to the world outside. Trust and compassion for oneself bring inspiration to dance with life, to communicate with the energies of the world. Lacking this kind of inspiration and openness, the spiritual path becomes the samsaric path of desire. One remains trapped in the desire to improve oneself, the desire to achieve imagined goals.... Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy. They recharge your energy, because in the process of relating with them, you acknowledge your wealth, your richness. So if you have difficult tasks to perform, such as dealing with people or life situations, you do not feel you are running out of resources. Each time you are faced with a difficult task, it presents itself as a delightful opportunity to demonstrate your richness, your wealth. There is no feeling of poverty at all in this approach to life.
from Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa
It's been a while.
Do I look 33? I feel much older than that, today.
For my birthday, breast cancer cake (It was because we went, as a family, on a group Race for the Cure).
In the practice of meditation, the way to be daring, the way to leap, is to disown your thoughts, to step beyond your hope and fear, the ups and downs of your thinking process. You can just be, just let yourself be, without holding on to the constant reference points that mind manufactures. You do not have to get rid of your thoughts. They are a natural process; they are fine; let them be as well. but let yourself go out with the breath, let it dissolve. See what happens. When you let yourself go in that way, you develop trust in the strength of your being and trust in your ability to open and extend yourself to others. You realize that you are rich and resourceful enough to give selflessly to others, and as well, you find that you have tremendous willingness to do so.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
It's term paper season, and so I've been experimenting in the kitchen between fits and spurts of writing. It's one way to get the creativity flowing.
All-goodest of the All-good Cookies: (makes about 2 dozen large cookies)
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/2 cup coconut oil
- 2 eggs
- 1 over-ripe banana, mashed
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp ground cardamon seed
- 1 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup rice flour
- 1/2 cup besan (chickpea flour)
- 2 tbsp rum
- 1 cup shredded coconut (unsweetened)
- 1 cup goji berries (aka wolf berries or lycium berries)
- 2 1/2 to 3 cups rolled oats
- Soak the goji berries in the rum.
- Soften the butter and coconut oil and whisk together
- Beat the eggs and the banana together
- Mix the sugar into the butter
- Whisk the sugar/butter and eggs/banana together
- Mix the dry ingredients: flours, salt, baking powder, and cardamon
- Mix the wet ingredients of #5 in with the dry ingredients of #6
- Add the goji berries, rum and coconut to #7
- Mix in the oats
- Use spoons to make balls of the cookie dough, place on a cookie sheet with a sheet of parchment paper
- Bake in a 375 degree oven for 10-15 minutes
- Remove when edges are browned
Caveats: cookies with coconut oil tend to spread out a lot when baking. After baking, cookies are relatively moist. If kept in a sealed container, they will keep their rum flavor. However, they will also be crumbly and fall apart easy.
I attribute the crumbliness to the rice and besan flours, but what do I know? It could be the coconut oil. I think next time I'll try some flax seed meal instead of rice flour (since the rice flour contributed nothing in the way of nutritional value to the cookie).
Kept in a not-airtight container (a ceramic nabe pot which has a small hole in the lid), the cookies hold together well and are moist and chewy,
Questions: Why the rum? When searching for a recipe to play with, I ran across a rum raisin oatmeal cookie. I transplated the idea and substituted goji berries. The berries were really dry, and I wanted them to be relatively soft in the cookie.
Aren't goji berries expensive to put in a cookie? Not if you get them from Pacific Ocean Market.
Why coconut oil? You know you're not cutting down on calories or saturated fats that way, right? Right. I had only one stick of butter and what I was making called for two. My other options were: greek olive oil or expired vegetable shortening.
Does it taste really banana-y? No, only mildly so. I added it because: I had it, and it was a coconut cookie, and there was rum involved, and so...well, let's just say that if I had dried pineapple and sugared lime, they would have been somehow added as well. Consider it to be a colada cookie.
What pre-existing conditions of my existence have the greatest potential or the most potency within them already to evoke drala, to invite the dharma to blossom in/as my life? What challenging and charged situations occur and recur most frequently, stir the most emotion and provoke the most conceptual reactivity? In short, where are my sticking points, where are my triggers, and what passions and interests inspire me most, and how can I relate to those particular aspects as fuel for the journey?
Shantideva wrote the Bodhicaryavata, so the story goes, as instruction for himself, which he later shared with the assembled folk of Nalanda University. His instructions are per his particularities, his peculiarity, his preferred metaphor. His primary klesha, at least as indicated in the text, was anger, and his favorite metaphors those of warriorship and battle. While this is useful/helpful insofar as I can generally relate to it, anger isn't my primary mode. Military and combative imagery is for me more injurious than instructive. How can I relate to Shantideva's brilliant work and find a way, through reflection on his metaphors, to evoke my own method to work with my peculiarities?
My sticking points are around passion and ignorance -- the hallmarks of padma and buddha energies, if one is inclined toward the maitri or wisdom energy model derived from the Bon tradition via Tibetan Buddhism (they teach classes on it at Naropa, it's curious). Regardless of the systems of relating to these root kleshas, passion and ignorance are identifiable in anyone's experience. How I delve into the Bodhicaryavata as a way to work with my own bodhisattva path might be beneficial to others who find that passion in particular is more generally a "thing" for them than anger.
What is passion? In my experience:
- desire to connect intellectually, emotionally, physically
- palpable chemistry/energetic connection with an other
- vigorous enthrallment
- heady intoxication with the other/love
- falling in love with love/the other
- rhapsodic reflection and related busts of creativity
- tendency to relate to that which conveys meaning with a strong heart-filled warm emotion, often teary-eyed
- relying on my heart as the arbiter of truth and meaning
Bodhicitta is the inseperability of wisdom and compassion in our experience. It's an experience, not a thing, arising from a direct realization of emptiness, from which we can cultivate a richer and deepening compassion. It is a blaze which can be kindled from any spark of love or heart-felt-ness. My particular spark arises in intimacy. From/within that ground of loving another in a way that is not about me or them or us or selves or good aspects or ignoring bad aspects but simply the shared recognition of our interdependence, impermanence and potential to be awake in any and every moment, love/compassion/wisdom may take root and grow.
How did I get there, that loving that is not about selfish attachment or self-structuring or self-reinforcing or ideas of what that person can do for me or what I do for them or how we are as a pair or what the point of it all is or a sense of goal or a sense of relationship as a solid reference point or something permanent or any of the usual ways of codifying and normalizing and regulating relationship?
For myself, it begins with the disconnect between intimate relationship and the heteronormative modes of marriage and family. While "marriage" of a sort and family are now recognized by American society as reasonable possibilities for "same-sex" couples, in the timing of my development of a sexuality and sexual identity, these possibilities were divorced from my horizon. For me now...well, that's a divergent topic. But let us say for now that my formative experience relates to view separate from the "traditional" and "normative" models of relationship.
A key piece is a recent remembering: when I first heard the names Santideva and Nagarjuna, it was at a Mahayana Buddhist retreat, from an ordained monastic. A woman on the retreat had recently lost her husband, and was asking the monk if she would see her husband in a future life. He told her that it was very unlikely, and that the more she wanted it in this like the more unlikely it would be that they would ever connect. This was, of course, heartbreaking for her to hear.
It occurred to me at the time that the monastic perspective on human intimate relationship might be a bit lacking in the realm of sensitivity and understanding. I developed a fierce sense of relationship being an important thing to understand, to have and share in healthy ways, and that it necessarily must relate to and contribute to a larger spiritual journey. In a sense, this was a conceiving of the spirit of enlightenment, an awakening of my heart with a fierceness of conviction: what my heart knows is the path and provides fuel for the journey.
A sudden flash of enlightenment does not need training. It does not require an educational system. It is inborn nature, not dependent on any kind of training at all. The whole concept of needing training for things is a very weak approach, because it makes us feel we cannot possess the potential in us, and that therefore we have to make ourselves better than we are; we have to try to compete with heroes or masters. So we try to imitate those heroes and masters, believing that finally, by some process of psychological switch, we might be able to become THEM. Although we are not actually them, we believe we could become them purely by imitating -- by pretending, by deceiving ourselves constantly that we are what we are not. But when this sudden flash of enlightenment occurs, such hypocrisy doesn't exist. You do not have to pretend to be something. You ARE something. You have certain tendencies existing in you in any case. It is just a question of putting them into practice.
from Crazy Wisdom by Chogyam Trungpa
