13 posts tagged “dathun”

Since Dathun, I've been remembering a lot of when I was 10 years old, reliving it viscerally, returning to places in my experience filled with ...well, a lot of unpleasantness I'd rather not recount at the moment, no more than I'd like to find myself re-experiencing it in any given moment. But there it is, inescapable and therefore available to the mindful eye.

On this particular date, 22 years ago, a teacher wheeled a television into our classroom, plugged it in and turned it on, tuning into news coverage of the Challenger Disaster, marking what would be a worldview-changing event for myself and my cohort. At the moment, the most remarkable piece is that it feels so very long ago in memory, in my sense of time and the events that fill in a life day-to-day, and yet in my body the stunned feeling, a stinging numbness, still lives and is felt in the space between heartbeats, as if waiting to lurch suddenly beyond an unexpected pause into a fluttering that shakes my bones.

This time of the year, the last ten days before the Losar, the lunar new year, is known in Tibetan culture as the döns -- a time when the döns themselves are running rampant, bringing with them all manner of unpleasantness.  My buddysatva Brenda related the perspective from the Sakyong that this time of year is when the entire past year's worth of accumulated karmic tendencies are experienced in a concentrated way. She said that it's a time when we can review our activities of the past year, our quality of engagement, our intention, and so forth, and decide what we wish to continue and carry forward into the new year, and what we would like to discontinue.

For the döns and any time of year, when negative experience comes pouring in, the basic instruction is to welcome it like a beloved guest. For myself, when looking at old shame, anger and frustration welling up from memory and from within my body like a suppurating wound, "welcoming the experience like a treasured friend" doesn't even rank last on the list of my preferred approaches. My usual response, residing alongside these flesh-bound memories, is to numb out, shut down, disconnect, dissociate. My preference is that whatever unpleasantry cease immediately and never reappear.

From the somewhat pop-psychological perspective, the inner child needs the outer adult to take care of her now in ways she wasn't able to when the pattern and energy became somatically ingrained. So, whether it's welcoming the unwelcome guest, or comforting the inner child, or making offerings to the döns, the nonviolent approach is the way through the negativity and confusion. Somehow, I have to welcome with gentleness what arises in my experience, whether that's somatic memory, storylines, people, conflict, illness, etc.

I believe, however, that one shouldn't be too loose with gentleness--there's always a need for precision. How can I be gentle with myself in those same moments when looking at where I have really erred during this past year?  How can I both hold myself accountable and firmly plant the intention to do no such harm again, while also avoiding swaddling myself up in blame, immobilized in guilt?  How can I come back out of the downward-spiraling numbness of dissociation and re-engage the tender edge of my experience.

With the bitumen taste of irony at the back of my throat, I recognize that faith remains a crux of my spiritual life, despite all attempts to move past and beyond what I learned in my Catholic upbringing. That faith sometimes still says "I believe in..." but it is also hope, trusting that whatever may occur is somehow part of the journey, fuel for the fire, and so on. I don't believe in a god or gods or g-d, but I still operate with some sense of that placeholder for a highest signifier. I try to remember that the only thing I might coherently conceptualize and hold in that highest place is love. Remembering that, just in the tiniest bit, even just conceptually, brings to heart the courage to step forward, again. And again. And again. Perhaps with a fluttering heart and shaky bones, but stepping forward into an unknown.

I remember also that in 1986 the movie Space Camp came out. When I went to Purdue University, I met so many peers who felt inspired by that movie that they chose to study engineering and other sciences at Purdue with intent to to become astronauts and/or engineers at NASA. What happened to the Challenger did not dissuade them, but perhaps instead gave them a sense that there's room for improvement and growth that they personally can participate in. In that memory of disaster and a finding of brilliant aspiration, there is some sense of faith.  Faith can, I believe, be a trust in that which is as incontrovertable as basic principles of physics as much as a trust in the unknown.

For myself, I hope that the many disasters and misdeeds of my past year are activities I will not re-engage in. I want to learn well from my follies, mistakes, blunders, and outright failures. I also hope that the many kindnesses I expressed, the gentleness I embodied, the love that I gave, will be growing capacities for the same. I hope that others may forgive me. I hope that I may forgive myself. I hope that I may engage in all activities with more mindfulness than I have previously, whether the previous year or the previous moment. I hope that I might remember love in each breath.

In most of the self-portrait pictures I took all month long, I looked profoundly sleepy.  I often was.

I sat. I walked. I sat. I ate oryoki. I sat. I angsted. I sat. I ate oryoki. I sat. I walked. I sat. I ate oryoki. Here and there, some chanting.

Profound connection to some, deeper connection to myself, irritatingly frequent appearance of my own neurosis. And I fell in love with the dharma all over again, and learned a new patience with the unvoiced parts of myself.

I breathe in a new and lasting innocence.

And I'm so glad to be home.

...fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed, it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will hirself draw exhaustively from hir own existence.

--Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I'm not ready for everything, but I think myself able to cope. I hope.  I will try.  I want to live in relation to the other as someone, fully alive, subjective.

Dream of dathun -- it was held in a wharehouse sort of facility -- all attendees had to find somewhere to sleep in their sleeping bags within the spaces available among the aisles and rows and racks full of things.  It was kind of like a Costco, only more stripped bare, with no indication of what was in packaging. Also, there were hundreds of people, including my parents there. There was some kind of plush but old convention center attached -- rooms with brown couches, fake plants.

I remember stumbling around lost a lot of the time, trying to figure out why people were talking so much on a retreat, why everything seemed like a family dinner party or a convention.  I could never find Reggie, and the only dathun coordinator I found had no information about the retreat, but she could tell me where the self-described queer space was.

I went to the queer space--it was full of older gay men, and there was no room for another person. I thought to myself in the dream, "they probably all snore anyway", and so I kept seeking a place to bunk down. I ended up sleeping underneath something, like a table.

I noticed that the Poet was there at the retreat, and I wanted to sleep near her for familiarity, but she wasn't talking to me nor acknowledging me. She was busy pulling materials out of boxes so she could write literal reams of poetry.

I sat and had white wine with my parents and a bunch of older people.  We sat around a round table that was topped with one of those cloth-backed vinyl table "cloths" common in the 1970s. It was pukey green with a faint yellowish lattice-and-vines design.

At another point later, like a week in, I kept wondering when the retreat would start, and if I could bear another three weeks of this aimless wandering in confusion with no structure save for the towering racks of unlabeled boxes which rather resembled the hoppers at the Celestial Seasonings factory. No place to sleep -- I moved my sleeping bag every night, trying to find a comfortable, warm niche. No practice either. No stability, only the hard concrete floor.

Wherever I found clusters of friends, there was no room for me to join them.

Throughout the time there, I carried a sense of the presence of and connection to another who was there with me, but in her own separate experience. I never saw her, only felt her as if sensing the direction of the faintest breeze by sticking out the tip of my tongue.

I'm going crazy. Time is a simultaneity; the stone dropped in the calm pool creates ripples moving forward and backward, lapping back to center once bounced off the shore. I'm already on retreat; my mind is showing itself to me in the spontaneous perspicacity of my actions. I keep stepping forward into opportunity, all caution catabatic. Each moment of self-reflection in which I am stunned dumb by my audacity. Whose? What?

I'm already on retreat: I touch my heart and start sobbing with the feeling I've resumed from where I left off five days from now. I feel my body in the clenching depth of it and perceive no difference in how she feels from orgasm from convulsive laughter. Sobs/laughter/coming birth/sex/death.

I'm already on retreat: I feel each hug as if I want it to last forever; I melt into the other feeling body/heart/mind flicker discontinuously then merge past the typical resistance. Sweetness pervades the meeting of lips, the sharing of breath. In the space between breaths I hear the clack and rattle of sound/noise/music/movement making to the wrathful fierce protectors (devour them/me with ferocious delight). No one speaks of the pain of the Vows, but I recognize the glimpse/grimace of it in the undertone of humor/pain in DPR's voice. Can I really do that? Or is the fortunate circumstances of this lifetime enough to show me that I have already done that, that the vow is merely reaffirming what was said long ago? This life is so good; the sweetness kills me. The more love I receive, the more I have a soul-deep responsibility to give.

I'm already on retreat: I've fallen in love, breath in air, a jigger into the sea. I yearn to dive into the brine up to my nostrils, savor the scent and taste of you. Let you go when it's time, but oh sweet, not just yet? Hook into me, catch and release. Fetch me out into ecstatic evocation; say my name.

I'm already on retreat: my appetite has shrunk, my sense of alcohol and other intoxicants has shifted; all altered states of consciousness evoke the desire to practice. My guts in particular are squirmish at indulgence, meat tastes of blood unconscionably spilt. With each whiff of ego's usual selfish aims I feel a nausea, vertigo, unable to stand. I cannot continue forward in this broken way, applying salves to a wound insatiable.

Brokenheartedness. Loneliness. Sadness. No way out of this. No solution to the basic human situation. Still, I chase it but the chasing continually fails to satisfy.

Thorn-pierced, ravaged bleeding and flaming heart of yours/mine, open, sun-scorched and wind-seared. Love is most true when freely given, beyond the edge of grasping.

Some reminders from Reggie:

1. Stay in your body
• Don't worry about other people
• Don't care about what others think
• Be very independent
• You are on your own
• Don't look to others
2. Stay in your practice
• if you are a cool, thinking person, be you
• don't try to be someone else.
3. Stay true to yourself, no matter what
• Listen to your inner voice, be who you are
• Do the work and REALLY be who you are
• No one will ever really understand you.
4. The dharma is truly is about outrageous openness
• 99% of the journey is clearing the space
  
5. Whatever is happening to you is the trustworthy thing
• You have to completely trust your own experience

I'm going crazy, but I'm willing to trust it. But can I ask you to trust me in that?

I would like to maintain the polite fiction of our mutual compatibility but
The truth precipitates like white sugar out of solution with
Vodka mixed with artificial cranberry drink powder
Seeping out of mix and balance into its constituent elements
Layering solid and white through reds, roses, pinks
Palest blush to clear
Sweetness is the last taste perception left to us in old age
Everything but water is erased when we die

Soon to be willingly drowning in the mess
Currently both shaken and stirred
Each discrete aspect gradually emerging within the sleepiness of
Perpetually moving broken motion machine of the heart
Incubating swirl of foetid bliss

The nectar of immortality is within this moment tasted just as it is
Regardless of the mix
Of late, I am all top-shelf bottles filled with bottom-shelf booze
Cosmopolitan on a midwestern girl's cheap

Who am I/are we without our combative projections?
Expectations
Misperceptions and apprehensions

Only silence will speak.

I'm leaving on Sunday.  I was going to write something thoughtful and eloquent about the seeming acceleration of emotional energy in my life of late, but instead I'll just say: I trust it.

On December 16 I depart to spend 4 weeks on retreat. Holy fuck. I can't wait! And...I'm dreading it. And I can't wait!  And I'm terrified.  And I can't wait!  And I will be so ready for it to be over. And I won't want it to end.

And yet...I can see the familiar interior of the center, feel the chill of the air, see the Sangre de Cristos range, sense the looming presence of Ritro Gonpo, hear the drum calling us to sit, smell the woodsmoke of the fire, taste the tip of my setsu.  Ahh, yes, I am ready to yield into that space, to welcome what comes, to sit in the same space with dear friends and absolute strangers, to touch into the breath, anchor all experience in the moment with and through and as the body.

Days with no goals, weeks with no aim, just sitting.  No study, no work, no worry, just time to sit and walk and sit and walk, often in silence.  I can feel the month ahead stretching before me with such an abundance of time.

I'm in such a different place than I was last year.  For one, I have some foundational understanding of the Dharma. For another, I can actually drop my awareness into the earth. I still can't stay awake during bodywork, but I'll figure that out. I've also spent a year outside of long-term relationship, and learned much about how I am in relationships, what patterns I espouse. 

I'm ready to spend this month on the cushion, practicing in silence and solitude in the midst of a crowd, feeling the unvoiced and ungestured support of others, offering to them the same.

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was on retreat, which was a combination of the upcoming "Contemplative Community Retreat" at Shambhala Mountain Center (in which the BA Contemplative Psych program takes all of their majors there for a weekend.  I'll be going (if I go) as staff), and the monthlong Dathun in Crestone.

In one part of my dream, there was a collection of folk from the Dharma Ocean sangha walking down from the stupa, singing an Indigo Girls song and looking all glowy, radiating a kind of peace and happiness idealized in Coca-Cola commercials of the 1970s.

In another part, I was standing around one of the side rooms off of the main shrine room, with other staff, watching the first two week retreat-attendees depart.  We laughed and joked about the upcoming two weeks being a breeze after the first two.

When I woke, it hit me that I'm definitely going on a month long retreat.  And no, those first two weeks last winter weren't easy.  And I know that once I'm two weeks in I'll be fine; nonetheless I feel a great deal of trepidation about a whole month.  A whole month. 

However, a lingering sense from my dream is that I was serving on that retreat -- I was there working for others.  I was practicing, of course, but I was mostly in a role of service. Rather than focusing so solely on my own work, I took a role in the creation of the supporting structure for that intense personal work.

In other news, I'm feeling a kind of reluctance about Dharma Ocean, and am thinking of SMC because of a dear friend who's on staff there, and how I'd like to deepen a practice relationship with her.  But the SMC retreat is with Judith, whereas Dharma Ocean is with Reggie.  I guess I'll see which of my teachers I feel more resonance with by the registration deadline and decide then.  It'll be interesting to watch myself through this.

Among the many experiences of my morning, I see in myself a deep longing for Dathun--to reacquaint myself/mybody with the rhythms of the day: meditation, teaching, oryoki meals, chanting, more meditation.  Long periods of silence.  Discerning self/other other/other self/self in the vastness afforded by nonspeaking our experience to each other.  Undertstandings passing only in the gaze before eyes averted, back to practice.  But everything is practice, most especially watching the twinge of aversion, letting it go until it doesn't need to occur.

The states of openness/self-seeing/other-being/inviting I've been in of late remind me much of the texture of Dathun.  I miss practice.

Brenda, who ought to be a teacher, or is at least as close to what I recognize as what I'm looking for in a teacher, told me that I've not stopped practicing--I've just stopped sitting.  Indeed, I still practice a mindfulness, patience, gentleness with other and self, particularly in relationship (to any human being, or to my cat).  I practice just being there, really there, with whatever is coming up betwixt us, in them, in myself.  Looking at my anxiety and being with it, trying to ride the currents of that twittering energy, rather than letting it ride me.  Looking at the shielding of my heart and constantly, gently, easing it open.

When I sit regularly, I am better at this.  But at least I'm still practicing something.  I want to practice more.

I am, I admit, a bit attached to the heightened states of being which come of consistent practice.  I want to be that wakeful, capable and open all of the time.  I can't always be, but I can be more (I always already am).