by sitar | Apr 6, 2020 | Uncategorized
As I did my practice this morning, I was thinking about the activity of making offerings. It’s one of the activities of bhakti yoga, and interestingly enough, it’s one of the practices that helps us to cultivate resilience, which is clearly important for all of us in these times.
So, when I say, offerings, it might conjure up many different kinds of images. Offerings of service or support, offerings of material goods (Masks, perhaps?) – The first thing that comes into my mind when I think of offerings, is a candle. If we have a seated practice that includes an altar, we often have a candle front and center. We light the candle, and enjoy the glow.
Traditionally, we don’t light the candle for ourselves, at least not our ordinary selves. We light the candle as an offering to the gods, to the ancestors, perhaps to our higher self. We’re offering the light, and hopefully our love as well. We toss a piece of our love into the astral, purifying our heart with an act of unconditionality. The warmth softens the cold hardness we’ve accumulated over the course of the day, and as we love at the altar, it prepares us to be more able to love in the face of whatever madness the next day will bring. We’ve got a chance.
So you’re saying there’s a chance!
When we study ayurveda we’re taught about the cultivation of Prana, Tejas, and Ojas. Loosely translated in English, Life, Light, and Love. Our self care and meditative practices are hopefully designed to strengthen and balance these qualities. Simply meditating or journaling on each of these qualities can be rewarding and engrossing for a lifetime. We can juxtapoz them over other ideas, to see what insights emerge. In this case, we’re overlaying the idea of offering. The idea of ‘give it to get it’. The idea of ‘Be The Change’. Be the love you want.
So I offer to you, a simple practice. Like all good simple practices, it might bring up a little resistance, so notice that. But ultimately, it should cultivate a resilient feeling. Tweak it if you want, make it your own. Think about what would help you get resilient and go there.
Ayurvedic Meditations for life, light, and love
Seated, perhaps in front of a candle, an altar, breathing evenly with a nice spine.
Contemplate:
“I offer my life to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
Lifeforce that connects us all flowing in and out of us, becoming a channel for life and health of all beings.
Contemplate:
“I offer my light to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
Brilliant Light that shines from your heart and/or head. It illuminates everything in all direction without fading. Bringing light to any dark places.
Contemplate:
“I offer my love to the well being of myself, my family, my community, and all beings everywhere.”
Visualize:
A soft and compassionate energy, like a warm hug, embracing anyone and anything that arises in your mind. Any barriers to love dissolve.
To close the practice, feel those three energies mixing gently together in your low belly, bringing yourself back into a more ordinary state, bringing our energy and aura back in, closer to our physical bodies, and honoring practical boundaries that keep us safe.
So, give that a shot, and report back. Let me know how you like it. Le me know how youre cultivating resilience in your life these days.
by Sitaram Das | Dec 31, 2018 | Coaching
Integrated Preparation for the New Year
New Years (winter solstice) is my favorite holiday. As a long time yin yoga teacher and student of all things ‘yin’, I’m enamored with darkness, mystery, turning inward, quiet reflection, gentle subterranean preparation, etc. I actually find these things necessary for my survival and proper functioning. So, to set my year up right, I like to do some self inventory, some intention setting, and maybe even give myself some exercises and some field work. Perhaps we could call it Integrated Preparation.
This year, I really wanted to do some work with my teacher’s newest book, Presence Based Leadership. His name is Doug Silsbee, and he passed earlier this year, which makes this book all the more special to me. I’ve been working with the concepts in the book since he introduced them to us in late 2017, and think that this new years is a perfect excuse for a deep dive. In particular, I’m interested in his dynamic, nested systems of the self; context, identity, and soma. It’s possible we’ve also worked with these ideas together. But I simply love the clarity and perspective that they offer. They give me the resource to look at myself in ways I wouldn’t ordinarily.
Here is a diagram of the nested systems: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/Download/9-Panes-Practice-Lab/cis.pdf
Here is an excerpt from the book, detailing the systems: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/wp-content/uploads/Books/chapter-4-pbl.pdf
This model seems particularly useful for those of us who are batting around the term ‘Integration’. 2018 has been quite a trip, and bringing the lessons we’ve learned into a wiser, kinder 2019 is no small feat.
So my question for myself, and for you, is how do we want to shift these three areas of our life in this new year?
You’re welcome to use these as journaling prompts….
Context:
What situations am I currently in, and how do I feel about them?
How have I been contributing to them, for better or worse?
How would I like to see these situations shift in this upcoming year?
In a perfect world how are those situations presenting themselves in my life as we begin the new year?
Identity:
Who have I been being in the past year?
What are some of my primary pieces of negative self talk?
What have I been attempting to present to the world over the past 12 months?
What parts of my identity have I been protecting or hiding?
What parts of my identity do people miss about me?
Who do I want to be in new year, in the various aspects of my life as described in the ‘context’ section.
What parts of me would change if my situation changed?
Soma:
How have I been holding tension?
What have I been doing to not feel that tension?
How is that tension is response to the negative self talk described above in the ‘identity’ section?
How is the tension in response to some part of my context?
How does the person I identify with sit, stand, and move in the world?
How would the person I want to be sit, stand, and move in the world?
I could go on and on with these. I’ll give you a brief example from my own life, nothing too extreme, and probably relatable:
When I am in a situation that is difficult for me, or at what I believe is the edge of my ability, (context)
I get into negative self talk about my worthiness, and my ability to solve problems elegantly. I start to believe I’m more of a blunt instrument, that has to solve things by brute force. (identity)
My upper chest and arms get tense, i lean forward as if to go into attack mode, my jaw tenses and my fingers tense up as if to try to grab and control. (soma)
Of course these things usually happen on a subtle level, but through a kind of meditative attention, I can start to get a fuller picture of what is happening with me in the moment.
What to do?
I don’t want to stop having challenging situations. I want to continue to work at an edge that keeps me growing. I just want to handle them better (hopefully this is also relatable for you!)
The person I want to be is more secure about their ability to generate elegant, sophisticated, and lovely solutions to life’s problems. He is increasingly soft, flexible, and pliant through his tissues. He sits in his center, not rushing forward to control, allowing things to flow.
Of course that takes practice
This is going to be a big part of my personal practice this year. I’ll be focusing on it though my meditation and physical practices, so that I have a greater chance of living this way in my daily life. I won’t bore you wit the details.
Suggestions for you to facilitate Integrated Preparation.
I truly hope you’ll try to answer some of these questions, and to look at yourself using these lenses. I’d like to suggest two things:
- First, that you especially look at the way you’ve been talking to yourself, and see if there are places that you’d like to make a shift there. Make some new mantras, with some more positive and uplifting language.
- Second, Take some time with your body language. Sit, stand, walk as the person you hope to be in 2019.
Good Luck, and please let me know these integrated preparation practices goes. If you’re interested in working with me on some of these ideas, of course I’m here for you.
Best wishes for the new year! Daniel
by Sitaram Das | Sep 16, 2018 | meditation
We all have times when we feel like we’ve been kicked in the teeth by life, when we’ve been stabbed in the back, or dragged through the mud. It’s hard to know what to do in these times. We might be told to do ‘self care’, but that can seem abstract or meaningless.
Working with a client, we recently co-created a meditation practice to support ourselves when we’re in this space. We decided to call this practice The Inner Florence Nightingale. If you aren’t sure who that is, she’s the founder of modern nursing, and worked with wounded soldiers. And, like the name suggests, it’s a meditative practice of nurturing self care. It’s not a flashy, transcendent practice designed for reaching enlightenment or connecting with ascended masters. Those things are all fine and good, but sometimes we just need to sit still and pick energetic shrapnel out of our tender bellies.
The practice is simple and effective. It just requires a some time and self trust.
First, we just need to sit still and breathe evenly. We allow ourselves to be convalescent for a moment, to be in a position where we realize that we need care, and can’t do much else until we receive it. This means we stop trying to solve any problems, or retaliate to any perceived wrongs, and just focus on healing for a moment. Feel your body take on the attitude of the patient – vulnerable, open, willing to receive healing.
Then, we recognize just as we are the patient, we are also the nurse. We channel our inner Florence Nightingale. We recognize that we are capable of care and compassion. We are capable of generating a healing energy. Feel your body take on the attitude of the healer. Feel yourself sweet and motherly, willing to lovingly face whatever wounds may present themselves.
Once we’re able to embody these two archetypes simultaneously and can feel their energies alive within, we just let them mingle. We scan the body looking for the most sensitive places, and then we extend our love and care into them. We might feel these areas of the body as achy or painful, they might feel dark or gross. Just let your intuition and healing instincts guide you. You might feel like extending a healing light to the area, or it might feel like it needs to be psychically washed out and purified. Trust that your inner nurse knows what to do, and give it the space to do it.
There is sometimes a tendency to try to ‘figure out’ what is going on. You might find an issue and wonder to yourself, ‘how did this get here?’. Let that go. This isn’t forensics. It’s triage. If you want to try to figure it out later, you can. But for now, we’re spending our time cleaning our wounds, changing bandages, applying ointment.
That’s all there is to it. When you feel complete allow yourself to come back into your space slowly, and be extra gentle and kind with yourself for the next while. Drink lots of water and repeat as needed.
If you try it, please let me know how it goes. If you’d like private instruction, or my assistance in going deeper, please feel free to reach out.
by sitar | Mar 14, 2018 | Book Club, Coaching
My 25 year old copy
High on the top of my list of things I’m grateful for is my exposure to amazing teachers and teachings. There is a world of fraud out there, unhelpful teachings, ego maniacal charlatans, and simply ridiculous nonsense. I’ll consider it grace that I’ve been continued to have really high quality teachings dropped in my lap, while being guided away from the shallow and just plain wrong. I was 18 when I had Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Prometheus Rising’ pressed into my hand. I devoured it. I read his other books. They terrified me, and offended me, and I couldn’t stop reading them. They weren’t like the 1970s yoga books I had seen, and they weren’t like my dad’s books on magic and witchcraft, which were more like anthropology meets ghost stories. Wilson’s book practical tools for changing your consciousness, taking control of your nervous system. Intelligence Increase. Who knew? And while I never got to meet Wilson, I still consider him a major influence.
One of the lessons I’ve gleaned from RAW, that I’ve really taken to heart, is his definition of Intelligence. It’s helped me to increase mine, and to value it. I’ve taught it in teacher training. I want students to think about it. I want teachers to think about it.
“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.” – Robert Anton Wilson
Simple. Three simple steps. Input, Process, Output. Increase your ability to do those three things, and you increase your intelligence. The same process can be applied to all kinds of things. How do we give, integrate, and receive love, for example?
For years I thought this was an obscure idea, relegated to the underground and the counter culture.
The New Book
Fast Forward 20 years, I’m doing my lifelong learning thing, working with another brilliant teacher, Doug Silsbee. He’s teaching me to coach, how to use mindfulness practices to create clarity of vision, resilience of being, and results that matter. If we’ve talked in the few years, we’ve discussed it. If we haven’t, give me a shout and we can.
Turns out that Doug has been teaching this same idea. He labels them ‘sensing, being, and acting’. I’m not sure where he picked up the ideas, I’ll have to ask him the next time we talk. He just published a book on the topic. It’s called ‘Presence Based Leadership‘. I’m really digging on it. It offers a beautiful and coherent framework for bringing self awareness to the complex lives of complex people doing complex things. The tools are simple, at at the same time very effective, including things like:
Sensing
- Observing the system around us
- Recognizing our identitiy
- Attending to our experience
Being
- Regulating the inner state
- Decouple state from context
- Embodying what matters
Acting
- Scale awareness
- Extend leadership presence
- Tune the instrument
The teachings of his new book has already worked its way into my coaching practice. If you’re curious about working with this, please feel free to reach out to me, I’d be happy to share a sample session with you.
And please, do yourself a favor and pick up these two books.
Presence Based Leadership
Prometheus Rising
Doug Silsbee, Sitaram Das, and Rodney Allen
by Sitaram Das | Jan 2, 2018 | buddhism, Coaching, yoga
I’ve seen a hundred social media posts asking me what I want to let go of in 2017. and part of me thinks these memes are goofy, but at the same time, I do think about these things.
We all have problems that have been problems for years. I certainly do. If you know me, you could probably share a list of them with me, and you would know exactly what I need to know about them. We’re good like that. Spotting other people’s problems. (also, don’t send that list)
But our meditation practice is about Svadyaya, Self study, not the study of others. Self study is where the wisdom comes
It reminds me of the old saying, ‘insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results.’
I get the same certain results.
I keep doing the same certain things.
I keep thinking the same certain thoughts.
I keep looking at life the same certain way.
What I’m trying to say, is that I’m very certain. We all have these places where we’re very certain, resist introspection, and lash out at feedback.
WE GOTTA STOP DOING THIS
I know it’s hard to root out the beliefs and the perceptions. They can be subtle and evasive, be design. I like to work backwards. What’s the situation? What’s the open sore of an unwanted manifestation?
Like we mentioned above, often it seems like other people or external situations are at the root of our unhappiness. If only such and such were different.
It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s no kind of place to finish. We’ve got to refocus on ourselves. We’ve got to be less certain that we’re right, that we’re justified, that we’ve got it all figured out.
What can we be less certain about? What thoughts are we holding onto so tightly they cause our jaw to clench and our forehead to furrow?
I don’t know what to do…
I don’t know if my ideas about this are actually in line with my highest truth…
I want to do better, I don’t know how…
This is a great place to start, admitting that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, and that we don’t necessarily know any other way. It’s a mysterious place to be and full of possibilities.
This is our work.
And this is all for this email, for now. I’ll have more in a day or two. In the mean time, I hope your new year is full of questions, and mysteries, and possibility.
by Sitaram Das | May 13, 2017 | buddhism, meditation
Most of you probably know the story of the Buddha, when he left the castle and his princely upbringing for the first time, and was confronted with the harsh reality of the real world.
First he saw an old man, then a sick man, and then a corpse.
He asked his charioteer, “Who are these people, why did this happen to them, what did they do to deserve this fate?”
Each time, his driver shook his head and looked at him like he was new, “Dude, this happens to everybody.”
The story glosses over another event. He saw two people, talking to each other, nervous and twitching, their eyes darting around.
The Buddha asked, “What is going on over there?”
“Oh, that’s an awkward social interaction?”
“Who does that happen to?”
“Everyone, brother. There is no promise in this world that you’re going to avoid things getting awkward from time to time. Awkward is going to happen.”
So, there you go. old age, sickness, death, ubiquitous awkward social interactions. Now you know. Take it easy on yourself, folks.
—————
Buddha image by Mark Henson
by Sitaram Das | May 8, 2017 | meditation
When I decided that I wanted to put a little more energy into writing about meditation, the first thing I discovered is that the writing started to take over the meditation. I sat down, took a few breaths, and start to practice whatever technique I was practicing, and then the ideas for the article started to pour in. With the ideas for the article, came the justifications. These are good ideas, the mind said, these are thoughts about meditation. thoughts about meditation are important, it said. Thoughts about meditation are as good, if not better, than meditation itself.
This can be tricky.
As you may know, I’m not a big proponent of using time on the cushion as exclusively time to aggressively restrain the thoughts. It been my experience that sometimes letting the mind wander in an easy restful manner, casually checking things off the to do list, compassionately reviewing the previous day is a good use of our innate intelligence. Putting ourselves in a restful state can engage a creative part of ourselves that we maybe don’t always have access too. We often come up with new solutions, ones that include humility, forgiveness, and even ease.
However, we’ve probably seen firsthand that thoughts don’t always go that way. Depending the trials of the day, we can spiral, stuck in a mental rut or confusion, blame, gasping. And regardless of the flavor, it’s accompanied with that aforementioned justification. That voice telling us that these thoughts are important enough to take up all this space in our mind.
It’s even trickier when the spiral seems positive. We’re finally going to start that non-profit, we’re going to do all those nice things for all those people. We’re going to cure cancer. I don’t know about you, but if I had a dollar for all of the yoga meditation vegan homeless shelters in costa rica that I decided to build while meditating, I’d have enough money to build one.
So, what to do? One of the things I like to do, is to practice narrowing and widening my focus. This gives my mind a chance to be free and relaxed, and also trains me in some perspective and discipline. I’ll give you an example, but you’ll have to experiment with this on your own. It isn’t meant to be explicit instructions.
Perhaps I’ll start by just sitting down and settling in, watching my breath start to deepen. I’ll let my eyes wander over the altar, I’ll smile about the coziness of the Pendleton I’m wrapped in. I’ll say a few mantras, and scan my body a little to let it relax. I’ll check in to see if anything comes up that i’ve been ignoring in the business of my life, and I’ll give it some time. If there is something I don’t want to forget, I might even lean over to make a note on the phone. And this goes on for a bit, settling down, settling in, getting quiet, softening. This is a wider kind of focus, it’s natural, easy, soothing, creative.
Then, I’ll move into a shamatha practice. This is strict, disciplined. I’ll guide my attention to the tip of my nose and watch my breath go in and out. Exclusively. Thoughts still come up constantly, but are paid no mind. Attention goes back to the breath, again and again. Sometimes it seems as if the thoughts stop for a while, almost threatening that they might never come back. They are going to take their ball of good ideas and go home. It never lasts long, though, and once again I’m guiding the attention back to the breath.
To be clear, I don’t want the thoughts to go away forever, I just want a little more executive control over them. I’m not sure exactly what you want, dear reader, but it’s my guess that if you’re reading this, you want something similar. I just want a little bit of self control in the face of temptation. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
I often don’t end my meditation with the narrow focus. Popping up quickly after Shamatha and running back into my day can be a little shocking, for me personally. I like to widen the focus again, and let the mind wander some more. If the stuff it was talking about before is still that important, it can talk about it again. It’s almost like a treat. Ice cream after the doctor. I feel like it lets the mind know that it is still seen as a valuable life partner, that it is still loved. A bit of integration, aftercare.
There are many ways to structure a practice. This is just a brief example of how one might work with the mind. Depending on your desires, your practice might be totally different. It might even differ from day to day. It’s personal, and deserves experimentation and curiosity. I just want you to know that you’ve got options, you don’t have to take what one guy said one time as gospel. You’ve got the opportunity to have a meditation practice that serves you, and makes you really, really, happy.
——-
Side Note/Plug: The image of the dancers is by James Jean. Brilliant artist. I have some notebooks with his art on the cover, one of them has been to India with me. Check Him out. http://www.jamesjean.com/
by Sitaram Das | May 5, 2017 | meditation
“The purpose of meditation is to clear the mind of all thoughts, right?” – All the students
I’ve been teaching meditation in my little corner of the world for quite some time now, and I’ve got some pretty sharp students. At this point, they have some pretty healthy ideas about meditation. So it definitely surprises me that this old idea keeps popping up. People still, to this day, complain that they can’t make their thoughts stop.
Like you’d really even want to. If it happened to you for real, it would be like one of those old bad Jim Carrey movies where his wish came true, and it turned out to be a curse. How would you function?
Shamatha practice, sometimes called calm abiding meditation, is a popular meditation technique, easy to learn, and yet sometimes easy to misunderstand. It’s simple. The practitioner focuses on a single object, most often the breath. They watch the breath go in and out, and when a thought pops up, it’s noticed, labeled (often ‘thinking’) and let go of. The attention then goes back to the breath. Sometimes, when this is practiced over a long period of time, there are extended spaces without thought, but sometimes there are not. But just because the practice is the noticing and discarding of thoughts, doesn’t mean that the purpose is the final destruction of all thoughts, or even the ability to be without thoughts at will.
The purpose is clarity. The purpose is focus, attention, and perspective. Just because you train a puppy to sit – sit….siiit…sit…sitsitsit….good boy….sit – doesn’t mean you want a dog that only sits. You want a dog that listens, is faithful and well behaved. We want a mind that knows not to chase squirrels through traffic, and doesn’t roll in the muck. When bring the attention back to the breath, we are telling ourselves that being peaceful is more important than following a resentful story, ruminating on our misspent youth, or worrying about a future that might never come.
We practice with watching and training our minds on the cushion, so that this understanding and value system will begin to permeate the rest of our life, as well. We have the clarity and perspective to make better decisions. We are less likely to getting sucked into an unhealthy situation. We are less likely to miss out on an opportunity because of fear. We have an increasingly better chance of responding from our center, and being the person that we want to be, the person we know we are. As near as I can tell, this is the purpose of meditation, not to be a mindless zombie, but to be who we are.
—-
side note – if you’re unfamiliar with this practice, and you want to learn it, please find a qualified teacher. Of course, I’m also available.
by Sitaram Das | Mar 3, 2017 | Uncategorized
From the roof, I can see coconut palms, stretching out as far as the eye can see, in three directions. To the west, is the Arabian Sea, disappearing over the horizon. It’s gorgeous, and new, but totally posting a podcast is impossible. I take a morning walk to the Goddess pujas (Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Uma) through tropical garden paths, and stroll the bridges over the backwaters, which is totally conducive to meditation, but not broadcasting. Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi) was here for a couple of days, between tours. She hugged us, and gave us spiritual teachings, and passed out rice and dahl for 2000, and generally imbued the space with holiness, and I’d love to say I’ve got a podcast with her coming up, but she was pretty busy. Which is cool, I’m ok with that. Jungle Podcasting is difficult.
But I did want see if I could sneak this little post up through my 3g hotspot. (1 gig for 185 rupees) I had every intention of getting a couple of episodes out much sooner. For those of you that don’t know, I experimented with living in a yurt on a hillside in Marin County. And while that had some of it’s own first world level connectivity issues, it was lovely. Until it wasn’t. There was really heavy rain last month, and a lot of the area flooded, highways got shut down, and the yurt turned into a wet, moldy mess. So we (the gorgeous Somya Devi) and I packed up our stuff in a super big hurry, vacated by the end of the month, and hightailed it out of the country. It was a sprint, and didn’t really leave any time to post the two episodes I have on the hard drive. Now things have calmed down, there is plenty of time for this sort of thing, and the atmosphere is sublime, it’s the technology that’s off. Podcasting is apparently a first world activity. A privilege of sorts. But, I digress, and I’ll leave the politics and social justice talks for people who are better suited.
So, I beg the forgiveness of Vraja Kishor, and Noah Julian, who played their parts amazingly well. They showed up, and shared of themselves, their wisdom, their struggles. I really look forward to you hearing them. And, while at the ashram, I also ran into Prajna Viera. We did a session on location, overlooking the sea, as her husband laughed at us the entire time. It came out pretty good, even if the sound is a little off. So, as soon as I’m back in a place where uploading is possible, that’s not one, not two, but three recordings of conversations with some very brilliant, interesting, and patient people.
by Sitaram Das | Jun 4, 2016 | Book Club, poetry
Zen Poetry Is Blowing My Mind Right Now, Man
At every breath I’m happier
What’s this? Am I mad again?
I went mad once, then again.
At every breath I’m happier.
I sneeze: an explosion of ash, puff!
The city blazes, disappears.Once again I’ll build myself
A house, fire-proof, pleasant.
I begin carting bricks, with others.
The cornerstone is laid, my dream
Indestructible. But Then I sneeze-
The city rises like the phoenix.
-Shinkichi Takahashi
I was talking to an old friend from The Philadelphia Satsang the other day, and she wanted to know what I was reading. That’s one of the kind of things we talk about. Better that than gossip, right? I was excited to answer, because I’m on this Zen Poetry kick. I don’t like saying things like ‘I’m on a zen poetry kick right now’, because I think it sounds pretentious, I can hear John Cusack’s character from High Fidelity making fun of Tim Robbin’s character, ‘he wears rings and reads zen poetry’.
I went up to Oregon last month, to help my friend pick out a little school bus to transform into an rv/tiny house. On the way back down, I stopped in Eugene, my stomping grounds from 95-00. I wanted to do some of the old things I used to do. One of my old rituals was, I’d go to John Perry’s yoga class, and then I’d spend an hour or two going through the yoga section at Smith Family Books. They shared a building. It’s really where I got my initial yoga education. Their yoga book section was huge, and was mixed in with books on channeled pleiadian teachings, buddhism, shamanism. It’s where I first really dug into Ram Dass.
So, It was college, and I didn’t have a ton of money to spend on extra books. I could do the Ramen Noodle equivalent of book collecting. And so, I read what I could while I was there, and I would also look for tiny little gems, needles in haystacks. How much wisdom could I buy for the smallest amount of money? What does $3, $4 worth of enlightenment look like?
Shinkichi Takahashi
Well, this trip, $4 bought me a copy of Afterimages: Zen Poems By Shinkcihi Takahasi. Shinkichi was born in 1901, and didn’t spend his entire life cloistered. So there are modern references, of TV, of Mexico, and even some romantic references, that I didn’t quite expect:
Thistles bloom in the vast moonlight
Cup of the Mexican Sands
Thistles bloomed on the round hillock
of a woman’s heart.
And he’s funny, “Exactly thirty years ago my father died, While Autumn flowers were fading. What’s happened since? Don’t ask him-”
And at the same time profound. The poem that I opened this post really spoke to me about the way the mind moves in meditation. Creating entire worlds, destroying them, building them up again, only to have them washed away by forces beyond our control. It happens over and over again, even in a short session, and there is nothing to be done other than to continue breathing, and continue observing. We get taught that all things are impermanent, that all things appear to rise, stay for a time, and then pass away. And we internalize that insight, and start to see it in our lives. But most of the time, when we talk about it, or read about it, it is in a dry, technical way. This is, of course, problematic. Our minds, and our soul require a certain amount of poetry. Poetry shines a light into corners of our mind that a lecture (like this one) just can’t. It’s almost like a little secret. You get it, and a wry smiles crosses your lips, and you grow.
Museo Soseki
Then, Last week, I went to Great Barrington to hang out with Somya’s Family for a little while. Great Barrington is just a town over from Kripalu, so I figured they might have a couple of good used bookstores. We found Yellow House Books. Nice Spot. I got Somya book on Ayurvedic Tongue Diagnosis, stumbled upon a book on Maori Tattooing for my pal Salem, who owns Eye of The Tiger Tattoo, and splurged on another book of Zen Poetry for myself, forking over a whole nine bucks to pick up a copy of Muso Soseki’s Sun At Midnight.
Muso is much more old school. Born in 1275, he lived as a monk from a very early age, and sought a ‘special transmission outside the scriptures’. He became well respected for his insight, so much so, that several warlords and emperors all sought his audience, asking him to live at their various temples. In his later years, he took to tending the temple gardens, and is known as the father of the zen rock garden. Much of his work still stands today.
It is said that he attained enlightenment late in the evening while walking through his hermitage. He had no light, but thought he knew exactly where he was. He put his hand out to steady himself on a wall that was supposed to be there, and instead, found himself lying on the ground. In this moment, he broke through to the other side. He then wrote his satori poem, which is as follows:
Year after year
I dug in the earth
Looking for the blue of heaven
Only to feel
the pile of dirt
choking me
Until once in the dead of night
I tripped on a broken brick
and kicked it into the air
and saw that without a thought
I had smashed the bones
of the empty sky
And this is why I practice. It’s almost instinct to dig with the rational mind, to try to figure out heaven, to try to computate our way into heaven, and it never works. I need to be reminded to that the sky is above me, and all I need to do is lift my head up, and breathe it in.
It only gets better from there. Muso is full of them. I’d love for you to hear more of them, but I really don’t want to type them out any more. Pick up a copy for yourself, your students will thank you.
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And, if you liked this article, come and talk about this sort of subject with me at My Next Yin Yoga Weekend. Click Here To Find Out More. Its going to be a whole weekend of empty sky.
