Ornoth

The long-delayed writeup of last March’s weeklong excursion to Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. Added here more to complete our set of scouting reports than to provide anything of interest to readers.

Thu March 14: Travel

We left on the warmest early spring day Pittsburgh had seen thus far in 2019, although we still passed snow in the Laurel Highlands. As we drove south beyond Richmond VA, we came across dogwoods and magnolia trees in blossom, and a surprising amount of mixed forest. It was a long but bearable 8 hour drive, and traffic wasn't intolerable.

Arriving in Durham, we checked into our AirBnB before a mediocre dinner at Bull City Burger, decent ice cream at Parlour, and grocs at Food Lion.

Raleigh City Market

I&O @ Duke Gardens

Orn @ Duke Gardens

Inna @ Duke Gardens

At Duke Gardens

Fri March 15: Raleigh

After the usual preliminaries, we spent the day checking out Raleigh.

On the way into town, we visited the suburban local office of Inna's employer, which was small and focused on client-specific project work, which isn’t ideal for Inna.

We drove to Raleigh's surprisingly small downtown, checking out their visitors' bureau and a cool co-op called Artspace. We walked through City Market, picked up lunch (pizza & salad and ziti arrabiata) at Vic's Ristorante, got a toy for Begemot at a pet store called Unleashed, and chatted with Melinda, the proprietor of the Devilish Egg art studio and store and owner of Rollo the Maine Coon.

Then we drove around at random, scoping out the surrounding neighborhoods. I chatted with a guy at the Oak City Cycling Project about local events and riding conditions. On the way back to Durham, I stopped by the Raleigh storefront of Bicycle Chain (a Specialized and Cannondale dealer) and met Steve, their local road cycling guru.

After ice cream at Ben & Jerry's at NSCU, we had dinner (shrimp & grits and chicken fingers) at Tyler's Taproom in Durham's old American Tobacco factory, right across from the unavoidable Durham Bulls' baseball park.

After finding the AirBnB's antique bed painfully soft, Inna dragged out a futon and slept on that. After two days of delightful temps in the 70s, a cold front passed through overnight, and the rest of our stay would feature chillier high temps around 50°.

Sat March 16: Kyudo, Durham

Saturday morning Inna stayed home while I drove down toward Apex to visit Meishin Kyudojo, a kyudo practice facility run by Dan DeProspero, a well-known teacher and author of "Kyudo: The Essence and Practice of Japanese Archery", which remains virtually the only English-language history and instruction manual for kyudo.

Dan and his half-dozen hakama-wearing practitioners gave me a warm welcome before beginning their outdoor practice in the 40° cold. The group seemed friendly, personable, and serious about the kyudo form and taking time getting people started with it. After three years in Pittsburgh without any kyudo, it was a delight to see people practicing, and I left the dojo feeling energized.

I had hoped to drop in on a practice session by Triangle Taiko, but they hadn't replied to my earlier email. Instead, I drove toward bland, manicured suburb Cary and stopped at Cycling Spoken Here, which turned out to be the local Trek bike dealer, where another guy described the local road scene.

Returning to the house, I picked up Inna, who wanted to crash a book club Meetup to chat with random people. So we went to the New World Cafe in a strip mall off Glenwood in Raleigh, where we met a handful of people and asked them questions about how they liked the area.

Afterward, we drove around the surrounding neighborhoods, then more residential areas around Durham before lunch at Maverick's Taproom. Then window shopping around Brightleaf Square and a stop at Durham Cycles, where the guy mentioned talking earlier in the day to another couple of Pittsburghers who were also looking to move south.

After three full days of driving, walking, planning, and comparing notes, we were drained and headed home for a quiet evening.

Sun March 17: Chapel Hill & Carrboro

Sunday's plan was Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We parked right at the main square and walked down Franklin Street, the four-lane main drag filled with newish retail buildings.

Passing into Carrboro, the streetscape became more shabby, with a small-town feel. We stopped at a couple artsy shops, the Clean Machine bike shop, and caught a local cover band playing a Daft Punk cover outside a BBQ joint. On the way back to the car, we stopped at Carolina Brewery, a generic sports bar where I had an interesting potato chip “nachos" with jalapenos on top.

Then we drove through the surrounding residential neighborhoods and UNC. We hit a grocery store and got makings for supper, but returned to the Parlour in Durham for pre-dinner dessert (where I was double-charged for our ice cream).

Mon March 18: Triangle Insight & Durham

Despite fatigue, I was up before 6am Monday for a morning meditation at Triangle Insight. I walked into the Duke Episcopal Center early and had to turn on the lights and wait for the organizers to show up.

Naturally, a 7am weekday sitting only drew a handful of people, but the leader—Ron Vereen—said their evening sessions draw 40-50 people. It’s an active community with Kalyana Mitta groups and connections with the Eno River Buddhist Community and New Hope Sangha. Ron had studied with familiar teachers including CIMC's Narayan and Rodney Smith. After a hectic few days, it was nice to just sit for 45 minutes.

On the way home, I refueled the car at an unexpectedly familiar convenience store: a Western Pennsylvania-based Sheetz.

Our next outing was checking out Research Triangle Park, which was underwhelming. Most of it was inaccessible due to security, but what we saw looked like any other suburban office park.

Then we went back to the Duke campus to walk the Duke Gardens, especially their asiatic arboretum, where the sakura blossoms were out. That reminded me that a year earlier I’d been at Tokyo’s Narita airport, where the runways had been lined with blossoming cherry trees. That in turn reminded me that Dan DeProspero had established his kyudo dojo in Raleigh because it was the closest he could get in the US to Tokyo’s climate. It felt like spring, as the park’s ducks demonstrated in flagrante delicto.

In downtown Durham we checked out a couple co-working spaces, including cause célèbre WeWork. Then a brief tour of artsy Hotel 21C Museum before unpretentious food at Elmo's Diner. Then home to run a laundry and prepare for the following day.

Tue March 19: To Charlotte

Packed up, closed the AirBNB, and began the 2½-hour drive to Charlotte.

Partway there, we decided to spend some unplanned time in Greensboro to avoid a 90-minute backup on I-85. We hit a Gabe’s discount store, then a bad lunch at Friday’s.

Got back on the highway and into our small NoDa AirBNB with no delays. We checked out a couple shops on Davidson Street, then grabbed groceries and had a quiet evening settling in.

Wed March 20: Charlotte

Began the day walking to the Smelly Cat Coffee House to meet up with Daniel, a local cyclist I knew from the online community on Zwift, to pick his brain about Charlotte.

His take was that it’s a small city that’s growing quickly, absorbing transplants that cause suburban sprawl and property rates to go up, and crowding out its former eclectic quality. The financial industry are the dominant employers. He said point-blank he hated living there.

We wandered around Uptown, checking the visitors’ center and Inna’s employer’s office. Then around the residential neighborhoods, poking into artsy shops like Paper Skyscraper, where I bought the book “Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists”. A few cycling questions at Uptown Cycles, a meatball sub at Pizza Peel, and back to the house.

I left Inna and drove to a Baptist church in Myers Park to check out the Insight Meditation Community of Charlotte. I sat in on an orientation with three newcomers, led by teacher Debbie George, another former student of CIMC’s Larry Rosenberg. Then joined 50 people for a sitting and dhamma talk about wise speech and lovingkindness. Afterward, I connected with their treasurer, Adrienne Price, who had—like me—studied at the Bhavana Society, and was headed for a retreat at the nearby Southern Dharma Retreat Center. I again enjoyed connecting with people based on common friends and frames of reference.

Thu March 21: Home!

We packed and left the house at 10:30am, but made a lengthy and agreeable stop at Amelie's patisserie for macarons and a ham & gruyere croissant.

The more-inland drive from sunny North Carolina back into the March gloom of Western Pennsylvania was hillier and more scenic than our previous coastal route, with less traffic and fewer towns. We landed weary and happy to be home, catching our cat-sitting friends at the house when we arrived. Job done!

Overall Impressions

My general impression of the area was positive. So far as I could tell from a brief visit, the climate seems wonderful, and the people seemed intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastically welcoming.

Triangle Insight seemed like a well-established group, and the presence of a long-running kyudo dojo is a big plus. Although I didn’t get a feel for the local roads, there seem to be plenty of cycling organizations and events.

The job market is a big questionmark, and in such a widely-dispersed area we’d need two cars, although those are concerns anywhere we'd consider moving.

The area is booming, with lots of transplants fleeing the cold. That comes with downsides like increasing housing costs, and the towns haven’t planned or created the infrastructure to cope with such growth.

A big concern was Inna’s reaction; having mostly grown up in the northeast, she'd expected a more walkable and multicultural urban feel, rather than strip malls and suburban neighborhoods of detached single-family homes. Disappointingly, that’s pretty common in the absence of any natural constraints on sprawl.

Looking at the individual towns, Raleigh had a slightly artsy feel and enthusiastically friendly people, but a tiny central business district surrounded by nondescript residential developments. It felt more like a small town than a big city.

Durham is a reluctantly gentrifying working-class ghetto, with boarded-up buildings and a run-down, abandoned feel. While there were a couple small, funky-feeling areas that we felt comfortable in, even our AirBNB had reviews from renters who had felt unsafe in the ratty town.

Then there’s Chapel Hill, a college town that’s home to UNC. A spacious, affluent commercial drag with the usual soulless upscale chain stores, and again immediately backed up by suburban-style neighborhoods.

And separately, Charlotte, which had a more familiar urban center and funky mixed-use neighborhoods such as our temporary home in NoDa. But it seemed to lack character or much to recommend it beyond its rep as a big banking hub.

So from a scouting standpoint, we returned to Pittsburgh frustrated and disillusioned: Inna because she’d expected something very different, and me because of her feelings. It’s unfortunate and saddens me, because the area seems to meet my requirements well. But our challenge is to figure out how to maximize happiness for both of us, despite our conflicting preferences.

When the philosophy behind Vipassanā meditation started to resonate for me, I went through a phase of hoovering up as much as of the dhamma as I could get my paws on. Not content with my meditation center’s weekly dhamma talk, I subscribed to podcasts from teachers like Gil Fronsdal and Ajahn Brahm and drank deeply from the resulting firehose of teachings. Once new meditators find the dhamma, it’s not uncommon for them to go through an intense period of curiosity and enthusiasm like that.

I recently gave a talk about the importance of learning about the dhamma. Although I provided a verbal list of resources to help meditators self-educate, I have assembled this blogpost for easier and more permanent reference.

Although there are many flavors of Buddhism, this list focuses on Vipassanā or Insight Meditation, which has become popular in the US, as evinced by the success of the meditation centers and teachers listed below. So my most fundamental pointer is to seek out anything that claims to belong to the Vipassanā / Insight Meditation heritage, as there are a ton of resources beyond the few items I can list here.

Audio & Video Resources

Recommended Reading Lists

My Book Recommendations

Pali Canon Suttas

May your exploration of the dhamma be fruitful and rewarding!

Herakleitos of Ephesus might have been a bright feller, but when he asserted that “Change alone is unchanging,” he was dead wrong.

Most Westerners are at least familiar with the idea that change is inevitable. We do go through our lives with the idea that every so often something about our world is going to change. Although we only tend to remember that fact when it smacks us up side the face.

Us Buddhistical types also take pride in our ability to anticipate and accept manifestations of Anicca (impermanence), which our list-loving patron categorized as one of the three characteristics of existence.

“All conditioned things are impermanent. Their nature is to arise and pass away. To be in harmony with this truth brings true happiness.”

However, the very language we use to remind ourselves about change masks an incredibly important point. When we say that “change is constant”, “change is unchanging”, or “change is permanent”, we obscure this basic and incredibly important fact: change is often lumpy as hell!

For the past couple years, my life has had only minor changes, most of which were easily prepared for. Let’s call that “normal change”. In contrast, 2013 has been a year where many long-lasting things I thought I could count on simply vanished. Not just one or two times, but in a comically long string of unexpected jolts.

What do I mean? Lemme walk you through a couple examples.

At work, we were abruptly informed that our 15 year-old company had been sold and the founder was outta here. In the next eight weeks, several of my coworkers departed, including half of my team.

Some time later, it was announced that the whole company was being moved to Las Vegas, and that those who chose not to relocate—including myself—would be out of work when the Boston office eventually closed. Ohai, job market!

Meanwhile, at my meditation center, two of the three founding teachers (the two who were married) are getting divorced. While that doesn’t impact me directly, at the same time the woman who had been the center’s executive director for 15 years is resigning, as is the guy who for many years has run the office and website.

The private “spiritual friends” meditation group I’ve been a part of is undergoing similar trauma. Three of our eleven members recently left the group to move across country, including our two primary founding leaders, who also provided our meeting space. A fourth member moved, but only across town and thankfully will be staying with us. And getting married.

Meanwhile, another member of the group has been unable to attend our meetings after having her first child, and I fear the same will happen with two other members who are also expectant parents.

So now we’re struggling with who will lead the group, where we meet, what constitutes a minimum acceptable level of attendance, and how we decide on and integrate a potentially significant number of new members.

Beyond my own circle, Boston’s been having its own upheavals. The local alternative newspaper, the Phoenix, abruptly stopped publication after a 40-year run. My neighborhood pizza joint—Newbury Pizza—closed after 34 years (plus a brief but ill-conceived stint as “Bostone Pizza”). JP Licks closed their 20 year-old Newbury Street ice cream shop. And the iconic Crossroads Irish pub has been shuttered, too, after lasting 35 years. All these places were the sites of important memories for me.

Then just this week, the organization that runs Boston’s First Night—the nation’s original First Night, founded in 1975—threw in the towel, as well.

And, of course, the topper for my city was the shocking bombing of the Boston Marathon.

These major changes don’t seem to be limited to the Commonwealth, either. Two good friends recently lost their jobs, including my big “angel sponsor” for my annual Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride. And one of my favorite places in Pittsburgh—Klavon’s, an original 1920s ice cream parlor—also closed.

The final straw was when I came home and received notice that the cat-sitting service that I regularly use has closed after seven years in business. Even my cat-sitters!

So yeah. 2013 is the year of excessive change. For me, it’s been more like carnage than change, actually. It’s like what Berenger must have felt like after seeing everyone else turn into rhinoceroses in Eugene Ionesco’s play.

All this, and we’re not even halfway through the year yet!

So don’t ever let them tell you that change is constant; it sure isn’t! Change is lumpy as hell. Expect the lumps!

PS! I completely forgot to mention the failure and/or replacement of my water heater, faucet, and disposall. Big lumps of impermanence, people!

I recently completed my sixth “sandwich” retreat at CIMC: a nine-day non-residential meditation retreat that starts with all-day sittings on Saturday and Sunday, then evening sittings all week long, followed by another weekend of all-day sittings. All told, it adds up to about 50 hours on the cushion and a lot of sleep deprivation.

First let me relate some of the odd circumstances of the retreat.

Four days before the retreat, I had just begun my regular Tuesday night sitting at CIMC when we felt an earthquake shake the building. That was interesting.

Then, two days into the retreat we began feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which caused them to cancel Monday night’s sitting. It also canceled my planned trip to Foxwoods, and delayed the delivery of my new laptop for two days.

And then on Saturday, one of the cooks came in early that morning and fired up the stove and filled the building with natural gas, such that once everyone arrived at the center, the teachers chose to evacuate the building until the gas company gave an “all clear”.

So it was an interesting week. Combine all that with the usual sleep deprivation, a birthday, a doctor’s appointment, and my mother’s shoulder replacement surgery, it was pretty stressful.

Another interesting bit happened when I was outside, doing walking meditation in a local park. I looked down and saw the shackle of a padlock on the ground. Someone had used bolt cutters and cut the lock. When I’m on retreat, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this; the obvious symbolism being unlocking one’s heart. It was only later that I read the word stamped onto the shackle: HARDENED… A very nice addition to the symbolism.

I really wasn’t expecting any major revelations. After all, this was my sixth sandwich retreat, and I knew what to expect: a whole lot of sitting and walking. But I actually came back with four major insights, which I’ll share in abbreviated fashion here.

One thing I’d been kicking around before the retreat was how much of our suffering is purely a fabrication of the mind. For the most part, when we’re suffering it’s because of an image of what things were like in the past, or how they are going to be in the future. If you stop and look at your real, present-moment experience, we’re almost never actually experiencing painful circumstances. It’s all just our minds telling us how bad things will be once we get to some future time. It’s like being afraid of shadows on a scrim.

Another item. I have a longstanding story that I’m different because when I meditate, no big emotional traumas come up. But this time I suddenly remembered something that does come up for me that doesn’t bother most people: physical discomfort! But how to work with it? It didn’t seem to me like there was much wisdom to be gained in just watching your own pain…

Well, I asked Michael in my teacher interview, and he had some great observations. He agreed that relaxing into the pain was a pretty useless pursuit. He also said that one could watch one’s relationship to pain, but that too wasn’t all that fruitful.

Instead, he recommended whole-body awareness as something that he’d found useful from his Chan practice, and that was later reinforced when I talked to Narayan. So I guess I’ll be trying a little of that, although I find it a challenge not to narrow the field of attention down to a specific part of the body.

Another thing that came up during a group discussion with Michael was the idea of continuity of mindfulness. He was of the opinion that it would be freeing and effortless, while I challenged him by asserting that it would be tiring and require continuous mental effort not to get distracted.

After talking it over with Narayan, I think the difference is between concentration practice and wisdom practice. In concentration practice (samatha), one must exert effort to continually bring the mind back from any distractions to the object of concentration (usually the breath); whereas wisdom practice (vipassana) is more relaxed, focusing on accepting present-moment life as it is. The only mental effort involved in wisdom practice is in staying in the present moment by steering clear of thoughts of the past or projections and planning about the future.

So in that sense, I’ve been spending a lot of time on concentration practice, and not so much on wisdom.

One final revelation actually related to the “homework” that usually accompanies the sandwich retreat. This year we were to observe when resistance arose and how we could detect it. I was pretty interested, because I tend to be a resistant type, and that resistance manifests as frustration, which then can sometimes escalate into anger.

For me, it was pretty easy to spot, because in most instances I started swearing to myself. Once was when I learned that a package I was expecting (my new laptop) hadn’t been delivered; another was when a magnetic card reader failed to read my card on the first swipe.

The connection between the triggers I observed was immediately apparent to me. In each case, I had an expectation that something would transpire in a way that was beneficial to me, and that expectation hadn’t been met. Even though they were minor things, they were upsetting because they impacted me. In other words, it was clear that the problem was that I was living from a place where my ego was dominant.

From there, I started playing with the idea of living from a place where ego wasn’t so central, relaxing my grip on my “self” (or its grip on me). I found that really interesting. Narayan cautioned me not to take the ego as a concrete thing; by viewing it as just a passing sense of self, I could avoid setting up a futile battle royal between my “self” and myself. Good advice.

So although I didn’t expect it, I came away with a number of things to work with, so it was a surprisingly productive retreat.

Since 2009, I’ve oriented my meditation practice around the brahmaviharas, the Buddhist virtues of lovingkindness (metta) and compassion (karuna). I’ve just completed a year of intensive karuna practice and thought I’d do a quick debrief, much as I did last October after twelve months of metta practice.

I certainly found compassion a more productive practice than metta. I think part of that is because metta’s basic friendliness is my default mode to begin with, whereas compassion isn’t quite as natural and intuitive to me. After all, I’ve always been more prone to blame someone for causing their own problems than to empathize with them.

Compassion also has a proximate cause: it is a response to obvious suffering. So when someone is under mental or physical stress, that provides a prompt that reminds one: this is a situation that calls for a compassionate response. For me, that makes it easier to evoke than metta, which is just a vague kindness with no immediate intent behind it, rather than a response to an obvious need.

I used the Buddhist concept of the two arrows to structure my compassion practice. The first arrow is the painful event or situation: the basic discomfort that cannot be avoided, like the pain of a stubbed toe. The second arrow is the additional, unnecessary discomfort that we inflict upon ourselves: “Why am I always stubbing my toe? I’m such a klutz! I’m worthless and no one loves me and it’s always going to be this way until I die…” The second arrow is the self-generated fear and anger that proliferate as a result of how we relate to an event.

A couple of my insights this year had to do with the nature of these two kinds of suffering.

It’s odd to me that when people think about that first arrow—physical or emotional pain—they usually think of it as applying to humans. But it’s equally true that many animals experience pain in a very similar way. And a sensitive person might even leave open the question of whether plants experience some kind of analogue to the pain we feel. When we wish for everyone to be free from pain, I think it wise to extend that to all forms of life.

But the second arrow—the proliferation of painful mental states that we add to simple pain—that is indeed the exclusive birthright of sentient beings.

As my meditation practice grew, I came to see how we allow our mental states to compound this indirect suffering on top of simple, direct suffering. I also discovered that we actually choose to do this. The second arrow isn’t required; it’s completely optional, and if we are truly free, we can choose not to harm ourselves with it.

Ironically, this is how I discovered the primary thing blocking my compassion for others. While I find it easy to feel for someone who is experiencing a simple, unavoidable pain, I find it extremely difficult to empathize with someone who is allowing their own mental state to create additional, unnecessary suffering. It’s hard to feel compassion for someone when you know that the pain they are feeling is entirely within their control (or would be, if they were only self-aware enough to realize it). Again, I find myself falling back on blaming people for their misfortune, because I see their ignorance as something they have chosen, a shortcoming they have neglected to address.

Getting past that view will be one of my ongoing challenges.

Those are some of the insights I’ve experienced through my karuna practice, but they are more of a small side-effect of the practice, which was primarily oriented toward nurturing the experiential, felt sense of compassion, which doesn’t translate as well to a simple blog post.

As for what’s next, I can’t say. After two years of structured brahmavihara practice, I think I could use something a little less directed. And the two remaining brahmaviharas—equanimity (upekkha) and taking joy in the happiness of others (mudita)—I feel I already have a good handle on.

The only two things that stick out right now are being a little more relaxed in terms of letting more thoughts and emotions arise during meditation, and continuing to look more carefully at the body and the breath for any indication of physical manifestations of emotion.

But I think the main change will be giving up both such a structured, approach to meditation and such a strongly directed technique. After two years of focused practice, I think I’ll let things be a little more relaxed and free-form for a while.

One of my Xmas gifts this year was the slim paperback “A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path”. It’s a brand new book from Gil Fronsdal, the guiding teacher at Redwood City’s Insight Meditation Center and one of my absolute favorite dhamma teachers.

It contains about four dozen very short teaching stories, a traditional Buddhist instructional technique, all based around the interactions between the abbess at a monastery and the students who are her charges.

The longest stories are two to four pages; the shortest just a paragraph or two. The 90-page book could thus be a very quick read, but if you take the time to reflect on the stories, each has its own insights to impart. I’ll provide one example here.

Having long since left my wild thirties behind, I opted not to spend New Year’s Eve in a club seeing a band. Instead, I spent the evening in a five-hour meditation session at CIMC.

This year the New Year’s observation was led by Philippe Daniel and Bonnie Mioduchoski, two close dhamma friends. It was also their first time leading an event at CIMC, so I also wanted to observe, share, and support them in their progression from students to community leaders.

Part of the evening included a period for sharing readings or other observances, and I took the opportunity to read the following story from Gil’s book.

An old monk traveled from afar seeking advice from the Abbess.

He explained that all his life he had used stories to tell himself and others who he was. He lived in some stories for decades. When eventually a story proved hollow and meaningless he would find another belief, another religion, another role.

He told the Abbess, “Buddhism and being a monk has been my story for the last thirty years, but now I’ve let go of even that story. With no story I don’t know who I am. How can I live when I don’t have a story?”

Gently the Abbess said to him, “This is good. Now, turn to the people around you and listen to their stories.”

I thought that was a particularly good reading for the occasion, since it brought people’s attention to the act of listening to others, at a time when members of the audience began sharing their selected readings with the group.

There seems to be a predictable trajectory for people who get interested in Vipassana meditation. At first it’s all about information-gathering: learning as much as one can about the dhamma by inhaling Buddhist books and dhamma talks.

Not surprisingly, when I went through that phase, I did it to the nines. From 2004 through 2008, I read voraciously and attended hundreds of dhamma talks at CIMC, absorbing as much as I could. But I also plundered the internet, downloading and listening to (without exaggeration) a couple thousand dhamma talk podcasts, particularly by Ajahn Brahm of the BSWA and Gil Fronsdal of IMC.

A couple years ago, I finally reached the saturation point. The subject matter of the talks had become very familiar—almost second-nature to me—and my beginners’ enthusiasm slowly waned, giving way to a mild annoyance when a live dhamma talk would be followed by people asking the same redundant and off-topic questions during the usual post-talk Q&A. I found myself feeling frustrated that CIMC’s speakers had to limit their talks to an introductory level, since a fair percentage of their audience are beginners. And I wanted to look into the topics in more detail than a single 45-minute talk could allow.

It was time for me to move on.

CIMC also hosts a handful of standing practice groups that meet on a weekly basis. I attended a few of these (specifically on metta, wise speech, and moving from reactivity to discernment) and found them useful, but they typically meet about eight times, so it felt like the group disbanded as soon as it had gained that sense of continuity I was looking for. It seemed a bit silly to attend the same practice group multiple times, and I wasn’t interested in attending other practice groups whose topics weren’t of value to me.

Just recently, I found my way to another CIMC practice group called the “Long-Term Yogi” program. It’s a more permanent standing group of experienced practitioners, so they get into topics in much more depth, and the participants tend to stay with it for a much longer period of time, so there’s real continuity from month to month and year to year.

The downside is that one has to obtain permission from the teacher to attend. I was asked to assemble a brief history and describe the current state of my practice in order to justify my participation, then wait for the teacher to judge me worthy or unworthy. It was a very uncomfortable exercise in ego and self-aggrandizement and then awaiting judgment… from a place that typically discourages all that. But in the end I was accepted and enrolled in the program.

So far I’ve been to two (weekly) meetings, and have enjoyed them quite a bit. We’re going slowly through the Eightfold Path, examining each path factor in great depth. This fall the group will focus on the latter two (out of four) aspects of wise speech: harsh speech and idle speech, both of which are of particular interest to me. The atmosphere is very collegial, and the weekly contact with CIMC teacher Narayan is also very valuable.

I’m really very optimistic that the LTY program is where I belong right now. It seems like the perfect venue for deepening my practice while benefiting from the consistent support of a great teacher and other knowledgeable and experienced practitioners.

Like my wonderful Kalyana Mitta group (which has been running for nine months and I am remiss in not having mentioned before), the LTY program feels like the embodiment of sangha: a semi-permanent supportive community of dedicated practitioners. I am very fortunate to have been welcomed into these two groups; they both feel very comfortable and right, like the true refuge that sangha is supposed to be. They give me great optimism for my practice and its future evolution.

Somewhere in my travels I came across this contrarian secret about Buddhist teacher interviews: if you express anxiety or confusion at an interview, the teacher’s job is to reassure you and give you confidence; whereas if you show up confident and in control, their job is to present you with deeper or more difficult challenges, to spur you to undertake greater effort.

The latter was my experience in a recent interview I had with Michael, one of the teachers at CIMC. I began by telling him that I was fairly satisfied with my life and that when I meditate, no pressing issues seem to come up for me.

I told him that in general I am on top of things, using my planning and organizational strengths to mitigate the risk involved in anything I commit to or undertake. When that happens, he suggested that I examine the energy level and the motive behind the actions I am taking, because sometimes that impulse to have everything under control is driven by fear or anxiety, rather than wisdom.

He then asked whether I had any suffering in my life or any deeply buried insecurities or fears. While my life is generally quite good, of course even I have a couple things I keep way down in the murky depths. Without getting all personal about my own particular demons, it’s important to be able to allow those feelings to reveal themselves, rather than to instinctively suppress them, so that one can then make choices and act out of wisdom rather than reactiveness.

So I left that interview with a bit more anxiety, and more of a sense that I need to do a better job admitting and facing the things I fear, rather than burying them. Joy.

Later that week we held another dharma movie night. I had proposed the animated film “Waking Life”, which is stuffed with philosophical meanderings. Even though it’s mostly a bunch of talking heads, and not everyone is as fascinated by philosophy as I am, I expected people to find it thought-provoking. I might have even hoped it would receive as positive a response as my book club selection had.

But before the movie began, we got into a discussion of our next book club selection: Mark Epstein’s “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”. When I was asked my opinion, I was honest: I think the book is logically flawed, ridiculously deluded, and dangerously misleading. On the other hand, a couple people enthusiastically loved it, and wanted me to explain why I disagreed with it. As the only person to openly criticize the book, I was on the defensive, and at a disadvantage because it had been a month and a half since I’d read it, and I didn’t have my notes to refer to. So that unexpected discussion left me feeling a bit singled out.

Then we started the movie, which got a predominantly negative reception. In fact, about a third of the way in, four people (out of nine) got up and walked out of the room, spending the rest of the evening outside on the patio rather than watching the rest of the movie. While I have no problem allowing people to make their own decisions, and I know that disliking the movie isn’t the same as disliking me as a person, I still had some emotional turmoil to work through as a result of their surprisingly blunt rejection of something that has a lot of personal and philosophical meaning to me.

In between those two events, CIMC had a dharma talk by Winnie Nazarko that related to creativity. While the talk didn’t touch any nerves for me, one point she made has stayed with me. In general, people engage in a meditative practice because they’re looking for something, whether it’s the answer to a personal dilemma or relief from generalized existential angst. Winnie emphasized the importance of knowing what your overriding question is, so that you can judge whether or not you’re on the path toward an answer.

When I considered that question for myself, two responses came immediately to mind. The first is my familiar refrain of how to live my life such that I will have no regrets on my deathbed, as I discussed here. The other is to learn how to make decisions which are more consistent with my deeper sense of personal ethics and reflect the person I aspire to be and the kind of world I want to manifest. I think it’s a positive sign that those answers came so easily to me, because it shows that I have a clear understanding of why I practice and what I hope to achieve.

And last night at CIMC Maddy held a dharma talk on generosity, and how it is the basis of practice. As we age, we have to let go of everything we have—our possessions, our relationships, our health, and eventually our lives—and the essence of the spiritual path is learning how to be at peace with that process so that we can both live and die with grace and fulfillment.

If that is so, then acts of generosity are a good way to see if we can let go of our possessions, and what it feels like to do so. By exercising our ability to see beyond our attachment to material possessions, we are practicing and becoming more familiar with the kind of letting go that we must all eventually become accustomed to facing.

On top of that, generosity is a truly ennobling act that is a demonstration that one cares about others’ suffering. And it provides fulfillment beforehand (in contemplating giving), during (in the act of giving), and afterward (in the memory of having given). There aren’t many actions one can take that are so pure and have so many positive effects, both for others as well as for oneself.

Last Saturday our dharma book club discussed a book I recommended. This post captures some of that discussion, and why I chose the book I did.

When I was first asked to pick our next book, it was pretty obvious to me what my selection would be: Alan Watts’ “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Written in 1951 by a British scholar in comparative religions, it was one of the first books in English that brought Buddhism to an American audience, including the Beat Generation. More recently, it also played a pivotal role in my own movement toward Buddhism.

Back in 2002, I decided to review my existing philosophical beliefs. In high school, I’d adopted Existentialism after reading Sartre and Camus and Ionesco in French. It had appealed to me as a typically angst-ridden adolescent, but did it still serve me as I approached 40?

Coincidentally, I had just begun blogging here on LiveJournal, so as I spent the next year plowing through Nietzsche and Sartre, I was able to document many of my thoughts along the way. One of the most important of those thoughts came from the following passage in William Barrett’s 1958 book “Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy”, a book I read in January of 2003.

The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in Buddhism, a bubble, and a bubble has nothing at its center. But neither in Buddhism nor in Sartre is the Self riddled with negations to the end that we should, humanly speaking, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive nihilism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of ourselves is intended to lead into a striving for holiness and compassion—the recognition that in the end there is nothing that sustains us should lead us to love one another, as survivors on a life raft, at the moment they grasp that the ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is coming, can only have compassion on one another.

That one somewhat convoluted reference was the first I’d heard of any commonality between Buddhism and Existentialism. Apparently, although the two philosophies began with similar assumptions—that there is no paternal creator god, that there is no inherent meaning in life, and that man has no permanent essence that survives his corporeal body—Buddhism offered something that I never got from Existentialism: a positive and ethical way of living one’s life based on those assumptions. That was the seed that got me thinking about looking into Buddhism. You can read my original comments on Barrett’s book here.

Just a few days later, I found myself browsing at a local Barnes & Noble. I’d scanned the entire Buddhist section and gotten nearly to the end of the alphabet without seeing anything that called out to me. Then I saw this tiny little paperback with an eye-searing lime green spine and the words “THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY - ALAN W. WATTS”. The cover blurbs seemed to intuit exactly what I’d spent the previous year looking for, so I immediately picked it up and blew through it.

Watts was the first author I’d read who, rather than restating the existential problem and wringing his hands, provided a rational and fulfilling way to respond to those conditions, without resorting to the self-delusion of unproven faith or its opposite extreme of pessimism and despair.

Even today, I’m stunned by the serendipity and good fortune I had to happen upon that exact book, because it was the perfect gateway to all the wisdom, development, and fulfillment that has followed. You can read my original reaction to the book here.

So that’s why I selected that particular book. It has an immense amount of personal meaning for me.

As you might expect, I was a little anxious about sharing something that personal with others, even my fellow meditators. That feeling was compounded by the long wait: three months passed between when I was asked to select a book and our discussion of it!

However, it didn’t take long to get a reaction. As soon as he learned of my selection, one of the attendees emailed back: “AMAZING selection!!!!!!! I will definately [sic] be there. I cannot express how amazing this book is to read.” Okay, that’s one solid vote of confidence!

Another one came a few weeks later. Socializing after a sitting at CIMC, one of the attendees showed me her copy of the book and mentioned that she was enjoying it. That’s two!

But as she flashed the book, its amazingly ugly lime green and purple patterned cover caught the eye of the woman who had officiated at the evening’s meditation. She recognized it immediately and also effused about it, indicating that, like me, it had played a big part in her coming to Buddhism. That really made me much more confident about the selection, since she’s a longtime practitioner who is known for managing CIMC’s “sandwich retreat”.

By the time our book club discussion came around, even the woman who hosts the group made a point of letting me know that she was enjoying the book. So I was able to go into the meeting without too much self-consciousness about it.

That’s not to say that the book received unalloyed praise. Watts’ language was both commended (in his choice of metaphors and images) and critiqued (in his tangential rants and sometimes inaccessibly complex sentence structure).

Eleven people attended the meeting, and about half had read the book, which is a bit better than normal. Let me gloss over a few of the topics that came up during the discussion.

One comment that was repeatedly made was how pertinent Watts’ words are today, even sixty years after he wrote them. He wrote about consumerism and how everyone was chasing the newest, best television. It stunned us that in 2010, we’re still being sold new and supposedly much better televisions, just as was the case back in 1951! He also anticipated our need for ever more rapid and imposing forms of entertainment. He could surely have been talking about last week in this passage:

There is, then, the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity. In the past hundred years so many long-established traditions have broken down—traditions of family and social life, of government, of the economic order, and of religious belief. As the years go by, there seem to be fewer and fewer rocks to which we can hold, fewer things which we can regard as absolutely right and true, and fixed for all time.

We spent some time talking about how religious faith can be a comfort, but once it has been pierced by skepticism, you can’t ever restore that belief. That harkens back to my own feeling that you cannot simply decide what you believe; belief is not an object to be so simply controlled, and you can do little more than discover and perhaps indirectly influence what you believe. As one attendee put it: the challenge of Watts’ book is how to stay connected with modern reality in the absence of mollifying religious faith, without being scared.

Another big theme that people pulled out was that our feelings of insecurity are the direct result of the fact that we want security. If you want something, by definition it is something that you feel you do not have now, so the more desperately we seek security, the more insecure we feel. This was likened to the concept of the “power of attraction”, where one must be careful to cultivate the vision of having what one wants, not the wanting itself, because focusing your energy on the wanting presumably reinforces your yearning and the absence of the thing you’re after.

Our discussions also circled around the Buddhist concept of conditioned behavior, and the large degree to which our actions can be reduced to a response to the situation we are in, based on patterns of behavior that have been successful for us in the past. Where this got interesting was our realization that as dharma friends, we are each providing conditioning factors for one another, and hopefully influencing one another such that we will all make wiser, compassionate, and more fulfilling decisions in the future.

Another amusing tangent had us discussing the idea that on average, your friends are more popular than you are. This is mathematically true, because we all tend to be friends with outgoing people who are already very popular.

Obviously, the discussion was much broader than those few items, but I wanted to capture those in particular, and they’ll also give you a flavor for where we went with it. Overall, the discussion stayed pretty well on-topic, and people kept returning to the book and reading key passages aloud, since Watts’ prose is eminently quotable.

In preparation for the book club, I re-read “Wisdom of Insecurity” myself last week. After three readings, almost every single page has something highlighted on it. It’s an extremely dense book in terms of the profundity of its concepts, and I feel that although it’s only a thin 150-page paperback, one could easily base a semester’s study around it.

I wanted to highlight a few things that I got from this most recent reading that I didn’t mention in the book club discussion.

Here’s a great passage, where Watts begins by commenting on our impossible and irrational desire for permanence:

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy. To drink more fully of the fountain of pleasure, it has brought forth capacities which make man more susceptible to pain. It has given us the power to control the future but a little—the price of which is the frustration of knowing that we must at last go down in defeat. If we find this absurd, this is only to say that nature has conceived intelligence in us to berate itself for absurdity. Consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture.

In other words, if we’re intelligent enough to realize the futility of our plight, we must then be nature’s way of mocking itself! When I read this section about the basic absurdity of humanity’s quest for meaning, seeking pleasure, and avoiding pain, I realized that the best way to think about life is as a Zen koan. There is no answer! And any attempt to arrive at one rationally is bound to fail. Life is a paradox; accept it and move on!

Another passage:

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call “I”.

What leaps out at me from this section is the absurdity (again) of feeling that one has to prop up or defend something that we’ve defined as eternal and immutable. How ridiculous! If there is some permanent “I” within us, then what need does it have for defense? If such a thing existed, it would persist irrespective of anything we did or did not do.

Watts spends a great deal of time on the importance of living the present moment fully, and not letting desired future states obscure our ability to enjoy and be fully present with what is. The difference between someone who perpetually looks for fulfillment in the future and someone who lives for the present couldn’t be more poignant than in this passage about death:

When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full.

This passage shows how the fear of death is mostly rooted in the fact that it signals the end of our ability to expect a better, more pleasant future. It shows that by a simple change of mindset, we can begin to leave this fear behind. Imagine having a relationship with death that wasn’t dominated by fear!

Then there’s this little zinger. Compare the following passages:

If it is true that man is necessarily motivated by the pleasure-pain principle, there is no point whatsoever in discussing human conduct. Motivated conduct is determined conduct; it will be what it will be, no matter what anyone has to say about it. There can be no creative morality unless man has the possibility of freedom.

That citation, which says that ethics and morality make no sense if man doesn’t have the freedom to make choices, is from “Wisdom of Insecurity”. Then:

You are deluded to assume that you are reading this of your own free will. My friend, you had no choice but to read this! Will is not the action of a being; it is the end product of a process. […] Whatever you do is just a result of complex programming.

This counterpoint is from Ajahn Brahm’s book on jhana practice, “Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond”, which I reviewed here. Ajahn Brahm subscribes to the view that free will is an illusion, and that our behavior and apparent choices are indeed fully determined by present conditions and our past conditioning. I’d love to get these two in a room and ask them to debate the topic of choice. Or maybe not…

Finally, consider Watts’ description of hell:

Hell, or “everlasting damnation” is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained.

I might clarify this definition of hell as threefold, comprised of seeking for pleasure but remaining unfulfilled, running from pain but never being able to avoid it, and looking to the future for fulfillment without ever being present at that future. As such, I think this is a perfectly apt description of many people’s lives, and a good way to understand why a lot of people find themselves frustrated, angry, self-absorbed, and suffering from existential angst.

In conclusion, I have to once again say how delighted I am with “Wisdom of Insecurity”, and how heartily I recommend it to others. It’s amusing, quotable, succinct, and very deeply profound. It impresses me as much today, after seven years of Buddhist study and practice, as it did on day one.

I am truly amazed that it was written sixty years ago, by someone who was only 36 years old. It contains an amazing amount of wisdom in a very tidy little package. Well, except for the single ugliest cover ever created by man.

Ironically, one final surprise is that all that wisdom didn’t necessarily help its author. In the ’60s, long after this book was published, Alan Watts experimented with mescaline and LSD, and became something of an advocate of marijuana. He became an alcoholic, went through three marriages, and died of heart failure at 58 years of age.

But then it is the nature of all things to change, isn’t it?

Another year, another CIMC “sandwich retreat”. Here’s a report from my third annual nine-day urban “integration retreat”. If you’re absolutely bored out of your skull, here are links to the 2008 and 2007 retreats.

Saturday I arrived early and was offered my choice of yogi jobs. Hooray! I picked the same thing as last year: end-of-day cleanup, which gives me 90 minutes of free time to myself during the lunch break, while other participants have yogi jobs they have to attend to after eating. This year my partner was my friend Bonnie, when last year it had been Shea.

I knew things were going right when the first sitting of the morning was punctuated by the schizo-frenetic calls of the mockingbird I’ve heard several times before at the center.

My intention for the retreat was to focus on the metta (lovingkindness) work that I’d recently begun in a five-week practice group that had only concluded two days before the retreat. More details about that here.

I guess that’s only poetic justice, since I wrote the following about a teacher interview I had on the 2007 sandwich retreat: “I talked about how judgmental I am about other people, and how I really dreaded that the prescription for that would be metta (loving-kindness) meditation.”

On Saturday I devoted each 45-minute sitting on sending metta to just one of the five people I had been working with: myself, my benefactor, a close friend, someone I felt neutral about, and a person I felt really challenged by. I also spent additional sessions on specific individuals as they arose randomly in my mind, geographic areas ranging from the room to the state of Massachusetts and out to the universe, and one final session simply sitting with open awareness.

Although it had started out chilly, the temperatures soared and it became a beautiful day, although the winds were gusting as high as 45 mph, which was quite dramatic. So I spent most of the walking periods meditating outdoors, and I actually started a collection of interesting found stuff, which grew to include acorns, a pine cone, seed pods from several other types of tree, a bike reflector, a playing card (the six of clubs), a puzzle piece, a pigeon feather, holly and Japanese maple leaves, the nameplate from a Graco product, a brown hair elastic, and I added three more keycaps to my collection of CAPS LOCK keys.

Throughout the week I also scoured the neighborhood for outdoor cats, especially the extremely friendly one I’d met last year on Cleveland Street. While looking for the latter, her owner (a cute redhead) came by and told me the cat’s name was Pushkin when I asked.

Saturday’s most memorable event took place while I and others were mindfully eating our tea/dinner on the center’s front stairway. Sitting behind/above me was a young man I’d already noted as not the most mindful yogi. As he got up, he allowed his knife to slide off his plate, and it fell down and hit me in the back. He then compounded his issue by verbally apologizing, breaking our usual noble silence. I just handed his knife back to him; I’d like to think he learned something from the incident, but further evidence suggests otherwise.

The final irony on Saturday was the ride home. It was a major shock to go from twelve hours of silent meditation to going to Central Square and picking up one of the MBTA’s most busy bus lines to go home. Now, normally that’s not too bad, but it was also 9:30pm on Halloween night. The mental image of that scene is left as an exercise for the reader.

Sunday started off all wrong. During the retreat, yogis use a signup sheet to schedule one-on-one interviews with the center’s teachers. That morning, there had been an announcement stating that they weren’t going to be enough slots to give everyone a weekend interview, but that anyone who didn’t get an interview over the weekend would have one on Monday night. When the first walking period began, I knew there’d be a mob scene at the signup sheet, so I went straight outside and began my 30-minute walking meditation. That way I’d avoid the scrum, and I’d actually have more to report if I waited until Monday, having another day of the retreat under my belt by that time.

Well, that was a big mistake. When I checked in the day before, I’d given a note to the staff, asking them to ensure that I had an interview with Narayan. She’s the most popular (and busy) teacher at CIMC, and although one usually gets an interview with each of the three main teachers, I had never been scheduled for an interview with her in my previous two sandwich retreats, so I wanted to be sure I got one this year.

Well, you know where this is going: they had written my name in the very first slot in the morning! Not knowing that, I’d gone off and was walking around the neighborhood. Fortunately, they snagged me as I returned, and Narayan was kind enough to speak with me at that time. I’m glad, because it was a very encouraging interview.

Just as I’d been interested in speaking with her, she wanted to follow up with me, because she had been the instructor for that five-week metta workshop that I had just concluded. We talked about that, and she approved of my plans to spend the whole retreat doing metta. She really impressed me by showing genuine respect for my six years of dedicated practice and my ability to progress in the dharma fairly independently, without much direction from the teachers.

Teacher contact was actually the crux of what I wanted to talk to her about. At the 2008 retreat, I’d spoken to another teacher (Michael) about establishing a teacher/student relationship with him, with check-ins every 2-3 months. However, various factors intervened, and I never got around to following up on that. I wanted Narayan’s advice on how important it was to have a teacher’s time, especially since I was reluctant to schedule appointments when teachers have so little time and so many other students who seem to need their direction much more. Naturally, she encouraged me to work with Michael, and even sneak in an occasional interview with her by leaving her a note during her Thursday and Sunday sittings.

I also told her some of my history, specifically about my meditative response to insomnia as a teenager, and the time I’d counseled the roommates of a friend who had attempted suicide.

I also told her about a recent conversation with a friend where I’d challenged her perception that one facet of her personality was fixed and unchangeable. I’d found myself explaining how absolutely everything is subject to change, and that belief in the possibility of change is absolutely necessary for human development. Denying that change is possible is completely disempowering, and a denial of responsibility for one’s own growth and maturation. I’d been shocked when my friend replied with one of the more advanced Buddhist truths, “So you are telling me that there’s no permanent part inside that is me?” It had been a very interesting discussion.

I’ve always been challenged by the retreat requirement of eating vegetarian. Although the food is extremely well done, I’m just not used to many of the ingredients, and now it’s even worse, because I suspect that I’ve become very allergic to onions and garlic, which were in nearly every dish provided by the center. So Sunday noon I threw in the towel and went to Four Burger in Central Square, where I got a hamburger on wheat with gouda, jalapeno, and BBQ sauce. It was delightful, as was the sunny afternoon I spent on the steps of the Cambridge City Hall, watching the cyclists pass by on Mass Ave. The weather on the two weekends was just delightful.

A sign on the refrigerator at the center reminds people that no meat is allowed on the premises, although I took amusement from the thought that over the course of history, just about everything in the center was probably a form of meat at some point in time.

As I returned to the center at the end one walking period, I saw my friend Amy fast-walking down the street. As I crossed the street and fell in ahead of her, she changed to a jog, and then I went to a trot, and without speaking we wound up sprinting down the street to see who would be first to the center’s gate. Maybe not 100 percent mindful, but it was fun nonetheless.

And even the teachers have a humorous bent, as evinced by Larry’s showing up right after the evening chanting, Michael’s daily changes to his crazy mathematical schemes for dividing the retreatants into groups, and Michael’s reminder that we should not just practice wisdom on the cushion, but also until we die, and even beyond!

Sunday evening we were given the homework that we’d practice with throughout our weekdays, which was to notice each time that resistance came up for us, specifically resistance to reality as it played out, rather than as we thought it should be. This wound up being a very challenging topic, but also pretty rich.

So I practiced with that, and by Monday evening’s sitting I had some ideas. I was a little surprised that I’d only noticed twelve instances of resistance, but I wasn’t surprised by where they had come from. Three-quarters were caused by my cat Grady or technology or other people. The remainder included myself, corporations, and concerns about the future.

The most important chunk of wisdom that came out of it was that nearly all my times of resistance were due to a mismatch between my expectations and what the world provided. But I realized that the expectations weren’t the problem at all, but my attachment to them was.

For example, I was irritated when I repeatedly saw cyclists riding illegally on the sidewalk, because their behavior violated my expectations. But if I said to myself that they were just humans, and one really should expect such behavior from mere humans, the irritation went away. If you let go of your attachment to the expectation and realize that life often doesn’t work that way, it makes living in the real world much easier.

Tuesday and Wednesday were much the same. I must admit that I didn’t do as well focusing on the homework during the day, and my end-of-day debriefs started getting repetitive.

However, things changed a lot for me when I came home from Wednesday night’s sitting. Checking my online news feeds, I learned something that completely floored me: the Thai forest monks from Ajahn Chah’s Wat Pah Pong monastery had excommunicated Ajahn Brahm of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia for participating in the ordination of women priests (bhikkuni). The ordination of women has been an issue of great debate in Theravadan Buddhism for the past few years, and it is more complex than a simple question of sexism. It is a question that has divided the sangha, and remains a point of conflict to this day.

Now, the late Ajahn Chah and the forest tradition have legendary status in the US as one of the founts where all Western Buddhism comes from. And Ajahn Brahm, a student of Ajahn Chah, is someone I respect tremendously, having listened to hundreds of his dharma talks online during my initial period of study, and having met the man during his US book tour. So I was flabbergasted to learn that the disagreement between these two was so dire that he had been excommunicated, and it became quite an international row.

Aside from everything else, this evoked a tremendous emotional response in me that included resistance, so I tried to work with it as such. The ironic part is that there our retreat had no group discussion period scheduled for Thursday evening—just sitting and walking—so I had to sit with it for another day before bringing it up, although I did talk to a couple friends about it after the formal program ended Thursday night.

Both Thursday and Friday, I spent the formal meditation period directing metta toward Ajahn Brahm and the Thai forest monks, and also for my ex-wife’s mother, who was having heart surgery.

Unlike the rest of the week, Friday we broke up into small groups and talked about our experiences without the supervision of the teachers. My group had an excellent exchange, and I had the opportunity to lead the group and also empathize with each of the members. It was a very moving discussion. And as we left at the end of the evening, I noticed Michael posting the sign-up sheet for teacher interviews on Saturday, so I hovered and made sure I was signed up for an interview with Michael.

I also got a couple book pointers during the week, which included Ken Wilber, author of “Integral Life Practice” and “A Brief History of Everything”, and Ajahn Brahm’s “Mindfulness, Bliss & Beyond” as a guidebook for jhana practice.

By Saturday it was evident people were getting worn out. During one walking period, I stopped by the second floor landing, only to see nearly a dozen yogis all lying on the floor, sleeping! And nearly a quarter of the cushions were empty during the sitting sessions. I had been apprehensive about another 12-hour day, myself, but I had learned a critical lesson: don’t put too much effort (physical or mental) into meditating. You’ll produce a lot less mental and physical exhaustion if you relax and sit simply, rather than striving and forcing a lot of effort.

My interview with Michael went surprisingly well. I explained to him why I had dropped the ball on starting a relationship with him last year and he agreed that I should touch base with him after the holidays. I asked him about the persistent tingle in my neck that I had started getting when I start meditating, and he explained that concentration practice can bring up odd sensations like that, but to just let them be. And he was pleased to hear of my plan to dedicate myself toward metta work, and suggested I try doing metta during the walking periods, which I had purposely not done so far.

Because I had the whole lunch period free, I always made sure I was near the end of the line for lunch, so that others could get their food first. As I did so, I repeatedly wondered what it must feel like to be first in the lunch line, why a yogi would literally put himself before others. I was amused to note that my knife-dropping friend was one of the first people out the door for lunch. Interesting.

Finally Sunday arrived, and the finish line was in sight. Per Michael’s advice, I tried doing metta while walking, which was surprisingly easy. The only item I could eat from the lunch board was one burnt scone, so I made another (not unwelcome) pilgrimage to Four Burger, which provided a tasty interlude.

At one point, teacher Larry instructed us to go outside on that beautiful day and find an object to meditate upon, as he had once had a profound experience reflecting on a leaf. I almost chose my own shadow, but continued on to a nearby park with a paved path through it.

I actually came to appreciate how our self-centeredness and the disposable consumer culture teaches us to treat the world we experience as if it is only there temporarily for our benefit. We never stop and think about the epic history that a bike path has seen, the multitude of lives both before and after us that it has touched and will touch. As if to underscore the point, nearby a woman was teaching her child how to ride a bike without training wheels. Even the simple paved path I regarded: it held important meaning for some people. How many? How far back, and how far into the future? The same was true of the ballfield, the street, the trees, and the buildings around us. I felt a new sense of respect for the world around me.

Finally, the day came to a close, and we passed the microphone around so that everyone had a chance to say thank yous and describe their experience. When my turn came, I led off with, “I guess I really have to question the wisdom… of giving me a microphone,” which got the chuckles that I hoped it would.

Then I talked about how impressed I was with the wisdom I’d heard from the other yogis throughout the week, but especially from the number of people who described their practice as a struggle or a challenge. I went on to explicitly challenge those people on holding that as a story, and that their struggles were evidence that they were engaged in the difficult task of putting the practice to use in their daily lives. Echoing another participant’s comment, I said they should view themselves not as passive victims of difficulties or as people whose lives are full of struggle, but as heroes and warriors, and that it was an honor to sit with them.

After the retreat ended and people were socializing, I think five or six people came up to me and thanked me for my comments, which was nice. I enjoy speaking in public and especially enjoy giving motivational talks, so that pleased me a great deal.

At the same time, I have a very difficult time accepting praise, so it gave me a chance to practice with that. I think I did pretty well, deflecting the comment by describing how frustrated I felt when someone said they were struggling but then spoke of the hard-won wisdom they’d gained. Then I mentioned my hope that my observation would help them gain respect for themselves and how far they’ve come in their practice.

Since I was still on end-of-day cleanup, I remained after everyone but the hardcore folks had left. We wound up talking dharma through an entire 72-minute dishwasher cycle, then four of us (Mark, Shea, Philippe, and I) went to Picante Mexican Grill in Central Square for a late meal, then I made my way home, concluding another very successful retreat with a well-earned and long-anticipated sleep.