Ornoth

My Austin kyūdō group doesn’t have a teacher; it never has. But we fall under the distant tutelage of a Japanese archery group based in Greenville, South Carolina. The South Carolina Kyūdō Renmei (or SCKR) is run by Blackwell-sensei, one of the most senior kyūdō teachers outside Japan, and his wife Reiko-sensei.

SCKR hold kyūdō seminars a couple times a year, which are attended by local South Carolina practitioners, Austin kyudoka, as well as people from all over North America.

Given my well-documented and very fundamental beginner struggles, I never attended a seminar. I didn’t want to take sensei’s time away from his many advanced students to deal with my remedial problems, and I didn’t want to waste an expensive trip if I wasn’t going to get the attention I need.

However, sensei offered to run a seminar just for us, only open to the comparatively junior members of Austin Kyūdō. It was an irresistible opportunity to get sensei’s help in a way that didn’t feel like I was imposing on other archers. So in September I joined ten other Austinites for a three-day kyūdō intensive.

And “intense” is the right word to describe my experience, from beginning to end. There’s way too much to be able to share it all, but I’ll do my best to briefly share the important parts of where I started, what I went through, some of the things I learned, and where I go from here.

The Honda Prelude

Just two weeks before the seminar, I was ready to call off the trip and quit kyūdō entirely. After two and a half futile years enduring consistent failure in stoic silence, I had finally reached my breaking point.

While everyone around me – even complete first-timers! – demonstrated basic competence and increasing proficiency, I simply couldn’t successfully fire a bow without injuring myself or damaging equipment. My arrows would fly through the air sideways and clang off the practice target, or flop feebly to the ground only a few meters downrange. I broke strings, stripped the feathers from arrows, and bruised my forearm. And the months I’d spent trying dozens of different ways to correct it had all been for naught.

In the interest of moving on, I’ll leave it at that for now. But to get a better idea how frustrated I was, I’d encourage you to read the blogpost I wrote eight months ago, entitled “All the Gear and…”. Just take all the anguish in that post and amp it up to eleven.

Ironically, that week I had a promising insight: that I clenched the fingers of my right hand so tightly that they were interfering with my release. That didn’t solve all my problems, but it seemed like a clue: one piece of the puzzle. But I didn’t even have time to put it into practice before the seminar was upon us.

So that was my mental and emotional state going into the trip: off-the-scale frustration, extreme pessimism, and the only thing I wanted out of the seminar was for sensei to fix me… Although I was skeptical whether he would, or could.

It was – if you’ll excuse the pun – “my last shot” at being a kyūdō practitioner.

The Tyranny of Logistics

Bearing so much emotional distress, I wasn’t very tolerant of the usual discomforts of travel. Other than two trips between Pittsburgh and Austin when we were deciding where to move, I hadn’t flown in six years: since before the COVID-19 pandemic. And it was my first time flying Southwest Airlines, whose asinine unassigned seating policy makes boarding a complete free-for-all.

Things didn’t get a lot better once we arrived, either. I had to share a room with another person, which added some more stress. Not only were we going to prepare communal meals, but because no one had bothered to communicate with one another, sensei and his friends had also prepared meals for us too, which was yet another stressor for everyone.

Even the seminar provided some unexpected wrinkles. Sensei vetoed my use of the familiar bow I’d brought. I’d purchased some used zori sandals for outdoor use getting to the dojo and fetching arrows, but those promptly broke, necessitating a special trip to the store to buy replacements. And although the seminar was supposed to be for his Austin students only, we were sporadically joined by 5-10 local practitioners. Despite being able to use the dojo 365 days a year, they took shooting spaces and sensei’s time away from those of us who had traveled from far away for a precious 2½ days with him. And I have to admit I got frustrated by seeing other kyudoka improving much more rapidly than I did.

But the underlying message here is that the seminar was extremely mentally, physically, and emotionally draining. In addition to my already-charged emotional state, I was dealing with lack of sleep, poor and insufficient eating, muscle fatigue, dehydration, headaches and nausea, social stress, and of course the emotional rollercoaster of judging every shot I took.

It was, in short, an incredibly draining experience.

Nana Dan the Sensei

I’m gonna be honest: I felt a lot of trepidation going into my first experience with Blackwell-sensei. In speaking with my friends who had worked with him in the past, my preconception was of a teacher who was willfully terse, irritable, intolerant, and easily offended. But after telling their daunting stories, my friends would always add the postscript: “… but as long as you’re serious about kyūdō, he’s really great!”

During the seminar, Blackwell-sensei was actually very willing to give me the benefit of his time and instruction, and he patiently listened to my observations and needs. Despite my skepticism and obvious frustration, he was able to see the mistakes underlying my problems, and gave me clear strategies for correcting them. And he did so with patience and graciousness.

While fixing my issues will take lots more practice and reinforcement, my shooting did begin to improve by the end of the seminar, thanks to his valuable and generously-offered instruction.

Not that he isn’t surly and cantankerous and all that. But I think it shows up in his interactions with more experienced students, with whom he has higher expectations and more established relationships.

My Threefold Incompetence

So what exactly did I get out of the seminar? Well, there were lots of little, specific learnings, but those will be documented in my kyūdō notebook, rather than here. And as far as I was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was figuring out the cause of my constant misfires.

Over the course of the weekend, we identified three specific issues with my release. I’ll distill them down as briefly as possible.

First, my grip on the bow was incorrect, which was causing the string to slap my wrist and the bow to invert itself. Fixing it requires both holding the bow more loosely, plus making small changes in how my fingers configure themselves on the grip.

My second issue was what I’d identified just before the seminar: by locking my fingers around the string, they interfered with the string when I released it, causing the arrow to fire off-kilter, with very little power, and stripping some of the fletching. Ideally, I wouldn’t lock those fingers at all during my draw, but for the time being I’m simply trying to consciously loosen those fingers before I release the string.

I developed the habit of locking those fingers because the string was prematurely coming out of the groove it’s supposed to sit in within the glove. Sensei gave me several techniques to counteract this tendency during my draw, including: keeping my right hand flat; being careful to keep my thumb level or pointed up, rather than downward; making sure my right elbow comes down and back as I draw; not drawing the arrow all the way down to the chin; and not holding my full draw for very long.

Of course, there’s an immense difference between a conceptual understanding of what one has to fix versus actually physically performing it reliably each time one steps up to shoot. And because I’ve spent two years developing muscle memory of improper techniques, my attempts to correct my form feel completely unnatural and wrong. So even though I know what I should be doing, it’s going to take time and lots of practice to learn new habits.

The Fourth Problem

As chance would have it, our kyūdō trip coincided with two Zoom calls that I wanted to attend, both organized by Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, where I practiced meditation for 12 years, and which has been an important part of my growth for more than two decades. Saturday’s call was in honor of CIMC’s founding teacher, Larry Rosenberg, who is in his nineties and in poor health; and on Sunday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of CIMC’s founding. These were intensely moving for me, and featured several of my dear old friends. A shaved-headed version of Ornoth even showed up in the background in part of the “community reflections” video they shared!

The main reason why I mention these here is because those celebrations included poignant messages about looking at how one relates to the challenges and suffering that arise in one’s life, and to pay close attention to what one is attached to, especially ego-based ideas about who one is and how one wants other people see them.

The applicability of these ideas to my kyūdō practice couldn’t have been clearer, and really put the past couple years into perspective.

To clarify further, here’s a citation from a recent article in Lion’s Roar magazine that stated things rather well:

Often a problem at home or at work isn’t just troubling because of the surface issue that the problem is about. It’s what the problem makes us feel and think about ourselves that is disturbing. Taking the time to examine those feelings and thoughts using our meditative practices often shows us that we have some internal hook by which the external challenge has grabbed us.

[…]

Try answering this self-exploratory journal question: “What is the difference between the actual problem posed by my situation and my perception of and feelings about my situation?”

A neutral observer would see that there’s really nothing objectively painful about my kyūdō practice, other than maybe an occasional abrasion. The towering mountain of anguish I’ve endured is entirely due to the meaning I’ve attached to my practice, specifically my need to be seen as a competent – if not a skilled – archer, both in my own mind as well as in the estimation of others.

My need to be a skilled kyudoka was the source of a great deal of pain: that is the fourth problem with my archery practice.

I would free myself from an immense quantity of suffering if I were able to let go of that need, or at least hold it more lightly. Like changing my shooting technique, that’s easier said than done, but just having that mind-shift cleared some space for me to relate to myself and my struggles with more ease, more compassion, and hopefully a little more freedom.

Since my early days as a tech consultant, I’ve known that I don’t thrive in my “stretch zone”; I thrive in the “comfort zone”. I want to enjoy life as it comes, in accordance with my own values, without unnecessary effort or discomfort. I don’t understand people who fixate on personal growth, always striving for something more, wanting to leave their mark on the world. To me, that sounds like living in a perpetual hamster wheel: lots and lots of effort, achieving nothing of value. Or as Devo sings: “Toil is Stupid”.

I had an exchange with one of the senior kyudoka from South Carolina which was especially discouraging. He told me that he enjoyed having the younger Austin people visit, because they reminded him that practicing kyūdō could actually be fun. If enjoying kyūdō is an alien concept to such a longtime practitioner, that raises a big question about whether I even want to continue. What’s the point, if there is no enjoyment?

Kyūdō challenges my self-image, my attachment to how I am perceived by others, and the basic values I hold toward life. Hopefully I can work through those challenges and find a better way to relate to them, so that I don’t have to suffer as much as I have for the past two years.

Seeking the Target

So where do I stand?

Sensei actually gave me both hope and a number of specific changes that I can incorporate into my shooting technique. It would be logical to make a sincere effort to adopt his suggestions, to see whether they actually improve my shooting or not. That will take time and practice to prove out, but that’s an investment I’m willing to make.

I’m also willing to work on my relationship with kyūdō. It’s important that I learn how to let go of the frustration that comes with identifying as a competent archer, while at the same time asking myself whether kyūdō’s endless self-improvement treadmill is something I am able and willing to tolerate over the long term.

As such, I am not going to quit kyūdō… yet.

But at the same time, I am only suspending judgement long enough to work with sensei’s suggestions. Those changes might not help, and I might still decide that I can’t cope with kyūdō’s perpetual challenges and frustrations.

So we’ll see. The arrow’s journey continues, for the time being.

I’ve always been a little – sometimes a lot – older than the friends I hang around with. So I figure some folks might be wondering how it’s going following my recent stroke… What it’s like to live with the realization that a portion of my brain is, literally, dead.

The most pertinent fact is that my stroke is over. Actually, it was probably over by the time the EMTs showed up, but then there was the whole diagnosis and treatment protocol and investigation and followup plan. But now, six weeks later, that episode is as much a piece of history as my first driving test.

Physically, I’d like to say that I have no lingering aftereffects. Sensation returned to my left hand over the first 48 hours, and that numbness had been the only significant aftereffect.

The psychological impact was more lasting, manifesting in several flavors that’ll fill the balance of this blogpo.

Betrayal

Easily the most prominent emotion has been the feeling that I was betrayed by my body. For sixty years, I knew in my bones that my body could thrive and succeed no matter what outrageous demands I placed on it. Eating like a 14 year old? No problem. Bike 150 miles in a single day? Piece of cake! Going out drinking and nightclubbing until 4am and getting up at 6am to facilitate meetings with Fortune 500 clients? Easy-peasy! Work 80 to 120 hours per week for nine months straight on a death march project? BTDT.

But completely out of the blue one morning, the body I’ve relied upon all my life suddenly betrayed me, with no warning, while doing nothing more strenuous than walking down a staircase, something I do dozens of times every day.

I can’t tell you how much of a shock that was. I’ve been through the classic responses: anger, grief, bargaining. The only one I missed was denial, because it just wasn’t possible to ignore.

Mistrust

Trust, once broken, is difficult to restore.

Even after the hospital sent me home, I didn’t feel that I could just go back to a normal life. Even though that episode was over, I didn’t trust that I wasn’t still in imminent danger. I still felt that I had to stay vigilant, on guard against anything that might come up, even though I know that I’m not in full or direct control of my body’s health. Once bitten, twice shy.

Hyper-awareness

Because of that, I’ve been hyper-aware of every little niggle that arises… and in a 61 year old body, there are plenty of them.

I have developed some neuropathy in my feet, and any time a body part “falls asleep” sets off stroke alarms in my head. And that pain in my armpit: could that be a lymphoma? The stitch in my side kinda feels like a kidney stone, or maybe diverticulitis. The pain in the opposite side is probably pancreatic cancer, or maybe just liver failure. And my chest pains might be a symptom of atrial fibrillation, which is a huge risk factor for stroke.

I’m not normally prone to hypochondria, but nor am I used to waking up one morning and having a stroke. Even after consulting my physician, I can’t say for certain whether all these maladies are complete fiction, or real but minor discomforts, or something far worse.

Fear

What does the future hold? How much longer will I live? The truth is that I have almost no information and very limited influence.

That’s hard. It’s a cause for anxiety, uncertainty, and unease. In a word: fear. Raw existential dread. Not something I’ve ever had to face directly, so it’s one of those unpleasant “learning experiences”.

During the day, there’s enough stuff going on to distract me from all this, but the fears are more insistent at night. Keeping one’s imagination in check is a full-time job!

Living a normal life in this midst of all this is not easy! But then, what’s the alternative?

Fortunately, every morning I get up and notice that I don’t appear to be fatally ill. And after six weeks of evidence to the contrary, my worst fears have weakened to the point where life has started to feel normal again.

Coping

What helps? Good question.

Has my longstanding meditation practice helped? Somewhat. Meditation taught me how to distinguish between skillful thoughts and unskillful thoughts as they arise; that I don’t need to give full credence to everything a fearful mind envisions; and how to short-circuit the mental proliferation that can fuel unnecessary fear about the future. It also allows me to see that my moods and emotions are intensely charged interpretations of one possible future – not reality itself – and that they are essentially both transitory and empty of real substance.

That doesn’t mean that I’m able to dispel all my fears, especially in the dark, lonely silence of a late night, with nothing to think about other than my body, its ephemeral nature, and its treacherous sensations.

The thing that seems to help most is the simple passage of time. As I mentioned above, day after day, the worst case scenario doesn’t seem to happen. And that data has slowly piled up into an irrefutable conclusion that I seem to be mostly okay, at least in this moment.

Not that I feel like I can trust that just yet. But it does seem more and more plausible as each day goes by.

Conclusion

I am subject to aging. I am subject to sickness. I am subject to death.

These irrefutable truths are hard to face, and they’re a rude awakening that every one of us will have to come to terms with, at a time and in a manner we do not control. And this society does a shitty job preparing people for this immense challenge.

I’ve had a conceptual understanding of these truths since my sister died following a stroke fifty years ago. In my life, they’ve been reminders of the preciousness of life. Now they’re more omens about the precariousness of life. My life. My very finite life.

So we have a global health crisis on our hands. The COVID-19 virus has eluded even our harshest attempts at containment, and there’s no prospect of either a preventative or treatment, other than for associated diagnoses such as pneumonia.

With an unknown number of infectious but asymptomatic carriers wandering around, Inna and I have taken the only measure anyone can do, which is complete social self-isolation.

No more Monday or Wednesday meditation groups, and I prematurely ended my brief stint as a CMU brain research subject. Inna has cancelled a business trip, two seminars in Austin, and plans to take the salt cave women’s group she leads online.

We don’t plan on leaving our apartment except for safely isolated outdoor activities like hikes, or emergency grocery runs. We’re pretty well stocked with supplies, having each made major trips before our lockdown.

Thankfully, cycling will still be a good option for me, although I’ll curtail rides of more than two hours, rather than replenish at the usual convenience store.

It’s very reminiscent of the widespread lockdowns following the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and the shelter-in-place order that followed the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. It’s the same scope of disruption, and the same sense of separation from general society.

In the meantime, the stock market—which had been on a tear so far this year—has experienced unprecedented volatility. Like a good long-term investor, I’ve sat tight and gritted my teeth, and even made one opportunistic buy, but it’s nerve-wracking watching your money vaporize. Where I had been crowing about my growing wealth in February, in little more than two weeks I’ve experienced massive losses that bewilder the imagination.

Between the stock market’s gyrations, the fear of illness, the social isolation, the wholesale cancellation of all group activity, and the drama surrounding the Presidential primary elections, there’s been a surfeit of emotion to process, even for someone as stolid as myself.

No one likes uncertainty, and no one likes anxiety, but the situation is unlikely to change for several weeks, if not months. Rather than venting that discomfort in random ways (like a completely pointless run on bottled water), it’s important that each person discover how to accept their anxiety and be okay with it.

For me, my meditation practice provides a reassuring guide: acknowledge my feelings and my fears about the future, then take refuge in what’s happening at the present moment, because none of those fears have manifested in my present-day, lived experience. Life really isn’t that bad, so long as you have the mental discipline to stop the mind from fabricating and getting lost in wild doomsday scenarios.

And I’m blessed to be sharing my space with a partner who also manages her internal state with great insight and wisdom. Viewed from a less fretful perspective, this is an opportunity to deepen our relationship while also getting some goddamned housecleaning done!

Be well, my friends.

Ten months ago, I went out to the Insight Meditation Society for their 9-day New Years retreat. It was my first time doing a retreat of that length, and I found it vastly more dramatic and emotionally challenging than any retreat I’d ever experienced.

When I came home, I hoped to share my experiences in two separate blog posts: one public, the other friends-locked. Although I completed the first draft of the public post, I never shared it, because I was unable to adequately express the more personal stuff in the private post. And external events interfered, as well.

Nearly a year has passed now, and so much has changed since then. I guess I probably won’t ever complete the private half of my account, but I thought it appropriate to clean up and share the bit I’d planned to post publicly, for those of my friends who are interested.

So here’s my report on last year’s New Years retreat, albeit belated and edited for privacy.

Back in December, three women and I shared a car ride out to the Insight Meditation Society in Barre for their 9-day New Years retreat with guiding teachers Yanai Postelnik, Catherine McGee, and Pascal Auclair.

This was only my second time at IMS, the prior visit being a 5-day retreat two years before. After reviewing my blog entry from that first visit, I made damned sure to bring more than a single pair of socks!

As you might imagine, the weather in the Worcester hills at the end of December provided a spectacle of its own. The first three days were fairly mild (35-42°), and the ground was bare, so I took the opportunity to familiarize myself with the miles of walking trails through the woods behind the center.

That was followed by five straight days where it didn’t get above 22°, and dipped below zero for several nights. Thankfully, our rooms were kept comfortably warm, although I noticed one space heater being used to thaw some frozen pipes in the basement of one of the dorms.

We had two snowfalls of about 3 and 6 inches, neither of which stopped me from regular trudges through the wooded paths out back, as you can see from the photos at right.

While walking outside on New Years Eve (before the snows), I realized that the long hedge in front of IMS was made up of large holly trees. Having grown up in Maine, I have a deep affinity for holly, which thrives in similarly cold and desolate places. So I gathered a handful of holly leaves and berries from the ground and placed them along the windowsill in my room (see photo).

The cold weather peaked on day eight of the retreat, when I took what could be conservatively called a brisk 3-mile trek around Gaston Pond. The sunrise above the snowed-over pond was lovely, but I nearly lost my fingers taking the accompanying photograph in air that was seven degrees below zero! Ironically, that was during perihelion, the time of year when the distance between the Earth and the Sun is actually the shortest!

Then the temperatures miraculously shot back up to nearly 50° on a misty morning on the last day of the retreat. The fog only thickened as the week’s snows rapidly sublimated and completely disappeared.

I definitely didn’t sleep well, and heard similar reports from several others. My theory is that the amount of time spent each day with eyes closed, observing the mind, builds up so much momentum that it’s difficult to shut it down to go to sleep at night. But that’s just one theory.

On New Years Eve, the teachers led us through a ceremony that included writing something we’d like to give up or leave behind on a piece of paper, then depositing them into a container to later be burned. I was sitting next to the container, and it was interesting to observe how most people emphatically threw their unwanted attributes into it, often ritually ripping the paper into bits beforehand. And then a very few folks (including myself) were much more reluctant to drop theirs in, as if they were letting go of a safety blanket.

The second Saturday—day eight of the retreat—was the day that all hell broke loose.

After returning from that long, frigid sunrise walk I mentioned above, I noticed that my throat was really sore. I had come down with a cold. I had taken lots of careful precautions, knowing that retreats are ideal breeding grounds for disease, but it had still caught up with me. Thankfully, there were only two days left before we headed home!

But that was nothing compared to what followed. At the start of the midday sitting, the teachers asked us to immediately go and check our rooms and secure our valuables, because someone had gone into several meditators’ rooms (there were no locks on any of the doors) and taken all their cash! Eventually we learned that eight to ten people in one particular dorm had been robbed, and some prescription painkillers had been taken, as well.

Having spent an entire week opening their hearts and allowing themselves to work with their emotional vulnerabilities, it would be difficult to describe the sense of violation that my fellow retreatants felt. However, with the wisdom of the teachers, the group found some ways to respond to the invasion that helped people heal.

First, the entire retreat—more than a hundred people—took up the “om mani padme hum” chant and walked in a procession from the main building’s meditation hall, through my dorm, then across a passage to the affected dorm, and back again. The chant was moving and powerful, and the combined strength and goodwill of so many people helped the meditators in that building feel that we had “taken back” the space.

Then arrangements were made for small groups of people to voluntarily take shifts doing walking meditation in that building all night long, so that the residents would know that someone was awake and present at all hours to protect them in case the thief returned. I would have volunteered, but I knew that getting a good night’s sleep was imperative for fighting my oncoming cold.

I wasn’t particularly concerned about my own safety. My room was near the main building, and no one in my dorm had been robbed. I was mostly concerned for the others. But as we went to bed that night, everyone was on edge and emotionally primed to respond to the potential return of the trespasser.

So it was in that state of mind that I woke up at 2am when the door to my room was opened. In the dim light from the “Exit” signs I could see the silhouette of someone slipping into my room from the corridor. By the time I was conscious enough to respond, they’d begun backing up, but that was when it hit me that this could well be the guy!

My heart racing and barely aware of what I was doing in my panic, I threw off my bedding, grabbed the door, and screamed “HEY!!!” The interloper was backing off hurriedly, then cowered on the opposite side of the corridor from me, saying “Imsorry Imsorry Imsorry, I got confuuused!”

That wasn’t the response I would expect from a thief, so I froze in mid-leap. That gave me enough time to scan what I could see of the person’s features in the darkness. Out of a hundred complete strangers at the retreat, I thought I recognized one of the women I had shared a ride with… “Claudia, is it?”

Apparently it was. She apologized again, and I think I just said “Okay” and closed the door on her. I would have flopped right back to sleep, except my heart was pounding and I was chock full of adrenalin. No matter how still I laid or how much I tried to calm my mind, there was no more sleep that night.

The next day—the last full day of the retreat—the teachers held a a small session for people who still felt they needed to work through some of their reaction to the burglary. I decided I would go and just ask how to deal with my body’s response, because no matter how much my mind had settled, my heart was still racing along in fight mode.

Claudia also appeared at that meeting, and we talked through the event. Apparently she had been one of the people doing walking meditation during the night, and in returning hadn’t realized that the passage from the second floor of one dorm led to the first floor of the other. She had walked into what would have been her room if she had been on the second floor, but because she was mistakenly on the first floor, she’d walked in on me instead.

People going into the wrong room by accident isn’t unheard-of there, since the doors all look the same, and there weren’t any locks on them (there are now). Of course, having that happen to me at 2am the night after a burglary was pretty much the worst timing imaginable. Since it was conceivable that something like that could still happen again, the following night I slept with my bed frame blocking my door from opening at all. I didn’t want to go through that a second time!

The final day brought the closing feedback session, where I spoke a brief piece about how the retreat had affected me emotionally much more than any previous retreat. And Claudia and I and the other two women in our car were the last ones out of the center after the retreat ended.

So, that’s a good bit about the body of the retreat. Now I’ll talk a bit about some of the ideas that came to me while spending all that time in silence.

Everything we experience, which feels so personal and unique to us, isn’t; it’s actually just one instance of sensations that virtually all humans experience at some point in their lives. Viewing them as universal phenomena makes it easier to hold one’s own pain lightly and feel a lot more compassion for others.

I thought up two interesting metaphors for how we relate to time. One can only see what’s happening clearly by being fully engaged and aware in the temporal present. Our past experiences can be like the film on a dirty window, making it more difficult to accurately view what’s going on in the present; our histories leave a residue that obscures or filters one’s view of the present. One need to try to see through or beyond the obscuration, or somehow clean the obstructions away. Similarly, focusing on the future can cast a shadow that darkens and obscures one’s view of the present; you can either spend all your time planning for and living in the shadow of an as-yet unrealized future, or step out of the shadow and experience the present moment in its full, vivid brilliance.

There’s an old instruction that goes something like this: never miss an opportunity to make someone else happy. I had some opportunities to play with this during the retreat, and the results were rewarding. I’d like to remember to do this more often.

When dealing with strong emotions (positive or negative), the best way to relate to it is with curiosity. Trying to suppress it isn’t healthy, and conversely one can easily lose perspective by self-indulgently wallowing in those emotions. The correct prescription is to explore one’s emotions with a sense of curiosity, because then one can understand, see the value of, and learn from those feelings.

In meditation, we cultivate a separation between the observer and the observed. In that way, the part of the persona that is observed can experience an emotion like anger, while another a part of the mind is at a slight distance from the experience, observing it, and learning from it. This separation of the observer from the observed isn’t just useful to help us see ourselves more clearly. Conversely, for those of us who have difficulty with our emotions, or are afraid of giving them free rein, it’s also a good way to free part of one’s persona to be fully absorbed in our emotions without the fear of losing control or being overwhelmed by them.

The common conceptual framework we inherited tell us that the heart is the place where we feel emotion. But saying that the heart is the seat of emotion is no more accurate than saying you hear sound through your kneecaps. If the heart was truly where emotions were located, people with man-made artificial hearts would never feel emotion, and doctors would perform cardiac surgery to cure depression, rather than prescribe drugs that impact brain chemistry! It’s time to stop referring to the heart as the seat of emotion, which is merely fossilized lore from a distant time of human ignorance.

There’s a huge amount more to say about that retreat, but I’m afraid the rest of the story will have to wait.

I’ve found it increasingly difficult to blog over the past couple months. That’s partly due to the content I have to write about, and partly you: my audience.

The content is tricky. Since December, I’ve been absorbed in an exploration of several very sensitive topics, such as emotional sensitivity, social life, group dynamics, gender relations, romantic relationships, and sexuality.

While I am extremely open about sharing what’s going on for me, this kind of content naturally leads me to reflect upon how much of this very personal material I want to share in a permanently-archived, public blog.

On top of that, the overall theme of my inquiry is social, so I have to be doubly careful about what I post. Instead of just worrying about my own privacy, I also have to consider the privacy of the other people I mention, and how they would feel if they saw my description of our interactions posted online.

Furthermore, I’m also embarking upon a job hunt, which introduces the question of prospective employers and coworkers discovering this blog. That too influences what content I feel comfortable posting at present. Although I hope that prospective employers would see the value in hiring someone with a complex, dynamic internal life, rather than a coding robot with no depth of personality.

So all those considerations have left me feeling pretty constrained.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be posting, but it might take more time than usual for important topics to show up (as you’ve seen by the delayed writeup of my New Years meditation retreat). And some important events might only get alluded to in passing, if at all.

As implied above, I have a ton of stuff going on right now; the past two months have been incredibly transformative, featuring lots of amazing developments and just as many heart-wrenching problems. Things are happening very quickly, so I’m having difficulty keeping up to date in sharing my thoughts and reactions.

I guess the bottom line is this: thanks for your patience, for your friendship, and for any role you’ve had in my life over the past couple months.

And there’s more to come, you can be sure…

A (slightly tweaked) quote on depression from a disciple of Ajahn Chah:

This feeling of depression has just come for a visit; soon it will leave. Having gone it will come again. Just let it be and it will leave of its own accord. It’s only a visitor, it is not a resident.

Center your mind, not delighting, not despising, not being frightened; neither taking nor rejecting, just keep knowing. If we’re suffering or depressed, we simply know that suffering or depression exists. It’s not necessary for thoughts to proliferate on it. We are patient and observe those feelings. Just knowing. Sitting, just know; walking, just know.

If we keep observing we will begin to undertand more clearly. We will see that both suffering and depression are merely sensations; they are not our self nor do they belong to us.

There are several key points here. The first is that depression is a temporary state; it will surely pass, because nothing is permanent. The second is that there’s no benefit in being preoccupied with one’s depression; identifying as someone who is depressed can only prolong its duration. And, of course, it’s not who we are.

Another key insight here is that depression is “conditioned”: it arises under particular circumstances, is present for a period of time, and passes away when particular circumstances happen (notably, when new sensory input arises).

When I read the reference to sitting and walking, it sparked the following thought. Why do we think our emotional state is more meaningful than our physical state? Why do we think that emotions like depression or stress or anger are any different than the physical postures of sitting, walking, standing, or lying down? All these states arise as a result of conditions, last a while, then disappear as circumstances change.

When someone is standing up, they don’t make an issue out of it. They’re standing, but soon enough that will change. They don’t identify themselves by saying “I’m a *standing* type of person and I’ll always be that way. I’ll never be someone who can sit down.”

Are our day-to-day moods really any different than our posture? Sure, we have more conscious control over our physical posture, but like postures, our emotions—including depression—are unstable states that come and go over time. That is their very nature. Why, then, do people treat these passing moods as if they were permanent states, as if they defined the sum total of who we are?

Naturally, I imagine those readers who are invested in self-identifying as depressive will have issues with this idea. But I thought I would share these questions with you.

What would it be like if we related to our emotions with the same matter-of-fact practicality that we use when relating to our physical postures? Are these physical, mental, or emotional states really so different? Why are we are willing to identify with—and thus grant great power to—some moods but not others, even when they cause us such obvious suffering?

Just some thots. I’m sure YMMV.

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.

There’s this one meditation technique called metta, “metta” being a Pali word that is usually translated as “lovingkindness”. You basically sit and wish people well.

For the longest time, I resisted metta practice, mostly because I saw it as hokey and stupid and a waste of time and effort. But as my practice has matured, I’ve come to understand the intent behind it, and to see how many of my own spiritual roadblocks might be addressed by metta practice.

I realized that the practice wasn’t about using prayer to influence someone else’s welfare, but on summoning the feeling of well-wishing within oneself, and becoming accustomed to invoking that, rather than the fear, mistrust, and hatred that our society and my dear friend Sartre tells us is the proper response to other people.

Metta practice actually has similarities to cognitive-behavioral therapy and neural plasticity. CBT (an acronym that always makes me chuckle, for reasons that will be obvious to those in the know) is a form of therapy that basically tells people that if there’s a change they want to make in their behavior, they should model the behavior, even if it feels inauthentic, and that as they become more comfortable with the behavior, the sincerity of the motivations will come later. It’s the “fake it til you make it” theory.

Metta practice is similar. By reciting specific phrases of well-wishing, the meditator gradually re-wires and strengthens the part of his brain’s dynamic internal circuitry that is devoted to lovingkindess and compassion. Over time, real, meaningful change is affected, and kindness comes more easily and naturally due to its familiarity.

Getting back to my particular roadblocks, probably my biggest issue is my judging other people, treating them as objects or even obstacles. Metta gives me a way to relax that judging mind and learn—at a deep level—that they deserve my respect for being just as real, complex, and vulnerable as myself.

Another example is the difficulty I have connecting with my own emotions. Metta comes at this head-on; the basic technique is to cultivate feelings of kindness, and become familiar and comfortable with them. If I can do that, perhaps I can come to know my other emotions better, as well.

So, with all that as preamble, last month I attended a metta practice group that met on the five Thursdays in October. The balance of this post is comprised of my observations.

The practice consists of silently directing metta phrases toward particular individuals, and progressing from one’s self to the most difficult people in one’s life. Many people tailor the phrases so that they are particularly comfortable, but I only made one minor tweak. While I plan on modifying my phrases in the near future, for the duration of the practice group, I stuck with these: may you be safe and protected; may you be at peace; and may you be fully at ease.

I found that rather than cycling through these in order again and again, if I repeated each phrase two to six times before moving on, it allowed me to better touch the emotion behind the words. In theory, the words can eventually fall away, and one can simply work with the feelings.

The first week we focused entirely on directing metta toward ourselves. This is traditionally viewed as the easiest person to feel kindness for, but the overwhelming majority of workshop participants had adopted such deeply-rooted self-loathing that the instructor really emphasized the importance of this step. Fortunately, I don’t have difficulty with being kind to myself, so this step wasn’t difficult at all for me. Still, there are a few key areas where I have confidence issues, and it would make sense to direct metta toward myself for those particular challenges.

In week two, we added sending metta to a meaningful personal benefactor. In week three, a good friend and someone you’re completely neutral about. And in week four, a very challenging person or enemy.

The neutral person is difficult because you have no strong feelings about them, so it can be hard to envision the person or stay focused on the practice. I had some difficulty with an enemy, because I don’t come into conflict with many people, especially outside the work context. So I picked the class of people who most trigger my judgmentalism: everyday strangers on the street.

One of the things I found odd was that we were instructed to stick with the person we had picked for each category, both within a sitting as well as throughout the month. It felt more natural to me to go from person to person, sticking within a particular class (benefactor, friend, etc), rather than always staying with the same person. I suspect there’s room for both of these methods within the practice.

I was also surprised that we were encouraged to wish the recipient well right now, in their current moment, rather than for some unspecified future period. Rather than viewing “may you be safe” as a wish for the future, the intent was that it be a wish for the present.

Naturally, we were asked to practice with this during the weeks between sessions. The instructor actually asked for 30 minutes a day, which is what my daily sitting practice had been in the recent past. So that got my daily practice back on track.

I have to say, it was very different than my usual meditation practice, which involves clearing the mind of all internal verbal discourse and practicing open field awareness. I haven’t spent a ton of time doing samadhi (concentration) practices, so it was something of a new experience. Having something to concentrate on made the sittings feel like they were half as long as usual, which was a pleasant change.

By the last session, I hadn’t had any major revelations, but my confidence and faith that metta practice will be important to me was unchanged. I felt it would be a productive line of inquiry, but that it is likely to be a very long road for me. I also pointed out that I was attending the annual nine-day “sandwich retreat”, which began only two days later, and that I planned to spend that time almost exclusively on metta practice.

But how that went is a story for another posting…

Wow… If you wanna get your LJ noticed, say something disparaging about love! I don’t think I’ve ever had that many responses to anything I’ve posted!

Two people agreed with my statement “Having loved once is once too many”. One person inquired what was up (in the form of a single questionmark). Four people felt the need to tell me that I was wrong, and one person posted a related quotation.

A couple general comments back…

First, it was an expression of emotion. Emotions aren’t right or wrong, nor do they reflect permanent truths. If I’d posted saying “I hate my mother!!!”, you’d probably take that as a temporary emotional outburst, rather than an expression of my deepest truth. No difference. It was one of those things that happens in the middle of the night. And honestly, Carlo’s song quote was absolutely spot-on: “What do I get to keep? A name, a face, a memory that burns in my sleep”. Specifically, at 2:13am last Tuesday.

Second, as one of those midnight moments of melancholy, it had its own poetry to it, at least in my head. It wanted to be said, shared. Part of my journaling is to record and share the depth of feeling I have, because I’m so horribly bad about revealing it in the moment. In the past I’ve written about my feelings about particular people, or about nature, or life in general; this was one attempt to capture a passing moment of melancholy. It’s no more fixed and permanent than anything else in this brief life.

I will say it surprised me how many people interpreted that statement as an integral part of my beliefs. It’s not; in fact, it’s pretty atypical. Maybe that’s why it needed to be expressed in that moment; I dunno. But it seems odd to me that people treated it as if I were making an assertion about Universal Truth, rather than just sharing another passing feeling, another moment of my all-too-humanity.

But that’s enough said. You don’t have to worry about me or my outlook on love. The ups and downs are part of the ride, and I was just sharing one particularly poignant moment. As they say, all such states arise and pass away, and wisdom is in recognizing that fact and maintaining one’s equanimity amidst the storm.

I recently read David Kundtz’s “Nothing’s Wrong: A Man’s Guide to Managing His Feelings”.

I guess the first thing to relate is why that book interested me. I grew up in a family where little to no emotion was visibly manifested. I was extremely introverted and intellectual. As an adolescent, I found myself becoming ever more angry, selfish, and hateful.

Then I started dating, which was an immensely transformative experience for me. I was confused by how impulsive my first girlfriend could be, and jealous of her stunningly carefree demeanor. I decided to try to incorporate this lesson into my life, thereby gaining a previously absent appreciation for beauty, nature, kindness, and humor.

Back then, I didn’t think the intellectual and the emotional halves of my personality could coexist, so I created separate, distinct identities for them. “David” was cold, calculating, and intellectual, while “Ornoth” was impulsive, open, and joyous. One or the other would be predominant for six months to a year, while the other popped up at odd moments, and then they’d reverse. In those days, someone close to me could see in my eyes when I switched gears. That took me through college and into marriage.

Despite all that, I guess the trend was for the cold intellectual to gradually reassert itself. My ex-wife’s parting shot to me was to give me a Mr. Spock tee shirt for my birthday, an unabashed reference to my lack of warmth toward her.

In the fifteen years since my divorce, I’ve changed more radically than I ever thought possible, but the basic disconnect with my emotions has persisted. I’ve worked hard to develop compassion and generosity, but no matter how hard I look, I can’t seem to detect what most women tell me is the essence of life: my emotions.

It’s undoubtedly a difficult thing for a woman to understand: that a man really doesn’t have the emotional range or insight into his emotions that is so basic to her. I can’t speak for any other men, but I don’t think I’m alone when I admit that I’ve spent much of my life honestly doubting whether I have any emotions at all, and whether I could ever detect any I had, however hard I try.

Thus, the book.

The first thing the book establishes is that men need a different vocabulary to talk about their emotions. Women’s emotions come from their hearts, but men feel things “in their gut”. By drawing attention to the body’s physical reactions, Kundtz actually echoed themes I’ve heard in my Buddhist studies, which emphasize the physical form and its state changes as the place to look for evidence of emotional activity.

The next logical step is, of course, for a man to become more aware of the changes in his body. That would seem like a potentially productive line of inquiry, although I found the way it was presented a bit unhelpful.

“The very first and vitally important thing you have to do in dealing with any feeling is really something that you must *not* do. Don’t bury it. Don’t run from it and don’t cover it over. Just stay in the moment and feel it. Just feel it. Don’t bury. Don’t run. Don’t cover. […] Got the idea? Just stay put; don’t run. Just feel.”

That kind of rhetoric does nothing to help those of us who have stopped, have looked, and found nothing. “Just take a few deep breaths and feel whatever you’re feeling” is not only an unhelpful tautology, but it’s also thoroughly frustrating for someone who has no idea how to “feel what they’re feeling”.

Kundtz talks about this ability to notice one’s feelings and says “Without this first step, all else is doomed”, but then turns around and says, “It might also be true that at any given moment you may not be feeling anything very strongly”. Well, duh. I can’t say I’ve “felt anything strongly” in years!

The underlying, common assumption is that men are all actively suppressing their feelings, because everyone has feelings, don’t they? As someone who is reasonably mature and has actively tried to sense my own feelings and come up empty, I find that a decidedly hurtful way to dismiss my difficulties. I may indeed have emotions, but don’t accuse me of being dysfunctional simply because my emotions are not as overt as a woman’s. Defining women as normal and men as inherently abnormal is both prejudicial and hurtful.

Beyond that, as Kundtz himself is quick to point out, “Nothing’s Wrong is based on the strong conviction that there is a direct and causal relationship between violent behavior in males and their repressed (buried) feelings.” If that were true, one might well expect me to be a mass murderer, given my longstanding and lack of emotion, which can supposedly only be explained by active repression. But it hasn’t happened yet, so far as I know.

Anyways, leaving that particular issue aside for the mo’, let’s turn back to Kundtz’s three-step program to male emotional fitness: notice the feeling, name the feeling, and express the feeling. Assuming I find some way to get past step one—the real problem—there’s still this final step of manifesting the emotion.

The next question is *how*. Okay, I’m feeling happy, and maybe I can even recognize that; now how do I make a conscious choice between the myriad ways of depicting that emotion in my actions? Should I skip and jump? Should I whistle a tune? Should I go buy a drink for a cutie at the pub? How do I choose? And don’t you *dare* tell me something useless like “whatever you feel like doing”, or I’ll rip your throat out. It’s not that easy.

When he starts to talk about expressing one’s feelings, Kundtz cites a 1998 Newsweek article that reads, “when people regularly talk or even write about things that are upsetting to them, their immune systems perk up and they require less medical care”. Kundtz interprets this as “The talking or writing is the third step. It externalizes the feeling.”

That’s actually extremely good news for me, because I do a *lot* of written self-expression, as the length of this entry attests. The very first thing I turned to when my wife left me was email. Ironically, even today my real-world friends criticize me because they see more of what’s inside me by reading my blog than by talking on the phone or hanging out with me. Another funny bit is that Kundtz not only mentions writing, but also specifically calls out cycling, poker games, exercise, and meditation as other avenues for self-expression, and those are all things I do quite a lot of.

Another interesting bit is how thoroughly Kundtz disses isolation. He opens one section with a quote from Men’s Health magazine which reads, “Lack of social connection is ’the largest unexplored issue in men’s health’”. He follows with, “If there is only one change that you make as a result of reading this book, please make it this one. *Please!* Determine somehow, some way, at some time to regularly get together with friends.” I found that kinda interesting, considering I’m really the epitome of the isolated bachelor, and have recently been pondering how to reach out and craft a few new meaningful friendships.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I disliked the book. It was reasonably interesting, and successful at raising all kinds of topics for reflection. I just wish there was a little more depth to his analysis of how to detect one’s own emotions. “Just feel what you feel” isn’t helpful at all, although I’ll start watching my physiological responses to see if they provide any clues.

One last bit, which is something of a tangent. In addition to the Mary McDowell quote I’ve posted about already, Kundtz also cites the following quotation: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that’s my religion.”

I think that’s about the most eloquent statement of the Buddhist law of karma that I’ve ever heard. Satisfaction comes from taking moral actions, and immoral actions produce dissatisfaction. And I’m blown away that the speaker added “And that’s my religion” as a postscript. Can you guess who the quote was attributed to? I’ll give you a hint: he has a wretched hairdo and spends most of his time on $5 bills.

Imagine what might happen if we had a president today of a comparable ethical standard.