Ornoth

My meditation practice has been in maintenance mode since moving to Pittsburgh in 2015. But helping establish a new group and delivering my first dhamma talk has injected some energy.

The new group that’s starting up is organized by two women whose backgrounds include Thich Nhat Hanh, IMS, and Tara Brach. They sent out feelers looking for like-minded Vipassana practitioners, and got enough response to form a small practice group. Typically eight to ten people show up from a total pool of a couple dozen. I think we’d all like to see it grow into something more substantial, but that’ll take time and effort. And none of us are authorized dhamma teachers, so right now it feels very reminiscent of my old kalyana mitta (spiritual friends) group back in Boston.

CIMC meditation hall

A fair number of us—myself included—have long attended a Wednesday evening meditation group led by Rhonda Rosen. So far the two groups seem to be complementary, in that Rhonda focuses on Goenka’s guided meditations and Q&A about practice, while the new group seems more philosophical and a bit less secular.

At the first meeting, we talked about our individual goals for the group, and I think I summarized mine pretty effectively. What I am looking for is the opportunity to learn from other local meditators, the chance to invite distant dhamma teachers to visit Pittsburgh as guests and learn from them, the opportunity to share the learnings from my own practice with others, and to help build a venue where all of that can happen. And I emphasized that for me, the biggest thing I’ve missed since moving to Pittsburgh has been dhamma talks, where experienced teachers expound on the philosophical teachings of the Buddha.

Thereafter, we’ve met weekly for brief meditations—both sitting and walking—followed by some kind of dhamma talk and discussion.

As I said earlier, our biggest challenge is that none of us are teachers. So we’re sharing the responsibility of preparing material to present, whether it’s readings or recordings or original thoughts. Predictably, we began with the central tenets of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths. I was asked to lead an evening discussing the Second Noble Truth: the Origin/Source/Cause of Suffering.

Treating this as my first proper dhamma talk, I spent some time gathering notes, and found that although the subject was far-ranging, everything fell together nicely with obvious segues. I put together an outline and ran through it a couple times in my head. Ample client facilitation experience as a consultant, plus the sessions I’ve led in my old kalyana mitta group, all gave me confidence and kept any nerves at bay.

Unfortunately, I set myself a very ambitious task: explaining how the sequence of events in the Buddhist psychology of Dependent Origination give rise to the pain of desires that ultimately cannot be fulfilled, along the way touching on kamma, ignorance, the Three Characteristics of Existence, the Four Divine Messengers, the Five Recollections, and the Eight Worldly Winds (Buddhism is *all* about lists), then closing by revealing the often-unexplained link of why silent meditation is the chosen tool to reach the goal of alleviating suffering. It was pretty much the Grand Unified Theory of Buddhism According to Ornoth.

Although ambitious, I think the idea was really worthy; but with so much ground to cover, the execution wound up being a bit strained.

After the talk, the verbal feedback I received was all very positive. The two founders were both effusive in praise, as was one of the new practitioners who admitted an intellectual inclination. But two longtime practitioners and the three new practitioners were all silent during the Q&A, which tells me that my own impressions about overreaching myself were probably correct.

Specifically, I tried to plow through way too much material for a single dhamma talk. I didn’t need to go into quite so much detail, nor be so technical. The delivery wound up being a lot more intellectual than I had hoped, and I think I lost some of the attendees as a result. Although that probably happens at every dhamma talk to one extent or another. Still, I should tighten up my material and make more effort to keep people engaged in future talks.

Giving such a long talk—40 minutes plus a few minutes of Q&A—was surprisingly tiring. But I’m really proud of the ideas I presented, especially explaining the mechanics of how and why Buddhists use silent meditation to address the suffering we all experience.

Preparing and delivering my first dhamma talk was novel and fun. But more importantly, I found it deeply rewarding to share some of my insights in hopes that they might help others along the path—whether experienced practitioners or relative newcomers. It was very satisfying, despite my inexperience in a teaching role.

Of course, the one thing that cures inexperience is practice. So it’ll be interesting to see whether I will enjoy and grow in proficiency in that teaching role, and to what degree my knowledge and experience can be of meaningful value to others. I look forward to that exploration.

It wouldn’t be the most entertaining use of your time, but if you’re truly curious, I’ve shared a written transcript of the talk. And if you’re truly masochistic, here's the 44-minute audio MP3, although be forewarned that the audio quality is low.

Enough stuff has happened in the past two months that it’s time for another aggregated life update.

Health issues remain inconclusive. After surgery in December, I had another attack of abdominal pain around New Years, which prompted another visit to the GP and a followup CT scan. That detected nothing, so I’m back to eating a regular diet and taking a wait-and-see attitude. Meanwhile, I’ve taken the lull in proceedings to catch up on dental and eye stuff, get a new pair of glasses, and a haircut.

Watched the Super Bowl, since the Patriots were in it, and it proved to be a remarkably exciting finish. Whatever. I would rather the Revs have won.

Last month I observed the one-year anniversary of my kyūdō First Shot training. I also started learning hitote, which is a more involved form involving two shots and repeated kneeling down and getting up. It’s nice to have something new to think about and work on.

In January I made a long-overdue four-day visit to Pittsburgh, which was extended by two days due to Boston’s first huge blizzard disabling air travel. Pittsburgh wasn’t very eventful, but it was a nice visit.

Since then, Boston has been pounded by huge snowstorms one after another, causing daily gridlock, forcing the transit system to shut down for days at a time, and setting numerous all-time records for snowfall, wind, and cold temperatures. A sampler:

• For the entire winter up to January 23rd, Boston only had 5.5 inches of snow. In the next three weeks, it would receive an additional 90.2 inches (over 7.5 feet)!
• February broke the record for Boston’s snowiest month ever, and did it by the 15th of the month!
• By the end of the month, Boston had received five and a half feet of snow, beating the old record by 50 percent.
• Boston set the 4th snowiest 30-day period anywhere in American National Weather Service records.
• It snowed on 20 out of 28 days in February.
• Boston set its all-time record for greatest snow depth.
• This has been Boston’s 2nd snowiest winter on record. We’re less than two inches away from setting a new record (9 feet of snowfall), and we typically get about 8 inches of snow in March.
• An avalanche off the roof of a skating rink hit four people, burying one. Two of them had to be hospitalized.
• Boston cyclists built a 40-foot-long “underground” snow tunnel for commuting.
• In many cases, cars were so deeply buried that owners had to put cardboard signs on them warn snow removers not to plow there.
• An MBTA ferry and a Coast Guard icebreaker both got stuck in the sea ice in Massachusetts Bay.
• Blocks of sea ice more than 7 feet thick came ashore on Cape Cod.
• During one of our blizzards, Mt. Washington recorded the highest wind gust it has experienced in seven years.
• February was 12.7 degrees below normal temperature.
• It was the 2nd coldest February on record
• For the whole month of February, we only had one day where we reached the day’s average high temperature.
• At 15 days, we fell one day short of setting the record for consecutive days below freezing.
• At 43 days, this was the longest consecutive time that Boston has ever stayed below 40 degrees, beating the old record by 8 days.

I could go on at length, but it’s an experience that honestly is best forgotten. I will say that it has unambiguously strengthened my commitment to moving to a warmer climate.

Out of utter frustration with the weather, I set up and started using the indoor cycling trainer, which I didn’t use at all last winter. As a result, I’ve already earned $66 as a paid cyclist, thanks to my company’s health benefit…

And I’ve now been working at Buildium for 100 days. The money is happy, the atmosphere is friendly, and we’ve added yet another old Sapient (and Business Innovation) coworker. I’ve been doing a lot of Javascript, Knockout, and Angular work, which is enjoyable (mostly).

Thanks to the snow, I worked from home several days, and enjoyed an empty office when I made the trek in. I’ve made three satisfying lunch expeditions for Thai from Lanta (formerly Rock Sugar). Our company recently announced our first acquisition, and it looks like the two businesses complement each other well. And I hope to hear news about improvements to our office space.

While there, I’ve enjoyed rebuilding my foosball skills, and have been alpha testing a new version of my foosball ranking site. I’ve optimized the UI for mobile devices, made it more interactive by porting it to the Angular Javascript framework, and made it behave more like a single-page application by burying all the data requests in behind-the-scenes JSON AJAX requests. After talking it up to my coworkers, I’m excited to open it up to general use! I’ve even played with the Web Speech API and hope to incorporate speech recognition into it soon.

Otherwise I think things are quiet. Like that thrice-damned groundhog, I’ve been holed-up, waiting for the mountains of snow to recede before venturing back out into the world.

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.