Struggles

I hadn't realized it has been so long since I last posted here. My father has died since then. I will turn 60 in a bit over a week. I'm having a hard time right now, though I'm not quite sure what the first two statements have to do with the last.

Sometimes it feels like a loss of faith. Not faith in any particular thing, because I did not start out with faith in a god or a system or a plan. I have been an optimist, but no Pollyanna. I am not at all sure that everything will turn out just fine, and I am damn sure things don't happen for a reason. And if you tell me about god's plan one more time....

No, it's more like a loss of faith in the point of it all. I know that sounds very depressed (and depressing), but that's not how I mean it, believe it or not. There is in me the sense of the foundation somehow having been shaken. I know that the political climate in the U.S. and in the world has something to do with it. I have a deep belief in the efficacy of kindness and reasoned thought, but neither of these are much in evidence in the world these days. It's almost as if the majority of people see this as the end times and feel that unless they give their maximal energy to anger and vindictiveness right now, disaster cannot be averted. What they do not seem to realize is that it is the anger that is the cause of the destruction rather than its cure. And I see this from every direction in America's political divide, a nastiness that subsumes and consumes everything in its path.

I also had an experience recently which shook my faith in my marriage. It was a minor tremor, really, but it caused me to realize just how much of my well-being is tied up in the health of that connection. I'm not so sure this is healthy. Because it will end, of course. That is the central lesson of the Dharma, that all things end. Love is a guarantee of loss, because either the relationship will end or one or the other of you will die. Ha! That sounds awfully grim, I know, but is the simple reality of such things. And to have a little off-handed, casual comment cause such tremors in me is pretty frightening. On the other hand, if this is a wake-up call to nurture and heal what we have, then so much the better.

And I know it seems petty in comparison, but some of my perturbation is that most of my technology is rebelling against me. My internet goes down periodically for no reason whatsoever (who knew that going from copper wire slow internet to fiber optic fast internet would be a problem?) and my brand new laptop has a malfunction so bad that it must be returned to the manufacturer for replacement or repair. Crazy-making.

I miss my father. He was a sweet and wonderful man. He taught me a great deal. He was a man of deep faith, and I respected that more and more the older I got, even if I did not share his belief. He died April 7.

But, what the heck! On June 11 I will be 60. I will be in Portland that day, enjoying the city and going to Sweeney Todd with my much beloved wife. We will visit gardens, hiking trails, book stores, restaurants, parks, and coffee shops. All will be well. I love my life and am very fortunate to be living it. So be it.

Late

So, I was late for the opera. This was mostly poor planning on my part. Doesn't matter. I was late. And there was a Justin Bieber concert (of all things) in the same area of town at the same time. And so I was going to be late, I was pretty sure.

This led to an interesting reflection. I was anxious. I felt a sense of urgency. I was annoyed with every car in front of me. I was annoyed with myself. I was already disappointed. And it was all entirely useless. Not just a little bit misguided or misdirected, but entirely, completely, indefatigably pointless. So, I took the opportunity to use this time in the car, driving to the opera, to simply rest in the anxiety and see it for what it was—an odd and destructive remnant of my primordial being, a lizard-brain response to threat, a kicking in of my endocrine system to enable me to respond to a perceived matter of life and death. I mean, really? I was late for the freaking opera.

This reminded me of a line of inquiry I have pursued many times. When I see someone rushing through a hallway at work, or when I find myself doing that, I try to remember what a misguided response this is to being late or in a hurry. Here is the basic math: let's be generous and say you are trying to go 100 yards from your starting to ending points. Let's give you credit for being able to walk 5 miles per hour, which is pretty fast unless you are a professional speed walker. Let's compare that to the normal walking pace of 3 miles per hour. At 5 mph, you can walk 100 yards in 0.68 minutes. At 3 mph, in 1.13 minutes. So, by rushing down the hall at 5 mph, you gain less than 30 seconds. And you arrive at your destination flustered, winded, and harried, hardly in the best shape to begin whatever work it was you were rushing to. Even more amusing to me is people who rush from their door to the car, a savings of (if they are lucky) five seconds, which of course is entirely negated (and more) if rushing causes them to forget or drop something.

And yet we live much of our lives this way, as if we are always late, as if our destination mattered to the fate of the world, or even ourselves. Which it does not. I have observed before that we seem to feel the need to be busy because important people are busy. I think it's the same with hurrying. There is no evidence that hurrying makes you faster and quite a bit of evidence that it slows you down. I recall working in the ICU and rushing about whenever a code was called, letting adrenaline run the show. What I finally noticed, though, was that those who were the most effective in a code were those who strolled in, spoke calmly and in a normal voice. They were always thinking clearly and usually had a very good idea what the next, best step would be. Ever since then, I have tried to emulate this behavior in an emergency. It's not nearly as exciting as getting all worked up, but the patient usually does much better, and so do I.

The same in truly in my daily life. When I become agitated and worked up, whether because I am late or stressed or challenged or disrespected, the outcome is never a good one. I usually create more chaos and always create more internal agitation. And it's worthless. A waste of time and energy. I will get to the opera or I will not. No one will die. All will be well.

No Time Like the Present

I have been living in a delusion, a fairly common one, but one to which I had thought myself immune. I suppose it is in the nature of delusion for me to believe this: others may be prone to this false belief, but not me. Heaven forbid.

The delusion is this: eventually things will even out at work and I will finally be able to just work my 40 hours. Everything will henceforth go smoothly, none of my employees will resign, or get sick, or become pregnant, or move to Denver. The way to ensure that this evening out happens (so goes the delusion) is for me to work 50 or 60 hours a week now. I will reap the benefits of all that peace later.

This is bullshit.

The realization of just how far down this particular rabbit hole I had gone arose from the recognition of the many mornings I have been skipping my meditation to go in early to work. This is just nuts. One of the pillars of my system of belief and my regimen of self-care is a steady diet of daily meditation, but I have not been getting that. And I have been feeling its lack.

The reason why this fantasy equilibrium can never come to pass (I just had an epiphany about this today) is that I am confusing situational chaos with constitutional and institutional chaos. Up until this moment (I can just barely admit, even to myself, how long it took) I have been operating on the belief that if I can just handle the current situation adequately, smooth sailing is inevitable. The basic problem with this way of thinking (it seems obvious now) is that the problem is not the situation. First of all, it is in the nature of my work (it's constitution) that there will always be chaos. I work in a bureaucracy, in health care, with many moving parts, and even more egos to clash together. Not to mention the basic fact in any workplace with greater than one employee--there will always be inequities in the way people work, how hard they work, whether or not they come to work consistently, their propensity to illness (and "illness"), the likelihood of a move to Denver, and on and on. It is also in the nature of most institutions to ask of their employees just a bit more than each has the ability to give, and when they succeed in supplying that little bit more, to ask for a little bit more yet. With the increased emphasis on "productivity" (which, thankfully, we do not yet have to contend, at least not in any measurable form), I have seen many workers devote hundreds of unpaid hours a year to fulfill these unrealistic requirements, which are then steadily ratcheted up.

I am now, it becomes clear, a practitioner of presenteeism, a fascinating word I heard for the first time just the other day, the definition of which is "the practice of coming to work when ill or tired, or remaining at work for extended hours unnecessarily". Because of where I work, I do not go

to work sick, but the other parts of the definition fit me to a tee. Of course, one could argue about the definition of "unnecessary", but to trust that delineation to me would be like trusting an addict with just how much heroin is a good idea. Thus, the 40 hour limit, the built-in definition of a sane work week.

So, here is my public vow: in June I turn 60. For years I had been saying that at 60 I was going to take a 50% position, work only half time. When I took my current supervisory job, this became unrealistic, but I vow this instead: when I turn 60, I will no longer work any more than an average of 40 hours a week. (I say "average" not as a hedge, but because my plan is to work eight nine-hour shifts and one eight-hour shift every two weeks, taking the tenth day off). As part of this vow, I am going to inform my employers and employees of this. And now I am telling you. And my wife. And everyone who will listen. And I ask that you all hold me to it.

What I can get done in 40 hours, I will get done. What I cannot, I will not. In all likelihood, it will remain undone. And it probably (sadly) won't make all that much difference. That, too, is part of the delusion, isn't it, that my work is so extraordinarily valuable that the place would FALL APART if I worked less than 50 hours a week. How grandiose is that?

Maybe I'll see you in the park. Or the coffee shop. The movie theater. A museum. Anywhere, anywhere, ANYWHERE other than work. I promise.

The Only Power We Have

The only question these days, or so it seems to me, is, "How do we live in this world as it is?" Because it is no secret to anyone that we are in a bit of a mess. We are threatened on every side, or so it appears, and it is difficult to remain optimistic. And yet I am. I am not naively optimistic that everything is going to be O.K., because I'm pretty sure it's not, at least not by the definitions of okayness I have always held as my measure of such things. And sometimes I genuinely despair when I think of the world children being born right now will inherit.

No, my optimism has an entirely different source, one that is difficult for me to tap into from time to time, but which is much more solid and real than the cynicism it is so easy to fall into these days. It is not that everything will someday be alright, but the thought, the deeply held understanding that they could not be otherwise.

I know this can seem to be a tautology: things are as they are because they are as they are and could not be otherwise because if they could be otherwise, they would be otherwise. Well...duh. But that's not really what I mean. The deep meaning of the teachings of the Buddha (at least as far as I am capable of penetrating them with my relatively shallow insight) is that there is nothing that cannot be made worse by wishing it were otherwise. And there is no joy that cannot be ruined by wishing that it could remain forever so. The good and the bad (so-called) arise and pass away.

Each generation believes they are living in the end times. I recall very clearly the certainty we felt in the 1970s that nuclear apocalypse was upon us and the only question was when it would happen. We had to decide from day to day whether or not it was worthwhile making plans. Kathy and I had quite a serious discussion about bringing children into a world they would never see into adulthood; that is how thoroughly we believed in the end of everything. Yet that era arose and passed away. From the luxury of historical remove, we can see that world wars have a beginning, a horrid middle and a joyous end. But in the minds of those living through them there is no such certainty. They, too, have lived through the certainty of end times that nonetheless never arrived.

So, I go through my life with two key commandments for myself: the first is to practice complete and utter acceptance to the best of my ability, because pushing against the reality of what is will only increase the misery of all those around me. The second is to do my very best not to make things worse. There are actions I can take to ameliorate my small corner of global climate change. I can vote for and support those who practice tolerance and kindness. I can open my heart to everyone around me to the best of my ability (I am not very good at this, I admit—it's scary. But I try). I will assume that everything will come out precisely as it is supposed to, not in some sort of "God predestined it" way, but because, indeed, it could not have happened any other way. To presume we can change the past to create a better future is pure fantasy and is not helpful.

And I will not hate. I understand that there are many people who are doing a great many despicable things, but to practice hatred is to let those evildoers call the tune and create in me a place of hardness and rage to match theirs. Humans seem to share an odd delusion that if we practice hate toward a person or group of people, somehow our hatred will overwhelm theirs (somewhat analagous to shouting at the television to change the outcome of the ballgame). Where is the evidence for this? How exactly would that work? Do we believe Donald Trump has the answer to these questions? He seems to think he does, but I have yet to hear him give us a practical plan for how hate is going to solve anything at all, how it will not in fact make things much, much worse, than they already are.

I am not going to do these things because they are the right thing to do, even though they are. I am not going to do them in the vague hope that my love will spread all over the world and make things better, though it might. I am going to do these things because it is the only decent, respectful, openhearted, constructive, proper way to live, and in the end, it is the only decent, respectful, openhearted, constructive, proper way to die, if that is what is to come sooner rather than later.

What else can we do? How can we do anything but love? What other power do we have?

A Year of Metta

I have been pondering the metta sutta recently. For those of you not familiar with the teachings of the Buddha, metta can be translated in several different ways, but most commonly as lovingkindness. And a sutta is simply a teaching. So, the metta sutta is a teaching on lovingkindness delivered by the Buddha.

One of the things that led me to consider this sutta is that quirk of human character which makes all of us more or less selfish. I know this sounds like a criticism, but what I mean is that we are hardwired for survival of ourselves as organisms, and that while essentially no effort is required to think in this way, quite a bit of effort is required to think altruistically.

This fact is not a problem, really, at least not for the most part. Of course, taken to an extreme, this overarching philosophy is the source of all war and the degradation of the environment, since we tend to think rather narrowly about personal or tribal survival at the expense of more (literally and figuratively) global concern. But on a day to day basis, thinking in this way does not really create much havoc.

But it doesn't create much harmony, either, and I have been wondering if my own life and the lives of those around me might not be made considerably more harmonious if I focused my attention on ways of serving others as my first consideration. It's not that I'm some insensitive bastard in my accustomed mode, mind you, but I do find myself rather narrowly focused on what is going to get me through the day, rather than how I can make your life simpler or easier.

Thus the metta sutta. It seems to me that this simple teaching provides the guidance I need to make this shift in thinking and acting in the world.

One quick word on the name of this sutta. Metta can apparently be translated in several ways. I don't speak Pali, of course, but a teacher I trust (Christina Feldman) has chosen the term unconditional friendliness as the translation she prefers. She has said that the term love can be quite a loaded term for many of us, and kindness a bit vague. On the other hand, unconditional friendliness seems to her (and to me) very specific and describes a way of being in the world to which we can all aspire. Thus, from here on out, when I speak of metta, it is this translation I will use. You probably won't see me write the word lovingkindness in this blog for quite some time.

Not that I dislike the word itself, but I do feel it has become code for some sort of vague, warm, fuzzy feeling toward the whole world and all the creatures in it. I'm not sure that's what the Buddha had in mind. We can all generate happy thoughts about bunnies. What metta asks of us is much more stringent. Can you, it asks, feel unconditional friendliness toward everyone and everything? Toward nuclear reactors and ISIS? Toward those who practice hatred, greed, and violence? Toward people who have done the deepest damage to you in your life? Rather than the casual generation of good vibes, metta may well be among the hardest work any of us will ever do.

What I am proposing is to make metta the heart of my practice for a full year. I have taken such vows before (not metta vows, but others) and find that a year is a good test of my discipline. Also, after doing just about anything for a year, it usually becomes an integral part of who I am. That is the hope. Because I distrust the whole idea of New Year's resolutions (too often bogus, too often broken by January 15), I propose to begin this on Decmeber 1st, which is, of course, in a few days.

I'll keep you posted. In future posts, I will also write a bit more about the sutta itself so that you (and I along with you) can figure out a bit of what this vow means. What have I gotten myself into? I guess we'll see.

Aspiration

I read an interesting article in the New York Times the other day, titled Can We End The Meditation Madness?. What the author objects to is that some people attribute to meditation things it cannot deliver and load it up with expectations of outcomes, while pushing others to join in the crusade. This can be a serious disservice to both meditation and the practitioner. I couldn't agree more.

On the other hand, it certainly isn't up to me or anyone else how one chooses to use meditation. It might even be useful, I suppose, in becoming a better thief or murderer. Meditation is a tool. I can use a crowbar to help build a house, to break into a house or to kill the householder. It is not the crowbar's fault if I choose to use it unskillfully.

This gets to the heart of something that is integral to Buddhist practice, but easily misunderstood: the characteristic of aspiration. This article addresses the difference skillfully. Aspiration, in the Buddhist sense (the translation of the Pali word sankappa), does not mean desiring, or focusing on a particular outcome. This last point is of great importance.

The problem with aspiring to an outcome in meditation is that we then feel we can determine whether or not our practice is successful or unsuccessful. We have criteria by which we can judge the experience. And, of course, this is fine if you choose to use this tool to do these things; reduce stress, for instance, or become more mindful. But one must realize that these are extremely short-term aspirations and have the potential to sell short the benefits of meditation. There is also a good chance that if the practice does not fulfill your expectations in a fairly brief period of time or (heaven forbid!) actually exacerbates the problem, you will abandon meditation altogether as a failure. To do so is to risk missing the view from the top of the mountain because there are a few rocks on the trail leading up to it.

Actually, it is quite common for meditation, when done correctly, to add to your stress and struggle. This happens because you are systematically removing the blinders from your experience. As such, it's not that difficulties increase but that your awareness of them is greater. Which is actually a gift, because it is only to those things of which you are aware you can apply the principles that will give you freedom from them.

Once again, though, I must say that it is not for anyone to determine how you use these tools. Jon Kabat-Zinn, for one, has made a career of teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction and has helped many people to come to a place of peace with what is going on in their lives. I wish him and his acolytes all the best, and hope for them that this leads to joy. But this would not be enough for me. I am in this thing for the long haul (in the Buddhist cosmology it may even take several lifetimes). That's OK with me. I understand that true stress reduction comes with the wisdom derived from long-term practice of these ways of being in the world. I know that peace of mind is not the outcome of 15 minutes on a cushion, but of a lifetime of practice and study and aspiration to becoming one among the many Bodhisattvas who seek enlightenment in the hope that we can bring joy and harmony to all sentient beings and the entire universe. I know, this seems like something beyond the possible, and so it is if thought of as something achievable by one person in a single lifetime, not to mention in just a few days, weeks, or months. But even to merely point our hearts and minds in that direction is to move toward peace and well-being for all. Surely, that is something worthy to which we can aspire.

Did I Mention That The Buddha Wasn't A Fat Guy?

This is the last post in a three-part series about the food choices I am making and how that all fits in with everything else in my life (big topic!). The first part is here and the second here. You might want to read those to make more sense of what I am writing about in this post.

I am not suffering, I hope that is evident. I remember before I gave up other of my addictions (alcohol and tobacco in particular), one of the primary reasons I gave myself for not wanting to stop was that I would no longer have any fun, that these things were what gave me pleasure and without them my life would be dull and featureless. I felt much the same way about my food indulgences.

I was just speaking with someone yesterday who was curious about what I ate and I began to list off the things which I no longer consume: alcohol, drugs, tobacco, caffeine, sugar and all sweeteners, almost any processed food, nearly all fried food, meat, gluten, and most oils other than olive oil. I eat dairy sparingly. What a  bore my eating life must be!

But it isn't. Just as with alcohol and tobacco, I was kidding myself that these foods gave me pleasure. I should also point out that I did not give these things up all at once. I have been a vegetarian for nearly 20 years. I quit smoking 25 years ago, drinking 16. I haven't indulged in any drugs for even longer. And every choice I made regarding these things was made from a desire to avoid suffering. I have no impulse to be a purist, I really don't. But each of these had in some way or another caused me pain or difficulty.

As mentioned in an earlier post, one of the magical moments in following the elimination part of this dietary plan is the discovery, when foods are added back, how much they have been causing difficulties. My sister-in-law, who is also following this plan, went through a particularly stressful event not long ago and decided to treat herself to some ice cream. A lot of ice cream. Though previously she would not have attributed the consequences to the sugar therein, she had given it up entirely prior to this and knew that the body aches and pains and other bodily struggles had to be because of it. It was for her a revelatory moment.

But here is the most important thing: I am enjoying eating more than I ever have. In the absence of sweeteners, fresh fruits and vegetables taste more flavorful than ever. Grain salads (gluten-free, of course) are delicious to me. A dish full of (sugar-free) yogurt is a treat. A slice of good cheese is a delight. I made an eggplant Parmesan the other day that was to die for. I don't miss chips or ice cream (well, not much, anyway), chai tea lattes, donuts, cakes, pies, or cookies. I don't miss the digestive issues, the body aches, the tiredness, the malaise, the hangovers of indulgence. I feel better than I have in years. And I am no longer a fat guy.

And isn't this the very nature of what the Buddha meant when he talked about the end of suffering? At one point he said (I am paraphrasing) that what we believe gives us pleasure is precisely what causes suffering and what we believe causes suffering is what leads to freedom, which is the ultimate pleasure. While we pursue the short-term satisfaction of desire, we remove from our lives all possibility of Nirvana, which is not a place but a state of being that can only be found through concerted effort. But this effort is not that of conforming to a certain ideal. Rather, it is an internal investigation to find what is true for each of us. What Dharma means, after all, is Truth. And the only way we can find this Truth is to look closely at what causes us to suffer and what causes those around us to suffer.

I know this all doesn't sound like much fun. I wish I could convey to you more clearly that it is, in fact, the ultimate joy. It is as if we are surrounded by beauty and looking down at the dirt wishing for beauty. All we need to do is look up. Look up.

The Buddha Still Wasn't A Fat Guy

I promised last time I wrote that I would return to the subject of the Precepts and how they apply to my (at this point successful) effort to lose weight and get to a healthier place in my relationship to food. If you have not done so yet, you might want to go back and read that previous post, because this one will make a whole lot more sense if you do.

The last of the Precepts the Buddha taught was that of avoiding intoxicants. We don't usually think of foods as intoxicants, that is, as things that create a literal state of intoxication. A few words about definitions, then:

• In the Buddhist sense, intoxication might not even be the right word. I can't read Pali, so I have no idea how the original word or words might be translated. But I interpret an intoxicant to be anything that diverts you from the ability to pursue your ultimate fulfillment (whatever that may be). This can also be something that does not affect you physically at all, such as intoxicating scents or music. And many foods—even healthy ones—can be used to mask our emotional states, which is another form of intoxication.
  
• As mentioned in the last post, the root word for intoxicant also means poison. In the broadest sense, then, an intoxicant could be anything that treats your body badly or causes you to abuse or not fully support it.
• Intoxication is not necessarily an event. Intoxication can occur over a long period of time and, as such, you may not even be aware of its effects until it stops.
• However, intoxication is a state, at least in the way I am thinking of it. The Precept says that we avoid intoxicants, but I think it is more accurate to say that we avoid intoxication. Though monks and nuns entirely eschew alcohol and all drugs, this is not necessarily the standard by which modern, Western lay practitioners (and their teachers) would judge intoxication. In other words, that occasional glass of wine is not generally seen as an intoxicant under those circumstances.

But, what does this have to do with food? Well, here's the thing. About that third point above: I think we have become entirely inured to the effects of certain food choices and have taken for granted that the harm they do is incidental to the pleasure we get from them. But this is actually far from being the case. Everything we put into our bodies has an effect, some of it desirable, but with many of them not. Especially in this world of highly processed, sugary foods, we are ingesting unimaginable amounts of stuff and much of it is doing us harm, whether subtle or more serious we can't always know.

Now, here's where we get into really touchy territory, and I want to proceed carefully. While talking about these issues, I have found that most people are very protective of their right to eat whatever they choose. Please hear me loud and clear: it is not now nor has it ever been my intent to judge or change anyone else's behavior around food. God knows, I have had to free myself from a huge number of intoxicants over the years, including alcohol, drugs, and nicotine, and I never once benefited from someone telling me that I was a bad person or was doing a bad thing. So, please don't think that what I am about to say is a judgment on what you choose to eat. It's all just information I have gleaned from my experience with this.

One of the primary tools of the Abascal Way and of any plan that aims to help you make wise choices about what you eat is the elimination diet, wherein you eliminate all those foods that might cause you to have a harmful reaction. The problem with the day-to-day ingestion of these foods is that the inflammation and other ill effects are often happening at such a low level they are not immediately noticeable. Or, they have been happening for so long that we simply consider them to be a normal part of our lives (joint and back pain being a prime example for those of us over 40). An elimination diet takes these out of our consumption for long enough for these effects to go away. You then add them back in one at a time to see which might cause you to react negatively. In this way, for example, my wife and I both discovered that we don't do all that well with gluten. We love our bread, but gluten was causing problems we never realized.

Another example (and here I move with trepidation) is sugar. I know, I know, every single person to whom I have ever mentioned this food plan has gone along with me right up until I say, "Oh, and by the way, sugar is simply gone forever. No more sugar", at which point they want nothing more to do with me. But, as much as I never wanted to admit it to myself, after eliminating it and then trying a little bit again, I am entirely convinced that sugar is an intoxicant. Our bodies are not designed to process sugar in such a refined form, and our bodily reactions are both predictable and negative. It creates inflammation and kicks you into a biochemical state from which your body has difficulty recovering. It also creates a craving for more of the same, so if you are not meticulous (and more highly disciplined than I am) you will continue consuming it, which will exacerbate the ill effects and set up a cycle of ever-increasing harm.

These effects are no joke. Sugar is a major player in the epidemics of both obesity and diabetes around the world, and these two conditions also predispose one to heart disease and stroke, not to mention many other inflammatory-induced harmful states such as arthritis and other body pain. All that from a doughnut? Sadly, yes. At least, that's how I read the evidence that is accumulating around the consumption of sugar. Don't believe me? Eliminate sugar (by which I mean ALL sweeteners of any sort—yep, no stevia, either. Nope, no honey, sorry) for three weeks and then eat some again. To make this a fair trial, you should eat a substantial amount of it when you add it back or else the effects might be too subtle to notice and you will assume they are not present. Believe me, you will feel the pain.

And the damn stuff is everywhere, have you noticed? Have you tried to buy a salad dressing without sugar lately? Good luck. It's even in most commercially produced soups, though God knows why, and nearly all microwaveable foods.

But all is not lost! When I write again, let me tell you about the joys we have found in consuming foods that do not cause all of these reactions. Because, even though I have a long list of foods (and other substances) I am no longer consuming, I enjoy eating more than ever. It turns out we don't even know what we're missing when we turn to intoxicants to feed us both physically and emotionally.

The Buddha Wasn't A Fat Guy

This blog began as a meditation on being overweight and what it means (if anything) in relation to my belief in the Dharma, which is the collected teachings of the Buddha and his followers.

And then, last week, I reached my goal weight. My path to that point both was and was not the one I anticipated, but I have, somehow, arrived there. Even I am a bit surprised by this, especially that in the end it seemed to happen almost without my accord, as a desirable side effect to a completely different effort regarding food.

Let me explain: the proximal reason I have been able to lose the weight I have been seeking for years to lose is The Abascal Way (which I wrote about here and also here). Rather than a dietary plan, this really is a philosophical rethinking of one's relationship to food. This accords well with what I have been writing about here for years. But Kathy Abascal has coalesced a way of regarding our issues around food into a practical, down-to-earth guide.

But here's the thing: it is one thing to know that one ought to eat a certain way in order to feel better and quite another to pull it off. I hasten to say that this is not a way of bragging that I have succeeded where others have failed or that I am stronger or more disciplined than anyone else (you only have to read any randomly chosen half dozen of my entries here to see that I clearly am not). So, what made the difference and continues to make the difference for me?

Upfront, I want to say that a primary driver is the fact that I simply feel much better: fewer aches and pains. Abascal's primary focus is not weight or even food, per se—rather, her emphasis is on bringing the inflammation in our bodies under control, which leads to more comfort (less joint pain and the internal results of inflammation). Because part of this is regulating your body's insulin and other hormonal cycles more effectively, weight loss is a (nearly) inevitable consequence.

But why else have I been able to resist the urge to stray from this dietary plan when so many plans and hopes and schemes before have failed me? I am convinced that a large part of my willingness to stick to it stems from my study of the Dharma and from other spiritual disciplines that, in the end, are only tangentially about food or body weight. I find that one of the most potent forms of spiritual guidance I have are the Five Precepts (which I wrote about more extensively here). For the purposes of this post, let me just say that each of the Precepts—to avoid killing, stealing, sexual harm, harmful speech, and intoxication—is a training in the morality of purpose that points not just to being a Good Person, a status to which most of us aspire, but which can infiltrate our lives in ways that are unexpected and unexpectedly rich. This occurs because each opens us up to a broader understanding of our place in the world and our ability to influence that world for the better. In particular, the Precepts each correspond to a quality we can actively cultivate—in order, those of compassion, generosity, responsibility, kindness, and clarity. These are not simple things, and an aspiration is entirely inadequate to their cultivation. Rather, what is required is a long and sustained devotion coupled with a willingness to repeatedly fail and begin again.

In particular, I find the Precept to avoid intoxicants a cogent one. To begin with, I am an alcoholic, so this has a deeper meaning than it may for others. (On the other hand, it's also a great deal simpler for me, since I am obligated to refrain from all intoxicants—that little glass of wine or puff of marijuana are not for me, whereas for others these might not lead to true intoxication).

But this Precept has (as they all do) layers upon layers of meaning. I like to reflect on the fact that the Latin root of the word intoxication simply means "poison" (in Spanish, one of the word for poisoning is intoxicado). Of course, most of us have the wisdom not to knowingly swallow strychnine, but we take into our bodies many things that we know to be harmful to us, that we believe will give us pleasure, peace, and an surcease of pain.

I think I have gone on long enough for today, though. I will expand upon this a bit further the next time I write.

Vivifying the corpse

I want it to be as it was before.

Before, I was routinely praised. I was, or so I thought, respected and liked. Oh, I had my rough edges, but those were just a part of the charmingly curmudgeonly Reid that came with the territory. I was outspoken but fair; you always knew where I was coming from, and all of that was just fine. Or so I thought.

And then The Event happened I wrote about last month (can't believe it's been a month since I wrote here! Yikes!), and everything changed. And I don't want it to be different than it was.

I ran into someone who said she used to routinely read this blog but gave it up when it became "more Buddhist". I only mention this because what I have tried to say here as often as I can is how everything the Buddha had to say was really just common sense that applies to everyone everywhere, all the time. It's not really Buddhist, per se, so much as it is deeply and abidingly human.

We want to be praised and not blamed. We want to be happy and not sad. We want to be young and not old (or at least not decrepit). We want to be well and not ill. We want to be loved and not hated. We want to be trusted and not distrusted. We want to be respected and not disrespected. We want to be raised up and not shamed. We want to be rested and not exhausted. We want to serve but not to be taken advantage of. This is what it is to be human and caught up in the day-to-day business of living a life of suffering.

And the common sense of the Buddha had this to say: yes, this is what we all want, but the suffering is not in the blame, the sadness, the aging, the decrepitude, the illness, the hatred, the distrust, the anger, in death or pain or shame. The suffering is in the lack of recognition that these things are inevitable. And when we resist the inevitable, well, we are welcome to do so, but it won't affect the outcome one bit. It will only create the conditions to exacerbate our own difficulty.

Still, I want it all back the way it was. I was probably even deluding myself about how it was before. I don't even care about that. I want the delusion back, too. In The Truman Show, the Jim Carrey film, I recall how along with the anger and disappointment of Truman's discovery of the trick that was played on him came a genuine grief that his magical world had to come to an end, had been a fraud all along. I am not at all sure that, given the chance, he would not have wanted to go back to the delusion. But that was no longer possible, as it is not for me.

I have forgiven, at least I think I have. But the injury goes deep and is not easily healed. It is as if I was stabbed through the heart—I will get better, I will forgive, I will embrace both of the people who perpetrated this harm with love in my heart. But I will think twice before I get near them while either is carrying a knife, if you know what I mean. I can love and forgive, but to trust, respect, or befriend may not be within my power.

I must constantly remind myself that the relationship of today to yesterday exists entirely in my mind. Yesterday is as dead as ash. Yesterday is a corpse. And in my desire to make things as they were, I am wasting my energy attempting to vivify that corpse, doing CPR on that which is already cold and decaying. I can prop it up, paint its face, manipulate it into the simulacrum of humanity, yet it still will be a corpse. Meanwhile, the newborn child of today is sitting neglected and sad, waiting for my attentions.

Ah, but it's not easy. The Buddha knew this. After all, if we were all already good at this stuff, there would be no need for enlightenment, would there, because we would be there instantly. As soon as we realized the problem, we would apply the solution and—poof!—no more problem! But it doesn't work that way, does it?

Still...still...and yet...I have tools. I have teachings. I have companions. I have teachers. I have faith. I have love. And I have a deep and abiding understanding that the more I practice letting go of the corpse, the easier it becomes. The more I can let go, the more likely it is that I can heal these wounds. And someday I will.

Blame

I am being falsely accused of something at work. I can't say much more because, hey, you never know who is going to read one's blog.

But I also have no desire to go into detail because it really doesn't matter much. As with everything else we encounter all the time, every day, day in and day out, the real meat of the matter does not reside in the details but in how I respond. And I feel blamed.

I have written before about the vicissitudes, the famous four pairs of conditions:

pleasure and pain
praise and blame
fame and disgrace
gain and loss

I have felt mostly praised in this job, at least recently. I have received many acknowledgements and this feels good. I want this feeling of praise to stay with me, I grasp it and will not allow it to arise and pass away. So when blame comes in, threatening to drive out the glow of praise, I am unprepared to open wide my doors and let it in.

I have written also about the lovely Rumi poem Guest House (actually, I find I have written about it twice, the other time here). I will not reproduce the entire poem here again, but the piece I find most relevant today is where, after writing that we should invite in every new arrival ("a joy, a depression, a meanness") he says that,

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of all its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be cleaning you out for some new delight....
Each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

My teacher Heather is fond of saying that there are not just four vicissitudes. We cannot live always in pleasure, praise, fame, and gain, much as we might like to. It just doesn't work that way. And Rumi is adding that I cannot possibly know what the outcome of one of the other four coming into my life might be. It could be that I am being cleaned out for a new delight.

It is especially interesting to contemplate the feeling of blame when I know myself to be entirely blameless. If my mind were a logical entity, I would simply understand that the blame was irrelevant to the situation and, no matter what the outcome, I can feel good about myself. On top of this, I work in a pretty reasonable place, so it is highly unlikely that the situation will lead to anything negative happening to me, at least nothing that will impact my ability to do my job and keep collecting a paycheck. I am in what I refer to as my "terminal position", meaning that I have no desire to have any other job before retirement, so even if there was some sort of censure, it would not matter. So, why the fear (because, of course, that's what is really going on here, I am deeply afraid). But it is not rational; it is an animalistic response to threat.

Another poem I have written about is William Carlos Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow". And while I

stick by my contention that this poem is, in fact, about a red wheelbarrow and is not particularly symbolic, it also seems to me that the line, "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow" is evocative of a larger reality. So much depends upon this job of mine: my home, my life, my health insurance, my wife's ability to live the life she lives (and that I treasure being able to help make possible), my ability to be a support to my parents and other family, food, clothing, meditation, the very electricity that makes it possible for me to write these lines (not to mention the computer and my internet connection). To feel that it is threatened (no matter how minor the threat) is to have to face the idea that what I hold most dear might not remain whole. It is mother, father, wife, son, teacher, student, member of society, survival itself.

At the risk of repeating myself, once again I must reach the conclusion that the answer is to open my heart. As Rumi says, "The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in." The answer, still, is love. I must love myself enough to know that none of this can last, it is all illusory. All of them, my parents, my wife, my son, my accuser, myself, all of us have arisen and will pass away. This situation has arisen and will pass away. The challenge (and the opportunity—oh, and what an opportunity!) is to practice loving the person who is casting aspersions on my integrity and professionalism, to entirely open my heart to her and let her in. Oh! how I want to reject her, push her and her accusations away, blame her in return and make her appear Wrong in her own eyes and the eyes of others, but this is the very nature of suffering. Make no mistake, the aversive impulse does not cause suffering, it is suffering.

And so, one more poem, from Hafiz, one of my favorites (and Heather's very favorite, I think), about which I have also written before:

The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He knows.

While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,

Keeps dropping keys all night long

For the Beautiful,
Rowdy
Prisoners

I will drop my keys. I will not imprison her or anyone else. I will work for the freedom of all beings and, in the process, will free myself. I will love, not only including where it is most difficult, but especially there. That's just the way it works. Everything else is suffering and the creation of suffering. Hey, I might not have to duck my head when the moon is low, but I'm working on it.

The Limits of Compassion and Its Limitless Nature

It is foolish for me to believe that I can understand what it is to be black in America today. As one commentator put it, there is Team Black and Team White, but if you are on Team White, you don't even realize you are on a team, it's just Normal. The only slight taste I get of the constant fear and loathing black people experience, the reflexive sense of caution and suspicion that Team White most often imposes on them, is the feeling of tension I sense in the parents of children I don't know but speak to in public. Because I am a man, the assumption is that I could possibly be a pedophile. Even in those I love, when I comment on how cute a little girl is, I can feel just a hint of the assumption that it might be a bit creepy for me to say that. They know me, they know I have no such predilections, but there is the blanket assumption that Male=Potential Creep that sneaks into every interaction, no matter how innocent. If asked, these people would say they are not sexist or prejudiced, they are just being cautious. Uh huh.

I can only imagine (I can truly only imagine) how dreadful this same sort of suspicion must be for Team Black in America. People cross the street. They wonder what you are doing in their neighborhood. It crosses the white mind to wonder if you truly belong in this place or that, or if you might have some nefarious purpose. I have never had the experience (literally never) of being stopped by a police officer unjustly, nor have the majority of my pale companions. But it is the rare person of color who has not had this experience (just ask them).

My point is this: I wish to consider myself a compassionate person. Compassion quite literally means "feeling with", what we might also call empathy. But because I really don't know how it feels to be a black American, there are limits to how deeply my compassion can run.

I celebrated the victory in the Supreme Court for gay marriage, but I realize that there, too, I have a very limited ability to understand the depth of meaning this has for those whose lives and loves have been further validated and enshrined in law by the highest court in the land. I can rejoice, but I can't join in. I have, after all, been able to marry for the past 41 years, and have availed myself of this privilege three times (to two people with only one divorce—it's a long story).

I can't know what it is like to be a woman. A woman who has never given birth to a child can't know what it is like to do so. We can do our best to "feel with", but there are limits. We can imagine what it is like to be another gender, but can't really know. If we have felt pain or sorrow or sadness, we can imagine what it is to be in chronic pain or deep grief or intractable depression, but this will miss the mark by light years because the very chronicity of the experience is its most salient feature. By its very nature, the pain most of us feel is short-lived and that is what makes it both tolerable and an entirely different experience from those states that seems as if they may never cease, which in fact they may not, except (one would hope) in death.

In Buddhist terms, compassion is one of the translations of the word "bodhicitta". To define things further, there are two types of bodhicitta, the relative and the absolute. It is relative bodhicitta which is sometimes spoken of as compassion. But absolute bodhicitta is emptiness or openness, and it is in this concept that we can see the truly limitless nature of compassion. While it is true that I cannot appreciate the specifics of your experience (unless you happen to be a middle-class, middle-aged, straight, white, married, male nurse), nor you mine, what I can do is strive to break down the barriers between us that make this so impossible. To put it another way, if I am so hung up on the specifics of my experience and how it is different (and therefore better, worse, superior, or more painful) from yours, then I make it impossible for us to find the common ground of feeling that opens the whole world for us to experience and share.

I understand, at least to the best of my ability, the need many people feel to separate their experience from that of the rest of the world. To do otherwise must seem like a betrayal of that experience and those who share it, whether that be the experience of color, gender, sexual orientation, poverty, politics, profession, religion, disability, parental status, education, ability, preferences, choices, needs, or what have you. But to deny the possibility of the transcendence of these categories of experience is to also deny the possibility of the end of suffering. We must never forget that the Buddha did not preach a higher moral order or a religious understanding of the world. What he taught was the definition of suffering and the real possibility of its end. By striving for the greater goal of absolute bodhicitta, we open the gate to the road of such a complete openness that we cannot divide our experience from the experience of all beings. Such divisions are artificial in any case and the reinforcement of them is the precise cause of all suffering in our lives and in the world.

In the conventional sense, compassion has nothing but limitations. But in the larger sense, the absolute nature of compassion is not a mere feeling with, but a being at One with all that is. If we can get there (if only somewhat, for it is a continuum), how can we do other than love all that is and all that can be? To live our lives there is what Joy would feel like.

Indifference?

As I was walking past a fenced-in area near our home a few minutes ago, I saw some curious behavior on the part of some geese. A flock was feeding on the grass when four geese flew in from the west. Four of the geese who were on the ground flew up to meet the four newcomers. Three of the newcomers landed with the flock, while one of them stayed in the air with the ones who flew up to greet them. These five flew around the field three times, seeming to vie for some sort of position, then flew away to the west and did not return.

I have no idea what this means. I'm sure in High Goose, or whatever language they speak, this all made perfect sense. And it occurs to me that I probably have just about that much understanding of what most humans do. I think I understand the motives of others in some significant way, but I am not at all sure that's true. Just because they resemble me in some ways and speak more or less the same language does not mean I have any idea of why they do what they do.

I work in an HIV clinic and got a call from a patient yesterday who was convinced that his wife's medical provider was actively trying to kill her. It turns out his wife had been on two different regimens of HIV medications, both of which adversely affected her liver. While this was all being sorted out, the woman had been taken off medications completely. To us, this made perfect sense; better to take the very low risk of being off the medications briefly than the very high risk of permanent liver damage. But to her husband, not being on HIV medications when one has HIV is tantamount to a death sentence. We were speaking Goose and he was speaking his language and no one had bothered to translate.

What this brings to mind for me is the concept of equanimity. This is one of the Ten Perfections taught by the Buddha. In fact, many teachers have said that if one develops the qualities of patience and equanimity, the path to enlightenment is smooth. So what is equanimity?

Equanimity is quite simply the quality of mind in which we do not react to either the negative or the positive in any long-term way. At least, that's how I define it. The fact is that we will all face the pleasant and the unpleasant, and will react to them, at least until the day we are enlightened. But our reactions need not be incorporated into our being, or even into our day. We can choose to recognize them for what they are, accept them, and move on.

I know this sounds like indifference, but the two are qualitatively as different as geese and humans. My role model for equanimity is always the Dalai Lama, who said, "I try to treat everyone I meet as an old friend." The Dalai Lama cannot be said to be indifferent; far from it, he engages with everyone and everything at all times. How can he pull this off without burning out? I also think of the sage, Amma, who is well-known for sitting for hours upon hours and hugging every single person at her gatherings who chooses to approach her. But the energy to engage with the world at this level comes from the ability to entirely open their hearts in a non-judgmental way, to not feel that this engagement in any way depletes them, that in fact they gain more than they give, by far. This is one way of living in equanimity.

The Third Zen Ancestor said, "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences." No preferences? Now, hold on, now we must certainly be speaking of indifference. Not so. What he means is that we can acknowledge that both the pleasant and unpleasant will come to us but we need not react to them with aversion or desire. They can roll on through. The Buddha himself said, "As long as there is attachment to the pleasant and aversion to the unpleasant, awakening is impossible". This is equanimity.

But how can we practice this in our day-to-day lives? How can we not get caught up in the busyness or things, or resist a reaction to a slight? And why should we even try to question the pleasure we feel when praised or when things go our way? The most important thing to recognize, it seems to me, is that everything arises and passes away. It is in our natures to believe that all bad things which come to us will last, that the unpleasantness of this moment is how it will be from now on. And it is also inherent in us to believe that we deserve to have the good in our lives and it's only natural that we would want to cling to what is pleasant. But all of this, the good, the bad, and the indifferent, is simply of the nature to arise and pass away. This is the core of what the Buddha taught. All things arise and pass away. We can appreciate them while they are here, or grieve while they are here (no need to be indifferent), but then we must let them go on their way. Because they will. Always. As will we.

Overwhelmed

I must confess that I am feeling overwhelmed by events right at the moment, so I won't be blogging for long today. Why do it at all? I dunno; I guess I feel a mild sense of obligation, if only to myself. Though I am generally a pretty disciplined guy, there are many things in my life I feel I have let just slide into decrepitude, and I don't want this blog to be one of those.

So, here I am, with a few things to say, mostly personal and not all that Dharmic, but there you have it....

First of all, I continue on the Abascal Plan, as I described in the last few posts. I am not trying to sell you on this, by the way. I couldn't care less if no one else ever does it. But it sure has helped me and is helping a bunch of other people I know. Enough about that. Oh, and I found out by doing this that wheat is not my friend. Without further investigation, I am not willing to say it's gluten that bugs me, though that seems pretty likely. Fortunately, I have never been a big bread eater. And I can still eat it if I want to, I just might suffer some consequences.

I also want to put out there that Kathy and I are going to Ann Arbor next weekend and staying a week to celebrate our daughter-in-law's graduation from graduate school. Yes, by the way, since you asked, it does feel strange to be old enough to have a daughter-in-law who is finishing graduate school. And—good news—she will be coming to Seattle to continue her studies, working toward a PhD at the University of Washington (which is also one of my alma maters, by the way). So, we will have Jamie and my son, Mitchell, here for at least three years! Yippee!

After Ann Arbor, we will be home for about a week and then take off for a week at Disneyland with Mitchell, Jamie, and some friends from California. It's been a long time since I have been there. A little known fact about me: I absolutely love roller coasters. The faster, more dangerous-looking, turn-me-upside-downish the better.

Anyway, there you have it, the reasons I am not furiously blogging away right now, but will instead try to get my life together enough that it doesn't entirely fall apart with all of this gallivanting around. I wish you all well and will write again when I can. Take care.

Abascal Dharma

[A note: this is a continuation of last week's post and parts of it, in particular my references to the Abascal Diet Plan, might not make as much sense if you haven't read that one.]

For one who wishes to take up in earnest regular meditative practice, it will be very desirable that he should be moderate in eating.

--The Buddha

For eight years, I worked as a burn ICU nurse. I encountered hundreds of badly burned patients in that time. What struck me as most remarkable is that a certain proportion of them, say a tenth or so, told me their lives were better, had more meaning since they were burned.

A study some years ago looked at people who had won the lottery and attempted to determine if they were happier since having become millionaires. What the researchers discovered is that if the winner was happy before getting all that money, they continued to be happy; if they were miserable before, the money did nothing to change that.

I have worked with some paraplegics and quadriplegics and heard stories of many others (and you probably have, too), who said that their lives had more meaning and purpose after the accidents that paralyzed them than they did before and that they were, for the most part, happier than when fully able-bodied.

For 15 years I have worked as a nurse in an HIV clinic. There is a subculture of deep emotional and material support for those who are positive that many never felt before they contracted the disease. We surround them with help that they could not have gotten prior to having the disease and their community often gives them a level of understanding that was absent before.

It is a fact that nearly all persons who survive a suicide attempt report regretting the choice and having more pleasure in life and less of an impulse to further suicidal behavior afterward.

Of course, I am not saying that one ought to seek out being badly burned, poor, paralyzed, a suicide survivor, or HIV positive in order to find meaning in life. Rather, I raise these examples to point out a very basic reality at the core of what the Buddha taught: we do not know what is good for us. In fact, the Buddha in many places argued that precisely what we believe will bring us happiness is what is most likely to cause suffering. We are certain where happiness lies and we are often absolutely, completely, utterly wrong.

Since food is what this post is about, let's take an example from that realm: sugar. We think sugar makes us happy. It tastes nice, it touches a primitive pleasure circuit in our minds, it feel luxurious. But what we choose to ignore is that it also causes suffering of both an immediate and long-term nature. Almost immediately our insulin goes wild trying to accommodate the overload of sucrose and makes us feel worse. A craving for more sugar kicks in and this can in turn cause a cycle of binging that makes us feel terrible. Long-term, as we all know, it can cause many ills, including dental caries and weight gain out of proportion to the calories consumed as sugar. It is implicated in the development of Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, stroke, and heart disease.

Yet, knowing all this, we continue to consume an enormous amount of it. I am not speaking out here against any and all consumption of sugar: I am a fan myself and intend to have it every now and then once I am off the strict part of this diet plan. But I am trying to make the point that we are more or less clueless when it comes to what will make us happy, and sugar is a pretty good illustration of that.

I called this post Abascal Dharma, not because Kathy Abascal had this in mind when she came up with the plan, but because it fits so neatly into the idea behind the Dharmic principle of Renunciation. The Buddha did not believe in self-punishment or deprivation. In fact, he was a proponent (and an example) of the Middle Way between self-indulgence and asceticism.  But he also recognized the basic fact I have been pointing to here, that our intuitive sense of what will make us happy, what will bring joy to ourselves and to others, is misguided. We could speculate endlessly about why this is, why our most basic impulses are so off course. The theory most tossed about (and which has the greatest appeal to me) is that these predispositions are hard-wired into our primitive brains as a mode of survival that no longer serves us well. For instance, our strong affinity for sugar might be a residual impulse from a time when sweetness in food made it highly desirable for survival because it supplied sorely needed calories. Much as the fight or flight instinct in us was useful when we were a young species but now causes untold suffering, our desire for sweetness often leads to a sourness our hunting and gathering forebears could never have imagined.

There are many teachings of the Buddha, but the one with which he began, and which constitutes the core of his philosophy is that of the Four Noble Truths, which, stated simply, is that there is suffering and there is an end of suffering. He went on to say that the source of all suffering is craving, which is the desire to have that which we do not, or to not have that which we would rather not. This is where Renunciation comes in. Renunciation is in a very real way an experiment. Something deep down in us believes that if we do without something, a certain food, tobacco, sex, a shopping trip, alcohol, that we will feel worse. It seems intuitively true: something that makes me feel good in the short term must be good for me overall. But we know this isn't always true. What the principle of Renunciation asks us to do is to be scientific about it, to do without something and see if our joy increases or decreases. The Buddha bet his spiritual life that we would discover, as he had, that it would increase.

Abascal Dharma is understanding that during this three week elimination phase of the diet, when I asked myself not to consume sugar, wheat, peanuts, dairy, or dried corn, as much as it at first felt a bit like deprivation, is actually the source of a sense of freedom. Though I have made many good food choices over the years, I feel as if I am coming (slowly, gradually) to a true wisdom about those choices and how they influence my life. And how they can lead to the end of suffering.

Embodied

I just got off the phone with my father. His body is wearing out. He is 86. He is sad and distracted. I honestly don't believe he fears dying. But his mind is consumed with the actions of his body.

The other day I drank some sour milk. Not on purpose; it was just a bit off and before I determined it was too far gone to drink, I already had. Not long after, I had a feeling of anxiety in my gut. I couldn't figure it out.

A few weeks ago I got an Americano with four shots of espresso, which I often do because I like the stronger flavor and, since I drink decaffeinated coffee, it doesn't really matter. Except this time they screwed up and used caffeinated espresso. For a moment, before I realized what had happened, I felt as if I was having some sort of emotional epiphany or psychological breakthrough.

We were talking the other day at work about the fact that when we are tired or hungry (god help us if we're both), we quite predictably feel irritation and anger. The state of having low blood sugar or inadequate rest imitates these emotional states to such an extent that we don't even think about the fact that there need be no cause for the emotions to arise except the body's need, that the mind has taken no part in the change. (If it happens because of not eating, there is even a portmanteau word for it: hangry. I really like that).

My point here is that we are embodied beings. Contrary to how we often think of them, our bodies are not merely vehicles for carrying our heads around, and recalcitrant vehicles at that. That's not the way it works. The Buddha spoke very clearly about the fact that the mind exists everywhere within us. Though it feels odd to consider it, there is as much of consciousness in my big toe as in my head. There is nothing to say that I could not reach an enlightened state from the bottom up rather than the other way around.

A few years ago, Stephen Levine was giving a talk (I listened to it on tape) titled, "The Heart of the Womb" about living our lives from this place inside us, even those of us who are not equipped with one. (It's a beautiful talk, if you get a chance to hear it). At the end, he said that he was considering making his next talk about "The Heart of the Bowel". Everyone listening live laughed, but Levine was absolutely serious. "Why not?" he asked. Why not, indeed?

Joseph Goldstein tells two wonderful stories about embodiment. (I feel the need to say that these are my versions of these stories and are not verbatim).

A young man came to him complaining of neck pain, then proceeded to tell Joseph how very uptight he was and the ways in which his life was a wreck. To which Joseph replied:

You mean you have a pain in your neck.

Yes, said the man, I do, and I have always carried my tension there, ever since I was young, and I think it has to do with the way my mother treated me. To which Joseph replied:

You mean you have a pain in your neck.

Well, yes, and I have such a difficult job and I wonder if I should change professions or perhaps become a Buddhist monk; wouldn't that perhaps be the wisest thing? To which Joseph replied:

You mean you have a pain in your neck.

You see the point he was making. We are embodied. Just like my sour milk anxiety and my caffeine epiphany, we forget that the chemical soup in which we swim influences us in ways big and small. The error is to see our "selves" as being the controlling entities and all the rest of this as within our control, when by and large it is not.

The second Joseph story: once, fairly early in his practice, he was at a retreat and doing walking meditation, when a feeling came over him that could only be called existential despair. He wasn't sure he belonged on retreat and perhaps even the path itself was the wrong one. He was uncertain about his own efficacy and whether or not he could accomplish anything in life...and then he burped, and everything was fine.

When we point to ourselves, we point to our hearts. "This is me, I live here". We could just as well point to our ears, our fingernails, our knees. We are embodied beings, and can free ourselves from the shackles of our suffering beginning with the small of our backs or our tight shoulders. Far from being a mere vehicle for our minds, this is a vehicle for us to awaken. What a precious gift.