I kept my commitment to sit every day for the past three days, and I am certain that it is only that commitment that got me to sit on the fifth and sixth days of Ango. I could tell that those were days I regularly would have forgone sitting. The sits themselves were difficult, with a racing and uneasy mind and uncomfortable body. I even cut those days back to what has been my usual sitting time during the last year, 25 minutes (I made a commitment for the Ango that I would increase my sitting time by 5 minutes). Today was much easier, though with a mind still awhirl.
I noticed today near the end of the sit the posture of expectation I bring to sitting, as I also bring to much of my daily activity. It feels like the posture of a baby bird, sitting there with its beak open, waiting. I've noticed the expectation I've had that after resuming daily sitting, my average mindstate would become smoother, and I've seen that expectation dashed. This week my mindfulness and state of mind at work progressively regressed, and mindfulness dwindled to a bare minimum. This was initially a source of frustration and aggression toward myself--how can I discipline myself more?--but today I saw the hungry attitude behind this thinking. This hungry attitude is more interesting, and more problematic, to me, than the quality of mindfulness it is hungry to establish.
"Hungry" is an apt term, as I've noticed too in this first week of Ango how much I resist mindful eating. My eating became less and less mindful over the course of the week. I think part of this may be not wanting to look at the precious and neurotic attitude I bring to the table. I take great pleasure in food and expect it to deliver that pleasure. Many of my favorite indulgences revolve around food, and are very ritualistic. I like to pair certain foods with one another, pair certain foods with certain beverages, and pair certain meals with certain activities. I like eating sushi and drinking Torrontes while watching a nature documentary. I like drinking a musky red wine and eating chocolate by candlelight. I like to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with my morning Sugar Free Red Bull, or sometimes pancakes. I have a hard time enjoying most meals without a Diet Coke, which I especially like with chips and salsa or with a Lean Cuisine pasta meal.
I realize that there is nothing necessarily wrong with finding pleasure with food in the idiosyncratic way that I do. But I find the attitude of expectation underneath this behavior problematic, and a source of an endless cycle of craving and disappointment. Every once in a while I have that perfect moment--with food or otherwise--but most of the time, I am chasing it and not attaining it. Do the perfect moments justify all the time spent chasing them? I truly do not know, though I know the "good Buddhist" answer would be no.
I have noticed too that I am often in a fighting posture. I catch myself many times on the cushion and off fighting with myself, trying to make whatever my mind and body is doing into something different. There is a constant background of self-criticism. This is something I am relieved to drop when I can, but I also have an underlying fear that to drop the fight is to sink into complacency, to surrender to entropy and sloth. But perhaps it is the tension of the constant fight posture that drains my energy and makes me sloppy with things.
I am not sure I will be able to do it, but I think I would benefit from establishing both a morning sit and an evening sit every day. I am instinctively a night sitter, which means the whole momentum of the day has set my mind achurn before sitting. It might be interesting and worthwhile to commit to sitting with morning mind also, though I may find out it is not any different.
Hey partner!
ReplyDeleteOnce again I have enjoyed reading your post.
I feel a good deal of resonance with the following which you use to express what you call a "hungry" attitude:
"I like to pair certain foods with one another, pair certain foods with certain beverages, and pair certain meals with certain activities"
For a while I had this problem with alchohol. It was not so much a problem with alchohol, per se, but having a problem with believing that it would enhance or add-to a certain activity or situation simply because an activity or situation similar to that had been enjoyable in the past, and therefore remained as a fond memory.
I will take the current climate as an example:
Autumn.
Autumn in my gastric world equates cider.
It is the case that I have a collection of fond memories relating to times I spent in my teenage years, drinking cider with friends and hanging about / playing in local woodlands; typsy as that deep crimson sun sunk below the horizon line and the half-light between the leaves drew our perfumed minds into an intoxicated fairy tale realm.
...I write poetry and often of an autumn I have tried to re-create the feeling of those times by sitting down to write whilst tanked up on cider. I have drank and then I have walked, desperatley, somewhat, seeking to experience again the good thing I experienced then.
The "good Buddhist" of course knows this is bullshit; impossible and a task laden with folly from the very beginning.
I am glad to say I don't make a habit of this anymore. Just wanted to share that by means of solidarity, in that, I hear what you are saying.
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I look forward to hearing how the addition of a morning sitting works out for you.
Love and prayers,
Dave.
The Envoy
ReplyDeleteby Jane Hirschfield
One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.
Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.
I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.
For a year I watched
as something -- terror? happiness? grief? --
entered and then left my body.
Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.
It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.
There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.
Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
hope this finds you happy and well
DM
Dave M. #1: Thank you for your wonderful comment. I appreciate and relate to the open sharing about your life. I think we all have our secret rituals and pleasures that, while not necessarily problematic in themselves, become problematic through the expectation we bring to them, that fuel behind the engine of samsara.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably going to take me a while to work up to that morning sit ;)
Dave M. #2: How wonderful to have you by for a visit, Dave. And that is a breathtaking poem, one I will come back to again. A perfect capture of the mysterious shadows of experience as they flicker across consciousness.
I've been thinking a lot about you lately, and Praxis. You've been a tremendous shaping force in my life and spiritual path and I am quite grateful. I've been fascinated lately all over again with consciousness research (a la Susan Blackmore) and the interesting insights yielded when considering its findings in the light of an experiential practice like this.