Kicking the Habit

"Compassion and resilience are not, as we might imagine, rarefied human qualities available only to the saintly.  Nor are they adventitious experiences that arise in us only in extraordinary circumstances.   In fact these essential and universally prized human qualities can be solidly cultivated by anyone willing to take the time to do it."

― Norman Fischer, Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong

“Because you are alive, everything is possible.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh,   Living Buddha, Living Christ

 

I think one of the most exciting discoveries to emerge from medical science is neuroplasticity.  

Even in cases where there has been fairly severe physical damage to the brain, research now indicates that new neural pathways can be created. With proper stimulation, undamaged neurons can even sprout new nerve endings.  Certain functions can even be transferred from a severely damaged hemisphere of the brain to the other!  Faculties and behaviors can be restored.  Healing can happen.

 

How cool is that!? 

 

Creatures of Habit 

Most schools of psychology agree that our basic personality is formed very early in our lives through the interplay of our genetics and the conditioning we receive in our interactions with the world around us.  As we mature, most people come to experience a "me," with a recognizable set of beliefs, attitudes, emotions and behaviors.  This "me"seems to be substantial and real -- and fixed into place.   

 

Modern science -- and, of course, the traditional teachings of Buddhism -- both challenge that widely shared perception.  Neuroplasticity  indicates that we can alter the elements of that personality.  We can transform the ways we view and act in the world in fundamental ways. 

 

As research techniques and imaging technology have advanced, modern science has been able to get a much better understanding of the brain and the vast network of nerves that are involved in creating our experience of life.  What we perceive, feel, and do relies on neural pathways, deeply conditioned sequences of synapses in our brains and elsewhere firing in predictable ways.  For the most part, this operates "out of sight" beneath the level of our awareness.

 

This certainly explains why many of us seem to go stumbling along entertaining deep yearnings to do certain things (or not do certain things) -- and we fail to change.   In my case, I want to be a kind, caring, compassionate person.  I've wanted to act constructively and productively in my life.  All too often over the years, I've ended up being a jerk -- and not getting the job done. 

 

Thankfully,  Western Science is now indicating what many of us have sensed to be true.  The phenomenon of neural plasticity indicates that change is possible.  It even happens at the cellular level!

 

Contrary to the old adage, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Kicking the Habit

 

I'm grateful to have come of age at a time when the spiritual traditions of Asia brought various forms of meditation into my life.  Mindfulness Practice has been crucial in transforming how I experience and act in the world. With Practice, I have been able to bring awareness to what had previously operated subconsciously.  In doing so, over time, I have been able to "rewire" my responses. 

 

Research has shown that meditation can and does alter the way that our brains function.  Studies even indicate that, over time, there are positive organic changes in the brains of longtime meditators!  This affirms what the sages, seers, and saints of the world's spiritual traditions have been saying all along.  We human beings have access to more exalted ways of being.  We are capable of incredible courage, deep compassion, and insight.  We are capable of Love.  

 

With Practice, we can kick the habit of being who we have been --  in deep and fundamental ways.  We can become the persons that we yearn to be.  We can get it together.  

 

I know this to be true.

 
To wit: I had a violent temper.  I was raised in a household where angry outbursts occurred often.  Like my father and older brother, I could readily fly into a rage and lash out verbally-- or physically.  My younger brother and I fought often.  Even though I was inspired by the teachings of Dr Martin Luther King as a high school student, non-violence was only an aspiration. I struggled with anger into adulthood.   

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Sad But True

This world-

absolutely pure
As is. 

Behind the fear,

Vulnerability. 

Behind that,
Sadness, 

then compassion
And behind that the vast sky.

 -- Rick Fields

 

  “This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we’re unkind.  It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. ”
-- Pema Chodron

Sometimes, insight and healing emerge slowly during the course of Practice.   Like spring gently unfolding across the palette of April, our world slowly greens and blooms.  What was dark, harsh and frigid, slowly brightens, softens and warms.  At a certain point we notice:  It's different now than before.

At other times, insight and healing emerge like a bolt of lightning!

Zap! 

Sometimes coming with a torrential downpour of tears, sometimes not, a Grand Gestalt comes together in a heartbeat. In a flash, in an instant,  we really Get It!  Or perhaps, more accurately -- It Gets Us! 

We can't help but notice.  It's different now than before.

I love comparing notes with others on such awakenings.

 

I was fortunate enough to be at Himalayan Views, a nearby spiritual gift shop/bookstore a few years ago, to hear about a woman's experience of one of those moments.  

 

Suffering from what had been diagnosed as "clinical depression" since adolescence, she had struggled through a series of medications for nearly twenty years before coming across a passage on "the genuine heart of sadness" in a book by Pema Chodron.

Zap!

As she read that passage an awakening had come in a flash.  In a burst of tears -- she knew.  At that instant, she discovered a whole new way to view her experience.  Rather than accept that she had a "broken brain" and needed medication to correct a chemical imbalance, she knew that she could trust her heart.  In that moment, she saw clearly that her deep sadness about the human condition wasn't a sickness, it was an essential Connection to Bodhichitta, the soft and tender core of our Spiritual Heart.  

Like many of us, this woman had felt the power of this deep connection to the Mysterious Reality of Life/Death as a child, but nobody in her life knew what it was.  Her parents didn't understand. Neither did her teachers.  In a society steeped in scientific materialism and a pharmaceutical industry run amuck, she was diagnosed and "treated."  

 

As she read the teaching from Pema Chodron that day, she understood.  Her sadness wasn't a personal flaw.  It wasn't an illness.   That day, she knew that in her Heart of Hearts that she had touched what the Buddha had touched.  Suffering was inherent in the fabric of human life.

 

Now, she just needed to learn how to work with it.  

With the assistance of a supportive counselor and a regular meditation practice, she successfully decreased, and then discontinued, her use of antidepressant medications.  At the point she was sharing her story, had been successfully, sometimes quite joyfully, navigating her life for several years -- drug free.

Please understand: My point here is not that medications are always the wrong approach.  (As a child of the sixties, how could I ever claim that drugs are always a bad thing?)  Drugs simply are what they are.  

 

Over the years, I have had dear friends whose quality of life has been improved through the use of prescription drugs to address their psychological and physical health. Yet, I also have friends who, like the woman I met that day, found that their quality of life improved only when they stopped relying on medications.  There is no "one size, fits all" mode of healing.

Instead, what I am pointing to here, is that there is a great value in exploring what our society conditions us to avoid.  When approached skillfully, the emotional energies of honest grief can be the gateway to a deeper Connection to our True Nature. 
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Know What?

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.”  

― Pema Chödrön

 

"I vow to live a life of Not-knowing, 

giving up fixed ideas about myself and the universe."

-- The First Tenet of the Zen Peacemakers

 

 

Over the years, the assumption that I absolutely understand what is going on, and know exactly what to do about it, has tripped me up -- a lot.  The presumption that I know all the salient variables and know exactly what someone else should to do about it, has wrecked havoc.

 

In this vast interconnected web of energy floating through an infinite sea of space and possibility, the thought that I really know what is going on is just a presumption.  Grasped tightly and clung to, it can be patently presumptuous. 

The Summer of '62

 

My first boss, Charlie Winchester, foreman of the maintenance department at a small factory in a small town north of Chicago, had a decidedly less delicate way of making the point.  The memory brings a smile and warm glow to my heart.

In those days, I was able to get a relatively good paying union job for the summer at the factory where my dad worked.  It was time.  I had to start saving money for the college education that would, perhaps, propel me up a notch in social status, if not in income.  I wanted to be a public school teacher.

Charlie was a kind and able mentor.  His spirit pervaded the maintenance crew.  During the seven summers I worked there, I was well supported by a small team of guys willing to show "the kid" the ropes.  I learned a lot about how things work -- on many levels.

One particular lesson emerged when Charlie came around the corner to find me standing in front of a piece of production machinery.  I'd been trusted to replace the belt that connected it's electric motor to the drill assembly.  It should have been a simple repair. 

 

It wasn't.

Belching smoke, the entire machine was lurching erratically and making threatening noises.  As soon as I saw him, I began to explain what I had done and why.  Interrupting me mid-sentence, he immediately shut the machine down. (Duh!) 

 

Then, with the ever-present cigar stub clenched in his smile,  Charlie took a pencil and a small spiral bound notepad from the plastic pencil holder that always rode in his front shirt pocket.  He opened the pad to a blank page, and in large, capital letters, he wrote the word "ASSUME."

"You know what happens when you assume?" he asked.
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When You Wish Upon a Star

"What you are looking for is already in you…You already are everything you are seeking."

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

 

 

"The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment." 

-- Jon Kabat-Zinn

Sometimes, it seems like a previous lifetime.  

 
Almost twenty years ago, I sat on the front porch of a rustic A-frame perched on a ridge overlooking the campus of Zen Mountain Monastery. It was nearing midnight.  Inside, my housemates, also in Zen Training at ZMM, were asleep.  

 

We''d all been up in time to walk down to the first meditation at 4:30 am that morning.   

 

Then, after a long full day, I'd walked up the ridge in the dark, alone.  As if a high pressure deadline day of producing a set of CD's during "work practice" wasn't enough, I had been assigned the service position of Evening Jikido.  I was in charge of ringing, banging, and clacking a collection of wooden blocks, bells, drums, and gongs to announce the evening service, time the meditation periods, lead the walking meditation, and close the service.  Then, as others headed back to their quarters, I had to straighten up the coffee service counter, clean out the coffeemakers, and set them up for morning coffee.  It was well after the obligatory "lights out" at 9:30 pm by the time I climbed back up the ridge.  Exhausted, I crawled into bed as soon as I arrived.  

 

I couldn't sleep. 

After about an hour, I  slowly and silently made my way outside into the crisp, clear,  mountain air.  There I Just Sat Still, breathing, and gazing into the deep blue-black infinity of a  star-filled Catskill Mountain sky.  

 

At that point, I knew ZMM wasn't working for me.  

 

Yikes.
 

Moving Right Along

  
Over the course of the past six months, it had become increasingly clear that the rigid, hard-driving, and unabashedly authoritarian nature of the Roshi's Eight Gates of Zen Residential Training didn't ring true to me.  For sure, I was grateful to have experienced some openings at ZMM and made some new friends.  Yet, to be honest, the community culture at Zen Mountain Monastery wasn't all that different than the outside world. It seemed like the same old story. Business as usual in a capitalist society.

 

At Zen Mountain Monastery there was a "big boss. " He ruled the roost and ran the show. His word was the law. He, his protege, and a few senior monk/supervisors told us what to do, when and how to do it.  Being a spiritual training program, they told us what to believe in, to boot.  (I was incredulous when one of the senior monks --who has since become a "transmitted" teacher -- snarled at me that Thich Nhat Hanh wasn't teaching Real Zen!  WTF?) 

 

The senior monk/supervisors, and the worker-bees put in long, often quite strenuous, days on a strictly timed schedule keeping the retreat center and grounds, publications operation, and the mail-order businesses going -- as well as attending the mandatory daily meditation periods and zen services. 

 

It was stressful. 

 

As well as our "work practice" assignments, we each were required to rotate through ritual service positions which could require intricate and demanding physical moves performed in public.  Supervisors and meditation hall monitors barked out orders and corrections, even during silent meditation practice.  We were "on," with very little down time between required activities, through days that began at 4:30 am and ended with lights out 9:30 pm.  

 

It was exhausting.   

 

Meanwhile, the Roshi, had his own space and seemed to come and go as he pleased.  He rarely was around at early morning meditations, communal mealtimes, or evening services.  He showed up in the Zendo to give talks on Sunday, to meet privately with students in Dokusan a few times a week, to preside over special ceremonies, and to hold court during the monthly sesshin.  Of course, as the Top Dog, he also met with his managers and the board when he thought it was necessary.  There was no doubt that this guy was in charge.  At one point during my residency, he unilaterally changed the entire organizational structure to conform more closely to what he had just come to believe was the structure of Dogen's medieval monastic community. 

 

The rest of the time (if he wasn't traveling to teach/recruit elsewhere, including New Zealand,) he appeared to hang out doing what he wanted to do in his modest, but spacious, home. It's large yard fronted on the Esopus, a beautiful mountain river.  As well being the Roshi, he was a pioneer digital photographer.  (The first iteration of ZMM was the Zen Arts Center that he founded on that site.)  

 

The couple of times I was sent down to do his yard work as "work practice," I saw that he had two state of the art Mac computers running .  As I picked up winter downfall and raked leaves, he spent hours and hours at the computer screens doing what he was doing.  He had articles, books, and interviews in publication.  His art was on the newly emerging world wide web. 

 

Right across the road, the rest of us were living communally in cramped quarters, spending hours in the zendo each day, and working away under the close, and sometimes verbally abusive supervision of the senior monk/department managers.  I was on a scholarship, but -- believe it or not -- folks were paying for the privilege of being in residence.

 

Looking back, I guess this was not a big surprise.  

 

We live in a capitalist society that prides itself as "democratic," yet operates in hierarchical,  authoritarian patterns.  There are inequalities of power and privilege in all areas of life. Our families, schools, churches, and workplaces are all set up that way.  But, unlike the usual workplace, where folks had the opportunity to bitch about things when the boss wasn't around,  those types of conversations didn't take place at the lunch table.  (Such behavior violated a number of the traditional Bodhisattva Training Precepts).  We also, couldn't look forward to punching out and going home -- although we did have a couple of days off schedule each week.

 

When I entered residency, I knew that this would be the deal.  I'd been involved in the community for over a year.  I already had spent a month in residence during the Fall Ango training period before entering residency in the Spring. Yet,  at the point that I entered -- at age 59 -- I thought that I might be able to suck it up and ride it through for a year's commitment. 

I was wrong. 

 

Toward the One

 

I had come of age in the late 60's and early 70's.*  Like many others, I was part of the widespread counter-cultural ferment of that era.  By the time I had graduated from college with the infamous Class of 1969, I had experienced altered states of consciousness (with the various medicines available).  I soon began an exploration of meditation and Eastern mysticism.  

 

I had a peak experience in 1972 that affirmed to me the existence of the One Love that is the ground of our being.  It was experienced with an outpouring of tears of joy and wonder at the Perfect Beauty embedded in the fabric of existence.  It only lasted for about twenty minutes or so. I wasn't on drugs at the time.  I was actually sitting at my desk writing up a lesson plan for the High School Civics class I was to teach the next day. 

 

It blew my mind.  It was beyond belief. 

 

By then, being the geek I am, I had poured through volumes of literature on the nature of mind and mysticism, including the scriptures of the world's religions and numerous commentaries . It had become clear to me that there was spiritual dimension of being that had been experienced by seers, sages, saints, avatars throughout the ages.  Intellectually, I had accepted that there was a direct experience of Divine Oneness at the heart of reality.  Now, I felt it in my bones.   

 

I now knew, in my heart of hearts, that we are not only all in this together -- we are all this, together!  

Unfortunately, even a trip to the Mountaintop wasn't enough to heal the deep wounds of a traumatic childhood.  Radicalized, I wasn't able to accept the American Dream as the path to happiness.  My marriage collapsed.  Addicted to romantic love,  there were more marriages and more kids. I  still experienced bouts of anxiety and depression. I suffered a number of serious "career" burnouts and returned to low status jobs as a matter of principle.

 

Yet through it all, I still continued to return to mediation.  I studied and practiced with a number of teachers, mostly in the Buddhist tradition.  I read extensively, corresponded and compared notes with kindred spirits.

 

So, when I was finally in a position to retire and become independently poor, I had followed the longstanding, and fundamentally disempowering convention that it was necessary for an "authority" to validate my own experience of the Sacred for it to be real.  I thought I still might be missing something essential. 

I wasn't. And, as best I can tell, neither are you!  

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