Come As You Are

The spiritual teacher Mooji says that the most frustrating thing he hears from his students is the remark, “Mooji, I have so many questions!”  “How is it possible,” he says, “that a human being could have more than one question at a time?  Perhaps he thinks he has more than one question, but he must mean something else by this.  Many thoughts, perhaps, but many questions?  Impossible!”

We constantly confuse thinking and experiencing.  We imagine we are in love because we think about love.  We imagine we are solving problems because we think about problems.  We do this with all the big questions of our lives: “What should I be doing with my time?”  “What am I upset about?”  “Where can I find true happiness?”  We imagine we are asking these questions because we are thinking these sentences.  But a question isn’t a sentence or a series of words ending in an upward inflection of voice.  A question is a way of being.  Specifically, a question is a way of being that involves the intention to wait for a true answer.  So when we think one thought after another without having any intention of waiting with any of them, we aren’t asking questions at all, even if we use the right punctuation marks.

Truly asking a question is like going to an airport to pick up a good friend.  You can’t be at five different airports waiting for five different people at the same time.  You’re going to have to make the trek in one direction, head towards one gate, and then, quite possibly, sit for a very long time.  If it’s for a good, reliable friend, though, you don’t care.  You know the friend will show up eventually, and you know the wait will be worth it.  But the way most people approach the deep questions of their lives, you’d think they’d never known any good, reliable friends.  It’s as though they think, “It’s too risky to go to one airport.  Maybe I’ll just wait at home and see if someone nice rings my bell.  Or maybe I’ll just be learn to be satisfied with the people who are already around me.”  In this way, we develop an entourage of thoughts and facts in our minds.  These bits of information about the world are like those fake friends we know “from around” who aren’t really there for us, even if they’re always there with us.

But this is how we live, most of the time, and more tragically, this is how we love.  If the deepest question in life is, “How can I experience real love?” this is precisely the question we think we ask on a daily basis but rarely ever do.  True love, you could say, is an answer for which we’re usually too impatient to ask the question.  And because we can’t ask the question with any intention of waiting, we hastily try out loving people who cross our paths, and then, when we fail to be satisfied by them, we blame them or we blame love itself.  It’s like blaming “5” because it ended up not being the answer to “2 + 2 =”  It never occurs to us that the question, “How can I experience real love?” might have an answer that would be impossible for us to be acquainted with ahead of time.  The answer might not be a person at all.  It might be something, some presence we’ve not yet seen in this world, but which we nevertheless might come to know by living in the question.  That prospect sounds risky, of course.  It sounds like the sort of blind faith of which we think only stupid people capable.  But what exactly are we using to evaluate the risk of waiting?  Are we scared of waiting because we’ve been disappointed, or are we perpetually disappointed because we’ve never yet learned to wait?

It’s interesting that waiting is such an anxious activity for us.  Of course, sometimes this is natural: waiting at the doctor’s office to find out whether you have a terminal illness is no fun.  But this is not the only kind of waiting that life offers us, even if we so often act as though it is.  There are other kinds of waiting — for example, taking a bath, in which the waiting is waiting in a tub full of warm water.  That sounds like a strange example, I know, but it actually isn’t, for when we know we are in the right place, waiting can be a kind of pleasurable absorption, in the same way that luxuriating in a bath is not an anxious precursor to something else, but rather, the main event.  Sometimes waiting is a type of becoming-full in which the reward happens in the waiting, not just in the future.  But we were never taught to live or love this way.  We were taught to run as many baths as possible and never sit in any of them.  We know a lot about opening the taps of our hearts, but not much about staying immersed in their flow.

Now here’s the important part: learning to experience waiting as pleasure is something we learn in our bodies, not in our minds.  Think again of taking a bath.  What convinces you to stay in a bath rather than leap out is not the thought, “I should stay here,” but rather, the ability to know pleasure in your body.  And this is why the waiting that love demands is not just the abstract thought, “I’m waiting for love to appear” or “I’m waiting for this relationship to work out.”  That sort of waiting is waiting in the head, and it isn’t very pleasurable at all.  But if you look into your body, you will discover that there are parts that feel good, right here, right now.  Of course, you may feel pain in parts of your body, but if you look honestly you will see that pain is not 100% of your bodily experience.  If it were, you’d already be dead.  So once you understand that there is already some pleasure in your body, you can begin to choose to focus on that pleasure.  And if you allow yourself to stay with the small but real pleasure that already exists in your body, you will see that it starts to grow and pervade your whole physical being.  Pretty soon it feels good just to have a body, just to be alive.  But you’ll never know that kind of pleasure unless you keep your attention in one place, unless you learn to wait.

This is love itself.  We were taught to think of love as another person, but if we can’t feel love in our bodies, we can’t feel love with others.  We might think we are “loving” others when we lose touch with our bodies and flee into the thoughts in our minds, but this “love” never can be real.  It can neither last nor satisfy.  It’s hard for us to believe this.  When we look for love in our bodies rather than in our stories, many fears visit us.  They tell us that we need answers and confirmations from the outside world.  We need a wedding, a bouquet of roses, a box of chocolates.  They tell us we shouldn’t trust the small and steady glow that we feel welling up inside.  These fears open the doors of their limousines and implore us to get in.  But in the end, the choice is ours whether to leave with them or to wait right here.

All your life, you’ve been told there was someone you were supposed to be.  This confused you, of course, because the person you were becoming never yet existed, so you were forced to try on the world’s false answers to the question of who you are like a person trying on a set of badly fitting hand-me-downs.  Even when you tried to break with society, to break with the crowd, you still tried to wear the clothes of Christ or the Buddha or Jimi Hendrix.  You never believed you could come as you are to love, simply by learning to care for the small glow of pleasure that comes just from having a physical form, that comes from asking for love from yourself and then waiting right there in the small but happy waiting place of your body.  But the more you wait, the more you will believe that you are the one you’ve been waiting for.  You yourself are the feast.  Take your time or hurry up.  The choice is yours, so don’t be late.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically- and lyrically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

Beach Houses

A spiritual practice is like a beach house.  In the middle of winter, suddenly everybody wants one.  People start sharing inspirational quotes, taking classes, giving each other advice.  If you don’t have a spiritual practice, it seems sometimes, you’re about as interesting as a cold slab of city concrete.  The social pressure around spirituality is personified best by that guy we all know who comes back from Florida in February and says, “What are you still doing here in the city, man?  I bought this amazing villa right on the ocean for next to nothing.”  And you think, “Could it really be that easy?”  Luckily, you probably stall and do nothing, because when you see that guy next year and ask him about his villa, he shakes his head and says, “The hurricane took it away … but let’s not talk about that.”  This year, you see, he’s found a better investment …

And so it is with spiritual practices.  They tend to attract people who are looking to escape their lives and are therefore prone to building “houses without foundations.”  One way this lack of foundation tends to manifest in our culture is in our obsession with learning “techniques.”  A lot of what we call spiritual practice in the West is actually nothing more than spiritual technique, and this confusion is very telling about why these paths so often fail to make us more genuinely happy.  A technique, as I define it, is a series of steps that yield a result regardless of whether you understand why or how they work.  For example, if you get on a treadmill at the gym and stay on it for forty minutes, you will experience cardio-vascular benefits even if you haven’t been paying attention.  You can daydream or listen to your iPod or watch TV and you’ll get the same effect either way.  We like techniques, because they are predictable and don’t require us to be present, a way of being we find threatening.  So when we approach the issue of our happiness, we tend to look for a technique: we pray, chant, recite mantras, perform visualizations — all with the unspoken assumption that we will do these things only with part of our awareness and still hope to derive benefit from them.

Now, techniques have their uses.  Sometimes they help us spontaneously discover some possibility in us we didn’t know existed — just as, for example, if you start writing without knowing what you’re writing about you may well stumble across a good idea.  But in our obsession with technique, we neglect a very important capacity in us: our ability to evaluate the present moment to see where happiness can be found in it.  This faculty of evaluation is generally the last thing people want to depend on, because for all their bragging about having found the truth, most people actually have enormous doubt in their ability to evaluate what makes them happy.  When faced with the question, “What do I want?” most people substitute the question, “What should my life look like?”  So they do hours of yoga, therapy, exercise, etc., as though they expect that a genie will appear at the other end of that time and say, “I pronounce you happy.”  But there is no such genie, and there is nothing your happiness depends on other than your own powers of observation.  As a friend of mine always says, you’re going to have to trust in your own magic.

So how do we do this?  How do we learn that greatest of spiritual practices: trusting ourselves?  Well, to start with, we don’t develop trust by simply telling ourselves that we are trustworthy.  Trust is earned, not given.  You wouldn’t follow a stranger down an alley just because he says, “Trust me.”  In fact, just as people who say “trust me” are usually the last ones you should trust, so too the part of your mind that initially insists it is trustworthy — the part that usually asks you to trust your prejudices — is usually the part you should least believe.  We develop trust in ourselves by first of all understanding that we are not yet deserving of our own trust, at least not completely.  There is such a thing as healthy suspicion of ourselves, just as there is healthy faith.  The balance between trust and suspicion is like the similar balance you need to have if you’re going to find a romantic partner who makes you happy: if you never take a chance with anyone, you’ll always be alone, but by the same token, God help you if you’re the sort of person that wants to be married after the third date.  Trusting in yourself is going to take some time, so you can’t come on too strong.

As in our relationships with others, trust in ourselves begins by testing our powers of evaluation in small situations.  This is why the Buddha recommends starting with the breath.  Becoming aware of how you breathe is a great place to start asking the question, “What would make me happy?”  There are ways of breathing that bring peace, ease, and a sense of security to the body, and there are ways of breathing that bring tension, dis-ease, and anxiety.  And while we all would love a manual that says, “Breathe long 24 times, then short 16 times, then experience bliss,” it doesn’t work that way.  The only person who knows how to breathe well is you yourself.  We talk a lot about “loving ourselves,” but the breath is a perfect place to experience this love on level beyond mere talk.  How you breathe is a concrete manifestation of how you take care of yourself in all aspects of your life, so you’re going to have to look and see what is really serving you.  You can also use sensations in the body in a similar way.  You can ask yourself, “What parts of my body feel good right now?” and put your awareness on those parts.  And even if you aren’t yet ready to sit still and meditate in a formal way, you can get up every morning and ask yourself the question, “What action can I take today that would be an expression of loving myself?”  When I give this assignment to my meditation students, they tend to groan as if I were torturing them, and this is understandable, because asking these questions throws us back on a foundational part of ourselves we’ve been scared to trust for so long.  But without this foundation, everything else will fall down in time.

I recently came across this interview with an elder of the Crow tribe who said something very interesting.  He said, “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough — even white people — the spirits will begin to speak to them.  It’s the power of the spirits coming from the land.  The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.”  His words made me think that this is the tragedy of America: not that life has outwardly changed or that we no longer have the same traditions — but more importantly, that we have lost the conviction that wisdom comes from staying in one place and knowing it really well.  Not only do we move around physically so much nowadays, but more importantly, we move our awareness even more: we go from technique to technique, from discipline to discipline, from desire to desire, without ever pausing to wait for the spirits of our inner wisdom to emerge.  And really, our true homeland is none other than ourselves, that geographic region that spans from head to foot.  It really doesn’t matter whether you go to India or Thailand, whether you live in the city or the country, whether circumstances around you are good or bad or happy or sad.  What matters is that you learn how to wait and observe your own mind.  Only then you will find a place that truly receives you.  Only then you will find a place you can call home.

Everything else is just postcards of palm trees.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically- and lyrically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the Spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

This Is Not a Crisis

Jung once wrote, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.”  It was out of this idea that he developed his theory of crisis.  Crisis, Jung said, is the moment in a person’s life when an external disaster shows him the unsustainability of his inner conflicts.  A person gets fired from work, loses his partner, or simply finds that the idea of “growing old” has taken on an undeniable urgency — and faced with these turmoils, he experiences the sensation of having nowhere to run.  For Jung, these sorts of predicaments, painful as they are, are signs of health, because they reveal that the individual has reached a point where his inner psychological system refuses to rest until it has worked out what needs to be worked out.

Most of what Jung says is true, in my opinion.  But there’s a problem with the idea that crisis is inherently a sign of health.  We all know lots of people who are perpetually in crisis, and these “emergencies” don’t seem to make them any happier or healthier.  So while crisis does reveal internal conflict, it often does so in a form that makes resolving that conflict impossible.  This is because our ideas about crisis are usually connected with the people in our early childhood who taught us those ideas.  Most of us learned about crisis from parents or guardians who also instilled in us the notion that our role in life, our reason for existing, was to fix or comfort them.  And because we were children then, we believed in this role, even though it was impossible for us to perform it.  When Mommy or Daddy fell apart, we learned to experience the resulting instability not just as instability, but also, as a call to which we somehow had a duty to respond.  And now, as adults, we continue to relate to the world in the same way, through this simultaneous sense of panic and powerlessness.  Things don’t go well and we think, “This is a crisis.  I must do something about this crisis.  But I can’t do anything about this crisis.”  And so we shut down, both emotionally and physically.

Someone I love recently gave me this pamphlet.  It was from a little-known (as least to me) 1970’s movement called “Integrated Body Psychotherapy,” and at first I was somewhat skeptical.  The pamphlet contained a brief overview of what most people today would simply call “co-dependency,” but the pamphlet also contained an interesting list of “mantras” that the user was instructed to repeat in order to break this habit of co-dependency.  One of the phrases particularly caught my attention.  It said, “This is not a crisis.”  The pamphlet explained that the goal of repeating this phrase was to break the habit of thinking that we are entitled to love only if we can fix or repair other people.  It went on to say that when we live with the self-deception that our lovableness depends upon our illusory power to make other people happy, we experience all their unmet needs as threats to our identity.  A lover or friend or boss has an unfulfilled need and we immediately interpret that need both as a personal rejection and as a loss of our visibility in the other person’s eyes: we disappear, or so we think.  For this reason, it can be extremely helpful, when faced with conflict, confrontation, or the dissatisfaction of others, to remind oneself, “This is not a crisis.  It is only my conditioning that makes me think so.”

Our crisis-habit goes deeper than words, though, and this is where the work of meditation comes in.  It’s unfortunate how many people in the States see meditation as nothing more than a technique for achieving relaxation (as if being able to fall asleep were the crowning achievement of being alive.)  But meditation is much more than that.  Meditation, put simply, is the art of setting healthy boundaries in the mind so that we can flourish.  Most of us did not learn healthy boundaries as children, so it makes sense that when we close our eyes and make an effort to focus, say, on our breath, we soon find ourselves attacked by thoughts that present themselves in the form of a crisis.  These thoughts say, “You have to think about us!” and we accept their urgency because we feel we would be betraying something or someone otherwise — just as all our lives, we’ve been accepting the alarm of those we love because we’re scared of losing their affection otherwise.

When I teach beginner’s classes in meditation, by far the most common complaint I get is, “I have to think my thoughts!  How will I function otherwise?”  To which I reply, “Why do you think those thoughts are ‘yours’?  Did you ask them to be in your head?  And if you didn’t ask them to be there, if they don’t respect your wishes, then why do you accept them as your responsibility?”  The answer to these questions, of course, is that we’ve been taught that when we’re in any relationship, we’re not allowed to experience any separateness: separate lives, separate desires, separate toothbrushes.  And so it is with the thoughts in our heads (i.e. our relationship with ourselves.)  These thoughts pop up screaming, and we think, “This is my problem too.  It would be selfish of me not to respond.”  So meditation is not a technique.  It’s the practice of learning to create duality between oneself and the thoughts in one’s mind.  The practice, as it were, of saying, “Thanks for sharing, but I have a right to my own life, my own peace, my own destiny.”

I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship between the crisis-habit and creativity.  Our culture puts constant pressure on artists to accept unhealthy boundaries between their art and the world, and I think this is why people suffer so much around creativity.  Artists are perpetually given messages that they should value their work only in as much as it makes others happy.  Most people find it nearly impossible to experience art without asking the question, “Do I think it’s good?”  That’s probably the result of our democratic tradition, which has taught us never to let more than thirty seconds of experience pass by without “voting” on it (think, for example, of the way Facebook’s “liking” function has become a structure through which the public receives art.)  But as artists, we need to be especially vigilant of this issue at the point of production, for when we sit down to do our work, there are going to be a million voices telling us, “We need you to make something really good, something that will please us.”  And so it’s very important for us to remember that, just as feminism has tried to teach women that their bodies do not exist solely for the purpose of pleasing men, our art does not exist solely for the purpose of being validated by the world.  You can’t find a voice in your art when you’re constantly trying to please other voices.  You can’t work expression of self when you’re constantly trying to make an impression on others.

As many of you know, most of my life recently has been devoted to making an album.  It’s been a transforming experience, one that feels deeper than I’ve ever found in music before.  And upon reflection, I think that most of the transformations have taken the form of facing my own demons, not by conquering them, but by understanding that I don’t need to please them.  I haven’t raised nearly enough money, sung well enough, or done something “cool” enough to make the voices in my head be silent.  But I’ve learned to say to the voices, again and again, “I have a right to my own music.  I have a right to my own voice.  I have a right to my own destiny.”  And what I’ve been finding is that, with each repetition of this confrontation, I become more “myself” in some inexplicable but undeniable way.  It’s not that the endless movie-reel of crisis ever shuts off.  It’s just that I’m finding it simpler to get up and leave the theater.  As a friend of mine says, “I’m not sure life gets easier.  But you get stronger.  My God, do you get stronger.”

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the Spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

A Guide to New Year’s Resolutions

“People don’t really change.”  How often have you heard that phrase?  How often have you said it yourself?  I heard it a lot growing up, and so I was surprised when I met my teacher and he told me the opposite.  “People really do change,” he said.  “Not magically, not in a day — but in accordance with the actions they take.”  Tolstoy once said that the greatest surprise in a man’s life is to find that he has become old, and the same can be said of all change.  It amazes and dazzles us, but if we look, we will see that the magician behind our greatest transformations is none other than ourselves.

It always seems a bit arbitrary to choose January 1st as a day to start making changes, but that arbitrariness is no different than the arbitrariness of all beginnings.  And the nice thing about arbitrary beginnings is that they remind us that the most important question is always, “If not now, when?”  And yet, the way we relate to New Year’s resolutions most of the time is the way we relate to all change in our lives: we hide, either behind doubt, depression, or desire.  Denial: “Resolutions never work.”  Depression: “Resolutions — ughh!”  Desire: “I resolve to always be happy, laughing, dancing, and joyful in 2013.”  And so it is that the new year takes on the character of the old before even its first day is over.

So here are a few guidelines I’ve picked up over the years about how to make resolutions that actually lead to change.  A lot of these guidelines come from the Buddha’s teachings (or at least my understanding of them,) but a lot of them are common sense.  I hope they can be of some use:

1. Pick one or two resolutions to work on at a time: Remember that your ability to keep one promise to yourself affects your ability to keep all other promises, so you want to do one or two changes well.  Remember: You’re watching yourself, so try to set a good example.
2. Make your resolutions specific and attainable: Don’t say, “I resolve to be more happy,” because you don’t have direct control over your level of happiness (though you do have indirect control over it.)  It’s much better to make a list of qualities that you feel contribute to your unhappiness and work on one or two of them.
3. Observe, don’t judge: New habits take root when you understand their benefit with all of your awarness, not just with your intellectual, thinking mind.  This means that beating yourself up over, for example, eating too much junk food, is not only unkind, it’s also unhelpful.  When you judge yourself, the mind sets up a screen, a partition, so that one side goes on calling you names and the other side goes on secretly telling you to eat more junk food.  A wiser approach is not to beat yourself, but rather, to ask the question, “How do I feel when I eat junk food?” — and then to look, honestly and closely, with all of your awareness.
4. Acknowledge your efforts and accomplishments: For all our selfishness, we actually have a very hard time patting ourselves on the back for anything.  We think it’s vain or prideful to focus on the ways in which we’re improving.  But the truth is, if you can’t acknowledge your improvements, you can’t improve.  How can you weed a garden if you think everything is a weed?  You end up uprooting the entire plot, flowers and all.
5. “Trading Candy for Gold”: The Buddha said that you should never try to give something up until you can understand this sacrifice as a trade of a lesser happiness for a greater one.  So don’t just say, “I resolve to give up smoking” until you understand the greater happiness that this resolution is aimed at.  Happiness is not an abstraction, furthermore, so don’t say, “I’m going to quit smoking in order to be more healthy,” because your mind won’t understand that.  Say instead, “I resolve to go for a long walk or eat some good food or listen to music I love every time I have a craving for a cigarette.”  There has to be a favorable balance of trade, or else your mind, like all victims of oppression, will eventually rebel.
6. Don’t throw money at things: If your resolution is to learn how to play the guitar, don’t begin by buying an expensive guitar.  You’ll just see your new purchase collecting dust and curse yourself for having wasted money. Get a cheap guitar or borrow one, and tell yourself that once you’ve learned to play a certain number of chords you’ll buy yourself a more expensive one.  One exception to this rule, however, is spending money on classes, because classes can actually help instill new habits.  But even with classes, you have to remember that it is ultimately your inner qualities that are responsible for your external changes of habits, so avoid the habit of seeing money as essential for growth.
7. Start with the top layer: Don’t say, “I resolve to be more confident,” because “confidence” is made up of many layers.  Start with an area in your life in which you feel least confident and work with that.  For example, if you have a lack of confidence because you feel unintelligent or out of shape, work with one of those areas first.  What you accomplish with the top layer of your insecurity will automatically influence the way your deal with all the other layers.
8. Thirty Days: This is very important.  Don’t say, “I resolve to do __ daily,” because missing even one day will then throw you and you’ll be likely to give up.  Tell yourself, “I resolve to do __ every day for the first thirty days of 2013.”  If you can do something every day for thirty days, you can continue it more or less daily without a lapse of one day derailing your whole practice.
9. Use a journal or some other tool of reflection:  You can’t change a habit without seeing clearly whether or not you are following your resolution to change it.  Keeping a journal really helps.  For example, if you want to become more patient, you can tell yourself, “For thirty days, I will write down one time every day when I was patient and one time when I was impatient.”  Doing that will create the transparency necessary to make the change.  Otherwise your old opinion of yourself — that you have been and always will be an impatient person — will run the show.

So what sorts of resolutions should you make?  The best resolutions are the ones that come to you out of your own inner wisdom.  On the other hand, it can be useful to see some examples.  I’ve been asking everyone I know to share their resolutions with me, and so I’ve been able to assemble a community-based list of small actions and practices that have helped people make good changes in their lives.  Feel free to adapt them however you like.  And remember: work with just one or two!

General

(1) Daily walk: Take one long walk (minimum 45 minutes) every day.  The easiest way I’ve ever found to make life better.

(2) Face your fears: For thirty days, do one thing every day that you either (a) are scared of doing, (b) have been putting off doing, or (c) have never done before.

(3) Count your blessings: For thirty days, keep a gratitude list.  You can start with the gratitude you have for things and people around you, but make sure to include gratitude for your own good qualities.

Arts/Creativity

(4) “Morning pages”: Every day for thirty days, write three longhand pages to clear your mind.  (More info here: http://paperartstudio.tripod.com/artistsway/id3.html)

(5) Discover new music: Need a good place to start?  Check out 1,000 Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die (http://www.1000recordings.com/)

(6) Art Galleries/Museums: Once a month, go to an art gallery or museum

Health/Exercise

(7) Go to the gym at least once a week

(8) Take a least one yoga class a week

(9) Stretch every morning

(10) Do one headstand/somersault a day

Meditation/Reflection

(11) Breath meditation: There are many classes in breath meditation.  I’ll be teaching a beginner’s class in Buddhist breath meditation starting in January (http://www.dnymc.org/schedule.htm)

(12) Metta meditation: The practice of extending goodwill to oneself and others.  Once a day for thirty days.  There is a good guided meditation on Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s website (http://www.dhammatalks.org/mp3_collections_index.html#guided)

(13) Self-forgiveness meditation: Once a day for thirty days.  Jack Kornfield has some good guided meditations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7OzbeGud8)

(14) Tonglen: The Tibetan practice of taking suffering from others and giving them happiness.  Once a day for thirty days. (http://www.naljorprisondharmaservice.org/pdf/Tonglen.htm)

(15) Active imagination and journaling: Jung’s technique of having a dialogue with oneself in journal form.  Twenty minutes a day for thirty days. (http://www.jung.org/Staples.html)

Healthy Renunciation

(16) Give up the Internet one day a week

(17) Don’t look at a phone or computer for at least one hour before going to bed and/or one hour after rising

(18) Give up sugar (specify frequency)

(19) Give up bread (specify frequency)

(20) Give up meat (specify frequency)

(21) Spend one morning a week in total silence

(22) Fast one day a month

(23) One-year clothing rule: Give away any item of clothing you haven’t worn in a year.

(24) One corner at a time: Once a week, clean one corner or area of your house.
(25) Few bites to full: Try to stop eating when you are a few bites away from being totally full.

(26) Straight to the doggie-bag: In restaurants, ask the waiter to pack up half of your plate before you even start eating.

Generosity

(27) Give to a charity: If you choose to do this with an “auto-pay” option, make sure to read about what the charity is doing, so you can bring awareness to your generosity

(28) Collect change: When buying something, don’t use exact change.  Then, when you’ve accumulated change, give it to a homeless person or put it in a tip-jar

(29) Tip 5% more than you normally would

Relationships/Communication

(30) Make I-statements: In speaking to others, try to replace judgments and  interpretations with statements about “how I feel” and “what I need.”  Learning something about Non-Violent Communication is helpful (http://www.cnvc.org/Training/nvc-chapter-1)

(31) Try to speak slightly more slowly and with more pauses: The more you pause and speak more slowly, the more chance you’ll be able to catch something you’ll regret saying before it comes out of your mouth.
(32) Make ammends: Once a week, think of someone to whom you acted badly and make a verbal apology to that person

(33) The old-fashioned call: Call someone (not text or email) you haven’t talked to in more than a month

(34) The old-fashioned letter: Write and mail one longhand letter a week

Education/Self-Improvement

(35) Take a writing class

(36) Take an acting class

(37) Take a music class

(38) Study a foreign language

Exploration/Adventure

(39) Take a vacation this year: You might be able to afford it!  Subscribe to a weekly email service offering the cheapest travel.  There is Travelzoo and many others (http://www.travelzoo.com/top20/)

(40) Join Groupon etc., and do one new cheap thing a week

(41) Once a week, pick a new neighborhood or part of town and go there

Money

(42) Save a certain amount every day/week/month: If you use an automatic withdrawal from your account into a savings account, review your balance regularly so you bring awareness to this process.

(43) Write down all purchases and expenses: There are so many iPhone and computer programs to help with this (https://www.mint.com/, http://www.thedailytracker.com/)

(44) “How much is in my wallet?”: This is a big one in Debtor’s Anonymous.  Every day, for thirty days, try to know at all points in the day how much cash is in your wallet.  This brings great clarity to the process of acquiring and spending money.
I hope some or this proves helpful.  I wish you all a wonderful new year and the joy that comes from the changes we must, and can, make.

Love and light,

Paul

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the Spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost

 

An Acorn For Someone’s Proverb

Ajaan Fuang once said that, for most people, the act of meditating is like climbing a ladder slowly, step by step, to the second floor, and then jumping out the window.  What he meant, I think, is that most people mistakenly see meditation as a preparation for something else.  They make some time to get their minds still, but as soon as they get a glimpse of stillness, a glimpse of contentment, they run off after some other goal.  To a greater or lesser degree, we’re all this way, on or off the meditation cushion: we get a new job or a relationship, or we master a new skill, and all we can think is, “Okay, now what?”  And while we know on some level that the answer to this question is, “Now nothing.  Now just spend time with what you have” it’s still very hard for us to do just that.  We want so badly to throw ourselves out the window!  Because then at least something — as opposed to what we’ve learned to regard as nothing — would be happening.

We blame our short attention spans on chemistry and culture and all kinds of things, but one notion we rarely consider is that attention is intimately connected with the sort of values we have.  “Values” is a delicate word, I know, and we’ve all had quite enough of politicians and demagogues using it in phrases such as “family values” or “Christian values” to suggest that people should be forced to subscribe to a certain belief system.  But our leaders have misused this word, for values aren’t beliefs at all, and their purpose is not to force others to behave or think in a certain way.  To value something means, simply, to regard it as having worth, and this “regarding” is something a person can only accomplish through his or her own individual actions.  If you say you value prayer, for example, but you don’t pray, then you don’t really value prayer.  It doesn’t matter if other people around you are praying or if there is mandatory prayer in your child’s school.  The value you find in an action is the value you yourself bring to it.

The opposite holds true too: if you keep finding yourself distracted by all sorts of worries and resentments, this is because on some level you value them.  That’s a scary thought, I know.  We don’t like to think there’s anything wrong with our values.  We like to think our values are all in order and it’s only that there are so many distractions “out there” in the world that separate us from them (that idea, too, is a value we have.)  But it’s a good philosophical exercise to respond to any thought in the mind by asking the question, “Who is making me think this?”  For if you do that long enough, you start to realize that no one is making you think anything.  You start to realize, “I think these thoughts because they are what I value.”  And if that realization scares you, remember that, despite what New Age gurus tell us, fear is not necessarily a bad thing.  It is, all too often, the beginning of wisdom.

Once we realize that our values are not as we’d like them to be, we can start to change them.  This is the beautiful thing about accepting that we cause ourselves suffering because of our values: that acceptance opens up space for us to change those values.  But how?  The Buddha talked about the cultivation of values as involving two different activities.  He called these activities (a) directed thought and (b) evaluation.  Directed thought means actively thinking certain thoughts.  For example, if you’re learning a musical instrument and struggling with a particular aspect of that skill, you need to assert the thought, “Learning this is hard, but the learning is worthwhile.”  If you don’t actively talk to yourself in this way, your mind will overwhelm you with all sorts of other ideas about how you’re no good and you’ll never get anywhere, etc.  This concept of directed thought is hard for some people to understand, because they’re used to regarding thoughts as passive events in the mind.  But just as we have a choice about the words we say externally (even if we seldom exercise that choice,) we also have a choice in what we say to ourselves internally.  The trick is remembering to remember, but as with any skill, the more you remember to exercise it, the easier and more pleasurable remembering it gets.  In the end, it comes down to this, though: you will not wake up in one morning and find value in what you do.  You will have to assert that value in the face of your distractedness, dullness, and doubt.

The second part of bringing value to any action is evaluation.  In other words, not only do you have to assert the value of your actions, you then have to look and experience what that value feels like.  What does it feel like to do something with care, rather than without it?  The deepest joy in life, we are told, comes from this ability to take care — to take care of ourselves, to take care of others, and to take care of the moment that has been given to us — but if we don’t actually train ourselves to look for and experience that joy, our talk of “care” remains on the level of words.  In our culture, for example, we have an extremely passive attitude toward love.  We view love in much the same way we view our fossil fuels: as a scarce resource to be grabbed, hoarded, and consumed — but over the production of which we have no real control.  We talk excitedly about caring for others, but when there’s a lapse in this initial excitement, we feel certain we are powerless over whether or not we care.  And a good part of the reason we feel powerless is that, when we do have opportunities to love, we never stop to evaluate what it feels like to act lovingly, to take care.  We are scared, quite frankly, to look at the details of love.  If love is like a plant we’ve decided to nurture, our tendency is to keep pouring water, day after day, on the plant without actually looking to see if its leaves and soil are healthy.  And then, if the plant dies, we complain, “What happened?  I cared for that plant so much!”

The values we bring to any activity are also intimately connected with the faculty of memory.  We don’t appreciate the immense power of memory.  We tend to regard memory, at best, as a curiosity of the mind, some old-fashioned trinket left behind in an attic.  But our ability to recollect the past actively is one of the ways we bring value to whatever it is we are doing in the present.  Athletes often talk about “muscle memory,” i.e., the ability of our bodies to remember the most efficient way to carry out a physical task.  But our ability to value what we do is no different: we have to remember what it felt like to value something in the past to be able to find value in the present.  One excellent practice is to recollect every day the times in your life when you were happy.  This might seem like a useless exercise in nostalgia, but it’s important to connect in a felt way to what it’s like to perceive value in your life.  You can deepen this practice by asking yourself questions such as, “Well, what was I doing right then?” but be careful not to answer that question in words, for the point is not to get into a debate with yourself about your failings, but rather, to remember — with the deep wisdom that the body and the heart have — what it feels like to live a life of value.

Above all, we have to remember that there are no intrinsically valuable actions.  There might be some intrinsically good actions, but it’s up to us to perceive the goodness of these, and if we don’t learn how to do that, we’ll never really reap the benefits of our work, whatever it is.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a teacher or a social worker or you work in a soup kitchen.  Without bringing value to what you do, your life, in the end, will seem like nothing more than a long, tedious to-do list.  But by learning to bring value to your actions, however small, you find your to-do list yielding great happiness.  As Leonard Cohen wrote,

If you are lucky,
You will grow old
And live
A life of errands.
You will discern
What people need
And provide it
Before they ask.
You will drive your car
Here and there
Delivering and fetching
And neither the traffic
Nor the weather
Will bother you
In the least.
You will whip down the 405
To San Diego
To pick up an acorn
For someone’s proverb …

I like that phrase, “an acorn for someone’s proverb,” because it reminds us that generosity is not, as many people believe, a matter of giving money or somehow repairing the world.  The basis of generosity is wisdom: the understanding that gifts have value to the extent that we value giving.  When we understand this, we will see that we always have something to give.  The content of our generosity isn’t the main issue, in other words, but rather, the value we place on generosity itself.  Most people can accept that it’s good to be generous, and most people are already generous to some to degree.  The problem is that they don’t actively assert the value of their generosity as they are giving, and so as a result, they often feel resentful as soon as they give and don’t immediately get recognition for their giving.  Some people find it extremely painful to be generous for precisely this reason.  But if we hold generosity as a value, which means understanding the happiness it holds apart from the recognition of others, we won’t be vulnerable to the thought that we aren’t appreciated.  Then can we experience the truth of Rabindranath Tagore’s maxim:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life is service.
I acted, and behold, service was joy.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically- and lyrically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Medicine For a Ghost, will be out in the Spring of 2013.  For more information, please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/medicineforaghost