Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Thanks giving for the 99%

Here is my Thanksgiving food for thought about those turkeys, the one percent. It's a quote from the venerable Kyabgon Traleg Rinpoche.

"You must realize that if your whole purpose in life is to pursue wealth, to protect friends and relatives, and to destroy enemies, you will not be spending your time well and are actually causing a lot of harm. When death arrives nothing will be of any use except the spiritual insights you developed while alive."



HSandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Occupy Self

I spent Thanksgiving weekend practicing teachings recently offered to me on my human body, specifically how to use its tangible physicality to locate and work with my insubstantial, intangible mind. Four days of Occupy Self.

The first step was, in a manner of speaking, to claim squatter's rights by directing total attention to those parts of my body that were touching the ground--or a cushion or a chair that was itself touching the ground. The practice was to notice how without judgment or demand, the ground, aka the Earth, so willingly supports me. With a little help from gravity, it does all the heavy lifting. There's absolutely nothing to do but relax, just relax the entire body into its embrace, sending all tension and stress down into the Earth. It's there for me, for all of us, a cushy support 24/7.

Realizing there's no need to fight to hold the body up is a tremendous relief, an eraser that clears the mind. Feeling grounded, or anchored if you prefer, makes it possible to direct total attention to breathing, to the air that comes in and then goes out of the body. In and out, in and out... to just be keenly aware of this continual interchange between the body and outer space. That too is friendly and supportive, and becoming a bit more palpable.

Every in-breath is a fresh lease on life, a new start. Every out-breath is a death, a release. Inner space fills and merges with outer space; the body exhales and separates itself. The body itself begins to feel like space, an open window with air blowing through it. Not so heavy, not so settled, not so inflexible as it seems.

The practice is to breathe deeper into the body. Deep down to hit the spot four fingers below the navel, deep inside the core. Tibetans call this sweet spot "the origin of all dharmas", which means all phenomenon. They mean it is every person's epicenter. I don't know how they figured this out without MRI machinery, but this is actually the embryonic spot we all stem from, the very source of our life. "It is the place where the egg becomes a ball of cells that form space for the spinal cord to sprout," a medical doctor just explained to me. "That's like a template/architectural blueprint from which the pattern of the body gets formed. It's the first movement of creation and sets the tone for the entire process, which of course, is ongoing until death terminates it."

So the practice is to hit the spot with full attention and try to hold it there. Magically, effortlessly, all perceptions shift as the mind expands. It's possible to simultaneously feel grounded in the Earth yet free and wide as outer space. It's easy to see I am not so limited as I thought. There is more...much much more...vastly more. Possibility is infinite if I don't choke it off again.

Sense impressions become astoundingly clear--unfiltered high definition. And just as magically the crucial distinction between what is real--what is actually perceived by the senses-- and what is imagined as we experience that--our wishful or ignorant spin-- becomes more self evident. This is "waking up." Or in non-Buddhist words, a bailout. This now subprime collection of hair, skin and guts obsessively covered with fashionable clothes, this old bag of liver spots and bad knees who has become so frighteningly forgetful she went the wrong way up a one-way street she knows very well, this is not me. I am not stuck with or in older age. I am beyond that.

I could occupy myself with this realization forever.


Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved






~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Thursday, November 10, 2011

A Worth to the Wise

Last night, the exercise in my Dharma class was to breath/feel deep down into the body and say aloud: "I am worthy...I am worthy." Three weeks ago it had been: "I am grounded in the Earth...I am grounded in the Earth" and two weeks ago: "I am alive!"

Being worthy turned out to be much harder than being alive, at least for the small, dark haired woman facing me as a pair-off partner. At first she couldn't get the words to pass through her thin lips and when they finally did escape, water flooded her eyes. She wiggled, struggling to tamp down her despair so she would not cry. Instead of the words: "I am worthy," she uttered a trembling sigh, and her shoulders sank under its painful weight.

"Do you not know about Buddha nature?" I felt compelled to whisper. She shook her head, "no."

She was an excruciating reminder that way too many of us don't know how Buddhism is fundamentally different from other religions readily available to us. Unlike Catholics being damned for original sin, Protestants with lists of must not dos, obsessive Jewish guilt and consumerism with its come-ons that if you just buy this now you will live happily ever after, Buddhists believe we are all pure and perfect just as we are, 24/7. This is not a stretch of the imagination. The Buddha was just a human being, one who used his personal struggles to get enlightened and thus transcend the limiting depredations of his human body. By logical analogy, all human beings also have what it takes: that same "Buddha nature." Right now, and always, we have within us that same ability to use our own experience to cultivate enlightening wisdom. We just have to want to stop shopping and texting and try.

"Sentient beings possess the essence of Buddhahood," Je Gampopa says in The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. "The actual way in which they possess it can be exemplified by the way silver is present in silver ore, the way sesame oil is present in sesame seeds or the way butter is present in milk. It is possible to obtain the silver that is in the ore. It is possible to obtain the oil that is in the sesame seeds. It is possible to obtain the butter that is in the milk and likewise it is possible to obtain the Buddhahood that is in sentient beings."

The late Trungpa Rinpoche liked to say our failings and foibles, what we and he called "our shit", was the ideal fertilizer, the perfect manure for wisdom to grow in. Our ability to sense that the problems we have and create for ourselves are what make us ill at ease, this painful sensation of dissatisfaction is actually the bright sign that wisdom is already seeded in us. At the most basic level, Mingyur Rinpoche once pointed out, when our leg gets cramped or throbbing, we instinctively move it into a different position that will make it feel better, so we do know how to fix ourselves.

In the homeopathic sense, our "shit" is the poison that becomes the medicine that can cure us. The more of it we have, the more it churns, the more likely, and faster, we are to see how useful it is, because it takes a suffocating sense of suffering to impel us to seek relief, if not through drugs perhaps by tiptoeing or diving headlong into something else mind altering like Dharma. "They haven't suffered enough," is what my teacher told one of his longest students when she asked him why her adult children weren't as interested in Buddhism as she was.

The churning of crap into the gleam of Buddhahood is the supreme way Dharma proves you are worthy, because if you don't have any suffering, any bad stuff to wrestle with like Jacob and the angel, you're not likely to discover your own potential and net worth. The lotus is the symbol of Dharma precisely because this magnificent, eye-catching flower grows out of unseen mud and comes into view unsullied.

At lower and simpler levels, Dharma is chockablock with re-assurances, starting with the unimpeachable fact of your human life. Given how many lower life forms are out there in the universe--gazillions of bacteria, insects and protozoa--you obviously did something right to have had the good karma to get born in a human body and not as a beetle, or a burro or a goldfish. The proof that you are super worthy is that you were born not only in a human body, but to boot in a safe place with clean food, water and easy shelter, with nobody firing bombs or natural devastation like earthquakes blowing you to smithereens. You are not a slave in chains or other physical bondage. Then too, you must have been top of the good karma crop to be born with your brain chemistry balanced and your sense faculties in working order so that you can see, hear, taste, feel and as they say in law, know the difference between right and wrong. Not everybody is that lucky. You evidently earned this.

All these riches bestowed upon you are the magic wand that can crack open the treasury of Dharma, and grant access to an infinite wealth of wisdom. The wealth starts with the re-assurance that you are good to go as is, pure and perfect as you'll ever get, and paves a path to the profound understanding of this great inheritance, your inherent Buddha nature, s surf board that will carry you up and over all the waves of suffering.

Meanwhile all Dharma cohorts and the Asians in traditional Buddhist countries who politely bow to you are a rewarding reminder that you are a potential Buddha, even if you, like that woman I was paired off with, think you're going to be the turkey at Thanksgiving. After I whispered all this to her, she managed to smile. And when the class was over, she got up and hugged me.










~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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