A Word from Wayne

“You might want to
get over that! ”

A cou­ple of days ago, I ran some soft­ware on my site and got back some sta­tis­tics. Here are 3:

The Phoenix Cen­tre site went online: Thurs­day, May 29, 1997

Our web­site has an Alexa rank of 777,034 which is in the top 2.59 % of all websites.

Our blog cur­rently has a Tech­no­rati rank of 1,245,176, which puts it in the top 1.78% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

Inter­est­ing.

I’ve decided to leave the sur­vey up for another week or two. Thanks to those of you who have taken the time to express an opinion!

I just put together a sur­vey! (If the sur­vey doesn’t show up below, click the link!

A New Series—The Body Speaks

(In the first in this series of arti­cles, I pro­vided you with a handy lit­tle chart that pro­vides the loca­tion, descrip­tion, and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Chakras. Use the link if you want to refer to it.)

Today, we turn to the Heart (4^th) Chakra zone

Per­haps it goes with­out say­ing, but let me say it anyway.

This series, and pretty much every­thing else that I write, has to do with self respon­si­bil­ity.

It’s scary out there!

Per­haps the great­est error that peo­ple make is to assume that their prob­lems, solu­tions, pas­sions, and dis­ap­point­ments are some­how con­nected to some­thing “out there.”

We pro­pose an alternative.

Accept every­thing, and deny noth­ing.

Notice, I didn’t say “approve” every­thing. We still live in a phys­i­cal uni­verse, and some stuff needs avoid­ing. On the other hand, I con­sider it the height of dumb to walk around like Mary Pop­pins, whistling happy tunes, and hop­ing that the big bad world will sud­denly behave itself, prefer­ably in Technicolor.

It’s an inter­est­ing walk, this. I’ve been read­ing a new book, by Brad Warner, called “Sit Down and Shut Up,” which is a follow-up to his quite excel­lent “Hard­core Zen.” I’m only a lit­tle way into the new book, and I’m already quite impressed.

It is “very Zen” to talk about what is, and what is not real.

The short form is that the only thing that is “real” is the here and now, or the present moment.
Past and future are just sto­ries we tell our­selves.
And the joke is, we don’t even have a self.

Here are a cou­ple of quotes.

“Self is just a men­tal con­struct, an idea, a way of under­stand­ing real­ity, a slot within our heads into which we place a cer­tain por­tion of what we expe­ri­ence.” Page 21

“There is some­thing, some seg­ment of the vast and wide uni­verse, that you carve out and call “self” and say belongs to “you.” It’s an odd idea, you know, that “you” belong to “you.” When you were very young, you noticed this aspect of the uni­verse, and your par­ents and teach­ers and friends all told you in overt and sub­tle ways that this some­thing was your unique “self.”…

You accepted this expla­na­tion and based your inter­pre­ta­tion of all your expe­ri­ences on this way of look­ing at things. …

Bud­dhists claim to have dis­cov­ered that this ordi­nary and nearly uni­ver­sally accepted way of look­ing at things is absolutely untrue.…

And they say that if we throw away this false view of things,absolutely every aspect of our lives will become immea­sur­ably bet­ter.” Pages 25–26

Warner’s book is an explo­ration of the writ­ings of an old Zen mas­ter named Dogen.

Dogen sug­gests that we always come back to “this con­crete place.”

This con­crete place is the present moment —
the only thing that is “real” and “for sure.”

Let me quote Warner again.

“Notice he says, “come back” — as if we had some­how left the con­crete place where we are right now. How can we ever leave where we are? But we do it all the time. In fact, most of us are sunk so deeply into our own men­tal images that we can barely even rec­og­nize where we are any­more. We need to learn to come back to a place we have never left. It’s absurd. But that’s the way it is.” Page 26

So, you may be won­der­ing what this has to do with the heart.

“I’ve never heard them called layer cakes before…”

Well, there are two things to talk about. First, the heart area, on the chest side, is sort of like a layer cake. Many, many emo­tions lie dor­mant and unex­pressed in this region. It’s not unusual, when press­ing into this zone, to see sad­ness and grief, anger, then laugh­ter emerge, one after the other.

Then, if you flip the per­son over and work on their upper back, specif­i­cally the back shoul­der mus­cles (exclud­ing the top of the mus­cle,) and the mus­cles that lie to either side of the spine between the shoul­der blades, you get all the respon­si­bil­ity stuff.

Or per­haps bet­ter put, the over-responsibility stuff.

Our lan­guage con­veys the dual nature of each side of the body.

On the chest side, we get com­ments like,

• “Her heart wasn’t in it.”
• “It’s hard to trust enough to be openhearted.”
• “He was good hearted.”
• Of course, appar­ently, hearts swell, and are bro­ken.
• And true feel­ings are heart­felt.

On the back side, we

• “Shoul­der burdens”
• Get our backs up,
• are either spine­less or “have spine.”

– all expres­sions of will­ful­ness, or the lack of it.

Because the heart has always been con­nected with love, (and boy, there’s a mis­un­der­stood word,) and because of the deluded belief that we love the other per­son (as opposed to our inter­nal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the other per­son) we think that love is some­thing we “do” to others.

In our view, love is sim­ply one more way of being in the world.

In other words, love is actu­ally a verb — an action — a way in which I choose to engage with the world.

Here’s another way of look­ing at it. I’m always try­ing to find a ref­er­ence on Google to the facial expres­sion that is com­monly seen in paint­ings and on stat­ues of the Bud­dha. I know I read this some­where, but the Buddha’s smile is called, “The smile of infi­nite compassion.”

Now, com­pas­sion is yet another mis­un­der­stood word. Com­pas­sion is some­times equated with “feel­ing sorry for,” and is often used as a blud­geon — “If you had an ounce of com­pas­sion, you’d look after me and do what I want.”

And yet, in the Zen world, the com­pas­sion­ate act could be a kick in the ass. It’s often abrupt, and direct, and challenging.

Infi­nite com­pas­sion is rec­og­niz­ing that we are all the same — we are all caught in the same loop. We are all caught up in mak­ing up sto­ries about our past, and fear­ing our future.

We are caught to the point where we think our imag­ined ver­sion of real­ity is not only true, but should be swal­lowed whole by our near­est and dearest.

Or, we equate com­pas­sion with res­cu­ing, and exhaust our­selves try­ing to fix oth­ers. And then, we are shocked! shocked! to dis­cover that the recip­i­ent of our bogus com­pas­sion is nei­ther thrilled, nor changed, but cer­tainly expects us to keep up the res­cue. It’s all so nuts.

I’m not going to do what I’ve been doing with this series of arti­cles, and give you five or six sug­ges­tions of things you can do.

Just Do It!

Rather, I’m just going to sug­gest, ever again, that you “hit the mat” and start med­i­tat­ing.

The ulti­mate com­pas­sion­ate act, the clear­est and clean­est way to be in the world, is to “be” in the world — in this moment — fully and com­pletely, is to learn to meditate.

From the cush­ion, you non-critically and non­judg­men­tally watch your own men­tal gym­nas­tics and games. You see your thoughts arise, like bub­bles in soda water, insub­stan­tial and mean­ing­less, if you leave them alone. They arise, and they burst.

So what does this have to do with com­pas­sion, or “love?”

Every­thing.

The only truly lov­ing, com­pas­sion­ate act is to be present with another.
Not to fix, not to change, not to blame, not to manip­u­late. To be with. To “sit with.”

I remem­ber once, back in my min­istry days, when a young cou­ple in my con­gre­ga­tion had just expe­ri­enced the crib death of their six-month-old son. Dar­bella and I were off some­where, and imme­di­ately turned around and headed home.

When I got to their house, there really was noth­ing to do but sit down, cry with them, and be fully present. Words, at that point, were irrel­e­vant and would have done no good. I remem­ber them say­ing, later, after the funeral, that the thing that got them through was our “silent sitting.”

Com­pas­sion, then, is being with one’s self while being present with the “world.”

In other words, to be deeply and inti­mately present with what­ever is going on. With­out judg­ment. With­out cat­e­go­riza­tion. With­out the need to “do.”

A lov­ing act is an action, but it’s the sim­plest action of all. Let me quote Brad Warner again.

“Zazen, in spite of its appar­ent lack of activ­ity in the usual sense, is the purest form of action. It’s action reduced to its barest essen­tials, the action of sim­ply sit­ting there and pay­ing atten­tion.… or you could say it’s the bal­ance between thought and feel­ing. When these two oppos­ing sides are per­fectly equal, they can­cel each other out, thus caus­ing both body — the mate­r­ial side — and mind — the spir­i­tual side — to appear to drop away.” Page 45

You could say that love and com­pas­sion are encap­su­lated in sit­ting with, and pay­ing atten­tion to, both our­selves and our present reality.

One of the ways Dar­bella and I do this is through what we think of as engaged dia­log.

• I speak about what I am doing to myself, the sto­ries I am telling myself, the dra­mas I am cre­at­ing, and the emo­tions I am man­i­fest­ing. None of what I am doing inside of me has any­thing to do with her, or the sit­u­a­tion. My job is to report what I’m doing.
• Her job, in that moment, is to “sim­ply” sit and lis­ten, with­out judg­ment and with­out attempt­ing to fix any­thing. Any fix­ing required would be my respon­si­bil­ity, and only my respon­si­bil­ity, because I’m mak­ing the mess I’m sit­ting in.
• Then, we trade. Dar­bella talks, and I sit and lis­ten — and strain to resist rush­ing in with solu­tions — given who I am, and what I do for a liv­ing, this is one of my great­est challenges.

The love and com­pas­sion part is the will­ing­ness to sit and be present. Again, I say, with­out judg­ment. It is what it is.

It’s so much fun to be neutral!

One last point. Last night was one of our Wednes­day night med­i­ta­tion groups. We quickly taught what we call neu­tral pos­ture, which is all about learn­ing to stand in the most health­ful way. You can read about it in the body­work sec­tion of our web­site.

Or, if you’re really keen, you can buy our soon to be avail­able DVD.

Any­way, just before the final cor­rec­tion, you’re stand­ing up straight with your back against the wall. The palms of your hands are pressed against the wall, and the effect of this is to really open your chest. The posi­tion actu­ally opens the chest a bit too far — what we call mil­i­tary posture.

The peo­ple giv­ing this a try com­mented, “Boy, does this ever hurt.” It hurts because many peo­ple roll their shoul­ders for­ward. In Body­work, we say they’re try­ing to pro­tect their heart from being hurt, typ­i­cally because they think their heart has been hurt before. By oth­ers, of course.

And we often say, oth­ers can hand you a knife, but only you can stab yourself.

If your heart’s been hurt, that would be all about you and how you chose to see the sit­u­a­tion. Most peo­ple hate to hear this. So much eas­ier to blame oth­ers, so much eas­ier to shut down, so much eas­ier to curl over and be pro­tected from the cold, cruel world. Except think­ing and being this way does noth­ing more than shut you off from expe­ri­enc­ing life.

The Body­work approach, then, is to work deeply into the stuck mus­cles, to open the chest and metaphor­i­cally reopen the heart. Once you real­ize and fully accept that no one can hurt your heart (except for you of course!) it’s just plain silly to have it slammed shut, just in case. All that gets you is phys­i­cal pain, espe­cially when you try to stand up straight, and the deep and dis­ap­point­ing dis­con­nec­tion from your life and from others.

This week, be com­pas­sion­ate with your heart. Spend some time silently sit­ting, being present with your­self, breath­ing into your heart, and just lis­ten­ing. I have a funny feel­ing you may be sur­prised at what you learn.

And, here’s a heart med­i­ta­tion you can try, from an ear­lier blog arti­cle. There’s a script, as well as an mp3 record­ing there, half way down the page.