Well, here it is, Sep­tem­ber of 2010, and Dar­bella and I are into our last year here. Which is rather ironic, as the main rea­son for our being here no longer exists. (See the foot of the arti­cle for an update on our projects.)

I’ve spent the sum­mer read­ing and video­tap­ing. Read some great, and some not so great books, mostly Zen books. And we lis­tened to one inter­est­ing audio book, called “Taoist Sex­ual Secrets.” I was amazed at how much of what they described was stuff I was already doing in body­work.

So, that said, here’s my plan for the Fall writ­ing schedule.

By way of a brief review, Dar and I have been work­ing on a new web­site, which may just get off the ground by Octo­ber or so. (I thought Sep­tem­ber, and got close…) The mem­ber­ship site con­sists of an 8 week video course that arose from our work with injured workers.

I wanted some­thing for peo­ple who were strug­gling with find­ing their place in the world, and decided that 56 videos was the way to go.

Given the way we do life and the way I do ther­apy, the break­down of the course makes per­fect sense. Each day of the week has a dif­fer­ent theme—the first four are phys­i­cal, (yoga, med­i­ta­tion, Qi Gong, and Breath work) the remain­ing three are life approaches.

What I’ve been doing this sum­mer I jok­ingly call “talk­ing head videos.” These are the life approaches videos, and con­sist of me describ­ing aspects of liv­ing life fully. Thus, I am the “talk­ing head.”

At first, I tried writ­ing out scripts for each of the videos and using a teleprompter. Things really bogged down, so I decided to just wing it. Given how much talk­ing I do, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place.

Any­way, it should come as no sur­prise that com­mon themes keep aris­ing. Nat­u­rally, it’s the same stuff begin talk­ing about here since 1999. Things like using the com­mu­ni­ca­tion model, let­ting go of blam­ing, watch­ing how your mind works, and fig­ur­ing out who you really are—this is a short list of some of the top­ics covered.

The phys­i­cal side of things is fairly pre­dictable too. I’m demon­strat­ing yoga stretches, med­i­ta­tion, in breath­ing, and Dar­bella is teach­ing Qi gong. There’s only a pass­ing ref­er­ence to Bodywork,because that one’s a bit tricky to teach with­out hand-on experience.

A friend was kind enough to let me video her for the breath­ing videos—and we’ve got a cou­ple more to do this week.

I’ve been quite impressed with some of the things she’s expe­ri­enced dur­ing her last cou­ple of Body­work ses­sions. The story I tell myself is that she has found a way to stop story-telling (some­thing she’s good at…) so that she can fully expe­ri­ence what’s going on in her body. The last time, her expe­ri­ence lasted for days!

I sus­pect that she is sim­ply being with what is hap­pen­ing, with­out judge­ment, block­ing, or attempt­ing to “push.” In the audio book I men­tioned above, the authors talk about falling back­wards into the expe­ri­ence of chi—that you can’t force it by forg­ing ahead. My friend cer­tainly asks ques­tions and asks specif­i­cally for want she wants, but it’s clear that the let­ting go aspect is paramount.

Her work and the books and the film­ing have coa­lesced into this series of arti­cles.

I want to start with Zen 101 and talk about how let­ting go is the only way to shift from being stuck to truly experiencing.

One of the key Zen texts is the Heart Sutra, and a famil­iar line is, “Form is empti­ness, empti­ness is form.” This line, poorly trans­lated from San­skrit, has led West­ern­ers to think that Bud­dhism is akin to exis­ten­tial­ism or nihilism—that it’s say­ing that life is mean­ing­less. This is not so.

The idea of sun­y­ata (trans­lated “empti­ness,”) is that things have no (are empty of a) sin­gu­lar essence. If, for exam­ple, we look at a cup, there it is. How­ever, the cup is not a sin­gu­lar thing. It’s made up of parts, includ­ing the space con­tained, of “con­stituents.” You can break it apart, and never find a “thing” called a cup. Another illus­tra­tion is to look at a car. What makes the car a car? Any descrip­tion you give will also apply to other modes of trans­porta­tion, and no part has any “car-ness” about it. In fact, I have a neigh­bour that uses his car as a stor­age bin, so a car is not a car.

Recently, schol­ars have attempted to resolve the empti­ness conun­drum by trans­lat­ing “sun­y­ata” as, “as-it-is-ness.”

I like that. It matches a line I love from Stew­art Wilde, a famous Taoist, who writes, “The way it is, is the way it is.” If we use this def­i­n­i­tion, the line in Heart Sutra becomes,

“Form is as-it-is-(ness), as-it-is-ness is form.”

See how that helps?

Grin­ning.

OK, here’s the real help. A sit­u­a­tion (let’s call it a thing, but a thing is “what’s hap­pen­ing,” a per­son, an object, the weather, a war—whatever) is exactly and pre­cisely “as it is.” No more, no less. Our ten­dency is to add per­sonal inter­pre­ta­tion and judge­ment to the thing. As this is an activ­ity of our minds, and our minds do this whether we like it or not, the path is to de-emphasize our addic­tion to the process of judgement.

This is why we sit zazen. To see the oper­a­tion of our mind.

Most peo­ple have no clue how much of a mess they are mak­ing of things, by adding in judge­ments, pro­nounce­ments, and demands. The mess comes as “I”:

1) “see” what’s right there, and

2)compare it to my fan­tasy world, and

3) find “right here, right now” lack­ing as com­pared to the fantasy.

4) I then must begin to judge “right here, right now,” by hang­ing blame, judge­ment and demand on it, like moss on a tree. And THEN,

5) I turn my atten­tion from the sim­ple “as-it-is-ness” to demand­ing that the “oth­ers” accept my fan­tasy and start act­ing as if my fan­tasy is real.

And I do this with­out any aware­ness that this is what I’m doing.

Here’s a quote from the book, “Step­ping Out of Self-deception,” by Rod­ney Smith:

Our defense mech­a­nisms can work over­time medi­at­ing the influ­ence of our hon­est self-awareness. If we give over to our defen­sive­ness, we end up see­ing and under­stand­ing only what we already know: lis­ten­ing to the world, we hear our own opin­ions; view­ing the world, we see our own con­di­tion­ing. Noth­ing changes, because our resis­tance will not allow us to see through the screen of our con­di­tion­ing. Page 66

Again:

“…it is a will­ful igno­rance, a not want­ing to know the truth, a direct avoid­ance and denial of the obvi­ous. To turn this around and see a real­ity for what it truly offers, we have to con­sciously estab­lish an inten­tion to do the oppo­site of our habit­ual responses, and hold the sec­ond level of inten­tion to a razor — sharp scrutiny.

But the lim­i­ta­tion is only half the story. We would not be per­pet­u­at­ing this inverted view time and time again if if we were not get­ting some­thing out of it. What does this nar­ra­tive offer us? What ben­e­fit are we receiv­ing from this par­tic­u­lar desire-pattern? We begin to see how we are entwined within the story, how we need it to rein­force our stance, to assure us of our worth were lack of it, to recon­firm our mean­ing and pur­pose. page 87

If I work only from within the story I know (“I’m a vic­tim,” “I’m wise and all know­ing,” “I never get angry,” “Other peo­ple make me,” “There’s some­thing bet­ter down the road,” etc.) then I can take the “as-it-is-ness” of the thing “right there in front of me,” and paint it over with “what I always do.” And as I do—here’s the punch-line: I get what I expect to see!

Change comes at the price of stop­ping the enact­ing of our judgements.

But first, we need the light of zazen—look­ing inward, see­ing, and then walk­ing down another path. And deal­ing directly with the resid­ual ener­getic block­ages. This is the premise behind our new mem­ber­ship website—that par­tic­i­pants actu­ally do what we sug­gest—actu­ally prac­tice walk­ing this other path. Even the seem­ingly weird exer­cises, such as mov­ing energy through the micro­cos­mic orbit by breath­ing and doing Kegels… stay tuned!

Here’s an exam­ple of this “as-it-is-ness” mentality.

I grew up fairly pam­pered, and fairly short. I got picked on, and likely deserved most of it, given my propen­sity for being sar­cas­tic. I even got stuffed into a gym locker once. I leaned my approach to life from my par­ents (this isn’t “blame the par­ent” — we learn through some­one telling us what our expe­ri­ences mean. We don’t know until some­one tells us — that’s what all kids expe­ri­ence) and espe­cially from my mom, who often said, “They can’t treat me like this! Don’t they know who I am?”

When stuff hap­pened, I had learned (as have every one of you!) to look for some­one or some­thing to blame. Mostly, we blame oth­ers, or cir­cum­stance. Some blame them­selves. This is what Smith describes as the “screen of our con­di­tion­ing.” If you look at the world through blue glasses, things appear blue!

In truth, I was angry. So, I blamed bul­lies, or teach­ers, or my par­ents. I got angry with co-workers, lovers, friends, and espe­cially peo­ple whose opin­ions dif­fered from mine. I’d fight back, or argue. I’d blame.

Then, I decided to try being nice. I’d feel the anger, stuff it, and be polite and under­stand­ing. But it was still all about, “They shouldn’t treat me like that!”

It wasn’t until I really started look­ing that I saw that “they” weren’t doing any­thing, and even if they were, I had a choice to drop the fil­ter of “They shouldn’t treat me like that!” in favour of “as-it-is-ness.” This process is ongo­ing and end­less. I am bet­ter at see­ing stuff and cir­cum­stance as “as-it-is-ness”, and my reac­tion as the place to work.

So, I can point my fin­ger, or I can deal with my anger, each and every time.

When I receive body­work, then, I can yield to the pres­sure, and see what comes up. Usu­ally, some anger and then a lot of laugh­ter, and then some charge. And an increase in my energy flow. And then, lunch… or whatever.

This is what my friend does, in spades. Just has the expe­ri­ence, on the table, that she needs to have, and leaves the story-telling alone.

In the com­ing weeks, we’ll look at approaches to energy, feel­ing, liv­ing and “as-it-is-ness.” If you’re will­ing to sus­pend judge­ment, not lock down and refuse to open to some­thing new, you might actu­ally learn to let go of the con­di­tion­ing. Let’s see where we go with this!
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A quick note about stuff.

1) As I noted above, the mem­ber­ship web­site is close to done. We’ll keep you posted.

2) The main rea­son we’ve stuck around past Darbella’s retire­ment date was our project with injured work­ers, work­ing with the Province of Ontario’s WSIB. That project, due to pol­i­tics totally unre­lated to our project, got canned a few weeks ago. I am sad, and Dar is sad, as we really liked the work, and the peo­ple we were work­ing with. We’re now open to per­haps leav­ing for parts unknown before July 2011, but we shall see.

3) As noted in the top box, our Med­i­ta­tion Retreat (topic: com­mu­ni­ca­tion) is resched­uled for Decem­ber 3 to 5. Again, we don’t know where we’ll be or what we’ll be doing, so take advan­tage of our will­ing­ness to run this work­shop, and sign up early!