Monday, 04 January 2010 17:27 Written by Lezlie Laws

Jack Kornfield says “the wisdom of uncertainty frees us from what Buddhist psychology calls the thicket of views and opinions.”  This is a really great lesson for me right now.  Especially in the light of recent study of the teachings of Andrew Cohen and his comments on “undefended awareness.”  So I have held some very definite views and opinions on what I intended to do this year.  The universe has constructed circumstance such that I’m forced to drop those views and reside in uncertainty.  Kornfield says “when we are free from views, we are willing to learn.” 

His practice at the end of the chapter twenty-three of The Wise Heart is called “Don’t Know Mind” and it’s probably yet another example of this book offering me exactly what I need at the very moment I need it.  This will become my core meditation during this week of silent retreat, and I think it’s worth copying here.  It can be found on p. 381 of The Wise Heart.

Sit quietly and easily.  Focus on your breath or body.  When you feel settled, bring to mind a time ten years ahead.  Recognize that you don’t know what will happen then.  Feel the not knowing and relax with it.  Think of the earth spinning through space with hundreds of thousands of people being born and dying every day.  Where does each life come from?  How did it start?  What changes are ahead for us?  There are so many things we don’t know.  Feel the truth of don’t-know mind, relax, and become comfortable with it.

Now, bring to mind a conflict, inner or outer.  Be aware of all the thoughts and opinions you have about how things should be , about how other people should be.  Now recognize that you don’t really know.  Maybe the wrong thing will lead to something better.  You don’t know.

Consider how it would be to approach yourself, the situation, the other people with don’t-know mind.  Don’t know.  Not sure.  No fixed opinion.  Allow yourself to want to understand anew.  Approach it with don’t-know mind, with openness.

How does resting in don’t-know mind affect the situation?  Does it improve it, make it wiser, easier?  More relaxed?

Practice don’t-know mind until you are comfortable resting in uncertainty, until you can do your best and laugh and say, “Don’t know.”

Sunday, 03 January 2010 15:55 Written by Lezlie Laws

It’s the second day of my annual retreat, and I rise early to read The Wise Heart and do some writing.  I had wanted to finish my Wise Heart posts before the end of the year.  Alas, the soul was willing, the body not so.  The first day of a retreat is usually exhilarating for me, but yesterday was brutal.  I cried most of the day.  Undoubtedly, it is the beginning of coming to terms with some hard truths.  And the big one is this:  things are not going as I had planned.  God is laughing.  Yes, the big thought I grappled with yesterday was my deep disappointment at the huge turn of events in my sabbatical year. 

     First, the knee is healing slowly, holding me back severely in my yoga practice.  And in addition to the knee (my left), I have sustained a severe hamstring injury in my right leg.  These injuries have posed a huge problem for my yoga teacher-training.  How can I be a yoga teacher when I can’t seem to do yoga very well?  The skill of any teaching grows out of the depth of the teacher’s practice.  And though I do have a deep practice in breathing, moving, and striving for focus on the mat, and though I do practice the ashtanga eight-limbed path, I don’t have a strong or flexible asana practice right now.  This causes me distress.  And if I examine this distress, I would surely find it based in ego (the ego loves to quantify things, doesn’t it?).  I want to present myself in a certain positive and successful way for my students and fellow practitioners (and certainly for my teachers), and for right now, that is not going to happen on the mat.  And since the mat has become a huge metaphor for life, I have to examine how this belief plays out in other areas.  Another opportunity for practice.

   There are great contradictions, though, in this state of events.  First, right at the time when I seem to be debilitated, Theresa and Calvin are entrusting me with more and more opportunities to teach.  I am so happy about this.  And Jeff Davis has asked me to be a part of a small core of yogi/writers who will go through his first intensive training to be facilitators of Yoga as Muse workshops.  So opportunities for growth have not stopped, even though it appears my qualifications are questionable.  I cannot tell you how this has shaken my confidence.  

     Second disappointment and alteration to Lezlie’s plans for the sabbatical: the book stalls out.  Comes to a crashing halt, actually, at the end of October.  I cried, I was afraid, I wanted to quit.  It was a very familiar pattern for Lezlie:  things get hard and I cave.  Jeff helped me tremendously, becoming not just my writing coach, but my therapist, too.  I wondered if my extreme anxiety about and dislike of writing was a sign that I simply should not be doing it.  Aren’t we called to be joyful?  If so, why do I keep returning to what makes me unhappy?  (Could this be a destructive conditioned response??)  I’ve written about this in other blogs, so I won’t belabor this point YET AGAIN.  Still these feelings have been baffling and confidence rocking. 

    Then, Tim Lynch sends me an email on his reading of scientist Paul Dirac.  Dirac, commenting on the process of creative discovery, says that this process is riddled with anxiety.  “Anxiety (not joy), felt during the creative process, is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the breakthrough.”  Aha!  Maybe what I’m experiencing is the beginning of breakthrough!   But how do I know?  How do I know this?  I need confidence to move forward.

    And finally, the third blow of the greatly anticipated year of white space came last month when it was discovered there is a mass of cells-gone-wild in my left breast.  The last six weeks have been filled with brutal tests, doctor’s appointments, and research scary enough to send me to Pine Lawn to buy a plot.  Surgery will take place in two weeks, followed by radiation, and I don’t know how many weeks of further debilitation.   This seems like much more than a minor derailing of my plans.  It seems like a multiple-car train wreck.  Everything is in disarray.  Cars are strewn all over the place and it will take an energy greater than my own to get them back on track.

   Again, the wretched ego rears its knobby head.  In addition to the huge distraction that surgery and recovery pose for me, there is the dealing with another huge contradiction to my version of identity.  I have thought of myself as a person of health, of energy, of fitness.  I am not that person any longer and this is unnerving and anxiety inducing.   I know this is a temporary state of being.  I know I have the ability to heal.  I know I will muster the energy to work toward healing.  I will do what is necessary because I can “do the work.”  But it just wasn’t part of my plans.  And I fear that, at my age, the chances for full recovery are fairly slim.  So goes one version of Lezlie’s identity.    

     I know, I know, I already hear what you’re saying:  No, Lezlie, this is a good thing!  Stripping away the “personal” versions of self is exactly what evolution is all about.  I get it.  But I’m just trying to tell you what is in my heart right now, in spite of what my head knows.  I’m sad, and disappointed, and fearful, and I’m not quite sure how to proceed.  What am I supposed to be now that my identity props are buckling underneath me?  The small self is pretty much ruling the roost these days, scrambling for territory in a mad panic.  I’d rather things be going another way, even though I know there is much to gain from these apparent losses.  Right now, I can’t see myself on the other shore, though I want to have full faith that I will get there.

     So, from one perspective, projects of the sabbatical come to a standstill.  I can hear what you’re saying, again, this time you’re jumping up and down and saying it louder:  “YES, YES, Lezlie, this may be true (temporarily) IF you assume that writing the book and doing yoga are the primary projects of the sabbatical.  But what about the larger project?  The project of Lezlie growing up and stepping more fully into her skin?”  Yes, I remember that project.  I just didn’t expect it would be quite this hard.

    But what about my plans? I can hear myself whining.  There’s a little girl inside me who is throwing a fit.  She feels completely dismissed, and quite frankly she feels completely helpless.  She as no idea how to proceed, how to think about herself, how to fix herself, how to make decisions about the future.

    In this state, this first Sunday morning of the new decade, I pick up Kornfield’s The Wise Heart.  In Chapter 23 he writes about being at ease with insecurity.  It’s so easy to talk about this as a useful practice—until you’re really in a state of insecurity, and your mind is fighting to find some tiny bit of firm ground, and you’re flailing against a self-declared set of conditions for living that suddenly appear untenable.  What if I can’t do yoga any more?  What if I really can’t write a mediocre book, much less a good one?  What if my version of a future has to be amended?   Such thoughts reduce bold, happy, confident, capable Lezlie to a wobbly bowl of insecurity. 

    But Kornfield says we can bring fearlessness and trust to any circumstance.    He talks at length about trusting the process of life.  Andrew Cohen talks about trusting the process, too—and learning to participate in the process.   I have wise teachers all around me.  Kornfield quotes a Zen text:  “To live in trusting mind is to be without anxiety about non-perfection.”  To live in trusting mind.  I must cultivate a way to live in trusting mind.  He says, “Instead of struggling to perfect the world, we relax, we rest in the uncertainty” (372).

    This is, of course, good advice, and as I read this chapter, I can feel the tightness in my chest loosening a bit.  But just a bit.  Because right now, in my current state of disappointment, I don’t know quite how to do this.  But I have no choice right now but to try.  My plan for this year is demolished. My version of perfection is out the window.  I have no idea how to proceed. But the practice abides:  To breathe.  To sit.  To get quiet.   It’s the hardest practice I’ve undertaken.

P.S.

I feel the need to place a small disclaimer on these comments, for fear I seem to be catastrophizing the physical challenges of the moment. Please know that I am very aware that my physical challenges are not life-threatening, or even life-style threatening.  The body will repair.  I know so many people who are facing life-threatening physical challenges, and I do not in any way want to equate my circumstances to theirs.  It’s the state of being that resides under my health issues that is the core of this writing.  My willingness to be aware of life as it emerges, to resist judging what emerges, to experience what emerges fully, and to be open to the wisdom that every experience offers up.  That's the topic I'm addressing.

Friday, 01 January 2010 20:15 Written by Lezlie Laws

A year or so ago, I was moving a beautiful potted jade plant from one side of the yard to the other.  It was a tight, full cluster of squat limbs; the thick, succulent leaves were a rich shiny green.  On the trek across my tiny yard, I dropped the pot.  It did not break, but the plant spilled out of the nicely mossed Guy Wolfe pot and split into chunks.  Limbs broke.  Leaves feel off.  Shallow roots were exposed.  The jade lay strewn on the grass, a total mess.  I gasped at the loss of this favorite plant.  Hoping to save some part of it, I picked up the big pieces and put them back into the pot, packed the spilled soil around the roots.  It looked just awful, all a-jumble in the pot.  What had been an elegant, gorgeous specimen now looked like a collection of mismatched skinny limbs, the symmetry and boldness of the plant gone.   In a matter of seconds a stunning, thriving plant was reduced to disarray. Though still alive, it had little appeal.

     Still, I couldn’t get rid of it.  It had been with me for many years.  I put it in a remote part of the yard and watered and fed it over the next few months, though I really doubted those few roots would be able to take hold again.  For the longest time, those few branches did not change, but hunkered in the pot stoically.  Once or twice I carefully pushed a thin stake into the soil to hold a twisted limb in place and keep the pot from toppling again.  But mostly I just let the jade alone, hoping it was working its own magic.  But for months it remained damaged and disoriented, stunned into quiescence by its tragedy. 

     Time passed, as is its wont. 

     Today is January 1, 2010, the beginning of a new decade.  I was awakened by a gentle rain today, and took the luxury of lingering in bed a while, just listening. Wondering what on earth this decade would bring,  I prayed for skills to accept the challenges ahead of me with simplicity, equanimity, and an open heart.   When I came downstairs to make coffee, I spent a few minutes at the back windows, surveying the yard after the rain, always a joy.  The jade plant is on the deck now, alive and well, thriving in its original pot.  But you wouldn’t recognize it as the same plant that took the awful spill a year ago.  It has fewer branches than it did before, but those branches have stretched gracefully toward the sky, looking like a group of long, slender arms making petition to the gods.  Solidly grounded now, it has a lovely symmetry, and possesses a new relationship both to the pot and to the space it inhabits.  It is a new plant with a larger presence than before, an eager reach outward. 

    As I stood looking out at the lushness of my tiny garden, I thought how wonderful to know the jade weathered its disaster and recreated itself.  Out of its own dark dormancy it has transformed into something new.

Saturday, 12 December 2009 01:30 Written by Lezlie Laws

Sometimes, when we read a good book, we realize we like it because we’re recognizing ourselves in one of the characters.  In fact, that’s what we seek in literature, isn’t it?  Some sort of recognition about who we are.  Usually, we recognize ourselves in human beings.  But recently, I read a book in which I recognized myself as a dog.

     In The Dogs of Bedlam Farms, Jon Katz writes so wonderfully about his love of border collies, a breed with which I’ve had very little experience.  He has two young border collies that he’s training to work his herd of sheep on a small farm in upstate New York.  I love this book for the story it tells about Katz’s own transformation from sedentary urbanite to capable farmer.  But his descriptions of his dogs Orson and Rose are the best part of the book.  I’ve seen border collies working a herd on TV, and it is a sight to behold.  Agile and eager, these dogs are smart and energetic and so beautiful in the way they move through their world.  Katz really captures the character of this breed and tells some very touching and hilarious stories about his adventures with Orson and Rose.

    So when I read about how they are trained, and how training can go wrong, I so appreciated the many fine traits of this breed, as well as their foibles.  I’m not sure exactly when it happened in the book, but by the time Katz was telling stories of the farm in winter, and depicting the challenges that Orson and Rose had in their training, I began to see myself as a border collie.  Now, it is clear that I flatter myself in making this comparison.  But, still, as Katz described the antics of Orson and Rose, I couldn't help seeing myself in some of his descriptions.

Border collies are very loyal and exceedingly responsible.  They are natural organizers; they will gather all manner of creatures together for unknown purposes.  They like to work.  They want to be well-trained in doing their work.  They want to gain the respect of their trainers.  They want to please them.  They need to have work.  If they don’t have work, they will create work for themselves.  If they’re inside the house for too long and not able to be out herding or organizing, they will start moving their toys from one end of the house to the other, as if the fate of the world depended on the task of relocating bones and rubber duckies from the corner of the living room to the back of a closet in the bedroom.  When an early thaw finally allowed them to get outside to play, Katz says of Orson and Rose,

Now chipmunks, field mice, rabbits, and deer had reemerged to keep the dogs occupied as they dashed here and there in an effort to organize things.  Border collies are heroic in their ambition, but doomed to fail.  They simply cannot position every moving thing in the world where they want it to be (217).

      They are naturally enthusiastic and physically agile.  This enthusiasm has to be directed by a higher source.  They can bring laser focus to a task and they can be goofily distracted.   They are amazingly enthusiastic and seemingly happy about living.  However, their natural enthusiasm can sometimes work against them.  A poorly trained dog will run headlong into a herd, dispersing them instead of consolidating them.  Border collies can sometimes be a bit too assertive in their herding.  Once trained, they want their charges to behave and on occasion they bite or pull a recalcitrant sheep in the direction it needs to go, sometimes causing distress or even injury to the sheep.  

     They like to fix problems efficiently.  Though playful creatures, they can be overly serious about their work.  Once he had the herd in place, Orson would hunker down behind them and watch relentlessly for hours.  His evil eye was as useful as his nipping at the elbows of any sheep thinking she could take off on her own.

     Border collies love treats.  Border collies like to rest their chins in the lap of the person they love and rest gently with them.  Border collies are fine looking animals.

Just watch me next time we’re together and see if you don’t see a little of the border collie in me.  I promise I won’t nip at the back of your knees or try to push you into the nearest barn.