Love, Death and the Skandhas: pt 2

Posted on December 3, 2018 by admin

“Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”

This quote from Dogen Zenji, founder of the Soto School of Zen in Japan in the 1200’s, is recited at the end of the afternoon zazen practice session at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, and alludes to the first of the five invitations from Frank Ostaseski’s book mentioned in the previous post. The five invitations are useful to everyone, at all times and are at the core of spiritual practice.

1. Dont’ Wait! Begin Now, not later, not tomorrow, not when you feel better, or have more time. Do not squander your life! This breath: pause, relax, open, allow; begin again …. Practice is not just on the mat, but every moment of your life is your practice. Take heed! Awaken! You never know when Lord Yama may come knock knock knockin’ at your front door. Be ready to greet him. Learn your own skandhas and transform them through practice.

2. Welcome Everything, Push Away Nothing. In a previous post I included the famous Rumi poem, the Guest House, which describes the sense of this second invitation. We tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain, at all levels of existence, but we can never heal the wounds that do not get to see the light of our own discriminating wisdom. Your soul will provide lessons that need to be learned, and they usually involve some type of pain or suffering. Trust that you will be able to face the challenges.

Now in cases of more serious trauma, we may need outside support. Somatic Experiencing, the work of trauma resolution developed by Peter Levine and others is an excellent therapeutic approach to working with embodied trauma. Other types of psychotherapy can also be helpful to hold the larger energy field and help the client modulate their own nervous system. All of the upayas, (the Sanskrit word for ‘skillful means of stabilizing the mind field and opening the heart) are helpful when practiced. We will look at working with the Brahma Viharas as an upaya in the next post.

3. Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience.

Social media has been a disaster when it comes to the third invitation as it has created a forum for people to contrive personalities out of fantasy and feeds the illusion that faults, fears, weaknesses or other unpleasant aspects of our real moment to moment self sense need to be hidden away. Not just from others, but from ourselves as well.

There is wisdom that comes from facing the ‘undesirable aspects’ of our selves. To quote Frank, ” Yet more than once I have found an ‘undesirable’ aspect of myself, one about which I had previously felt ashamed and kept tucked away, to be the very quality that allowed me to meet another person’s suffering with compassion instead of fear or pity.”

My aggressive cancer diagnosis has uncovered all sorts of hidden nooks and cranies of my ‘non’ conscious mind, where fear, shame and other unpleasantries lurk. My practice is to welcome them, and then bring them into the light, holding them lightly and compassionately, but neither ignoring nor getting lost in them. Not claiming this is fun, but necessary.

4. Find a Place of Rest in the Middle of Things

Last July, I had an MRI done on my prostate, and that involved being tied down inside this tubular machine for a half hour or so, with load banging noises and whirring sounds surrounding me. I was supposed to be still so as to not blur the images. This was good practice in finding a place of rest in the middle of things. Sometimes, the chaos comes from the outside, as with the medical world. Sometimes, it comes from the inside, where you own emotions and thinking are creating the chaos. Resting in the middle of things is , of course, meditation practice. Meditation means literally staying in the middle, staying centered, in spite of what is happening around you, or inside you.

This is not an easy practice so it is best to start with simple challenges. Can I sit in a quiet room for 10 minutes, without needing to ‘do’ something. The inner urges to keep busy, to ‘fix the problem’, to ‘improve’, are relentless. The demands from the outer world are equally daunting. Pause, take a deep breath, relax, open to the moment, allow it to be just as it is. Repeat, again and again. The urge to ‘do’ is habitual, but can be transformed through practice.

In the Samadhi Pada, sutras I-12 to I-16, Patanljali gives two practices right away to get the process rolling; abhyasa and vairagyam. Abhyasa is developing stability, the capacity to not be moved’ from your seat’, from your center. Vairagyam is letting go of attachments to habits, beliefs, thoughts and patterns of action that perpetuate suffering.

5. Cultivate ‘Don’t Know’ Mind.

How do we balance the need to know, with deeply recognizing that ultimate mystery is ‘unknowable’. Like all spiritual practice, paradox is at the center of things. When I was first diagnosed with the prostate cancer last July, there were a lot of ‘unknowns’. What type of cancer was it, how long had it been there, and had it spread to anywhere else, were the first of the questions. Then there is conflicting information on just how to find out. Some feel that needle biopsies are dangerous; they can lead to infections and cause the cancer cells to spread. I absorbed that and paused. I had some blood work done to find if there were any metastasized cells in the blood stream. None from the prostate. Good news.

But my PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen, a marker for prostate cancer) numbers were going up. Not good. Following my intuition, I finally decided to do the needle biopsy to get the specific data on my cancer, and fortunately I did not put it off any longer, as the biopsy reports came back with gleason scores of 8 and 9, indicators of aggressive cancer growth. Not good, again, but with good data, a plan of action has been hatched.

After consulting with radiation oncologist Anthony D’Amico at the Dan Farber in Boston, I (we) have decided to undergo a combination of radiation and hormonal therapy. Prostate cancer feeds on testosterone, so I have just begun taking testosterone inhibiting hormones, and will probably be on those for several years. The word is I may begin to have hot flashes, grow breast tissue, gain weight, lose muscle mass and sex drive, and begin to binge watch chick flicks. Not sure about my voice.

The radiation will take place over an eight to nine week period, 5 days a week for 10 minutes each session. I will be doing this in Boston, probably beginning in early March, and there is a place where I can stay for free near the hospital, provided for out-of -town cancer patients. The radiation targets the prostate specifically, the hormones both the prostate and any other place where the prostate cancer cells may have landed. I have a bone scan coming up to see if there are any cancer cells growing in the bones. Because of the cancer, part of the prostate has fused with the rectum, so surgery will not be an option. No clean margins available.

Lots of new and useful information, but the big unknown remains. Dr D’Amico said there is a 70 – 80 % chance that in nine years I could be cancer free. No guarantees, but then again, life doesn’t offer guarantees; just possibilities to learn and grow. Anyone who is alive now knows how chaotic our local slice of the cosmos is right now. We are all in a big ‘don’t know’ moment, so it is a great opportunity to open to not knowing. We can still gather info, make intelligent decisions and lead lives of wisdom and compassion, but ultimately ‘don’t know mind’ can be our place of refuge.

This means the first skandha becomes in invitation to open, not run away. In 1990, during the third Iyengar Convention in San Diego, I was in deep emotional turmoil. I had just left a previous relationship to move in with Kate and repercussions were rippling through our local yoga world. I felt that I was in the middle of a minor nervous breakdown. But I somehow managed to teach my classes and had some extraordinary experiences with Mr. Iyengar, but one day, out of the blue, it seemed to me, he looked at me with those big bushy eyebrows flaring and said “you are always trying to escape’. He caught me totally by surprise and I did not know quite what to make of his comment. Those words left a deep impression and I only recently realized he was referring to that first skandha. He saw me at the abyss but choosing to not fully face it. Given his early years of serious illness, pain and emotional struggle, I’m sure he was very familiar with the first skandha.

There is no escape from the truth of impermanence and any intellectual resolution is totally inadequate. It is a deeply embodied state, where nerves and organs can say yes to their own fragile and yet vitally alive presence. If we can just learn to trust in life and rest there, then the infinite light of the timeless extending out over the cliff invites us to be the ultimate mystery. Emaho!

Love, Death and the Skandhas: pt 1

Posted on November 24, 2018 by admin

Kate and I were recent participants in an amazing 4 day workshop at Joan Halifax’s Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. Entitled “Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts.” Roshi Joan, a force of Nature, has spent many years working with death and the dying process and her co-teacher, Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Program out of the San Francisco Zen Center at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the 1980’s, is one of the world’s leading experts on compassionate hospice care.

Frank’s recent book, “The Five Invitations” is a must read for anyone inhabiting a human body, as it presents his Buddhist/human approach to being with the dying with real life stories and his own personal experiences and challenges in diving into all the realms of human existence. The basic message is that our essential humanity, what the Buddhists call our basic goodness or Bodhicitta, and what Patanjali refers to as ‘drashtuh svarupe‘ is ever present beneath the roles and masks we present to the world and our selves and is the ultimate ground to meet all that arises with love, wisdom and compassion. But in order to discover this, we must be willing to open to all of the pain and suffering, in ourselves and the world around us, we repress and ignore out of fear.

From the perspective of the skandhas, this fear arises as the first of the skandhas, when we meet the mortality of the body and our egoic structures freak out. This leads to the second skandha we begin to strategize ways of avoiding acknowledging our own impermanence. First we divide our world into likes and dislikes, or as Patanjali describes them in sutra II-7 and II-8, raga and dvesa, attachments and aversions, two of the five kleshas or afflictions we humans are subject to. In the third skandha, we respond impulsively to our likes and dislikes and busy ourselves in satisfying their demands. Of course, relief from our inner terror is impossible when we refuse to be present to it, and our suffering will continue, as long as we refuse to face our impermanence with an open heart.

To address our innate impermanence directly, and leave us with a lasting meaningful impression, Frank led a closing ritual on the last day, where the group was divided into three inner and outer circles. The inner circle sat on chairs facing out, and the outer circles sat on chairs facing inward, so you were always in a one on one situation with another person. We were all given a sheet of paper listing 5 affirmations from an old Theravadan Buddhist scripture based on Buddha’s oral teaching and translated by Thich Nhat Hahn, I believe. They read as follows:

I am of the nature of old age. There is no escape from growing old

I am of the nature of ill health. There is no escape from ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no escape from death.

All of those I love, and all I hold dear, are subject to change.
There is no escape from being separated from them.

My actions are my only true possessions.
There is no escape from the results of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Persons on the inner circle, speaking slowly and from the heart, offered these verses as reminders to their partner on the outer circle. Then the person on the outer circle offered them back, heart to heart. This completed one cycle, with everyone both offering and receiving some deep truths about our own impermanence. After this, the outer circle rotated one station to the right and the process began again. When ‘in tune’, the verses were read simultaneously by all in the inner circles, and then all of the outer circles. So you had to be aware of not only your partner, but the whole group as well. By the end, there were 11 or 12 exchanges with different people, pointing to and holding the space of impermanence with an open and compassionate heart. Each exchange was unique, as we all embodied the process differently. It lasted a good half hour and left us all blown open. This was after all the preparatory work done in the previous days.

This was all good timing for me, as the day after I arrived back in Ojai, I received the results of my prostate biopsy and found out my cancer is the aggressive type and requires immediate attention. I am currently in the process or sorting out just what that means. When I first heard about the cancer back in July, there were still a lot of unknowns, as there are many types of prostate cancer, most being slow growing and manageable, and I had no idea which was mine. It was very disconcerting, but I was holding out for a ‘good’ prognosis. But when I saw a radiologist two weeks ago, as I was prepping for the biopsy, and he said “I wish I had seen you two years ago”, the abyss of impermanence opened up.

At least I was ‘somewhat‘ ready for it! All part of the human experience. I’ve always thought that the spiritual/cosmic side of life was much easier than the human side. The human condition is very messy. So I guess this is my graduate course in being human, and it involves transforming the energy of the skandhas, out of reactivity and impulsivity, and into, as Roshi Joan would say, an embodied presence with a ‘strong back, soft front’. The yogis would say ‘sthira sukham asanam‘. ‘Strong back, soft front’ is also very Taoist, paralleling the yang strength and the yin receptivity.

Roshi Joan contrasted this with the current dilemma in Japan where ‘maintaining face’ is so strongly imprinted in the culture that most everyone puts up a strong front, leaving a soft back unable to support challenging emotions. There is an epidemic of suicide in the young generation in Japan and the traditional monks are at a bit of a loss dealing with this. Roshi Joan was just in Japan presenting the emotionally challenging metaphor of ‘strong back, soft front’ at her home Soto Temple. She is the first woman honored to ever address all these male zen monks. The ‘yin’ softening front body, allowing our emotions and feelings to be known, is very much a feminine virtue that all cultures desperately need to embody.

Grief, sadness, greed, jealousy, anger and many more of our emotional experiences need to be fully embodied and integrated into our moment to moment unfolding to keep us from falling back into the delusional pursuit of the likes and dislikes. The impulse to avoid our ‘dark side’ and stay in delusion, skandha three, is powerful, so we become masters at being distracted. There is no cultural impetus to be with difficulty, so the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain become a powerful field shaping our moment to moment behavior. But the secrets of inner peace and true happiness are only uncovered when we face the messiness of life with wisdom and compassion.

The primary practices Frank and Joan taught us during the four days, to help us work with our emotions and cultivate an open heart, were meditation and reciting and embodying the Brahma Viharas, (sutra I-33 for the yogis, metta for the Buddhists). We’ll return to the Brahma Viharas in part II of this blog post.

Mediation practice in a zendo is usually silent, but we had several occasions where Frank would lead guided meditations during zazen sessions, and one I found very helpful. It involves four simple instructions that circulate in and around each other: pause, relax, open and allow.

Pause: Every breath has two pauses; at the end of the in-breath, and at the end of the out-breath. In Itzak Bentov’s brilliant book, “Stalking the Wild Pendulum”, (one of my all time favorites,) the pauses, when the pendulum naturally comes to rest as it is about to change directions, are portals to the infinite to drashtuh svarupe. These pauses are also explored in depth during the kumbhakas in pranayama practice. Frank offered an example in real life of this process. Before he would enter a room with a hospice patient, he would check to see on what side of the door the hinges were. If on the left, he would enter to room left foot first, and vice versa. As he explained, rather than being an expression of OCD, he wanted to make sure he always paused and found a moment of stillness before he entetred, so he wouldn’t walk in with preconceived notions of what he was about to see, what to do or how to present himself. He wanted to lead with his humanity, so he paused before acting.

The pause is the immediate antidote to impulsivity. The impulses are mostly unconscious and deeply habituated, so the pause momentarily stops that. In my meditation, I call call the pauses ‘getting off the train (of thought)’. The distraction of our own thought patterns can be disrupted if we continually remind ourselves to pause, get off the train and wait. As every breath has a pause, we always get to begin again. Beginner’s mind in every pause.

Relax: Amidst the pause we can add ‘relax’. We may be momentarily ‘off the train’, but there may still be an underlying need to ‘make something happen’. I should be doing this pose, doing this meditation practice, so I get it right. In sutra II-47, Patanjali describes the next step after settling into ‘sthira and sukham as ‘stop ‘trying’ and just be.’

II-47 pra-yatna shaithilyaananta sam-aa-pattibhyaam
With the release of effort and absorption in the limitless (posture is mastered).

Relax. Posture/presence is a state of being, not doing. We need to remind ourselves again and again to just relax. I can be a bit compulsive about needing to ‘fix’ or ‘improve’ my sitting posture, so this is a challenging instruction for me. If something needs attention, take care of it, but don’t obsess over the details. Relax does not mean collapse, but to find what is called in Taoism, wu wei, effortless effort. Ananta in sutra II-47 is the Tao. Relax and let the Tao hold and nurture you. Be aligned with the flow of life and Trust it. This trust is described in sutra I-20 as shraddha, one of the five ‘yoga vitamins’

Open: From the release of efforting, we may feel places that are still holding on, resisting the flow of qi/prana/aliveness through our bodies. The instruction ‘open’ is an invitation to find some space in and around the holding, around the fear, to open to the deeper aspects of the breath waiting to emerge. We may feel this as an expansion out of structure into energy, or out of energy flow into the expansive energy fields. Or it may be just holding the fear in an open heart.

Allow: When some are of the body is holding on, there is usually some pain or suffering associated with it. ‘Allow’ gives permission for the pain or difficulty to be felt honestly, with an open heart. I like the word allow much better than surrender. Surrender, a term often used in this context, can feel like ‘giving up’, whereas allow seems to me to be non-judgmentally open. Frank mentioned the same thing.

Isvara Pranidhana , first mentioned in sutra I-23 from the Yoga Sutras, invites us to allow our own innate Divinity to merge with Divinity as wholeness, in any and all life situations. It is actually never separate. We just believe that it is. Namaste. Our divine wholeness is ever-present, effortlessly. Nothing to do, but feel, open to the breathing, open to Mother Earth, open to the cosmic heart. Find the strength to be present to whatever arises.

I find myself going back and forth with whether to begin with Pause or Relax. They seem to work together. As they become established, Open and Allow can come forth and deepen the practice, until you get distracted and then another pause is needed. Find any way to use these invitations to help your meditation practice and then put them to use in your day to day life. Pause, Relax, Open, Allow

Boston Notes pt 2

Posted on November 12, 2018 by admin

(continued from previous post)

Breathing from The Three Burners

From pelvic floor to navel = Lower Burner

From navel to diaphragm = Middle Burner

From the diaphragm to either 1st rib or roof of mouth to include the throat = Upper Burner

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, one of the 12 acupuncture meridians is known as the sanjiao or triple burner / triple heater. There is no equivalent in Western Medicine, but its role is the balance of yang/fire and yin/water through the core of the body. In general, fire rises and water sinks, so the sanjiao helps in remixing them so the tissues and cells are always at the optimal temperature and fluidity for health. This breathing exploration helps orient us to the inner spaces where this alchemy takes place.

Our primary shape for the breath is the sphere, expanding and condensing like the action of a Hoberman sphere seen here to the right. We always begin from the space inside of the sphere, not the sphere itself. Space moves the form, rather than the form moving the space. With inhalation, the space expands and the sphere does likewise. On exhalation, the space condenses and the form gets smaller. At the end of the exhalation, your attention is still inside the sphere, the sphere is just smaller.

Practice 1. Sitting or lying comfortably, align yourself, relax and bring your attention to the breath. Gradually focus your attention on the lower burner space, from the bottom of the pelvic floor to the navel. Imagine this space is spherical, with the center of the sphere in the center of the pelvis. Feel expansion in all directions on the in-breath and a slow release inwards on the out-breath. Stay with this for a few minutes, 9 breaths or whatever feels right.

When complete, pause for several breaths and then shift your attention to the middle burner, between the navel and diaphragm. Imagine a sphere centered between your two kidneys and allow the expanding and condensing sensations of the breathing fill this mid torso region. Stay for 9 breaths, or whatever, and then pause for several more.

Now bring attention to the upper burner area, with your imaginary sphere centered just behind the upper heart. Repeat as with the previous sections. Finish by feeling the breath, rooted in the lower burner, moving freely throughout the whole torso, keeping eyes, ears and spinal muscles soft.

Practice 2. Bowls and Domes
We will repeat the same steps as above, only this time noticing the ‘north and south poles’ of your sphere. In the lower burner, the north pole will be about four fingers above the navel, in the center of the body, the south pole, CV-1. The north pole holds the top of an expanding dome, like an umbrella, the south pole the base of an expanding bowl, like a flower pot.
The whole sphere continues to expand and condense, but our attention is only on the two energetic points along the median line, or chong mai. On the in-breath, feel the energy of the points, let the space expand and the structures respond. On the out breath, let the energy points and the space lead the condensing action. Let the structure follow. There will be no gripping or contractions this way.

With the middle burner, the north pole of the lower burner becomes the south pole of the middle burner. It descends bowl-like on the in-breath while the north pole, in the center of the diaphragm, ascends dome like. On the out breath they reverse.

In the upper burner, again there is a reverse. The center of the diaphragm, now the south pole descends bowl-like , while the north pole, mid-throat or top of the soft palate ascends. Again, on the out breath everything slowly reverses.

If you fell adventurous, play with the three burners. Imagine and breath with lower and middle as a single space, from diaphragm to pelvic floor. How is this different from the previous practice? How is it similar ? Then, middle and upper as one, with the diaphragm between the two. What do you feel in the various organs/tissues of the region. Finish by rooting in the lower burner and feeling the wholeness of the breath.

Climbing the Wall from the Three Burners

An old favorite: Reminders:
A. engage and open K-1 on the feet and PC-8 on the hands
B. relax neck, shoulders, kidneys, spinal muscles. We are looking to feel the inner body lifting and the whole periphery hanging down.
C. Press down through K-1 to create the lift. The heels will rise up, but not because you are lifting them. Actually the ankles lift and the heels hang down from the back of the ankles. This keeps you in the Deep Front Line (anatomy trains) and not in the outer calf muscles.|
D. Ascend as high as possible and then descend slowly at first. Then, ascend and remain fully extended through core to fingertips and slowly release down without dropping your hands. This will alert you to the glue in and around the diaphragm and mediastinum.

New Practice: Combining the previous breath practice with the wall climb, begin by ascending and descending with you full attention on opening the lower burner, using the movement of the N and S poles to create a charged space. Then the middle burner, followed by the upper burner, same process. Expand the space, create a charge of vitality, feel the charge melting dense tissue. Then take a walk around the room, feeling the median line/chong mai as you move.

New Practice: Combining Bhoga block bridge with tail lift from the previous post.

Find a comfortable place for the block, staying grounded through K-1 in the feet and long through the core of the body. Begin to lift up vertebrae by vertebrae until you reach your limit. Then reverse, slowly returning, link by link in the vertebral chain, letting the anterior lumbar/psoas lengthen circularly to the floor while still lengthening the back body. This will keep you in the center. Move the block around or reverse its direction. If you only have a regular yoga block, roll up a blanket and place it on top of the block (not the full height!) to create a curved shape.

Notice how this action affects the three burners. The lower burner includes the deep groin muscles. Find a way to help them become more elastic. The middle burner includes the kidneys, liver, gall bladder, stomach, spleen and pancreas. This is the keystone of the backbends and if the breathing, space and energy charge can expand and open, the strain is removed from the spinal muscles and the core opens more deeply. The upper burner extends into the throat and soft palate. Energy can be trapped here. Height under the shoulders can help to elongate C-6 through T-2 or T-3 to open this inner channel. My face is redder than the torso, indicating a blockage. It is a work in progress.

This inner experience can then be taken to sarvangasana and variations or viparita karani. When you are inverted, the legs can really help create inner length. In shifting from extension to flexion and vice versa, the middle burner serves as the intermediary between front and back, upper and lower bodies. Photos above: young me, current me, fantasy me.

Part 3 coming next. Please write with questions about the practices. They are not always easy to express verbally, and the inner experience is totally impossible to verbalize. “The tao that ca be spoken is not the true Tao.”

PS: As I am posting this, California is again in the midst of conflagrations from hell. Hold us in your prayers.