Guilt Trip July 24, 2009

Yesterday was not the best day at work. Well, actually it was a pretty good day until the end of it, in our team meeting, my boss totally gave us a guilt trip. She said she’d been thinking about it a lot and she just didn’t feel the team was doing as much as we could and we weren’t working at it’s best.

O.k.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this speech. It’s usually given after she comes back from some sort of trip and (I’m assuming) feels out of control. After years of therapy and yoga and meditation, I don’t completely freak out when she says something like that. I take it in stride. To a certain extent.

It’s always upsetting to hear that you’re not doing your best (finally finished review for Four Agreements, although I haven’t posted it yet).  My immediate reaction was: well you and your favorites (hint of bitterness there? Yes. But I’m aware, so it makes it o.k. right?), your supervisors, don’t know how to delegate; give me something to do. While this is true I realized that I was being completely defensive. It doesn’t matter that they’re poor managers. What matters is most days I surf the web all day when there is work to be done. I am not doing my best.  Or am I?

I’m currently reviewing Loving What Is so I decided to do The Work on this statement. (I know I only have like two readers, but I swear I’m going to start writing and posting reviews more regularly. This is my passion, right? I’m putting questions marks behind everything today. That’s interesting). So here’s The Work:

I am not doing my best.

Is that true? Yes. Absolutely? Yes

How does it make you feel when you have this thought? Like a loser, like a thief, incompetent, lazy.

How would you feel without this thought? Like I’m doing my best.

I don’t even have to get to the “turnaround”; that’s it.

But how could I be doing my best if I know I could be doing more. In the Four Agreements the author says “…always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next.” (pgs 75-76). What’s my best right now, this period of my life, this present moment?

My life is about honesty. That’s the chapter I chose to write first for the SHA book. I’m obsessed with the idea of honesty, especially internal honest. Am I pretending to be something I’m not? And if I am, what is it? I’m not sure what the pretend is and what the real me is. I’m I really the laid back person that everyone sees, that I think I am. Or am I really that (sort of?) type A personality that comes out sometimes, to the shock of some, who is honest and direct about what she wants or needs and doesn’t feel guilty about it, feels like she’s good enough and deserves it?

Doing more here, really getting involved, coming up with ideas, feels like a lie. My job makes me feel dishonest.  At first I really believed. But for so long now I’ve been pretending to care about what I’m supposed to care about, which is not the same as what I actually care about.

But here’s what I don’t get about loving what is?  After years of seeing people say one thing but do another, at what point am I allowed to say “I don’t want to be a part of that?” without turning it around to say “I do want to be a part of that?”

This barely makes any sense to me, so if it’s confusing, I understand. If you have some ideas…

Suffering/Unhappiness July 24, 2009

The Doctor Is Within is a great post in the NYT about the Dalai Lama.

I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about the difference between suffering and unhappiness. I always assumed suffering led to unhappiness, or maybe unhappiness led to suffering. But that’s not the way it is. Here’s the author giving his interpretation of Buddhist teaching:

Happiness is not pleasure, they know, and unhappiness, as the Buddhists say, is not the same as suffering. Suffering — in the sense of old age, sickness and death — is the law of life; unhappiness is just the position we choose — or can not choose — to bring to it.

Suffering is there, always. And so is happiness.  That’s something to ponder.

My heart the alter July 7, 2009

Only within burns the
Fire I kindle
My heart the alter
My heart the alter

A 5-day Buddhist meditation retreat is not supposed to be fun. At least it’s not advertised as such and most people have trouble being silent that long. Not me. For me the retreat was relaxing and, dare I say, fun. I discovered I really liked not having to talk to anyone and no one talking to me. I mean really liked it, maybe too much.  There’s a tremendous freedom in silence I think. Maybe it’s because I don’t have to care what other people think as much, simply because I don’t have to interpret every word that comes out of their mouths.

The expectation on these retreats is that you will be tortured by your issues coming up in the silence, but without the usual ways to combat them or feed them. I didn’t feel that. Issues came up but they floated away, no deep vein tapped, just a time for general self contemplation and relaxation. Then at the very last sitting before I left one of the teachers offered this chant:

Only within burns the
Fire I kindle
My heart the alter
My heart the alter

By the time she chanted it the third time I finally understood the words, when she chanted it the forth time I chanted it with her and the fifth time she chanted it I couldn’t sing because my voice was cracking, my heart breaking. Then tears were streaming down my face, and I was barely able to stop myself from wailing, managing a quiet sobbing.

I still don’t understand why that chant struck such a rich vein of emotion. But I couldn’t get it out of my head for hours and if I thought about it too much I would tear up again. In the cab, on the plane, once I got home. It stayed with me.

Loving yourself is the first principle of the self help addict and often the most difficult to achieve. The theme of the retreat was metta, lovingkindness. I don’t know if that theme was official, but we had a sitting every afternoon with metta instruction and we ended every day with a metta chant. There was a focus not just on metta in general but metta toward oneself specifically.  I listened to the metta meditation talks the whole week, knowing in the back of my mind that I don’t love myself, not really. Yet I let it go easily like it was any other issue that came up, not feeling deeply affected by this knowledge.

But this chant. This simple chant somehow opened me up when nothing else did. Even now thinking about it I’m starting to cry. I can’t deconstruct it or make any intellectual sense of it. All I know is that this chant affects me deeply, it stops me in my tracks, so I have to listen to it, pay attention. It’s like a accumulation of everything I’ve ever felt about myself. And that doesn’t make sense I know. Logically, linguistically those words put together should not emcompass the whole world, the whole universe, but somehow they do.

Somehow they explain everthing.