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Spiritual Self-Inquiry
Leslie Ihde LCSW, 15 Oakcrest Rd., Ithaca, NY  607.754.1303

You are the Mountains, You are the Sky

4/11/2016

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In the field of psychology there is a famous test known as the Rorschach.  You’ll recognize this test by the ink blot images it is known for.  In the test, the recipient is shown a series of abstract, roughly symmetrical shapes and asked to comment on them.  The test taker might see two people kissing, or a couple of horses galloping,  or simply a storm cloud threatening on the horizon.  It is the imagination of the test taker that offers information to the tester.  The beauty of the ink blot test is that the images don’t actually represent anything!  The tester witnesses the recipient’s mind directly and intuitively in the remarks and imagery that the recipient offers.  

Another tool from the field of psychology is the identification and analysis of human defense mechanisms.  The terms that psychologists use to describe these mechanisms are now so common that they are easily, and often accurately, used by lay people.  We speak of denial, rationalization, and displacement in our ordinary language, but the terms originated in psychology.  The most significant defense mechanism, in my opinion, is projection.  A well known discussion of this psychic mechanism is described by Jungians who discuss it as the shadow.  The shadow side of a person is his dark side.  He may project this side onto another person.  Hence the animosity one may feel towards someone who exhibits one’s own flaws.  The 1940’s fictional character, the Shadow, was inspired by the Jungian discussion.  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Projection plays a role in all of our relationships.  In Jungian psychology the discovery of and analysis of these projections is key to psychic health.   We project psychic meanings onto others.  The goal of analysis is to help the person reintegrate the aspect they have projected.  Bringing back into oneself what one has projected precipitates an internal conflict.  Where previously the individual attempted to work out contradictory traits and interests through projection,  the reintegration of projections shifts the conflict from the interpersonal realm to an internal one.   This is true whether one loves or hates one's projected aspect.  

Archetype refers to universal human qualities.  For example, there are feminine and masculine archetypes.  The warrior, or the nurturing mother may reach the elevation of archetype.  An individual person may represent an archetype to us, and this picturing of a meaning in an individual is another sort of projection.   The failure of actual person to carry the value of the archetype can be a source of unhappiness.  Take ‘mother’ for example.  There is the particular person who is our mother, but there is also the archetype, mother.  Relative to the archetype mother; the great nurturer, many mere human beings don’t measure up.


The artist works intuitively with imagery.  The images that the artist chooses can, with care, be traced back to psychic meaning that concern the artist.  Even the abstract artist who attempts to use only color and not image cannot escape psychic picturing.  Color itself relays meaning.  Rarely would the artist undertake an analysis of their imagery, perhaps even eschewing such an effort as an obstacle to the dream like lure of the muse.  For me, though, reflections on projections illuminate the dream and lead me further along my spiritual path.

It is also inevitable that we project our own visions and thoughts onto a landscape, or scenes in nature.  This is as common as projections onto a person.  Take, for example, a small tree growing ‘bravely’ on a precarious precipice.  We have all seen those miracles of nature.  Perhaps you have been as struck as I by the lone pine tree at a cliff’s edge, or the hardy mountain laurel nestled in a tiny crevice surrounded by wind and rock.  What do these real life images say to you?  Do you momentarily project human attributes onto these plants?  Do they seem ‘lonely,’ ‘strong,’ or ‘frightened’?  They do to me.  

My extensive exploration of orchid pots in my work as a potter was stimulated by a projection.  How brave the little orchid, needing so little, offering so much in its luscious and subtle blooms seemed to me.  I spent months devising the perfect orchid pot.  I left openings for the ariel roots that would extend and intwine.  I patterned my hand built pieces with impressions from Indian wooden print blocks.  I fired them in a raku kiln so that they would suggest the rustic environment that the wild orchid thrives in.  


I felt that I myself was a kind of orchid.  Raised with little, I learned to be self-sufficient and imaginative.  Living on air and the micronutrients that travel by air, I am content in a small place.  Like a cat, I can make a home anywhere.  Sturdy, self-reliant and, with my words, or in my youth, lovely.  In a way, the orchid is both showy and hidden.  I am like that, too.  The orchid seems to do so well what I aspire to do: thrive on nothing, bring beauty to those with the patience to seek it.

Natural scenery offers an infinite number of opportunities for discovering one’s mind-because that’s what it is to clarify one’s projections.  Imagine yourself at an overlook in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  From where you stand you see an ocean of space with waves of silent, still mountains fading into the distance.   You see the gradations of color; first deep green, then blue green and finally a whisper of gray fading into cloud.  Are you not yourself as wide and as expansive as space when you see such a scene?  Don’t you, by the magic of projection, imagine the freedom of soaring through the skies, unlimited by the hundred contingencies of your daily life?  For a moment, with your inhale, aren’t you yourself space?

What if this spaciousness that you feel were an aspect of who you truly are?  Better yet, what if spaciousness is the visual representation of yourself as free awareness?  We know the mystics use that word when describing their consciousness.


We can inquire into our projections onto scenes in nature for the health of our own spirit.  The expansiveness of a vista might call on us to experience a loving expansiveness toward others.  Discovering the direction our muse wants to take us might also be understood as coming to understand our own spirit voice, or inner teacher.  For psychic health and self-clarification, we can learn to identify and then internalize our projections.  As I suggest this, please don’t recoil into an intellectual stance.  If you do, you will be disappointed.  Remain with the imagery alive.  Then notice, no, recognize yourself in the imagery.  Doing so will galvanize both your spiritual and artistic energies.


                                                                   turning my eyes
                                                                   to my shoes
                                                                   from the mountain vista
                                                                   I notice I’m pretending 

                                                                   to be a woman and not the sky
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Solve or Dissolve?

3/21/2016

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When people come to see me they hope to solve a problem.  It is possible to solve certain orders of problem.  For example, you can make a decision.  With your decision you hope to make the best choice and you understand that you may be eliminating certain options that were also attractive.  For example, you buy a house, or marry a particular partner, or decide on a degree program for your education.  In each of these cases you solve a problem with a decision.  What you cannot do by decision is retain all options.  Nor, ultimately, would you want to.  You marry a particular person in part because a monogamous relationship with one person seems richer to you than relationships of less depth with many.


There is a dark side to every decision.  The options which you don't affirm in making the decision are lost.  The other person, the other career, the other house.  You accept this loss because you are making a bid for satisfaction along particular lines.  

Other difficulties don’t yield to decision alone.  Let’s say you have contradictory interests, or the decision you are required to make by circumstance will eliminate something that is very important to you.  You love a particular person, but in order to be with that person you have to live in a place you hate and leave a place you love.   The conditions are such that you cannot have both the things you want.  If you are not able to transcend or abandon one of these desires you become depressed.  Depression is just the psychic aspect being “stuck” wears.  Such a situation is truly painful, but it is not the one I want to address, because even in this case the remedy is decision, if a painful one.

The problems that I want to address are even trickier.  The root of these problems are your way of seeing.  Your way of seeing is constitutive. In other words, the very mind that is trying to escape the problem is itself a case of the problem that it tries to escape. 

I once saw a show that illustrated this point nicely.  The main character was a paranoid man who spent years building an underground shelter in case of a nuclear holocaust.  At a certain point in the movie, he believes the holocaust has begun.  Frantic to find his family, he is forced, finally, to take shelter himself without them, and seals off the communication with the world.  As the story ends, we see him with his supplies prepared to live out the fate he has so feared.  What the audience knows that he doesn't is that he brought it on himself.  Outside of his shelter the conditions of life are as they always were-green trees, fresh food, and so on.  It was his mistaken understanding of what was happening that caused him to imprison himself in his shelter.  He believes he is the lone survivor, but his family mourns him from outside.

Although not a perfect fit, this story suggests what I am trying to describe.  In my example the man’s paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Attitudinally the man saw a holocaust.  There wasn't actually a holocaust, but because his mind was prepared to see it, he did and his life unfolded accordingly.  Mind form is like that, but it is much more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mind form, or way of seeing, is constitutive.  It shapes your life so that your life appears to conform to your un self seen vision of life.

So when I ask the question, solve or dissolve? how can I apply it to this problem?

Imagine that you are the type of person who always questions him or herself when something goes wrong.  You have a self-faulting personality.  If something goes wrong or falls short of your or others’ expectations, you blame yourself.  You do this for years.  If anything goes 'wrong' you respond by trying harder, not by asking whether or not human failing alone could even be the cause of the trouble.  Then one day, in what might seem like a miracle, it occurs to you that you can not yourself alone be the source of the failing in your or others’ lives.  I don’t mean that you just get tired of it all and say, in effect, 'the hell with it' (which people sometimes do at a certain point in their lives).  I mean that you realize you are attributing to human capacity something does not belong to human capacity.  Its not that you don’t have failings.  You do, probably many.  It’s that what you imagine you can correct by ‘trying hard’ simply can’t be corrected that way.

You begin to feel great relief.  You are no longer burdened by the weight of the world.  Neither anger towards others or yourself is appropriate to the frequent and commonplace failings of life.  You feel relief.  Your attitude of self-blame lifts.  You have dissolved a problem rather than solved it.

There are many other examples I can describe.  Imagine that you are a person for whom the notion of community is central.  When you attempt to explain what goes wrong in life, you do so along the lines of this notion.  Either you or the other is failing the community.  Or, on the other hand, either you or the other is giving too much to the community and failing yourself.  Back and forth you go, over and over, attempting to find that elusive balance.  How much do I give?  How much do I take?  How much did that person give?  And so on and so forth.

Then you meet a person who has no community notion at all.  That person simply sees 'a bunch of people’ where you see a world.  You don’t know whether this person is a miracle or a curse.  Your chastisement bounces off them like so many rubber bullets.  Your praise is absorbed into their own notions of what might be praise worthy about them.  You discover, in essence, that you don’t even speak the same language.  

What do you do?  Do you go to marriage counseling to try and elicit the help of a third party in enlightening your partner as to the nature of community?  Or do you return to a self-inquiry, seeking clarity about your own explanation for the negative in life?

Obviously I am a proponent of the latter.  We need other people situationally, but we also need them in order to come to see ourselves.  It is only through this endless bumping up against one another that we have a shot at identifying our own constitutive ways of being/seeing.

Problems of this order cannot be solved.  I’m telling you that but I know you will ignore me.  Most likely you will try again and again to redouble your efforts to make right what seems wrong.  You will do this along the lines of your own mind form without noticing that you have a mind form.  

If you do listen to me I can tell you a secret.  The problem of limited seeing is not open to solving by persisting in seeing limited by mind form.  You cannot keep your mind form and solve your problems any more than the man in our story could solve his problems without dropping his expectation of a holocaust.  His mind form prevented him from asking himself whether the bang he heard so loudly could be anything other than the beginning of the end he was primed for.  The problems that arise due to our being limited in our capacity to see are not open to being solved but only repeated endlessly until the mind form itself is dissolved.  


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An Invitation to a Tea Party

2/21/2016

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Early in our lives, my sister and I developed the ability to call a sort of psychological ‘time out.’  Whatever the turbulence of our family life, we could create a hiatus in which to converse cordially about all manner of things.  Even during times when we were sworn enemies, we were capable of discussing the nature of our opposition as politely as civil war generals over a pre-battle breakfast.


Sometimes these sessions took place as formal tea parties.  One or another of us would extend an invitation.  This capacity to set aside the ordinary parameters of our relationship allowed a kind of meta friendship to develop.  A dialogue would unfold between us like a dialogue between passengers on a bus: completely frank, impersonal and deeply intimate simultaneously.  These conversations were made possible only by abandoning our usual orients.  Both my sister and I understood this intuitively.  Ours was a precarious meta friendship- it could be violated by either of us with an involuntary return to ego-consciousness.   An unduly harsh adjective, or a proffered remark about a too-fresh wound, could interrupt our truce.  Yet, balancing on a razor’s edge, with self-concern set off to the side somewhere, we could engage in the most remarkable and edifying conversations.  Painful honesty, like mountain air, only heightened my love of the glorious transcendence possible on these occasions.  

“Will you have tea?” I would ask my sister in my most formal pseudo-British tone.

“Why yes.  Yes I will,” she would respond in a pince-nez voice. 

So began our philosophical dialogues.  Our themes were the nature of life, the various positions of our family members in an ever changing mobile of conflict, and the divvying up of the talents we had each been granted with our birth.  She, it was agreed between us, had the musical talent as well as a mind for math, and a softness that gained her favor with adults.  Were she to act outside the wishes of our parents, she could do so with skillful secrecy.   I, on the other hand, was the artistic one, with an unfortunate propensity to be abrasive with too-direct interactions with the world around me.  While I lost points for my tact-free behavior, I gained for my ability to be honest under all conditions and for my courage not to faint in the face of danger.

After such revelations, when we left the sanctity of our tea party, we would each tiptoe carefully around the edges of our divided up world.  I never touched a musical instrument, nor did she take an art class.  While in our current lives the joys of any artistic pursuit is free game, during childhood this subtle mutual respect helped us avoid an unhealthy competition.  In other ways, too, the wisdom we wrought together with our explorations would inform our lives.  Now, many years later, I think on these moments fondly and, startlingly, recognize them as my first experience of what Martin Buber calls the I-Thou conversation.


In adulthood, our world and ourselves seem less fluid.  Gone is make-believe and easy transitions between play and responsibility.  Some keep the spirit of play more alive than others, and probably most want to, but as we go on in our lives the intractability of our struggles is trenchant.  Perhaps my invitation to tea even seems flippant.  How can one carry the spirit of play through divorce, or illness, or the impossibly contradictory requirements that we find ourselves subject to from both within and without?  Honesty is one ballast.  The I-Thou relation is another.   

People differ.  They differ in their tolerance for conflict and in their aspiration.  Some are self-disciplined.  They are able to see their goal in a tiny point trembling in the distance.  Others fade quickly, unable to stand the desert that lies between them and their desire.  Your fate is who you are.

My invitation is an invitation to sit down and frankly explore previously un self-known agendas, and to do so without hedging.  People taking a risk in life often have a plan B.  The exploratory effort I am suggesting undercuts plan A as well plan B.  Ordinarily, since you have a stake in sustaining your make-shift solution, you will hesitate to discuss them.  Honesty might blow them apart.  In fact, the only reason to do it at all is because you value self-discovery over comfort and persona, or you are so desperate that you are driven to make a leap of faith.  Self-discovery may make it impossible for you to continue your resolution.  Having discovered the tenuous foundation of your structure, you scramble to reinforce or abandon it.  Now would you like some tea?

It is a rare breed of person who develops a taste for the kind of dialogue I am advocating.  This dialogue is as tricky as the tasks any hero in an adventure show faces.  (In fact, the adventure stories are all based on these psychic truths.)  On the other hand, this dialogue is the easiest form of talk.  To undertake it, all you have to do is let go of everything.  You don’t have to come up with anything.  You only stand in the light of truth.

I cultivate the spirit of these careful dialogues in my work as a teacher.  My work is an invitation.   Join me.  Let us prioritize the crisp, dangerous honesty of self-inquiry over emotional responses, self-protectiveness and conflict based agendas.  Let’s open ourselves to mountain air, delicious truths with life-changing import, and honor one another as seers and helpmates-we are together in the marvelous mystery of life as a human being.  Living the word, Namaste, let’s gentle our wills so that our hearts can soar.  
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Decision Making as Spiritual Practice

2/2/2016

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One symbol that haunted me as a child was the symbol of the cross.  It was the central image of the religion in which I was being raised.  There, in front of my eyes every time I entered a church, was the representation of a man being tortured to death.  I came to see the cross, even the benign ones that lay sweetly on the throats of young Christian women, as a symbol that signified not just a man’s tortured death, but my own inexplicable crime.  I was implicated, I was taught, in this man’s death- a death which took place many hundreds of years ago, by a sin I did not consider myself the source of and did not understand.  I asserted my innocence, and only after some decades of life came to understand the dialectic of fault and responsibility in my own life.

The cross is the intersect of horizontal and vertical.  The horizontal dimension represents the here and now, the expanse of our lives in space and time.  The vertical is the line of our aspiration.  Reaching beyond ourselves toward the heavens and the azure blue of transcendence, our aspiration draws us upward toward wisdom and peace.  I experimented with these lines as an artist.  I reflected on them from a psychological and philosophical vantage point.

Our lives are lived out at the intersect of these two planes of being.  Our aspiration on the one hand, and our physical, creaturely aspect on the other.  Each moment we have the opportunity to adjudicate the forces of horizontal and vertical in our lives.  When we face decision, and even when we avoid it, we are casting our vote. 


It is a striking feature of human consciousness that we must make decisions.  Sartre rightly pointed out, if with a dour attitude, that man is condemned to freedom, and must make decisions with limited knowledge and time.  We do this daily.  Yet, looking closely, perhaps we can use decision making as a spiritual opportunity.

It is necessary to cultivate inner strength to face the difficult, if beautiful, truths of life.  Turning away from truth and weakening oneself in the hundred distractions whittles away your chance.  Your chance is your birthright.  Your chance is the chance to deepen your awareness, see the mystery of your life and life itself.  It is also the chance to attain, through a succession of insights, another order of human reality.  

Man is afforded a finite number of opportunities in which to act.  The act I refer to is the ability to choose.  He has no control over the fact of his limitation as a mortal, physical being.  He will never attain complete knowledge.  He has little influence over his fellow man, and seemingly only variable success with self-control.  He does, however, have the opportunity to make decisions.


To make a decision is an act of will.  Several attainments must be achieved in order for an act of will to qualify as decision that is also spiritual practice.  I think that first it is necessary to be deeply and fully honest about the matter at hand.  You must not turn away or hedge your bets when an opportunity arises.  Your goal is to cultivate inner strength as much as it is to make a decision.  It will be through your decision making that you will become who you are to become.  Honesty means to take a full measure of yourself and your circumstances and the others whose concerns pertain to the occasion of your potential decision.  You must not exaggerate nor diminish the facts available to you, including the facts pertaining to yourself.  This is not the time for rose colored glasses, although that does not mean that you must cast aside optimism.  It may be part of your decision; you may choose to affirm the possibility of success even when success is remote.

An act is only possible when the individual sustains the full awareness of limitation and opportunity.  He must bear in himself the horizontal and vertical of his moment in time as he makes this decision.  Here the cross takes on a new meaning, new beauty.  It is the spirit shining courageously.  Facing the contradictions involved in the desire to be infinite when we are finite, sustaining aspiration when we see fully that we are humble- this is the chance that we have been granted.  It is a fiery experience.  Being honest here means fully facing the costs of any unanticipated outcome to your decision.  You may fail.  You can make a good decision which turns out badly.  You can make a bad decision.

It is necessary that you attain the ability to sustain your decision through time.  If you actually made the decision, you will do this.  It is possible for an individual to mistake intent for decision.  You might, for example, have the intent to change your diet, but when the dismissed food appears, you falter.  This is because you didn’t really make the decision.  What you did was consider making a decision without affirming that decision to the core of your being.  The appearance of the food doesn’t matter.  If you made a decision, you already rejected the option of the unhealthy food.  There are a hundred reasons to fail in the moment, all of which may have superficial merit.  My experience with decision is if you made the decision on a deep enough level, the options are gone.


A third attainment, along with honesty and the ability to sustain your decision through time, is the ability to understand the window of opportunity available to you.  Certain decisions must be made within a certain time frame in order to have any meaning.  You must decide whether or not to get the surgery, or where to move to when your lease is up.  Other decisions are developmental.  It may be time to move out of your parents' home, or end a relationship.  With these decisions it may not seem so easy to know the exact moment to act.  At some point you may become aware that you have avoided making a decision.  You waited too long.  The window of opportunity, which is not merely circumstantial, is closing.  You can’t always see when this happens to yourself, but sometimes you can see when it happens to someone else. This is true in the world of time and space, of moments and things.  It is also true inwardly.  In language learning it is often said that there is a period of time in a person’s life when learning a second or third language is relatively easy.  All capacities are aligned; the brain is at the right moment in development; the social confidence is strong enough.  Waiting to learn the language until later in life will be much more difficult, and most likely the person will never develop a native’s accent.

The inward critical timing is harder to describe since we are speaking not about a particular decision but only about decision per se.  It seems clear that you can wait too long.  The moment for decision can pass.  Recognizing this moment involves another sort of personal power.  If you fall asleep you will miss your chance.

The final attainment necessary to make a decision is the ability to accept the limitation implicit in the decision you make.  You may fail.  You don’t want to underestimate this possibility.  Don’t use the prospect of failure to weaken your decision.  Rather,  bear it as truth.  While the cross of decision is a cross of opportunity,  it remains a cross.  

Most of these considerations seem to rest in the horizontal of life.  The spiritual dimension, the vertical, is your desire to wake up.  When you make your decision, you can make a decision that will help you wake up.  By asking yourself,  "Will this action help me wake up?"  you may find an answer arises to your awareness easily and clearly.  

It is a paradoxical question.  How can you know what will help you wake up?  You don’t know what it is to be awake, and therefore you don’t know what you are trying to wake up from.  If you are alert, you are aware that you are suffering.  Nevertheless, as we learned from Sartre, we do not have the privilege not to act.  We must make or refuse decision.  We are forced to consider our circumstances, our intent and then seek an answer with our highest intuition.  

When you decide, take the direction you have decided on as fearlessly as possible.  Affirm your own gesture by committing yourself to your act.  It is through successive efforts of this sort during your lifetime  that you gain personal power.  Refusing decision does the opposite.  It weakens the spirit.  For me, making decision is like hearing music from afar.  It is a beautiful sound and I want to hear more of it, but I know I will only reach it through a leap of faith.
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to be revised

1/31/2016

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Satomi and the Mona Lisa

12/19/2015

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First published as Passionate Journey: The Spiritual Autobiography of Satomi Myodo and then reissued as Journey in Search of the Way, this autobiography chronicles the journey of a Japanese woman’s search for enlightenment. Satomi lived from 1896 to 1978, her lifetime spent during some of the most difficult of Japan’s history. The story reveals the darkness, urgency and extremity of Satomi’s effort. She did some terrible things in her life, like abandon her child. She also never gave up. Ultimately, she attained releasement while studying under Yasutani Roshi. What I’d like to discuss in this essay is a practice that Satomi developed herself and which became a support to the occasion of her letting go, or waking up, as it is sometimes known.

At the time that she developed the practice described below, Satomi worked for the wife of a Buddhist teacher. Although the teacher was kind, his wife was very difficult to work for. This woman was impatient, quick to find fault with Satomi and generally hard to please. Satomi, who was struggling to be a good Buddhist, tried, to no avail, to use each difficulty as a spiritual lesson. Try as she might, she couldn’t overcome her own angry reactions, reactions of which she was very ashamed. Finally Satomi discovered a fruitful practice. 

In the guest room of her teacher’s home hung a reproduction of the Mona Lisa.  The Mona Lisa’s smile affected Satomi profoundly.  Each time she passed the image, Satomi contemplated the smile.  Gradually, Satomi found herself melting into the Mona Lisa’s smile.  Smiling like the Madonna brought peace and joy to Satomi’s body.  Beginning with the smile on her lips, the warmth of her expression spread quickly through out her body and banished the troublesome attitudes she struggled to transcend.  Noticing the soft power of her own smile, Satomi was struck by a revelation.  She determined to smile first, no matter what.  Smiling first became her every moment practice.  In her own words, “Quickly, before anything could happen, I cut off all deluded thoughts with my sharp sword of a smile-and the results were one hundred percent. By smiling first, I was always clear and bright, and I could handle whatever came up.”

Satomi continued this practice no matter what irritation, anger or sorrow arose within her.  The depth of her practice is reflected by Satomi’s subsequent gratitude to the very woman who had been her petty tyrant.  In her autobiography, she describes how upon her awakening she was overcome by warmth toward the very ones who had once been the occasion of her torment.
The discovery of a practice is a wonderful happening. In this case, Satomi’s discovery was almost indistinguishable from insight. In seeing the Mona Lisa’s beautiful, subtle smile, Satomi intuited a peace that transcended every petty torture of her daily life. As the Mona Lisa smiles gently, Satomi, too, practiced a subtle smile. Perhaps there is no greater tribute to the Mona Lisa’s smile than this story of how it inspired a seeker.


Satomi’s story illustrates what a creative and devoted mind can do with insight. An invention in a moment of despair; personal practice can arise from insight as it did for Satomi. Her story is all the more palpable because her frustrations are the daily and ordinary kind. She was born in 1896, but she could as easily expressed the same frustrations with a boss or peer in any kitchen or work environment today.

Satomi’s story elevates petty suffering to the level of significance that is warranted. People are usually ashamed of their little sufferings. Yet these small sufferings can be the content of their daily lives. To bypass their virtues would be a spiritual loss. The content of most people’s pain are rather ordinary. Certainly there are the big ones; sickness, old age and death. But ordinarily our trials are the little ones; jealousy, bitterness, hurt and loss. What matters, I often tell my students, is not the smallness of our hurts but the greatness of the spirit with which we respond to these hurts. Each occasion grants us an opportunity to transcend. We are the “petty tyrants”2 to one another. A petty tyrant is a small tormenter that we meet in our daily life and cannot easily avoid. Depending on the depth of your intent, your petty tyrant can teach you about yourself.

So what are the virtues of small sufferings? For one, they are pointers. When your temper rises, or your self-hatred appears, notice the trigger. Is your reaction based in truth, or belief? Does the trigger stir up the tangle of a historical pattern? Is it necessary for you to live within the confines of this pattern, or are you ready to let it go? Perhaps your suffering is more vague. You are only able to say that what you are experiencing does not measure up to the happiness you crave. As someone once said to me, “I can’t say exactly what I want or what would make me happy, but I can say what doesn’t make me happy.” Noticing what doesn’t work is also perception.

Our attempts to realize fulfillment include generous portions of trial and error. We twist this way and that, usually with little clarity, as we seek happiness. I often reflect on Satomi’s discovery almost as if it were my own memory. I imagine that I am working under a petty tyrant. I try different approaches. Perhaps I can be unaffected? No, not for long. My emotions boil to the surface and redden my cheeks. Maybe I can merge with my task and feel a oneness with the doing? Yes, but soon the voice of the petty tyrant interrupts me. Then an image of the Mona Lisa rises before me. I picture clearly her enigmatic smile. She knows something. What does she know? I smile myself, letting the warmth of my smile open my body to the universe. When I feel tension and resistance, I smile through it, and surrender my attitudes as if they were so many items in my home to cast off. I clear the space of my body/mind with Mona Lisa’s smile. ‘Smile first’ becomes my secret practice, too. The smile grounds me, and teaches me to surrender.
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An aspect of Satomi’s spiritual genius is reflected in her gratitude. Imagine the depth of insight necessary to feel grateful to your petty tyrants!  Perhaps you yourself have been able to be grateful to a period of hardship in your life, or even for a difficult childhood because you know that it taught you much. Gratitude softens the soul and melts the hard resistance we feel into golden joy. Satomi found this out when she practiced Mona Lisa’s smile.

This essay first appeared in the winter issue of Still Point Arts Quarterly
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A Meditation on What Matters

11/23/2015

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On the notepad I had written the obscure line, “They matter.”  Now, having lost the prior sheets, I was left to contemplate these words.  The stray page belonged with a stack of notes I’d written about my clients.  The one to whom this note referred was a therapist like myself.  When we met, she spoke to me about her relationship to her own clients.   As the memory came back, I smiled.  It is not always the case that therapists care so deeply about their clients.  For some the days’s hours follow each other in long line of tedium: a rosary of complaints, angers, jealousies and self-importance.  Lacking the honesty to see oneself in the trials of one’s companions, sessions can pile up like a stack of slow soap opera episodes.  This woman was different.  For her, they matter.

The short sentence came back to me throughout the day, at odd times, like a revelation.  Once when a woman came to see me and unexpectedly brought her daughter.  Facing a tragedy, the two women, physically so alike, took careful comfort in each other.  I was struck by their well chosen words, their tentative embrace.  

The words came back as I witnessed a young man, a clerk, humiliated as he lingered, helping an attractive woman of his own race when his boss scolded him for neglecting the cash register.  Frowning angrily, the youth sought to restore his dignity by muttering under his breath.  I, his customer at the register, said to him gently, “No hurry, no hurry.”

They matter.  What exactly is it that matters of them?  Not squandered moments or petty emotions, emotions that we all have.  Not delusions of grandeur or childishness.  What matters is Spirit.  Spirit rises in the most difficult and ordinary of circumstances:  the everyday hurts that we try to cast aside, along with the grander ones.  Spirit matters as it comes to know Itself in the occasion of ourselves.  Unyielding, it rises again and again, perhaps freshest in the morning when we feel hope, but most beautiful in the evening if we lived our day without letting down our effort.

What is the effort we make?  We make the effort to be real; to be fulfilled.  We claim it with a hundred silent calculations.  We choose the best fruit in the marketplace, the nicest clothing we can afford.  We look for our name written somewhere, or listen for it spoken on the lips of a friend.  “What tone was that,” we ask, “what attitude?”  Do we count, count the way we hope we do?  Do we matter?  

I know the secret of how we matter.  I try to tell you with my smile and my eyes, especially my eyes.  Can I catch your attention, that attention that you want to have?  Can I help you to notice the jewel that you are: perfect and complete and fantastic-you that embody the impossible everyday marching on, as if undaunted somewhere deep within because there, there you know the same secret that I know even if you can’t bring it to word.

You know.  You know when you feel outraged by the slight, though the outrage is not what matters.  You know when you are hungry: soul hungry to be seen and understood.  Gasping for air your hungry spirit refuses to starve even as years pass by without satisfaction.  

I know the secret.  You need nothing.  You already Are.  You must nurture and encourage the flame within.  Distinguish it from it’s petty manifestations but don’t let it go out, never let it go out.  It is for you to realize.

This time matters.  The time of your lifetime both short and long.  Long enough to find the answer and make it real by faithfully climbing the succession of images that come to your mind-the answers that get cast off one by one.  What is cast off is that which fails to really express what you know inside to be true.  

You are not your feelings.

You are not your doings.

You are not your history.

You are not your loves. 

You are….you know.  That’s right.  Let it rise.



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Meditations on a Waterfall

10/10/2015

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Whenever I stand near a waterfall I feel moved.  No other natural form of flowing water stirs me more.  Imagine the dance and play of the water as it cascades over stones.  Picture the light flickering and twinkling like the winking of Spirit in dangers that would crush you and me, made as we are of human bodies in flesh, bone and sinew.  While we mortals twist and turn daily to avoid injury, both psychic and physical, the water moves freely meeting any obstacle; water is ultimate fluidity.

‘Fluidity’ often denotes freedom.  A person who is capable of demonstrating fluidity is the opposite of a ‘rigid’ person.  A rigid person must have things ‘just so’ whereas the fluid person is uninjured by circumstance, bending and yielding as necessary.  The virtuosic fluid person moves within and through circumstance without surrendering his or her values.  

When observing the waterfall you will notice a paradox.  The water, infinitely yielding, carves stone-that ancient and utterly hard substance, the bones of this earth.  Water caresses stone with whisper touches, or crashes against stone with utter abandon.  Water carves its mark through the aeons while stone guides the dance of the water.  Causing the water to shift, fall back, dash again-apparently without care or resentment-the water’s path is determined by the hard substance it plays against.

Which shapes which?  In one way, it is clearly the stone that shapes the path of the water.  The water, while marvelous in its play is forced to move ever downward to the lowest point.  It gathers momentum or rests in pools depending on the forces that work on it.

Yet stone is shaped by water, isn’t it?  Notice the textures of the stone, the basins that have been carved by whirlpools and the gathering of like with like to create a pebbled stream bed.  With another paradox, it is the water that moves rapidly but does its work over very long arcs of time.  The stone; solid, cold and unmoving has an instantaneous effect.  

What does this play of hard and soft, liquid and solid, movement and stillness teach us?  The movement and stillness can be reversed by perception.  Stand back from the waterfall and notice the repetition of the patterns.  Yes, it moves rapidly, but from a distance a painter could paint the same mounds of water, the same mass of bubbles, the same quiet pools.  From that distance, all is still.  

Turn now to your own life.  From a distance, isn’t all still?  Don’t your doings and actions repeat endlessly, seemingly infinite from the inside while imbued with drama, but when viewed from the outside an unmoving picture?  

Think of time.  Do you feel that you are in time as if time were some substance or thing that you must work your way through?  Or are you the stationary one, the one who does not move while the world passes by around you-your being divides the flow, but you cannot jump in for fear that you will be swept away, ever down and down to some crashing end?  
Are you what moves or are you what is still?  If you are still, what is the nature of your stillness?  Is it repetition?  Is it resistance?  Do you take the same posture again and again like the figure on a Greek vase chasing his foe on the other side of the same vase?  Does this posture give you the sense of movement because your gaze is pinned determinedly on your foe fleeing just ahead of you?  If you were to step back, just a little, or turn around quickly, what would you see?  Could you see the play of forms, endlessly the same yet suffused with the dynamism from within, informed by the dream?  What is inside and what is outside here?  What is movement?  What stillness?

Silent, for just a moment, you contemplate your seeming action which is really inaction.  These daily actions and reactions are as still as night when viewed, like the waterfall, from afar.  

Now turn your attention away from the drama that usually grips you.  Stepping back with the mind’s eye, can you notice the steps of your own dance in slow motion?  Visualizing these dance steps, can you notice yourself twist this way and that as you try each day, each moment really, to experience freedom?  Are you not are greeted by a hundred impediments, coming from both within and without?  Some of these impediments are understood by you, some are not.  Some, less known to you, contribute to the dull dissatisfaction of your day.

Who notices this play?  What is this other Stillness that moves you like a sharp gasp of recognition?  With your indrawn breath you become quiet.  You exhale softly, carefully wanting to notice everything about your perception, a perception whose origin you cannot fathom yet know to be your home.  Silent, you inhale slowly to let the mystery infuse your being.  You feel respectful, soft, calm.  There is a fresh energy moving up your body.  You also feel a wide, expansive horizontal reach.  You are centered in the mystery (but suddenly it is not right to say in.)  You are the mystery of Stillness and movement, form and formlessness.  Exhale.  Your breath becomes a circle.  The circle is infinitely large yet somehow experienced by you. 

What is the you?  Is there any other you aside from the dream that you are always held to be reality.  If you are the one who dreams, who is the one who is dreamed?  Inhale.  Your alignment shifts.  You feel gentle, receptive and kind.  Nothing can rouse you to anger or despair because those are features dreaming, while you are the Dreamer.

Exhale.  The water crashes over stone in both stillness and movement.  Stone is solid and yet moved by the softest of pressures slowly through vast expanses of time.  The stillness and movement are the same.  The moment and the arc of time are one.  The dreamer dreams that he is the dreamed.

Inhale.  





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Basho's Fault

9/2/2015

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This piece is reprinted from my column in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Fall 2015

In the 17th century, the poet Basho wrote a sort of travelogue called ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North.’  In his day, travel in Japan was dangerous and the outcome uncertain.  Basho’s journey was a profoundly contemplative pilgrimage.  The premier haiku poet of his day, Basho related deceptively simple scenes to an audience already familiar with a rich history of short form poetry.  This poetry included tanka, a five lined poem that predated haiku.  On his journey, Basho experienced hunger and cold while feasting on beauty and the sublime.  The first to combine prose with tanka, Basho wrote from the deep presence of Stillness.  This Stillness is the Emptiness of the mystic.  A lay Buddhist, poetry writing was Basho’s spiritual practice as well as his craft. 

We are familiar with haiku, perhaps having written our first in grade school using the familiar syllable count of 5-7-5.  Basho’s most famous haiku is

The old pond;

A frog jumps in:

Sound of water. 



In this poem, the jump of the frog and the sound of the water are simultaneous.  Since it is the frog jumping into the water that creates the sound, why does Basho say it is the sound of the water?  Because frog and water and the mind of the listener are not separate.  In these few, simple lines, Basho deftly indicates a mystical level of awareness and invites the reader to experience the same.

Seemingly as far from the modern day as a contemplative poet can be, Basho is one of my mentors.  First by writing tanka, and then tanka prose, I found my voice with this ancient, Spartan form.  In particular, I am drawn to minimalist tanka, painting a picture with my palette of five lines.  Here I speak of nature and the voice it arouses in me:


recognizing 

its image

in mountains

the soul soars

octaves above




Or, with five lines, revealing the essence of relationships many years long:


my sister

adopted the doll

I neglected

   will we argue when it’s time

   to take care of mom?



and:


call me flash

my brother said

zooming past me at 5

   on the phone he tells me

   that his wife left him 




As a teacher, I find the brevity of the form valuable as a challenge to my students.  They are pressed to relate the truths they discover as succinctly as possible.  I encourage them to write a journey to their own interior, juxtaposing prose with short tanka.  The tanka hits the point home in a staccato of sharp images-sometimes contrasting, sometimes amplifying the prose.

The modern English language haiku writer usually doesn’t count syllables, nor does the tanka writer.  It is also customary to leave out punctuations and capitalization.  While haiku only gives the writer three lines, tanka allows for five.  If you were to count syllables, the tanka poem would be 5-7-5-7-7.  Two additional lines allow for more personal remarks than the haiku.  Tanka predates haiku by hundreds of years, evolving from short songs.  Communicative forms of tanka writing evolved in the form of notes passed back and forth between members of the court.  They were obscure enough to fool the messengers while sharp enough to communicate the vicissitudes of love affairs.  Later tanka parties developed.  I have held some of my own with my poetry writing students.  A 5 lined poem begins the conversation, and, passing a notebook, we write responsive tanka, circulating the notebook between us.  Sometimes for fun and ceremony we don antique kimonos and sip sake.

Basho’s genius was his clarity, brevity and piercing insight into what in the plethora of experience was the jewel to pluck.  In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, we are as haunted as he is by the briefness of his remaining time on earth. We share with him his pleasure at the beauty of nature and his comradeship with contemporaneous poets as well as with those who left their traces with brief verses.  Coming upon a scene a poet spoke of years before, Basho adds his own as if continuing a conversation.  In his hands, verse, like art, seems an ample foil against the imminent darkness of death.  How that darkness pales in the face of such brilliant words!  His prose alludes to friendships that span centuries, like mine with him.  Admiringly, I share his contemplations and imagine misty Japanese mountains.  My mind, too, seeks truth as my weary body resists sleep.

There is one description in particular that leaves the modern reader in anguish and points, perhaps, to a failing in the sublimity of Basho’s love of nature and beauty.  In an earlier travel journal, ‘The Records of a Weather Exposed Skeleton,’ Basho describes coming upon an abandoned child.  Here his words describe the scene:


As I was plodding along the River Fuji, I saw a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the bank, obviously abandoned by his parents.  They must have thought this child was unable to ride through the stormy waters of life which run as wild as the rapid river itself, and that he was destined to have a life even shorter than that of the morning dew.  The child looked to me as fragile as the flowers of bush-clover that scatter at the slightest stir of the autumn wind, and it was so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had with me.


The ancient poet

Who pitied monkeys for their cries,

What would he say, if he saw


This child crying in the autumn wind?


How is it indeed that this child has been reduced to this state of utter misery?  Is it because of his mother who ignored him, or because of his father who abandoned him?  Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive-by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven.  If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind.



This child’s cries now haunt us more than three hundred years after Basho met him.  It is hard not to rage against the poet whose observations seem merely aesthetic and indicative of a moral fault. Could this poet be the man who fathomed the Oneness of all things in the sound of water?  What is the ‘irresistible will of heaven’ such that Basho, a man, can’t swoop up this child and bring him to shelter with some peasant family?  Why must he pass on, advising the child to raise his voice to heaven against his undeserved suffering?


My favorite poem by Basho is the following:


Still alive

At the journey’s end:

A late autumn eve.



In this haiku I find a sense of mystery, wonder and gratitude.  There is no feeling of entitlement; only wonder.  The poet greets his journey, and finally, the late days of his life, with awe.  How does his sense of awe cast light on his attitude toward the lost child?  What is Basho’s fault?  It is hard to understand him correctly as we gaze back through the centuries.  His was a time of frequent violence.  Tragedy was commonplace.    Reading his surprise, still alive at the journey’s end, we sense that he found his life to be an unexpected, and perhaps unearned jewel.  He seems to suggest that we don’t suffer because we deserve to suffer nor experience joy because we earn it.  Is it the stillness from which we emerge, in joy or sorrow, that arouses Basho’s awe?  If so, it is also the Stillness that we are.

Inspired by Basho, my own poem references my teacher:


holding tight

to the stick you offer

I see now

it is attached 

to Nothing








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How to Begin

8/12/2015

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Sometimes, when I meet a prospective student, he or she asks me, “How do I begin?”  I think this is a wonderful question.  To ask it is a privilege.  Usually we don’t slow down enough to ask.  We don’t ask, “How do I begin?” because we already know the answer.  We are involved in a matrix of doings.  Our purposes are revealed in our doings.  We are unlikely to stop to review those purposes in the drive to accomplish them.  Arriving at the openness of the question means that we have let go, at least briefly, of the answer that occupies us.

There are many moments in our day that support beginning.  The morning is a natural beginning.  If you are able to sit quietly before the flush of your day has taken hold, you are at a moment of beginning.  Less easy than the morning, there are nevertheless a hundred other chances.  A minute of quiet, here or there.  A pause in a discussion.  A hesitation before a repetitious argument.  But because there are many chances, don’t assume they will always arise.  One day you will arrive at your last chance.  

Beginning requires attention.  It is a state of being in question.  Beginning, for me, requires a letting go of attitudinal answers.  Like the attention you invite when you stand in a yogi’s mountain pose, to begin you must casts aside emotionality, attitudinal stances of all sorts, and the posture of being the one who already knows.  As knower you cannot be in question.  As seeker, you can.  

Beginning becomes possible after an ending.   We seek to solve our problems, but anyone who has actually solved one has seen that a real solution is more like a dissolution.  The terms of the decision are not necessarily carried into the solution.  Take a break up as an example.  In the throes of the conflict you have with your mate you struggle this way and that to make the relationship work.  If you solve your problem by breaking up, the struggle simply evaporates.  You abandon the terms you were trying to meet.  

Inner moves also have this character.  Let’s say you are struggling with the sense that you are inadequate.  You feel the heaviness of disappointment in yourself, and wonder why it is that you cannot do better with your efforts.  Then, almost miraculously, you make a decision.  You decide to go to school, or lose weight, or apply for a job.  A new inner energy awakens and you are able to do what you thought you could not do.  You have dissolved your previous answer; the previous refusal to make a move in life.  In the dissolution of your inertia, you discover that you can act.  Doing, which previously seemed impossible to you, is now possible.

With spiritual work, we begin.  We ask the most fundamental questions.   “What is satisfaction?”  “How am I attempting to be satisfied in my daily life?”   “If I am not satisfied, how is my answer inadequate?”  The beginning returns when you ask the right question.  With each life transition the question arises anew.  “How am I seeking satisfaction?  If I am satisfied, what is my satisfaction?”  Arriving at these questions is your beginning.  Your question, which may begin with torment, is your jewel.  Hold it with great care.   It can open a door.







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