BEYOND THE SELF - Big Mind Marries Shalom Process

I've been silent on this blog for a little while, not really knowing exactly how to use it now. We're no longer in Utah, we're back home...so now what?

But so much is happening. Big Mind is changing our lives...and fast. We had a workshop here last Sunday and over 20 people showed up! There's been a tremendous response to Big Mind here at Shalom Mountain and it's both gratifying and mysterious to see. Apparently at last weekend's retreat, there were lots of people buzzing about Big Mind this, Big Mind that, at the Quonset Hut. And they are trooped over across the street after the retreat was over. And we did Big Mind together and got to know our S-Self a bit better. It was an amazing time together.

So now we're doing two retreats that feature Big Mind and combine it with the loving intentional spin of Shalom Process. We're calling it Beyond the Self. If it's at all possible, I think that two extraordinarily powerful processes just got more powerful. The two are certainly changing and re-shaping my life in large and small ways.

So here are the details that I wanted to be sure to share with you.

The dates are:

February 21-24, 2008 -- coming up soon!
AND
August 7-10, 2008

Please see the Shalom Mountain website for a write up about the retreat

We're also taking Beyond the Self on the road to the various Shalom communities on the Eastern side of the US and to Ontario, Canada. I'll post again with dates and locations.

I hope that you'll join us! Let's be butterflies together!

Lots of love,

Pat

Home Again Home Again Jiggity-jig

This past Monday, we arrived at JFK at 5:50 am. Our wonderful friends Rob & Lisa picked us up at the airport and made us a yummy breakfast. If they hadn’t helped us out, we’d still be trying to figure out how to get from JFK to Connecticut and home. Thank you, Rob & Lisa!

Then, with only a few hours sleep, we drove home by mid afternoon. I was so happy to see the Catskill Mountains. I love where I live. Everything looked fresh and new to me, including the dusting of snow that was on our deck when we got home. Less welcoming was the freezing rain that greeted us on Tuesday morning. After a month of clear blue skies and warm temperatures, freezing rain was a bit of a shocker.

So now we’re back at work, entering into the next stage of our lives here at Shalom Mountain. I’m working on the brochure and Alistair is working on maintenance things. There’s always lots to do around here. It’s the cool season now, so I’m firing up the wood stove and feeling grateful for all the wood that Alistair chopped and I stacked back in the summer.

It’s now a time for integration. In our morning meditation, Alistair and I are discovering how much we miss the sangha at Kanzeon. When we meditated together as a dharma community, we created a collective samadhi wave that we all rode upon, making my meditations less distracted and deeper. Meditation with Roshi was a treat because I piggy backed on his samadhi, making my meditations seamless and profound. Now Alistair and I have to do it on our own and I miss the support of the sangha and our teacher.

We’re also learning what it means to speak to people about our Big Mind experience and to say what is true for us. We have been through an experience that has been life changing. Since I know Roshi and the Big Mind process to be the real thing, I also want to let other people know. I’m learning how to speak of this, simply and directly. I’m also feeling my self-consciousness of speaking about this, simply and directly. I keep making the mistake of thinking that people want me to entertain them with my stories, rather than speaking clearly from my heart.

I’m also discovering that my time at Kanzeon opened me quite deeply. This discovery surprises me because there were many times when I felt very, very ordinary. I kept expecting to feel all swoopy as I do on the Sunday morning of a Shalom Retreat. I did, sometimes, but often not. I think that this is one of the beauties of Roshi’s teachings. I was gradually opened and altered in a very profound way but without all the hoopla. Roshi might say that I am manifesting Maha Vairocana Buddha – the cosmic Buddha that gives birth to Buddhas. I’d say that I was learning to let Buddha out and doing it so slowly that I hardly noticed the shift in myself. That’s why I feel altered but quite ordinary. My ego never even had a chance to feel frightened.

Returning home is bringing home to me the absolute necessity as well as the inevitability of accepting my life just the way it is. No bells, no whistles, just radical acceptance and responsibility. I feel like water that is being poured into sand. I just pour out and absorb. This is very different from feeling fatalistic. I can hear my teacher’s voice inside me saying, “this is a quality of the Non-Seeking, Non-Grasping Mind; it is one of great faith and great trust.”

Almost Home

I can hardly believe that in a few days that I’ll be climbing on board a Jet Blue to return home.

On the other hand, I’m very ready to go home. It’s been an incredible experience and I’m also looking forward to firing up the wood stove and sleeping in my own bed in our beloved Quonset Hut. It’s going to be great.

Being with Roshi and the Big Mind process and group has been an experience of a lifetime. Many people come here year after year to be with Roshi and do the Big Mind process. I could just become one of those folks.

At the end of first week, I asked Roshi to become my teacher. It took me about that long to decide that he really is a highly realized being, maybe even enlightened (whatever that means -- nowadays I'm considering it as the fully integrated human being). Genpo Roshi’s the real deal.

I surprised myself because I am habitually very cautious, I hang back so much, checking things out to make sure it’s safe. But I came here with that question in mind, wondering in advance you might say. The spiritual peak experience I had about 2 years ago had set me on a path of opening up and I was finally beginning to understand the value of having a teacher (thanks to Sogyal Rinpoche). But there are a lot of wackos masquerading as enlightened teachers out there. So how do you determine who’s for real and who isn’t? It’s not easy.

But I was blown away by Roshi. He’s charismatic but he isn’t out to impress you. He’s the most masculine presence that I’ve ever met and I think that this was a big factor for me. I’ve done so much healing around my father in these past years, primarily through my relationship with Alistair and the alchemical retort that is Shalom community. Especially since moving to Shalom Mountain, I have discovered the very real river of love that I possess for my father. It had been blocked for so very long that I wasn’t even sure whether or not I possessed any. To find it not only was a joy but a total surprise.

So now I feel ready to enter into a relationship with a teacher. It’s an important part of the spiritual path and it means both to surrender and to submit. Surrender is the feminine principle, receptive, open. Submission is the masculine principle, active and penetrating. Both of them scare the bejesus out of me which is yet another layer of my conditioning as my father’s child. So becoming Roshi’s student is the right thing at the right time for me.

So these past 3 weeks have been a new journey for me to discover what this all means. In speaking with many of his students here, they have repeatedly told me that this kind of wondering IS the relationship. It never really ends and it's constantly changing. It's very intimate.

The other thing that I’m learning here is that through the compassion and kindness of the teacher, through direction transmission, I may have the nature of my mind revealed to me. Those are just words to me right now but they are filled with a kind of longing and hope as well.

I do know that I have sat next to Roshi during Zazen and that my meditation has been strengthened and carried along by the depth of his Samadhi (meditative state). I had only read about that kind of state experience before but now I have experienced it for myself. As far as I’m concerned, it’s totally true.

I absolutely have no regrets. Just a lot of curiosity as to what the hell this relationship is supposed to look like. I already have some hazy plans as to when to see Roshi next time. We might come back here next April for 2 weeks. If I do, then I will do a joining ceremony which in Zen is called Jukai; the Tibetans call it Taking Refuge. I have considered doing this for years, as a way of formalizing my Buddhist leanings. But I had never felt connected to any particularly sangha (community) before now. Roshi’s also coming to the east coast in the spring (NYC, Kripalu, D.C.) and I’ll also probably go there. It’s a tad closer than Salt Lake City.

Another thing that I am learning is that, if nothing else, the one thing that the student needs to do is to increasingly open herself to the teacher. This will be a very great challenge for me. Especially with a teacher who is so very masculine. Maybe even because he is so. As I transform, soften and open in response to this new relationship, the relationship will also deepen, and so will my spiritual experience. Not seeing Roshi very often appears to be an obstacle but perhaps it will also the catalyst. We’ll see. I’ll let you know.

In other news, this past week each one of us had to facilitate a group of 20 in the Big Mind process. Each one of us was rated and then ranked in the overall group. The results were announced today and I placed in the top 20! I outranked many long time students of Roshi’s who have had years of Zen and koan study and training. So go figure.

Of course, I am very pleased about all of this. But it’s laughable too because I was SO scared at the time. I’m amazed that my fear didn’t screw me up. Or perhaps because I knew that I was profoundly frightened that I was able to let the fear just be. But afterwards, as the fear left and the group was over, I felt waves of shame pour through me. Hmmm….what do you think? Do you think there’s a mat trip in there somewhere???

So Alistair and I will be bringing all of this home to Shalom. We already have two dates scheduled to do the Big Mind process at home. Because of trademark restrictions, we can’t use the words Big Mind but we can facilitate the process. And we sure will. We have a date in February and one in August and we’ve titled the retreat Opening to Oneness. We will be combining Big Mind process with Shalom process and we are very excited as to what will emerge in this marriage of processes.

I'll probably write once more before leaving, or upon returning home. Read ya then.

I’m a Bitch

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell, I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way
Meredith Brooks

Now, come on, all of you who know me well know that’s true. I can be a bitch. For those of you who don’t know me that well, just wait awhile. She’s bound to turn up sooner or later.

Roshi’s still into delving into disowned voices, most of them his. Today he started out with the Voice of Passion. But it was putting everyone to sleep, me included. So then he switched to the Voice of the Asshole and all hell broke loose. There was lots of jeering, Assholes saying pissy things to each other, even a smatter of philosophizing that only received sniggering. The women couldn’t relate to the word Asshole, so Bitch was substituted – that worked better for me too.

Roshi admitted that this voice is disowned in him and he’s trying to understand this part of himself better. The group mostly struggled with the aggression that seems built into the Asshole – why would you consciously want to be that aggressive? Some guys tried to say that the Asshole was the voice of male compassion. That was roundly booed down.

On the way to dinner, me with 4 other guys, we talked about being an Asshole unconsciously versus consciously. Some of us said that it’s really a primitive power that’s helpful and necessary for survival, when under attack, or at war (my personal favorite). Others thought that the Asshole only had a negative, unconscious side to it and couldn’t see anything positive about it at all, never mind conscious. I’m not so sure about that, but I couldn’t come up with a positive side either. I agree that if you’re consciously an Asshole, that’s pretty direct and mean. But still, there’s got to be something positive – it only makes sense. Every negative has a positive.

As we were talking over dinner, three of the guys turned into assholes right before my very eyes as they were teasing the fourth guy. The one being teased is young, 24 years old, and has just recently moved here to become enlightened. He says he’ll stay here the rest of his life until that happens. Talking to him was like talking to a newlywed who just won’t believe that his soon-to-be-spouse will one day surely turn into a three-headed purple monster at some point in the relationship. He just can’t hear it because that’s not the stage he’s at; he’s in the in-love stage that gets only the positive projection. As they say, the intended only pees (never pisses!) perfume. Still, these three assholes had a field day with him. But oh no, they weren’t conscious! But they were definitely having a lot of fun being assholes. It was fascinating.

As for me, I also shy away from considering that being a bitch consciously has a positive aspect to it. Even so, it’s just got to be there. When words like fag, dyke and queer – historically reviled words -- have been redeemed, why not Asshole and Bitch? Still, it’s an awful lot of fun just to be a bitch, to have it encouraged and loved, and enjoy it for what it is. When it’s unconscious though, which I admit is most of the time for me, everyone else can see it but me. That’s the very definition of unconscious. And I’m sure many of you have seen it in me lots of times. Poor Alistair gets the brunt of it, that’s for sure. But then hey, that’s what marriage partners are for – working out your projective bullshit. Making it conscious, holding it with awareness (aka Big Mind) and love (aka Big Heart), can keep the damage to a minimum. Heck, maybe my bitch can even be celebrated.

I have to admit something else. Before coming here, I knew that Shalom Mountain does really good shadow work. Owning something like your asshole or your bitch is almost routine. But after being here this past month and seeing Roshi plow through disowned voice after disowned voice, I want to state that the shadow work that’s done at Shalom Mountain is absolutely incredible. Big Mind can learn a thing or two from it.

Time's Precious

It’s day 3 of the final week at Big Mind. Sitting in meditation last night, I could feel the preciousness of the moment. And of all the moments that are coming down the pipe this week. It won’t be long now until we’re on the red eye flight back to JFK on Sunday. But until then, there is a whole lifetime to be lived in this week.

The first week we gelled as a group, all of us grooving on each other’s company. The second week Roshi started teaching basic Zen a la Big Mind process, which is a whole other experience, far more interactive. Last week we started learning more about facilitation skills and practicing in mid-size group. This week we’re doing Big Mind facilitation in larger groups. We’ll be evaluated on a numeric scale based on a 25 minute session where we have to cruise through 4 voices in rapid succession. Then we’ll be ranked and the results will be posted for community viewing. The Competitor voices are starting to show up. I’ve often found competition distasteful, which has resulted in my own lagging development in this area. So I’m learning to love my Competitor voice and appreciate the way she straightens up my spine.

Roshi’s been working us hard these past 4 weeks doing shadow work. His personal passion right now is to discover disowned voices, allow them to speak and then to integrate them. Most often he uses the triangle model, a recent invention of his, to align the dualistic voice (usually the disowned voice) with wisdom and compassion. Often, when that happens, the apex voice (the integrated voice) manifests as a transcendent voice. Not always, but frequently.

Last night we worked on the voices of The Doer, The Non-Doer (or Non-Doing) and the apex or integrated voice of The Doer & The Non-Doer. It was a wonderful experience for me. I learned that when I just do, then there is a joy and a passion that flows naturally from the doing. The “what” of the doing isn’t as important as the sheer joy of just doing. Where I get stuck is by insisting that doing be partnered with meaning. I absolutely can’t stand doing without meaning; in fact, I find it stupid and painful. For me that just leads to the insanity of working like crazy for no apparent reason. I’m talking about the kind of working that verges on workaholism as addiction. It’s an addiction that keeps me from living my life fully and prevents me from touching into the parts in me that are painful or difficult. While I'm not crazy about pain, I am committed to seeing things (myself) clearly.

For me, The Non-Doer is much closer in feeling to Being. The Non-Doer is essential for me because it is the place from which I re-fuel, the source of energy for Doing. I can also tell when Non-Doing veers into laziness or can feel the resulting energy drain and lethargy. But when I’m in Non-Doing, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated, even joyful.

Last night, when I put those 2 voices together and spoke from the apex, I discovered that the Non-Doer is the source of power, creativity, energy and direction for the Doer. Even more so, the Non-Doer offers the Doer confidence and wisdom. But meaning? Not sure where that comes from as yet. I’ll have to sit with these voices a bit longer and see what comes up.

This Saturday Roshi will finish the training with a teaching on Tantric Zen and it will be a transmission. Before arriving here, I was really mystified about transmission, not having a clue what it's all about, feeling that it was rather mysterious. After these weeks with Roshi, I believe I have received transmission several times over. And so have most of us who have experienced the transcendent on the Sunday morning of a Shalom Retreat. As I understand it now, transmission is Roshi’s capacity to hold – and my capacity to receive and hold – the energy of the transcendent, the non-dual state, without returning to a dualistic state prematurely. Alistair calls this feeling “swoopy”, especially when referring to being in love. In Roshi’s presence, I am learning to call this a new perspective that aligns me with wisdom and compassion.

I’m ready to go home. Looking forward to it yet not wanting to “be there” until I’m there. I’m still got being to do here. Time is precious.

With love from,
The Dual-ble Girl

“It’s All Gorgeous” *

This past weekend, our good friend Joyce Harvey-Morgan joined us in Utah. We hopped in her car and headed south to Moab which is smack dab in the desert. It has two national parks right beside it: Arches National Park and Canyonlands. There have been many times here that I thought “it doesn’t get better than this”. The past 24 hours topped that. (Roshi’s going to have to work very hard to top this!)

Many people have told me of these experiences in the desert. Nothing prepared me for the wonderful beauty of it. The fact that we only did the usual tourist hikes didn’t trivialize the incredible experience of all of it. After looking at the photos I took, I realized that the shots can’t express the magnificence and magnitude of it all. Only have the 360 degree experience can do that.

Even so, paltry digital photos will have to do. See the slideshow at left for a sample; click on the static image to see larger photos.

Arches National Park and Canyonlands couldn’t be more different. And they are within the kissing distance of 30 miles of each other. Arches consists of a relatively flatland with this soaring towers and naturally formed stone arches (apparently a hole in the rock wall has to be 3 feet big before it’s officially called an arch). One of the arches, Delicate Arch, is particularly famous and graces Utah’s license plates.

Canyonlands is the beginning of the series of canyons that moves southwards and eastwards into Colorado, and turns into the Grand Canyon. We went to Dead Horse Point and walked the rim, an easy hike of 6 miles all along the rim of the canyon. The views were extraordinary into the canyon 2000 feet below. The canyon walls revealed 7 layers of earth, representing 275 million years of the earth’s history in that area. The Grand Canyon exposes 2 billion years of geological history.

Alistair and Joyce kept teasing me because I frequently asked “how long do you think it took to create [the arch, the boulder, the pinon tree, the river bed, etc., etc.]. I was rather fixed on time because I loved putting me (and humankind) into perspective. But instead of feeling insignificant, I felt like I was a part of all of it. And I absolutely loved knowing that when my bones are nothing but dust that this beautiful, spectacular, wind and cloud swept panorama will still exist. That’s if we don’t completely blow up the environment and ourselves before that.

And what a place to experience the non-dual! When we first arrived, we took an easy 1 mile hike down a canyon with towering walls, called Park Avenue. I tried to take in my surroundings, the likes of which I had never seen before, and it was altogether too much. Too much sensory input, too much to hold all at once. Reminded me of the first time that I walked into Toys R Us and had a near sensory meltdown. This was much bigger. I think that’s why, in part, it’s hard for us to live outside of dualism – it’s too big to hold. Or rather, we’ve progressively and systematically shut ourselves down to the nondual as we grow up, so that we can just manage to get along without blowing our circuits on a daily basis. And then, eventually, we have to re-learn how to shift back into the non-dual, intentionally and with focused awareness. It’s definitely do-able.

That’s it for today. The home stretch of the final week is already happening. The more hard core facilitation practice is happening and everyone is bring on board the Healthy Competitor. Bring it on!

* This is a direct quote from a guy who, after a 2 minute walk to the rim & back, was heading back to his RV with is generator and TV. He ought to know!

Boredom as The Way

Zen is an intensely first person practice. Sitting on the cushion, over and over again, referring back to the self. Or, to be more accurate, the No-Self.

Being aware of being bored these past few days has opened many doors for me. I’ve been having great conversations with folks about boredom and being bored and I’m discovering that many people are having a similar experience. So at one level, the experience of boredom is part of the overall retreat experience. It’s a collective hitting the wall and going deeper.

I’ve been having feelings of “is this all there is” and then grudgingly coming to accept that this is it, this is my life. I am the common denominator wherever I go. I am the meaning maker of my life. I am the one who experiences joy, anger, pain and everything around and beyond that. I bring the world into existence every day.

But it isn’t even I. It’s the awareness behind the ego-I. In a recent teaching, Roshi was using the metaphor of a tea cup for us/the ego. As the metaphor progressed and morphed inside me I could feel it turning into a teacup with no bottom, immersed in the flow of the ocean, just becoming a conduit for awareness. That’s where boredom is taking me. It’s becoming the path. This doesn’t feel like a terribly exciting discovery, actually. But it does feel like a huge relief to see clearly.

The state of non-dualism is becoming a familiar place to me. What’s more, I’m finally learning language for it. At Shalom and on retreat, we’re in a non-dual state often, mostly accessed through the heart. But there’s a tendency to treat it like, poof! surprise! we’re here! and no one really can tell us how we got there exactly (although there definitely are methods) and we mostly language the experience as God appearing.

Here, I am dropping myself into a non-dual state for hours every day. It’s starting to become a familiar feeling that doesn’t have any of the poof! feeling to it at all. At first, I feel a huge sense of relief simply to be in the non-dual state. It’s not like any of the screwed up parts of my life have disappeared, but I am in a larger, expansive state that holds everything – including my screwed up parts. Only in non-dual, it’s all really okay just as it is. I don’t even feel the need to do anything about it, because it has its own perfection, it just IS. But as I continue in the non-dual state, this “it’s all okay” feeling begins to feel like radical indifference. And that’s very uncomfortable because (once again!) I’ve got this concept that I’m supposed to feel loving all the time. I believe that this is the ground giving rise to my boredom, even disappointment. Paradoxically, the non-dual Big Mind state is offering me a profound sense of responsibility in a state of being where there are no rules.

Moving into Big Heart, which is just as big as Big Mind but is the feeling aspect of it, feels like a relief. Whew, all of a sudden I care again. In Big Mind there’s no need to do anything at all, just be. Big Heart moves me back into the world and action once again. But one isn’t better than the other. They’re literally the yin and the yang of one particular state of being. Big Heart is the state of Kanzeon, Kuan Yin. Big Mind is the Buddha just sitting there. But for me to choose one over the other is just insanity, because that would be to deny a very important part of myself.

To switch gears here, Alistair and I have a fun weekend lined up. Joyce Harvey-Morgan is driving in from her home town of Boise, Idaho to join us for the weekend. We’re going to head out to the desert near Moab – maybe go to Bryce or Arches National parks. It’s been almost 70F lately and down to around freezing at night. I hear that the desert has even wilder temperature swings than that. So I’d better bring my woolies.

I’d like to close with a wonderful quote that Jim Hession posted to the blog today (thank you, Jim!) – it’s a good touch stone:

"The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day."