i'm gettin' old

there's humor in that title somewhere...

tonight, at dusk, i sauntered, with a cup of tea, and i reflected... how once again, i got myself into a situation where my heart opened big & wide and i got hurt. so i started to berate myself... but i interrupted that with forgiveness. wow. that's a new transition.

"i only meditate when breathing."

i was able to assess that i tried really hard to tread lightly... and that i did my best to research & evaluate beforehand... yet it got complicated, as things sometimes do... and my heart got a bit squished. dontcha hate that?

time for a change... instead of hardening, battening down, swearing not to let it happen ever again... i told myself that it was ok. there it was: i forgave myself. there was no way i could have or would have played it differently if given another chance.

"can you love some more?"

my new patterns are brought to you in part by the amazing girlfriends im so lucky to possess... like those wind up toys that totter off, i can always count on them to pick me up and set me back away from the table's edge, back on my course. tonite, i was given a good talking to and reminded of my dreams. yes, someone who knows me well enough that she sat there and reminded me what is it that i want, that i hope and hold out for. and she was right.

"be still and let the universe."

realizations of new patterns is eye-opening, spacious, simple. the reminder that i'm in control and choose how i opt to act moment to moment.

"this is your life."

maybe this is what those nice buddhists mean about becoming friends with yourself? if you'll excuse me, i'm waiting... ;)
c.

hold on loosely

this one's for you, M.

went for an early morning bike ride. wanted cleveland, wanted the metroparks where i used to get up early on such glorious summer mornings and pound out a few hours solo on the paved trail... riding fast, head down, strong stride once the quads warm, and forget it all. instead, i found an urban fabric that required constant attention to cars and terrain. i headed for the park... there's an asphalt path around the lake! it took me all of 4 minutes to circumvent, so i turned off onto a gravel path leading into the woods. now i hate ("c., we don't say hate." yes, mom.) riding on gravel... especially big chunky gravel like this was... until i remembered that i knew how: loose in the saddle, relax the grip, give the handlebars some play, keep the bike in a general straight trajectory and let natural synergy between body & bike handle the rest. ahh! grasshoppers flitting, pine smelling, sun dappling - pick that gaze up and look around!

thinking: how much of it do we define based on past experience AND WHAT WE THINK WE WANT before we ever even give the present moment a fighting chance?

taught my first yoga class here last night. felt uprooted, awkward, verbose, insincere sounding. heard how much the students loved it afterward. ridiculous, i tell ya. i read them this:

"...we live in duality. We constantly affirm [good & bad]. We call one thing pleasurable and another painful. We label and file and compartmentalize everything we see. Our behavior is directed largely to finding people who will bolster our judgments so that we can maintain them, and making enemies of those who challenge them. ...[Judgments] are created to block the flow of love through the mind. Each judgment, big or small, positive or negative, is a step away from the knowledge of the True Self. ...the relinquishment of those judgments is a step closer to Self-realization." - Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main (thanks for the loan, F. you'll get it back.)

taking advantage of this ride,
c.

pictures pages

we've been studying hard together lately, no? so here's some mental respite... pictures from my weekend sojourn to canada: paradise found. i want to go back - now.
c.

soul speculation

You gotta have soul (edited for length by me!)
By Tom Robbins

Mental Bungee-jumping may not be your sport of choice, but there's a cerebral ledge that sooner or later each of us has to leap off. One day, ready or not, we glance in a mirror, cuddle an infant, attend a funeral, walk in the woods, partake of a substance Nancy Reagan warned us to eschew, chance a liaison, wake in the night with a napalm lobster in our chest, read a message from the pope or the Dalai Lama, get lost in Verdi or lost in the stars - and wind up thinking about our soul.

Yes, the soul. You know what I mean.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese...

But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that.

By Tom Robbins Esquire, October, 1993

read it through.

Practice Like Your Hair's on Fire

Enlightenment is possible in this lifetime, but time is running out. We have to make the most of this rare and fleeting opportunity to wake up.

All sentient beings, including myself, have gone through continuous ups and downs, life after life, experiencing the sufferings of samsara. The reason we keep having all of these problems is because we haven’t managed to fulfill our life’s mission.

What is our mission? In the most basic sense, we all have a desire for peace and happiness, and we all wish to be free from pain and suffering. But though we may experience happiness here and there, it is not the kind of happiness that has never known suffering. In fact, for most of us it is the kind of happiness that is based on suffering.

We put a lot of effort into having material comforts, and on top of that we want mental and spiritual comfort. But even when we think we are working for spiritual benefit, if we dig deeply we may find that it is simply attachment—the attachment of bringing ourselves to a state of material or spiritual or emotional comfort.

The kind of comfort most of us seek is a kind of stopgap comfort. We haven’t really addressed the root of suffering or developed the true cause of happiness. Once we realize that, and reflect and meditate on it, we can begin to see the true nature of suffering and the cessation of suffering. From there, one can make the decision to seek true peace, nirvana, which means freeing ourselves and others once and for all from suffering and its causes.

Why haven’t we been able to achieve that yet? Why haven’t we fulfilled our mission? Because we don’t yet realize how important this life is. We don’t realize the limitless capacity of our human body and mind, and how difficult it is to find. We don’t have a sense of urgency because we don’t realize how easily this human life can be lost. Instead, we keep ourselves busy chasing after happiness and running away from suffering, life after life.

Many of us complain, “I have no time.” I like to call that a good, fancy, stylish excuse. Everybody likes to say, “I’m too busy,” because everybody would like to seem important. It is a great excuse that offers several benefits: you can avoid what you don’t want to do; it gives you a showbiz idea of being important; and all the important people do it, so you can include yourself with them.

I refer to that as busy laziness. We experience this kind of laziness because we have a problem recognizing our real priorities. Even if we have time, we put the most important thing in our life—our spiritual development—on the back burner. - Gelek Rinpoche

(Excerpted from the Fall 2008 issue of Buddhadharma - available NOW at your corner, locally owned bookstore! what? you don't have one on the nearest corner to your house? ha!)

free gift with purchase

i think the best part of this crazy yoga trip is the other seekers i've met along the journey - wise people you can crawl out of bed to email about emotional subtleties in the middle of the night...

i should be in bed
instead im sitting in my zebra underwear and gandhi shirt in my dark kitchen spouting you missives by candlelight
it's like the late 1800s except for the clothing

since moving, ive had a few emotional icky spots plaguing me so last night i put pads to keys and got it out. yes, trusty reader, you are excused from such couch sessions...

i awoke to find words of wisdom awaiting, which resonated so much that i want to hold on to them... so i will share the best...

"I truly believe we are put in certain situations as life tests, as things we need to work on, so yes, maybe there is something about you that needs to be worked on... You're working on the subtle things! Your resolve must be strong to get through this, because when you finally figure this out and learn to deal with your feelings, give yourself to them, surrender, if only at night and by yourself, explore it, don't overcome it but get so familiar with it, so aware of it that it will not have a grip on you, trusting that inside you are so great, so whole, that nothing can keep you down for long, because it is not who you are."

ah... through darkness to the light. made me realize that ive explored the emotional ickiness of this experience in close detail for the past few years and it's silly that i avoid any sign of negative experience now - especially the nuance of a situation that keeps rearing its whispering head. and i truly believe that which you resist, persists. so i do intend to sit with it, love it, embrace it, move through it, and back to shining out goodness. such good stuff.

the future's so bright...

if you'll excuse me,
c.

prayer defined

"The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated
attention to something other than your own constructions." - W.H. Auden

amen!
lord, grant me peace from my self-created dramas.
c.

i thought i was the only one

All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered "yes."

- Zi Ye

almost full.
c.

road trippin' ruminations

rochester road trip this past weekend. i would post photos, except after years and years, i apparently still haven't learned to keep spare batteries in the camera case.
mini-realizations:
- its really good to have friends with whom you can truly be yourself and let it all hang out
- climbing trees is important for personal growth
- there are catalogs that sell lingams mail order

we stayed with a friend's parents outside rochester. we did what anyone would do when entering a strangers' house - promptly walked out the back door and danced under the giant trees & bright stars. ive never met these people and yet they graciously accepted our loud insanity into their house and our crazy veggie food in their frig. they were having their own sleepover at the neighbors so they left us with this great house in the middle of a forest while an electrical storm raged. mmmm! how many times can i say it? so cared for!

i learned tonite that councilwoman fannie lewis died. wow. a cleveland institution passes on. rest in peace, fannie. thanks for the many years you served and administered from your front porch, always trying to do what was best for the residents of Hough.
c.

maya prison

"A human being is part of the whole called by us a universe - a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and his feelings as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us; it restricts us to our personal decision and our affections to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creature and the whole of nature in its beauty."

- Albert Einstein

a legacy

master carpenter,
today was your birthday. emails trickled in from various cities across this country where those you touched have landed, reminiscing about you, all that you taught, and how you always made each feel there was something in them.
i keep that cup you made on my desk, to remind myself what it means to be a master craftsman - the care, attention, precision, creativity, and forethought that should go into ones work - and also to remember the family legacy - one that i pray i do justice. i learned so much & im so honored to have had the opportunity, that this becomes an instance when words are not enough.
head bowed,
c.

brain surgeons are people too.

in my typical you never know what you're gonna get when you get out of bed in the morning life... today, i watched a (live) brain surgery. it was a new procedure, first time ever performed in north america, and the surgeon was a study in stress management. not only did he have a career culmination, an awake patient being operated on, and a media frenzy, but he managed to be amicable, professional, and handled it all with such aplomb. watching the procedure, my body was crackling in such obvious proximity to divinity. on the table lay a 75 year old pig farmer, having plaque removed from a brain artery. amazing.
i had instant brain meld love with the older surgeon, mentor of the surgeon performing the operation. he brings together various medical disciplines - calling them collisions - and watches the resulting innovations & collaboration. since so much medical history has occurred on accident - via collisions such as experiments gone 'awry,' etc. - its an interesting model. im sure glad i collided with him today! i came away so appreciative that there are such amazing people on this earth, doing such good stuff.
some quotes i picked up from him:
"if all you've got is a hammer, everything is a nail."
"a rising tide floats all boats."
c.

2am

summer storm rolls in
just as im turning in
say ahhhhhhhh

blue lightning
thunder, accompanied by the sound
of motorcycles racing home

nighty night
c.

manifestation update

i just received an email from a studio owner in buffalo asking me to sub a few classes... this occurred less than 12 hours after i posted last night that i was ready to teach again. i just nodded as i read it... ok, so this is the path. i love when it's so clear.

how can there be any doubt?

i've had chills all day long... i wonder what's about to happen...
c.