Fun with Buddhism

Just so everyone knows, I will be going away on vacation starting tomorrow with no ability to blog, but will resume my usual practice once I return. With my impending vacation, I have been thinking about how it all fits into my Buddhist walk. As Americans, we LOVE entertainment! We use it to distract ourselves without even knowing it. At that moment where Lorelei is asleep and I have been going all day playing with her and cleaning or doing my mommy duties my first impulse is to turn on the television or pick up a book. Lately I have been fighting against this natural impulse. Pema talks about those moments of quiet being so key to mental health. Let those moments permeate you. When you feel bored, be in that moment. Feel the joy of simply being where you are. Experiencing the sounds and colors and smells of where I am brings so much joy to me. It helps me to refocus and snap back into a mindful state when I have been thinking about this or that. My mind will wander into some uncharted territory about "what happens if?!" (and I am getting better at realizing when these moments occur) and suddenly I snap out of it and realize where I am and that I don't have to worry. I can sit and just be where I am. So on my vacation this week which has the potential of being so hectic and draining, I will practice mindfulness and simply be where I am. I will not seek an outlet to keep my mind busy the whole time in order to avoid myself. I am coming to realize that I am a much better person when I stop trying to be who I think I should be! It is so wierd. Finally I am the person I always wanted to be: I have energy and zeal for life, I want to be with the ones I love without worrying if it will drain me mentally. I have so much to give now! Truly, I feel that a net has caught me from falling. So, let's go and have fun experiencing all the ups and downs of life!

The Fledgling Buddhist

I would have never thought I would be a Buddhist. This is mostly because of my own misconceptions on Buddhism in the past. I shied away from anything requiring a leap of faith. Little did I know, faith and beliefs are not a requirement. A heathy interest and a scientific mind are all one needs to get started. In fact much of Bhuddism can be practiced along side other religions. Some make the claim that Buddhism is not a religion at all but a practice. As Wikipedia puts it:

Religion is a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of life and the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a supernatural agency,[1] or human beings’ relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine.[2] Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

Now there are some strains of Buddhism that worship Buddha as a god, but there are strains of Christianity that ritualisticly hold rattle snakes to prove they are truly in the spirit. Some sects get slain in the spirit or claim that they speak directly to God (need I go on?). We need to take what is good and throw the rest out. We have a brain for a reason.

I have such new found freedom with these new ideals. Everything is fresh and exciting, in fact I can feel myself glowing and radiating energy and joy! I see myself and think back to fledgling Christians when I was younger. The excitement one sees in them is so wonderful. The sins of the world are lifted from their shoulders, they feel so free and motivated to change the world, to share their story of salvation which they call their "testimony". A testimony usually includes how life was before a conversion, what drew one to converting and ultimately how life is afterwards. Amazing that one can recieve a sense of freedom through many different outlets! Salvation through Jesus Christ is not the only way. As I thought about this last night I realized something so simple it struck me in a profound way. My "Bhuddist testimony" I think brings this epiphany to clarity:

After the plucked carcass of my faith lay before me nearly eleven years ago (perhapse a bit dramatic or perhapse not, haha!)I asked myself, "what now?" But no matter what I did, I could not move on. To those who have not experienced such a loss I compare it to losing a limb or a parent (of course I have lost neither of these but that is the closest I can come). In my first attempt to heal, my husband and I went to therapy together. This allowed for some mobility, but not much. I no longer knew how to function without Him. The only thing I knew for sure was that I could not return to the picked apart, holey, patchwork remains of a faith I had abandond. My second attempt to bandage my wounds was to begin attending the local synagogue and even beginning conversion education. It was different enough from Christianity to be safe yet similar enough to be homey. After about six months a sense that I was rebounding into Reformed Judaism to cover up my hurt overcame my need. I realized I was not ready for conversion and informed my husband. After this, many years were spent in pain regretting my loss of faith. Eventually, this turned to a mild interest in searching for truth which led me to a comfortable place in which I began to talk about faith and God again. My husband told me one day about four years ago that he was considering Buddhism. I lashed out at him feeling abandoned and angry that he could feel ready to move on before me. I accused him of not having been a true Christian and not loving God as I had. My husband responded by no longer informing me of his thoughts on spirituality, which was fine with me. A period of feeling safe and a sence of rightness resulted for years after that. I didn't reach out except to expand on my scientific theories of life, death and our beginnings. After starting couples therapy AGAIN in May of this year a fire began to burn in me. I knew that I wanted and deserved passion for the first time in....eleven years. I knew then that it was time to go back out on a limb. So here I am and it brings me to my epiphany: In my own imperfect way, I have exemplified Buddhism for the last eleven years. I have neither indulged nor repressed my grief, I have followed my brain and what I knew in my very being was right. Most importantly, I did not take the easy road by turning back to chrisitanity and against my heart. This took me nearly eleven years, but I have faced my greatest fear.

Looking back, I see now the unhealthy attachment I had to Jesus Christ. I used faith as a crutch to get me through life. When I took that leap as a Christian to say "Maybe what I have been taught is not correct", I felt what I was doing was right, despite the pain I experienced. This brings me to a quote from Pema that breathes life into the challenges of my daily life:

"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us."

I feel that where I am now is solid rock. Not to say that I do not have ideals and monsters to continue contending with! This is a daily walk. The good, the bad, and the hideous arise in me all the time and my goal is to see them all clearly as I did my dependance on God. I want to turn and confront the monsters chasing me and stare them in the eye. I feel no more fear regarding God or religion or belief. It is empowering to know what a huge mountian I have overcome in myself! Joy is abundant at the Knickerbocker household!

Happiness

I love being happy. LOVE laughing. Love beating myself up over things. I am much harder on myself than anyone else is on me. Attaining happiness is for many the ultimate goal in life. It has been my own goal! It seemed that each time I would attain happiness it would slip away and feel as though a dream to me. What was I doing wrong? How could any unhappiness be present in my life?! I planned meticulously for our comfort and happiness: I got an education, put my husband through law school to ensure we would be financially stable, had a baby a little later in life, bought a modest home to prepare for family, two dogs....it didn't make me happy. At times, yes, happiness was abundant, but always these feelings of sadness, resentment, jelousy, and hurt would set in. I felt like a horrible person. How could I be unhappy with so much?! I was bad. Selfish. Doomed to be discontent forever. I turned my unhappiness into yet another reason to be cruel to myslef.

An "aha!" moment arose for me when reading in Ms. Chodron's book the other night. Harsh is a mild adjective when describing how I treat myself at times. I demand perfection from myself constantly and when I don't attain perfection, I either beat myself up verbally or mentally as discipline or I become depressed and lose any ambition to attempt anything new. This is why I am so very sensitive to critique from others because I simply can not take much more. I think Pema puts it very eloquently:


"The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves. Yet it's never too late or too early to practice loving-kindness. It's as if we had a terminal disease but might live for quite a while. Not knowing how much time we have left, we might begin to think it was important to make friends with ourselves and others in the remaining hours, months, or years."

"Maitry- developing loving-kindness and an unconditional friendship with ourselves. People sometimes confuse this process with self-improvement or building themselves up. We can get so caught up in being good to ourselves that we don't pay any attention at all to the impact that we're having on others. We might erroneously believe that maitri is a way to find a happiness that lasts; as advertisements so seductively promise, we could feel great for the rest of our lives. It's not that we pat ourselves on the back and say, "You're the greatest," or "Don't worry, sweetheart, everything is going to be fine." Rather it's a process by which self-deception becomes so skillfully and compassionately exposed that there's no mask that can hide us anymore."

"What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart".

"Two women are standing behind their locked door peeking out the window at a monster standing on thier doorstep. One of the ladies is saying, "Calm down, Edna. Yes, it is a giant hideous insect, but it may be a giant hideous insect in need of help."


This is a completely different concept to me. Wrapping my mind around the idea that "Yes I am flawed, and that is okay" is so fresh. I don't have to draw blood from myself every time I make a mistake (figuratively of course). I simply acknowledge my mistake and let it fly away. If it persists, I again acknowledge it and release it again and yet again if needed. I no longer digest it and rechew it like a cow. That is what I see as loving myself. It is what I would want to do for others, so why neglect myslef in the process? Maybe the biblical passage should read "Do unto yourself as you would do unto others".

Happiness is elusive. It comes, it goes. The goal here is not to be happy. It is to be present in all we do. Experience the bad with the good and do not hide from it. Use the bad experiences in our lives to our growth and betterment. I believe that if we befriend and love ourselves that happiness will increase, but the goal should always be to just BE. Experience the cold of a winter's day though you may shiver. I can face my demons, AM facing them daily. Already I feel more peace than I have in years. Playing with my daughter has never felt so unhindered. I feel like I have unloaded a hundred pounds from my shoulders. Perhapse I CAN do those things I have put off for so long because I didn't think I was capable.

Finally, contrary to what some may think, I do not allow my passions to run wild now that I am letting these ideals crumble before me. I acknowledge my downfalls and know them as destructive, then I let them go and do not dwell on them either positively or negatively. It is always disheartening when people ask me how I choose to do the right thing when I do not have "God watching over my shoulder". I desire to do good. I desire a good life for myself, my husband, and my daughter. I desire to live life to it's fullest. Do I need any more reason than that?

Stress

For years I have wondered why I started going gray in the sixth grade. How is it we allow ourselves to live with so much on our shoulders? My whole life I have been a high stress person. I mull over things, eat away at them and chew until my jaw is sore! Apparently stress will make you age at six times the normal rate. Heart disease risk, illness- all increase the more your stress levels increase. All reasons to decompress. In Europe people have less, but they don't over work themselves. In the US a 40 hour work week is practically unheard of. It is time for change. More meditation, and less caring about the detail things that don't matter in the long run.

Had a slight difficulty yesterday with a co-worker who thought I had made a poor decision. My patient during a test I was performing showed a slight disrhythmia. I could feel it manually and I could see it on EKG. Before proceeding with the test I called the Dr's office to inform them of this and see if they wanted to proceed with Isuprel (A cardiac drug that increases the automaticity of the heart muscle) because I had some concerns. This co-worker told me that I was going to get my ass chewed up one side and down the other because she did not see what I claimed to see. My usual response to this would be to mull over it to ensure I had made a good decision. I would have been worried and possibly unable to function as highly as usual. Instead my response was to say "If the doctor chews my ass for having my patient's best interest in mind, then let him." And that was that. I acknowledged that I felt stressed and it entirely changed my response! It was empowering to know that I could purposefully change my behavior to the better. Not only was my response clear cut, but I experienced much less stress. I am changing slowly, one baby step at a time. I will not bear the weight of the world any more. And by the way, I did not get my ass chewed one bit. : )

First Blog!

So after seeing my sister-in-law's blog during Thanksgiving I started thinking: "Geez, I could soooo do something like that!" I have so much I could write about.  Sometimes a person just needs to get out what they are thinking.  So here goes my first blog.

I have been a miserable girl the last bit.  I have felt so empty and lost in many ways.  My husband Carl and I have been going to therapy one or two times a week to clear up some long standing issues we have been having.  And finally I say ENOUGH!  Enough is enough!  I am so damn tired of putting up with myself.  I have only been halfway living.  I am tired of living a sub par life and letting that be my reference for normalcy.  Just because everyone around me is living sub par does not mean that I have to.  I have put this off long enough and now I am finally ready to dive into a life changing experience.  I am going on eleven years now of being sans religion, or belief in general.  I was so hurt after christianity crashed and burned for me that I couldn't move on.  I wasn't ready to, but now I am. 

And what aspects of myself do I hate with so much venom?  Glad you asked.   I am easily stressed.  I need far too much time to recouperate after emotional trials.  I have a viscious tongue.  I am an awful housekeeper (really, the worst!).  I am very self centered at times.  When stressed I push everyone I love most away from me.  I think over and over again about issues past that I can not change.  Basicly, I am thoroughly flawed.  Utterly and completely imperfect. 

Last week I started thinking about how I have allowed myself to get where I am.  Slowly, over time, one hurt after another, I have smothered myself into a cave that I peek out of and squint at the sun and quickly go back into for safety.  It came to me all at once the other night as I was watching the new Julia Roberts movie with my husband for our date night.  It sounds cliche!  "Eat Pray Love" was flawed, but the core was juicy and ripe with encouragement.  DON'T just exist!  Which is what I have been doing for a very long time unknowingly.  I left that movie feeling inspired and I have started reading a book my husband had tucked away that I have always wanted to but couldn't muster the inspiration to pick it up...god I hate that.  It is called "When Things Fall Apart" by Pema Chodron.  Oh...yes!  Only on the first chapter and my mouth is watering. 

"When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.  The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell.  In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable.  Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

"What we're taking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye-not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.  The truth is that when we really begin to do this, we're going to be continually humbled.  There's not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring.  The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further.  The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything.  They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.

Instructions on mindfulness or emptiness or working with energy all point to the same thing: being right on the spot nails us. It nails us right to the point of time and space that we are in.  When we stop there and don't act out, don't repress, don't blame it on anyone else, and also don't blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer.  We also encounter our heart.  As one student so eloquently put it, "Buddha nature, cleverly disgised as fear, kicks our ass into being receptive.""

Honestly I could just type the whole first couple chapters into this it's all so good! For me this isn't about whether or not there is a god.  It isn't about any of those difficult questions that I feel are truly unanswerable at this point.  This is about inspiration.  Life altering change that has no "believe this or you burn" or really anything at all attached to it.  This is for me.  This is about loving myself.  This is about actually LIVING again. And in so doing lovng all those arround me.