The Parking Spot

I worked a full day yesterday, met someone new for lunch, (networking with another therapist), took my youngest daughter downtown for her voice lesson, saw a client, and then raced over to go meditate, on 31st and Hennepin, where it’s always impossible to find a place to park. I drove South on Hennepin, turned around a few blocks and went North on Hennepin. Only a block away from my destination, an open spot, yes! The spot that I pulled into was behind a driveway, and there in the driveway sat a car that once I was in the spot, I realized, must have turned left into the driveway to get into the spot I was now in.

I wondered, then, maybe he’s just backing out, turning around? How can we know what’s going on with other cars? From his angle backing out, and my angle parked on this busy street, there was not much chance that I could get out of the spot and let him in. He backed out and I saw him drive back and forth again. I sat there for a few minutes, thinking, “Should I try to give him the spot ‘back’”? And by wondering ‘back’ I’m thinking “Did he have the spot first?” I was worried he was angry. I thought about leaving and not going to meditation.

When I walked into the room where we meditate, the room was full, but one of the things that I like about Tergar meditation, is that they just keep scootching in and making more room. It’s a welcoming place. I found an empty pillow and sat there wondering if I was wrong to have parked where I did. I wondered if the person who was in the driveway finally found a parking spot and was here in the room; and I wondered if he was mad at me, judging me. I wondered why I was obsessing about this. I got the spot, he didn’t. Did I have to always give in? Is that the most Zen way? Giving in? How could I have known that there was a car in the drive way to begin with? I didn’t see it until I had already parked. I realized that if I gave the spot up, the person who was in the driveway would be unlikely to get that spot. I wondered why it always seemed like the best way out for me, was to just give in.

So, I meditated on being OK with winning once in a while. I meditated on dealing with what is, when it’s in your favor.

Milk and Cookies

happiness is a shared bag of Oreos with cold milk near at hand

unhappiness is trying to fit in with people you don’t like

happiness is Bonnie Raidt, singing that song about the midway

unhappiness is worrying about getting old

happiness is knees touching under the table

with a good glass of wine on the table

unhappiness is a rainy day without spaghetti and warm bread

happiness is liking what’s going on in your head

unhappiness is like a breeze that just needs to blow

every once in while, so that you can sense happiness is just behind it

no matter how good life gets

I always want to reserve the right to whine and

cry some bitter tears

every so often

Malleable Mind

For all of us there comes times when life doesn’t work anymore. Either we lose a job or a relationship. We have a new baby, or the babies are all grown up. What we’d been doing just doesn’t ‘do it’ for us anymore. What then?

This is September, usually a month I love, this month I am melancholy in weird ways. As I walked around the windblown waters of Lake Harriet yesterday, I was frustrated by my inability to calm my thoughts. The past rushed up against my mind like the lake against the shore, and I thought about how nearly 30 years ago, on a beautiful sunny day, on the 27th, I got married. In a church, in a beautiful white dress, had a Mass, thought with a wish and a prayer it would last forever. Not so much. It’s divided in half now, 15 years married, 15 years single. Never ever thought I’d be single for 15 years. Along the way I had to let go of most of the untruths that I held on to as truth. I had to let my life be dynamic, and let the ‘rules’ (if there is such a thing) be dynamic also.

In September, 13 years ago, I had to accept that my oldest daughter, at fourteen was pregnant. I thought my life was over, I think I had more invested in my role of being a mom than my role of being a wife. I was a newly single mom with three unruly daughters already, and felt so overwhelmed. One of the ways I measured families in those days was how well they conformed to what I thought was the ‘norm.’ I measured myself and my family this way and I believed the lies I was told about young moms. Now that wonderful grandson is 13 and so cool, so amazing and my daughter is fine. She has her ups and downs like every other person, and some struggles that pertain only to single moms, and the life questions that most twenty somethings ask themselves. I am a better person for leaving behind the idea of trying to measure people. There is no good way to measure human beings, we defy measuring. It’s an insult.

I look back though, to my life, to my struggles with these September events that bring me back through time and give me a glimpse into how I’ve been able to change, and change with the flow of life, instead of stand against it, and I’m grateful for whatever spirit it is inside or outside of us that allows us to take our own truths and hold them against untruth and see the difference. Grateful for a mind that churns up against the hope for a peaceful walk and shows me how to walk.

I think, therefore I am, I feel, therefore I am more than

Western thinking has long been using Descartes’ model of mind and body as separate from each other; the mind as more spiritual and the body as likened to a machine. This duality placed the brain in a hierarchy over the emotions. This model has informed medicine and religion, both powerful entities in shaping our culture.

This duality of thinking plagued me as a youth. I thought of it as heart and mind. Which do I follow, heart or mind? I read Gone With The Wind, who should I be like, Scarlett or Melanie? The thought of my heart and mind working together, in sync, was not even a thought in my head. So without even the possibility of this happening how did I grow through my growing up years? Like most I suppose, often scared and confused, trying to figure things out.

When I was thirteen, (yes thirteen), many of my friends in 8th grade in Catholic school were starting to have sex. It wasn’t as consensual as we’d thought it was. One friend had sex with the dad of the family she babysat for, he told her his wife said it was “OK.” He was a sales rep with a designer make up company and gave her high end make up. Another friend just had a lot of boyfriends.

I was both shocked and left out. We had all been taught to wait until marriage, or to become nuns, so what was going on? Well, when I finally had a boyfriend, much older than myself, I understood somewhat. Being touched felt good. It felt validating in a way that doing schoolwork and being told what to do never could. The culture I grew up in, in most families I knew, did not involve much physical touch or affection. For most of the girls I knew, one kiss, and there went all thoughts of purity. We mistook the feelings in our bodies for the essence of love. How could we have done any differently?

The sad thing, there was no adult to talk to about this. So, we had our secret lives, and hoped not to get pregnant and eventually got married, still not knowing anything much about ourselves, our bodies, and clueless as to how most of us ended up getting divorced in our twenties and thirties. Having sex and bearing babies loses it’s allure when there is no attention to mind, either.

Then as mothers, how did we parent our kids? Tell them the same stories, the same myths about mind/body separation, mind good, go to college, body, bad, don’t have sex? Trying to retain the Christian paradigm, ignoring the cognitive dissonance, buzzing in our heads, we, most of us, told the same stories, not believing in them ourselves, but having no other truer stories to tell.

Language of Love

I heard of something recently called the Five Languages of Love (from the book of the same title), and of course I’m skeptical, skeptical but curious. It seems this book is being used in women’s bible studies. Seriously, a preferred love language? That’s my reaction, and I will admit I’ve never read the book, but I did peruse the author/book site and take the free online test, which, of course, is simplified, and it does seem to lead people on to think they really should have, or should pick a love language, just for them.

Here’s the love languages according to Dr. Gary Chapman: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch. This probably sells books, but I don’t think that someone should use this information in relationships. It seems a bit unfair, to say to someone, “If you loved me, you’d love me like this, my love language.” My preferred language was Quality Time. This came as no surprise. I haven’t had Quality Time from someone in quite some time, as in quality time=a date, who else just wants to sit and stare at you? Not my friends or children. So, if I don’t get quality time, should I feel unloved? If my daughter’s preferred language is Receiving Gifts and I’m broke, how does that work? I’m just wondering....

I’ve been thinking about love lately. I’ve also been reading David Richo’s book, How To Be An Adult In Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving. A book worth reading from beginning to end. In this book, Richo says that what all children (and adults) need are: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing, as in being allowed to explore and be ourselves. And so, I wonder how abundant, or how scarce these things were in my parenting, and in my own life growing up? I believe we can always learn to love ourselves and those in our lives better. What a great premise and what a great goal: to continue to be the best lover I can be.

I realize that two of the ways that I seem to love myself the most, are the ways that my mom was best able to show me that she loved me. I dress myself well, and eat pretty well. These were both important to my mom, that we children looked good and ate well. Compared to getting a lot of other needs met, this seems superficial, and when you need a hug, and you’re told that your shirt is untucked, well, it doesn’t feel like love at all. But we all get what we get and it is really up to us to make the best of it. So, now I need to learn to give myself attention, acceptance (even when I’m not looking good), appreciation, which I do get from my mom now, affection, and allowing. A big task, non?

This requires more honesty and introspection. The ability to accept that we don’t always get our love needs met from our parents, or our partners. This then, however, frees us up to learn how to best love ourselves, and in the process, model for others how to love. The beauty in this is that I’ve found that how we love ourselves is how we love others. As we discussed at meditation sitting last night, as we meditate, compassion flows out from the practice of meditation. Love is not static, it’s dynamic and moves out into the world. It creates it's own language.

Welcome to Meditation, Tea & Shame

It’s a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, it’s going to heat up again today, but the morning is cool. It seems like a good day to finally go to the Minnesota Zen Center to see how they meditate. Even though I’m really happy with Terger as my new meditation center home, I’m still curious about this big beautiful Spanish style home on Lake Calhoun that houses the Minnesota Zen Center. So I go.

I walk up the paved path and enter into a porch-way that overlooks the Lake, and I could just stay here all day. I’ve been trying to imagine the home of my dreams, just for the sake of creating the intention of where I want to live next, and well, this, or someplace like it, is it. I’m greeted by Rosemary, who seems to be in charge here, and we wait, as we take off our shoes and for everyone who will arrive for this intro session, to arrive.

Once it seems that we’re all here, we are shown into the main meditation room on the first floor, and then led up to the third floor. Thin memories of playing with friends in houses like this come through to me, I grew up just on the other side of the lake, and the third floors, or attics of these homes were often play rooms for us kids. All the while I’m here, I’m getting the notion that this kind of meditation, Zen meditation, is different than Tibetan Buddhist meditation. This Zen mediation is much more formal. I’m getting uncomfortable by it, and trying to check in; am I uncomfortable because I’m new and alone, (the other new comers here are in pairs)? And I wonder, why am I uncomfortable with the formality?

Rosemary introduces herself as a priest, and this tells me that this woman likes hierarchy, and likes titles, fair enough. I’m a little disturbed by the catholic similarities, but staying aware of my bias, I sit still and listen. Remembering that I need to have an open heart chakra, that my meditation, right now for life, is lovingkindness and compassion. Not all meditation centers are for everyone, and who knows, maybe I’m resisting because I need more discipline, more formality in my life, maybe? She asks if anyone has had any experience with meditation, and I share that I have, and that I’ve attended a seminar with Mingyur Rinpoche.

Then after she talks about how they meditate here, in this tradition, and explains the importance of the formality and ritual, we meditate. Problem is, we’re on the third floor, where it’s hot, and so there is a fan blowing, right in my face. I’m dealing, but while meditating, this causes me to both sneeze and cough. I compose myself, meditating enough to calm the tickle and to assure myself I can sit quietly, even though I desperately need a drink of water. My mind is wandering, I want to live in this house. I want to make some friends, I’d hoped maybe I’d make friends here, and it’s not turning out that way. Is it my ego? It’s obvious they want donations, here, unlike Terger, where it’s free, both financially and emotionally. I want to go now, but I stay, I’m still trying to keep an open mind.

After we meditate, Rosemary calmly talks about how you should not move when you meditate because it disturbs others. Well, meditate on the pain, unless of course you just have to be rude and move, and well, then, you should bow to excuse yourself to the people around you. This is in direct contrast to Mingyur Rinpoche’s teaching, he says, meditate on whatever distracts you, then go back to your original meditation. Thankfully, she wasn’t bringing up that not only did I move, but I also sneezed and coughed.

She goes on now, saying that if you sneeze or cough, that too, disturbs others. I’m starting to realize that this is about me. I sit there, new, guilty, wanting to say, “It was the fan!” This is about me in more ways than Rosemary realizes, and my newfound awareness of competition in myself, makes me aware of this horrible competition that is going on with this woman, as she goes on to tell us all how she now longer sneezes or coughs whatsoever during meditation practice. Well of course not, she’s a priest now. This comparison between my sneezing and coughing and her ability to control it is not lost on me. I struggle to maintain my loving compassion for her in the midst of this. Although she seems to not have loving compassion for someone new in her center, I remind myself that I didn’t know her before she began her practice, and so for her, she may be closer to compassion than she was before she started, all those years ago.

She reminds us that they’d like donations at the end. I struggle with the idea of having to pay for this introduction to their center and my humiliation as a teaching tool. She is calmly unaware of any of this. I only have bigger bills, (when did this happen?) and put $5.00 in the basket. I’ve decided at this point to stay for the teaching, maybe this will redeem the Zen Center for me. It did not. The teacher read some poetry and talked a bit about the concept of intimacy, something I didn’t feel here. Something about having intimacy with your meditation pillow, then taking that out into your world. I went out into my world, with the feeling of someone attempting to shame me, but with an awareness that this shame didn’t belong to me.

Not Guilty

The thing that can happen when you learn new things is that you can think in a whole new way. This sounds exciting, and amazing and I’m the first one to tell you it is; but what also can happen when you think in a whole new way, is that you wonder how or why you thought in the old way, and if by losing the old way you might be losing something valuable, and it ends up being a lot to think about. The new stuff, the old stuff, comparing the relative worth and merit. Also, all the while this is going on, you are going about your life, people thinking you are who you used to be,when really you are a whole new you, or at least some new neural pathways are making strides in your brain.

Then the challenge becomes how to let people know, hopefully in a rather gentle way, that you are no longer the you you used to be, but instead, a new you. There is a practice in the Narrative Theory (of Marriage and Family Therapy) of sending out letters, or making a certificate, somehow documenting, that through therapy you have changed, and you can call these people witnesses, witnesses to your change. Cool idea, even though it does seem a bit contrived these days, when you could just post a message on Facebook or Twitter it.
Or you could blog.

Part of my change process has been and still often is, a journey alone. I don’t often find people who think like me, or understand my passion for learning and my desire and ability to deconstruct strongly held religious and cultural views. I’ve often been told that I take things too seriously, and perhaps I do, I’ll try to be up for more parties. Yet it is this seriousness that partly drives me.

This is a long introduction, I’m sure. But here’s the stories....

Yesterday I read about two court cases where Marriage and Family Therapy students had sued Universities over having to accept GLBT clients and their lifestyle, and the students argued that with their Christian belief system, they could not. The Universities said that they were not asking the students to give up their beliefs, but to ‘suspend’ them, while they were seeing GLBT clients. This brings up an interesting idea to me, that it is not working from your belief system, but actually suspending it that is then being taught as good therapy. To this I have to say, hmmm.To this I have to say, “Who then is the healthy one in the room? The one outwardly struggling with their identity and how this works in their and the world, or the one suspending their belief, their worldview, acting not in integrity but pretending to hold a different worldview so as not to harm the vulnerable client?"

This brings me to the next story, also based on something I read yesterday, but this brought me clarity, not confusion, like the story above. I’ve been struggling with what I’ve been crassly calling to myself and close friends, “dumping the baby out with the bathwater” when it comes to my former Christian faith. If you have a dark sense of humor, you can get a bit of a chuckle from it. For me it works, because as I’ve studied theology and history, I’ve found so much of what has passed for faith, or God’s word, is just a lot of socially constructed verbiage meant to control people, a static faith grid put over a dynamic life force that won’t be contained. The Christian metaphors that permeate our culture then link up and people believe that someone saying, “God has a plan” for the fourth time that day gives them a divine comfort, when really the comfort was from the person who reached out and said the words to you. That you share metaphors for life only reinforces the human connection. It is the dynamic human caring that helps and heals, not the forced grid of what your behavior should be. The bible, by the way, does actually say, “Mercy triumphs over justice.” We swear on a bible for court, but where’s that verse built into our justice system?

Yesterday, around 5:00 pm, when I’d wished I was home, or taking a walk around the lakes, I was sitting in the Southdale area government center waiting to renew my car tabs. Realizing that this might take a while, I clutched my number, making sure it wouldn’t get lost, and ran out to my car to get a book. One of a number of books I’ve been reading lately on Buddhist psychology. I grabbed “Brilliant Sanity: Buddhist Approaches To Psychotherapy” and started reading, and this is what I read:

Coming from a tradition that stresses human goodness, it was something of a shock for me to encounter the Western tradition of original sin. When I was at Oxford University, I studied Western religious and philosophical traditions with interest and found the notion of original sin quite pervasive. One of my early experiences in England was attending a seminar with Archbishop Anthony Blum. The seminar was on the notion of grace and we got into a discussion of original sin. The Buddhist tradition does not see such a notion as necessary at all, and I expressed this viewpoint. I was surprised at how angry the Western participants became. Even the orthodox, who might not emphasize original sin as much as the Western traditions, still held it as a cornerstone of their theology.

In terms of our present discussion, it seems that this notion of original sin does not just pervade Western religious ideas; it actually seems to run throughout Western thought as well, especially psychological thought. Among patients, theoreticians, and therapists alike, there seems to be great concern with the idea of some original mistake which causes later suffering- a kind of punishment for that mistake. One finds that sense of guilt or being wounded quite pervasive. Whether or not such people actually believe in the idea of original sin, or in God for that matter, they seem to feel that they have done something wrong in the past and are now being punished for it.

It seems that this feeling of basic guilt has been passed down form one generation to another and pervades many aspects of Western thought. For example, teachers think that if children do not feel guilty, then they won’t study properly and consequently won’t develop as they should. Therefore, many teachers feel that they have to do something to push the child, and guilt seems to be one of the chief techniques they use. This occurs even on the level of improving reading and writing. The teacher looks for errors: “Look, you made a mistake. What are you going to do about it?” From the child’s point of view, learning is then based on trying to not make mistakes, on trying to prove you actually are not bad. It is entirely different when you approach the child more positively: “Look how much you have improved, therefore we can go further.” In the latter case, learning becomes an expression of one’s wholesomeness and innate intelligence.

From the Preface: The Meeting of Buddhist and Western Psychology, Choyam Trungpa, (p. ix-x).

I found these words comforting as I try to align my beliefs, values or passions with how I treat people and interact in the world. I too, came to find the belief in original sin to be stifling and horrible, and I find believing that I, and others, are whole and intelligent to be much more hopeful and suited to helping others believe that they can heal from life’s hurts. As I’ve been studying Buddhism, I’ve come upon many authors who claim that Buddhism (and/or meditation) is completely compatible with Christianity, and I would have to beg to differ. I find this a bit disingenuous, and an attempt to make everything palatable to those of us steeped if not in Christian faith, then in Christian tradition. The Christian tradition that makes pretending to be whole or holy or accepting, more important than aligning your intellect with your heart.