Zen and the Art of Peacekeeping

Stringing me along

Offerings in Bali

On Friday morning I met a dear old friend for a cup of tea before work. We got talking about Buddhism and quantum physics and the fascinating overlap between the two.

A couple of years ago my brainy ex-boyfriend gave me a copy of Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" to read. It is a relatively simple introduction to quantum physics and to string theory. I use the word 'relatively' advisedly in this context.

He was gently trying to educate me. My ex and I never quite saw eye to eye on the matter of my spiritual beliefs. He was an athiest with a great hunger for scientific knowledge. I was an agnostic with a great hunger for spiritual practice.

The irony is that our very different paths (physics and philosophy for him, yoga and meditation for me) may very well have brought us to a similar place in the end.

I never quite got my head around quantum physics. But I was fascinated by the experiments that showed that sometimes particles act like waves and sometimes light waves act like particles. What intrigued me most of all was that the act of observation appeared to influence whether particles acted like waves or particles.

I loved the simplicity of Niels Bohr's interpretation of this experiment. When it looks like a wave, it is a wave. When it looks like a particle, it is a particle. He essentially said that nothing is real unless it is observed.

Did you get that? Nothing is real unless it is observed. The entire universe is actually a series of probabilities.

String theory appealed to me even more. The fundamental, elemental matter of the universe is in fact a dancing, vibrating loop that appears to be either particle-like or wave-like depending on where you are looking from, amongst other variables.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with twenty other people, sitting in meditation and receiving teachings on how to live our meditation.

At the end of the day all the teachings came down to this - we are not as separate from each other nor as fixed as our egos would like to believe. We are all connected. Are we connected by the four universal forces identified by quantum physics or by prana, the shared universal energy identified in yogic teachings? Maybe they are the same thing.

We are not fixed. We are constantly in the process of creating ourselves and our realities moment by moment. By the act of observation we take those dancing, vibrating strings and make of them "me" and "you". What would it be like if, when we looked at the world and at each other, we let the picture we have of what we think we are looking at drop away for a moment and opened up to the mystery and the beauty of not knowing what we are looking at.

With this in mind, I'm off to observe the effect that the act of cleaning has on the dancing strings that make up what I call my home.

'Don't know'

Sitting on top of Mt Bakur in Bali, watching the sunrise. Ready to leap.

When I was going through the process of deciding to leave my job with Oxfam (now that I've resigned I can finally name my wonderful employer) there were three main barriers that I found I had to work through.

The first barrier was perhaps the most obvious, I wondered whether I would have enough money, whether my savings would last long enough to finish the book and where I would find money once the book was done. In the end this was the simplest to get past. I have savings, I will live on them while I write. Once they run out I'll find work to make more money. Easy. I could make it a lot more complicated by imaging scenarios in which I don't find ways to make money again but since I've been in the work-force for twenty years and have always been able to make enough money to pay my bills I decided to keep it simple and trust that I would be able to do it again in 6 months time, if necessary.

The second barrier was a sense of obligation to my employer. Oxfam is a wonderful organisation that does great work all over the world to help find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice. I was drawn to Oxfam because they look beyond the obvious and direct contributor to poverty and are prepared to tackle the big injustices that create and perpetuate global imbalance in resources and opportunity. With Oxfam I've been able to do advocacy work on unfair trade policies, ineffective aid and the growing impacts of climate change on developing countries. I am able to do work that I'm passionate about and to work with like-minded and like-hearted people. I've grown close to my colleagues and have a strong personal commitment to the work we all do. It was hard to leave all that without a sense of guilt.

But I've been learning about guilt these past few years and I now know it doesn't serve me or anyone else so I'm getting better at recognising and releasing it. I'm not indispensable to Oxfam and although I always do my very best, I'm not even necessarily the person best able to do my job. It is time for me to pursue other paths and to open this job up to someone else.

The final barrier was a little less obvious, but was perhaps the most powerful. Over almost two decades I've built a strong sense of personal identity around my work as an advocate for human rights, justice and dignity for all. At its crudest, this manifests as a desire to know that I am a good person, and a hope that my good work/s might be evidence that this is so. When I explored these thoughts and feelings, I uncovered an underlying belief that I have to earn my place in the world, that I have to some how pay the world back for the extraordinary privilege I have enjoyed as a child of the middle class in New Zealand.

In recent years my exploration of the practices and teachings of the Buddha have been nudging me towards the possibility that my identity might be less certain, less knowable and - ultimately - less important than I had previously assumed. Yesterday in meditation class our teacher encouraged us to explore what it was like to release ourselves for a moment from the grasp of the intellect - that marvelous thought-proliferating machine - and to settle into the 'don't know' mind. What if I don't know if I am good or bad? Can that also be okay?

Can it be okay to no longer have a job title that is almost guaranteed to get admiring responses from everyone to whom I am introduced? Can it be okay to dedicate my days to something that gives me incredible satisfaction but that may never do any good for anyone else? Can it be okay to really believe that what the world needs most is people who have settled into their own simple wisdom and who are following their hearts? Can it be okay that I don't know? When I settle quietly into the space that sits behind, above, beneath and all around that marvelous thought-making machine that is my thinking mind I find that there is plenty of room for all of this, and more, to be okay.

In Times of War, Feed the Right Wolf

By Marianne Elliott

In November 2007 I arrived back from a short holiday in the United States to my work as a UN human rights officer in Afghanistan. Days later, the deadliest suicide attack to take place in Afghanistan happened in Baghlan, killing at least 40 adults and three children and maiming more than 60 adults and 60 children. For two days after the bombing I sunk into a despairing sadness for Afghanistan...

Continue reading at the Shambhala Sunpace blog where I've been invited to start submitting guest posts. I'm thrilled because Shambhala Sun is one of my favorite magazines and their blog is on my daily must-read list.

Stepping out

Om, one of the beautiful daily mandalas of fresh flowers at our yoga retreat in Bali.

It took one week of yoga retreat for me to finally experience for a sustained period what I have have long 'believed' but had only experienced in short bursts or glimpses. I discovered that when you practice regularly, consistently and appropriately the distractions of thoughts and feelings really do begin to fall away and you settle down into the simple but profound experience of the universal peace and love that is your essential nature.

It was such a wonderful experience that I knew immediately what I needed to do. So yesterday I resigned from my day job. From here on in (well, once I work out my notice and pull everything together into fabulous hand-over notes so that the great causes I've been working on can be seamlessly continued) I'll be dedicating my time to writing, practicing, studying and teaching yoga and to building a social profit company the aim of which will be to bring opportunities to experience that peace to people working in places of conflict. Yoga and meditation courses in Kabul? I think so.

Stay tuned for more! For now I'm putting my head down to write while I can since the office awaits with a mammoth to do list tomorrow.

Namaste!

Change the World Friday

I'm in Bali. I'm staying in a beautiful traditional Balinese villa with six beautiful friends, all yoga teachers and body workers (and one fabulous surf and yoga teacher). I'm surrounded with compassionate wisdom about what we hold and carry in our body and how we can release it and let ourselves relax into a deep trust in ourselves, our bodies and the simple truth of the way that things are.

In the midst of all this wisdom and loving kindness I'm experiencing some interesting obstacles, or opportunities. I've got a cold that has travelled into my chest and settled into a pretty solid chesty cough and which is making it difficult to breath, let a long practice pranayama and asana. I also have some fairly acute back pain which is making it difficult for me to practice all but the most gentle postures. My body wants to rest.

Given that I'm surrounded by opportunities to move - surf lessons with one of the worlds best female surf instructors, yoga by the pool with some of my favorite yoga teachers, beach swims and outings to temples - it has been taking all my wisdom to know that I need to stay still. I need to rest. I need to heal.

This morning I thought I was ready for a slightly more active yoga practice so I joined two of my companions by the pool and began to follow their practice. But before long I could feel my back was aching and I knew I had to stop. I rested in child's pose and began to cry. I was feeling deep frustration that I was in this place with all these extraordinary opportunities and I could not join in. I felt scared by the sensation of not finding safety and freedom on my yoga mat, a place of such sancturary for me in times of difficulty. As I began to cry I found that there were deep waves of sadness waiting to flow.

I got up off my mat and went to sit on a cushion in a wicker cocoon on the veranda of my room. I felt safe there and for a good ten minutes I allowed myself to cry. The sadness surprised me but I allowed it to flow. Eventually I began to feel the waves of grief subsiding so I settled into my seat and put a guided loving kindness meditation on my iPod. I sat for half an hour following the familiar instructions of the loving kindness meditation. I said to myself "may I be happy, may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I be peaceful".

After half an hour I felt the stability of kindness had settled my mind and my heart and I grabbed a cup of tea and settled in to listen to one of Jack Kornfield's talks on compassion. Before he got to the main topic of his talk, however, he referred back to the teaching from the previous week. His words connected immediately with the truth that I knew and they started to help me find a different way to be present with my experience on the yoga mat.

What he said - very simply is that we can spend all our energy wishing that things are different. We keep waiting for samsara (the rounds of life) to be different. We want the pleasure but not the pain, we want the gains but not the losses, we want the praise but not the blame, we want the fame but not the disrepute. Very simply he reminded me that if I want to have peace it will not be because I stopped the worldly winds but because I saw this dance of life as it is and rested in spacious attention.

He reminded me that obstacles are really opportunities to practice and perfect my patience and generosity and wisdom and love and trust. On a very simple level, my back pain is not an obstacle to my yoga practice, it is part of the dance of my yoga practice. It is an opportunity to practice patience with my body, generosity within my practice and towards my weaknesses, wisdom in my choices of practices that heal rather than harm, love towards my whole being - the weak and the strong - and trust that I am whole and complete as I am.

On a deeper level I know that the sadness emerges from places that run beneath the physical pain of my back and when I look at those places I can also see them as obstacles standing in the way of a path to the place where I think I should be or I can see them as opportunities to practice and perfect my patience, love, wisdom, generosity and trust as part of the eternal journey to be right where I am, right now.

Finding the space and quiet that I need to make this shift in my perception seems to be to be another way to change how I act and interact in the world and therefore - another way to change the world.

Change the World Friday: What a little love can do

A change of pace this Friday. Sometimes we want to take action to change the world, there are practical needs we can meet or injustices we can work to change. But beneath it all I know that nothing really matters more than this, loving kindness, having goodwill for oneself and for others. So sometimes the way I change the world is by sitting alone on a cushion and changing the landscape of my mind and heart for a little while.

Metta or loving kindness meditation is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist meditation practice, the companion to mindfulness meditation practice. In my experience the practice of loving kindness meditation can allow cracks to appear in the walls that protect my heart, allowing me to experience for a moment the truth that there is no real difference between 'you' and 'me'.

This glimpse of the truth that we are all connected, together with the experience of connecting for a moment with my natural, basic desire for the well-being of all, is what then enables me to act in the world, to change the world.

This month I have had the gift of meeting a wonderful new meditation teacher and we've agreed to focus for a while on loving kindness or metta meditation practices. When I get in touch with a bit of loving kindness all sorts of other things start to shift.

If you think you might be ready for a bit more loving kindness, and if you are already comfortable with the basics of meditation, then you might like to try one of these: guided metta meditation from Gil Frondsdal; guided metta meditation from Shaila Catherine; or a whole page of guided metta meditations from the wonderful DharmaSeed website.

Benefits of Distraction?

By far the most thought provoking article I read in the past week was a piece on the Benefits of Distraction by Sam Anderson in New York magazine.

Talking about a subject that seems to consume almost paradoxical amounts of our collective attention, i.e. our increasing inability to pay attention, Anderson quotes Herbert A. Simon who back in 1971 wrote what now seems a prophetic description of this modern malaise:

What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Which reminds me of at least three different conversations I've had in the past week, most of which involve me simultaneously defending my new-found love of Twitter and extolling the virtues of Freedom, a software that locks me out of the internet for hours at a time so that I can get on with my writing.

Not surprisingly, Anderson's research showed that meditation has been so far found to be the most effective antidote to this attention-deficiency. As I discovered when I was studying psychology last year, Anderson reports that:

Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists.

I was especially interested in this finding about the practice of 'maitri' or 'loving-kindness' meditation:

The brains of Buddhist monks asked to meditate on “unconditional loving-kindness and compassion” show instant and remarkable changes: Their left prefrontal cortices (responsible for positive emotions) go into overdrive, they produce gamma waves 30 times more powerful than novice meditators, and their wave activity is coordinated in a way often seen in patients under anesthesia.

All of which ties in very nicely to my plans for this week. With some trepidation, I am about to embark on the 'reading deprivation' exercise that is part of the Artist's Way process. For one week I won't be checking my personal emails, surfing the internet, reading blogs, following Twitter, checking Facebook, reading the newspaper (thank goodness for interns who can read it on my behalf) or even reading any books. My train journeys will be devoted to either writing, watching the world go by or, my favorite activity of all, eavesdropping on conversations to steal great ideas for dialogue!

At the same time, this week I'm starting one-on-one meditation instruction with a wonderful Buddhist teacher. I met him last weekend when I did a one-day yoga and meditation retreat and when he led us in the maitri/ loving-kindness meditation I just knew that I needed more of that particular practice. So that's what I'm going to do, with his instruction and guidance, I'm going to practice the loving-kindness meditation every day for a month.

What I found fascinating about Anderson's article, though, was his proposition that all this distraction we encounter through the myriad media sources that stream into our desktop all day long might not be an entirely bad thing.

Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t — a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.

Mindful Twittering? Now that's something I'm going to give some more thought to. In the meantime I've prepared some dishes in advance to be served later in the week including "Change the World Friday" and "Five good things" for Sunday. Enjoy and I'll be back in a week!

Returning to zero

Maybe it was a Monday thing, or perhaps the relentless bad weather over the weekend drove me to it. I'd like to blame it on the pain of getting through the first draft of a difficult chapter that reaches down into the depths of my darkest moments in Afghanistan. But in reality I suspect it was the simple error of having the stuff in the house.

Whatever it was I fell off the wagon of my cleanse today. Actually, I somersaulted dramatically off the wagon in a great flood of chocolate.

So I'm grateful, as always, that everything returns to zero. Tomorrow I start a new day. Traveling with me will be the wisdom of this zen teacher, encountered by a film-maker on a park bench in Manhattan.Whatever wagon you may have fallen off this weekend, or whichever mountain peak you may have scaled, know that I am in this with you as we all return to zero. Over and over again.

Natural dignity of gentleness

Confidence brings the natural dignity of gentleness. You can afford to be gentle. You are not pretending to be gentle in order to achieve something by it, but you have a general sense of gentleness, which means you are being kind to yourself. Sometimes when the warrior feels doubtful about himself, he might have a problem being gentle to himself. Gentleness to yourself is necessary for a warrior; otherwise you find yourself puffed up, with no way to expand your vision to a great level at all. At that point, warriorship becomes pure bluff.

        Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
        From "Outrageousness," a talk given in July 1978 to Directors of             Shambhala Training
        via Oceans of Dharma quotes of the week

Living Simply, Living Peacefully

I haven't read her book yet, but reviews of Kate Lawrence's The Practical Peacemaker: How Simple Living Makes Peace Possible have rung all my bells and I'm looking forward to getting a copy. 

In a letter to my favorite daily read, Shambhala SunSpace, Kate summarised her approach to living simply, and thereby living peacefully:

“Simple living involves 3 things. First, we must use less of the world’s resources. This doesn’t mean deprivation, but noticing the waste and over-consumption we have come to consider normal—and instead, forming habits that will free up more resources for people elsewhere in the world. Second, we need to open up time in our daily schedules. No one can act peacefully when rushing around, feeling frustrated, trying to do more than is possible or even advisable. Third, we need to pay attention to the present."

Several times in the past few months I've heard myself saying to people that I prefer my life and myself when I make time and space in my days for quiet, still reflection. Yet still I say 'yes' to this, and 'okay' to that, I sign on to this and turn up for that and before I know it I am rushing about my life according to the timetables and priorities of everyone but me. It doesn't work for me, I know that. But I forget, and I get caught up in my culture's obsession with "productivity" and I fall for the myth that the busier you are the more useful and/or important you are.

I read an article the other day about a successful business women in New Zealand. The key message of the article was that she made sure that every moment of every day of her life was productive. She had no time to 'waste' and she was relentlessly active and proactive. I felt the familiar feeling of guilt at my longing for daily doses of 'unproductive' silent stillness. And yet I know that those times settle the murky, swirling waters of my mind long enough to see clearly for a moment. I know all this, and still I get so busy that I can't remember where I'm supposed to be sleeping tonight.

I have learned to embrace the part of me that knows what works for me and to embrace the part of me that gets myself caught up in busy-ness nonetheless. But it does help to sit still for a moment this morning and remind myself just how good it can feel. So, here's to a little more simple living in the weeks to come.

PS: this review of The Practical Peacemaker caught my eye in particular, because I'm as overfed as the next person but still want a just, peaceful and sustainable world:

"In The Practical Peacemaker, Kate Lawrence explores the root causes of ongoing unrest and dysfunction in our world. Because we're overfed but undernourished in so many different ways, our eyes are not on the prize: a peaceful, just, and sustainable world. Lawrence shows us how to shift our focus and our actions to these things that really matter."—David Wann, coauthor of Affluenza and author of Simple Prosperity