new year aspirations

Bodhichitta is essentially a quality of warmth, an experience of our connection with all beings and with all things. It's said traditionally that it's expressed as a wish or an aspiration, initially expressed as a strong longing or wish that nobody suffer, and that we could in some way in the course of our lifetime, as much as possible, help to alleviate suffering in the world. - Pema Chodron

One more day left in 2011, and to be honest, I am happy to see the back of this year and ready to greet the new one. In these last days of the dying year, my mind turns to aspirations. Not resolutions - I've written about that trap before. When we make resolutions, we are often setting ourselves up to fail, to repeat the constant cycle of aggression and suffering rather than cultivating seeds of gentleness and compassion. Aspirations are powerful because they are more open ended - we are not so much attached to a particularly specific result, but to a slower, more encompassing transformation in our lives or patterns. Our personal patterns and the patterns of our family.

What are your aspirations for yourself and your family in the coming year? For your parenting path? The fundamental aspiration of bodhichitta, as Pema Chodron describes above, is to cultivate our fundamental warmth and connection with all things, and prevent and alleviate suffering. This aspiration seems a powerful one to continue to return to on the parenting path, so that even at our most stuck, our most habitual, our most overwhelmed, we can breathe, touch our hearts, and return to some kind of gentleness. The gentleness has to begin with ourselves. We cannot be consistently gentle and compassionate with our children, our partners, our friends, strangers, unless we can be so with our own basically good selves.

My own aspirations for the new year are gentleness, compassion, understanding, and mind of no complaint. The last one has to do with continued mindfulness of speech, whether spoken or written, and refraining from complaint and negativity. On a more subtle level, I have the aspiration to continue to work with my thoughts, noticing when they are complaining or negative thoughts, and holding those thoughts with gentleness and compassion, rather than pushing them away or justifying them. I feel that by continuing to return to these aspirations, I will be nurturing the seeds of basic goodness in my family.

What are your aspirations? Whatever they may be, I wish you all a beautiful year to come, full of joy and sweetness.

being who we are

[The] complete teaching of Buddhism is how to re-discover who we are. That is a straightforward principle, but we are continuously distracted from coming to our natural state, our natural being. Throughout our day everything pulls us away from natural mindfulness, from being on the spot. We're either too scared or too embarrassed or too proud, or just too crazy, to be who we are. - Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

I am trying to write here more often, but I was at my parents' house over the long weekend, and there is just so much going on there with my mother's illness and the family dynamics that it is impossible to even go online for a moment, let alone be at all eloquent or useful. So, here I am, back in my own little chaotic nest, getting us unpacked and trying to keep my little ones happy on a day when it is pouring rain. These three things saved us this morning from tantrums: 1) the construction of a small city out of all available cardboard boxes; 2) the making of ribbon sticks; and 3) a wet, wet walk in the rain, where we got completely soaked from jumping in every available puddle. We also made the happy discovery that the apples from the sadly neglected apple trees on the street behind us are actually tasty, and so, pockets brimming with ones gleaned from the wet ground, we made our way home and into nap time.

There were still tears, as my little ones didn't sleep well at my folks and the long car ride yesterday put them in a bit of cranky mood. But, I was able to go with the flow, even with the detritus of our journey all over the house and some unhappy felines making demands after our absence. I'm tired, certainly. My toddlers are both nursing much more than I would prefer. The house is a mess. Loads of laundry to get done. Our bedroom ceiling is leaking from all the rain, and I have no idea when the landlord will relate to it. There is still the emotional residue of my visit back to my family. But...it is all ok. I have been able to keep coming back to the present moment today. I have been able to keep letting go of my various agendum without any fuss. I have been able to surrender to the fact that my 18 month old has fallen down, once again, and is crying, once again. I have been able to pick him up, hug him, comfort him until he feels alright, put him back down, and keep making that cardboard garage my 2 year old is asking me to make. I have been able to just be myself today, and to just let my children be themselves. Funny how often I don't allow either to happen.

The quote above from Sakyong Mipham is from a longer talk, here. It is a fabulous talk about how to meditate, and I reread it every year, sometimes several times a year. Different things jump out at me each time I read it, and this time, it was the following line:

When we're talking about being mindful and living in a mindful way, we're talking about the practice of spontaneity.

Spontaneity for me has been the key to being happy with my children, and keeping them connected to their own goodness. And it is really, really hard to be spontaneous when I am obsessing over the past or thinking about the future. There is no space for spontaneity to emerge because I am so entirely disconnected from what is actually happening, right in front of my very eyes. It's funny how resentful we can get when other beings, our children included, pull us out of our dreams of the past and the future with their very real needs happening in the now. But if we let go of those imaginings, how much richer and happier we become. The world is so much more alive when we are actually fully there to experience it.

This is what I am working on today. It is what I am always working on. Being who I am, right here, right now. It can be so difficult, can't it? Wishing us all luck in being ourselves today, fully, completely, lovingly.

I am here for you

That is the title of this beautiful talk by Thicht Nhat Hanh, given yesterday to children and families of his sangha at Plum Village in France.  I love hearing all the babies and young ones crying and babbling as he gives his lovely teaching.  Watch it with your own little ones.

bowing as the cure for the pain

“The cure for the pain is in the pain.” - Rumi

We celebrated Halloween this past weekend at my parents' house upstate. My elderly mother is ailing from late stage, multi-symptomatic Parkinson's Disease, and is being cared for very inadequately by my elderly father. I haven't been visiting as often as I would like since my youngest was born this past spring - the four hour trip is hard for us, and it is difficult to care for my children while also caring for my mother and father, and vice versa. Whenever we visit, the house is in complete chaos: emotional, physical and familial. It is very hard to not get pulled into that chaos, and lose one's mindfulness. I find that the difficult circumstances often lead to the unfortunate flowering of seeds of aggression - there is just so much fear and sadness in the situation, that it is hard to open to what is. Especially when the ancient family dynamics and neurotic habitual patterns are in play.

Sometimes my awareness is strong enough that I am able to see the pattern and pause, step away, not engage in the old scripts we have been acting for so long with one another, exacerbated by my mother's illness and my father's overwhelm. But this weekend, I really failed at it. I engaged in silly arguments with my husband, my father and my sister who was present. I literally cried when my toddler refused to wear the Halloween costume I spent all week working on for him. I gave into exhaustion and despair. I felt totally undone by the reality of the situation and instead of opening to it, touching my sadness, I just behaved like a big, stressed out grump.

How appropriate that during the time of year when evil spirits are said to walk about, I was overcome by my own ghosts and demons. Lately in my parenting, I have seen so clearly the places where, if I fail to bring my awareness to them, the neurotic patterns I have inherited from my family rise up and get projected onto my own babes. I have seen clearly the places where I hesitate, an old fear gripping me, preventing me from being in compassionate action, and I have seen where I want to just vomit out all of my own stuff - my fear, my resentment, my rage, whatever- onto my little ones. It is in those really claustrophobic moments, when I feel all the karma from my own past and mind hurtling out of me towards my children, that I am beginning to just bow to it and to them. I literally find myself stopping mid-sentence, and bowing to my toddler. "You are my perfect guru" I tell him repeatedly. When I am feeling paralyzed by fear, I kiss my baby and say to him "You are my perfect guru" as I wipe his nose. Something in me relaxes when I voice this. Something stops running away from my own mind and turns instead and bows - bows to my stuckness. Bows to the demons and the ghosts. And the bowing leads to them melting away.

What I realized this weekend is I need to bow to my family of origin as well, if I really want to stop the flow of karma. If I really want to end this lineage of neurosis, and not inject my children with the old familial poisons, I need to bow down to them. I need to touch the pain. Open to it, even though I really don't want to. It is too scary, too raw and, it feels at times, absolutely devastating. Sometimes instead of bowing, I would really prefer to just be really angry and right about what a toxic environment I grew up in. But I realize, that is just a thought, a story, a delusion. It isn't so solid, so permanent and monolithic. The more I open to my pain, the more holes seem to grow in it, the more it loosens and I can see through the cracks the moments of basic goodness and nurture that my parents and family gave and give me. By bowing to them, I offer up my heart, and recognize their hearts as well. I recognize their buddha nature, their goodness. I recognize their struggles. I recognize that they suffer, greatly. Then I can help. Instead of arguing with my father, I can move the carpet that keeps getting stuck under my mother's wheel chair. Instead of arguing with my husband, I can help him roll that carpet up and bring it to the basement. Instead of snapping at my sister, I can apologize to her and recognize she is really sad about my mother dying. I can touch my own sadness about my mother dying instead of covering it up with all that aggression and fear. And I can begin to work with my tangled feelings around that, and begin to unwind them and let them go.

As the great yogi Milarepa wrote:
Previously, I was confused by delusion, And staying in the dwelling
of ignorant confusion,
I perceived gods who help and demons who harm as real...
With the realization that confusion is groundless,
The water that reflects the moon of awareness is clear of murkiness.
The sun of luminosity, free of clouds,
Clears away the darkness of ignorance from the edges.
Deluded confusion disappears.
The true nature arises from within.
The precious thought that perceives demons
Is the wonderful clarifier of the unborn bias.

Bowing to our demons- what a powerful practice for the Halloween season.