on patience

"Being angry and wanting to be peaceful all of a sudden doesn't usually work. If we're about to blow up, the best thing to do is just sit there, settle, breathe. The best technique may well be patience." - Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

I have been contemplating the paramita of patience all week, as the facebook page for Parenting as Path attests. Patience (or ahem, a lack of patience) is a daily theme for me, felt more keenly with the care of young children. The teachings on patience in the buddhist tradition are rich, and often focus on the quality of forbearance, which I don't find necessarily useful. It is a word that has such negative connotations, with more than a hint of martyrdom. I prefer to see it as acceptance, radical acceptance, as teacher Tara Brach describes it. Being present to what is occurring, and instead of trying to manipulate, change or escape it, to relax, let go and open.

It can be so hard to do this with our children, particularly when they are pushing our buttons, not doing what we want them to do, or testing boundaries. Who knew that simply attempting to get a young toddler ready to go outside to play could be such a stressful experience at times?! Or getting your child ready for school, or to do their homework, to go to bed, or to be integrity with their curfew? So many things can trigger our impatience, but I have found that fundamentally, impatience has to do with an unwillingness to just be there, leaning into what is happening in the present moment, no matter how uncomfortable it is. When I am impatient with others, it is almost always because rather than opening to what is occurring, I am stuck in the past or projecting myself out into the future. How exhausting. No wonder I get snippy.

Cultivating patience with our children means that we notice when we are relating to them from the past or from the future rather than the now. We notice when we are speaking from anxiety and a sense of what should be happening, and then let it go and open to what is actually occurring. It means leaning into the discomfort, the fear, the aggression - leaning all the way until we can open to the still, tender spot that is always at the center of even these painful emotions. Cultivating patience also means nourishing ourselves so that we have the space to relate skillfully to others. Maybe this means going to bed earlier so you have more energy in the morning when things are more intense getting everyone ready for school. Or perhaps it means taking the time when your children are napping to rest yourself, or eat a nice snack, or watch an episode of a show you like. The other day, our schedule got really wonky and my children would not nap. My husband was working very late, so I knew I would not get any break until they were asleep that night. I was a bit at my wits end, as I can't get much done or relax when they are both up and grouchy from being overtired. I drew a bubble bath with some soothing lavender oil, and put them and myself into it. I let them splash and play while I also got to relax a bit. Then I let them help me make butterscotch pudding, which we ate together after our dinner. The kitchen and bathroom ended up being a total mess, but it was worth it. The bath and the pudding cheered all of us up and helped us enjoy the rest of the day together, although we were all very tired.

Part of being patient is being resourceful, creating space even in the most claustrophobic situation. That is why the recommendation for times when you are feeling impatient is to stop, get still, and just breathe. By bringing our minds back into our bodies in the present moment, we open to the vast space that is always available to us. It can be difficult to do this when we get caught up in impatience, feeling justified to keep pushing rather than stepping back. But the more we can just take a step back from our impatience, resynchronize our bodies and minds, the easier it will be to accomplish what needs to be done. I think another important aspect of this all is having confidence that you can do it - that you can actually let go, open and relax. That you can be patient. Sometimes, we get on such a roll with a habitual pattern that we begin to distrust we can do anything differently. I am here to tell you that you can! Every habitual pattern can be transformed. Every time we let go and relax, we are weakening the hold impatience has on us and our families.

opinions don't help our children

It is only with the heart that one can see
rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Sorry for my absence. 2012 has gotten off to a bit of a rocky start - some juicy challenges and opportunities have arisen, including attempting to purchase our first house, and these things have kept me busy. But the parenting path doesn't pause for obstacles, it just intensifies, doesn't it? There is so much I have been contemplating, so many things to write about. What has been on my mind this week though is opinions. Specifically, the opinions we harbor about our children. And how these get in the way of having a positive relationship with them.

"Is she a good baby?" This is a question we hear often, sometimes from the moment our child is born. The question is asked by strangers, friends, close family, in-laws. I always respond with "every baby is good." People take this response in different ways. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes they say, hurriedly, "oh, of course!" And other times they explain further: "oh, I just meant does she sleep. I just meant, does he eat well. I just meant, does he do what you say." And so on. People respond to us when we say, no he/she is not sleeping much, not eating solids, not potty learned - "oh, that's bad. What are you doing to change that?" I guess what they really mean to say is, "is she easy? does she conform to your wants and needs, rather than to her own?"

The view we carry is that all beings are primordially, fundamentally good. Goodness is their, and our, essential nature. But even on a relative level, children and babies are good. The behavior we tend to label as "bad" is merely behavior that does not conform to how we think things should be in that moment. Maybe our child (or, ahem, our friend's child, or, even worse, our grandchild) is not sleeping as we think they should, is not eating as we think they should, is not speaking, playing, listening, interacting with others and on and on, as we think they should. On the flip side, when they behave as we think they should, we praise them for being good. "You ate all your dinner - what a good boy." "You didn't come into mommy's bed all night - what a good girl."

This habit of putting our opinions on our children, of labeling their behavior, does them and us no favors. It allows no space for growth and no space for compassion. It closes down connection between us, and creates in its stead disconnection and a feeling of being judged, of not being accepted. It also makes it harder for us to teach and guide our children to behaviors that are helpful for them. It is hard to see what would really help them learn when we are coming from a place of making them wrong or right.

An example of this is how we relate to our children's emotional outbursts. In the vajrayana buddhist tradition, emotions are considered to be energy. Emotions are neither good or bad - although they do have wisdom. Anger for instance - anger has the wisdom of clear seeing. We lose that clear seeing when we constrict the anger into aggression, when we add the story to the anger that we are right about something or someone. When we can open to the energy of anger, to its wisdom of clear seeing, and drop any story line we have attached to it, well then we can act skillfully, responding accurately to what we have seen with clarity and compassion.

Whether or not we are able to work with our emotions so that we can access their enlightened aspects and express their wisdom rather than their neurotic qualities - this all depends on how we relate to them. If we relate to our emotions in unskillful ways, then we behave in neurotic ways that harm ourselves and others. To behave skillfully begins with accepting whatever we are feeling without judgement. In order to teach our children to access the wisdom of their emotions, we also have to accept them (their emotions) without judgement. Then we have to take the additional step of accepting their behavior without judgement as well. Whoa - that sounds like I am giving them an excuse to behave in any way they want and do whatever they want, right? No, not at all. Our job as parents is to help our children relate to their energy in a skillful, compassionate way. In order to do that, we need to drop our opinions about it.

We tend to label behavior as being "good" or "bad". Can you try to see your children's behavior as just behavior? As energy expressing itself? Sometimes the energy is brittle, tight, and unhappy. Sometimes the energy is joyful and free flowing. Sometimes it is loud and overwhelming. Sometimes it is sharp, and wants to jab at us and the world. Sometimes it is quiet and soft, and needs warmth and gentle nurturing. It is all just energy. It isn't personal, though it can feel that way, and we often respond out of that personal sense of hurt or displeasure, embarrassment or resentment. When we can see their behavior as energy expressing itself, then we can respond to it cleanly. We can provide boundaries so the energy does not harm them or others. We can teach them how to self-regulate when they are upset. We can notice when we make a bigger deal over something than is helpful. We can notice when our expectations of what should happen are getting in the way of accepting what is. We can cultivate gentleness. We can stop telling ourselves and them that something is wrong, we can open to what is right. We can accept that whatever is happening is already a passing dream, changing and impermanent. Once we make sure they and others are safe, we can also practice just sitting with their energy.

Sometimes, when our children's energy is very wild and chaotic, like in a tantrum, it can be very hard to just sit with it. It is scary for them and for us. We have a tendency to just want to make it stop - and who can blame us? It isn't pleasant to be around a tantruming toddler. Sometimes both my toddlers tantrum at the same time, and well, part of me just wants to teleport the hell out of there. But when I notice my own discomfort with their emotions, I can relax and just open to them, hold them, just be with the raging until it passes. The calmer and gentler I can be with them, the more quickly they tend to calm down. The more I acknowledge what they are feeling, rather than try to convince them they are feeling something else, or that they shouldn't be feeling that way, the more they are able to just release it and move on.

We have to model this ourselves. When your own energy of anger gets sparked, how to do you relate to it? What do you do? What do your children see? If we have the tendency to yell at our children, we cannot expect them to speak gently to us. If we hold onto our emotions, stuff them down, judge them - our children will eventually do the same.

Notice when you label your children. Notice when you label yourself and your own emotions and behavior. Through cultivating mindful body, speech and mind around and with our children, they will learn to work with their own emotions. They still will not always do what we would like them to, or behave in the way they "ought to", but neither will we. It is part of the joy and pain of being in this human body - we make mistakes. If we can embrace those mistakes with acceptance and love, we will all flourish.

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.

gentleness during this season

During this time of year, it can be easy to put our children into situations where they are set up to fail. Where there is too much stimulation, too much going on, too much forced affection, too many expectations. Because of our own hope and fear in family and friendly gatherings, we can meet our children with a lack of understanding and compassion when they act out or do not conform with how we or others think they should be behaving during these times.

An important part of mindfulness during this season is to continue to cultivate gentleness and understanding towards our children. We can look at our schedule and see where things need to be dropped in favor of providing some quiet time for our family. We can provide some extra nurturing to ourselves and our children to bolster everyone for interactions with groups of family and friends. We can stay aware of our own expectations - are we projecting lots of hope and fear onto a situation? Are we being influenced by how others may be viewing our children, rather than viewing them from a place of basic goodness, compassion, and awareness of what their experience of the gathering, the gift, the person actually is?

Rather than reacting with disappointment and aggression when our children do not act as we think they should during this time, can we continue to cultivate gentleness, by acknowledging our own fear or sadness around what has occurred and out of that soft spot, helping our children by reassuring them, cuddling them, acknowledging their difficulty, their discomfort, and letting them know it is ok to feel what they are feeling?

My own family will be attending a Christmas gathering where I know my children will be overstimulated and will most likely, not be at their best. I am laying the ground this week by continuing to find spaces for us to pause and reconnect with the ground of goodness, to join our bodies and minds in the same place, to be gentle, gentle and again, gentle. There are lots of opportunities during the holiday times to really work skillfully with what is, to be aware of the story line we are creating around situations, and to cultivate our appreciation and compassion. This may actually be the greatest gift of this time!
Wishing everyone a mindful and peaceful season.

cultivating appreciation

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving here in the United States, I find it useful to consciously take on the daily practice of cultivating appreciation. Appreciation, while it encompasses and encourages gratitude, is a bit deeper than just being thankful. It includes deep respect and sacredness. Appreciation nurtures trust in the basic goodness and brilliance of the world and its beings. To water the seeds of appreciation in our daily life brings great joy to our time with children. When we are able to model appreciation and reverence for our tasks, our environment, our family, our neighbors, even our burdens - our children witness basic goodness and dignity in action.

The teacher Gaylon Ferguson writes in his book Natural Wakefulness: Discovering the Wisdom We Were Born With

"The atmosphere surrounding meditation is warm and welcoming. We are cultivating appreciation, friendliness, a sense of gratitude for what we already have and are. This undercuts the speed and restlessness of materialism of all sorts."

To begin cultivating appreciation in our daily life with children, we can work with mindfulness to create a similar atmosphere of warmth, welcoming and understanding. We can work with our habitual pattern of judging our experience and things as "good" or "bad", "for us" or "against us". Using mindfulness, we can notice when we are engaged in negative speech (whether internal or external), and then make the choice to change our speech. We can treat ourselves with gentleness and acceptance, which will naturally extend out to others. Rather than looking in the mirror and greeting ourselves with a negative commentary of our flaws, we can smile and appreciate that we have a human body. Even if we are ill or disabled, there is something that our body does well, that works within it - our minds, our hearts, the blood flowing, our hair growing - something.

It can be easy this time of year to focus on what we don't have, on what we want to have, instead of taking a breath and the time to acknowledge everything we do possess. We can notice throughout our days when we are focusing on what is wrong - what is broken, who is misbehaving, when the weather isn't cooperating, the heat won't go on - we can always find a lot! Try to notice if you are dwelling on these obstacles, telling yourself or others stories about them, instead of just relating to them, cleanly. Then try to consciously notice what is working in your world! If we can pause and drop our projections and labeling, we will actually find, no matter how dire our circumstances are, that there is at least a little bit of magic and beauty and flow in our days, if we can only make ourselves available to it. Can we drop our resentment about the weather enough to notice the delight our children take in the rain falling down? Can we drop our scolding of a recalcitrant child long enough to see the fear or discomfort that caused the misbehavior? Can we notice the hawk circling overhead as we wait for the tow truck next to our broken down car? You get the idea.

So, in these days leading up to United States Thanksgiving, I am trying to pause each day, many times a day, and just honor my children, my physical space, animals, trees, my body, the food I am eating, the people I am passing - and just open to their wonder and sacredness. Sometimes, appreciation is as simple as bowing and acknowledging that this is how things are right now, and that this will also change. As simple as tasting our tears as they fall and savoring their salty warmth, another indication that yes, we are still alive, and that being alive is an extraordinary fluke, a gift, no matter how painful at times. We can appreciate how no matter how bad our day or week or year may be, the good earth is holding us up, the good sky is encompassing us, the sun is shining or the rain or snow are falling, nourishing many beings. The air is flowing through our lungs, in and out, in and out. All these little, interconnected, incredibly vast things that actively sustain us as we move through our days. And in every acknowledgement, we can bow to our children for being their brilliant, shining selves, whether smiling or screaming. Wishing you many days of appreciation and joy.

wonderful reminders

I often find myself returning to the amazing dharma book "Radical Acceptance" by Tara Brach. Ms. Brach is a compassionate, insightful and wonderful teacher - I really can't recommend the book enough. I was looking at some old interviews with her the other day about her book, and came across this wonderful teaching, which I am reprinting in full, because it is just so good :). This is her response to a question about working with depression and anxiety, or other painful emotions. These gateways she discusses are powerful tools to use in our daily life and practice, and gifts we could give with great love to our children. Enjoy:

We suffer because we have forgotten who we are and our identity has become confined to the sense of a separate, usually deficient self. All difficult emotions-fear and anger, shame and depression-arise out of this trance of what I call false self.

I’ve found that whenever I am really suffering, on some level I am believing and feeling that “something is wrong with me.” Over the years I’ve been drawn to three primary gateways for awakening from this trance. In the Buddhist tradition they are referred to as the three refuges:

One (called “sangha”) is loving relationship-both live contact with loved ones and also meditation on the love that’s in my life. In the moments of remembering love, there is an opening out of the sense of separate self. For me, reflecting on love has included prayer to the beloved, to what I experience as the loving awareness that is my source. When I feel separate and stuck, that loving presence might seem like it’s apart from me and “out there.” But by reaching out in longing and prayer, I’m carried home to the loving presence that is intrinsic to my Being.

A second gateway (“dharma” or truth) is taking refuge in the present moment. The training of meditation is a gift as it has helped me to pause, wake up out of thoughts and contact my moment to moment experience. When I am no longer running away or resisting what is happening inside me, I reconnect with the space and compassion that has room for whatever is going on.

A third gateway (“buddha” or “buddha nature”) is turning towards awareness itself. Most of the time we are paying attention to the foreground of experience-to our thoughts, feelings and sensations. What we are missing out on is the background of experience, the formless dimension of Being itself. By asking questions like “What is aware right now?” or “What is knowing these sounds?” or “Who am I?” we begin to intuit our own presence or Beingness. The signs of this presence are space, stillness and silence.

For myself and so many I’ve worked with, becoming familiar with this formless dimension of who we are makes it possible to open with love to the changing expressions of life within and around us. It allows us to make peace with living and dying, and to live our moments fully.

Wishing everyone connection with your own Beingness today and every day. Much love to you all - you are all Buddhas!

painful reminders

We can stop looking for some idealized moment when everything is simple and secure. This second of experience, which could be painful or pleasurable, is our working basis. What makes all the difference is how we relate to it.
- Pema Chodron

I had the painful reminder today that when I lose my temper with my little ones, it is so very, very rarely about what they are or are not doing. Instead, it is most often the result of me carrying the past and/or the future into the present moment. My worries, my story lines, my fears, my hopes. I am caught up in all that when suddenly, one of my children acts out or does something that is upsetting. Or like today, when my eldest got a pricker in his finger and refused to let me help him in any way, but instead screamed in pain, complaining that it hurt him, for five entire blocks, then in front of our apartment house, then up the stairs as I carried him to our apartment, both fighting me from touching him, but refusing to go up the stairs himself.

I shouted. I told him "to walk up those stairs." I told him, "no, we are not going to just stand outside here and scream." I said, "I am very frustrated right now, because I want to help you and you won't let me." I suppose I could have said all of the above gently, but I did not. I was angry. I was angry because I have been having one of the worst months I have had in years and years, a month full of obstacles and threats. Challenges and setbacks. I was angry because I was looking forward to going to the library storytime with my little ones, which we have not been able to do for quite some time due to several of the aforementioned obstacles and setbacks. I was angry because on the last three outings I have taken my children on, they have either gotten hurt or had a huge tantrum that forced us to leave said outing often almost as soon as we had gotten there. I was angry because I am worried about where we are going to live. I was angry because I am worried about getting food on our table. I was angry because my mother is dying. And so on. It had nothing to do with my poor little boy and his very uncomfortable finger.

And it is at times like these, when I totally lose it, that I just can fall so easily into despair. It is so easy to use an outburst like this as evidence of what a failure I am as a mother. But instead, I can use a time like this to be more gentle, kinder to myself. Pema Chodron says:

Openness actually starts to emerge when you see how you close down. You see how you close down, how you yell at someone, and you begin to have some compassion.

If we can see how we shut down and yell, then we can begin to understand how others can yell too, or how they can hurt us or others. It comes from their own suffering, just as those moments when we do it comes from our suffering. So again, we are presented with the choice - close or open? Touch that tender, broken heart of our's or pretend it isn't tender at all, and wrap ourselves in duality and aggression? In being right?

So, I began again. I apologized to my son for shouting. I got a bowl of warm water, and had his little brother splash in it. This helped my eldest relax enough to try putting his hand in it. We were home again, stuck inside on a beautiful day, story time a lost event, but he was calm again, and the pricker floated out, as I knew it would. His younger brother, who had been very upset at having to leave the library, played happily with some blocks. I got some support online from caring friends, who have been there, in that same kind of painful, raw moment. Things changed. I had to let go. Let go of my worries. Of my story line. Of my hopes for the day. Of my little one letting me help him, even. The letting go was the opening up.

I haven't been writing here often because of all the obstacles my family is facing currently, but you are all in my thoughts. I hope you and your little ones are able to relax into whatever moment is arising, and let go again.

giving yourself space to be

When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. - Pema Chodron

So, I have just been terribly lax at blogging this summer. Something about the warm, open ended days has made me want to just do anything but write in any depth about any thing. My apologies about that. If given my choice, I would probably spend every day in the summer either lying on my back in the middle of a country meadow or just being at the beach, my feet submerged in water, while my husband fed me watermelon and my children played happily by themselves with the local flora and fauna. And I have actually had a couple of days this summer when such a scenario materialized, more or less. How lucky!

I have been contemplating my difficulty in giving myself and my family the space to just be, whether in the summer, fall, winter or spring. As a society and world, we seem hell bent on keeping ourselves as busy and productive as possible. It is one of the very disorienting things about being a new mother in fact - the sudden surrender of activity, or at least activity that outwardly manifests as such. Nursing or feeding your baby, changing diapers, comforting, bonding - it is actually incredibly demanding work, but much of it looks sedentary, still, and monotonous. Even amongst all this work, there is a lot of just sitting, just being there with your baby as he or she rests or feeds. And of course, with a newborn, you are usually confined to your home for the first few weeks, depending on different circumstances. A new baby forces us to take a long, deep in breath, perhaps for the first time in many years. As in sitting meditation, we can react with a hot, itchy boredom to this, or we can begin to relax, surrender to the present moment, and breathe in deeper, allowing ourselves to just be. In this space, our heart can be touched, deeper perhaps than it has ever been touched before. We can begin to really get to know that bottomless gentleness and love that it contains, as Ani Pema mentions above.

We can do this no matter how old our children are, no matter if we work outside our home or in it. We can find periods each day to breathe in, deeply, and ground ourselves fully in the now, before breathing back out into our busy lives. This can be an internal breath. A letting go of our constant inner activity, our planning, story telling, criticism, gossip, complaining and so on. We can notice our thoughts and let them go, leave ourselves alone for a bit. It can manifest as an external letting go as well. Letting go of a project, an agenda, an activity, even for a moment or two. It can be getting outside, as I often advise - just getting outside, even for a short time, no matter what the weather. You don't have to do anything in particular outdoors. Just open. If you have young children, let them guide you. They will lead you to many important discoveries - a large slug, inching its way along the wet grass. A collection of choke cherries lying on the sidewalk. An interesting crack in the sidewalk. A broken street lamp. A new stray cat on the street, who is so friendly she allows them to rub her tummy and follows us to the old church yard where we like to play. Try not to hurry them along. Linger with them. Allow yourselves the space to be open, curious, attentive to the magic of the world.

We experienced a forced in breath just the other day, because of Hurricane Irene. We lost power for about 24 hours, and were unable to do the laundry, or use the computer, or stay up late doing chores. Instead, we lit our candles, gave the boys each a flashlight, and spent hours playing together in a large tent made up of sheets on our bed, exploring the play of light and shadow. It was a lovely pause, a gift. We could have chosen to be hassled by it, and there was some anxiety about the food warming up in the fridge, but what was there to do other than put it all (along with our ice trays) in the cooler and then let the anxiety go, so we could be with our littles? Hassle was replaced with warmth and laughter. Space.

Give yourself some space to be today. Engage in some aimless wandering outside with your children, or by yourself. Leave yourself alone. You don't always need to be so busy. We are always so afraid of things falling apart without our constant interference. I will let you in on a secret - they fall apart anyway, no matter what we do. So relax. Let go. Let your heart be touched. In that soft, tender spot of stillness, great power exists.

[NOTE: blogger is giving me lots of trouble in terms of formatting, so I apologize for the appearance of the blog, and if this posts appears as one big block of text. I will eventually figure it out when I don't have two nursing toddlers on my lap as I type.]

just a reminder

Maybe more to myself than to anyone - this parenting business is challenging. It's hard.  It can be very lonely, especially in a culture that is anti-child and unsupportive of nurturing.  In a culture where many of us live far from family and close supports.  So be kind.  Be kind to yourself.  Hold yourself in the cradle of loving kindness.  Hold your children in it.  Hold your friends, your family, strangers.  But start with yourself.  You are basically good, sane, wise and compassionate.  It is your true nature, even if you doubt it.  Your good heart and mind are always there, underneath all the other stuff that makes you feel sad, lonely, resentful, angry, jealous and so on.  All that stuff is passing, changing, impermanent.  


Your good, brave heart is underneath it, beating, strong, calling, calling to you all the time.  Hold it in your hands and rock it, as gently as a newborn baby.  Be gentle to yourself.  Give yourself something you need, some space, some kindness, some love. Sending you all a huge hug.

true gifts

"The point is to look properly. See the colors: white, black, blue, yellow, red, green, purple. Look. This is your world! You can't not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don't hesitate - look!" - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

We had our local Children's Day celebration, and it was a lovely time. The King and Queen dolls seem to approve, no? And my toddler was happy with our "Pin the Tail on the Dragon" game.

It was a very simple celebration, and small, and just right. There was great richness and vividness to it, in the colors, the songs, the jokes, the food shared in community. It was a wonderful little opportunity to share our basic goodness with one another, through the celebration of our children.

This has been a hard month for me, with lots of illness, doctor visits, emergency room forays (everyone is ok, although my toddler now has a dermabonded laceration on his forehead), lack of sleep, and so on. I have had some rough moments when I have felt I can't possibly give anything further. What has helped me is to pay attention, just continue to pay attention to what I am feeling, and who I am being. I have been allowing myself to touch my exhaustion, and my overwhelm. When I touch it, and don't judge it, but just look at it and allow myself to feel it without indulging in lots of thoughts around it, I can see that it is already changing, dissolving, turning into something else. That allows me to move forward, through it, and carry on with what needs to be done. It's been hard at times, but I am still here to tell the tale, so it has been working. Sense of humor has been helping as well. And the support of my sangha, both the sangha of practitioners and that of other parents who give me their warm encouragement and are generous enough to laugh with me and share their own challenges.

What has helped me most of all though, is gentleness. The gentleness that arises from dropping any judging of my experience. This gentleness has allowed me to open further to myself, my partner and my children, when my first instinct has been to get harder, withdraw and lash out. Not that I don't slip sometimes, but that is all part of our practice too. We stumble along, but we keep coming back - back to our breath, to our bodies, to our hearts, to our gentleness. This is why our teachers call this practice warriorship.

Basic goodness is always here, available to us in every moment. It just needs the gift of our attention for it to shine out. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche exhorted, all we need to do is simply look. Look! This great feast awaits us. The phenomenal world is so full of simple magic. Our children are attuned to it, as they are better at paying attention, better at simply being in the moment and allowing it to present itself to them in all its richness.

I wish us all a feast this solstice. It is a feast of our neurosis and of our clarity, of our aggression and of our compassion. Spicy and sweet. Happy and sad. Full of beauty. Completely real and ever changing. Spacious and open, like our minds.

Children's Day or preparing for the solstice

"Children's Day provides a special opportunity to express appreciation for and with our children."

Rather than celebrate Christmas or Chanukah in our household, we celebrate the joy and goodness to be found, even in the darkest times, with the Shambhala holiday of Children's Day. This link provides information if you are interested in finding out more about it. It is a holiday that connects us to the winter solstice while celebrating the joy and magic of our children.

We decorate our meditation center's shrine and our home shrines with pine boughs, twinkling lights, candy and toys, all offered to the King and Queen dolls, representing the masculine and feminine principles of skillful means and compassion, energy and space, father and mother. These dolls sit in the place of honor on the shrine. Some people purchase beautiful Japanese King and Queen dolls, while others make their own out of gingerbread, or paper, or felt, or perhaps pine cones - whatever is at hand and that is inspiring.

I love filling our home during this darkest time of year with light, warmth and the gifts of food, connection and kindness. My toddler can't ignore the omnipresent Santa Claus and the festive decorations in our USian city, and I, personally, really enjoy the example of generosity, community and celebration that is at the heart of these winter holidays. So, we are teaching our boys that Santa is a bodhisattva of generosity, that this is the time of year when we celebrate light amidst the darkness, and enjoying the pleasure they take in the various decorations, carols and lights. There is much magic to be found in these outer forms, and I don't want to deny them the joy found within.

I do however, wish to cultivate in them a mindfulness of consumption - to not mistake materialism for happiness. They are very young, so the concept of asking for gifts has not entered their mindstreams yet. They have very generous grandparents, who we have gently asked to give only simple gifts of natural toys, or to contribute to music lessons in lieu of a physical item. This works for now, although it is hard to contain their generosity. I am sure once the children are in school, influenced by peers and popular culture, we will have new challenges. I am hopeful that by nurturing a sense of contentment and appreciation for the richness inherent in every thing, they will be better able to discern between fleeting wants and actual needs when they are older, as well as able to use this time of year to connect to generosity. This Children's Day we will be collecting food items to donate to a food pantry, and when they are old enough, we would like to spend time around the solstice volunteering together as a family to help those less fortunate than we. We have also made it a tradition to put out food for the little creatures that inhabit our neighborhood - birds, squirrels, rabbits and so on, reminding ourselves that all beings want to be happy and free of discomfort.

However you choose to celebrate this season, there are so many ways to practice opening to others, by giving without the expectation of reciprocation or even appreciation, by practicing generosity with the pure aspiration of simply making other beings happy. We can use the season to cultivate friendliness towards ourselves and others, connecting to our gentleness and soft hearts rather than getting lost in the busyness of what we think we must do. We can be aware of own needs, keep things a bit simpler, and continue to let go of expectations and rest when we need to amidst all the "things to do". I have been trying to find time every day as we approach the solstice to just pause and connect to the present moment. When I can't meditate formally, I do this in the form of a short walk outside, or just sitting while my children play or nurse and taking some deep breaths, raising my gaze up and noticing, then gently letting go of whatever is arising in my mind. This helps create some space during a time when our lives can become quite claustrophobic with all the running around.

How do you work with mindfulness during this season? How will you be celebrating the solstice? Wishing you all peace during these shortening days, and that basic goodness, which "shines like the sun" as our teachers remind us, illuminates the dark.

be grateful to everyone

"If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities, which we project onto the outside world. In traditional teachings on lojong it is put another way: other people trigger the karma that we haven't worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders." -Pema Chodron
Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (Shambhala Library)

We are celebrating Thanksgiving this week in the United States, and so I have been contemplating this particular lojong slogan. It is a tough one. It is so tough that I often feel that if I was truly successful in following its teaching, I might actually wake up. Can I really be grateful to everyone? Not only that, but can I really be grateful to every circumstance that arises, no matter how challenging?

It is easy to appreciate the good things in our lives, the people and circumstances that make us happier. But to appreciate the other stuff - the people and situations that only cause us trouble and agita - well, that seems to take some practice. "Be grateful to everyone" is a radical way to live. It requires you to open up and let go when you would really prefer to close down, lash out, be right, hold onto a preference or opinion, and maybe just crawl into bed and stay there all day. It requires me to thank those circumstances and those sentient beings that I find difficult, distasteful or distressing. Because without them, I would have no opportunity to see where I still get stuck, caught up in this illusion/delusion of "me" and "mine". I would ultimately have no path to walk, nothing to transform. The difficult people and circumstances are the friendly reminders to me to wake up. They are the constant feedback telling me which way to go on the path, what I still need to make friends with. They show me where I still create suffering for myself and others.

In his teaching on this slogan, Chogyam Trungpa says some truly radical, ego shattering things. He also says a very small thing that always sticks with me: "if there is no noise outside during our sitting meditation, we cannot develop mindfulness". Our usual modus operandi is to try and protect ourselves from the noise, to shut it out. We want to try and wrap the world in bubble wrap rather than relate to the phenomena that arise constantly to disturb our peace of mind. But if we are really committed to manifesting our basic goodness and to getting unstuck, we need that noise, and we need those people - you know - those people that make us want to run away and wrap ourselves in bubble wrap. As I gather with family this week during the holiday, I will be holding this slogan sharply in focus. Our families are often so hard to be grateful to, especially when all gathered together with the expectation of having a celebratory day. So many buttons can be pushed during this time together. It is a good time to practice our mindfulness, especially with our children watching. A good time to practice gratitude for the troublemakers we know in our own inner circle - who hook us into our habitual pattern, into our old karma.

This is ultimately a friendly practice. It doesn't mean that we allow people to abuse us or walk all over us. If we need to set a boundary, then we do so. We can do that out of compassion for ourselves and our troublemakers, and not out of aggression. We do it out of gratitude. They are teaching us how to take care of ourselves, and by extension, others. This slogan can be contemplated on a daily basis, and I have found it invaluable in my own life with small children. There are times when I don't feel particularly grateful to my children even, and it is in those times that I bring this slogan to mind. It helps. I see where I am stuck. I see where I am not very friendly to myself and others. Slowly, I let go. Gentleness grows. Appreciation dawns.

So this Thanksgiving, try this slogan out for size when you feel like grabbing the turkey leg and running out the door. Or when the children are screaming in the car, when the person behind you in traffic cuts you off, when your mother-in-law makes her passive aggressive comment about your parenting, or whatever. Happy Thanksgiving, and as always, be gentle.

gentleness and making mistakes

There seems to be no end to doing things wrong, messing things up all the time.We are sort of trapped in that kind of negative “oy vey” situation. On the other hand, very interestingly, there is lots of room to make mistakes. That’s true, absolutely true. But such room for mistakes cannot be created unless there is surrendering, giving, some kind of opening. If we can give away our aggression or attempt to give it away, if we attempt to open up and to strip away our territoriality and possessiveness—then there is lots of room for making mistakes. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

It seems to me that gentleness is the parenting tool that when cultivated, yields the most rewards for us and our children. But it can be so hard sometimes to be gentle, and so easy to be aggressive, especially if we didn't grow up with gentle parenting ourselves, or when we doubt our own goodness. My toddler is rapidly approaching the age of two, and the challenging period of meltdowns that this particular period is fertile with seems already upon us. It can be very challenging to maintain my patience with him at times, especially if my infant is in need of my immediate attention. My toddler is having a hard time sharing me lately, and this leads to some difficult situations during our days, where I begin to wish there were two of me to better manage! I have been having moments of feeling I am making mistake after mistake after mistake in my role as mama.

It can be hard to act with gentleness consistently towards our children when we cannot be gentle towards ourselves. Mistakes will be made in our parenting, often on a daily basis. We have to accept that. We will often act out of habitual pattern, and we have to accept that too. But if we manage to stay aware, to recognize when we are acting habitually, unmindfully, with aggression, impatience, and so on, then we can let go. As Chogyam Trungpa says, we can let go of our aggression, our neurosis, and surrender to the present moment. Surrendering to the present moment may mean that we really feel that knot in our stomach as our child screams at us. Or the tightness in our throats as we touch our anger. Maybe we will see that our anger is not about our child and their actions but about something else - the fight we had with our partner that morning, our lack of sleep, our wish to have some quiet- often a thousand other things. Perhaps our child touched a button, long buried in us, that we no longer remembered even existed. And somehow, in that moment of their own frustration and difficulty, they managed to find it! We can bow to our children in that moment for being our wisest teacher. That act of bowing, of surrendering our button, our ground, creates a huge space for us, or opening to use Trungpa Rinpoche's word. A huge opening where gentleness can occur. Where we can touch our tenderness, see the tenderness in our children, and start again. Fresh start.

Chogyam Trungpa taught often on the idea of "fresh start". Basic goodness does not go away. Buddha nature does not leave the room even though we are yelling like a tyrant or feeling stuck. It just gets obscured. Like clouds that pass in front of the sun. Mindfulness is the gentle breeze that blows those clouds away so our true nature can shine out. That breeze creates the fresh start. It's like an automatic reset button. We find we are lost in the past or the future, in a story line, a pattern, overtaken by the energy of anger, despair, and so on and seeing that, we touch it, let it go and... fresh start. Here we are again. In this room, in this body. How do our feet feel on the floor? The air against our skin? That tear on our child's face - we can see it now. Maybe we can touch into their frustration as well as our own. We can breathe into our own pain, whatever it may be, and breathe gentleness to ourselves and to our children. Fresh start. We wipe away the tear, get down to their level, and work it out sanely. Fresh start. New moment. We touch our basic goodness and can begin to act out of that, rather than our stuckness.

We are going to make mistakes continually as parents and as human beings. What matters is how we relate to those mistakes and to all the other moments that surround them. Mistakes do not mean we are bad parents or bad people. They just mean we are learning. And our children will learn from us as they see how we relate with gentleness towards our own errors and move forward. That is a powerful gift to them. I wish us all gentleness and confidence in our own goodness this week, and truly, always.