in breath, out breath

"As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed." - Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

In meditation practice, we place our attention again and again on the breath as it goes in and out of our bodies. We go out with our breath, and then come back in, back to our bodies just sitting there on the good earth. Sometimes we may find ourselves going out, out, out with the breath and then staying way out there, feeling spacey and disconnected. Other times we may find ourselves in, in , in - closed, narrow, claustrophobic, forgetting to let go. We have to watch our own minds, and notice when we are too tight or too loose and then adjust accordingly.

I have been contemplating this lately in terms of our daily, weekly and monthly rhythms as a family, with the in breath and out breath as my guides for balance. When we spend to much time extending out - too many activities outside our home, too much stimulation, too many people - we get cranky, irritable, ungrounded and diffused. When we spend to much time focusing our energies inward on our home hearth, staying indoors, not engaging enough with others, being too stationary - we get stuck, myopic, stir-crazy. I have found that I need to hold our energies in my awareness each day, making sure we breathe together in and out.

In my family, we need time each day when we focus on staying grounded in our home - joining together for a song before breakfast, saying good morning to the Buddha and our teachers and sitting quietly for a bit, then doing necessary chores. We also need to exhale out - spending a good amount of time outdoors in the fresh air, getting together with other families when possible, or going to a library story time or other low key activity. I make sure we don't have something planned each day though with others - otherwise we get too overwhelmed and my little ones get too overstimulated. So certain days the focus is on just being with each other, both outside in nature and inside our home, and other days the focus is on a single excursion - a trip to the museum, a play date. Regardless of the day, we make sure to take the in-breath again come evening time - another shared song around the table, a lit candle while we prepare for bed, with my eldest blowing it out after evening chants.

Rather than working with something as scary as a "schedule", which my inherently rebellious nature resists, and which I sometimes suspect are used to make parents feel guilty about the inchoate nature of life with small children, I find that keeping this in-breath, out-breath rhythm feels natural, just as in meditation. After all, we aren't forcing the breath to go in and then out - it just does. The same with our daily and weekly rhythms - we aren't imposing something unnatural on our children, but instead are placing our mindfulness on the natural arising and ebbing of energy, and then going in and out with it.

I think we all feel when we have been indoors too long, or out in the world too much. We feel it physically and psychically, and our children are much more sensitive barometers of when we are out of synch with the breath of the day. We can get even subtler with this, in terms of what we do inside and outside the home - what is too diffuse, and what is too claustrophobic. Ideally our activities have their own internal in and out as well that is nourishing rather than draining. Each child and family is different in this, in terms of what they need to stay connected to the energy of basic goodness, or windhorse. What I have noticed about my own family is that when we are too inwards, we get depressed and stagnant and when we are too much outwards, we get cranky and often physically sick. When I am successful at balancing the in breath and the out breath of our days, things flow for us, we have fun, and we are both grounded and aware of others.

Here is a wonderful teaching by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche on meditation.

doubting

"...even if we think that we're doing our best in life, we still feel that we haven't fully lived up to what we should be. We feel that we're not quite doing things right. We feel that our parents or others don't approve of us. There is that fundamental doubt, or fundamental fear, as to whether or not we can actually accomplish something."
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Doubt. I just spent a weekend contemplating doubt - it was the subject of the retreat I participated in. Actually, windhorse was the subject of the retreat, but doubt was discussed as an obstacle to windhorse. Contemplating doubt is not new to me. I have always been haunted by it. After many years of practice, I have realized that all this doubt has ultimately been my lack of confidence in my basic goodness. Raising children has given this habitual doubt new texture and power. So many fears. Am I doing this right? Do others think I am doing this right? What am I doing? How could I have done that? How could they have done that!? And so on. Doubt can become such a trap that we almost dare not move for fear of making a mistake or embarrassing ourselves. There is no freedom to act, and we become completely disconnected from our basic goodness and that of others.

Again and again in my daily life with my little ones, doubt arises. At the end of the retreat, a little party was held to celebrate a milestone in my local meditation center's history. We brought our children to this party. They were the only children present, and they did what a two year old and a 10 month old do - they made noise, they were audibly frustrated with having to wait to have a piece of the delicious looking cake present, they were antsy and wanted to run and move about, wanted to explore in baby and toddler ways - i.e., throwing plastic forks on the floor, ringing the meditation gong, crawling over meditation cushions. Really, not a big deal. But, oh, the looks! And oh, the doubt that arose in this mama - doubts about my parenting, about my choice to bring the children, and doubts about them - feeling embarrassed about them and wanting to make them wrong for being, well, young children.

I began to doubt the entire situation. I felt stressed and anxious - very claustrophobic. And then at one point, I overheard an elderly woman say to another person present about my toddler: "He has such a loud voice for such a little boy" and it pierced me. I wasn't sure if she was irritated or just noting it neutrally, but it stopped my mind, which had been racing along in a similar observation. As so often happens in these moments, I began to laugh. Indeed, he does have a big voice for such a little boy. He is two years old. He is excited. He has a lot of pent up energy. He loves the gong and the pictures of the Buddha and the cushions. He loves running around on a carpeted floor. He was expressing his windhorse, his sheer delight in exploring the phenomenal world and his body moving through space. How marvelous. How absolutely appropriate for him. And how not a big deal. We weren't attending a silent meditation. We were at a celebratory party. He was celebrating something bigger. The life force, flowing through him, through us, through the space.

And I saw how I had felt ashamed about that. My heart broke open. I had been doubting his goodness. I had been doubting the fundamental sanity of the situation. There was nothing to be ashamed about. If necessary, I could redirect the children, move them into a different space, cut some frosting off the back of the cake to give to my eldest (which is what I did, ahem). But ultimately, there was no problem. There was no "not doing this right". What I realized again about doubt is that it is based in the fear of not getting confirmed by others. Or not confirmed in the way I would hope to be. This illusory, ever changing "I" wants to believe it is some "thing". Something real and solid and admired by others. Children have a way of disassembling this project we have of building ourselves up again and again.

I guess what I realized (once again) was that my children have a right to be here. And I have a right to be here. This doesn't mean we have the right to create chaos and confusion. There is a time and a place for the throwing down of plastic forks and the indiscriminate ringing of huge meditation gongs. But we can relate to all of it without doubt. With fundamental confidence in our sanity and the sanity of our children. And in the sanity of the others observing us as we relate to one another. Sometimes we have to wake up their sanity as well (the sanity of those around us)- we have to remind them that children are sentient beings, the same sentient beings they come to the meditation cushion to assist. We have to remind them that children are buddha. That the phenomenal world is messy and a bit chaotic and noisy, and ultimately, extremely workable. That phenomena can wake us up to the present moment, rather than shut us down further.

At one point during the weekend retreat I was asked to timekeep for the meditation session. This means sitting at the front of the room, next to the big meditation gong, watching the clock, ringing the gong to mark off the periods of sitting and walking meditation, and just "holding the space" as they say. As I sat up front, meditating, I could hear people crunching in the snow outside. I could hear the stomachs of people meditating growling. People sneezed and sniffed. Someone farted. I found it all tremendously moving. Every sound brought me back to right now. Every sound pulled me out of any self obsessive thoughts into the thought of others. Our children demand this of us on a daily basis. Let them pull you out of self-doubt. Let them remind you of your goodness and the goodness of the world.

being present makes you happier

A great little article today in the New York Times about a scientific study measuring people's happiness when their minds wandered. I find it interesting that ultimately the author dwells more on staying busy than the power of being present in whatever one is doing, and he does not touch on meditation practice. But in any case, worth a read, and a good reminder of what it costs us when we are not present.

appreciating ourselves

"A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don't appreciate themselves."
— Chögyam Trungpa (Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior)

I was watching my toddler today play with a group of slightly older children at a local indoor play space. As mentioned before in this space, he is cautious by nature and can become slightly overwhelmed in groups of children. This sometimes translates into him being bulldozed by other little ones - they take his toys right out of his hands or push him aside, and instead of taking the toys back or protesting, he shrinks a bit, steps away or clings to me. I don't want him to be aggressive towards other children, and I want him to share willingly, but I also really want him to appreciate himself and his own right to be there, to be here, on this good earth. I believe that if this is cultivated in him, he will be able to feel confident and gentle towards others at the same time, without the need to shrink. How can I help nurture that in him and his brother?

It is so hard at times to appreciate our own good hearts and minds. Probably because we don't often view our hearts and minds as being particularly good. Instead, we tend to view ourselves as being terribly flawed, or unlovable, or a mess, or maybe unkind, or ... you fill in the blank. It can depend on the day, who we are with, how much external circumstances live up to our expectations of how our lives should look. It can be very hard to see ourselves as basically good, sane beings if we have just yelled at our child or put our foot in our mouth, or made some kind of normal, human mistake. This isn't a new topic for me, but I think it can be useful to return to it, as I know in my own daily life, I am so often lacking in loving kindness for myself. And when I am lacking in loving kindness towards myself, it becomes very difficult to feel it towards others. That's the funny thing we begin to see more and more as we practice mindfulness and awareness in our daily lives. It is very difficult to open from a place of aggression towards oneself. It is very difficult to consider the basic goodness of others if we don't think it is in ourselves. So if we really want to appreciate our children in all their uniqueness, quirkiness, crankiness, brilliance, beauty and energy, and really want our children to appreciate all of that in themselves, then we need to appreciate our own messy humanness.

What does appreciating oneself mean? How do we begin to truly trust in our own basic wakefulness and compassion? For me, meditation has been the space where I have been able to see my own naked heart and rest with it, no matter what. The more I have been able to rest with it in all its moods and thoughts about the past and future, its little and big desires, its little and big mistakes- the more I am able to feel kindness towards myself. By seeing how truly human I am, I am somehow able to see how human everybody else is too, and slowly, slowly, begin to love and appreciate myself and others more and more. It is so tender, this being human. It is such a precious experience, even in the chaos and the suffering. We can begin to appreciate all of that, the more we work with not judging what arises within ourselves or outside of ourselves. Just staying with what is happening, and letting go of what arises again and again.

Another potent practice has been loving kindness or metta contemplation practice. This is a practice where you send loving kindness to yourself. Once you have worked with sending loving kindness to yourself, then you begin to send it to other beings. First you send loving kindness to someone who has helped you, who you respect. Then you work with sending loving kindness to someone you love, then to a person you feel neutral about (like the mailman or a grocery clerk) and then to a person you actively dislike. Eventually, you extend this loving kindness aspiration out to all beings throughout time and space.

There are many traditional phrases you can use during metta practice, but I like to use the following, as adapted from Sharon Salzberg's book, "Loving Kindness":

May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I be free from danger.
May I live a happy life.

Again, always begin with yourself. After a few minutes of wishing yourself genuine happiness, you can bring someone who has helped you to mind who you respect. Then it is lovely to bring your children to mind and wish that they be happy, healthy, free from danger and so on. And then the neutral party, and then the person you struggle with. If you are pressed for time, it can be as simple as when you wake up or are going to sleep to just say to yourself "May I be happy. May so and so be happy. May my children be happy." etc. Or just start with "May I be happy." You can work with that throughout your day. You are strapping yourself into your seatbelt in the car: "May I be happy". You reach for a snack from the fridge: "May I be healthy". You are changing a diaper: "May I be free from danger." Just bring it to mind whenever you notice where your mind is. Whenever you notice where your mind is, space occurs. You can choose what to put into that opening.

This is a simple but very powerful practice. The more you work with it, the more you can notice. Is it hard to wish yourself happiness? Is there a tightness around it? Irritation? Sadness? Just keep noticing and come back to "May I be happy".

We deserve to be here, on this beautiful earth. Basic goodness is our birthright, our inheritance when we come into being. Being human is a precious experience. The more we cultivate appreciation for ourselves in all of our humanness, mistakes and all, the more our children will see their own goodness, and appreciate their right to be here too.

Mindful birth

The power and intensity of labor pull us right into each moment. Each labor is unique. Like life, you never know how things will unfold. - Myla Kabat-Zinn

Giving birth is one of the most intense experiences that mind can go through- so intense in fact, that the buddhist teachings tell us birth can be an opportunity to experience the true nature of mind fully, just as at death. As with all experiences, we can open to birthing or we can close and attempt to stave off the physical and emotional challenges that it presents us with. By opening to each moment of labor and allowing ourselves to be pulled into the present as Myla Kabat-Zinn describes, rather than being dragged into it kicking and screaming, we will be able to relax and let go. The more we can relax and let go, the more we can experience our mind fully and welcome the arrival of our precious baby.

Relaxing and letting go can look many different ways. It can look peaceful, quiet, and calm as we ride the waves of surges. It can also look chaotic, intense, loud, or even scary. Whatever the birth, we can come back to the breath. We can place our mind on the in-breath, staying with the intensity of physical sensation, and relax and let go with the out breath as it dissolves into space. We can keep opening into space as we breathe out, letting go of any tension or tightening. We can allow ourselves to laugh or to cry. We can trust that each breath is bringing our precious baby closer to us. We can trust our bodies, their ability to grow and nourish this baby and bring him or her into the world. By opening and letting go, we can listen to our bodies during birth and let our body wisdom lead us where we need to go in the process. We can rest between surges, rebuild our windhorse, and get back to the work of bringing our baby out.

Birth can be a powerful opportunity to let go of our preconceived ideas of who we are and how we should behave. With my second birth, I literally growled and grunted like a bear during the final stages of labor- which was a full embrace of the present moment and what I needed to do to meet my baby. I let my body and mind guide me, rather than second guessing myself. I fully opened to the intensity that was arising and went with it, rather than fighting it and feeling any storyline of embarrassment or shame. We can try and watch our minds during labor and birth, noticing when we are resisting what is happening or adding hope and fear to the situation, and then choosing to let go of it all and open again. Whatever kind of birth we are having, we can do this. Whether you are having a vaginal birth or a c-section, natural birth or otherwise, you can continue to practice opening to what is unfolding, watch your mind, and relax into the experience moment by moment by using the breath as a guide.

Birth is unpredictable. We can't plan on how it is going to go. It is an adventure that asks us to open wider than we may have ever been asked to open before. By trusting in the present moment and in our basically good mind and body, we can bring our baby into being with confidence and power. Wishing you all a beautiful birth!

Transforming our family karma

One way of understanding "lineage" is "linkage" – that which links each of us to our true nature, to each other, to the teachings, to the succession of teachers and to primordial wisdom itself. – Richard Reoch

I recently read a paper by a psychologist named Lloyd deMause in which he talks about the neurotic and destructive tendency in abusive parents to use their children as “poison containers”, in other words, as vessels into which all of the unresolved psychic pain and neuroses of their childhoods are injected. The more I contemplate this, the stronger I feel that all parents are destined to do this to some extent or another, not just those who are abusive towards their children. We all have the tendency to respond to our children with the same neurosis that we learned from our families – and we will do so until we see this clearly, and are able to transform it. Not that our family neuroses are equivalent to abuse, but they certainly create suffering for others and ourselves. Why not stop the lineage of neuroses, and transform it into the lineage of wisdom and sanity?

Our parents are often the main, if not the only, parenting role models we have. They have the most success in continuing a lineage, or linkage as Richard Reoch defines it, of either neurosis or nurture that can be traced back for many generations. If we are not mindful in our parenting, we will find that those same habitual patterns will be inherited by our own children, and be carried on into future generations. How do we cultivate those karmic seeds in our own lineages that hold awakening and compassion rather than aggression and fear? I think this is one of our central tasks as parents. It all depends on what seeds we choose to water!

To have some choice over what family karma our children inherit from us, we must continue to create enough space in our own minds to be able to distinguish when we are acting out of the accumulated karma of our families of origin, and when we are actually making a choice and acting out of our basic goodness or wisdom. We often see this choice arise when we are under pressure, when our children manage to provoke us, or when we are not taking good enough care of ourselves and so get overtaken by exhaustion or resentment. In all of these scenarios, our automatic responses often get the better of us. And in my own experience, our automatic responses are often those inherited from our parents.

The more we are able to slow down our automatic responses, the more possibility we create for behaving in a different way. The more mindfulness we can cultivate through meditation, whether it is formal sitting practice or acting with intention throughout our day, the more space will occur for us, so that we will be able to see when we are about to react to something or someone else in a habitual way. At first, we won’t really notice until after the fact, in which case we can use the regret, remediate and refrain tool I blogged about before. But at least we notice. We can go through our entire lives without noticing when we have created suffering, although we won’t escape the residual pain it leaves in its wake. So just noticing when we have behaved automatically is a big, important first step.

The more mindfulness we create, the more we will be able to notice the habitual response while or even before it occurs. Once this begins to happen, we can begin to pause. We can just pause when we feel the energy arise in us that usually leads to harming ourselves or others. That pause begins to literally stop the momentum of karma, the flow of habitual poison cultivated for so many generations. Once that momentum is interrupted, we can touch in with our bodies. Where do we feel this energy of anger, of fear, of resentment, frustration, whatever? Is my chest tightening? Is my stomach cramping? Can I breathe? Touching into what is going on physically for us is a way to ground that energy, begin to work with it rather than being carried away by it. We can begin to notice what thoughts we are engaging in. Are these thoughts that reflect our basic goodness and that of our children? Or do these thoughts focus on what is “wrong” with ourselves, our children, the situation, etc? If it is the latter, we can choose to let go of those thoughts. We can choose not to believe them. We can stop writing the story that has been written for so many centuries in our families.

How then do we choose to react, to behave towards our children? The possibilities are endless. Maybe we can use a gentle but firm tone rather than shouting. Maybe we can leave the room until we feel calmer. Or we can choose to offer a consequence to our children for their behavior that we actually feel comfortable following through with, that is in proportion to what has occurred. We might even discover the most appropriate response is laughter, or a change of scene. We can begin to create enough space in our interactions for our children to see their own basic goodness, and be encouraged that, because it is who they truly are, they can act out of wisdom rather than out of their own fear or anger. This can create a dialogue of compassion between parent and child that will transform any poison into joy.

This is challenging work and it can feel uncomfortable at times. You are turning over ground that may not have been cultivated at all during many generations! I once went to a teaching by Pema Chodron where she said that when you feel that discomfort while doing this work, stopping that momentum of habitual pattern energy, it is the burning of karma. So, welcome the fire!

Surrendering to the present moment

Our life is completely full even though we might be completely bored. Boredom creates aloneness and sadness, which are also beautiful. Beauty in this sense is the total experience of things as they are. It is very realistic. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I feel that life is constantly offering us the opportunity to either open ourselves to what is, or to close the gates of our heart and mind tight against the present moment. My children are constantly pushing me to open wide to the world and the present moment, much wider maybe than I had ever planned on doing. I can either fight with the present moment, or I can relax into it, and find the beauty described by Chogyam Trungpa above. It can be so nuanced, the way we close ourselves off to what is actually going on, how much we can resist what is, because we are so afraid of ...of what exactly? Of space, and of boredom, which is what we seem to project onto our experience of simply being present. Whether in meditation or in our daily lives, we can become so afraid of boredom that we forget it is full of beauty.

For many months I have been eagerly awaiting the opening of a new library branch a mere three blocks from where we live, hoping that the librarian would offer a regular storytime for children. It was finally completed, and I trekked down one day with my two boys to check it out. The library was not yet open to the public but the kind librarian invited us in and gave us a tour of the facilities, which includes a lovely children's area. She was wonderful with my toddler, and he seemed excited to play with the toys and the books. And she informed me that yes, a weekly storytime for toddlers would be offered. I was thrilled, and left that day with much excitement and many promises to my toddler (who didn't want to leave) that we would return the following week for our first storytime.

The day and hour come, and we trek over once again, my toddler very excited. We enter the building and immediately, excitement turns into reluctance. I have to repeatedly coax him just to stay inside. We approach the story circle very slowly, very hesitantly. He backs off, and sits in the middle of the book aisle, refusing to budge. He is on the verge of tears. I continue to coax him, trying to entice him into the circle with the other children, who are happily interacting with one another and the librarian. He instead turns to the puzzle shelf, pulls out a puzzle and begins to point to it insistently, wanting to play with it. Story time begins, with the librarian singing with the children. I continue to try and push him verbally away from the puzzle, and into the cozy happy circle that I want to be in with him. I am beginning to feel the rising energy of frustration and the familiar tiredness that accompanies it. I begin to weave a mental storyline about my young son, about how cautious he is, and what a challenge it can be. How it worries me. How it must be bad, right?? And then I realize . . .that's just it, isn't it? I want to be in that circle. My son doesn't. Why isn't that ok with me? Why can't I just accept him for who he is in this moment? Why can't I accept what he wants to do? And so, I drop it. I drop my storyline, my frustration, my "but I want him to . . ." I stop trying to persuade him to join the others. I unzip the puzzle bag and take out the pieces, and hold my newborn as my eldest happily begins to play with the lovely new puzzle full of trains, trucks and airplanes - his favorite things! My energy returns and I can enjoy him, his baby brother, the sound of the other children singing, responding to the lovely story the librarian is reading. We are outside of the circle, but in our own cozy space.

Not that we must always surrender to our children's wishes - my son doesn't like to go to the doctor either, but obviously, he must do so, and I bring him to her willingly or no. But so often, we seem to hesitate or resist our children because we have a particular agenda for them that blinds us to what they actually need in that moment. When we are busy pursuing our agenda rather than just being with our children, friction occurs and drains us of energy. There is so much we would like to do, to busy ourselves with! And they would prefer to just sit there and read the same story a thousand times or watch that ant crawl up the leaf or do the same puzzle over and over again. We feel the subtle pull away from them, ignoring the incredible richness right there in front of us, that they continue to point out to us again and again. There is so much joy in surrendering to that fullness! Just as in meditation practice, the more we can relax into just being there, whether with our own minds or with our children, the more pure delight begins to inform our experience.

I continue to bring my son to story time, and he continues to prefer to play off to the side with a puzzle. Sometimes he will approach the circle and listen in, but for now he is happier outside of it. And I continue to accept that and delight in his individual exploration of the library. Eventually he will join the circle - or maybe he won't. As long as I continue to surrender to who he is and what he needs, it is all perfect.