13 posts tagged “bodhicitta”

Feeling better, which is nice.

most years, spring snow gets me down

but it just snowed:

nothing but a minute sliced out of air---

thick white drops, against a warm, damp breeze
all smeared living gray, green, and brown

thick white drops of rain
snow     in     spring      is      rain

this is grace, nothing but these moments of

brightcold rainsplash awake
and
redwood-warmlight heartdeep love

nothing but a rich treasure of an accident of fate

Reading that last post, I realize I'm not building in mental-health sustaining items to my lists. So:

In August, I have to take my comprehensive exam for my MA. I'll grapple with the list of 136 literary and theoretical texts my faculty has assigned, and write two short essays in response to two questions that arise from that list. I will also write one short essay of my own design, based on 10-15 texts I feel I can own thoroughly. I will write this essay about Rukeyser and the total response mode of reading as a framework for teaching/studenting in such a way as to make beneficial use of personal response in interpreting text, specifically in the college-level literature course. I will hopefully also address the importance of student writing and teaching writing in this context.

I make this choice because it is what I care about, because it arises from my moral imperative. I believe that this is what my field can offer students that is of use in their lived experience, both personally and at the level of making positive collective change. I make it for my friends and loveds, with whom I have collaborated to survive difficulty and to emerge into a new range of agency for good. For friends who also survived and grew, and for those who did not.

As you may have guessed by my overwrought tone, if you read this with any frequency, I have spent the last week re-reading the Harry Potter books again, and have just finished the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here is one of the epigraphs:

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
                                           --William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude

I always do my best work when I am invested in helping others do theirs; that is just a simple fact of how my motivation apparatus works. So I will succeed in passing this damned exam by helping every single one of my classmates pass it too. And I will succeed in passing it, too, because in doing so and writing what I believe to be true for an audience of people who are ultimately teachers, who will be continuing to teach more students, I am able to feel like I honor my hearts who have gotten me this far:

SLP
PTM
X
AMSW
GE
BC
DAY
ME
and
Michael Kelly
and
Emily Brooke Harmon,
both of whom I miss every day

Pema says that, on the CD set I listen to all the time. It's a series of teachings called Learning to Stay. In brief, her focus is on illuminating the phenomenon of shenpa--the ephemeral quality of hookedness that tends to send us running away from presence. For example:

I've been working on this research project for my 18th-Century Brit Fiction course for a few months now. Research projects are hard work, and I tend to bitch and whine about all my horrible suffering when I'm working on one, especially in this space. But the real truth is that research projects are really fun--I get to dig into all sorts of interesting texts and theory, mix 'em up with the lived-world scenarios that matter to me, and arrive at new insights and apprehensions. Along the way, I get to use writing to think it all through, and then I get to share that writing/thinking with at least one other person. This is not the kind of sweet opportunity that regular life offers, usually. As a full-time waitress, I rarely got the chance to think deeply, with great focus, about something that really interested me, with other people who also really cared about it, who brought their talents and seriousness to their work and my own.

This term, I happen to have gotten a professor who has not been a particularly sensitive or supportive team player in my process. In fact, I have been describing her teaching practice as 'cuntiferous' quite a bit, at pretty high volumes. The volume and intensity with which I have responded to her arises from this shenpa business. Her gestures of response have pushed on buttons that I am ego-invested in. In essence, she has hurt my feelings, and I have a really hard time not rising into a lot of avoidance behavior (read: rage, nasty comments, etc.) when I get my feelings hurt, especially when my feelings are getting hurt about something I'm sensitive about. So the shenpa is the ego-investment, the quality that somehow hooks me into a reactive experience of unpleasantness or discomfort.

Pema teaches that shenpa is value-neutral. It is unpleasant, but it isn't bad, per se. In fact, she teaches that shenpa can be read as an opportunity to develop mindfulness, insight, and warm regard for both oneself and whoever it is that's offered the opportunity in the first place. This is how I understand her interpretation of the concept of prajna--the experience of compassion-based wisdom that can arise simultaneously with shenpa. She points out that when a person's behavior elicits shenpa in me, it is often the case that that person is hooked into his/her own shenpa in the first place. She suggests that it is possible, when shenpa arises, to experience prajna about it at the same time--to feel warm and kind toward my own shenpa and the other person's. Hence, she cites her teacher who tells her, "when shenpa arises, sheer delight."

I listen to these CDs in the car, and they help. They help me get some quiet and mindfulness before I teach, they help me gentle down on myself when I'm ramping up stress, and they help me work on what Jimmy Carter famously referred to as sinning in my heart. Calling my professor a cuntiferous whore, and really going into that utterance with whole heart, is shenpa unrecognized, is sinning against someone else in my heart.

I know this. I knew it Monday, when I got my proposal back from my professor, covered with nasty, unhelpful feedback. I knew it when I flew immediately from feeling really hurt to blathering about her being a cuntiferous whore for 8 hours. Indulging in 8 hours of hate is exhausting on a number of levels, so I started trying to get some prajna going on by the time I got home that night. Wasn't overhwelmingly successful--I did manage to unhook from the intensity of both the hurt feelings and the flight-rage, but didn't really make it to compassion. So I skipped her class Wednesday night, in order to at least avoid doing any more damage, or getting re-hooked.

This whole time, intellectually, I have had the framework of compassion--the intellectual apprehension of my professor's likely suffering that makes sense to have given rise to the unkindness she does as a teacher. I even got so far as to be able to see that it is a suffering I have spent a lot of time in myself--perfectionism, which in my experience arises from basic self-loathing, and the enrollment in the kind of snotty, quasi-abusive hierarchy thinking that forms the basis for so much academic culture. But I have just been having a really hard time getting the rest of compassion--the open, tender heart, the softness and warmth of experiencing the basic goodness of another sentient being, and honestly giving a shit about that sentient being's pain.

And so. This morning, I am taking it nice and easy before I get back into my work. I'm drinking my coffee, smelling the spring coming in through my window, digging the sheer niceness of SLP. I'm reading Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my every-summer books. It's a pretty shenpa-free situation, and it's pretty nice.

So then I turn to page 274, and discover the only annotation I made in this whole book through all the re-readings since I bought it in 2000 or 2001:

It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.

I love this book--it's a long, luxurious read through lush mountains and country fields, with plenty of 'slow-hand' sensuality, and just enough loss to give everything a keen edge. It's chock full of terribly smart sentences, but this is the only one I underlined. In fact, I underlined this one in ink.

Because that sentence has been so true for me, because "this business of getting things right" has hurt, hurt, hurt for me. That loneliness, that despair, that sorrow at just being such a suck-ass person who'll never be able to get things right enough to make up for all her flaws, never get things right enough to be ok, to be loved, to just get some fucking rest and have an easy laugh and whatnot. And that, I'm sure enough, is what my professor is suffering through, and that I can feel for her through, and genuinely desire not to add to that suffering by hating her in order to avoid letting my feelings hurt a little bit.

Yep.

Oh, joy. Class is canceled for tomorrow night, which means I do not have to finish reading the entire text of Northanger Abby, including the contextual materials, tonight.

For now the winter is past, 

The rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth; 

The time of singing has come,

And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

GE's new girl-baby has arrived, and mother, new-person, and father are all well and happy--smiling, smiling, smiling, glee!

GE's having a baby! I'm off to visit!

1. Do you read TV?
2. Are gravestones a genre of text?
3. How do/would you get a good tip?
4. Do you usually win at Twister?
5. What's a metaphor you might offer to describe one of your favorite songs?
6. What literacies do you associate with the above five questions?

1. Yes. I can't watch without reading anymore, actually. It drives my husband nuts sometimes, but he's kind of gotten to the point where he does it too, and has fun with it. It's one of my favorite things to teach, so far. In my first-year research writing class, for instance, we look at the overlap between individual identity and subculture membership. First we read a couple of essays about identity and sociality, talk and write about them. Then, we work on thinking about close observation and analysis practices (not that we haven't already been doing this all along, of course; this is when we make them the explicit focus of our work). Finally, we watch the pilot episode of Alias. My students are split up into groups and assigned specific focuses through which to focus their observation and analysis: The Sunshine Grad-Student Subculture, The Heroic Badass Spy Subculture, The Creepy Evil Subculture, and The Overall Culture of the Show. While we watch, we all interrupt whenever we want to, to point out something weird or interesting about the way a shot is organized, or to ask a question, or make whatever comments. They take copious notes. Before the next class, everyone writes up a response to a set of prompts that accompanied their focus assignment, and then the groups each post theirs together on the wall. We do a write-around, and then we sit down and process the experience. It's sweet.
2. I think gravestones are an intersection of genres. Ummm... some are: written (the engraving), whatever angel image or whatever is carved on, the shape of the object, and then all the larger contexts in which gravestones are read.
3. Paying close attention to each customer's details, liking people, moving fast.
4. No. Maybe 50/50?
5. "Love and Happiness" and a bunch of other Al Green songs are layer cakes. Rich, beautiful, layer cakes, with different kinds of frosting between each layer.
6. Let's see:
1. Visual, discursive, audial, social, spatial, emotional, empathic, kinesthetic, historical
   
2. Visual, spatial, kinesthetic, discursive, emotional, empathic, historical
   
3. Too many to name: emotional, kinesthetic, social, empathic, discursive, spatial, mathematical, musical...
4. Kinesthetic, social, spatial, empathic, emotional
5. Audial, emotional, spatial, visual, empathic, kinesthetic, historical

A very dear girl of mine wrote me this morning. We haven't caught up in a while--she's busy with an exciting new job, and I'm lost in my swirl of grad school and teaching; she just dropped a note to say hi to her "sister sojourner."

Sister sojourner. That is a lovely way to be called, isn't it? I appreciate the reminder within it that my friend claims me--her embrace of me warrants the possessive pronoun, the familial honor. Even more, in my recent crabby, spiteful hookedness with the difficulty in life, I appreciate her reminder of my commitment to spiritual practice. I also remember that practice is not an isolated experience, or process--spiritual practice is profoundly intersubjective. We never journey alone; we are always in company with others: our teachers, living and textual, our family and friends, the people who participate in our specifically practice-identified communities. With those people, we practice presence and mindfulness and compassion; we choose honesty in presentation and reception; we do our best to keep it real and keep it kind.

This is sangha--the community of practice. I am glad to be counted in my friend's sangha; I am glad to count her in mine.

My friend is a Christian, not a Jewish/Buddhist/Whatever like me. She dropped the following on me this morning:

Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil, [which] brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the act of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.

--Thomas Merton
Passion for Peace

So I went looking for teachings from one of the traditions I identify with that offer some help on how to work with this. I offer my edited version of an exchange between Pema Chodron and her student:

Student: I often feel I need to take on an aggressive stance with some people or organizations to protect myself from those who will hurt or take advantage of me. How can I be open and compassionate and, at the same time, not be used?

Pema: Well, clear boundaries are really important. We all need to work with that. But, my experience of working with boundaries— which is like knowing your limits and stating them clearly. Not saying: forever and ever and ever these are going to be my limits— like, this is me. But, just saying: today, and this month, and currently, in this particular work relationship, or family dynamic, or whatever, these are my boundaries.

I am proposing here that we work with not driving all blames into the other. Because, why? Not because there isn't injustice out there. Not because other people never use us, or anybody. But, why? ...

Because it closes our hearts. It's like one of the main ways that we use to get away from fully acknowledging what's going on with us— the other way is repression. We either act out, strike out... This is supposed to bring us relief. But it doesn't... maybe temporarily. But, ultimately, it has a hangover—this striking out. As does repression or self-blame—not in the sense of driving all blames into one, which has a lot of honesty and courage in it, but of just like denigrating.

In other words, blindly striking out at the other, or blindly turning it against ourselves. So, they're like exits from really feeling our hearts, and feeling what's going on with us. A lot has been triggered in this situation where we feel we're being used. A lot is being triggered. And we don't really know what's going on. We just feel this confusion and this defensiveness.

Now, on the spot in a situation, I've seen this happen again and again, and I've experienced it, where aggression is coming at you— or at me, at a person. And, everything in you wants to be defensive, because you're terrified. And, instead, you just start breathing in, fully contacting what you're feeling, and sending out. And something begins to connect you with the other person.

It isn't that you're verbally thinking, "They're OK." It might be that you start noticing their mouth, or their eyes, or somehow they become more real to you. And what they experience is that you're really listening. But, what you're doing is just standing there, breathing in and out, fully owning what's happening with you, and opening up the space.

And then, what comes out of your mouth is usually not the habitual thing. Often it helps to dissolve the tension, or the bitterness, or the aggression, because it's honest. But, in any case, whether this story has a happy ending or not, it's a transformative process for you, rather than a process of getting better and better at protecting yourself, of closing down, of seeing others as enemies and opponents.

Really the question you have to ask yourself is: Do you want to spend your life making your habits and patterns stronger? Or do you want some kind of transformation to happen? — so that your strength and your confidence and your capacity to love and to care for people can begin to surface— you're not always blocking it.

It is good, good, good to be a sister sojourner today. With gratitude for my dear friend, and the rest of the sangha.