Vision

I have been told by the astrologically enthusiastic that my Aquarius predisposition accounts for my idealism. However, I believe having vision is more a matter of exercise and practice than predisposition from distant constellations. Vision comes with keeping your chin up and your eyes open.

I have found that maintaining my personal awareness in the moment makes it much easier to look ahead with confidence. There is the Great Vision: Peace and justice for everyone on a planet which is cherished and respected for the life it gives. Within that Great Vision is the immediate vision of the scope of my own life as I age and eventually die.

These visions of a future which is never promised sustain me in my daily practice, my practice in the moment. My practice of mindfulness, study and compassion in the moment sustains my hopeful vision of the future. This is the dance of consciousness within the boundaries of space and time. Meditation and reflection allow me to project myself outside the boundaries of space and time by strengthening my imagination and reducing my physical stress.

Life without vision beyond plain sight is self-limiting. The blind man with vision walks bravely through life. The sighted man without vision is materialistic and self-centered.

Crises

The best way to avoid constant crises in life is to avoid constant crises in life. By increasing your awareness and general state of mindfulness, many of life's so-called crises can be avoided entirely by proper planning and responsible action.

Yes, shit happens. To a certain degree, accidents are unavoidable. However, many accidents are the results of lack of care and attention in potentially dangerous situations. Improper home or car maintenance are common precursors to accidents, for example. There is no need to invite shit to happen.

It is important to know yourself and to take full, proactive responsibility for yourself and your personal environment, which includes all spaces you occupy in life. Practice, as I use the word frequently in my writing, includes vigilant and persistent maintenance of body and environment. The practice of meditation assists the brain in taking a relaxed and clear view of your life and your environment. Exercise, proper nutrition and adequate sleep maintain the brain and body in a state of efficiency and adequacy to the task of averting or dealing with disaster.

Multiple personal crises are symptomatic of disease and/or personal dysfunction in your environment. Where there is constant and dedicated practice, crises are minimal, because practice places you in a functional and efficient state wherever you find yourself in life. Instead of being a barreling, reactive train, headed for a wreck, the person with a well established practice of health and mindfulness is like a gyroscope, always maintaining balance and simply bouncing away when it hits obstacles.

Liberation

One way of achieving enlightenment in ancient prescriptions is striving for emptiness. Emptiness implies letting go of ego and a cluttered mind. Meditation is a traditional method for practicing emptiness of mind and liberation from suffering.

While I understand these concepts, I feel the ancient concepts of enlightenment and liberation are relevant in a very different way in modern society. As we become liberated from religion through science, our minds can open to many other ways to achieve liberation from suffering. For example, some would see pharmaceutical technology as a substitute for meditation or psychoanalysis in the pursuit of personal insight and evolution.

The problem with technological substitutes or alternatives for meditation and reflection is simple. Most of us cannot develop our own technological substitutes for these activities. In other words, liberation in a full sense is impossible, since we depend on a factory to make the pills which may take the place of practice. Capitalism fosters this dependence on product as a substitute for practice.

The beauty of practice as an approach to liberation from personal suffering is its empowerment. It requires no dependence on pills, gurus or mentors. By emptying a life of dependence and taking full responsibility for its suffering, a seeker who develops a daily practice of meditation and mindful investigation of being achieves one first step toward liberation.

Cleanliness

The old Puritan ethic said, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." This is one of the very rare instances where I agree with Puritanism. Cleanliness also lies at the core of Zen Buddhist practice, a traditional practice with which I more readily identify.

American culture has become slovenly. I feel it is an outward symptom of America's post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), a result of the narcissistic injury of September 11th, 2001. Hair styles, clothing styles and public spaces all display a greasy sloppiness that is indicative of low self esteem, lack of civic pride and depression. The parallel obesity, alcoholism and drug dependency come as no surprise.

The routine of maintaining the body and one's environment is part of any serious practice of personal responsibility and development. Making this routine a source of meditation and joy is a goal for the experienced practitioner. The inherent benefits of developing this aspect of personal practice are wonderful: Increased health, regular exercise, a sense of accomplishment, attractive appearance and more efficient use of personal space.

I have developed daily and weekly routines of cleanliness in my practice. For example, I have reduced the objects in my environment to make it easier to keep surfaces free of accumulated dust. Each object in my home has its place. After I use an object, I return it to its place. This applies to books, flatware, dishes, clothing, etc.. This is a daily practice.

Once a week, I do an afternoon cleaning meditation. I live in a small apartment. I thoroughly dust and wipe down all the wood floors. I vacuum the carpets. I wash down and disinfect all the surfaces in my kitchen and bathroom. Since I have to conserve my energy, I do this in stages which may take more time than it would for someone with more vigor. But, the meditative aspect is my concentration on the objects I am cleaning. An appreciation of the texture of wood. The structure and shine of tile and porcelain. The awareness of my body as I make the cleaning motions.

The process of routinely maintaining an orderly and clean environment mirrors the maintenance of an orderly and uncluttered mind. Japanese Buddhists have a key saying, "Person environment one." In my experience, this holds basic truth.

Breathing

I have had to learn how to breathe. Breathing deeply and slowly has become a conscious practice for me. I spent the greater part of my life unconsciously focusing tension in my chest, gut and neck muscles. Tightened chest, tightened gut, poor posture, poor breathing. Poor breathing, poor oxygenation to brain and muscle, which leads to more tension and even worse breathing. The result is disease and dysfunction.

Learning to sense tension in your body is a very good health-promoting skill. Taking an inventory occasionally through the day is the key. While sitting in a task chair or walking to work or sitting on the subway, consider your own body's posture and attitude. Straighten the spine with chin up and shoulders back. Inhale deeply. Exhale deeply. Repeat. Feel the change in your body. It will relax. You may even feel a burst of alertness and increased energy, as your brain is oxygenated.

Whenever you can, follow this procedure throughout the day. Stretch your arms and legs. Remember to keep your chin elevated as you look at monitor screens, listen to lectures or carry on conversations. This helps to keep the posture erect with shoulders back.

This activity is a form of meditation. It brings you back within your consciousness of your own life, your own body, which is ultimately all you truly and temporarily possess in life. Mindfulness of your own state of well being or dysfunction is the first step to greater mindfulness. By staying well, you will have energy to practice compassion and generosity to others.

Creativity

I recently moved from a house to a small apartment in the city. I had to prioritize my routines. Routines necessary for my health maintenance were first in line: Up at an early hour, yoga, medications, breakfast, going to the gym. These essentials were modified minimally while I was packing, unpacking and organizing on both ends of the move.

The process had an impact on my writing. The basic variable was one of time. I have come to understand that I need a lot of time to produce writing which I consider worthy of being shared with others. That time isn't always spent in front of a monitor at my desk, by any means. The time that was missing while I was moving was my time for walking in the woods or on the beach. It was the time I spend writing long emails to friends with whom I regularly correspond. And, it was the time I routinely spend reading on the Web and in print.

As I grow older, I am very impatient about and careful with my time. This comes with the daily mindfulness that my window of existence is closing and could slam shut at any moment. My creativity flows from the conscious use of my time to stimulate a creative response in my brain. I call it "playing with my brain".

The impatience about wasting my time becomes a problem in some relationships. I used to suffer fools gladly. My work for many years entailed spending time trying to decode the garbled thinking and impaired communication of mentally ill and impaired people. This builds personal habits, which I have been trying to unlearn for over a decade. Those habits were a major impedance to my creative process for many years, despite the fact the work which developed them provides me still with grist for my stories and poetry.

Entering relationships for me now requires quickly assessing the worth of each relationship in terms of my creative process and my need to maintain my vitality in order to be creative. This is a challenge to my precept of generosity of spirit: I have tried for decades to be open to everyone I meet and their needs, as part of my humanist practice, born out of my Buddhist studies. The by-product of this struggle has been an increased skill and creativity in developing the relationships in my life which enhance my creativity. Those people who obstruct my creativity by wasting my time get less of it.

So, my creative process does not exclusively entail externalizing ideas and emotions into art. It also entails sculpting my own daily human experience into an artful being. The synthesis of these two processes is very powerful. To live creativity, as a mindful person, brings a value and spontaneity to writing, drawing and movement which surpasses intellectual art. Every fiber of the day becomes a piece of the work.

This recent move has brought a realization that I have made progress in this process. While I found that my routines were disrupted and impacted my output of written work. I also found that my new and old routines easily melded into functional and creative days, in which I accomplished quite a lot without being overwhelmed or hypercritical of myself for not doing more.

The result is an appreciation of what is and who I am. This is a creative, living place in each moment from which to move through space and time. What is simply is. I am there in the moment to use whatever it is in a creative and positive way to the best of my ability. I believe this is the core of being creative and of simply being, in a mindful and compassionate way.

Stress

So much of becoming well in our bodies is adaptation to unavoidable stress. Stress is actually a negatively nuanced word for our natural reaction to inevitable realities, such as time, gravity and physical limitations. Our brains have the ability to visualize goals that exceed our physical and psychological limitations. Stress is often the conflict between the goals or desires and the reality of performance or ability.

Modern medicine has turned to drugs to medicate stress reactions. Tranquilizers and antidepressants are often used to combat stress reactions by alleviating anxiety, depression and insomnia. Often this approach enables individuals to cope with existing stress and to actually increase their stress levels under the influence of the drugs. Then other, more serious, symptoms of stress reactions arise. Drugs become less effective. The quest for the perfect enabling drug becomes a new stressor. A vicious circular process.

A more practical way to address stress is to diminish the stimulus of the stress. This entails mastering the mind (brain) and bringing it into a realistic accord with the rest of the body. This approach is simple and difficult. It is simple because it requires regular maintenance of the body which anyone can do. It is difficult because modern life distracts us from healthy choices.

The simplest way to begin is with your own body. A daily periods of exercise are essential. If you are overweight, that extra weight is a stressor which applies its pressure on your life 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It should be addressed as a top priority by adjusting your diet, increasing your activity and scheduling regular exercise. Yoga, walking, weight-training, bicycling, aerobics, tai chi....all forms of exercise are helpful when done regularly in moderation.

As the body becomes less stressed, the mind can be placed in better sync with the body through regular sleep, regular meditation and regular socialization. For some, this translates into less late-night TV, less self-centered obsessing and less isolation. For others, this entails sticking to a structured schedule, joining a mediation group/class and watching less TV. It's all about balancing your natural capabilities and tastes with healthy activities which are enjoyable for you.

Without the recognition of stress, we would not function well. Stress can often be a helpful motivator. It is our reaction to stress which causes us gain or loss in the quality of our lives. Mindful and intentional coping with stress can be a tremendous way to learn about yourself and life in general.

Awakening

Awakening entails letting go of the mind's path to discover your own.

Healing

The body is much more than the mind. The mind can interfere significantly with bodily wisdom. The body's mindless urges can also trouble the mind. These are challenges of the human condition.

Healing often entails telling the mind to yield to the dictates of the body. A common obstacle to healing, in my opinion, is the refusal of a tired and malnourished person to rest and eat properly. One result of this mind-dominated behavior is reliance upon drugs and alcohol for the facilitation of relaxation. Another result can be obesity, caused by reliance upon fast-food, sugar-caffeine drinks and carbohydrate snacks for energy.

The body's wisdom is simple. It will tell you when to breathe deeply, sit, sleep, eat or fast. However, to hear the body's wisdom, one must learn to shut off the mind's voice to hear the body's voice. This is where meditation can be helpful. By lying or sitting still for ten or fifteen minutes at some point during the day, you can tune into your body's voice and reap the benefits.

The choice to live entirely in the mind is promoted by technologically driven capitalist society. i-Phones, iPads, netbooks...all these devices promote mind-centered living. The eye becomes a portal for overwhelming amounts of mind-centered information. A mental form of bulimia can result. Gorging and purging. Cramming information and then blowing things/people up in computer games.

For the young and healthy, this is all a great ride. However, the ride itself, over time, can erode the health and well being of youth as it advances inevitably to middle age. By then, entrenched habits of being mind-centered, fatigued and malnourished start taking their toll. Healing balance must be initiated to avoid disastrous consequences.

Beginning a daily practice of some form of quiet relaxation or meditation for fifteen minutes in the middle of your day will bring tremendous benefit for very little cost. This can be done in a cubicle or on a park bench. Pay attention to how your body feels after these periods. Thoughts that seem particularly hard to escape while trying to clear your mind are the clues to what requires your healing attention.

Use the information access of technology to read up on good nutrition, the benefits of sleep and meditation. Health entails the ongoing healing of the inevitable toll time and gravity take on our bodies. While the mind may tell you that you are immortal or invulnerable, the body, which includes your brain, knows the truth of being. Living fully and well entails paying attention to that truth.

Goals

My natural orientation is forward. Some have voiced their opinion that this is very Aquarian. I simply have seldom had a past or present that could compare with my imagination of the potential for the future. Call me an optimist.

Maintaining ongoing concrete goals, some mundane and some more life-encompassing, is a habit I developed in my nursing practice. Assisting patients from total disability to gradual independence is a profound activity. My work over the years has taught me the value of step-wise, persistent goal setting and achievement.

Many people set goals for themselves based on external expectations of parents, bosses or superego. Some become quite successful. Others lead lives stifled by their own sense of frustration and failure.

Knowing and accepting who I am has helped me greatly to set goals which bring me an increasing sense of freedom and competence. I am not always satisfied with my own talents or lack of talent, but I have learned to accept my limitations. Working within my limitations while honing my skills and talents, I am able to make progress with core goals in my life.

All this takes time, reflection and personal honesty. Time is horribly wasted in too many human lives. It is the most precious element of existence. Spending time in reflection or meditation pays off. It is a good investment. Personal honesty comes with routine meditation or reflection. How can you know yourself if you never spend quality time with yourself? Once you get acquainted with yourself, you can use precious time to get on with being and becoming the person you would like to be.

Another crucial element of goal setting and achievement in my life is organization of time. Current computer apps are very helpful for some. However, I wonder if they present too much information and too many options. I still write things down. Lists and a monthly calendar are mainstays on my desk. I have been using running to-do lists since I was in high school. Each morning, I revise and rewrite my list with priorities running top to bottom. Each evening, I review my list and cross out what I've done.

Keeping life simple helps. Many of my daily goals are very mundane. Taking care of the widgets and rubber bands of daily life, like a stocked refrigerator and an an organized, clean house, leads to greater efficiency in the more abstract areas of existence. As Japanese Buddhists maintain: Person and environment are one.

Well, another goal achieved. I have posted this entry in my blog. Now to my list and the other goals of the day and beyond.

Meditation

Much has been made of meditation in pop American culture in the last 40 years. There was the craze of Transcendental Meditation, sold to a young intellectual crowd in the 1970s by the Beatles and their guru, who became a multimillionaire on it. There was Insight Meditation, another intellectual movement, inspired by meditative Buddhism. There were various self-actualizing New Age meditation gurus whose self-help books were eagerly adopted by the addiction-recovery industry. Zen meditation has been a constant path for those who turn their backs on frenzied, urban materialism. And, Tibetan Buddhist meditation has been popularized by the Free-Tibet movement. Thomas Merton wrote about Catholic monastic meditative traditions.

My question: Meditation or medication?

I have had some of exposure to all the meditative disciplines mentioned. I accept the validity and efficacy of meditation as a worthy behavior, regardless of the methodology. However, I do take issue with the concept that meditation has any cumulative effect if used only as a treatment in reaction to a psychic headache or worldly stress.

As I understand the traditions that developed meditation as an effective tool to expand consciousness, relax the body and calm the static interference of obsessive thought, their prescription for the use of meditation, based on centuries of its application to millions of lives, is the daily use of meditation as an exercise to build psychological strength and focus.

Therefore, when a regularly stress-polluted mind infrequently yields to meditation like taking an aspirin, its headache may temporarily be mollified, but the root causes of the problem are untouched. As occurs with the person who runs to the gym in May to feel comfortable in a swinsuit in June, backache is a more likely result than fitness.

Meditation of any kind, when practiced routinely, is both restorative and cumulatively empowering. Its restorative effect, in my opinion, becomes secondary to its strengthening of sustainable vision and focus in daily life situations. Like muscular exercise, meditation as habit eventually leads to greater emotional and intellectual fitness.

Gardening

A garden can be created in a 12-inch pot.

The point of gardening is gardening. It is practice. Design a space for the garden. Plant seeds or seedlings. Tend them. Meditate upon them. Watch them flourish. Watch them mature. Watch them die back in Winter.

The garden is a simple and accessible lesson about life on Earth. The good gardener holds the precious understanding of happy labor, beauty, ecology and the transitory nature of all life.

Labor

The use of the word "work" is varied. Most people associate it with the exchange of time for wage. I have always associated the word "labor" with demanding physical effort.

Labor is a part of my practice. I labor at staying physically fit. I labor at maintaining my small garden. I labor at maintaining my house. Turning labor into practice is a conscious decision to approach physical toil with acute attention and appreciation of the task as having value of its own.

This is a Zen concept as well. Zen practitioners rake gravel, sweep floors, bake bread, polish wood with meticulous attentiveness and daily repetition as part of their meditative practice. Focusing on simply being while laboring yields peace, balance, communing with the Universe.

I have found that choosing a new task, one with an inherent challenge to your skills, yields growth and a tremendous sense of liberation. This is a paradox. By becoming focused in the most material and mundane task routinely and entirely can lead to an openness to the wide Universe. This accounts for the utter bliss found in some craftsmen who master their medium (wood, paint, stone) and continue to strive routinely to achieve a great sense of perfection. The liberation they experience is found in the absolute dedication to the labor.

We are currently in a dark time. Physical labor is currently seen negatively by a vast segment of the population in wealthy societies. Even those with poor education or intellectual capacity look down on physical labor as an inferior occupation. Should we wonder why the infrastructure of these wealthy societies is threatened by increasing use and inadequate maintenance? Should we wonder why obesity is epidemic in these societies?

Practice itself is difficult. Incorporating physical labor into practice adds a great deal to it. For some, physical labor may be the path to practice and human evolution.

Boredom

There is no boredom in practice. Boredom is a symptom of a failing or flagging practice.

As we know from psychological theories and science, boredom is frequently a symptom of sexual frustration, clinical depression, lack of understanding through basic education. Boredom is a symptom of an inability or unwillingness to channel energy through meditation or chanting or hard work or intellectual curiosity.

The beauty of Zen practice, as an example, is its relentless attention to refining the usual, the routines of daily living. Zen practice entails a lot of hard physical work as well as sitting meditation. Balance. This leaves little time for the ego to corrode energy with obsessions about sex, food, alcohol or other addictive behaviors.

Any practice, mine or yours, can adopt the best of Zen and other practice forms. Just reading and then applying these different techniques of practice leaves little time for boredom. The payback is huge and far outweighs the effort.

So embrace boredom as a symptom. Use it as an alarm to get off your ass and do something that will increase your knowledge, your ability to be a growing person and your daily practice. Reaching for the TV remote control is the way of the lazy and the unadventurous.

Creativity

What can be considered creative? Paintings, writing stories, design, sculpture, these are traditional creative forms. Creativity in a capitalist society is driven by money, marketing and celebrity. In the post-Warhol age, people create to be noticed, to be lauded, to be acknowledged, to be paid.

Creativity is a part of Buddhist practice. It is not often labelled as such, but it is a necessity. This is the creativity of keeping the quest for positive human change alive, despite the inertia of the Universe.

Creativity is required to make one's immersion in the necessary routines of practice a worthwhile and renewing process for personal evolution. This is the creativity which stems from mindful observation of minute details of life. This creativity is aided by meditation. This creativity brings the mundane to another level, where it is cherished and honored as a great gift, the gift of being. With this gift, one can continue the creative process of becoming a compassionate human being.

Sunday

sunday...day of whites and colors...
fetch the straw basket out and sort.

regular load? high water setting, yes.
snap, twist, whoosh, clunk, swish.

blinking timer light says, 'go ahead'..
tic, tic, tic, in my mind's background.

spin thunders in the basement below.
final clunk. wash done. dryer gapes.

my steaming vapors vent outside.
do neighbors smell my cleanliness?

it is a liturgy of fabric resurrection.
it is a celebration of man's machines.

sunday...day of whiter whites.
sunday...day of brighter colors.

___________________________

Mantra

A mantra is a focal chant which is used similarly to meditation in practice. Ancient practitioners found that using a rhythmic, repeated phrase to free the mind allowed for a form of self-hypnosis, which then facilitated planting subconscious positive suggestions or images (causes) which could lead to actualizing desired behaviors or results(effects). This relates to the concept of causality, which is found in many Buddhist teachings. I am convinced that your mantra can be something as simple as "PEA-nut-BUT-ter", repeated while focusing on a mandala, or focal object, like a poster of the Buddha, or any other pleasing image. Basically, chanting is a form of conscious and intentional brain manipulation. Nichiren Buddhists use the mantra, "Nam myoho renge kyo," for example, a reference to dedication to the Lotus Sutra. Tibetans use the mantra, "Om mai ne pad me hung". I am convinced from my own practice that the specific sounds of the mantra carry less magic than the practice of chanting them with a mandala in a peaceful and relaxed atmosphere. The ancients tended to assign the mantra's magic to the creator of the mantra or to the mandala to which the mantra is chanted. But the ancients were unfamiliar with hypnosis and brain science. The means is less important than the end in this case. The end being the inducement of the brain to accept and foster the concepts of creating personal happiness and practicing peace and compassion.

Noise

There is a recent idiotic mania in the USA. It entails watching/listening to stupid dribble on television/radio. When a celebrity makes a remark that crosses some vague line of good taste or hypersensitivity, usually concerning a minority population, a cat fight ensues in the media, which the masses watch and feed with great enthusiasm. All of this is simply noise. It changes nothing. It feeds the very prejudices and resentments which are at the root of the behavior itself. This noise is a symptom of a society which has forfeited education and civic responsibility in the name of permission and libertarianism. One true cause is greed, which has depleted funds from the community chest for schools and child-support services. Another true cause is the lack of investment by parents in actually instilling ethics and manners in their own children. This is a society of childish, self-gratifying parents, whose children reflect their lack of discipline and respect for society. The cumulative self-loathing of the society has led to this mania for throwing stones from the windows of glass houses. My practice entails the conscious use of silence to quiet the mind. My practice entails looking at my own demons before pointing at those of others. My practice entails showing respect to others in the community, while reserving my right to my own thoughts and opinions. My practice entails confronting or ignoring disrespect calmly and non-violently on an individual basis as I walk through the world.

Quiet

morning quiet
racing mind
birdsong canvas
sit and center