Focus on Change · 20 September 2009
Two overcast Sundays. On the Palisades in late morning, the ocean’s the color of the sky and the ultrafine grass is so perfect that it might be fake. Welcome to Santa Monica.
I’m up at fourish, then take four hypnotic hours in Mysore space—the first two in the dark with the doors thrown open, the silence driving my awareness fairly deep. Then at 7 the other necessary ingredients arrive and I take two more hours on the move in yellow-gold light from floor-to-ceiling windows that face in every direction, following not my own breath but theirs, letting it lull me around the room. Lucky to stay in that headspace a second shift, as the soufflé I began cooking at 5 rises and finishes to perfection, and then disappears when we roll out of the room, satisfied for now.
These Sundays, thanks to freeconferencecall.com, I’ve been meditating with Shinzen or his students. People call in from five continents and put their consciousness in phonespace. After a 30-minute session of what sounds like dead air—twenty of us sitting quietly on the line in, say, Swedish forests, Scottish laundry rooms, Taiwanese park benches, South African parking lots, Santa Monican beach cliffs—he says “Good job everyone. That was really great focus.”
As if he knows, sitting out in his farmhouse in Vermont! But the thing is, he probably does. I have little doubt in the phone-space intuition of a man who his building a digital dharma successor, who speaks—like his teacher Suzuki Roshi—of emptiness and form in terms of zero and one, whose teaching reduces to equations like suffering = pain X resistance.
Are we of one mind, there on the line? For Shinzen, no problem. His consciousness has undergone several beautiful crises and now he can convert the world to greyscale on a blink. He’s seen something more meta than I can grasp with any amount of assumption-excavating philosophical contortion; his default state is a pulsing, vacant fast-blip movement of energy. Or it’s a love-nourishing void. He describes both—the zero and the one. I don’t get it, but it’s an awareness that you feel must be refined down beyond the bits—even in phone space, which to him might be no different from parking lot space or some laundry room or my irreplaceable perch here at Ocean and Alta.
Of course I am a different person here than anywhere else. It’s still all about my sense of self, which needs reference points even if it’s no longer so concrete as it was. In fact, unmoored a bit from my stories and a few samskaras, I seem to look to my surroundings now more than ever to know what I am. The physical world seems to bounce back and amplify the joy that is wanting to circulate. Never have I felt so strongly that my mind was reflection of the sky outside and whatever sounds are in it.
Two weeks gone from this place and it’s already surreally shifted. I glanced up from the gasoline pump at Federal Avenue and the crumbling corner building I’ve looked on daily for years was gone. Poof. Not even rubble. This is the problem with LA—nothing is ever as valuable as the shiny-smooth new thing you could install on top of it. You can’t walk down the same Santa Monica Blvd twice.
I told Shinzen that I’ve shifted my locus of experience away from the pelvic floor. On my first Vipassana retreat I learned to choose a place in the body where I could always take the awareness home—a touchstone for every time a conversation flew me off the handle or emotion really sucked me down. This is a great technique. I began by learning to be aware of the MB whenever I was talking to someone. Rather than dividing my attention, grounding it in the body actually made me more perceptive, a better listener, more able to catch subtle layers of interaction that otherwise would remain unconscious. The funny byproduct of this technique was that I learned to focus on movement, to meditate on a single vector of data as if it were a single point. Because after a while, the pelvic floor stops being a thing and becomes electricity. It’s like focusing on the breath: what you take to be your stillpoint expands, contracts, disappears and surges forth as much as you can bear to notice.
This summer, I’ve shifted the touchstone from the pelvic floor to the jaw. In part, this is because 3S is working my jalandhara bandha and kechari mudra, healing old pains in the neck, and doing a number on the thyroid in a way that forces the body awareness—finally—in to the head. The head is a body part, after all—not just a brain receptacle. In a sense, it’s harder to have head awareness than pelvic awareness. I’m not all that sexually repressed anymore, but I am in a sense still at war with my brain. And I’m still carrying all kinds of weirdness in the jaw—tension I’m determined to let go.
Shinzen found the shift interesting. He loves the pelvic floor, and reminded me that in China they call it the ocean of energy. “But”—paraphrasing—“the jaw may not have the same experience of energy flow that you find at the pelvic floor. That’s fine. If you’re resting there to try to cause things to break up, you’ll fail to notice what’s actually going on. If the energy there is not moving, that's not bad at all. Just pay attention to what it is doing.”
Oh yeah. You don’t release the jaw by using determination.
By the same token, I’m hesitant to come down all that harshly on my tendency to see my self as my surroundings. It is a much easier way to be than identifying mainly with: my resumé and pedigrees, my spiritual experiences, my ambitions and plans, everything I've been through, how hard I've worked, my issues, my secret backstories, whatever I'm accidentally good at, my analytical capacities, my funny quirks, etc., etc., etc.
I have tried those and found them pretty transient, usually unsatisfying, and not actually me. Place, too, is transient; and half the time I do know that I am not my surroundings. But it may be a while before I understand this on the level of intuition.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
Previous entry: Different logic / Next entry: Books...
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
Some links I haven’t yet read/heard…
Shinzen on what has happened to his consciousness
Interview
Youtube channel
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 20, 12:00 PM · #
Loved that
Posted by: Gregor · Sep 21, 05:02 AM · #
Oh geesz. Vritti of the day.
Happy Monday, everyone. Always the best writing day…
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 21, 08:50 AM · #
Fascinating. I unconsciously contract the back of my neck seemingly to open my throat and ease my breath, to make it noiseless rather than resonant, which somehow tends to feel weirdly constrictive to me. It seems to me that when I do that, it’s because I’ve allowed my pelvic-lumber structure to collapse, and so I put my focus down there. But the cervical-thoracic and pelvic-lumbar structures definitely are complementary, and I can’t really say which leads and which follows — they both have to be just right, simultaneously. But that never really happens — it’s a constant duel of exaggerated curves.
I’m very curious to read more about this thyroid stuff.
Posted by: Carl · Sep 21, 11:15 AM · #
Oh I know – I see this lady in Queens…grubby but my God, she’s worth it!
Posted by: yogapickie · Sep 21, 04:31 PM · #
fascinating. shinzen and the speed of light. enlightenment reduced to an equation. except that an equation is provable. like the one that says the higher the frequency the hotter it gets. the ancient yogis caled this phenonomon tapasa. that which reduces us to a heap of ashes when we eat too much granola. or get caught up in determining the diameter of the pelvic floor.
Posted by: charusheela · Sep 21, 10:16 PM · #
Carl, I feel that the asana practice for me has become weirdly… endocrinological. Thyroid and above.
Also, lymphatic. Can one feel one’s lymph? I searched online for theories that agitating the lymph is a good idea (since I feel it is happening, and a salubrious event) and came across some very bad pseudoexpertise, not to mention lymph exercise equipment you’d expect to see on the home shopping network. Anyway, enough about the humors.
Anyway, you seem to describe the subtle, rhythmic aspects of the hip-jaw connection we have been revisiting now for years. Your comments on the dueling curves are subtle… I’ve been feeling in to that today and it makes some sense. In my case, I wonder if the physical side of the hip-jaw connection has resulted from a rebounding of upward-moving signals when they hit the jaw/ palate/ thyroid are. The energy has tended to stop there in my body, and is only now really seeping through. There are people who would say something about granthis here. Whatever. Maybe I’m just learning to appreciate my sinuses, optic nerve, and the insides of a fullly expressed smile.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 22, 06:38 PM · #
hi (0v0)
what an interesting concept to meditate together via conference call. i’m happy with my kind meditation teacher here, but if i weren’t i could see if i could find a zen teacher that was as imaginative with technology as your vipassana teacher. from my teacher here i learn about focusing on the heart, and “everything is Buddha”. i also learn about tea. there is a lot of emphasis on learning the very hard hand mudra, which i’ve been told is only one in a line of several more to follow in time.
hugs
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Sep 23, 06:08 AM · #
As I understand the lymph system, there is no pump; thus, the only way to get that fluid moving throughout the body is by moving the body.
Posted by: KNL · Sep 24, 09:23 AM · #
Lymphasizing?
P.S. I have been corresponding with John Friend…
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 24, 10:54 AM · #
Jeez… get off that “Lymphasizing” web site. Go to the science sites. Oy… I got the willies looking at that.
Posted by: KNL · Sep 24, 11:14 AM · #
“Conscious living through living consciously.”
Isn’t it hilarous? Reminds me of the last time I got all spaced-out in the bathtub and read the entire label of Dr. Bronner’s.
Anyway, greetings from Santa Barbara. I only agreed to teach here for 4 days, and now I’m wishing I’d have signed on for longer. It’s a little like Mysore up here in terms of the quality of my dream-life and contemplative atmosphere. Too bad it’s also one of the whitest, tightest real estate markets in history.
A couple of queries about my Friendly correspondence. If I get time I’ll send out an email with some details. Let me know if you care to read it. Basically I called him out for his hypocritical twitter behaviors, read him chapter and verse from the “Anusara code of ethics.” He said, “I only want to see the divine in people.” I said, “Repress much? I’m comfortable with the real world too.” He didn’t respond to that.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 26, 09:52 AM · #
I’m vaguely curious about Friend, so I’d like to be included in the detailed e-mails list. He’s a character (in the novelistic sense). SB… I still think of Altman’s American family — Lance et al — every time I’m up there. Sometimes that’s too creepy for words; sometimes it’s positively interesting.
Posted by: KNL · Sep 26, 11:43 AM · #
I’d like to read the emails.
Posted by: Karen · Sep 26, 06:20 PM · #
me too, for the e-mails
Posted by: fatou · Sep 27, 03:44 AM · #