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saw the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring recently; portraying a small korean zen temple in the mountains and the monks that live there. each season is depicted about eleven years apart. i think the movie attempted to get across the wheel of life or cycle of karma in a vivid way. starting with a young monk as a boy under the wings of a master teacher, we watch the boy struggle with the major problems life can present from attachment and ignorance and then ultimately only find devotion and self mastery after directly relating to the suffering that results. beautifully crafted and designed, with a touch of the mystical, the film is gentle and pristine at times yet shocking and piercing in spots.
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“Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.”
- Pema Chodron
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as part of my bodhisattva class, i’ve been spending more time digging into the meaning to me personally of these teachings. compassion is a really interesting one. what i used to think of as compassion was more often pity (idiot compassion). there would be some heart connection with the other person or situation, but i would introduce other baggage onto it. like it would reaffirm my separateness from the other person or their condition with pity or compared to how i feel. Read more »
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open house went well for the silicon valley meditation group. everyone there seems ok with the one remaining rental space as our new center; i’ll finish up negotiations this week and see if we can have a lease in hand this time next week. it would be beneficial to have a center setup and decorated before we host a Pema video class in september in a nearby bookstore - so people attending that can immediately go over and get familiar with the space. if we have to tell them that the center is ‘coming soon’ we won’t have the same connection i bet.
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i took three folks from my silicon valley meditation group around to different commercial spaces today, after our morning sit. we looked at five locations which were all roughly equivalent to start a new Shambhala meditation center. They were all about the same price per month, with varying amounts of work required to get them suitable, or with minor differences in features and location. so far consensus is to pick between two options which are possibly smaller or less comfortable so that we could be downtown in Mountain View close to restaurants, bookshops, and pubs. to start the center, we figure, having community focused things to do together and being in the midst of such a cute and active social environment would be best. now comes the final dance with the respective landlords to get good lease terms and leaseholder improvements done to the spaces. also getting city usage permits for each space. that could take a couple months to complete, but we’re very close now to starting something really wonderful.
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this morning’s discussion after meditation got me thinking about hope, and how insidious it can be for me and how intertwined it can be with doubt. for example, i hope that this or that will go a certain way, and i doubt my current course of action will get me there. repeat…
usually when i make decisions, there can be a component of hope or vision but it’s not the dominant thing. the problem comes up for me when i spin and spin in variations of the future or spin and spin on how my current action is working or not working. lots of spinning, not much real action then.
this relates to my practice lately too. i’m having trouble meditating everyday in the midst of all this processing, and it’s in part because i’m measuring my progress and then comparing that to the progress that other people have had in their meditation. it’s like i’m measuring the spaciousness of people that i practice with, and then spinning in forms of hope and doubt that relate to my own mind and my situation. in contrast, what i could do is just practice without hope of fruition and continue to strengthen my mind and awareness at some unknown pace with some unknown progress. that would be more sane perhaps. but i’m already caught up in the hope and doubt by the time i notice that’s occurring, or more often i don’t even notice those traps until much later.
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Couldn’t sleep last night, so I stayed up and worked on web site projects and pondered some of the more interesting design puzzles that I have at work at the moment…
Wednesday night was awesome; Pema Chödrön gave a talk at Grace Cathedral to over 1100 people. And the talk was both really interesting to me and very relevant. The points that spoke most directly to me were about self-criticism and cultivating guiltlessness. But more generally I appreciated her focus in the talk on sitting in uncertainty and insecurity. The kernel of her talk was a quote which I’ll butcher here as, “at the end of an age or civilization, it is the people who can rest in insecurity who define the next age.”
She spent most of the lecture encouraging us to sit in uncertainty. To see it when we’re in an uncertain or insecure spot, and instead of doing the habitual thing seeking an escape from that situation to instead open to it.
sitting monkey is place where