An Unforeseen Payoff

He said, “You love me like my grandmother,” with his eyes showing a small gloss of water around the rim, while he laid his head in my lap. She was not his real grandmother, just a village elder who took him in when his mother abandoned him soon after his birth. This is probably the highest compliment I could ever earn and had never appeared until recently. Not that we did not have love before over these many years, but this one I really had to earn. My partner lately, instead of commenting on my change, has been doubling up on saying he loves me just to make sure I know it. The last two months were for me a bit difficult, and yet provided me unplanned expansion of my consciousness inwardly(anicca, dukkha, and anatta realized within myself). My changes over the years were really based on the desire to learn from him, a kind soul, who had evidently had a harder life than I. Fighting the need constantly to explain all my pains I started the path prompted by his love. I never quite knew the how it will all transpire. For me it took sitting down with myself over many years, seeing how I think and learning to love myself. I have had long-term relationships in the past, but always seemed to be looking outside of myself for solutions for my happiness. Tired of lining things up to secure happiness. And I learned that no one could ever live in another’s shoes.

It is true that there is never really a relationship with another person, it is more about your relationship to yourself. The other my prompt good or bad feelings your mind brings up, but they aren’t really responsible for how you feel. That is your clue to let go, and love them exactly as they are. Over the years I had to let go of my ideas of best to proceed with his education and just support him. Lately, he took on a research project for money, undercharging the other students who were his clients. I had to just let him do it, and sit back enduring his late hours and missed time doing things together.  Throwing out ideas of how it should be was my lesson allowing him more freedom to live his life.  Several wisdom things the last few months have come to him at his rate, and not by me telling him what to do when, with apologies sprouting forth. Today’s payoff came naturally with the spontaneity of the moment.  My partner was told a few years in Singapore where he meant my brother who said that I am much happier since two of us met. That unprompted confirmation by an independent source was a treat for him and also bond him with my family.

No One Asked for My Opinion

I felt it is about time to apologize... to everyone I have thrown my opinion out at warp speed, never giving him or her the chance to duck. I caught myself, early today with someone, and it was never burped up.....the miracle of consciousness.  This provided the almost instant feedback of making the other person happier, because I approached the day with joy with the idea of spreading joy instead of smearing them with one of my opinions ( cleverly disguised negativity, NOT ). I took it further all day, to set aside my happiness for others all day…the self took a back seat, if it just a bit at first. This will take vigilance to be aware and continue. This was born out of years of meditation...a hint of the wisdom that lies dormant inside of us. The feedback with strangers was pleasant and connected, they felt my intention...yup, I am a slow learner. Far more strangers engaged with me...Bingo! I had the key, but misplaced it for so many years.

My apology, based on how novice monks/nuns atone to Bhikkhu/Bhukkhuni’s:

All harmful acts, words and thoughts, ever committed by me since of old…on account of beginning-less greed, anger and ignorance… born of my body, speech and mind… Now, I atone for them all.

"wisdom grows" Wat Pak Nam

We all born into this life, and move towards happiness in our own way based on what we have been exposed to and karma. My path is NEVER anyone else’s way and to top it off, they never asked me. I will try better, and will keep the fact in mind that if I want more joy in life, then it starts right here.

Wisdom comes Quicker without Liquor

The fifth precept:
I undertake the training rule
 to abstain from fermented drink that causes heedlessness.

Wak Saket Prep for New Year's 2555

The abbot who I had so much respect for when I did I short term ordination in Thailand, said when I disrobed that the fifth precept is the most important to keep in lay life. I agreed but came home to enjoy my occasional wine with dinner, I felt I had it all under control, but this stuck with me. He also stated that it isn’t the alcohol that is so bad, but drinking makes you more apt to break other precepts about lying, false speech and maybe even sexual misconduct. One as a human becomes weaker.

I continued requesting precepts at temple with the Nuns at home, which is done after prayers and meditation, so I finally listened to myself. If I request the precepts then I must want to live by them. Don't I? I love red wine, and feel it was such an important part of who I am. I keep wanting some positive, I thought, a remainder of my life pre-brain injury. I realized that I was clinging still to my old self.

My kuti at Thai Temple Nov, 2554

But is it really who I am? Not on my wisdom seeking missile path, I am more and more leaning towards the natural compassion that lives within everyone. How can I let this shine more? Like when I went up to a participant at my weekend retreat with Bentinho, at the fire pit in the evening while rubbing his back, said to a gentleman, “Thank you for being you.” He was touched. Or when talking to another woman feeling her dis-ease with her life, kneeled next to her, with positive ideas of how to ask for what she may need from her husband instead of venturing in search of a spiritual experience. One cannot feel in these situations if you have even one half a glass of wine. You are more into the experience of the wine to care deeply about others. Although the wine will give you the illusion of being more in touch with your feelings.

I feel I can now write about why I quick drinking on 1/1/11(2554). First let me say, that I am pretty aware of the dangers of alcoholism, but in my twenties I still partied and drank socially. This lead me to wine with dinner, and as a way of opening conversation with friends. Thinking more, it actually lead me to an elitist idea of myself as my taste in wine got more and more refined.  I dawned on me, more ego …more suffering and less wisdom. I had to quit, not to prove anything but that it was just an organic leaning to greater wisdom.

You know it is actually liberating to walk past the wine in stores, knowing that is one less thing to look towards for any source of happiness. Just having a half-open bottle of nice red-wine that you can't throw out, means you are obligated to have it the following evening, and thus making it more difficult to do an evening meditation. When you are out shopping, it also becomes a focus of what next to buy. It all became very transparent that all the wine desires pushed me to wanting a new experience each time. I could not rest in awareness or taste the peace of just being. That is a huge relief not to be bothered with in thought and desire, and I now feel the peace that I was actually looking for by drinking. 

 Relaxing at the beautiful Shwedagon Paya, Jan. 2555

My partner rarely drinks, and when I last saw him I bought him some really good Russian vodka that he wanted, last year. A full liter, it remained in the fridge for his occasional use. He would have a shot or two after a hard day at work with dinner. When I took off for Myanmar, he found himself feeling lonely, and drinking more that he should, woke up feeling not very well. We talked about this, in both cases and he realized he was not really interested in drinking. He realized that a nice run, was more what he needed. I had to let his natural wisdom shine through his experience.

Thai's Have it Right: The Hidden Power of Smiling

…That a smile goes a long way. Oh, and now they find in studies that happiness is contagious… even among strangers. here If you don't get even a small smile looking at this photo than you are helpless. Finding that when I am too helpful or nice, especially at my gym they think I am looking for a date. I do already have someone special in my life, and I guess the band on my finger doesn’t mean anything anymore. I have since dropped any worries, and just laugh in the gym or yoga. Wearing my t-shirts that say: Some pursue happiness, others create it.(click on t-shirt in right column). A yoga friend commented recently, "It is so good to hear you laugh in yoga, just when I find myself struggling with a pose.
Now, a few folks have asked me how do I do it, regarding my partner? If you have trust and love firmly established, then doubts fall away. I am hoping that I am too smart to worry, knowing that will never make me happy. And who needs to invent more problems? I surely don’t, even though I know even more difficult times ...will come. It is the nature of life, you are given as much as think you can handle. Then more show up just about the time you think you have it all figured out, just to kill your high. It is not pessimism, but it is my time honored realist approach after my near death experience. So you better to learn to laugh at yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning or when you suddenly find you’re frustrated over simple tasks when driving or waiting in line. I am trying, because studies say that grumpy people have fewer friends. I know I need as much help as I can get. Let's make this the land of smiles!

Set Yourself Up for Success

I hear the chainsaws buzzing...Looking out at the tree that sometimes blocks my city view and watching neighbors who are dealing with a different tree. We often think that as soon as we get this tree trimmed, a meal cooked or this health care bill passed...then we will then be happy. Sure these things need to be done, but we are setting ourselves up for dissatisfaction in the future laying so many definitions of what our happiness can be right now. If we can be happy while these things are not done or are in the process of being done we will double our ability to find happiness. Now, I know happiness may be a strong word so substitute contentment when it feels right.

Currently, I am sitting here while I write this with a torn bi-cep muscle, and lack of a really good sleep for a long time. A bit frustrated by all the Dr.’s I have seen in the past four years that never diagnosed this correctly. I even went to a hospital, and did tons of PT, and they never caught it. I have thought about writing one chiropractic Dr who treated me for 2 years charging me all that time. On his wall he a muscle chart. If he had a great knowledge of muscle physiology then at one point he would have figured out that his treatments were not working. The important thing is I did, popping another Ibuprofen. But that now..is in the past, and right now while I wait to see another shoulder orthopedic Dr. to find out how to proceed in surgery. Why they never sent me to him the first time around behooves me, but again, do I want to pin blame on being discontent at this moment on a past moment?…thinking that I will be happier. What done is done, money was spent.


Now, can I be happy at this moment? Certainly, if I put my wishes on the back burner, let go of the idea there is something or somebody keeping my happiness away. How to do this? Stop fixating on one single source of happiness, a ridiculous “one-brain-cell” view of life. I will go out and help others, send care packages to Thailand, maybe fix dinner for a friend and move on with a sense of ease about life. Yes, I can do that with pain. Why, you might ask? Because I know people are doing this all over this world right as we speak.

I often tell friends who first start out in yoga, “Set yourself up for success, get all the props you need to feel comfortable and when unable to do something…just rest in child’s pose and watch.” The most important thing you can learn is to be humble and turn off the comparing mind. Why pin your happiness to one thing, jumping to the next thing, once that is done? We are setting ourselves up for failure to be content at any given moment. It will start a chain reaction, if happy at this moment, and again happy at this next moment....we will be happy in the ever present moment. Creating our success.

A footnote, my partner who for years I had to hound him in getting his teeth cleaned, even taking him to the dentist and got him started on Dental care many years ago. He was the first in his family to have dental care, so it was out of his experience. This morning while talking he said he had them cleaned without me reminding him, to make me proud.

Just Be Good

The temple I lived at in June had some free dhamma books and one of two I found interesting is Just be Good! from Sri Lanka. It is modern and approachable and states in the introduction, Buddha’s teaching: Has no room for blind faith or unthinking worship. Teaches us to take full responsibility for all our actions, provides a clear path for spiritual and personal development, and encourages questions and investigations into its own teachings. It goes on later to say the Buddha never said anything like 'worship me and you shall be rewarded.' He also said never threatened to punish anyone should they not believe in Him or follow His Teachings. He said that there is nothing wrong in doubting or even questioning Him, as most people will take some time to understand His Teachings. He stressed that everyone should seek, understand and experience the Truth for themselves, and not have blind faith in anyone or anything.
This is some of the core of the intellect of Buddhism, as it allows you the answer your own questions about life as you experience it. And take what rings to true to your own soul. The free small book, tells a lot in the few pages it has, in an effort to take any complication out of Buddhism. How refreshing and smart. It also has been taught to me, that of his 84,000 teachings he gave, some were designed for the different audiences depending on class and experiences. In an effort to teach more people on their level.

Now on a personal level, I have some questions of myself that I want to answer myself. That can only come with time to reflect deeply in meditation. My feeling is that my time on this planet is limited, and the desire for wisdom far outweighs the desire for ordinary pleasures. So I am leaning towards a more spiritual life, not out of some fantasy escapism. I guess I will have to continually ask myself the hard questions and not give up. The tendency is to get lazy when the answers don’t pop out and grab you. And we always want a quick fix. With gratitude here is a funny finding happiness teaching from Just Be Good site.

Spider Update and Firm Intention

Spider update, I had one adult and two children, so I guess the last one left me with more friends. Mom is out scouting, while the kids are trying to get the hand of repelling from my upper right ceiling. I grabbed Mom and lifted her higher before turning on the water.

On to more important things, my partner registered for a University Masters Program and I am enjoying his excitement to do what was only a dream for him. That he thought would never come true. Along with daily meditation for a minimum of 1/2 hour a day since last Oct which allows me the time to reflect on every thought that comes into my head. Some days it is easy, to pull away and find the clear space…other days it may be busy in there, taking longer to settle down. It does become easier to access this clarity. And the desire to analyze who and what, I think I am. My waking life I see more and more times of happiness and letting go of the need to say something critical to mask my unhappiness. I do think before I speak more often than not, also trying to find a positive mind and project my internal happiness. When I do I find many more people, especially ones I don’t know talk to me, because my body language is as loving as my mind. All this combined with dharma is conscious work and I have long way to go. With the positive feedback I see and feel …it is no longer a stab in the dark. I just keep placed in my mind the few times I have met realized happy people and felt the unbelievable love combined lack of body language that says stay away. I will get there with firm intentions and a spiritual guide.

Is That All There Is?

While having a friend over for breakfast, we were discussing the formation of our concrete acknowledgement of our impending death. Joking about it we sometimes feel that the Peggy Lee song, Is That All There Is? will suddenly come to our last conscious thought. But jokes aside, the self-awareness we have with age is also very comforting. One has enough personal history to fall back on to make hopefully better decisions. And if we make bad decisions we can laugh at ourselves easier.
When you are young, you sense what is behind you feels like jello. So you rush towards the future, in the hopes of finding that elusive happiness, thinking that is out there. We were never schooled on our own minds and how they work. That happiness lies within each of us. If we started kids with meditation, they would develop clearer minds and find no need to look beyond for external happiness. It can’t be found in things, jobs, cars, clothing, or techie gadgets. It was a surprise to me coming from advertising who’s whole premise is that we have something you want. It looks like happiness, it feels like happiness and even smells like happiness but once you get said thing it quickly becomes old or worn and leaves you back were you started. I knew back when I did advertising, there were some things I would never buy, yet would hard at getting others to buy. I slowly became aware to myself that I am selling my soul, if I really had one at that point. I may have been developing my soul, amassing enough personal history to make a better decision but still without finding happiness. Personal transformations happen when one is ready mentally. I tried a lot of external ideas of happiness, and they never quite seemed to work. Years ago, when I awoke from my coma, I saw the worried faces of my partner and family staring at me. That gave me enough strength in absolutely the most difficult circumstances I had ever known up to that date. And now, years later, I am aware that it was my first idea that doing things for others is way better than doing it solely for yourself. The power it gave me to heal for them far exceeded any power I had ever had previously.

Riding that Wave

Rolling over to the downward phase of life’s cycle in the usual parabolic wave of happiness I biked out in the sun. I am still working on the internal flame of happiness that resides in each one of us. Knowing if I combine meditation with the bike ride I can equalize the external to the internal. It is a process of accessing our internal well. As always, I write this to remind myself. If I stop my habit of piling all the bad or troublesome worries into one mountain you cannot climb. But I do find the more I meditate these slight down cycles are less long and less strong. So meditation helps to me to avoid use of any drugs and helps boost my happiness quotient. I do find that it brings me much closer to reality and to more normal expectations of myself and the view of the world. Today, on Service Day, I volunteered to clean up the beach with a rake and picked up trash. Surprised that there is so much Styrofoam broken into shell size pieces all over. No, I wonder how much is contained in sand when it is reduced by the wave action. I was not alone, as there were at least 150 near by and more way down the beach. A surfer and an older person who were not involved in the clean up, saw me and said Thank you. That was a nice relaxed way of being connected and rolling back up. That looks like a pet muskrat rolling his head back to look at you in the right of my photo.

Your Plane Doesn't Go There

A bus driver named Reggie was talking to me outside the pool before it opened. I said that this is the first time back after being sick with a good cold. He asked me how did you get over it? I told him that I made a conscious effort to be happy regardless of how I felt this time. Instead of surrendering into self-pity and moaning about being sick, I just dealt with it with a happy mind. Of course it did not end faster, necessarily, but was less of a mental wallop where one normally piles all of life’s little miseries into the same pile. Reggie was quick to say this is just he wanted to hear, and when he first started he was told this way back. I told him that they are a lot of unhappy people in this world, but it up to you to not get on their boat. Maintain a smile, and it will make you a wiser person. I say this to remind myself.
I carried this idea on when I flew right into an airport closure full of unhappy people during the holidays. Waiting for my flight that was extremely late, when they had cancelled all flights when the agent kept our hopes up that we would fly out. Then they ran out of deicer. I maintained my relaxed attitude through finding my luggage in piles of bags with tons of unhappy people, finding a taxi, a hotel, etc in the snow. I made the decision to get out as fast as I could to avoid spending the night at the airport eating over-priced high fat foods and lots of sugar. The food alone would drive anyone crazy. I listened to several stories of three nights at the airport from others fortifying my position to remain happy or at least neutral about all that was happening. And in rapidly increasing difficulties as thousands flew right into a mess with no hopes of it being resolved fast. Being calm as I could possibly be, helped to maintain my overall happiness.

Flowering Intention

With a glass of wine after dinner with some chocolate, I can wrap up the day, happily. I tried again to help someone who had relationship problems online. I hope that my insights and clear thinking will help set this person on the right track as to what to expect. I also told them about how to avoid this happening again by approaching the next relationship with a rational mind. I am aware at the time when someone asks for help, they see no way out when they are hurting. I again mention that looking outside of yourself for happiness will almost always lead to disaster. I have talked about this before, to casually remind myself as well, that to make anyone the sole source of your happiness puts a terrible burden on them. All I have to do is think back to unsuccessful relationships I had in the past looking carefully at why they failed or changed. Some things repeat themselves unless you examine them and change. Sure, change is not easy for me or anyone but change we have to …to mature. At least I have had several successful ones that I am able to use as a base line when attempting the next one. My current partner has little idea of much internal work and learning of past mistakes I had to do to make ours flow. But this is my gift to a great soul and partner who he has taught me a lot like forgiveness and understanding. He knows, it is all in the intent.

Expanding my Bubble

I’m curious, does fear keep one away from being the person we want to be? What I mean is we often think our happiness or our goals are a long way from where we are right at this moment. So what is keeping us from using our power of imagination? Just think of a worry you have that has not even happened! One can seem to hype it up in your mind enough to make an OK day turn dreary. I know I do it time and time again. So I am beginning while meditating to imagine I have a great feeling. It can be something I like, or want that I know in my mind makes me happy and transfer that feeling to imagining I am happy. Like the happy feeling you have when in love when everything in life looks like beautiful and people don’t bother you. I, in effect, prolong the “love-like happiness’ I created and transfer it to imagining that I am the person I want to be. Hopefully I will be kinder and more compassionate in time as I go along. Thus knocking out the huge divide from where I am now to where I want to be. Perhaps, if I keep this up I will expand my bubble of happiness that I found in meditation to my normal interactions by actually being happier longer.

Flight of Happiness

Today, I had a couple of weird events happen. One was an acquaintance texting me, and detailing his problems that are reoccurring. At the end of one message he complained and then added don’t tell him to do anything that I find works to quiet the mind like meditation, temple or exercise. I finally had to call him, and just say then what the hell do you want?(A friend brought this to my attention, that doesn't sound like me. It was not what I said, just a shortened version of my point) Condemn my solutions, ignore my common sense ideas I propose every time he whines, then go see professional help or just leave me alone. I can’t offer you comfort that you will never hold on to. Which brings to the conclusion I expounded to him about... is that you will never find happiness outside of yourself. The minute you give over your own power to have happiness to other people or things you will fail to find it. Lovers, friends, money and health cannot be depended on to make one happy. Just look at your past love, and how you once loved them and now at best, they are casual friends. Or a friend in the past that is now an enemy. Every thing in life changes, except for how you think about it.
The other thing that happened was a client who was late to their last minute change appointment. Upon arriving they really don’t have clear idea why they called me or what they want to do. Nor did they want to pay me to dig it out. I left befuddled but not upset, stopping by the park to pick berries and then go home for a nap.