Making it Personal

In Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's now classic primer, Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, he reminds us that "If you want to help the world, if you want to be of service, it requires a personal journey." Seems simple enough. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first. How're you gonna help anyone else if you can't help yourself? Our modern vernacular is full of these tropes and aphorisms about putting the self first, in order that we might be able to help anyone or anything else.  It sounds selfish and self-absorbed. "If I put me first then my family will collapse." "If I put my needs first I would lose my job!" "With four kids and 2 jobs, I don't even know what my needs are!" But what if it is selfish to put something else in front of you? What if doing all these things for all these other people, thereby distracting one's attention from the deeper needs of the self, what if this is really the true Selfishness? Are we in some way finding worth outside of ourselves? Are we then not entirely dependent on others for our value and meaning? And if this dependency is true, wouldn't that mean that we would grasp and cling to any externality that would continue to refresh and validate our value in the world? And wouldn't that leave us suffocating and separated from oursleves? Unhinged from our capacity to truly know and love ourselves? And if we are so disconnected, then where is the love and vitality coming form that we are offering others? And is it too dependent? Conditional? Somehow impersonal?

We watch the world. We get links, and posts, and newsfeeds on what's "happening" and where, and how terrible this place really is. Money-wasting lawsuits, senseless war & violence, disaster, politicality, breakdowns in communications, unlawful arrests, flat tires, debts, mean-people, terrible drivers GMOs, etc. et al

we hit "like" 

we hit "unlike" 

we involve our selves. 

WE

INVOLVE

OUR

SELVES

everywhere else but with our selves. Raising money and awareness for causes.  Putting the oxygen mask on someone else first.

While we suffocate.

Certainly this sounds dramatic. But what if it is? What kind of life can we really breathe into something if we are avoiding our own? 

What if the Facebook newsfeed was full of status updates from ourself, to ourself? What would it look like? How would it go? How could our attention to our inner worlds change? When Chögyam Trungpa invites us to take that personal journey and uses the idea of it being a requirement, I think it is because anything less than that journey is really, fundamentally impersonal; distant and disconnected. So that what we offer others is deeply strained by the conditions of external dependency that we are so tied to.

There is no counter to this besides examination, there is no salve other than acceptance and effort. 

In meditation we often use the breath is a focal point. I had an instructor once refer to the breath as a "vehicle"  our awareness can "ride on"  so that it can return again and again to the self. That same instructor also liked to call the self "home" and in this way we were able to use our breath to return home again and again. The mind will by its very nature take us away from home, it is its job. But we are  so much more than mind. SO very much more.

Pause

Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian Neurologist and Psychiatrist is known for stating that "Between the stimulus and the response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom" There are different versions of this quote; all as charged with meaning, all as generous with the idea that there is always a choice in regards to our responses to stimulation. Let's be clear when we say 'choice'. Perhaps we do not feel like we can 'choose' to take our hand away from a hot stove. This is Withdrawal Reflex, something that can certainly be overridden, we recoil with the nervous response to tissue damage: pain. Why would we want to 'choose' another response? Mostly in regards to hot stoves and things that can and do cause us physical harm there isn't any real need to choose other than to allow our withdrawal reflex to do its job and prevent us from being hurt. But there are other places in our lives where we might want to override our 'thoughtless' responses or reflexes to stimuli. Provocative places. Places where we might find that choosing responses outside of our conditioned reactions, might lead us to doors we never imagined that we would be standing in front of. Every second of every day a violence is being perpetrated: Rape, murder, assault, degradation, subjugation etc. et al. This is the world. This is humanity. Some would say humanity at its worst. I'm not sure it's important to weigh whether or not the current state of humanity as a species is in fact, at its worst or not. But what is important is that violence breeds more violence. Injustice breeds more injustice. Shit rolls downhill. And let's be clear about violence and injustice. We can compare our injustices and our wounds with others all day long but what's important is not who has been wronged or wounded, abused or violated more or less than any other but how we FEEL about what has happened. And what that feeling generates. Whether another driver on the road has cut us off and we miss our exit; or the authorities have cut off our hands for stealing a loaf of bread. The feeling of injustice, the rage, the having-been-wronged-ness of it is the same; individualized to be certain, but the same. So what do we do? How do we respond to this? What happens next in the story? Which of the infinite roads before us do we take having been so violated? There is a choice here. There is always a choice. And we always choose something. Usually that something that we do choose is born out of our life's conditioning thus far. It appears to be automatic but it isn't. The driver cuts you off. You scream and rage. You bang on the steering wheel, cuss, accelerate aggressively. Or you do none of these things because you feel like conditioned response is one of self-disgust: "That's what I get for being . . ." Or you do something else.

The ways in which we respond are as legion and unique as we are. But how much thought did we put behind that response? Were we present in the making of it? If we weren't present when we started raging then where were we? Where do we go when we are wronged? And more importantly if we can be even a little more present and involved in the choice-making of how we respond, what could happen? Someone walks up to you and punches you in the face. What do you do? How do you feel? What happens next? Where does your story take you? Do you turn the page instantly, or do you pause? Between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is our power. What will you do with yours? Most people, myself included, turn the page instantly. That space between the infliction and the reaction is so small that it hardly seems to exist at all. Subatomic. Invisible. There is more space between an atom's nucleus and electrons than one can really possible imagine. And in that space is the potentiality of all possible things. Violence breeds violence because we do not take advantage of that space. We don't pause. Because it's hard. Because we don't know how. Because no one has ever taught us to. No one has ever showed us that before we begin to cry out in rage against our attacker, we might be able to pause and be there, and see our clenched fist more clearly. How will I feel to hit him back? What will it accomplish? What 'good"? What 'bad'? What might he do if I strike back? Will we be locked in a perpetual fight to the death in some way, shape or form? What happens if I take the time to think all of these things? What if I try to see it from his side? WHat if I can't? The point here is that this is all incredibly difficult and yet possible. It only takes seconds to override a reaction. And pausing in those seconds to notice what we're feeling, notice what's happening, to investigate; it changes everything. No matter what we do after that, we do it with a modicum of presence that seemed unavailable before. This blog is a way for me to share my challenges, delusions and delights with my attempts at pausing. My failures and successes at trying to override my reactions; with trying to get to know that space that Viktor Frankl has so eloquently described as the home of our power.