Staying Grounded

Its been awhile since i have had much time to collect my thoughts. As the weather gets nice work picks up, and i have been traveling, first to North Dakota, and now to Montana. Work days have been long, 10 or 11 hours, and time for writing and meditation has been short. I have been away from home, living in motel rooms, for days or weeks at a time. When i get home i want to spend time with my husband and dogs, clean the house, do some laundry, eat food cooked on a real stove (not a microwave), and just relax. At times like these, when i feel my energy and/or desire to practice formal meditation wane, i rely on mindfulness practice and the Dharma talks to keep me going.

The first thing i do is not turn on the TV. TV drains my time and energy, and reinforces the three unwholesome roots of greed, aversion, and delusion. The next thing i do is set the alarm clock early. I want to be able to start the day mindfully, and that means i need to be able to take my time. Even if i don't make time to sit formally for meditation practice i like to be able to sit still and just follow my breath, sometimes only for one or two breaths at a time. I like to be able to make breakfast, even if its just microwaving a bowl of oatmeal, and eat mindfully (eating slowly is a challenge for me, it is something i have to concentrate on, and even then eating slowly for me is eating quickly for some). Sometimes i listen to a Dharma talk in the morning. The evening is similar. I like to have time to change out of my field cloths (I work outdoors), lean back quietly, listen to my breath, enjoy the boredom, feel the restlessness, make dinner (lately that means beans and rice), eat, listen to a dharma talk, and get to sleep early.

Feeling the restlessness and enjoying boredom are more important to me than they sound. Often i don't want to sit still, i want to get up, to do something, play a game, watch TV, make a plan, call someone. By not doing these things i have a chance to feel the deeper feelings that drive the restlessness. It gives me a chance to feel the unwholesome roots in myself. That sounds much more negative than it is. For me noticing greed, aversion, and delusion in myself is a gentle practice. I practice metta to accept the parts of myself i don't like, the grasping, pushing away, and tuning out, and in doing so i find myself becoming more tolerant of the parts of other people i don't like. That doesn't mean that i happily get along with everyone i meet (I still struggle with right speech and tend to nit-pick in ways that are not beneficial), but it does mean i don't take my feelings so seriously.

Its not about logic. I don't try to figure out why people do what they do. People do what they do because they want to be happy, yet are often mistaken about what brings happiness and so do the very things that make them suffer. The Buddha taught us that. But knowing that on an intellectual basis brings little comfort. Instead i need to feel that difficulty myself, feel the feelings i don't want to feel, and realize on a deep level that not only do i not want to feel these feelings, but that nobody wants to feel these feelings, and i don't want anybody to feel these feelings. Yet people do experience difficult conditions. Pleasure and pain, praise and blame, gain and loss, and fame and disrepute are a part of life, and we can't limit ourselves to just having the good parts. When i can feel these things on a deep level the compassion grows in a way that is very hard for me to put into words.

Sitting quietly, listening to my breath, practicing metta, letting myself feel both the good and the difficult are important, but the Dharma talks are equally important for me. Life as a lay person means i am subject to worldly conditions and obligations that keep me from having the time to sit until i achieve a breakthrough. Instead i rely on the insight of others and the power of faith. Faith, as i understand it, is a starting point, something that grows as we test it. Much of my previous paragraph comes from what i have heard listening to talks by Guy Armstrong, Jack Kornfield, Narayan Liebenson Grady, Sally Clough Armstrong, and other Dharma teachers. These talks both inspire me to keep going (or begin again, as the case may be) and give me ideas, such as the idea that people want to be happy, to test against my own experience.

By listening to the Dharma talks, and by pausing to listen to my breath and body throughout the day, i can compare what i hear about how things are with what my experience of how things are is. This is key to staying grounded, and helps me to use the busyness of daily life as an opportunity to practice, not an obstacle to practice.