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‘Karma sometimes manifests very directly. We eat a meal and we feel full. We turn the key and the car starts. A more subtle interconnectedness has to do with our thoughts, actions and words. One word too many and our friend blows his lid. Two little words, and we’ve married somebody. We never know at exactly what moment one action or word is going to trigger another, but everything we do sets something else in motion. This is why the tiger places its paws carefully.’

‘Ruling your world’ Sakyong Mipham

‘The only magic that exists is this life, this world, the particular phenomena we are experiencing right at this moment. Right now, right here, you are this magic. For instance, in giving this talk, I am a captive speaker and you are a captive audience. We can’t just walk out in the middle of a sentence-if we were to try and do that, the implications would linger with us for a long time. So we cannot wipe out our past, present, or future. Magic is direct and personal and lingers in our state of being. It is choiceless magic.’

Chogyam Trungpa, ‘Dharma Art’

My favorite quote of the weekend’s Shambala training…

My emphatic smartass reply: ‘That’s why we all keep coming back!’. As you can tell it was a rousing discussion group. In more ways than one. It’s been an awesome, deluxe, emotionally stormy, meditational breakthrough kind of weekend.

We sat, we walked, we talked, we learned the open sky meditation technique and shamata yoga and slogan contemplation… I’m tired and happy.

Someone even threw in a Shakespearean quotation: ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all’, which I found very apt, and privately rather amusing(since I just wrote appropriately located shakespearean quotations all over a naked woman for a performance last weekend), considering we were talking about the niggling self-doubts and hesitations that prevent us from acting with confidence in the world.

‘The difference between conscience and discernment?’, supposed I, which earned me a pleased, spontaneous ‘good job’ pat on the shoulder from our teacher, who just happened to have been a preschool teacher before she became an Acharya. I was startled, happy, honored and slightly embarrassed(like a precocious 3 year old)-not an uncommon feeling in the presence of your dharma teacher, though I hear it’s not always happy embarrassment.

Now that I’ve completed the first set of 5 levels, I’m told, the pony ride is over-from here on out we do the work and I’ve heard rumors of how tough and awesome the graduate levels are…

I’m a bit nervous, though excited, for the first one, in August.

I took some cute pics of us with our shiney new Great Eastern Sun pins, but unfortunately, someone set the camera on video, so I can’t show you what spiffy warriors we are.

You never know what you’re going to learn about in meditation class.

OK, OK, so the orgasm part was after class, but it WAS still related to the curriculum.

Shambala training, level 5, with Acharya Jenny Warwick. My weekend will be spent sitting, walking, listening and hopefully, letting the clear light of the three jewels shine through the dark places in this tender heart.

What’s life, what’s dharma, what’s art?

We asked those questions tonight in Dharma Art… Talked and talked, came up with all sorts of interesting ideas, but I really liked the potency of seeing life as a process of metabolizing experience.

I’ve been metabolising some serious sadness lately, just walking through the steps of my life, functioning fine, doing my job, having fun, relating to people normally, but there’s this sharp tight edge, like an invisible precipice of grief and loneliness and missingness… I know it’s not real, I’m not actually going to fall off a cliff, everything IS really OK, life is still full of beauty and good people and yummy food and friends who love me and believe in me. So I just let the waves of feeling rush through me, surging, releasing, grasping, reeling, lusting, rusting. I can’t will them away so I’m letting them percollate, even howl if they need to… Whatever. It’s all me.

I have a dear sisterfriend who matches me step for step in this crazy life, whatever I’m going through, she is too, even down to the last little emotional glottal stop on the hairy scarey road of love. Talking to her, holding her, being held, listening to her, letting it all spill out in all it’s ugliness, knowing there’s no judgement-just acceptance and so much empathy!-always helps so very, very much. She knows I’m strong and sane, even when I’m whipped. She holds that knowledge for me when I lose it.

Divinity on earth.

Metabolising experience, all experience, the good and yummy and the wrenching, painful kind-it’s all nutritious.

At least that’s the theory.

Mastering the reality, that’s another story, a lifelong one that I intend to take one little bit at a time.

…if I continue to behave like this,
and I will suffer pains and bondage,
wounds and laceration in the lower realms.’

There is a repeating pattern to our behaviour that we somehow seem to miss. When we ‘re challenged, our habitual reactions are especially predictable: we strike out or withdraw, scream or weep, become arrogant or feel inadequate. These strategies for seeking security and avoiding discomfort only increase our uneasiness. But alas, they seem addictive; even though the results are unsatisfactory, we use them again and again.
Attentiveness functions like a guardian who protects us from repeating the same mistakes and strengthening the same patterns. We can catch ourselves getting hooked and avoid being swept away by shenpa.”

‘No Time to Lose’, Pema Chodron

Pema Chodron, an American buddhist nun, is one of my dearest authors. She is amazing, in her truth-telling, in her commitment and in her capacity for clarity and gentleness. When I am distraught, raging, ready to give up on my fellow humans, myself and the whole damn world, I read her and somehow, I’m good to go again.

‘No Time to Lose’ is her commentary on ‘The Way of the Bodhisattva’, a famous buddhist text by the eighth century sage Shantideva. She breaks it down verse by verse and gives us the gold in terms we can understand.

Precious.

Wound up my long friday evening of massaging bodies at Turtletown.

I shook all the kinks out(well, maybe not quite ALL of them-being such a kinky girl) on the dance floor amidst the spectacular, wild, warm, loving, sexy, hilarious flying turtles.

Then we all snuggled up for strawberries, chocolate and even an improv sinking ship(true story!) theatre act!

Twas the perfect end to a less than perfect week.

We shared freaky vomit stories and talked heart-wrenching buddhism ’til the wee hours.

Life is good-even when it sucks.

As one familiar with the sticky slime of bootless kvetchery, I love this article:

My favorite pastime: Complaining.

Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron©

Always hoping for the quick fix? The sudden, lasting moment of inspiration and brilliance, enlightenment, clear view, wisdom, love and compassion?

It don’t happen like that, baby.

Here’s an excerpt(I highly recommend that you read the whole thing) from a talk entitled ‘The Fourth Moment’by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the current issue of the Shambala Sun:

“It’s deceptive if we see the process as a sudden one: once you get your title, you think you have become a slightly advanced and different person. From the point of view of true spirituality, we have to face this misunderstanding. There is nothing that should be regarded as a sudden jump at all. Rather, there is a gradual process, an actual process that takes place constantly.
People talk about sudden enlightenment, a sudden glimpse, satori, and all kinds of other spiritual attainments. But those things require the conditions for you to pull yourself together. You need to be in the right frame of mind to experience such a thing. So-called sudden enlightenment needs enough preparation for it to be sudden. Otherwise it can’t happen at all. If you have a sudden accident in your motorcar, you had to have been driving in your car. Otherwise you couldn’t have had the accident. That is the whole point: Whenever we talk about suddenness and sudden flashes of all kinds, we are talking in terms of conditional suddenness, conditional sudden enlightenment.
Sudden enlightenment is dependent on the slow growth of the spiritual process-the growth of commitment, discipline and experience. This takes place not only in the sitting practice of meditation alone, but also through the lifelong experience of dealing with your wife, your husband, your kids, your parents, your job, your money, your sex life, your emotions, whatever you have. You have to deal with everything you experience in life, and you have to work with and learn from those situations. Then the gradual process is almost inevitable.
Scholastically and experiencially there is no such thing as sudden enlightenment in Buddhism. So-called sudden enlightenment is simply insight, or understanding, that depends on what we have already experienced. We call it sudden in the same way that you might say: ’suddenly, I saw the sun rise’, or ’suddenly, I saw the sun set’. But what you are seeing is dependent on the situation that already exists, and you are just making it sound dramatic. The sun doesn’t suddenly rise or set, although you may suddenly notice that it’s happening. It depends on your experience.
The point here is that there is continuity in the spiritual journey. You begin solidly, you progress solidly, and you evolve solidly. Don’t expect supranormal magic of any kind on the spiritual path. Some of you may have experienced some kind of magic-maybe so. Some of you have read that such magic does exist, did exist, or will exist.
However, magic doesn’t suddenly exist. The magic depends on the magician, and the magician depends on his trainers, so magic cannot appear unless there is a magical situation or environment. The sudden magical ‘zap’ we have been told about is purely mythical. The zap cannot take place unless you are in the situation to be zapped. Automatically, the zapping is part of a gradual process rather than a sudden experience.’

That’s what I like about buddhism. It’s nuthin’ but the cold, cold truth, but somehow, that’s kind of encouraging.