Tending the Spark, Following the Weirdness: Reflections on Religion and Spirituality and Cultivating Compassion

Few subjects conjure up as heated debate as that of religion.  What is its nature, and what is its rightful role in the modern world?  Plant the question like a smoke bomb at a Bat Mitzvah and run.  Things are probably going to get ugly.

After abandoning my initial plan of studying theoretical physics in college, I found myself drifting for reasons I didn't understand very well at the time towards the nebulous topic of Religious Studies.  It wasn't out of the lingering urge to understand the workings of the universe, as some have assumed; I was too much of a materialist to go barking up the religion tree for that.  Instead I was motivated primarily by ethical questions--and by the need to scrap together a major from my motley coursework thus far. 
                                                                                       Image: His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama telling China he's "no demon."   The DL is in fact revered as a reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the embodiment of compassion.

 Within the hallowed halls of the Religion department I found answers to some burning questions--sometimes.  Sometimes I simply learned that I wasn't asking the right questions, the important or useful ones.  And sometimes in Postmodern Religious Thought seminar we simply drank Guinness or sangria until our brains were numb enough to broach Derrida or Heidegger.  Finally, with a B.A. in "Religion" under my arm, I found myself with more questions than I ever started with.  (This is tangential, but I can't pass up the opportunity to mention my classmate and former roommate Toby Louis David's brilliant graduation speech, in which he likens the Swarthmore experience to the Jews' journey through the desert to the promised land--and manages to reference the "scrotum-tightening sea.") 

After college, I did the only reasonable thing and forgot about religion entirely for a while.  I proceeded to take my own advice and "follow my weirdness."  As my weirdness is considerable and rather strong-willed, I roamed the country, worked in an Indian restaurant, dabbled in homesteading and goat-rearing on a much beloved once and future commune site in Vermont, and eventually landed in New Mexico at a funky little place called the Ayurvedic Institute.  It was there, in a strip mall a couple miles East of the Rio Grande, that my journey really began.

I speak, not too obscurely I hope, of my internal or spiritual journey: my own idiosyncratic way to growth, meaning, and fulfillment in what a mass email I never subscribed to keeps calling "this dream of life."  Thanks, Chava, whoever you are.  Having by now taken a few steps along this path, I find I have a somewhat altered perspective on religion.     

Religion can be thought of us as the larger construct: the institutions, the encapsulized traditions, the ritual--that which the living force we might call spirituality leaves in its wake across history.  Spirituality doesn't require religion--what use the flame for the tinderbox?.  And, unfortunately, religion doesn't require spirituality either.  Religious violence, pederast priests, and the myopic bigotry that so often attends religious life in America all stand as a reminder of this.  No religious tradition I'm aware of has escaped some degree of degradation once the living spark that Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha brought to be bear faded. Material concerns loom larger, doctrinal issues arise.  In the case of Christianity, people spend two thousand years fighting over just how Jesus said to love one another. 

Of course religion does have a role to play, as the living spark of spirituality does tend to fade or be lost.  Religion provides the structure to bridge the gap until the spark can be recovered.  It preserves vast amounts of learning, and if it can remain separate from power as such, it usually doesn't too too much harm.  It certainly provides an an inspiration or at least an excuse for huge amounts of timeless art and music.  It gives the masses some idea of ethical principles, even if it has to do it by scaring them with threats of hell or lower rebirths.    

With my renewed interest in the world of religion--for all its flaws, religious institutions are still likely places to catch whiffs of spiritual insight--I was relieved, then, during a recent 5 day Intro to Buddhism course at Tushita Meditation Center in Dharamshala, when the teacher stated during the first session that "the Buddha doesn't want you to become a Buddhist." This was a good sign: non-sectarianism is a characteristic of genuine spiritual searching.  The appeal of Buddhism for many is precisely that it tends the living spark of the spiritual quest.  Such questing is always an intensely personal matter, since we each come with our own baggage: the habit patterns of mind, speech, and body. Of these, it is the mental patterns which are most deeply-rooted.  It is an example of the principle that the subtle governing the gross.  Every vicious act of rape or murder begins with a "defilement"--anger, hatred, envy, lust--in the mind.   

Now, it is one of the central insights of the Buddhist tradition that the nature of everything is "empty:" empty of inherent, independent existence.  This is only another way of saying that everything is interdependent.  This emphatically includes ourselves: though we like to re-ify our personalities as real objects, Buddhism correctly argues (and Wittgenstein agrees) that the word "me" is ultimately an empty signifier.  The "me" in question always depends on such a host of factors, causes and conditions that to look at it as anything essential is absurd.  Of course there's a conventional me; we all know what this means; the trick is not to mistake it for anything ultimate or inherent.  It's important to recognize the unreality of the me as well. 

The most significant aspect of our "me"s is the mind.  Subtlety, again, trumping grossness. Never mind that the mind, too, is empty of inherent existence; like "me" and so many things, it is a useful fiction.  All the Buddhist traditions are intensely preoccupied with the mind, because the mind is where all the action is.  We construct our worlds in the mind, shape our experiences, and, as pointed out earlier, gestate our actions of speech and body.  Not really existing anyway, minds are infinitely malleable: look at all the things they can learn, the feats they can perform: from Polynesian stellar navigation to polyrhythmic drumming, from the Macarena to multivariable calculus.  They've invented Nutella. 

The mind, for all its talents, is awfully good at getting us in trouble.  This is a way of stating Buddha's First Noble Truth: that life is duhkha: suffering, discord.  Of course there's the mundane suffering that so many billions of have-nots experience due to their material circumstances.  But even amongst those who do have, lasting happiness is exceedingly rare.  What's the problem?  Why can't the many of us who have what we really need just be happy?  Buddha's answer acknowledges the tendency of our minds: to desire, to grasp at, to crave.  Or, on the flip side, to shy from, to avoid, to fear or hate.  What we do--almost all of us, almost all the time--is to look for happiness in experiences that by their nature are fleeting.  We repeatedly seek out those neurochemical states that we learn to induce whether by food, drugs, sex, exercise, or someone laughing at our jokes.  This craving mind is like a child, undisciplined, and we don't at first know any better than to indulge it.  We do so all the time.  The trouble is, where we indulge, the child spoils: the craving only grows stronger.

This is one way of looking at the human condition.  It may sound pessimistic, but actually this Buddhist view looks on the bright side: there is a reliable medicine for our ailing minds.  It is known as the Dharma, the truth, the way.  Buddha himself is the doctor that has prescribed it for humanity, and the third essential component, the supporting staff of nurses and attendants who do much of the day-to-day curative work, is called the Sangha--the community of other practitioners.  A nice quality of the dharma is that it is true--at least it regognizes certain fundamental realities for what they are--and is therefore true by any name.  So enough about Buddhas and Sanghas.  Back to the living kernel of truth, as best I understand it. 

We were at the point of turning to a new approach to the mind-child, a disciplinary one.  This is a matter of re-patterning, cultivating new habits and understandings until gradually the old ones fade out and our spoilt child becomes a model Timmy.  A number of tools are useful here, including but not limited to the proverbial stick and carrot.  All of them involve meditation at some stage, as this is where we can work directly on the mind. 

The particular pattern of the mind we've recognized as an enemy of our own happiness is the part that is ever hungry for more happiness, or rather more pleasant sensations.  In earlier posts I've written about Samatha or calming meditation, the technique of stabilizing and focusing the mind so that we can see clearly.  I've described the Vipassana technique of deep insight and re-patterning as taught by S.N. Goenka at his international centers. Vipassana trains us not to blindly grab at those pleasant sensations, but to observe them as they arise and watch them pass away.  In the process we gain insight into impermanence.  This is deep work but slow, and requires a firm foundation in Samatha, concentration.  Here I want to introduce something else, something that stands alone and that doesn't require such sustained, committed practice to bear fruit.
Since what we're aiming to abolish is a kind of selfishness, the tendency always to seek more pleasure for ourselves, we can apply an antidote in the form of an altruistic attitude.  We can consciously practice putting others first, and not only in terms of their happiness but in terms of their suffering.  If we take on others' suffering ourselves, it will act as a sort of poison that the "self-cherishing mind" can't abide.  The self-cherishing attitude will loosen its grip, and as it does so it will free our minds--a concept coterminous in many Asian traditions with that of heart--to release love.  Put this way, it sounds like a tall order.  The trick is, we can do it in our minds first, using the faculty of imagination to lay the first lines of a pattern that we wish to become our reality. 

The technique is called "Exchanging Self and Others." It is based on the following piece of reasoning. 'All beings deserve happiness and have the potential to achieve it.  I want most urgently to help them along the way, but my abilities to do so are limited.  Therefore I should do whatever I can do help myself help others.'  As this is a technique from Buddhism (a Tibetan branch of Mahayana Buddhism, to be a bit more precise), the logic continues 'I should become enlightened so that I can help others as much as humanly possible.'  This desire to achieve for oneself so that one may help others achieve is a step in the direction of what's called bodhicitta, the altruistic Mind of Enlightenment.  The meditation technique I'm going to describe is a means of cultivating bodhicitta, that is of expanding one's circle of compassion, in Gandhi-ji's terms.  But wait, some might say, wasn't the whole purpose supposed to be to increase our own happiness?  And all we've even started to think about doing is taking on the suffering of others in exchange for what happiness we've got?  False advertizing!  Ah.  But our own happiness is not a fixed quantity, nor something to be hoarded.  As this practice can reveal, helping others generates happiness in ourselves as a by-product.  As the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi says, " it is in giving that we receive...".  He weren't just being a romantic. 

      Exchanging Self and Others Meditation

Seat yourself comfortably and stably and take a few minutes to settle using whatever method works.  Let thoughts slow down as the awareness sinks down into the body.  Become aware of the breath and let it lengthen and deepen.  Relax.

The practice begins with the understanding that others are equally as deserving and capable of happiness as oneself, and that since there are so many more others than there are of oneself (which is only one, in fact), it is appropriate to work for their happiness rather than one's own.  With this altruistic motivation established, the practice begins.  It is easiest to start small, so we in fact begin with ourselves before expanding outward.  Imagine all your future suffering, the pain, the negative emotions, and imagine being able to take it upon yourself now.  As you inhale, draw in some of that future suffering as a black, noxious cloud.  This is distasteful and may be difficult, if you are visualizing strongly, but try and keep inhaling the black smoke.  As you do so, imagine it flowing to your hard, self-cherishing heart.  The selfishness in you can't stand all this suffering, and the presence of the suffering weakens it.  Keep breathing in the black suffering smoke and letting it dissolve your self-cherishing, and begin to envision happiness flowing back out with your exhale.  This happiness can take the form of a pure white or golden light.  Direct this happiness towards your future self.  Keep breathing in the black smoke from your future and breathing out the pure light.

The next step is to expand your scope to include another person.  It's easiest to start with someone you love.  Picture inhaling their suffering, little by little, letting it dissolve the hard selfishness in your heart, and exhaling pure light of happiness for them.  Watch the expression on their face relax as you relieve them of their burden. 

As you feel ready, add another person.  At some point, try visualizing someone you've had difficulty with in the past, an enemy, even.  They are no different than you in wanting happiness, and maybe less clear about how to achieve it.  And it will relieve you to comfort them selflessly, even in the mind.  

 As you work, imagine the scale of the enterprise growing.  You're no longer breathing in the suffering of individuals, but of households, entire neighborhoods, regions, countries.  As your energy and imagination permit, you can work up to the point of imagining yourself breathing in the suffering of the entire planet of sentient beings, unleashing it on your self-cherishing, and returning back the selfless love that results. 

However far you take the practice, at its apex, breathe in extra deeply of the black smoke and hold it in.  Feel it massed there in your chest, caustic, noxious, stinking, unbearable.  It is unbearable that beings should suffer like this.  It is unbearable that you should have to take it upon yourself.  Feel the explosion as your self-cherishing attitude disintegrates, leaving only a wash of pure light for you to exhale to everyone in your scope.

The practice can end in the traditional Mahayana way, with a dedication to all beings.  Or just sit quietly for another few minutes, watching how your mind has reacted and reflecting on what significance the practice holds for you at this time. 


Finally, in the spirit of non-sectarianism, I'd like to offer the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.
  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon:

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope

where there is darkness, light

where there is sadness, joy

O divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Investing in Ourselves

It appears that the Escher-eque architecture of the political economy (or is that the economic politic?) is finally betraying itself for what it is: a mesmerizing but trumped-up house of cards.  And while most houses of cards are at least built upon foundations as solid as, say, a coffee table, ours is held aloft by increasingly sporadic gusts of hot air from the maw of a bloated, sickly, senile carnivore.

I'll let those images float around free of further interpretation.  I don't claim any real talent for political/economic analysis.  For that, I'd like to recommend Very Knowledge and Club Orlov.  The authors of both are highly skilled at summing up just why, exactly, we're in so much trouble.  Trouble?  It depends on how you look at it.  But most people would call this Trouble with a capital T: the Western, consumption-oriented way of life is on its last legs, at least in the West (China may just be getting started).  The writing is on the wall.  The eagle has crashed into the ocean.  Yes, change is afoot, Mr. Obama.  Great upheaval is on the horizon, as the re-orientation of something as massive as the global economy won't happen without making a few, uh, waves.  As in tidal waves.  Things in the U.S. are poised to get radically ugly.  This is a good reason not to gloat, even over the downfall of as brutal, myopic a tyrant as the U.S. has become.  But it is exciting.

Amidst such a backdrop of gushing oil and economic failure, it's a good time to think about very basic things, including such impolite questions as "where does your food come from (and where will it come from)?"  And "what is your plan for when oil costs $10 a gallon?"  Many highly intelligent authors have argued that the necessary questions are going to be good deal harsher than this second one, since I have assumed that oil will still be available, and, implicitly, that things like highways will still be in good repair and safe to venture out on in a private vehicle.  Check out James Howard Kunstler for some juicy speculations on that score.  There are limitless possible scenarios, but I don't fancy stockpiling guns and canned food or even for that matter moving up to a remote hilltop in Vermont year round and tending a big garden and a flock of sheep.  Much as I like the sound of the latter, it just ain't me.  For these purposes, the details of just how a post peak-oil America will look are not really the point.  Instead, I prefer to focus on the basics.  When pondering how to spend time, money, physical and mental energy in a time of intense uncertainty, I find myself asking "what can I invest in that I won't end up regretting no matter what happens in the world?"

The short answer is "myself."  Lest that sound irretrievably egocentric, let me backtrack a bit.  

I've figured out that the intersection of my talents and passions and the needs of the world--which is how someone famous or other once defined "calling"--lies in the realm of nourishing, in making myself a vessel for traditions that nourish and tend toward wholeness.  If this I were in The Giver, I'd have been named Nourisher on my thirteenth birthday (and been awfully confused at the time, except that even then I loved to cook).  So I've decided to invest in the pursuit of that general goal.  Health being at something of a premium these days, there will be no shortage of work to be done.  All the more so if we define health broadly, to mean not just lack of detectable disease, but also a positive state of balance and contentment.  Ayurveda provides a set of powerful conceptual tools for achieving balance in body and even in mind.  The contentment part, though, is more elusive.  This is the realm of what we might call spiritual health.

Wait, hold it.  This is getting suspect already.  What does "spirituality" even mean?  Luckily it doesn't fall into the category of asking "what is jazz?," to which Louis Armstrong famously responded "man, if you've got to ask, you'll never know."  Really good jazz has a certain ineffability that defies definition, and if you can't feel it, there's no use trying to pin it down with words.  Ultimate reality may share some of that elusive quality--ask Mahayana Buddhists, who have developed complex ways of talking about that very elusiveness without reifying the concept of elusiveness itself, or physicists, who delve ever deeper into the structure of time and space, uncovering marvels within marvels.  Even the innermost marvels, if there are any that are ultimately innermost, defy all comprehensibility, with features like wave-particle duality.  The most promising theory, String Theory, requires that there be something like 11 extra imperceptible dimensions curled up into vanishingly small knots at every point in space-time--and this is in the name of simplifying.  Ultimate reality may well be beyond our capacity to understand it (wouldn't it be weird if it weren't?), but spirituality is not.  Leaving aside the term's mixed connotations, let us think of spirituality as a sense of purpose in our lives.  This doesn't mean we have to "know the meaning of life," just that we have an operational, pragmatic idea of how to create our own meaning.  Once we have meaning, we have direction, and we have something larger than our own egos and desires to base our lives upon.  Direction gives perspectives and resilience, a certain stabilization that, tended to, will tend us in return and keep us on the path.  

If this spirituality--meaningfulness--is the goal, what is the means to it?  A good place to begin the search is with the Sanskrit term for health itself.  The word is swasthya.  It means self-situatedness.  It conveys a sense that the place to start is with ourselves.  Each of us.  Working on her/himself.  This sounds simple, but in the context of Western society it is in fact radical, for we are accustomed to looking everywhere but within for fulfillment.  But it would seem that some sort of self-work is in order.  This is not egocentrism, for the goal of the process (or one of its side effects) is to eliminate the pernicious and false construct of the ego.  Rather, one's self is the only place one can start.  Later on ripples will spread outward, but those ripples come from the center.  We have to be self-centered; the challenge is (to paraphrase Einstein again) to widen our circles of compassion enough to embrace every being.

It's worth emphasizing that this kind of spiritual work is precisely that: work.  It is work in much the same way farming is work, and involves many of the same processes: preparing the ground, planting the right seeds, weeding out what is undesirable.  It requires the same sorts of attributes that help make any long-term endeavor successful: attentiveness.  The will to succeed.  Effort.  A sense of timing.  Immense patience.  Faith.  All these are necessary qualities, and yet they are also the fruit of the labor.  Thus the process is cyclical, and as different stages are reached, the seeker gains the strength and skill to proceed further.

So far I've avoided talk of religion per se.  Spirituality in the sense of finding and refining one's purpose through "self-cultivation," may or may not come associated with a particular religious tradition.  Many find that having a well-trodden path to follow is helpful--even if (in the world of so many Southasians I've spoken to), "all roads lead to the mountain"/"all rivers lead to the sea"--while others develop practices independently.  For most, some level of guidance is helpful.  What kind of path to follow does, of course, depend on one's aims, level of motivation, and many other factors.  And not all spiritual techniques accomplish the same thing.  The term "spiritual work" is still a useful one, however, if understood as that which contributes to an increase in positive attributes in the practitioner such as contentment, selflessness, and equanimity, while weakening negative thoughts and tendencies.  Buddhism and Christianity, for example, have some serious metaphysical differences, but they both aim to cultivate ethical living through kindness and compassion.

In the Southasian context, spiritual paths take many forms.  Even within Hindu traditions in which the overall goal is union with the divine, there are a number of different paths that are recognized.  Since yoga means union, these have names like karma yoga (the yoga of action), bhakti yoga (devotion), and jnana yoga (higher insight), as well as the more familiar hatha yoga.  Speak with Bharat Natyam dancers or Tabla players, and you will hear of their own practices as paths to the divine.  It doesn't so much matter what as it does as how: Zen Archery could equally well be Zen Underwater Basket Weaving, as long as it performed with mindfulness and devotion.  Many profoundly spiritual people don't associate themselves with any particular tradition, but simply follow the quiet voice of their own way.  I'd love to hear people's stories of others they've known that fit this description, because I think we all have met people who inspire us with their inner quiet, quiet courage, courageous eccentricity.

As I find (to my own continuing surprise) my own spirituality unfolding along a Buddhist path, I have more to say from that perspective than I do in terms of general remarks.  At the heart of Buddhist practice lies meditation, a direct and unmediated act of self-cultivation (bhaavana).  As practices go, meditation is relatively subtle: no signs of visible activity or direct impact on the world.  There is a tendency in our culture to discount the subtle in favor of the obvious, the tangible.  This may partly explain the difficulty so many have in conceiving of something like meditation as having any real value.  Why do Tai Chi when you could really burn some calories by lifting weights?  In reality, subtle forces are the most influential, as gentle, unassuming water carves a gorge out of solid rock.  Emotions may be insubstantial, but murder would never happen if not for rage, hatred, fear, and jealousy.  This principle--that the subtle governs the concrete--is what makes meditation so powerful.  Along with plants and animals, who so far have not been the cause of much Trouble, the world is composed of vast human societies, each of which is composed of discrete cities and towns plus rural areas, composed in turn of families, and finally, of course, composed of billions of individual people.  These people's actions, their ways of being in the world, depend on their internal states.  Without peace and harmony in the inner world, we can't expect it on the outside, either.  Start at the center and ripple out.  And--neat trick--eventually (they say) the center disappears.

                                                                      *         *         *

  For someone interested in pursuing self-cultivation of the sort I've been describing, but who is not sure where to start, there is nothing to be lost and much to be gained by developing mindfulness.   A calm, steady mind is a necessary stage on a number of paths, and it's a beneficial practice in its own right.  Calming the mind through this kind of meditation is akin to simply stopping the motion that we're always making.  If the mind is a car, then it's always running, and of course we need to stop it before we can open it up, see what's wrong, and fix the durn thing.  I like the analogy of muddy water.  Since the mind is always moving, the mud never has a chance to settle out, and the water never clears.  But with enough calming meditation, the motion slows to a stop, and the particulate matter settles to the bottom.  The water becomes clear, full of light.

The simplest form of samatha or calming meditation uses the breath to still the mind and make it one-pointed, absorbed in its object of concentration.  Here are some simple instructions aimed at a novice meditator, enough to get you started with a simple daily practice.  Sit in a comfortable position on the floor or in a chair.  Establish a firm, comfortable foundation.  Straighten your back, but not so much that you make yourself uncomfortable.  Loosen any tight belt or pants so that you can breathe freely, down into your belly.  Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes.  Close your eyes gently, and turn your attention to your breath, just the way you breath naturally, in and out.  Try not to control your breath, just watch it as it passes in and out through your nostrils.  Sounds simple, but it's not.  The mind will wander away again and again.  Each time you catch it wandering, gently but firmly bring it back to the object of concentration, the breath.  This is enough for many sessions, and it will be hard work.  It sounds obvious, but there is no substitute for doing the work.  Merely reading about it is no good.  You have to do it, every day.  "5 minutes a day better than half an hour on the weekend," says one of my teachers.  If you persist, you will find that the ability to concentrate develops, and your mind will wander less far and less frequently.  You will start to notice sensations that you hadn't before.  As this happens, you can zero your attention in very specifically on the place in or around the nostrils that the breath touches as it moves in and out.  You haven't exhausted the usefulness of this technique until you are able to sit completely absorbed in your breathing, without a trace of discursive chatter nor even a feeling of joy at your accomplishment, for extended periods of time.  Until then, there's always room for refinement of awareness, for sharpness of concentration.  

Root Growth

‘Tis a wonder to find the right metaphor--the one so fitting that it almost seems the thing itself.  Pondering this current, quiet phase of my life recently, I hit upon such an image: root growth.  That’s the phase of development I’m in.  Sending shoots down into the dark earth in search of nourishment; grasping the bedrock in a grounding embrace.  Above ground there’s not much happening--some buds visible, perhaps, to the discerning eye, promising flowers and eventual fruit in some season to come.  

It’s profoundly satisfying feeling my root tips drawing closer to the source of strength and stability: it’s no longer so difficult to have faith in a purpose and a path.  A path, a purpose: the book of changes, Yi Ching, suggested “subtle penetration,” an image appropriate to both.  The suppleness of water wears down rock; softness prevails over the hard, the brittle.  The hexagram shows a broken line, representing the soft force of yin, infiltrating a series of hard, yang lines.  So water trickles into rock, so roots penetrate into the earth through motion so slow and subtle as to be almost imperceptible.  

Our society worships all that is yang: hard muscles, outward displays of wealth or bravado.  Our heroes are athletes, one step removed from warriors.  In this context, it is easy to mistake subtle yin motion for idleness, torpor.  Don’t just sit there, do something!  (As the roots slide deeper, anchoring the tree against rough seasons to come.) 

Nor am I immune to the enticements of yang, as I watch friends spreading their names on stage, taking concerted action, forging ahead in their respective domains out in the world.  In comparison, I am hiding, digging my heels into the earth.  My most significant pursuits these days are internal.  On Thursdays I go to see one Mr. Lee in Chinatown, and he teaches me the ancient movements of Tai Chi Chuan.  The first lesson he simply showed me how to stand: knees bent, frame upright but relaxed, shoulders and tailbone always sinking towards the earth.  The second time we stood, then moved on to an exercise called ‘rubbing the ball.’  Loose arms gently trace the contours of a sphere whose diameter spans the distance from navel to shoulders.  The hands float up around the back to the top, then sink back down in front of the chest, curling around the underside before rising back up to the top.  Since then, 10 or 15 minutes of every day go toward rubbing this invisible ball, smoothing out my own flow of chi.  Letting my mind sink into my body, my body into the ground.  

On m=Monday evenings I go down into a basement room of Rockefeller chapel and listen to a droll Brit named Tom explicate a Theravada Buddhist meditation technique called Samatha Vipassana.  We sit for half an hour, and every evening I practice at home, following the prescribed steps.  First counting the breath, placing my concentration on the numbers as the breath comes and goes through a series of pre-determined lengths.  Then ‘following’ the breath in and out, concentrating on its movement and quality while maintaining awareness of the varying length.  Then ‘touching,’ concentrating on the point in the nostrils where the breath creates a sensation, still maintaing an awareness of the length and direction of the breath.  The idea is to train oneself to concentrate on progressively subtler objects, curbing the relentless tendency of the mind to wander free o’er farm and field.   

When people ask me what I’m doing here in Chicago, I rattle off the things I’m keeping busy with--tutoring ESL, studying herbs, teaching myself Hindi, not to mention strengthening the foundations of an important relationship--but my real work is the internal alchemy of meditative practice.  I am thankful to have the time and money to be able to delve down into myself, to grow my roots, in the knowledge that it is giving me the strength I need to spread my limbs, burst into blossom, and ultimately bear fruit.