Clarity’s blog

Some years ago, when I first read Ani Pema’s Start Where You Are, I was appalled: somewhere in there (i think in the chapter on giving up all hope of fruition) she said that the meaning of maitri (loving kindness) is, that we can still be crazy after all these years. I was shocked. I didn’t want to be crazy after all these years! I wanted to get better! Wasn’t this the point of all this practice?
Today was a difficult day for me. One thing piling up on top of the other. I haven’t been practicing much lately, I stayed up quite late - sometimes because I couldn’t sleep, sometimes watching some sci-fi tv series, which meant I couldn’t wake up early, which meant I couldn’t practice, so then I could feel guilty about that, and distracted, couldn’t focus at work, found all kinds of other things to do instead of what I should, so then I could feel guilty again, which of course didn’t help with being able to focus on my work even one bit. As the day progressed I just felt worse and worse. I saw it, but was still caught in it enough so that I couldn’t step out. Shouldn’t I be over these things already? After all these years I’m still getting caught in this way? And I’m teaching this stuff? What a fraud!
Which quickly leads to feeling hopeless and worthless. And feeling bad about feeling this way. It’s a really vicious cycle.

Somehow as I was going home from work things were becoming worse but then some space came into the whole thing. I got a postcard from a friend saying how much she loves me and is grateful for my friendship. As I opened the door, today’s slogan greeted me: “Letting go should not be confused with arrogance or indulgence”. I ate a peach. Remembered Pema’s thing about being crazy after all these years.
Seeing how hard I was driving myself, how I wanted to be different from who I am or where I am, how I was punishing myself for what I was feeling, how I wanted to be better (because I hated who I was)
A smile slowly formed on my face. Perhaps it’s just fine to be so crazy after all these years. Perhaps instead of trying to climb to the top of the mountain above everyone else and their pain, I can just let the pain of being human soften me, move me closer to everyone. A tender heart. It’s a shared pain. It is samsara, they told you it was painful, right?
And perhaps I can just allow myself to be human.

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you know, i’ve never believed people who kept saying how hard ngondro was. Well, not that I thought they were not serious, but somehow I thought it would not be so hard for me. yeah, right, pretty arrogant, i know.
But perhaps I really will learn something about devotion, a subject that was always difficult for me.
Why? Because, there’s just no f*** way you’d do this crazy thing otherwise! You can’t do it with logic, with intention, you can’t think it through. Whatever you try, nothing works.
It just rips you apart completely. Sounds like fun, eh?
So, as I look at the face of my teacher, this moment it feels like it’s the only thing that will get me through this.
Perhaps ngondro leaves nothing behind but that…

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it’s weird how you can miss someone pretty badly, and you’ve only met about a month ago and only spent a few days together…

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Oy, I couldn’t believe it.GMail now supports setting the from field in your emails to whatever you want:
Gmail: Help Center

I was thinking of hacking this via Greasemonkey but now I guess I don’t have to. And you can even set different emails and then choose when you’re sending what from address you want. Freaking cool! Now I can finally send email from my nice domain name, but still use gmail as my client!

Thanks Google!

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So, managed to edit 6 talks out of 13 and also managed to put in a few hours of work - and I even managed to learn C++ Standard template library map templates and iterators. It’s always fun to learn something new! (though in any dynamic language I’d have this done in a few minutes and 3 lines, instead of few hours it took me!). Oh well.
It’s still raining slightly outside… But no matter what the weather, tomorrow I’m going to try and find the rest of my gear for rollerblading somewhere!

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ouch, i have only 70megs left until the end of the month! Yikes! At home currently my only way of getting on the net is through an UMTS phone, which is workable in terms of speed (it’s no DSL though), but you only get 500Mb/month for a reasonable price. After that it’s around 5$ for 10megs. Insane!

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I’ve finally started editing talks from Warriors Assembly, whew! It’s going much slower than I expected, the beginning talks had lots of hiss that is really hard to remove and I’m still playing with the right settings for encoding to mp3.
i’m trying LAME’s –preset voice to see if it will be enough, as I’d like for all of them to fit on one CD.
I’m realizing a laptop is not the best for this kind of job, because while it’s CPU is fast, the disk is slow, and i’m working with multi-gigabyte files here. But hey, it’s moving!

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As an attempt of getting my life more organized, i’ve been trying to make a todo list of all the things i need to do and/or want to do. However I can’t seem to be able to make it! I always find an excuse.
So, I’m starting my list here, with the first item being:

• make the damn to-do list!

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I’ve been thinking this evening after reading the girl’s post on richness, about people or things that bring joy to my life. What came up, interestingly enough, was one person that I’ve never actually met, but have been reading her blog for a while now.
Reading it almost always cheers me up and I’m not quite sure why. She just writes about the most mundane things in her life, like today on:

baking bread and
cutting her finger with a spoon during the making. Or she stumbles upon the weirdest things.

There’s just something so ordinary about it, so no nonsense and no pretense about it, that it inspires me a lot. In Shambhala we would say it simply manifest basic goodness of being human.
So, thank you BeeBee for writing it!

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So, yesterday I finally gave in, and bought myself something that I’ve wanted for a long time. Rollerblades!
I bought these:

There was a sale, so I got them at 50% off and they were finally in range of what I might be persuaded to spend on such a thing.
I’ve only skated once in my life, haven’t been skiing since elementary school and generally am not doing lots of sports at all. In fact, I’m really bad at taking care of my body. I’ve tried running, and i do like going bycicling, but it’s all very limited. My body neuroses seems to be pretty deep in this regard and is definitely oriented towards not moving, or moving as little as possible. very strong laziness!
So, this felt kind of funny - there’s a plenty of other things I could be doing to get in shape other than rollerblades and it would be much cheaper, but my mind got excited about this. In a way it felt like treating myself as a kid - instead of being all reasonable and seeing I can’t afford this, and I could run instead and get the same effect, just going with it, kind of like, if this is what gets me to excercise a bit, why not? it’s actually a small price to pay to finally make me go out and something for my body.
so, we’ll see how it’ll work out, but it’s been fun so far! it’s definitely NOT easy, and I’m wondering if perhaps I should take lessons, but from what i’ve seen, the lessons cost as much as i payed for the blades themselves. hmm.
i looked on the net, and found some nice advice:
How to Fall on Inline Skates Hehe, very important!
and How to stop on inline skates - essential!
Both of these are not very intuitive, especially the breaking part - i’m not sure if I would’ve figured this out just by myself.

I’ve skated a bit last night and for a few hours today and while i’m still definitely wobbly I haven’t fallen yet and it’s been lots of fun, and I definitely got some excercise! What I need now is some more protective gear as the shops I’ve checked were all out, so I only got elbow pads. So, it’s good I haven’t fallen yet!

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During the 3 dignities retreat at DCL Sarah Coleman gave us meditation instruction which involved emphasizing curiosity and openess. What stuck in my mind was how she described it - whatever we experienced, we should great it with “Oh, how interesting!” (I’ll see if I can find it in the recording it and post it, the tone of the voice is important). See you’re beating yourself up? “Oh, how interesting! What is this? ” See you’ve been completely lost for the whole session - “oh, how interesting!” hehe, well, you get the point.
So, this evening I realized I was not feeling so great, in fact, it felt pretty crappy. But it did so in quite a familiar way. So, I remembered this instruction and became curios. Hmm, what is this? What kind of space is this? How does this trap work?
I realized it a big part of being in that space, is that i’m completely paralyzed. Whatever I think of doing next, I somehow manage to cancel it. Like, hmm, I should write about this in my blog. Naah, I can’t write. Perhaps I should sit. Naah, can’t sit. But there was something else too. At the end of these thoughts, there was something that felt like clamping down. I got a hing of something else, but I couldn’t see it.
Hmm, how interesting! So, again it comes, perhaps I can at least make a list of what I want to do tomorrow. Naah, can’t do that. And the whiff was stronger, and it was a whiff of self-hate. You’re not good anyway, why bother. You’ll never write anything worthwhile. Why bother sitting? And the clamping down is an interesting thing that I do - self hate is bad, i don’t like it, so i try to not see it, because the story goes, that recognizing that i have self hate, is further proof that self hate is right, and how completely messed up I am. A teacher once described this as ego pointing at itself, and saying, see, this is proof how worthless you are!

Hmm, interesting indeed!
I still don’t know all the steps to this setup, but it’s interesting to try to map the process. Cheri Huber calls this making a map of your suffering. Hmm, perhaps it would be good to actually make a map. Naah, can’t be bothered.
it’s persistent. it makes me feel completely stuck and bad about myself. It blocks any attempts at getting out. it wants me to suffer, because then it is in control. what is it? well, we could call it ego, or just very persistant, deeply rooted habitual patterns, and when you look at there’s really not much to it. But it does appear very real, and definitely wields a lot of power over my life. Being curious about it, bringing this “how interesting!” attitude seems to be the best way of dismantling it.

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pema-suzuki, originally uploaded by robertivanc.

Very important to remember!!!

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Seeing the brilliance of the world, arrogance falls away and the armour around our hearts melts into tears.

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Between one thought
    and the next,
ahh,
  what was THAT?

The world shines with luminous joy.

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Goodness is the ground of all

says Shambhala slogan of the day.

I wonder if my silly mind knows that when he does things that hurt other people… ehh.

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