Right and Wrong (more on the middle way)

It's been a long month.  I started this post in mid-May, just before our in-city move.  I put off final edits and now it's June.  This is my life at the moment.  Disorganized, distracted, dazed.  My daily routine involves chasing a crawling, climbing 9 month old through the box maze that is our new home.  Rather than procrastinate any longer, or start over, I'm ready to just post my thoughts from several weeks ago....

(May 12) My son finally "did his nights," as the french say, for the first time last night at 8 months and 10 days old.  He took longer than the other babies we know around the same age.  But he beat his dad by a few weeks.  We'd gotten to a manageable place at 7 months, then hit 8 months and it all went to hell.  Screaming, unable to console even when brought to bed with us, many night wakings, still nursing twice, impossible to put to sleep, short naps again... I planned to wait it out until our move Saturday, but by last weekend I had had enough and saw a window of opportunity to implement "cry and console."  Parents will probably know what I mean.  If you aren't a parent, it's pretty simple (but oh so controversial).  My own partner has resisted it.  Let the baby cry for increasing intervals and only console for 1-2 minutes between each, without picking baby up.  Sunday night...we went rounds for over an hour before he fell into an exhausted slumber.  Monday night...30 minutes.  Back to two night wakings to feed.  Tuesday night...12 minutes with, surprise, one night waking!  I was pretty happy.  Then last night he went to sleep by himself in 3 minutes...until 6am.  

Of course I woke up feeling pretty pleased with myself.  I had doubts about this strategy, especially going it alone.  But so far it's working.  Better than expected.  My husband is surprised.  I feel good about being right.  

Of course Pema has something to say about this.  I'm taking it slowly through her book, When Things Fall Apart.  This morning I re-read chapter 13 for about the fifth time.  It's easy for me to get caught up in feeling bad about being wrong - I spend a lot of energy there.  Yet parenting has me on the flip side - feeling good about being right.  It's so easy to get cozy with that superiority.  Pema reminds me to live in the middle - without attachment to right or wrong.  It's hard to move away from that black and white world.  Yet compassion can be found in the space you create in between extremes; a compassion necessary for leaving suffering behind.

The Middle Way

I got a little sidetracked from Pema Chodren last week.  It was good to return over the weekend during my morning practice.  I'm trying something new, in an effort to let go of my attachment to completion and order.  So many habits have formed in my life around these desires- I rush through much of my life in order to be done and check something else off my list.  Books are just one example.  It feels so good to finish; I love that sense of satisfaction when the chapter is read, the book is done, and I can take it off the "to read" pile and put it neatly in its place on the shelf.   So I've begun to placing my bookmark at the end of a chapter, rather than the beginning, to encourage myself to sit with what I'm reading a bit longer.  

This morning I found myself, still, at the end of chapter nine - Six Kinds of Loneliness.  

The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA.  We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern.  It's the human pattern we project onto a world, a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution... We not only seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution.  We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that.  We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

Not wandering in the world of desire is another way of describing cool loneliness... The word desire encompasses that addiction quality, the way we grab for something because we want to find a way to make things ok... Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are.  Loneliness is not a problem.  Loneliness is nothing to be solved.

Another aspect of cool loneliness is not seeking security from one's discursive thoughts...  We don't seek the companionship of our own constant conversation with ourselves about how it is and how it isn't, whether it is or whether it isn't, whether it should be or whether it shouldn't, whether it can or whether it can't...  We can gradually drop our ideals about who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.  We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are.

I love this, especially the last part.  I spend so much energy in my life analyzing what I think others' expectations of my life are.  Stories within stories within stories until I'm exhausted and very far from a calm appreciation of who I am.  I want things to be this way, to be that way, to be just a little bit different from how they are, how I am.  I've missed a lot of my life while I run back and forth between what could have been and what should be.  Maybe it's time to spend some time in the middle.  Loneliness gets a bad rap, but it can be a very rich space, as the ancient Persian poet, Hafiz , well knew.  

Good Enough Practice

"Good enough" is popping up all around me.  6 months ago I entered motherhood and now good enough parenting catches my eye.  I'm nearly finished with Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Big Magic, and themes of mundane and persistence stand out - a sort of gentle nudge to just do it every day, even if your writing is total crap and you don't feel at all creative.  I even tried to write this blog weeks ago, the words came out just right, and then as I went to publish I accidentally deleted it.  My second attempt will have to be good enough, because the ideal first version is long gone.

Good enough is normally unacceptable.  I have high standards, my family's are even higher.  I'm genetically predisposed to perfectionism.  But I'm tired to my bones.  I don't know when I'll really sleep.  And so "good enough" isn't such a stretch.  My yoga practice is a shadow of what it once was.  My work is adequate.  My cooking lacks creativity, but is edible.  I dress merely to be clothed, not to make any fashion statement. 

Good enough feels like failure.  I suffer greatly in my attachment to perfectionism.  I like to believe I'm in total control of my life and when it's merely a fraction of what I believe I'm capable of, I think I am to blame. I wrestle constantly with hope, which seems so virtuous but always lets me down.  My instinct is to run from hopelessness, but I can't shake it.  So here I am, muddling through, suffering greatly, and then my friend brings Pema Chodren back into my life.  She's got everything and more to say about my particular suffering.  This week I'm re-reading this passage from When Thing Fall Apart as if my life depends on it.

“The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief. Finally somebody told the truth. Suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move. In reality, however, when we feel suffering, we think that something is wrong. As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience up or liven it down or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot.

Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides. As long as there’s one, there’s always the other. This is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keeping looking for alternatives.

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That’s the compassionate thing to do. That’s the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape? We can explore the nature of that piece of shit. We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there’s something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better “me” who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It’s better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears. Then some kind of confidence in our basic sanity arises.”

It's funny, this passage.  It gives me a new perspective on the moon cards I read every morning.  Earlier this week, before reading chapter 7 in Pema, I picked up my card for Day 19 of the lunar cycle. 

I usually hate drawing this card.  I want to skip over Day 19, pretend it doesn't exist.  Except this time through the deck I'm confronted with shit head on.  Flying shit.  My son sneeks a dirty diaper into our afternoon.  I go to change him, expecting just another wet cloth.  I fling the the diaper open and there goes poop.  I can't see it, but I can smell it.  I'm forced to let eyesight play second fiddle to my sense of smell and let my nose seek it out.  I find a nice little stinky clump sitting on the pretty cream crib bumper.  I shake my head, hold my breath, then go ahead and grab that little piece of poop and toss it out.  There's a tiny mark left behind, but really, no one else would know.  I could undo all those nice little ties and do yet another load of laundry.  Instead, I just leave it.  It's clean enough.  And time to let good enough be good enough. 

A Return to Maitri

I've been a big fan of Maitri (loving kindness) Practice, since my dear teacher Lisa Steele introduced me to it years ago.  It's been a consistent part of my daily practice, at least it was until about two weeks after my son was born and my world turned completely upside down.  I let it go.  And then the hours of lost sleep started to add up.  And my support systems fell apart.  And we had the rainiest winter in Seattle in a century.  And I found out I have to move my family, again.  The world started looking pretty ugly.

Then my best friend brought Pema Chodren back into my life.  While I holed up with a new baby, she discovered secular buddhism and maitri and all the practices I love.  She did the kindest thing for me that I've experienced since she left a daffodil on my doorstep on a dark day 7 years ago.  She reminded me about mindfulness, gently, over and over throughout the long winter.  She sent me passages from Pema's When Things Fall Apart.  She reminded me to breathe.  I'm deeply grateful.

It's a transformative experience to sjmply pause instead of immediately filling up the space.  By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness. -Pema Chodren