In/Out, Deep/Slow, Calm/Ease, Smile/Release, Present Moment/Wonderful Moment (1)

The beginnings of a meditation practice

Hip Hop Buddha Contemplating a Contaminated Garden of Eden, 2002, digital painting

It seems like there isn’t enough turmeric in the world to deal with the inflammation of this time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to soothe what’s out of sorts. Maybe we need to extract the medicine from hidden veins, or maybe extraction is actually the problem. Or perhaps we just need to listen to something we don’t have the words to describe yet. At least, that’s what I’ve been learning listening to Bayo Akomolafe and his cohort. Diving into the unknown, dancing with mountains.

Like many others these days, I often lie awake in the middle of the night, feeling overwhelmed by my responsibilities and too alert to the horrors being enacted in so many places. With uncertainties of every shape clouding my vision, it takes lots of conscious effort to find my center. I can try to witness my breathing as best I can, although my concentration is poor, so I try repeating the words in the title of this post (a mantra-like poem - a gatha - written by Thich Nhat Hanh), relaxing different parts of my body, so I can gently meditate into another slumber. If it doesn’t work, which it often doesn’t, I get up and make a brew of some sedating herbs along with some L-tryptophan. Sometimes it’s the “trying” that conspires to keep me in a tense wakefulness. Over the past few years, chaos and grief have been creating giant, effervescent cascades through my nervous system that I can keep tamped down during the daytime, but can leak out at night. Sometimes it’s the local mayhem: a fear of civil war and rising fascism can be triggered by a close call with a duo of SUVs going rogue, racing down a two lane city street, blithely speeding through one red light after another. Several such incidents, the detritus of corrupt systems in collapse, have given permission for all sorts of dangerously threatening behaviors. Yet the intensity of the current global madness with the very visible, unceasing violence and aggression against innocents, filling our feeds is VERY hard to digest. If I had the capacity to be more physical with my feelings by joining in public protests (something I did frequently in my past), I would be expressing my solidarity with all those who are feeling the pain and powerlessness. Sadly, the emotional rollercoaster in our home makes it difficult for me to stretch in that way, so I sit here writing and making drawings about my grief. It’s no surprise that my back complains from time to time; so many difficult feelings to process. It seems too much for one body.

In the midst of everything becoming increasingly disordered, I am reminded that I have practices that can help with metabolizing this collective mess. There are many ways I have learned to take respite, whatever I can gather, to process and reflect. So today, my post will offer readers some stories about how I got introduced to meditation. I’m sharing this partly to inspire others who might need something to ground them in the chaos of this moment in history.

Kuan Yin Breathes the Bomb, 2002, digital painting

I was first exposed to yoga & meditation at age 15 - yoga was not mainstream in 1968. I received instruction in Hatha yoga asanas and chanting from a slightly older friend who was enthusiastic about everything from India and had been studying at the Integral Yoga Institute in Manhattan. Under his influence, I also became a strict vegetarian. While I didn’t become a committed practitioner until decades later, I was sufficiently passionate at age 17 to offer my fledgling understanding of yoga to small classes at the local Friends Meeting House, as well as an after school program to fellow high school students. Thinking back, I am somewhat astonished that I had the chutzpah and confidence to teach something with so little training. Yet, reflecting on the practice now, I can say that my early introduction to the mind-body connection and meditating in the company of others has served me well.

Crone Tree Pose, 2001, Digital painting

During my college years, my attention to mind-body connections took other forms, meditation and yoga not being among them. I returned to yoga at some point in my late 20s, but the meditation piece was something I avoided. I was so concerned with being productive that I felt, at that time, that my anxieties were better served by my creative practices and hanging out with friends. The idea of claiming any sort of spiritual practice other than my childhood rituals of talking to trees, birds, and insects, was no where to be seen in my daily life.

Then, over a decade later, in 1983, Joanna Macy’s book fell on my head in the Blue Mountain Center’s Library (I won’t retell that story here since it’s detailed in a previous post); once I began working with her in-person, I saw that there was a deep connection between spiritual practice and activism.

When I began living with Bob in our Long Beach, California apartment in November 1988, I witnessed his twice daily meditation practice on a zafu and zabuton with a deep respect & awe. I did not know how to slow down that much and his devotion and discipline to time spent on the cushion filled me with curiosity.

Buddha Who Breathes Through Fear, 2001, digital painting

In the months before meeting Bob, I’d been preparing three solo exhibitions that included a new interactive installation, “Please Take a Numb-er” and my series, “Taking the Empire’s New Clothes to the Laundry.” The first exhibition at Saddleback Community College in Mission Viejo, CA was called “You’re Such Complainer,” the second, at CSU Bakersfield’s gallery, was called, “You’re So Negative,”and the third, at CSU Northridge’s gallery, was called, “Will You Stop Depressing Me?” The latter exhibition included a new project called, “The Nightmare Quilt.” All of the titles of these exhibitions were comments I received in my interactive installation, THIS IS NOT A TEST, at the Long Beach Museum of Art the previous year. I felt really out of place as a NYer transplanted into what appeared to be a more superficial southern Californian culture, and wanted to foreground that contrast through my sarcastically-titled exhibitions.

All of this creative output happened while teaching full-time. This ambitious level of work seemed normal to me. It’s not that Bob’s schedule was that much less intense. When he wasn’t at his administrative job at Long Beach Community College, he was attending organizing meetings for different activist groups and taking more courses at the School for Integrative Psycho-Structural Bodywork where he’d already been training to be a massage therapist for several years. He’d also just begun his research for his Master’s thesis with Goddard College’s Institute for Social Ecology with a focus on activist art. So the fact that he made the time and had the passion to sit on his cushion was admirable. Little did I know that I would soon get an intensive introduction to sitting practice, not via Bob, since he was not one to proselytize, but the input came from another direction.

Multitasking Queen, 2001, digital painting

In the spring of 1989, just before our wedding, I was invited to attend a retreat for activist artists at the Ojai Foundation (my retreat there with Joanna Macy was discussed in a previous post). The letter said that Thich Nhat Hanh was inviting a small group of activist artists to come train with him. It was the second year that he was offering this type of retreat in Ojai, each time with a different hand-picked group of artists. In my pre-Bob life, I might have ignored this invitation, but when I told Bob about it, he got very excited.

Bob was an ordained lay monk in the Vietnamese Zen lineage, and although Thich Nhat Hanh (aka Thây) was not the teacher who had ordained him, he had heard Thây speak at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in LA and had found his teachings quite valuable. Bob was eager for me to experience the wisdom offered by Thây and to discover the benefits of sitting in a group. I got permission from the Chair of my art department at CSULB to miss a week of classes (that particular Chair was actually quite supportive of me and even found funding for the retreat fee). I got my camping gear ready and was soon off for a spiritual adventure with unforeseen positive consequences.

The road trip to Ojai, driving out of the crazy freeway traffic to the pastoral orchards and valleys further north, filled me with a sense of possibility. After setting up my tent next to one of the elders in the group, and nodding to several other participants, we were gathered into the main meditation yurt on the property and told of our responsibilities for the first few days of silence. Given that this retreat happened 35 years ago, the order in which things happened and their details are somewhat hazy now, but the experience of sitting, eating, working, and walking in silence, was profound. I recall doing some stone path building during our work periods and being moved by seeing the stones I put in place still in use in future years. I was impatient with wanting to hear from fellow artists and my desire to share my own work. I didn’t like having to push my ego aside so that I could quiet my mind.

One of the most amusing things about the three days of silent time (which became four) was the way my mind created stories about the other participants. I was startled to hear the voices of people who I had imagined with a certain kind of presence and personality; when they spoke I was taken in vastly different directions. On the evening of the 3rd day, Thây invited us into the meditation yurt to share our stories about our ancestors and cultural roots. I don’t remember much about the content of those stories, but Thây determined, based on what we said, that we needed another day of silence. This was enormously frustrating for the reasons mentioned above.

I remember that I broke my silence every night by calling Bob from a pay phone located at the top of the hill where we were camping. I felt only mildly guilty; I was mostly calling to complain about things: I ranted to him about the hierarchy that he had warned me about and my resentment that certain artists were able to perform and share their work and others, who were as yet unknown to the team surrounding Thây, had to wait and share our work for 5 minutes in a session at the end of the retreat.

At the same time, I was learning something about my drivenness, and that included the speed at which I was eating, the lack of mindfulness that I had about so much of my everyday life, the sense of urgency that I carried about my work and activism, and I was intrigued by what would happen if I began to incorporate more of what Thây’s teachings had to offer.

We were told that if we had a specific question to ask of Thây, to write it down on a piece of paper and leave it in the bell by the altar in the meditation yurt. I recall doing that, and then noticed that my note was hanging out of the back pocket of one of Thây’s minions. I was concerned that someone other than Thây had access to my words and I asked the assistant about it. He said that they were discussing how to best deal with the issue that I was raising (it concerned the fact that we artists needed more time to discuss our work and give each other support and feedback). I felt stymied by this process given how much time we had left, and the number of artists involved (we were maybe 40 people). I called Bob again that night to express my frustration. He was very supportive and said that the hierarchies & processes of Buddhist communities often bothered him as well, but there were good things to receive in the midst of that paradox. Given that he had put up those structures for decades before meeting me, I accepted his authority on the subject, and found a way to relax into what was unfolding.

As mentioned earlier, the artists who Thây’s team already knew from the previous retreat were given prominence and a platform to perform and share their work earlier in the retreat. Now, with a bit more maturity, I can say that this way of scheduling things made sense for the organizers, but, at that time, my ego needs and wounds were triggered; I felt excluded, disappointed, and it seemed that others did as well. In the last three days of the retreat, the sharing of our work was rushed and not at all satisfying, but I realized that my expectations were for a different kind of gathering, something more like an art conference, symposium, or think tank. I resolved to take from this experience whatever grains of wisdom I could.

Smog Buddha, 1998, Digital painting

Ultimately, over time (not at this retreat, in particular), I have found that the triggers that I experience while meditating or being in any group situation are my teachers. Something inside me was opening up and shifting. As Thây’s gatha’s began to take root in my quiet moments (mostly in bed and not on the cushion), I could see how rare it was for me to actually live in the “present moment.” Over the course of the next few years, I began to see patterns of thinking that were causing more suffering; particularly how my brain grasped onto worries about the future or how it ruminated on past actions as a way to avoid feelings in the present.

Before the retreat ended, Thây offered us some words to carry own on our journey home; he said to remember that WE were driving the car, and that the car was not driving us, and to be mindful of our breath as we drive. That mindset has been available to me many times over the past 35 years, but I can say now, with deep self-compassion, that it was often rare for me to arrive “home” in the present moment. It’s only now, with the huge heart breaks that I carry, that I have found breathing into the present moment essential medicine for the pain that comes and goes.

I wish I could tell you that this first retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh gave me the inspiration to have my own sitting practice, but the truth is that I did not rush to sit next to Bob on my own cushion. Yes, there were times that I did, but it was rare. He even bought me my own sitting bench so that I could be more comfortable, but what I really needed was a group to sit with so that I could feel held by the energy of many. As you will read soon, that eventually happened.

In my next post, I’ll share more about deepening my journey with the practice at Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh’s center in France.