90 Days of Gratitude

Yesterday was day one of an experiment.

I am going to say the words “Thank you” as a mantra 108,000 times. One hundred and eight thousand times.

At first glance, that’s a lot. And it is. Nevertheless, I broke out my calculator. My long mala beads are 108, and I would say “thank you” four times per bead, so that’s 432 times per time around. Approximating that to 400, three times around the mala is 1200. 108,000 divided by 1200 is: 90 days.

I may not even need 90 days to get this done. It takes me about 30-45 minutes to do 1200 (1296) “thank yous”. But that’s not really the point.

What will undertaking a massive experiment in gratitude be like? How will I change? What will I learn about myself? What will I learn about others?

I got this idea from Ken Honda, who is considered the “zen millionaire of japan.” He teaches classes about “happy money,” which is the title of his book. In it he says, there are two kinds of money: “happy” and “unhappy” money. “Unhappy” money is money that comes with emotions of frustration, resentment, bittnerness, sadness, stress and the like. “Happy” money comes with emotions of joy, gratitude, and all kinds of good feelings. The way to make “happy” money is to do things that give you joy and give other people joy. Another way to do this? Thank your money. Show it appreciation and gratitude when it comes in, and thank it on the way out.

Of course I, like everyone need to make money just to survive. But this idea of infusing one’s flow of money with joyful, appreciative energy really hit my mind. I can find joy through money? I can help others find peace and joy through money? Of course! Money is just energy; it’s just a symbol.

So in order to cleanse the flow of my money, and really to cleanse the flow of my mind, heart, and spirit, I am saying “Thank You” a minimum of 1,296 times per day for 90 days. I will say it more, because of natural interaction with people (and I like to thank people when I receive help, or money, or opportunities, or really anything), but the baseline is 1,296. Three times around the mala, four times per bead. Three months. 12-13 weeks.

Thank you for reading! Please join me again next week for a check in to see how this practice is going.

The politics of trees

This morning I woke up and realized I hadn’t heard the sound of sirens in almost 24 hours.

Instead, I heard chirping and singing birds, the rustling of leaves in the wind, the occasional sweep of cars going by on the road, the constant babbling of the brook nearby. As soon as I got here my nervous system breathed a sigh of relief.

Sirens are my reality when I wake up in the city. I live near two hospitals. It’s not every minute, but it’s enough to be constant. Here at my friend’s place up in Vermont in the woods, it’s quiet, peaceful; I am so much more relaxed here. I can feel my nervous system resetting even after being here for only an hour.

Of course, people need help when they’re ill, and the EMTs and firefighters onboard those vehicles with sirens are heroes; but what’s making people ill in the first place?

When everything’s an emergency in the city, doesn’t the stress self-perpetuate? Doesn’t the grime and the hustle make people sick?

How would we radically re-orient ourselves in a city to be more like trees?

First, we might free their roots from their concrete prisons. We might begin to build around nature, and plan to build with nature, instead of building over nature. We might plant whole rows of trees in sidewalks, instead of placing them in concrete solitary confinement. We’d give them back their communities. And we’d acknowledge that trees grow and change as they do so; why don’t our buildings (especially when at least part of those buildings have always included the remains of trees themselves)?

Second, we might realize that bringing nature back into the city has manifold positive consequences: crime goes down as people are more relaxed; health costs plummet as asthma rates slide and people spend more time in green spaces; inequity decreases because we start this greenification in the places that need it the most (what if “Brownsville, NY” became “Greensville, NY”?)

Third, we might find that the more that we plant trees, the more nature rebounds around us. We might find that people have more to eat because the pollinators are back. And when we get rid of the gas-powered cars in the city, the air quality will improve too. When we start paving roads and sidewalks with permeable pavement, the water will drain into the water table more cleanly. When we start daylighting the streams and brooks we buried, public life will start relaxing. New York City, in particular, would cease to be among the grungiest cities in the world, but would become one of the greenest beacons of hope and light in the era of climate crisis.

And what would politics look like if we took our cues from trees? Trees communicate, hold each other up, share nutrients and warn each other with chemicals; you might even say they practice socialism, or at least non-zero-sum politics. But of course it’s not “socialism” to a tree. It’s just the way they have lived for millions of years.

It’s the trees’ world. We’re just living in it. We would be wise to adapt to this reality.

Ancestors

So I’ve been thinking this weekend a lot about generational wisdom.

I never knew my grandparents, except for one of them—my mother’s father. And then, I only ever really met him a couple of times that I remember. He died when I was in third grade. The other three died before I was born. My father was 55 when I was born, which meant that by the time I was ten he was 65, and by the time I was twenty he was 75. He began slipping into Alzheimer’s right around then, and about 10 years after that he died at 82.

A lot of people that I know, either still have living grandparents, or had their grandparents around when they were younger. They get all this extra love and wisdom from them. They also get to re-contextualize their parents’ habits and choices through the eyes of their parents’ parents.

But I never got that chance. I never got the grandmotherly love, the grandfatherly wisdom. I felt so alone as a child and I never knew why. I was the last of three boys of older parents; my grandparents were gone; my aunts and uncles and cousins were all a continent away in England.

When other kids would talk about how their grandparents sent them care packages, I silently wondered what that was like. I watched films and tv shows about grandparents caring for and defending their grandchildren, and it felt like, well, that’s something that maybe I’ll experience after having kids one day, but that I never felt myself. And certainly I never received any sage advice from mine. The only thing that came close was a little New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs that he gave me when I was only three months old with an inscription that read, “God is Love; and he who dwells in love dwells in God, and God dwells in him.” (1 John 4:16). Given the lack of other grandparent wisdom, I’ve taken that to heart.

Honoring my ancestors was a practice I had to come to gradually. Whenever Buddhist ceremonies would mention that, I would think of my parents; anyone before them always felt like a distant dream. Like, there was no difference between my grandparents and 10 generations back.

I give my mother a lot of grief; today of course is Mother’s Day in the U.S., so I was on my best behavior. She’s all I have left of my ancestors. Nevertheless, I myself have a lot of another kind of grief to take care of, and I can’t expect her to be able to deal with it. I don’t think she ever really was able to support me in my grief in the way that I needed. Because it’s not just the grief of my father dying; it’s the grief of never having a larger family community to call upon. My father didn’t have brothers or sisters and most of his other relatives he didn’t like, so that part of the family was never there (with one exception in Colorado… but she’s a recent discovery).

I guess there’s not really a point to this entry, except to remark how sad I feel because I have a lifelong unmet need for family connection. I will forget for a time, and then remember when someone tells me a story about how their grandparents fed them, or gave them love, or took care of them in some way. I’m fortunate in many ways, but I’ve never had that privilege.

May I nevertheless be my ancestors’ wildest dreams.

"Thank you for your suffering"

Meditation is something that I’m passionate about. What I’ve noticed recently is that it’s self-reinforcing. I love sharing it with people, and the more I do that, I’ve noticed that it helps my life too.

When we share our practice with others, we naturally help them, and they naturally help us. It is strange, because ostensibly we’re doing “nothing.” We’re intentionally doing nothing; sitting still and breathing together. But we’re doing it together, which is really important. When we all go deep, and rest our minds, and do it together, we get closer to others. Why?

I don’t know how it works, but over the last 12 years I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and I have a hypothesis. I’m an anthropologist in spirit, and all throughout college (when I first started practicing) I learned about all the different ways that human are social beings. We’ll do anything to be with other people: play and watch sports, long and elaborate role-playing games; we’ll even be destructive to get each others’ attention, even if it’s negative attention, we still want it. We crave each other’s presence in our lives.

I think that’s because we reflect each other. We see ourselves in other people. And the funny thing about Buddhist philosophy is that it points directly to the things that are perhaps the most uncomfortable aspects of our lives: everything comes to an end, everything breaks down, order returns to entropy. We don’t want it to be that way, but this is how the world works. This is truth. And when we come together to drop everything, as in meditation practice, we recognize that we all share that reality. Nothing is what we think it is. Life doesn’t quite fit right, like a wheel that doesn’t quite fit its axle, a suit or dress that maybe fits a bit too small in certain parts or maybe altogether. We need a community that recognizes this.

As I’ve formed and joined communities of practice, I’ve noticed this gratitude for others who recognize the need to drop everything. In those communities we share how we came to meditation in the first place, what keeps us doing it, and what insights we’ve gained. There are as many variations of the story as there are humans beings in this world. But the common thread is this: I want something, I can’t get it, so I’m suffering. Even if it’s I want to feel happy, I want to feel normal, it’s still a great relief to hear people speak to the uncomfortable truths of their lives. Our suffering connects us like a great universal loom weaving us togethers like fibers in a tapestry. I found myself saying this recently to a friend of mine I was talking on the phone with who I met through practice: thank you for your suffering. It helped you be there for me.

Suffering is real, it’s normal, it’s an ever-present aspect of the fabric of our human lives. But as human beings, we have the capacity to wake up to what causes that suffering. We also have an opportunity to drop all the wanting, and deluded thinking, and anger that leads to this suffering. And the best way to do that is to enter into community with others who also wish to investigate the roots of discomfort in their lives. We support each other in silence, in conversation, in movement. When we drop everything and just be still, just look, then our suffering gets digested and transforms into wisdom. Wisdom is suffering made useful. And it’s not just my suffering that is useful to me. Your suffering helps transform my suffering, and my suffering helps transform yours.

So thank you. Thank you for having the courage to bury your suffering deep in the compost heap of practice, so that it can transform into wisdom that you can use to help others. We need more people like you.

Thank you for your suffering. Keep up the good work.

The Dharma of Thanksgiving, or, an Epiphany

This year, Thanksgiving was, of course, different in many ways. My brothers and their partners and I came over to my mother’s house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and we all kept our masks on and prepared a Thanksgiving lunch in a socially distanced fashion, before convening on the deck to have an outdoor meal. It was quite lovely, actually.

Nevertheless, karma is sticky. Our families set us off in ways that we can always predict, but never seem to be prepared for. This year I found myself at peace for the most part—I made sure to do some extra meditation practice at my apartment before heading out—but towards the evening, after we had drunk and eaten our fill of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and wine, I found myself doing a lot of “checking.” Checking-mind is what happens when we start complaining about or second-guessing things—“ugh, my family is so weird, they always get on my nerves, why do they always have to be this way?”. Except my checking-mind sounds like this: “I don’t connect with my family, they don’t think I’m good enough, they’re always judging me, they think I’m stupid.” Turns out I don’t need my family to drive me crazy, I’ve got that part all covered!

I made it home at a reasonable hour—benefit of having a lunch instead of a dinner—and immediately went to my go-to problematic-habit-to-wind-down, smoking a joint. After returning from the roof, I sat on my couch and started thinking about how things went. “Not bad, actually,” I thought. I actually could find some nice things, some positives to take away from it. Family is always stressful, especially once we’re all grown up and come back as adult children. But I realized I spend a lot of time complaining. Complaining about my relationship with my mother, complaining about my relationship with my brothers, complaining about my relationship with my extended family. Just complaining. I realized that the actual experience of being with my family was nourishing. I like my family, and I love them, despite their flaws and probably because of them. And then I remembered a story that one of my zen teachers told me. I believe this is a true story. Thus have I heard:

In the early days of the Cambridge Zen Center, a man moved in to live and practice. Now, at each of the zen centers in the lineage of the Kwan Um School of Zen, there are a set of “temple rules” in the back of the chanting books that they use. These are in 7 categories, with titles like “On Keeping the Bodhi Mind,” “On Mindfulness,” “On Conduct.” “On Eating,” “On Formal Practice,” “On the Dharma Talk” These aren’t must-do’s, but guidelines for practice, and can be really helpful when sitting retreats. As one teacher put it, “if you attain these rules, you attain Zen.”

So this guy read these temple rules, and decided to try to follow them to a T. But then he noticed that not everyone who lived there was doing a good job of following the rules. So he started checking other people: “hey peter, you’re breaking the rule about always letting other people go before you into the meditation hall, you need to be more mindful about that”; “hey, josephina, I saw you slouching during a dharma talk, it’s important to sit with correct posture”. “Hey Simya, you keep clinging to the scriptures*. You know that in the temple rules it says not to do that.” You know, kind of annoying, right?. But he kept on doing that, to everybody! This guy got such a big head that he starts checking the Zen Master. So during practice one night, he went in for an interview with the teacher and confronted him. “You’re breaking such-and-such rule, and such-and-such rule… how can you justify being a Zen Master if you don’t follow the rules to a T?”

The teacher lifted a finger and touched her eyes, and said, “Buddhist eyes only see Buddha.”

At this the man realized his mistake. He bowed and apologized to his teacher, and from then on no one had a problem with him. He never checked anyone’s practice again.

Back on the couch, I smacked my hand to my forehead. I’ve been looking at this all wrong! I’ve been spending all my energy on complaining and checking and whining, and trying to point out what is wrong, that I cannot see people’s true nature. All that is doing is channelling and reinforcing desire, anger, and ignorance—delusory thinking. Doing that doesn’t make the problems I’m having with my family go away, it distorts them in my mind and makes it worse, and then I can’t address it clearly. Stopping complaining also doesn’t make the problems go away, but it allows for clarity about situation, relationship, and function.

That’s what meditation practice is all about. Stop the bullshit. Stop the runaway train. Stop the backseat driver. It’s actually more like disengaging the clutch in the car: the motor is still running, but the gears aren’t engaged. And then you can see clear, hear clear, taste clear, feel clear, smell clear, and think clear.

“Buddhist eyes only see Buddha,” means, they only see people’s awakened potential. Of course, problems don’t go away, but the way we relate to them shifts. People around us don’t suddenly awaken and become compassionate and wise, but the way we relate to them shifts. The way we relate to ourselves shifts. And anyone who has ever had a teacher who so fully believed in their potential, more than they ever saw in themselves can attest to the power in that attitude. When someone sees you as Buddha, you become Buddha. When you see yourself as Buddha, you become Buddha. When you see someone else as Buddha, they become Buddha. Are you any different than you were before? What was Buddha before he was Buddha? Did he suddenly become something that he already was? How does that work?

When your mind opens wide considering that question, you will be able to see your family’s true nature shining brightly already clearly in front of you. Happy Thanksgiving!

*in case you missed it, that’s exactly what he’s doing…!