Wednesday, November 22, 2006
like dying, withOut any Of the disadvantages
What I am going through now is like dying without any of the associated disadvantages. People and I are telling each other how much we cherish each other and showing gratitude to each other. Everyone ready to be open to new changes. Unlike if I were really dead, I am able to hear and respond to the feedback and I cherish the experience! I like to keep a morbid-sounding but wise zen practice on the top of my mind all the time: imagine that death is at hand right now over your shoulder like a dark looming shadow and might happen to you in the next moment. . . and how would you respond the petty circumstances and problems you are facing now knowing that death is imminent? Puts a healthy perspective on things and forces you to focus on the really important things in life!
Teaching is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
I remember when I first embarked on teaching, I read a encountered a common saying and decided to take it to heart and make it my teaching motto:
Bad teachers tell.
Good teachers show.
Great teachers inspire.
What does it take to inspire, I wondered? I have been fortunate to have encountered inspiring teachers before so I have a clue. One such person hard to forget is Venerable Pannyavaro. A short encounter with a great teacher is enough to learn all you need. I had the opportunity to have Venerable Pannyavaro as a meditation teacher in a 5 day meditation retreat in Singapore. There, I experienced how effective it is when a person chooses to live in a way embodying the teachings rather than by simply telling someone else how to live. When Venerable spoke, his words are his own, formed from personal insight through personal experience and not from book learning. When he spoke, I listened, because his words were made of truth, and spoken with love. There is no self-interest at all, no attachment even to how you would respond to his words, there is only the voice of a human being who has beautifully been actualised. When he wants to encourage us to meditate, he does not just verbally exhort us – instead, he takes his own practice seriously. No matter how busy his duties, how many people are in need of his help, he will take his yearly personal retreat and go off into the Australian bush for 3 months and do his solitary practice. In his doing this, we know how important it is for us to do our own practice, we do not need to be told.
Venerable’s words still guide my meditation and his gentle but firm countenance constantly appear in my mind and check me back into reality. He is one of my role models having made a positive change in me and I aspire to his model of teaching.To help, you need to teach, to effectively teach you need to inspire change, to inspire you need to live the teachings. Of course, I am guilty of less than inspiring moments. This is because I am not totally free from greed, hatred and delusions yet. The limits of my self cultivation will limit my abilities to help effectively as a teacher. Thus I learned that to successfully help others, I need to strive to develop myself to the utmost extent through further training. We know that only in perfecting our wisdom and compassion that we can be effective agents for beneficial change. So I will not lose heart and I continue to aim for this ideal.
Letting go is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
Folks have been asking this since the "sabbatical announcement" (see below).
Because in order to love something perfectly, healthly, wisely, we need to love without possessiveness, we need to love it in a balanced, non-attached way, we need to love it without clinging on to it. Simply put, we need to let it go. I want to love yoga and our yogis perfectly, healthily, wisely - so I need to let go. This doesn't mean I give it up entirely! I am not giving up on yoga & our yogis, I only give up the feeling of attachment to yoga and our yogis. The love remains. . . and now remains in a pure form, without self interest, without possessiveness, unconditioned. Ultimately, the yoga ethic of aparigraha or non-grasping is a key to freedom. Love can make you feel so good that you get so worried that what you love will end. With non-grasping love we simply love without worrying because this love is not tied to things being the same.
As long as wanting to be away from unpleasant things causes us to suffer, and as long as wanting to be with pleasant things all the time causes us to suffer - we will never be truly happy, never truly have real peace. I remember both my yoga teacher and meditation teacher saying that when they found they have grown a fondness for a particular sweet or food that they will purposely eat tonnes of the stuff until they throw up and the fondness will show its real limits - and they have rid themselves of an attachment. All things are transient, nothing lasts forever. Our possessiveness is a human response to this. We want to have AND to hold. To possess something to make it last forever in the same state. This inevitably leads to much suffering since the intrinsic nature of all things is change. That is not to say that we can't free ourselves from this type of suffering. We see how our love is defiled by possessiveness and we let go of this pollutant and purify our love in this way.
Taking on new challenges is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
If I believe it to be true, I need to act on it. If attachments are unhealthy to my mind, I need to act to free myself from it. In yoga, the principal ethic of satya urges a commitment to the truth in this way. This is not just about telling the truth and not lying. This is about living the truths with your own life. There is no use just knowing the truth and caressing it with our intellect from the cushy armchair of our study removed from reality, we need to live the truth in an imperfect world. This is not an easy path. Yet I want to walk this path because it is walkable. And it is a path that leads to more and more freedom and inner happiness. I sincerely think that we can all be enlightened, I believe that while suffering is a fact of existence, it is not our destiny because we know how to transcend suffering. We fail because we give up before we really try. There is no serious commitment. And when there is no commitment, there is no energy to power change. We need to know that we can, by everyday decisions, liberate ourselves, little by little, from greed, hatred delusions created by an ego-based perspective and develop a more balanced and global perspective. We can arrive at a larger heart by opening ourselves to acting outside of our comfort zones, again and again, without losing heart - because we see the big picture - we want to live in a better way today. While behaving like this may be uncomfortable in the short run (and may even be dangerous!) the knowledge that we are progressing along our path to achieving our greatest self, we will plod on, happily.
The upside is that many problems become petty issues when you made a decision to live what precious time you have in the best possible way to benefit as many people as possible. As the Dalai Lama always teaches: While the group of people you want to benefit includes yourself, the vast number of people other than yourself shifts the locus of your attention beyond the narrow concerns just yourself and your loved ones. We are able to transcend our day to day sense of helplessness and meaninglessness and even with a simple act of choosing what to eat during lunch feel ourselves reconnected to the world that we live in all the time but yet only really participate in part of the time.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Teaching is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
I remember when I first embarked on teaching, I read a encountered a common saying and decided to take it to heart and make it my teaching motto:
Bad teachers tell.
Good teachers show.
Great teachers inspire.
What does it take to inspire, I wondered? I have been fortunate to have encountered inspiring teachers before so I have a clue. One such person hard to forget is Venerable Pannyavaro. A short encounter with a great teacher is enough to learn all you need. I had the opportunity to have Venerable Pannyavaro as a meditation teacher in a 5 day meditation retreat in Singapore. There, I experienced how effective it is when a person chooses to live in a way embodying the teachings rather than by simply telling someone else how to live. When Venerable spoke, his words are his own, formed from personal insight through personal experience and not from book learning. When he spoke, I listened, because his words were made of truth, and spoken with love. There is no self-interest at all, no attachment even to how you would respond to his words, there is only the voice of a human being who has beautifully been actualised. When he wants to encourage us to meditate, he does not just verbally exhort us – instead, he takes his own practice seriously. No matter how busy his duties, how many people are in need of his help, he will take his yearly personal retreat and go off into the Australian bush for 3 months and do his solitary practice. In his doing this, we know how important it is for us to do our own practice, we do not need to be told.
Venerable’s words still guide my meditation and his gentle but firm countenance constantly appear in my mind and check me back into reality. He is one of my role models having made a positive change in me and I aspire to his model of teaching.To help, you need to teach, to effectively teach you need to inspire change, to inspire you need to live the teachings. Of course, I am guilty of less than inspiring moments. This is because I am not totally free from greed, hatred and delusions yet. The limits of my self cultivation will limit my abilities to help effectively as a teacher. Thus I learned that to successfully help others, I need to strive to develop myself to the utmost extent through further training. We know that only in perfecting our wisdom and compassion that we can be effective agents for beneficial change. So I will not lose heart and I continue to aim for this ideal.
Letting go is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
Folks have been asking this since the "sabbatical announcement" (see below).
Because in order to love something perfectly, healthly, wisely, we need to love without possessiveness, we need to love it in a balanced, non-attached way, we need to love it without clinging on to it. Simply put, we need to let it go. I want to love yoga and our yogis perfectly, healthily, wisely - so I need to let go. This doesn't mean I give it up entirely! I am not giving up on yoga & our yogis, I only give up the feeling of attachment to yoga and our yogis. The love remains. . . and now remains in a pure form, without self interest, without possessiveness, unconditioned. Ultimately, the yoga ethic of aparigraha or non-grasping is a key to freedom. Love can make you feel so good that you get so worried that what you love will end. With non-grasping love we simply love without worrying because this love is not tied to things being the same.
As long as wanting to be away from unpleasant things causes us to suffer, and as long as wanting to be with pleasant things all the time causes us to suffer - we will never be truly happy, never truly have real peace. I remember both my yoga teacher and meditation teacher saying that when they found they have grown a fondness for a particular sweet or food that they will purposely eat tonnes of the stuff until they throw up and the fondness will show its real limits - and they have rid themselves of an attachment. All things are transient, nothing lasts forever. Our possessiveness is a human response to this. We want to have AND to hold. To possess something to make it last forever in the same state. This inevitably leads to much suffering since the intrinsic nature of all things is change. That is not to say that we can't free ourselves from this type of suffering. We see how our love is defiled by possessiveness and we let go of this pollutant and purify our love in this way.
Taking on new challenges is hard to do. Why do I do such a difficult thing?
If I believe it to be true, I need to act on it. If attachments are unhealthy to my mind, I need to act to free myself from it. In yoga, the principal ethic of satya urges a commitment to the truth in this way. This is not just about telling the truth and not lying. This is about living the truths with your own life. There is no use just knowing the truth and caressing it with our intellect from the cushy armchair of our study removed from reality, we need to live the truth in an imperfect world. This is not an easy path. Yet I want to walk this path because it is walkable. And it is a path that leads to more and more freedom and inner happiness. I sincerely think that we can all be enlightened, I believe that while suffering is a fact of existence, it is not our destiny because we know how to transcend suffering. We fail because we give up before we really try. There is no serious commitment. And when there is no commitment, there is no energy to power change. We need to know that we can, by everyday decisions, liberate ourselves, little by little, from greed, hatred delusions created by an ego-based perspective and develop a more balanced and global perspective. We can arrive at a larger heart by opening ourselves to acting outside of our comfort zones, again and again, without losing heart - because we see the big picture - we want to live in a better way today. While behaving like this may be uncomfortable in the short run (and may even be dangerous!) the knowledge that we are progressing along our path to achieving our greatest self, we will plod on, happily.
The upside is that many problems become petty issues when you made a decision to live what precious time you have in the best possible way to benefit as many people as possible. As the Dalai Lama always teaches: While the group of people you want to benefit includes yourself, the vast number of people other than yourself shifts the locus of your attention beyond the narrow concerns just yourself and your loved ones. We are able to transcend our day to day sense of helplessness and meaninglessness and even with a simple act of choosing what to eat during lunch feel ourselves reconnected to the world that we live in all the time but yet only really participate in part of the time.