My trip to Deer Park

This past Monday was a special day for me.  Since it is also a difficult time in my life, I chose to "celebrate" by getting away - booking a retreat at Deer Park Monastery in Escondido.  This is a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monastery that lives together in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition of Buddhism, which places a special emphasis on mindfulness:  Mindful eating, mindful walking, mindfulness in every aspect of lives.  Paying attention the breath, the dishes, your steps, being PRESENT to each moment - continually arriving.  Continually coming home.

In light of this, I have decided to start a new blog... to chronicle my experiences with the practices of mindfulness in my life.  How I get away from it, how I gently return to it, and what I observe along the way.  At Deer Park everything is meditation.  It becomes something of playful joke - to the point that when I would go to the bathroom I would think of "urination meditation."  The point, of course, is to pay attention, to be fully present to the experience of the moment, and to remember that this moment is the only moment there is, and that mindfulness reveals its wonder.

Or does it?  While there, we watched a dharma talk on dvd given by Thay (Thay is Vietnamese for "teacher" or "my teacher" and it is what Thich Nhat Hanh is called by his students.  When I am at the Monastery, I embrace Thay as my teacher, and so I speak of him here a bit more personally than I did when, say, I referenced his writings in my master's thesis).  In the dharma talk, Thay listed four aspects of the simple mind (I forget his term for it - people call it ego, the Buddha talked about the untrained mind, etc.).  Characteristic 1: Seeking pleasure.  2: Avoiding suffering.  3: Not seeing the danger of pleasure seeking.  4: Not seeing the value of suffering.

When I got to Deer Park I was suddenly confronted with myself.  My phone left in the car, I was suddenly without the distractions that kept a gap between me and deeply touching where I am in life.  No phone meant no texting.  I don't have facebook on my phone, but I had no computer, which meant no facebook.  It meant no turning to others to run from Jonathan.  So for the first day and a half I was at Deer Park, I was not happy.  I was scared.  I was lonely.  I was grieving.  I was facing where I was, and where I was was difficult.  I was grieving a marriage that ended a year and a half ago.  I felt the grief pot sitting inside of me and was shocked by how much loss and pain I had not felt in that interim time.  I felt the pain of being alone.  I felt the pain of "failed life" as my judgments poured over it.  I felt loss, depression, grief, sadness, failure.  At Deer Park there are a few "Gathas" (something like breath mantras) that we use for walking meditation.  One is "I have arrived; I am home."  Another is "Present moment; wonderful moment."  Well, if I had arrived home, home was a hard, scary place.  And it was not present moment, wonderful moment.  It was "Present moment; Terrifying moment."  And I think that's what mindfulness is.  A confrontation with the present.  It's not a spiritual bypassing or brainwashing trick designed to make you feel rosy all the time.  It's coming home to where you are, even if where you are is broken.

By the middle of the second day something shifted.  I don't know what.  Perhaps it was as simple as taking a shower, but I began to sink more deeply into the practice.  I began to embrace where I was rather than fight it - I really had no choice.  No phone, no texting, not a lot of ways to get away from me.  Something shifted.  Perhaps I just needed to face where I was and realize it could not consume me.  I've always been somewhat afraid of myself.  Afraid of arriving, afraid of coming home.  I used to inventory fears, and so many of my fears - as the layers were peeled back - came down to a core fear of being left alone, "abandoned."  I have spent my life afraid of being by - and with - myself.  Not knowing how to live at peace with that person, needing others to validate, affirm, and give purpose to my being.  And perhaps my truest struggles to be in community, relationships, etc. stem from the fact that I first and foremost have not known how to be at home in myself.  Present moment;

wonderful moment - even if that moment is scary, sad, or lonely... which it often is.  So I continued the practice of mindfulness into the weekend.  There were even times I chose to be mindfully unmindful.  Let myself walk quickly or eat slightly faster than I knew I was "supposed to."  Then I would slow down and come home to myself.  Today, I know there is a lot of fear that lives inside of me.  But I know too that there is joy... and a lot of gratitude.  For what?  I am not sure.  For the fear and sadness, for the ability to walk with that, and breathe it in.... acceptance, even when I might feel unacceptable.

The other profound realization (or re-realization) from this weekend was that I am not my mind.  And thank God.  I can't imagine a greater tyranny under which to live than this torrent of judgments, commentary, ideas, plans, "problems", and "solutions" to my problems.

So this blog is about mindfulness.  About my continued journey with it and my practice of it.  The things I run into as I practice mindfulness in odd and perhaps not-so-odd circumstances.  Like my coworker who asked me "I saw you walking into work today, are you sore from working out?"  "A little," I said, "but mostly I was just walking mindfully into work, trying to extend the practice from this past weekend."  I hope you enjoy and benefit from my reflections.  I hope to return to Deer Park soon.  Perhaps for another weekend, and eventually a full week - maybe even longer.  Whoever you are, and wherever you are, I hope you can be there.  One step - one breath - at a time.