A Month of Metta

There is a wave in our culture that values practice over achievement. A cadre of tie dyed hearts who encourage us to play, observe, soften, and experiment instead of hammer down an unbending path towards a clearly defined goal. The space of practice, of disciplined playfulness and gentle committedness to return and return and return to a task that at best may feel meaningless but occasionally is downright painful, paradoxically generates a deep sense of accomplishment. 

Perhaps it's just masochism. Wheee!

But it is very clear to me that love, kindness and soft-relating need practice in my world. In particular softening to my own experience, observing rather than judging my reactions, playing at my life rather than performing it like every day is a doctoral dissertation, is often not easy. 

So in characteristic goal-oriented fashion I declared July the month of metta*. I expressly dedicated my time on the cushion to lovingkindness toward myself. Every day. As they say, charity begins at home.

Below are some reflections from the month - an offering to anyone looking for love.

O, what a tangled head we weave.

I.

I commit to sitting every day and sending myself lovingkindness. I invite friends in my spiritual community to join me and sit daily for one minute or more and wish love to themselves in whatever words ring true. I seek to be comfortable where I sit. I strain to recognize my own inner voice of compassion. I feel for my heart and relax into it when I can.

II.

I conjure a mental image of myself and when I find one that moves my heart I recite to that woman in my mind:

may you be happy

may you be at ease with suffering

may you be safe

may you be healthy

may you be peaceful

may you be free of suffering

III.

I start out sitting 20-30 minutes a day. I average 18 minutes. I sit on my own 27 out of 31 days. I know this because there’s an app for it. God I love technology.

IV.

I spend a good amount of time finding my favorite bell on the meditation timer on my iPhone. It's better than the marimba, or the cricket. I'd like something clean and clear. Some of the sounds are tinny and cheap, like some Indian import I bought at Cost Plus. One bowl is too high pitched, a shrew, a nag. The gong warbles like a drunk in danger of falling over. I find my favorite. I hear it for about 5 seconds a day. I smile and sigh.

V:

When I sit in vipassana my mind wanders, most often to plans, calls, connections to make. These relations, explanations and interpretations all seem to shore up an identity. Medieval buttresses. Mind building mind.

I:

Monday: I set the intention to really relax with my thoughts in vipassana, which I will follow with metta. So often I react to the drifting. It feels like a tightening in my chest, a condemnation that wordlessly constricts my throat. How counterproductive judgment and frustration at mind's natural wandering are to metta practice. “Real-time non-judgmental awareness” as Noah Levine calls it. My minutes in metta glow.

VII:

I envision a woman kneeling behind me, her hands smoothing my hair, calming the storming mind. It feels like a saint's mantle streaming from my crown.

VIII:

All the day's frustrations rush back to me: when I was passive/aggressive, when I was impatient, when I rigidly clung to my plan. I feel my being tighten as I sit. Then I think: these are what need compassion. These are what I will hold in my embrace. I hug my own tight spots.

IX:

My heart opens in the calm of meditation. I have been looking at shelters for months. I met a tortoiseshell kitten last week. I am so clear that I want to adopt that kitty. 

X:

I cannot feel the warmth of my heart. The other day sitting with my hands crossed over my heart I felt softness, warmth, a compassionate seed growing, pulsing. Now there's only tension, and my mind wanders to the restrictions in my life, to the areas I feel tight. My heart beats tight in its bands.

XI:

My body feels too much, too big. I place my hands on my belly just below the navel, the point in Chinese medicine called the dan tien. It is so uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. I raise one hand to my heart. With this connection, I find more ease in my belly.

XII: 

A four month old kitten named Kriya lands in my life on July 13. The sleeplessness is mostly blissful, and revelatory. How challenging for me to root into self-compassion when something else, someone else, presses in on me. All of a sudden, my mind has a project.

I get caught in a whirlpool of ego and purpose. Worry presses in on me. My self care slips. Sitting for any length of time is a struggle.

XIII: 

I chant metta phrases at the shelter, surrounded by caged animals. Dozens of lives. May you be healthy. May you be safe. I stand there with eyes closed wishing them well.

XIV:

There are great moments when I am aware of my kitten’s experience. She is Present. Utterly in the moment. Inclusive. Unapologetically rooted in her life. She is always in walking meditation on four paws.

XV: 

I spend a weekend in movement and stillness at Against the Stream with Kate Shela and Matthew Brensilver. I dance my compassionate experiment. As if in aftershock, I find myself gesturing when I express myself later that week, moving the emotional energy through my hands like I'm in tai chi practice.

XVI:

Coming to crosslegged after an ecstatic wave of dance, I feel like I’m slotting myself into a cinderblock bunker with no roof. How much rigidity I bring to my sitting practice. How joyless this makes it. Listening to Pema later that night I hear: there is nothing harsh about it. We joyfully return to the breath.

XVII:

Having watched the sky lightening from 4am, I get up and go to 7am yoga. I am sure the restless tension and toxic exhaustion that plagued my rest will keep me from rooting in to the class. Half of the sludge flows out of me in the first forward fold.

XVIII:

I am struck by the value of community. I need not force myself out of quiet or solitude, even when I crave company. Other hearts beat and warm the space below my palms whenever I sit in metta.

XVIX:

Ananda asked "Is it true what has been said, that good spiritual friends are fully half of the holy life?"

The Buddha replied, "No, Ananda, good spiritual friends are the whole of the holy life. Find refuge in the Sangha community."

XX:

Mindfulness is the safe space inside us between suppression and entanglement. I sit at the apex. I breathe love.

XXI:

I cannot sit when I’m exhausted. Thirty minutes of dream drift. Or can I? The bell sounds, three spacious chimes.

XXII:

I fear I’m metta-washing my experience. Some nebulous anxiety rumbles, refusing to be suppressed. It cries and worries just below the surface of the metta phrases I repeat.

XXIII:

Caffeine is not helping my sitting practice. But I crave that buzz. My heart beats, but it’s fuzzed over by the static of the drug. Caffeine is not helping any of my life practices.

The shit and the bliss.

XXIV:

I hear the kitten on the kitchen counter and my eyes fly open. I lose my seat to shoo her. I take my seat again nine hours later after work. I hear the kitten on the kitchen counter. Something in me sighs. Maybe she’ll get bored. A moment later I hear her jump down. Or maybe I will.

XXV:

After nearly a month of practice I discover I recite phrases of compassionate self-love like a military cadence. Boots on blacktop. It hits the empty bowl of my heart like a wood tocsin.

XXVI:

I sit with my back supported. I slip into the comfort of breathing. This simple space of breath is the most compassionate space I can be in. Nothing needs to change.

XXVII:

It will be over in the blink of an eye. Love yourself.

XXVIII: 

For a few unmarked minutes after the bell sounds, I hold my heart. I change my mantra. May you be compassionate. May you be curious about your own experience. May you be healthy. May you be safe. I am.

*Wikipedia defines metta or maitri as loving-kindness, friendliness, benevolence, amity, friendship, good will, kindness, close mental union (on same mental wavelength), and active interest in others. It is one of the ten paramis of the Theravada school of Buddhism, and the first of the four sublime states (Bramaviharas). This is love without clinging.

Pema Chodron on metta

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-rRMUl04I

5 Rhythms, a moving meditation

http://www.kateshela.com/rhythms.htm

Insight Timer

(Wheee!)

https://insighttimer.com/

The shape of the Earth as we know it.

This morning I woke up with a ravenous soul. The weekend promised a much-needed respite from both the excitement and the drain of spring's rambunctious pace.


I knew exactly what I craved to replenish my inner well: the rich deliciousness of photography. I hungered for texture. For the rhythm of a substance, the flow and dance that all the materials in this world hold when we take the time to stop and look.


After this outward, social, breakneck week I was ready stop and look, and let art's vision fill the hollows in my heart, the welcoming warm space throbbing in my chest.


I looked over gallery listings as I took care of my empty tummy. I'd read about an exhibit of Ansel Adams' work in conjunction with Sierra Club at G2 Gallery months ago, and though I have a date with my dad for a Venice art adventure on the closing weekend of the show, I headed over to Venice.


Ansel's bespectacled face peers up at me from the cover of time magazine (September 3, 1979) in a case in the center of the warm upstairs gallery space that also holds his first Kodak Brownie.

The photos are mostly from the National Parks, and the original 1950 Portfolio Two stands like a monolith in a shadowbox in a corner of the gallery. That goofy smiling image seemed somehow at odds with the resonant black and white forms, the silent landmasses and snowdrifts and leaf prints ringing the room, as well as the exuberant holiness of Walt Whitman's poem* on the folio frontispiece.


You have seen these images. They are as megalithic a cultural phenomenon as the synergy of earth, air, water and light Ansel shot. And they are so humble, too. Just the play of the camera, just the result of light on coated paper, just snapshots. Just.

A picture of Schoodie Point in Maine opens to a great flat stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, articulated in the foreground by rocks below the water's surface. The water cascades from high to low, arcing over the rock, made gentle by the break in the surface level.

Were I there to study photographic technique I'd linger at the forest at Mount Rainier, a perfect composition as far as I can tell.

The texture of a jagged stump where a moth alights for a moment looks like ice floes were caught in the wood long before it split apart, cleaved maybe by the yearly sequence of freeze and thaw in Glacier Bay.

The streaked cliffs of Canyon de Chelly dwarf the millenia old dwellings niched in a pocket in the cliff face, dwarf the trees massed in the foreground. The image is called White House ruins.

One shot of a rock pile in Joshua Tree struck me less for the image than the caption. Joshua Tree was made a National Park in 1994. I went out there for the first time with my high school buddies in 1991. At that time it was still Joshua Tree National Monument. We enjoyed the great outdoors in that way that young folks do, irreverently and lightly and easily, in full joy of the absence of any authority other than the landscape itself, in awe of the desert's stillness and the revelation of an uninterrupted dome of stars from one horizon to the other which commanded our hearts at night. It inspired no undue religiosity and we understood the word "awesome."


Though I've become used to framing spaces like these in geologic time - a slow eroding that eludes the sense of one human's lifetime - yet what a transformation happened in my time when it became Joshua Tree National Park. This brought a ringing awareness of how conservation absolutely happens in the present tense. The whole expanse of it is there for us, for inspiration, education, and recreation.


Ansel's black and white image of the forest at dawn in the Great Smoky Mountains drains the rainbow foliage but replaces color with kinetic energy. The eye ricochets from shape to shape, alighting on one tree top after another. The tree's shapes seem sculpted by sparks, caught fire, as the sun ignites each tiny leaf. They look like bright ashes that, stilled by the camera, promise to dance down when we stop holding our breath.

Ansel talks about the genre of landscape photography in a way that preferences the individual's artistic engagement with what she sees: "a creative experience, in which the fact that it is a landscape, is incidental, perhaps accidental, and secondary in importance to the fact that...a subjective experience was created and expressed."


How lucky I am to have engaged so many of the places Ansel photographed: Sonoma County, Glacier National Park, the Snake River in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. And how proud I am to be part of the Sierra Club. There is probably not a single bone in my body that could be called political, but about the world around me and its beauty I am passionate, and that reverence for nature stirs me to action. On the most basic level, my journey has been self serving, because I love these spaces and how they nourish me. A quote at the entrance to the exhibit said much the same about Ansel: regardless of what he did for us, he did it all for himself.


I knew that today was Earth Day, but I did not realize that Earth Day is the anniversary of Ansel Adam's death, April 22, 1984**. What a beautiful memorial.

G2 Gallery
http://www.theg2gallery.com/


Sierra Club
http://www.sierraclub.org/


*Excerpted from "Starting from Paumanok" by Walt Whitman:


Each is not for its own sake,
I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.


I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is.


**A bit about Ansel Adams:


Born in San Francisco in 1902, Ansel chose experiential education over formal schooling, and first visited Yosemite at age 12. His amazing images served to inspire and awe with their beauty, and to gently raise awareness about conservation. His association with the Sierra Club began in 1919, and he later served 34 years on their Board of Directors. He mounted an exhibition in 1955 in collaboration with the Club, and his book Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail, was instrumental in moving President Roosevelt to designate King's Canyon National Park in California.

Where are your feet planted?

I think a lot about my feet. They are my foundations, after all: the roots to my tree pose in yoga, the vehicle for exploration, a way to connect to the earth ( those long solitary hikes in the canyons north of Malibu), and the key to my mobility (even when it's just those twenty steps I take to get in my car to drive to my next destination).

Longhouse ladder, Northern Vietnam.

I thought a lot about my feet when I was traveling through Southeast Asia. I was backpacking after all, so my foundations were taking on another 15 or so kilograms and an untold number of kilometers.

And I've owned a lot of shoes. Not necessarily the ones that immediately spring to mind when a woman mentions shoes, either. I'm talking about trail runners, cross trainers, MBTs and well-made boots. I'm talking about moccasins, cork-soles, clogs and comfort-engineered flats. Though you might find a pair of patent leather pumps for fancy occasions amongst the Clarks and Danskos, I've invested in lots of different shoes to keep my body in healthy alignment and happily pain free.

I took two pairs of shoes with me on my trip: a brand new pair of light, low top hikers purchased four weeks prior to my trip from the local sporting goods store that was going out of business, and a very old pair of Teva sandals that I purchased the day I started UCLA back in 2001.

Angkored feet. Pre Rup, City of Angkor.

I've hated those sandals for years (about ten years, now that I see the figures in front of me). They are light gray synthetic material with coral accents. In theory, they can take me slipping through rivers, get kicked off by the campfire and be equally supportive pounding the city pavement. In reality, they always made my sensitive right knee ache a bit and my feet kind of stinky from the incubation of sweat and dirt on the plastic petri dish sole for hours at a time. And I guess I was always a little grossed out to see the swirling patterns of dirt crusted into my toe prints at the end of a day and mirrored like a Rorschach blot inside the sandals.

What I noticed in traveling, though, is how my feet toughened up. My first hint of it was on the beach in Nha Trang. There is little else to do in this central Vietnam town except enjoy the waterfront. I woke up, put on my swimsuit, grabbed my towel, and walked across the street to the beach after a quick breakfast of fresh banana, pineapple, dragonfruit and mango and very strong french-style coffee.

I peeled off my sandals to sink into the beach experience, and walked to a high spot on the sand near a pair of European tourists. They were sipping green bottles of Saigon beer and frolicking in and out of the waves. (I checked my watch and it was before 9am. No judgment. I don't usually drink beer at 8 in the morning, but then I don't usually sunbathe that early either.)

Occheuteal Beach, Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

My feet burned on the coarse white grains as I walked. The kind of warm, tingly burn you get when you put your feet in hot bathwater after a day on the ski slopes. I spent a day and a half walking along the turquoise verge of the South China Sea, and eventually I stopped noticing the hot jagged-edged sand.

Other jarring experiences befell these tender feet throughout the trip. After a rainy day of hiking in the hills of Sapa in the far north of Vietnam, right near the border with China, I lost my big toe nails. My feet were water logged and pruney when I finally peeled off my soggy socks. A white ridge ran the width of my big toenails where the top layer of the nail sort of buckled up. Eventually the last quarter inch of the nail simply peeled away.

I got hot spots on my instep and the ball of my left foot. Blisters puffed up on the inside of my pinkie toe, which likes to sneak under the adjacent fourth toe when I'm trekking long distances, much to its disadvantage. Bedbugs and mosquitoes left a constellation of itchy red bites of varying magnitude that it took all my discipline to ignore. And I got used to seeing my feet dirty, powdered with the red dust of Cambodia.

The last day of my trip I stood on the veranda of Wat Mahathat in Bangkok, staring at the feet of a saffron-clad monk in front of me. "Stepping, lifting, forwarding," he instructed us in the mindfulness of walking meditation. I looked at his feet. Callouses lightened the caramelly skin in spots, and a rim of white, dry, cracks defined his heels and big toes. The toenails were craggy. He lifted one foot slowly, where it hovered over the cool pavers momentarily lost in his robes, until the heel softly met the gray stone.

Reclining Buddha. Nha Trang, Vietnam.

By the time I got back to Los Angeles I loved my old sandals. I kept grabbing for them despite the chill winter temperatures that normally bring me chilblains this time of year. I was used to having my feet exposed to the elements, and the skin was thicker, more resilient. My foundations had been transformed.

Last week I got my first pair of five finger shoes, those little split toe sheaths that are as close to barefoot as any urban dweller would sensibly be. I recall I almost broke my toes when I tried on a pair in a sporting goods shop in Hawaii in 2010. I would be hiking through ochre mud up to a waterfall on Kauai and I was sure my Tevas would not hack it. I'd heard how five finger shoes can improve your muscle tone and bring you back into alignment, and my yoga teacher swore by the barefoot lifestyle. "These things have got to be terrible for you. Not enough cushion between me and the world. I'm sure they'll make my knee/back/hip hurt," I thought to myself in that shoe store in Hawaii. My inner skeptic and reluctant consumer battled with the sunshine-and-lollipop part of me that is sure the open market has a fix for anything that ills me.

Walking around town at the weekend in my new shoes I felt like a poster child for REI. But I could feel my feet. I felt light. And I got that there is nothing wrong with any of my shoes. Nor is there anything wrong with me that a pair of shoes will ameliorate. There is nothing wrong with my feet, which erstwhile spent so much time cloistered in Italian leather boots, pumiced to vulnerable smoothness, with toenails painted to a gainly shine. My feet have toughened up. It may hurt a bit when I make contact with the hard surfaces of the world. It may register in my feet, or in a more subtle place in my being. But those hard surfaces become less so the more mindfully I walk. I continue lifting and forwarding and stepping, noticing all the while where my feet are planted.

In Phnom Penh.

Postscript: as soon as my toenails finish growing back in I'm going to get a pedicure!

Eat it or wear it!

In my early twenties I worked for an English firm that specialized in toiletries and fine comestibles. The connection between food and soap was jarring and unnatural to some (the same people who squinch up their noses at my favorite lavender fondant chocolates from Harrod’s of London, or rose saffron ice cream at Mashti Malone’s in Hollywood, or perhaps even the juniper nose out front of a Pliny the Elder from Russian River brewing). But in fact the best soaps and lotions as well as the best lunches come straight from the garden. Nature inside and out.

With the trend toward natural organic products we’ve all seen soaperies alongside berries at our local farmers market, and we've trod the miles of aisles in Whole Foods dedicated to lotions and potions, natural toothpaste and cosmetics. If you’re looking for a local gem from Portland come to Camamu.

Two lovely women named Sarah and Laurie handmake an amazing range of soaps in a converted residential property on Clinton street in a neighborhood full of artisanal breakfast joints. You can stop in to Compote for a spoonful of their signature berry goodness, then hop across the street to gobble up soaps that are totally natural, vegetable and gorgeous.

A table piled high with every variety of soap greets you when you enter the Camamu. I stood transfixed reading the simple ingredient labels and indulgently sniffing each bar. The names of their signtuare blends made me smile. The Lovely la LouLi (rhymes with Patchouli) is a bright orange bar crusted with safflower petals. Atlas Scrubbed, Lucky Lemongrass, Green Goddess, Zen Yen. Also on display are Sarah Love’s handcrafted inspirational works: decks of brightly lettered round cards that remind you to release expectations or enjoy your body with every breath.

When my olfactory glands were finally exhausted from breathing in the soapy goodness, I looked around. The shop, properly speaking, is a workshop. Brightly colored canvases painted by a local artist decorate the walls. The center of the space, though, is a huge worktable in the middle of the old house kitchen. A huge 60 gallon vat of olive oil stands next to the side door. A main ingredient in all of the soaps, the barrel gets refilled about every 6 weeks.

Each Camamu bar is a cornucopia of amazing ingredients that you might pull from the pantry for lunch. When I visited, Sarah was at work on about a 60 pounds of soap. The soap is made in batches in large trays that remind me of brownies in a cake pan.  Once the soap has set, the tray is sliced into bulk slabs with a custom wood and wire cutter, then further down into bars. Each tray weighs twenty pounds, which translates into 80 perfectly sized bars. Leaning in to a calmly speckled blue gray slab I inhaled the slight licorice scent of the neem flower. The mottled leopard print blocks contain coffee, perfect for the kitchen since the coffee naturally neutralizes odor.

I was smitten with the first Camamu bar I tried: Unreprentant Rose. The scent is as fresh and light as the rose blooming in your garden, rather than hyped up and perfumey, and the lather is soft and silky. My skins tends toward dry, and I was amazed at how soft and smooth I felt out of the shower, even on my face: healthy helpings of olive oil, milk, and the essential oils add the right blend of scent and moisture to each bar.


I stocked up on pooch bar shampoos for the sensitive-skinned dogs in my life. And I couldn’t leave without half a dozen yummy bath bars: another Unrepentant Rose for those days where I am feeling girly; sweet and mild Miel Oat; Rosehip Mint; the rich earthy scent and swirled brown and cream color of See The Forest Soap; and Lovely la LouLi.  My mouth watered reading about Hops in the Bath (hops are a natural anti-inflammatory), Chocolate Bliss which contains vanilla bean and cocoa, and the green tea infused Zen Yen. Which are destined for friends and which ones are for myself remains to be seen. 

The only bad thing about visiting the Camamu shop was the dozens of varieties I didn’t take home. Mildly therapeutic or just downright luscious scents like Summer Garden, with palmarosa and sweet orange, Queen Bee, with mallow and calendula, and naturally anti-microbial Turmeric Tonic are next on my list. Luckily, the lovely ladies at Camamu ship, so all the blends I didn’t take home this time are just a few clicks away.


And then, back home in Los Angeles, the quandary of which bar to pop open in the shower first. What a delectable treat.

Camamu

2021 SE Clinton Street

Portland, OR

http://camamusoap.com/