Winter Retreat

We are nearing the end of our annual ten-day winter retreat, and the end of a year which has brought so much change, new life, new skills, new perspectives, new friendships, new strategic partnerships, new mentors . . . Michele and I feel profound gratitude for all that has come to us this past year.

We have started integrating the new work into the traditional Buddhist teachings that we have offered here at Manzanita Village for fourteen years – though actually we were never that traditional. We have always stretched the point, always found new ways of integrating and reframing our material. The irrepressible creative spirit in both of us has always seemed reliably abundant.

The promise for the new year is, among many things, a new curriculum which will be transportable and adaptable to multiple situations, from traditional retreats, corporate environments, educational and organizational settings . . tools for activists, tools for entrepreneurs . . . It consists of elements drawn from Buddhist teaching, from traditional healing modalities, from neurolinguistics, from New thought, from multiple strands and trends in current organizational consulting . . . and more . . . above all from vitality and common sense emerging out of the creative wellspring that is rooted in our own inner congruence, joy, and gratitude after this year of learning and transformation.

It is 7:30 in the morning. Frost is on the ground. We still transmit, in a very traditional Buddhist ceremony, the Manzanita Village version of the traditional Buddhist precepts, on this morning on the last day of the year:

1 Aware of the violence in the world
and of the power of non-violent resistance
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the compassion that seeks to protect each living being.

2 Aware of the poverty and greed in the world
and of the intrinsic abundance of the earth,
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the simplicity, gratitude, and generosity that have no limits.

3 Aware of the abuse and lovelessness in the world
and of the healing that is made possible when we open to love
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate respect for the beauty and erotic power of our bodies.

4 Aware of the falsehood and deception in the world
and of the power of living and speaking the truth
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate the ability to listen; and clarity and integrity in all I communicate—by my words and actions.

5 Aware of the contamination and desecration of the world
and of my responsibility for life as it manifests through me
I stand in the presence of the ancestors, the earth, and future generations and vow to cultivate discernment and care in what I take into my body and mind.

An Amoral Universe.

The pervasive idea that good things happen (or should happen) to good people, and that bad things happen to bad people, and that "you get what you deserve" haunts our society and our minds like an old superstition.

I lived in the US for years before I really understood how pervasive this idea is. It is an idea that leads to the conclusion. “Unfortunate things happen to bad people probably because they deserve it.” “God is punishing them.” Basic Calvinism. It seems to me to be irrational and unkind and based in fear.

The idea was used to justify the worst aspects of Capitalism, the colonial adventures of the west during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and the current elitist world-view that supports our ongoing petrochemical-nuclear military-industrial addiction.

Closer to home, the idea that good things happen to good people and bad things to bad people becomes a source of disempowerment and confusion. It derives from a singular and simplistic view that makes people feel guilty for the circumstances of their life. And it is an aberration of the law of attraction because it denies socio-political realities.

The fact is, the universe, or “God”, is amoral. We attribute human qualities of volition and morality to it (to him, or her) - perhaps because we are sentimental.

Humans are volitional and moral, and as humans CAN choose how we live. If we choose to live an ethical life it is not because we are afraid of divine retribution, but because it helps us become accountable. That in itself has value. In fact, it makes morality possibility - a morality not based on fear or compulsion, but based on conscious intention, a desire to be accountable, and an intrinsic desire (and capacity) to love.

Teleseminar Secrets

Alex Mandossian

On Thursday 27th December my newfound colleague and friend Clare Mann and I are going live to our full list of contacts for our third teleseminar together. Check it out at
www.teachteleseminars.com

The medium of Teleseminars is extraordinary. I am not sure that I knew exactly what a teleseminar was a month or two ago. Not a teleconference, not radio. Something else. "Like sitting around a fire together" as my friend Natasha said after our first teleconference the other day.

Clare and I have been taking Alex Mandossian's Teleseminar Secrets course. After the first two modules of the class, conducted as a teleseminar, I am utterly amazed at the content, depth, and sheer quantity of the material presented and the amazing brilliance of Alex.

I now understand marketing to be an art, full of nuance, a communication tool able to solve problems and really help people live better lives by seeing clearly, by cutting through presumptions, fear, and self-imposed limitations. Imagine! I used to avoid the word marketing like the plague!

Combine Alex's integrity with his generosity and with how he over-delivers incredible content, utterly beyond what he promises, and you are in for an altogether amazing experience. (Among other things he keeps teaching to his 800+ students on the course for 7 or 8 hours and a time, answering all the questions that we pose, and providing literally ALL the tools you need to put on and profit by your own teleseminars)

If you are interested in learning more about Alex Mandossian's Teleseminar Secrets check out www.TeleseminarSecrets.com/cmd.php?af=703274&p=1

I am also really jazzed about working with Clare. An Existential Psychologist from the UK, living in New Zealand, and working mostly in Australia. Her work fits beautifully with what we - Manzanita Vilage and Five Changes - already do in our own work in leading retreats and seminars and coaching individuals - looking beyond assumptions, cutting through rigid belief systems, questioning everything, being present. Check out our next teleseminar at www.teachteleseminars.com

More about Clare Mann's work can be found at www.lifemyths.com

Three Meditation Exercises

Three Meditation Exercises. On What It Is Possible to Be, Do, and Have

Reflect on the single greatest obstacle in your life right now; the one that prevents you from becoming the person you might be, the one that prevents you from attaining what it is you most want. It’s best if you write it down. Go ahead. Imagine who you could be, and what you could do, if that obstacle was completely removed from your life.

Now reflect on what you would do if you only had six months left to live. Write it down. What would your priorities be if you knew that your time was limited?

Now reflect on what you would do if you were given ten million dollars, a hundred million dollars. Write it down. Write it down in as much detail as you like.

Now. Know that whatever you can imagine, you can experience.
You can, you really can BE, DO, and HAVE whatever you want. That is the nature of things. . . . If you want it . . . . The choice IS yours.

The idea that wanting is a bad thing is a punishing, life-denying notion. It is an idea with more affinity to Puritan repression than to any authentic spiritual instinct. Craving and clinging may lead to frustration and unhappiness. But Wanting, the setting of clear intention, planning towards the fulfillment of that intention, can bring freedom, joy, and effective ongoing habits towards action.

The thought leads to the word, the word leads to the action, the action repeated leads to the habit, anchored in a new mindset. The world itself is transformed by your desire. And all the living beings there . . . if you want it . . .

Jizo by Michele Benzamin-Miki

Whatever it Takes

I have heard Asian teachers, over the years say, that western science is only now learning things that have been know in India (or China) for millennia—a mirroring of western cultural chauvinism perhaps.

Now neuroscience is the current buzz, and it becomes the latest way to validate old ways of being. Relaxing is good for you. Meditation is healthy. Mindfulness, focus, awareness—all good. Who knew?

Whatever it takes . . . . !

Skillful praxis, skillful means

As a meditation teacher I must believe that the practice of being still is inherently valuable; that ‘being’ informs ‘doing’, that action comes from mind, from our thoughts, intentions, dreams, and desires.

There is more. Coming to stillness is not just an absence of movement. It is a journey into another realm; it is committing to relating to experience itself in a new way. It is also seeing that what we call our self is an invention, a concoction, and ruse. . . .

As a coach, a facilitator of change, I must also believe that there is no single way, no single view of things, no construct, no metaphysical representation, no psychological lens with which to view the world, that is automatically sufficient, nor even that is inherently true.

Any ‘true’ system dissolves its own tenets, sees through itself, and would claim for itself only that it is a skillful praxis —a movement towards freedom. Freedom being something you can define only by saying what it is not. Because it is not conditional on anything. It has no intrinsic qualities.

Why is this so hard to get?

Buddhist teaching in one sentence, “Everything is interconnected, therefore everything matters.”

The first and most important thing to know for living, working, surviving the twenty-first century, developing amazing relationships, running a successful business, practicing Permaculture, Medicine, History, Architecture, Farming, or any other deep Art:
“Everything is interconnected, therefore everything matters.”

The first and most important thing to know and practice for doing anything whatsoever—in one word (two, actually):
“Kindness, love.”

Buddhist teaching in two words: “Kindness, love.”

Ideas and Expereince

Ideas arrive fresh as an ocean breeze. If the mind is the cause of what we experience in our life, then all the circumstances we experience are the effects. Of course, the two are intertwined and together co-create the fierce power of life, which is love, which is presence, and energy, and creativity. How you name it is not important. I do not want to oversimplify or make a platitude. This is a model, a metaphor; and hopefully, it is also a tool.

It is something you can feel behind your own eyes, this freedom, or see it in the eyes of others. You can feel it inside your own heart, and in the words and presence of others. . . . . If you want.

When you stop imagining that anything can oppress you—and you CAN choose to do that—you understand that your only choice is freedom! Freedom is unconditional, not because it has no flavor or particularity (it is as rich and varied as life itself), but because there is nothing that can ever pollute its many flavors. Anything, any situation, can open the door to this freedom if you let it, and where it leads you is as particular as who you are. Unique!

Understand that it is not freedom ‘from’ something. Nor is it freedom ‘toward’ something. It is not permission nor is it the lifting of restrains. It is something altogether beyond those singular functions.

A hawk lifts off the telephone line, and hovers; or a swan flies up from the water, soaring and soaring, until almost out of sight. And a distant galaxy, barely visible with the naked eye on a dark night, does cartwheels across the sky.


--"Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion. But even here if a person is sincere, he will realize that his highest religious experience is nothing more than an uncertain, obscure and faint perception of Truth; whereas, no matter what kind of mystical experience he has, he will feel the intensity, immensity and certainty of Truth." Chinmoy

Fire

Thanks to everyone who contacted us last week with concerns about the fires in San Diego county. We are fine, and Manzanita Village is unscathed, though we are now hearing from friends who lost their homes.

I am also hearing that for the most part people are in amazingly good spirits. There were reports last week of people evacuated to the Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego who were singing together and dancing, and enjoying each other's company, even though some knew that their house had burned to the ground.

Someone I know said, "It's okay, I've been through things much worse than this. The family is safe, we're okay!" As if it takes a fire like this to remind us of our priorities and to bring us back to our basic appreciation and gratitude for what we have.

What I do now

To see the world anew, to change old responses, to disentangle from singular points of view. To let rigidity turn to flexibility. To breathe. To rely on kindness . . .

What I learned when I was first studying gestalt and hypnotherapy twenty years ago was that the client tells you everything you need to know.

Now I extend that to mean: let the world tell you what you need to know. Everything is a sign, both of itself, and of something beyond itself. So, as a coach, as a teacher, as a human being, my task is to learn to read the magic of the world. Magic, because it is not visible at first. Then, as each layer peels away, it’s hard to imagine that what is underneath was ever invisible.

I don't want to assign any special power to myself. What I am describing is available to anyone who takes the trouble to look.

Now as a coach and hypnotherapist, and as a teacher and workshop leader, my basic work is to turn this process into a collaboration, and to transmit as fully as I can the understanding that change is absolutely possible, and that entirely new ways of being, thinking, and feeling are actually available. All you need is enough commitment to begin the process.

The work has become so effective that clients have sometimes forgotten why they came to it in the first place. In a few short weeks they have transformed their life, and now wonder why they ever had the notion that they needed help<

I have to remind them why they came, then tell them how truly capable they are, and how brilliant they are at solving problems!

Drive Yourself Sane!

After years of pulling against the elastic chains of a Buddhist identity I succumbed last June to the exquisite recognition (not that I hadn’t been exploring this, writing about it, teaching it – for years!) that no single idea is fundamentally better than any other; that perceptions, and the ideas that we derive from them, are overlays, projections, extraneous extras!

I understood on some new, and much deeper level, that identity/ies really are overlays. We can simply peel them away. You’d think that after decades of Buddhist practice, and after changing my sex, I would have understood something about this. Now doubt I did; it's just that such things are like journeys, always inviting you further into uncharted lands.

It’s strange and interesting how change itself gets reified, charted, fossilized into the constructs we make of it – ‘impermanence’ as an item of faith among Buddhist dogmatists, or gender deconstruction as its own version of tyranny in the hands of certain feminists and gender queer folks.

And still we live in a world of monumental violence and destruction, oppression, denial and mind-boggling stupidity. So I have also come to appreciate, more than ever, the essential need for exquisite and complete accountability and flawless integrity.

And that’s another can of worms right there!

Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski
Drive Yourself Same by Susan and Bruce Kodish

Chris Howard

So . . . I was listening to the radio in April – KPFK –The Aware Show, which is sometimes interesting and sometimes incredibly annoying (all that new age guff!) I was listening to someone talking about his problem with The Secret – how it got people stuck in the idea that they were to blame for their misfortune. Indeed The Secret embodies assumptions of privilege that make most of my friends avoid it like the plague.

(Actually, there are some valuable suppositions in the movie, such as that very Buddhist understanding that we create the world through our thinking, and that how we do so is very much dependent on emotional states. Unfortunately, they are couched in assumptions of privilege and entitlement that obscure the complexity of our collective circumstance – Empire and global destruction . . . but I digress)

So . . . this person, who turns out to be a man named Chris Howard, begins to speak of how, if he were to talk to someone at Darfur or to someone who had been badly abused as a child, and if he got the chance to bring up the subject, he would ask, “If you could imagine that there was a positive lesson that you could carry with you from this what would it be?”

So my partner and I decided to go to the free three day workshop being offered in LA. “We need a kick in the butt,” she said.

We were reluctant participants, kicking and screaming from the start. “By a show of hands who would like more money in their lives?” Twelve hundred people put up their hands. Oh Lord! I'm way too cool for this! Then in the breaks there was dancing in the aisles. Oh No! I’m a Buddhist teacher I just don’t do this kind of stuff! It took us a day and a half to stop whining and to decide we were actually learning a lot, and to admit that Chris Howard is actually a brilliant teacher. So we decided to fly up to San José to take the workshop again the following month; and not to waste the first half of it complaining!

At that second workshop we danced in the aisles a lot, and signed up for a full program of training with the Chris Howard folks. In the process we spent more money than we though we had. And that was okay. It was a breakthrough to take care of ourselves in this way.

It is the end of June and I have now just finished three weeks of the training. What I am learning is astonishing and delightful. My work as a life coach is utterly transformed and rejuvenated. I am revising everything I am doing, not only as a coach, but as a Buddhist teacher, as a facilitator of change, as an activist, as a human-being. . . .

The website doesn't really convey the spirit of this work. Regardless, I must say, I do trust the integrity of this company Chris Howard Seminars

Image of Darfur at top of page from
shalomrav.wordpress.com/category/darfur/

Rhythms laid down before human memory

What enters the conscious mind is such a small part of our life. We draw from depths that are hidden to us, depths we feed and that feed us; disturb or are disturbed by us; depths that allow us to connect to life, or cut us off from life.

Most of what we are is determined by elements within ourselves that we have been unconscious of. Yet the invitation is always there to open, to trust, to soar.

So it is with the wild world that surrounds us. We imagined it was subdued by the twentieth century, yet it remains, in the movement of the wind, in the eye of bird, and always in our own hearts, and in the hearts of those we meet

And our hearts still beats with a rhythm that was laid down before human memory. Through this continuing emergency of wars and global devastations there is a natural capacity for healing and self-remembering that draws us home to those ancient roots, a power and wisdom that we know in our bones.

The Buddha spoke of it, and pointed the way, though it is not exclusively Buddhist in nature. That rhythm is still open to us. Perhaps now, more than ever before, there is a calling to come home to that rhythm, to come home to more than who we have been.