I am on a week-long meditation retreat with Jaimal, and Mitsu, several more lovely people, and teacher Steven Tainer (of Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and other places) in Morro Bay, California.

One of the issues I’ve been looking into is related to my moods, or modes of being.

I am strongly affected by light levels and the weather, and have a “sad” mood/mode that roughly corresponds to fall/winter, and a “happy” mood/mode that roughly corresponds to spring/summer. I tend to this interpret this by saying that in the summer, I’m “normal,” and in the winter I’m depressed and anxious.

The symptoms of depression and anxiety are well-known, and for those of you who have never had to deal with a serious bout of depression, I can assure you that it is worse than most things you can imagine. I went through a particularly rough patch this past winter, and literally felt so paralyzed by my negative emotions and thought patterns that I thought I couldn’t accomplish anything (this accomplishment-focus is in itself another mistake/habit). I am normally an “overachiever,” so this feeling unable to achieve is really torturous for me and makes me feel all-the-more useless and worthless when I’m in this state.

One of the most obvious symptoms of anxiety, as it manifests itself for me, is this little “voice” (for lack of a better term, “storyline” might be more appropriate) in my head giving me a running narration of what a huge disaster my life is. Practically all I see are disasters of the past, disasters of the present, and especially disasters to come. The “voice” also tends to tell me everything I’m doing wrong, what a failure I am as a human being, etc. Obviously, this voice is a total pain, a complete distortion of reality, and a hindrance to my living my life in a way that serves myself and others. And, because it is also making me miserable, my desire to silence it is very great! So I tend to be pretty good about my meditation practice in the winter, because practice is very helpful for uncovering storylines like this and seeing them for what they really are, which is necessary to letting go of them.

I went on my first retreat with Steven last November, when I was right in the midst of this. I would have to sit there for hours at a time with nothing to deal with but this voice, which was very hard, and I spent a lot of time crying about how I felt like I had lost my entire connection with the Original Nature (aka God, THIS, Tao, etc) and was totally doomed (which is impossible), but that retreat definitely helped get me through the next few months. And I also had a few other insights that stuck with me, in particular the realization that trying to be still while meditating was a mistake/problem.

And somehow, spring finally showed up again, and a lot of “good” things happened in my life, and the anxious voice went away.

Enter the “happy” phase. Obviously, being happy is pretty great. It’s hard to see that there could be any problem whatsoever with being happy. We tend to think the happier we are, the better, end of story. And I’m definitely not knocking happiness. Thanks to combination of factors, including Portland and a new romantic relationship, I’ve been happier in recent months than I’ve been in several years.

But then my friends started pointing out mistakes I was making. Big mistakes, cases where I was greatly overestimating my own understanding of particular situations, and also cases where I was acting insensitive and self-involved in ways I never usually do, not even in the depths of depression (granted, I’m self-involved in different ways then). All of these things stem from over-confidence, which is not a problem I ever experience in my “sad” mode, so it really took me some time (and some persistent warnings) to realize what I was doing to any extent.

It’s a lot harder to see the need for regular practice when I’m happy. I mean, gosh, when I’m all chipper and excited, I tend to want to be out doing things and talking to people, not sitting on a cushion alone in my room. I’m also less likely to be able to separate what I want from what I need.

But it was very clear, from the very first practice session of this retreat, that the little voice doesn’t usually just shut up when I’m happy at all. It just tells me things I want to hear, instead of things I don’t want to hear. This is a lot less bothersome in everyday life than the anxiety version, which tells me what a wreck I’ve made of everything, but, in a meditation context, listening to your ego telling itself how fantastic it is is really horrifying.

The personal greatness story is no less annoying than the personal failure story. And it’s also quite obviously a distortion of reality, no less a distortion than the idea that I’m a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person. Both that and the idea that I am somehow very, very “special” and “gifted” are based on many, many false assumptions, the most obvious of them being that I am who I think I am.

This story does not help me. Not at all. It leads to many mistakes. But beating myself up for experiencing the voice doesn’t silence it either, it just digs me deeper into the self-consciousness rut. There is no way of exerting effort to try to make it stop that does the trick. So what now?

A few brief notes from Steven’s talks:

Acceptance. Stop trying. Don’t improve. Participate in reality, which is unexceptioned. Have your life. Understanding is not your problem. Stop.

Thanks.

(A favorite from about age 15, this poem was one with which I particularly identified. I registered intensefragility.com ages ago, and still own it, though I’ve never really done anything with it. When I was around 18, I paid a calligrapher to draw the Chinese characters for “intense fragility” for me, with an eye toward getting a tattoo, one character on each wrist. I never did it, but, to this day, whenever I think of getting one, it’s the first thing that comes to mind.)

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I feel like reading love poems. I don’t know what happened to my E. E. Cummings or my Pablo Neruda. They might have been in the box of my books that self-destructed on the way from New York to Portland, or they might have vanished long ago. I read a lot more love poetry when I was younger. Now I read a lot of Rumi, of course, but the Beloved in his poems isn’t so much a person, and there’s relatively little mention of bodies. I want to read about bodies.

Today I took my fourth yoga class in under a week, and my own body already remembers what it feels like to have a regular asana practice. I sometimes think the “yogini me” was a former self, but if I go to a few classes in a row, I can feel that those months in 2003 and 2004 when I was working at Tranquil Space and taking free yoga classes nearly every day will be with me forever. It’s funny how little I knew my body in some ways then; I had never seen the x-ray of my spine with its 22 degree curve, but I could balance on my forearms in the middle of the room.

I’m living in a beautiful house with three women and five dogs and a gigantic rose garden two blocks away. This week, I planted herbs in pots, and I’ve been cooking at home for the first time since I lived with a boyfriend when I was 19. It’s amazing. I get up at 7:30 or 8 a.m., even though I don’t have anywhere to be, and I make my own coffee and cheese grits.

I ate out 3 meals a day in New York, for years. It wasn’t just because I was lazy and the groceries were so expensive, both of which were true; it was also because I didn’t have time. I was so busy I didn’t have time to cook a meal (or take a yoga class, for that matter). I complained about how busy I was as much as the next New Yorker, but I didn’t really realize how busy I was until I left. I was so used to running everywhere, it was like I forgot how to walk, or that walking was even an option. I remember how hard it was to adapt, when I visited Vilcabamba (a small village in Ecuador) the winter before last, and when I was on retreat at Blue Cliff, where one of the primary practices is slow, mindful walking meditation. But then I’d go back to New York, and my old habits came back very quickly, and were made necessary by the life I led there, which included a full-time job, and part-time school all year round, and a hefty schedule of social and church-related commitments.

I had an amazing life in New York, and I am so grateful that I had a job that made it possible for me to live in Greenwich Village, and to experience all the cultural richness of the City, and to graduate from NYU (however belatedly) without student debt, and that was intellectually challenging and interesting and (hopefully) allowed me to contribute something to the world’s understanding of an important topic (how we see).

But, I thought I’d miss it. I thought after a month away from the City I’d start getting antsy and feeling out of touch with the “real world.” I do miss my friends, very much, but I don’t miss my job, and I don’t miss New York. I don’t think it was the “real world” afterall. It’s a good place to spend one’s early twenties, for sure, and I highly recommend living there for a little while, but, up until the second I left I was still telling people I’d probably be back, that I’d get out here on the West Coast and the Village itself would somehow reel me back in. That seems so silly to me now.

If anything, being here in Portland has taught me how very important it is to pay attention to one’s environment. It has far, far more impact on our health and how we feel on a day to day basis than we give it credit for. Places can actually harm us! And places can heal us, and that’s part of why I want some of my New York friends to visit me here so badly. The notion that we are separate from our surroundings is just as false as the notion that we are separate from each other.

Architecture suddenly makes a lot more sense to me as a discipline, and one worthy of utmost respect.