On the theme of hot dogs...

Apropos to the last post, you also find very odd things just walking down the streets of the internet.

The Stubby Hot Dog Man/Woman

I don't really know if other cities function the same as this one. I think, to some degree, there is the invisibility factor, where there is an elevator-like agreement not to look at each other. I remember one Halloween when I, dressed as a Guernsey cow with utter and ears, went shopping in the Haight Street Cala, and all through the store, no one blinked or commented on my attire. That's the norm. Yesterday was a little odd, off the norm for San Francisco, because when I was buying my omega 3 mixture of flax, borage, and primrose oil (that is very SF), the checker at Whole Foods asked if all the nicks and marks on my motorcycle helmet meant that I'd done a lot of falling. We had a nice exchange about that (the marks were from bumping my head on the low overhang behind Adrianne's house in Sacramento, where I used to park the Honda), but the upshot is that that kind of direct comment on something obvious is fairly unusual.

So this morning, before heading out for Santa Cruz (I'm waiting for Heather to finish her Rosen session with Steuart...another very SF thing, bodywork before heading to Santa Cruz to see a "post-zen" spiritual teacher), I went down to the corner coffeeshop to do some work on the notes my marketing coach sent to me. I.e., the notes I've been avoiding since I got them.

On a break in attention, I'm staring out the window, and walking across the intersection is a hot dog on legs, a stubby red and yellow foamy costume worn by an apparently short hot dog lover. Upon reaching the corner, he or she walked around two old Chinese guys who were chatting away, and dropped some envelopes in the mailbox. Then, seemingly happy to have mailed his hot dog letters, the stubby hot dog man/woman walked briskly, and with purpose, down the street and out of my sight. A cop car drove down a minute later, and I wondered whether the cop might pull the man/woman over, perhaps ticketing them for...walking a dog without a leash. Ta da, dum!

1:16:38

So I did it! I ran my first race, a 12k (that's about 7.4 miles) up to the top of Angel Island and back down. My time, according to my wrist watch, was 1 hour, 16 minutes, 34 seconds. I think I finished somewhere in the middle of the pack; the laurels, in this case a rubber chicken and a T-shirt, did not fall to me.

It was a blast, and I was unexpectedly happy to have done it. Not so much to notch my belt, as to have participated in something communal, and to have learned something more about myself. The lack of competitiveness as a group was welcome; there was a sense of all of us doing something together, for literally no other purpose than enjoyment and challenge. The rubber chicken certainly wasn't the motivator. On the way back down the switchbacks, the 12k runners (us) would call down it's line to alert people of the 25k runners coming back up the hill for their second circuit of the route. Often one fellow would yell out attaboys, and we'd often smile to each other. There was a sense of pride in each other, in what we were doing and the limits we were pushing in ourselves. Very sweet.

In myself, what I got to watch was the rise and fall of my mind's deep kvetching. Most of the way up the hill, it kept pretty quiet and neutral, and in fact, the amount of energy and stamina I had was surprising. I passed many people once there was room for me to do so (the switchbacks were almost single lane paths, and in fact, in some areas we had to take forced walking breaks because there was a clog in the traffic ahead--maybe 400 people were running the path at once), and kept up a pace that was brisk and powerful. But then on the last leg up to the summit, the mind began it's low, sapping assessments of the inability to do anything more than it was doing. I tried to use the people in front of me as motivators--there was a way of matching gait and foot placement that seemed to feel like "drafting" a truck, letting it pull your car along with less effort--but twice I stopped and walked. So, that was familiar from my training runs, but what was not was what happened once we crested the hill and started down. It was amazing what pace we kept, not quite sprinting but keeping a serious clip. My legs weren't cramping, my mind was loose, I felt at the end that I could have gone up for the second loop. It was a deeper sensation--I don't know what other word to use for it--than I'd even thought to expect, especially in getting such a visceral and muscular experience of the transitoriness of mind and it's constrictions.

Heather greeted me with her camera, having snapped a victory photo. She had wandered around while I ran, taking pictures of the sights, being Photo Babe. Then the nice folks at Envirosports gave me a race T-shirt, and we hopped on a ferry home.

(You can see me in the dead middle of the pack, 153rd out of 336 runners, by clicking here, and photos at [pending].)

God Blind

I woke up this morning with traces of "The Fear," an anxiety that thins the air and flattens vision. It is thoroughly familiar to me, and as I woke to it my first thoughts were, "Oh, crap, Heather was right to doubt me when I said I was on the verge of deconstructing depression." I think the next thought was, "I'll show her."

So I sat for several hours, not so much to put the screws to "The Fear," but because I was wanting to experiment with engaging the experience. I have been practicing with open-eyed meditation--my tradition of vipassana is always taught with closed eyes--and today I also wanted to see what would happen with concentration if I could find a really comfortable physical posture. I ended up laying on the ground with the portable heater, and though my concentration didn't improve much, I did notice how "held" my body felt, tight and unnecessarily constricted. With my Rosen worker's voice in my head, I looked for what was pleasurable and let my attention be with that, rather than fixating on the pain or "problems."

When I arose, there was still a underlying sense of disconnect, that made it a little hard to feel communion with Heather, but I also noticed that there was not the despair or panic that has often accompanied The Fear. Somewhere in my awareness, like a circus clown in a crowd, I was aware of the insubstantiality of The Fear, and the substantiality of what I have to label as God. Not a real personal God, but not a Glorious Nothingness either, something with enough quality to not be the empty expression of emptiness. Under The Fear was a sense of lightness and continuity, and an understanding of both the ephemeral and essentially empty quality of the Fear, as well as the essential divinity of the total experience I was having--or was having me.

This sense of pervasive divinity--often more of a thought or conviction than experience--has been crystallized by Adyashanti (website) in his writings and talks, and is beginning to really take chunks out of this big old hoary oak tree of a depression that has pinned me to the ground so much of my life. The basic efficacy of understanding that all experience is divine, each thing or happening has exactly the same amount of divinity regardless of its form, is that if you are living a life of seeking God/Buddha/Essence, then wham! you got it! As Willie Wonka sang:

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it…
Anything you want to, do it…
Want to change the world, there’s nothing to it.

Meaning, you don't have to run away from anything. Nothing. Nada. You never have to make a move away from any single experience you have. You never have to move out of yourself or the experience, at the absolute base level. You can rest knowing that it's all essentially safe. Even the pain is as wet with essence as the joy; the ignorance as much as the wisdom. You simply can't escape Essence; you've already found what you're looking for, it's just that, in things like depression, you become God Blind. In snow blindness, the trees and the mountains and cabins and deer and bear and rocks and sky and clouds and dirt and friends and lovers and cactus and Chinese markets and Buddha statues and arms factories and dolphins and hub caps and knee caps--none of it disappears. It's only that your eyes are clouded, and when you forget that, you forget God, and that's why depression is so, so painful. Essentially we are suffering because we have forgotten God. All the symptoms--the irrational fear, the physical aches, the lethargy, the despair--all are tolerable and lovable when you don't lose track of their essential divinity, and the divinity that surround them and you, and is you.

So I think the antidote to God Blindness is remembering, which must be cognitive and embodied. Your body has to remember that the constriction of breath, the tightness of stomach, the bleariness of vision, are not finite--they're phenomenon embedded in an infinite flow--and that you are not reducible to these experiences, and none of it is simply reducible to a hellishly disconnected suffering. When such remembering happens, then the you're not tricked by the pervasiveness of the snow to think that you are cut off from God. You can relax into the cold, and make skillful choices (hey, let's get the heater!) but out of a place of grounded faith, not in a desperate scramble to escape a pit.

This morning, I could recognized the God Blindness as a thing in itself, a process just like that time when I watched a throat cold set in, with steps and stages and particular dynamics. One more wild expression of God, that clown juggling in the crowd, grinning at all the chaos, that helps shock you awake and remember.

Frost kills

Morning at work. The landscapers are trying to save the bouganvilla, which the frost last month nearly killed. It's a gorgeous day, otherwise, other than the gasping plant which we should have covered with burlap. I'd never experienced plants dying by, um, being outside. Well, not firsthand, as the Chronical did report on the losses in the citrus crops. We did take the potted plants into the garage...where, after a few weeks there, came out again like prisoners from solitary confinement--alive, but pale and weak. They're rehabilitating nicely in the milder weather, with new sprouts sticking out of what looked very much like life-abandoned twigs.

But mostly, life seems pretty good today.

Narcissists--with fuzzy or pricks

There's a particular route you have to take to get from areas north of our house to our house, involving a right turn on Geary, then a U-turn in front of New Perspectives, then up Geary to our hood. I was doing this ritual of socio-spacial negotation (i.e., you get a ticket if you turn left on Geary, and aren't a bus), when a grey-silver fancy-pants car (a Mercedes or Lexus?) pulled out from 15th, across the West bound lanes of Geary, to stop right in front of me. Me, waiting to turn in the turn lane: Lady Fancy-Pants, the turn lane is where people turn, HELLO!

So I sit there with the car that costs more than my yearly income parked in front of me, waiting for the cars to pass on the East-bound lane so it can continue on its fancy way. I feel the righteous indignation sort of peaking around the door frame of my psyche, flashing its lashes at me, offering to come in, when the Fancy Lady--squat, grey haired, pugnatious looking--looks me in the eye...and smiles and shrugs. Not in apology, but in a gesture that said something like, "Well, isn't that the way of the world, and isn't this just like me?"

I melted, included in something bigger than the both of us. If you're going to be a narcissist, barging up to the front of the lines of the world, then a bit of self-recognition goes a long, long way towards mitigating the damage. Hear, hear, Fancy Pants Narcissistic Lady!

Service

I'm not at all sure how to apply some insights that came last week, as I was feeling grumpy about my private practice, but they came, and I know they're what I've been looking for. Basically, the sluggishness of my practice has been both painful and mystifying to me for the last year. I've known more or less what to do, logistically, but have dragged ass on actually implementing my ideas.

So what came up early last week was some understanding that the practice I've been trying to build is one I didn't actually want. In the mid-1990's, when I contemplated what I wanted to do with my life, the impetus towards practicing psychology was that of service, rooted in my vipassana practice. It wasn't to build a business per se, or to accumulate money. Yet my efforts this last year have had the background assumption that that's exactly what I had to do, even if I didn't want to. Not having a clear conception of how to do a business or what myself as a business person was, the culture's default model became my own, though not clearly so. I realize now that it's been felt rather than seen, felt as resistance, as a fear or aversion to making contacts, as a general sludginess in building the practice.

I've always heard therapist complain, or interns worry about, the isolation of private practice. For me, the isolation, as in solitude, is not a problem, but rather what it has meant to me under the surface. It hasn't been clear that the setting has felt so atomized, so selfish in a way, in some deep way, stingy.

Recently, I wanted to read a novel, and picked up some mystery my mother had given me years ago. In a different mood, maybe, but it wasn't now. So that was put back on the shelf, and down came Ursala LeGuin's The Dispossessed, the best anarchist science fiction novel ever. I get now why that's what landed in my lap, and I think of how the protagonist, a scientist from an almost 200 year old anarchist culture on a moon, travels to the home planet to live among the "archists." When he realizes that his ideas are intended to be co-opted and controlled by his hosting government, for their gain over others, he feels physically nauseous. And that seems to be what I've been struggling with, this low grade nausea at feeling that I was commodifying the benefits of therapy. Not so much in its structure--it's inevitable that only some are going to have the money and time--but rather in my thinking about the practice and business.

The short of it seems to be that I really do not want to build something for it's own sake. To structure a business that allows me to serve people, that makes sense; but without that sense of service, it feels like hoarding, which comes with a sense of nausea and deep distaste. Like: why would one want to collect anything? I want to get rid of stuff at this point; I don't need more clutter in my world or especially in my own mind. Building walls, making divisions, excluding and segmenting: ugh. It actually has a disgusting feeling to me. My self is already plenty walled that there's no need of actually choosing to make more. The inherent, unconscious wall building of typical capitalist business feels so utterly pointless. Inasmuch as business is "find scarcity and exploit it," I just don't want to do it, and yet, lacking another model, I've been taking the cultural default as the inevitable given.

So now I'm faced with shifting footing and creating and doing my work from a different center, which feels a bit daunting but mostly invigorating. It's just a matter of keeping my head in a certain framework and breaking down the assumptions about what's possible.