Clearwater to Nina’s house, via Venice

It has been over a week since I moved on from a week at Nina’s house north of Tallahassee, FL and I haven’t even reported on my stay with her and how I came to be there again. When I was there she introduced me to her friend Bill at the Wildcat Creek Educational Center in Blountstown, FL where I am now. But that will be the subject of my next post!

Saturday the 10th of March came around and it was time for me to leave my sister Becky’s house in Clearwater, FL. Soon thereafter the house would be a bit over-full and I’d agreed to that date for my departure. My thought was to head back north, to reconnect with my friend Jo so we could plan our trip to Arizona together and in the process figure out where I’d be in the meantime, hopefully somewhere where I could make myself useful. Since Tallahassee is on the bus route back to Albany, GA where Jo lives, I gave Nina a call to see what was up and see if she would like to visit again on my way north. If you have been following me, you may recall that Nina is the woman I met earlier in the winter in the bus terminal in Tampa, who had already put me up for one night on my way to Koinonia Farm. It turned out, to my surprise, that she was planning to head south to the Tampa Bay area that same weekend, and then turn around and head home on Sunday the 11th! She immediately started to figure out how she could give me a ride north and when she heard that I was free, invited me to stay with her and her partner for a week or so if I’d like.

She was heading to Venice to visit a 95 year old friend who’s health was failing, or so she thought. She wanted to see her again before she passed and possibly help take care of her for a while.  She had the use of her partner’s car through the weekend, so it was an opportunity to do so without suffering the chemical smells on the bus (from scented detergent in people’s clothes, etc.) to which she is so sensitive. The challenge was to juggle the multiple stopovers she had in mind, and still manage to pick me up on Saturday, or come up with some other plan to meet. After a few back and forth ideas and changes of plan on her part over the course of a couple of days, on Saturday she finally said that she wanted to plan on staying in Venice and take me up on an offer to drive her partner’s car back to him on Sunday. By the time that decision had been made, I’d already determined that I could take public busses from Becky’s house to Venice for half of the price of a ticket to Tallahassee so I was happy to do her the favor and allow her to be with her friend for a more extended caretaking visit.

I left the house in Clearwater at 3pm and headed for the local bus stop. Five and a half hours and 5 buses later, I arrived at her friend Matilda’s house. On two occasions local city bus drivers had given me pass’es that allowed me to take the next bus, even though I was supposed to pay another small fee for each leg. I guess they took pity on me, because I didn’t have the exact change needed and was going to have to make a special stop at a store to get same! Welcome generosity, indeed.

In the course of the next 17 hours, I learned that while Matilda is old, she still has  strong ideas about what is best for her and that includes continuing to live in her apartment, even though she has been falling a lot lately. In the short time we were with her, we saw her stumble and catch herself multiple times. Amazingly, none of the falls have resulted in broken bones and once she has some help righting herself she goes back to insisting that she is fine living alone. The falls were the reason Nina wanted to stay. She felt that someone ought to be caring for her full time, so she could get help moving around without risking a fall that could easily lead to serious injury. There was a possibility that Matilda would go to a hospice facility for a couple of days to be evaluated and be sure her medications were all still working properly: she is a diabetic who has been self administering insulin injections for many years, and also had some prescriptions for sleep and anxiety to manage. Evidently she admitted to Nina that her last fall was probably due to some confusion and excess medication, causing additional imbalance when walking.

By Sunday morning, after spending just one night in the apartment, Nina was sure that she was not going to be able to stay after all. The smells of residue from a neighbor’s cigarette smoke wafting into the open hallway door were too much for her to endure, given her sensitivities. She was already getting headaches. I actually offered to stay for a while instead and Nina thought that would be good, but in the end Matilda insisted that no one could stay more than a night or two, because the apartment complex had rules against longer term visitors! Besides, she was clear that she did not want anyone to stay; she insisted she did not need us to follow her around to catch her in case she fell!

On the way home Nina stopped at her mother’s house to pick some neem leaves, which have many medicinal uses.

In the end, our main contribution to her well being was cleaning up her apartment, a task she no longer has the strength to do herself. We swept, mopped, did laundry and cleaned in the kitchen. She even got into the spring cleaning mode herself, re-organizing and tidying up in her bedroom.

There were quite a few other twists and turns along the way, including my going to her church in the morning to meet her local friends and a visit from a hospice nurse, but I’ve already shared more than enough detail here! At around 3pm Sunday, Nina and I got into her partner’s car and headed back up to fetch him from the Tallahassee airport.

The weather was beautiful many days at Nina’s house. The nicest place to walk was in the Bear Creek Educational Forest, which was about a half mile around the corner from her house.

My week with them was very nice. It started out fairly uneventful. One of the reasons Nina thought I’d enjoy being with them that week, was an author was coming to town sponsored by their local Theosophical Society group and she thought I’d be interested to hear what he had to say. The subject was “The History of the Chakras.” Unfortunately, a snow storm that week in Boston caused his flight to be canceled and he couldn’t make the date.

Bill has hosted Native American style sweat lodges down by the creek. We checked out the framework he uses when Nina took me to meet him.

Towards the end of the week Nina offered to take me to meet her friend Bill and check out the possibility of staying with him for a while. I was impressed by both him and his project. He is using permaculture principles to develop 82 acres into an international hostel, at which visitors will work for 2 hours a day in addition to their overnight fees. He will draw people with his love and knowledge of the land as well as canoeing / kayaking trips on the local river.

Bill’s current priority is finishing a small building (virtually the same footprint as my tiny house) he will use for an indoor kitchen. Up to now, he has done all the cooking outdoors under tarps, which reminds me of the setup Karl and I have used back home at SmallFoot. Since I have building experience it seemed a perfect opportunity to be of service and have a nice place to stay in the process.

On the way to Bill’s land we stopped to look at the new tiny house village being built for low income and homeless people in Tallahassee.

Bill and Nina were both planning to go to Tallahassee to attend a “Veggie fest” on Sunday, which would allow me to get to his place easily. The festival was designed to promote vegetarian and vegan lifestyles so it drew a fair number of hippies and progressives. We enjoyed sampling tasty products at the booths, and watched a local restaurant chef prepare a stir frie. I especially enjoyed meeting Nina’s friend Sam, a handsome, bright eyed young man that is a member of their theosophy group. He was full of insights and inspiration for spiritual practice and heathy interpretations of our world, so we exchanged pretty deeply considering we had just met!

Ups and downs in my new dream yoga practice

I’m starting to realize that moving to a new location every week to 10 days is not really so great for my spiritual practices! Especially the new sleep based ones, which I’m still learning and exploring. The first half of the week at Nina’s house saw me going into regular unconscious sleep most of the nights. It was the same pattern I’d seen in Clearwater, where during the beginning of the stay my practice was not nearly as fruitful as it was towards the end. It is becoming clear that the quality of my day-time practices of mindfulness and meditation pave the way for fruitful night-time practice, just as Wangyal teaches. This seems to even be true on a day-to-day basis; a recent solo retreat day of meditation was followed by sleep practices with facets that were particularly profound.

I’ve shared about my new practices with my sister Susan, another devoted seeker. Now she is also reading Wangyal’s book and trying out his techniques on a nightly basis! The last two Saturday mornings we have had very interesting study sessions by reading key sections of the book together. Hopefully the insights and understandings one of us has which the other appreciates are more of a help than a hindrance, because we are both beginners in this ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice! She has signed up for a three day workshop with Wangyal in Colorado this June and I’m tempted to go along with her if I can swing it financially. I’m going to wait to see how my practice unfolds before making that decision, partly because I believe the workshop is designed for people that are quite new enough to the practices that they may not have had any experiences of lucid dreaming or awareness of sleep before. How much of the material covered will be useful to me, where I’m already experiencing both quite often? I don’t know.

I’ve sent an email to the address on Wangyal’s main website, enquiring if there is any way I could consult with him long distance, but after 11 days I’ve still not gotten a reply. Is the webmaster screening out requests like mine, or is Wangyal simply too busy to keep up with his email? Maybe time will tell. For now I continue to be quite pleased that my spiritual practices are both during the day and night, with the night time practices being perhaps even more fruitful than those during the day!

I’m not going to share any details about those fruits here yet. Given my nascent understanding of the practices, that seems premature.

The emergency exit of the bus I’m staying in at Wildcat has become the main entrance, complete with deck.

As I write this I’m going into my second week with Bill at Wildcat Creek. He prefers to keep the length of stay of his visitors short and has other young people coming to live on his land with him soon, so I may be moving on before the second week is over. I’ll write about our building and my practice adventures here in my next post.

As I make finishing touches to this post, I’ve heard back from my friend Jo. Unfortunately she has had an injury to her leg that precludes our traveling together this spring. So I’m back to the state of almost anything being possible, with nothing certain, at least until my daughter Rose’s college graduation in May! Shall I go back to the Upper Valley before then, or head directly to Ithaca when the time comes? I’m not sure yet.

Fishing for the Self in Clearwater, Florida

In a very interesting discussion with my brother-in-law Jon Bower, which was mainly about the cool things he is doing to create tools and teach techniques to use in education, I realized that what I’m trying to do with my book and face-to-face opportunities is really not so much like teaching as it is like fishing. I’m encouraging people to cast out into the waters of beliefs to catch those that resonate, which will better inspire them to do regular spiritual practices. The idea is to use our rational minds to find beliefs which reinforce and support the reasons to do practices that actually weaken our addiction to, and identification with, the random stream of thoughts that plague the average person throughout their waking life. It’s kind of like the rational mind waking up to the irrational nature of our thoughts themselves, even though the intellectual reasoning being used, when energized by fears and desires, is a major player in many of these unhelpful thoughts.

After a wonderful month at Koinonia Farm, I spent the first third of March in Clearwater, Florida, at the house that my sister Becky and her husband John are renting there. They moved up from their rental in Sanibel Island just before I joined them. The highlights in this post are:

Koinonia Farm to Clearwater, Florida

To get back down to Florida from Koinonia I decided to take the bus again. Hitchhiking in Florida just hasn’t worked out that well and the ticket was only $61 from Albany, GA to Tampa, FL, the closest major city to Clearwater. So the first trick was getting to Albany from Koinonia, a 35 minute drive. Bren (the director of Koinonia) kindly scheduled one of their interns to take me down early on March 1, but then my friend Jo Knox, who lives in Albany, contacted me. I had been trying to reach her to schedule a visit, and it turned out she was coming up to do a little work at Koinonia the day before. Jo is about 10 minutes from the bus terminal, so I asked her if I could go stay at her house one night and hitch a ride to the bus with her the next day.

Jo with her chickens and geese.

Jo and I had been wanting to spend some time together anyway, going back to the end of my internship in 2015, so it all worked out beautifully. It was also great to meet Jo’s husband and see their home and beautiful yard with it’s 4 beehives, custom made deluxe chicken coop, chickens, geese, dog, parrot and more.

Traveling companion?

Jo & I discovered that we both want to go to Sedona, AZ. She has a friend there she would like to visit and I’ve heard wonderful things about the area with it’s many spiritual retreat centers and positive energy vortex. Jo and I may drive out there together at some point soon, which would enable the trip for her (she is 80 and couldn’t drive long distance by herself) and save a lot of hitchhiking for me! Stay tuned to see how this works out.

More biking, with my rollerblading family

My sister Susan and her husband Jon were visiting Becky at the same time as I was and she rented me a bicycle for my birthday, which enabled me to go along with them on their almost daily rollerblading trip down the Clearwater – Tampa causeway. We didn’t have a way to put the bike on the car, so I rode to the causeway from the house too. If I got a 10-15 minute head start, we would arrive at the near end of the causeway at the same. Their routine is to take a rest break for lunch at the Tampa end of the causeway at a nice restaurant right on the beach.

Short video of rollerblading:

Families play in the water on a cool windy day at Sand Key Park Beach.

The bike also enabled me to ride to Clearwater Beach on two occasions. In some ways it reminded me of Waikiki in Hawaii, with high rise hotels just across the street from the beach. The beach is wide, with fine white sand and volleyball nets to attract the masses. In addition to the main beach, I went to Sand Key Park where the beach is adjacent to a nice buffer of green space. It was a bit cool and windy, so people were mostly staying on the beach. The hearty people in the water were mainly motivated by their children, who were too excited about the water to be deterred. When I went for a dip, I would have stayed in the water longer if the waves had been big enough for body surfing, because once I was in I realized that by staying down in the warm water it was actually pretty comfortable.

I had a great 61st birthday. It started with successful dream yoga in the wee hours. Then my email brought a heart warming video of my friends at the Center for Transformational Practice, singing me a happy birthday song!  We went for our usual rollerblading/biking trip down the causeway to have lunch out. My family took me out again for dinner, at a nice restaurant near the house. Then my brother-in-law John let me borrow their car so I could go see “Black Panther.” It was good to have a little taste of the mainstream movie culture and see what lots of people are raving about!

 

Clearwater Zen Center

With a little Internet research I found a couple of meditation sanghas in Clearwater. The closest one was the Clearwater Zen Center, so on Sunday morning I joined them for their regular weekly practice. That week it included sitting, walking and chanting. It was my first time at a Zendo where you sit facing a wall to meditate, so I followed their practice and kept my eyes open, as I learned to do atthe Upper Valley Zen Center (UVZC). Some of the chants were in English and the rest were in ancient Japanese, like the ones I am familiar with from practicing at the UVZC. I really liked verbally affirming my faith through the profound teachings in the English chants, with each syllable falling on the beat of the drum, as steady as the beat of my heart at rest. The Zendo was quite full that morning and it was wonderful to practice with such a large, welcoming group.

Dream yoga practice starts to flower

I continue to use modified versions of the techniques from the book, “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep” by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche every night. At this point I need 3-5 hours of unconscious sleep to start the night, to bring my awareness to a clear enough state to practice lucid dreaming. Through experience, I’m getting better at sensing when my awareness is pure enough to begin the practice; when it’s not, I just lay back down for another session of unconscious sleep. That way I can do the preparatory “9 breaths” practice and guru devotion ritual that the book recommends, just prior to the first successful dream yoga session; I’d been doing them at the beginning of the night and I wasn’t sure they were that helpful to the practice after I’d been in unconscious sleep for a few hours. Given the time spent unconscious, I either practice only 1-2 of the 4 recommended session techniques, or each of the 4 sessions is shorter than the recommended 2 hours.

The visual quality of the lucid dreams is improving over time, with more and more color sprinkled into the experience, which has been mostly black and white up to now. Some scenes are even full color, but sounds are still rare, with occasional short conversations with other players. As I’ve shared here before, the feelings of peace and gratitude are still almost constant regardless of my nascent abilities to create a dream world complete with stimulation of all the senses.

Traveling to a new location every week or so has been challenging for this practice. The first few days I was in Clearwater I wasn’t having much success, with unconscious sleep more of the night than I had been at Koinonia. It is mysterious to me exactly what all the factors are at this point, but I love that Wangyal stresses that the quality of your day time practice is key to your success at night. It means I have another wonderful motivation to steady my mindfulness during the day and do extra sitting and walking meditations, etc., when I have a chance.

As I finish up this post, I’m in Quincy, Florida visiting my friend Nina who I met in the Greyhound bus terminal in January. When I contacted her that I was heading north via bus right through her area, it turned out she was going to be in the Tampa area and then heading home right when my time in Clearwater was coming to an end! She and her boyfriend Andy have been very hospitable. I’ll write more about that adventure filled leg of travel and my visit here in my next post.

Faith to Practice Presentation, Spiritual Dancing & Dream Yoga at Koinonia

I’ve got a lot to write about for this post, which will be the last one that is entirely about my working visit at Koinonia Farm. On March 1 I’ll be heading back down to Florida to stay with my sister Becky and her husband John again. My dad and sister Susan will be there this time, so it’s turned into a semi-family reunion. My third sister Jennifer is on her way too, although we probably won’t overlap. My daughter Rose and 3 friends are also scheduled to arrive later in March, so Becky is keeping a very busy vacation home this month!

The main things I’m sharing about this time are:

  1. The presentation I did here on my book, “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness.”
  2. Facilitating a spiritual dance session.
  3. A new directed lucid dream yoga which may enable 24/7 practice.

A Christian take on “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness”

After planning and waiting for a time that would work for everyone, the day finally came for me to present some of the ideas in my book, “Faith to Practice, Foundations of Happiness.”  I prepared a slide presentation for visual learners, complete with speakers notes.

I was all set, or so I thought, to cast the presentation from my iPad to the TV in the library where we were scheduled to meet, but when the time came I had technical difficulties and had to borrow a laptop and cord instead. By the time it was all sorted out, we started 12 minutes late, in a location that was not as ideal as we originally planned, and I was feeling kind of scattered. The 5 minutes of silent meditation I’d planned for the start of the presentation helped, but I still was not at my best as I launched into the presentation proper.

I was pleased to run into Tracy Newton when she visited for a day. She was living at the farm when I was an intern.

As you can see if you check out the slides, about half of the presentation was reviewing the ideas in the book, chapter by chapter, and the other half was applying the ideas to beliefs that could be adopted to support the practice of radical acceptance, aka non-judgment. This was my first time giving a formal presentation on both, so I’m grateful for the patience of the folks at Koinonia who came. It could have been clearer and smoother, even after the technical difficulties were overcome.

I wanted to use personal stories and poetry imbued with metaphor, to attempt to better appeal to those for whom a strictly intellectual approach does not resonate. I did so to some degree, and would have remembered to do more if I could have seen my presenter’s notes; the fall back technology I was using didn’t allow me to do so. However, when we got to the mini-bible study part of the presentation, we were all on familiar ground and I thought it went fairly well.

My goal was to inspire (some of) them to start a practice of non-judgment or what I call “radical acceptance.” I asked for interpretations to this teaching from the gospel, making notes on a flip pad as we went:

Matthew 7: 1-2, 5 “1 Judge not, that you not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”
5 “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

Then I presented the interpretations that I prefer, which would indicate that Jesus meant an unqualified “no judging, period” stance (from the presentation, slides 25-29):

  • I like to see this teaching as being immediately true, at many levels.
  • The judgments we pass against another are caused by misunderstandings, represented by “the log in your own eye,” blocking you from seeing clearly.
  • When we judge another we are also judging ourselves (Insight of Unity)
  • When we judge another, we “defile ourselves,” (see below) even if we tell the other how we feel. Even a speck in our eye hurts, let alone a log!
  • Mark 7:20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

Talking through how this works is tricky, and I think the experience at Koinonia will help me do a better job next time. For example, how can I accept everything in this moment and still take actions to help reduce suffering in the world? Won’t I lose motivation to take actions at all?  No, and the key is that accepting what is happening now is just practical, because it’s a “done deal” or “water over the dam” as my dad used to say. It does not preclude us seeing what can be done to improve on the situation in the future, even if that future is only a few moments from now. The actions come out of “love for,” rather than negative “judgments against.” I think I explain it pretty well through story and example in the book.

As I explained to the folks at Koinonia, the book really wasn’t written for people who already have a strong connection and faith from a spiritual tradition. It is more for those many people who either were never exposed to religion or spirituality, or have since become disillusioned or had other reasons to leave whatever faith tradition they had. To those that are engaged with church or some other spiritual community, I say please keep revisiting the teachings from time to time and see if you have gained new insights and interpretations that are helpful to support your wholesome life practices. This is such an important spiritual practice that I also recently posted a more secular approach to different levels of beliefs to support acceptance.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing walking meditation on the farm road.

Weekly day of solo practice?

The past two Saturday’s I did lots of extra meditations and/or sleep witnessing practice. The first I made my own schedule, including lots of walking meditations on the farm road and the second I did a “30/60 retreat” in support of and from the folks at The Center for Transformational Practice who were hosting same that day. I love getting extra silent meditation from time-to-time and could easily see making this a regular schedule every week! Perhaps my lifestyle will allow for that at some future junction.

Spiritual dancing with the birthday boy and guests from Quaker Volunteer Services

We cleared the furniture out of the new library, which has the best wood floor on the farm for dancing.

Saturday night I got a chance to re-use a playlist created by my friend Sophie, to facilitate dance practice here at the farm. She originally curated the list for the Soul Sunday dance community in Quechee, VT, where I normally dance every week when I’m home. The only person from the Koinonia community that wanted to come (partly given the late hour) was Nathaniel, one of the new interns who is an experienced dancer and was celebrating his birthday that day! We would have just gone ahead and practiced just the two of us, but for a group of 9 young people from the Quaker Volunteer Services (QVS), that happened to be visiting, many of which wanted to give it a try. Then another brave soul with previous ballet experience as a girl came down from the guest house too, rounding out our troupe quite nicely!

It went wonderfully. The only challenge was when general energy levels fell during a long stretch of staccato style rhythm, I decided to skip the end of a couple of the songs to keep things moving. At the end we reclined on the floor to relax and let it all sink in, as we always do in Quechee and I led them in some toning, which sounded really good! As we let the silence return, the last noise offered was a kind of a funny gurgle, and then out of the silence came a laugh from one of the young women. I took that as a wonderful suggestion and answered back with a laugh, which got us all laughing for another wonderful group practice. It was a hearty icing on a rich and many layered cake!

The evening after they left it seemed very quiet in the Fuller house , because the QVS group was staying there with me. They were all of that twenty-something age that I feel could really benefit from my book, so I gave them a copy. They all live in a single intentional household, so I trust they will be able to share and read it when (and if) they are inspired. I feel lucky to have spent a lot of time with this wonderful group of energetic, positive people and said so tonight at our weekly Sunday gathering where we share prayers of gratitude.

“Continuous spiritual practice” takes on new meaning with the addition of dream yoga

At some point after I realized the ability to stay aware during sleep last fall, (as described in a previous post), I found a web discussion group thread on the subject. The people posting were having similar experiences to mine. Last week I revisited that page and saw a reference to a book that looked very interesting, which I somehow didn’t pick up on before. I immediately purchased the Kindle edition of “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep” by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and started an awesome new chapter of my practice.

A little more than a week later, I’m 87% of the way through the book and I’ve added a practice of lucid, directed dreaming to my nightly routine. Since the night of the 23rd, I’ve been using modified versions of the practices described in the book, to initiate one to three sessions of 1 to 2 hours each per night. Being able to direct my lucid dreams feels pretty darn revolutionary, for many reasons: the number of dreams I typically have remembered in any detail has been around 1-2 per month; lucid dreams were rare; and I’ve never been able to direct my dreams before.  So my dream life has gone from virtually nil to a major facet of my practice!

Wangyal writes of the importance of a seeker’s quality of awareness, steming from their day time practice, to the success of lucid dreaming. So I credit my rapid success in using the teachings from his book to the continuous waking practice that I’ve been doing since I interned here at Koinonia in 2015.

What I’ve been calling “sleep witnessing meditation” is almost the same as what he describes as “sleep yoga.” Perhaps I’d already had short tastes of the state he describes, where all bodily sensations have ceased to register and the mind remains free of thoughts, leaving only the light of pure awareness shining on itself, uncluttered by even a notion of the relative world of manifestation. In a way the lucid dreaming that I’ve now started to practice is a regression from that pure state, but in other ways it is a wonderful tool in it’s own right.

Wangyal describes how our waking life is really very much like dreaming. The Buddha actually used a term that translates to “awakening” for what is now often called “Enlightenment” or “Self realization.” So as the seeker comes to understand how dreams are created during sleep, they can also gain insights into the nature of manifest reality. More importantly, he writes that sleep and dream yoga are effective practices for spiritual awakening itself.

Taize is my favorite form of Christian worship and we had it twice here at Koinonia this month!

My birthday is coming up next week and I feel like I’ve already been given the best present ever. The time I now have available to me for practice each day has increased by more than 25%! Back in October, I set a goal for myself to practice sleep witnessing meditation all night long. I thought that it was restful enough to meet all my daily restoration needs. I now see that the unconscious sleep periods that I kept falling into were needed because I wasn’t getting any dream time during my witnessing practice. Dreaming is understood by scientists as critical for stress relief and normal waking brain function. Evidently I still need that benefit even in my blissful state. Now that I can remain aware during both dreaming and the deeper phases of sleep, my I goal of practicing all night has become practical. I’ve already come pretty close.

Monday night I fell asleep on the couch reading and ended up getting an hour and a half nap before I went to bed. That gave me just enough conventional rest to enable a successful first session of dream yoga. Most of the handful of nights I’ve been practicing the new techniques started with 2-4 hours of unconscious sleep before the first of a series of successful dream yoga sessions. It feels like the quality of my waking awareness is already benefiting from the new night time practices, so I suspect I’ll need less and less unconscious sleep over the next few weeks.

Besides all these wonderful benefits to spiritual practice, directed lucid dreaming is also really fun! As described by Wangyal in his book, the dreams you can have are only limited by your imagination. Over these first few nights of practice, I’ve gone swimming; down hill skiing; sailing; windsurfing; walking on the beach; visiting with Nisargadatta in his shrine room; paddling with Jon, (my canoemate for my week with the River of Life, Connecticut River Pilgrimage last summer); and done lots of flying, unaided by any device, like superman. Shifting between scenes feels like teleporting; it can happen as instantaneously as the whimsical mind shifts to a new desire! I’ve also become a few different animals including a chipmunk, squirrel, seagull, dolphin, trout, and red tailed hawk. This really takes a good imagination! The clarity of vision and sensations of all these amazing experiences isn’t that vivid yet, though it is slowly improving. But the feelings that come with each experience are wonderful nonetheless. Gazing over Boston Lot Lake, watching the water sparkle in the sunlight as a gentle breeze raises ripples on the surface, brings the same feelings of peace and gratitude as really being there, even if the blue water is framed by trees that are a hazy black and white!

I’ve been making voice recordings after some of the sessions, so I can journal and share about experiences that may not stay in my weak memory long enough to write about later. In the recording I share here, I make reference to not being attached to planet earth, which deserves some explanation. I love our planet and everyone on it. The main motivation for me to devote my life to spiritual practice is to work to reduce suffering, as I describe in my book in the section on spiritual activism. In order to release fears that stem from the destructive trends that currently threaten the health of our planet, I’ve needed to release my attachment to it remaining the beautiful place I’ve known. In the dream, because it was a dream, I took that a bit further out of playfulness!

Voice recording made after a lucid dream yoga session:

2018 Koinonia working visit part 1

It is February 14, 2018 as I write this post.

I arrived at Koinonia on February 1. Thanks to the generous army veteran that gave me a ride all the way from the bus terminal, I arrived in time to settle into my room in the Fuller house and meditate before heading to dinner at 6pm.

It was peaceful practicing and pruning in the vinyard.

The first several days I worked pruning and weeding grape vines. The weather was perfect for it most days, cool enough to wear long sleeves but warm enough to not need a winter hat. Some of the time I had interns to work with, or Steve my former apartment mate from when I was in intern here, and some of the time I worked alone. Like most work on the farm, it was familiar and easy enough for me to stay in mindfulness mode.

The grape vinyard is quite large. Some of the rows have not been pruned and maintained for many years; there is more work than the available people hours.

The farm currently has nine interns, four who started last year and five that arrived this year. On the first Sunday I was here, the last two new ones arrived in time for the potluck and devotions service. I’m enjoying getting to know all of them and it is fun remembering what it was like when I was in their shoes, having just arrived three years ago.

On Monday the five new interns all shared their spiritual stories, and then signed their intern agreements, just like my group did back in 2015. It was great to have a chance to hear them and I really appreciate that I was allowed to be there. For me this is an important practice of intentional community: making the space and time to get to know each other pretty deeply, as soon as is practical after a new person arrives. The new interns all did a wonderful job, courageously sharing even aspects of their past which they weren’t as proud of and that challenged them and / or their families.

Martin is a very nurturing, protective farm dog. Here he is providing a bed for one of the cats! Historically his job has been to protect the free range chickens.

It is incredible to me that it was only 3 years ago that I was starting my internship here. It feels more like 5-6. That has been the way my time sense has been lately, kind of stretched. The old adage “time flies when you’re having fun” doesn’t apply though, because I have been having a wonderful time even though it seems to be crawling. I think it is because I’ve been changing so much in the last 6 years, since I left my last computer programming job and started to take up spiritual practice as my primary, nearly full time priority.

The quality of my life experience has shifted so much in those years, especially in the last 3. If you have read the About the Author section of my book “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness” (which is in the Kindle edition free sample) or certain parts of the history page here on my blog, you know what I mean.

I’ve been given permission to do a presentation on the ideas in my book for the folks here at the farm. I almost gave it last night, but it has been postponed until next Monday night so that more of the interns can come; it had been scheduled at a time that they would have been too tired, since they also had dinner clean-up duty and a study session the same evening. That will give me more time to polish up the presentation (I’ve created a set of PowerPoint slides). I’ll include a link to it in my next post, and I might even manage to make a video.

There is an “old intern” (meaning he started last year and has been here 5 months or more) named John that sometimes gets up early enough to meditate with me for 30-40 minutes before chapel. That has been nice. I’ve been getting to bed early enough to still do my morning routine of taking a walk before going back to bed for sleep witnessing meditation for an hour or so before I sit with him.

I always loved watching the sunrises like this one, through the Elliot pecan orchard. There are lots of beautiful sunrises and sunsets in Georgia, because it is so flat!

I’ve managed to do some sleep witnessing in the middle of the night and in the morning when I awake, without getting up and going for a walk first. I don’t know if this is a trend or just a couple of flukes; lately I’ve only been able to do it as part of my morning routine, or during the day if I’m not too tired. Like last weekend.

Saturday I did a few extra sleep witnessing meditation sessions, taking it as a mini solo retreat of sorts. I still did some regular activities, talked to folks, etc. when I wasn’t practicing, so it was pretty informal. I did walking meditation on the farm road between sessions, which was pretty sweet.

Dressed for church!

Last Sunday, I went to a Salvation Army church with John and his wife Evelyn, plus two of the new interns, Stephanie & Gabriel. I liked that the worship was very accessible, using projected videos for some of the lessons and words to songs, but I found it less engaging spiritually than a more tradional service. The bible passage and first lesson of the day, taught by our Koinonia friend John, was from Samual 1, about the story of King David. I hadn’t remembered the story, even though we share names, so it was good to review! The whole service was long: we started at 10am and were done at 12:45pm or so; there was a second adult Sunday school lesson that started around noon. I like their mission emphasis to help people that are financially disadvantaged. The church is in Albany, which is about a 40 minute drive, so it would be time and fuel consuming to be very involved with the mission work from Koinonia.

When I teach current moment mindfulness meditation, I suggest a number of different techniques and let each student experiment until they find the one that works for them. If they try a technique and find that thoughts are coming often and turning into thought trains before they realize they are thinking, I recommend they try keeping their attention on some additional thing. So for example, if following the breath is not enough, they could follow the breath and count from 1 to N on the in breath and out breath. My philosophy is to use a technique that involves keeping the attention on as few facets as possible while still remaining in the current moment and fairly thought-free.

In that light, I’ve made another change to my meditation technique, which seems to be working out well. In the last three years, I’ve gone through a process of gradually simplifying what I focus my attention on during meditation:

  • In March of 2015, I started following my breath and heart beat, counting each “lub-dub” (three beats) on the in breath and thinking the phrase “I am” on the fourth “lub-dub” at the top and then doing the same heartbeat counting process on the out breath.
  • At some point that first year I stopped counting each heartbeat.
  • At the end of December, 2017, I stopped thinking the “I am” phrase.
  • In January 2018, I switched to focusing on the space between the “lub” and “dub” of my heart beat and the pause between the in and out breaths. I was moving towards meditating on awareness itself, because Nisargardatta has said to some seekers, “You must stay aware of your awareness.” Honestly, I did not know how what he meant or to do that, so this was an experiment!
  • This week I started another experiment. I’m keeping my awareness on attention itself, with the intention of not focusing my attention on anything in particular, across all of my senses, including  thoughts.

I’ve been able to make these changes and still stay in the current moment fairly well, because my mind tends to stay clearer than it used to and when thoughts do arise, it has gotten easier and easier not to give them any energy or attention.  Nisargardatta actually says that you have to come to a state of not thinking at all (unless you have made a conscious decision to think about something) and I’m getting closer to that goal!

The latest meditation technique, described above, was inspired by a couple of things:

  1. The current tendency of my vision to spontaneously stay in the wide angle mode where I’m taking in the whole field of view without focusing on anything right in front of me. This started to occur once in a while back in September. The most memorable example was while riding my motorcycle. Suddenly, the awareness of the trees rushing by me on either side was intense! Like many of my other shifts, at first this was sporatic. Now whenever I intend to I can go to that mode of vision without effort, when it does not start spontaneously.
  2. While doing walking meditation earlier this week, I realized that I had spontaneously lost all focus of attention to any specific thing, within the full range of all my senses. It was like taking the wide angle view from just the visual sense into all my senses and thoughts. Just taking them all in equally, without focusing attention on anything. Evidently the intention I was holding during the experimental meditation technique I started in January had been fruitful! Since it started to happen without intending it and the awareness was more pure than other techniques, I decided to take the experience into my other meditation practices.

This latest technique is the closest I’ve come to Nisargardatta’s teaching to meditate on consciousness itself, with awareness of my awareness, without thoughts. The key word for me was “attention,” or rather the intention of releasing it to a state of virtual “inattention.”

February 15, 2018

Today I worked in the bakery for the first time this visit. I always enjoyed the fairly easy repetitive work of packing product because it is so good for mindfulness practice. I put on the required hair net as usual, then laughed at myself because for me it is a “no hairnet!” Later Geneva (the head cook) agreed that I didn’t have to wear one.

You may not be surprised to hear that my latest meditation technique is difficult to use during certain activities, even if they are fairly straight forward, because some jobs just seem to require focused attention to get them right! Like today in the bakery, putting labels onto packages in just the right place. So for those activities I go back to simply following the breath and releasing extraneous thoughts.

Now that I won’t be going to the monastery at which I applied to be a guest, (that process was described in a previous post ) I asked for and got an extension for my stay here through the end of February. So this post won’t include any hitchhiking or bus terminal adventures.

I’m not sure where I’ll go next. I may just head west and see how far I can go each day, with the long distance goal of checking out Sonoma, Arizona. I’ve heard it is a spiritual Mecca of sorts! But now I have a couple more weeks to discern a plan.

Patient acceptance, biking, beaching and bus terminals

I spent a lot of time on the beach.

I had a wonderful time in Sanibel Island, visiting my sister Becky and her husband John. They were renting a nice house right next to the community pool, which is maintained at a nice warm temperature for the somewhat cool and breezy days we had during my stay.

My wheels for the week at Sanibel Island

I rented a single speed bike for the week, so I could get down to Bowman’s beach in 10 minutes and take longer trips to explore the island. John had fractured his arm a couple of days before I arrived, so was unable to go rollerblading, which is their usual form of exercise which I would have done with them on the bike. So I mainly explored and practiced mindfulness on my own most days, walking the beach, taking short dips into the chilly ocean and enjoying the many species of birds.

My sleep witnessing meditation practice continues to be a once-a-day routine, done for an hour or so after I’ve gotten some exercise in the early morning. This routine was beautifully supported at Sanibel. I either went for a short bike ride and beach walk or I took a dip in the pool. Then I would go back to “my end” of their house, which has its own bathroom, for a quick shower before I went back to bed for practice. Very plush, by my modest standards!

The only group meditation practice that I found on the island was a class offered by the Samudrabadra Kadampa Buddhist Center out of Fort Myers.  So I went even though I don’t need a class designed for beginners. It was a very well attended one hour session held in the island’s small movie theater. The two monastics present, one of which was leading the class, said they had never taught in a movie theater before and hoped that we would be able to stay awake in the very comfortable recliners!

The young monk named Gen Chodor did a wonderful job introducing the most important points for beginners, including:

  • the dual motivations of finding inner happiness and contributing to the well being of others through your own more peaceful presence,
  • the basic current moment meditation technique of following the breath, while giving no energy to any thoughts that arise,
  • and the importance of daily practice even if it is only 10-15 minutes each morning.

Beyond these basics, the main subject of that week’s class was “patient acceptance.” I loved the way he put these two words together and plan to make use of the phrase myself in future teaching opportunities. The emphasis was really on acceptance, even though he introduced the teaching as being on patience. By the end he had illustrated how they support each other: It is easier to be patient with adversity when we intend to accept “what is,” and we also need to be patient with ourselves when practicing acceptance, while our judgmental tendencies still reign!

The sun rises over the inlet which I would kayak on later in the week.

I love the ocean so my week in Sanibel was a real treat, since I live in land-locked Vermont. So I spent lots of time on the beach, including one morning when I woke early and arrived before sunrise. With this blog post in mind, I took a series of photos as the light rose and played on the shifting clouds. I had trouble choosing which ones to include here. You can see all of them in the publicly shared Google photo album in which I’m putting all the photos from my trip.

The small sign says “Do Not Feed the Alligators

I also loved getting out onto the water, in a kayak made available by the owners of the house. I dragged it down to the launch ramp on a hand cart. As I launched I recalled some locals pointing out an alligator floating on the surface about 100 yards away from my launch site. Five minutes later, I gave myself a good laugh when I flinched a bit because a fish jumped right next to me. I guess I was a bit on edge at first as this was the first time I’d ever been out on alligator infested waters! I didn’t actually see one that day, but I did see the native birds at a closer range than I had from the beach. Since it was threatening to rain, I didn’t take my cell phone with which I might have taken some nice photos.

My longest bike outing was to the light house at the far south east end of the island. I had some fun walking the beach and watching kite boarders, which I caught some of on video.

The best angle on the alligator was from the top of a lookout platform.

On my last day on the island I finally made it to the “Ding Darling” wildlife drive preserve, which has 4 miles of road and 2 miles of walking and bike riding paths through the mangroves. Most of the wildlife I saw were the same bird species I’d been enjoying at the beach and kayaking, but I did get to see a modest sized alligator, around 5’ long. Most of the experience felt pretty sterile, by virtue of being on a paved road and improved path, but there was one spot called Colon’s Point where visitors could walk on the actual soil between the plants of the mangrove, right up to the edge of one of the inlets.

At the Ding Darling wildlife drive, there was only one place visitors were allowed to walk on unimproved soil, between the mangroves.

Sanibel Island to Koinonia Farm

The time came for me to start my next travel adventure. John had an appointment to have an MRI for his shoulder injury at 8am in Fort Myers, so they didn’t have to make a special a trip to take me to the mainland to attempt to hitchhike north. It turns out, attempt was the right word.

We dropped off John for his appointment and Becky took me to the closest interchange of Interstate 75. I decided to put Tampa on my sign, as it is the next major city north; I could always tell my ride the whole story once they’d picked me up. After buying some snacks for the road and walking to the highway, I waited from 9am to 1:30pm, taking a break to switch entrance ramps (there were 2 going north) and go to the bathroom in the middle. The only person that stopped wanted me to pay him $50 to go to Tampa. By the time that happened I had already been researching bus prices and knew I could do better, so I declined.

In this map from hitchwiki.org red states are known to be “difficult” for hitchhiking. From my experience, GA is actually much better than FL.

After my difficulty getting a ride in Fort Lauderdale, I had made a whole fall back plan for this leg, which included staying at a new couchsurfing.org friend and taking a bus the next morning, if needed. This plan didn’t work out, because the fellow who had agreed to host me became unreachable; he didn’t return my voicemails or couchsurfing.org messages. In a way that was good, because when looking at the bus schedules again I realized the route I had previously found was really long, going back to Fort Lauderdale before heading north, and included a 5 hour layover between busses in the wee hours of the morning. It was not a route I really wanted, anyway! So given that I had no place to stay and I wanted to make my own better bus route, I made a new plan.

I headed to the Greyhound bus station with just enough time to make a 3:10pm bus to Tampa. While on the bus I got back onto my phone and sent messages to 3-4 potential couchsurfing.org hosts in the city for that same night. According to the bus website, their terminal closed at midnight and reopened at 5am, and the bus I wanted to take to continue north was at 6:10am the next morning.

I really did not want to watch what’s his names state of the union address. Here he is waving goodbye to me as I leave the bus terminal to go to dinner!

I arrived at Tampa at 7pm and made myself comfortable in the bus terminal. At least as comfortable as I could, given the challenge that they had CNN tuned in on two televisions, with the volume loud enough to be heard anywhere in the terminal. The ear plugs I always keep handy went in, but it was still possible to pick up bits of the audio none-the-less. I was still hoping one of my requests would be answered before I had to head back out onto the street. At 8:45pm, I went to a local pizza place for dinner. I wanted to get out of the terminal before the state of the Union address started! I took my time over dinner. On my way back to the terminal I checked to see if I could find anywhere I might sleep undiscovered outside. The only possibility in the area that I thought might work, was a large cluster of bushes in a nicely landscaped, large park-like area that was really nothing more than a glorified traffic island. The bushes were tall enough that I would be hidden if I laid between them without putting up my tent!

None of my couchsurfing request messages were ever answered. I arrived back at the bus terminal at 10:20pm and the state of the Union address was still going! I had over an hour before the terminal would close, but I figured if I had to try my first experience of “being homeless,” it might has well start early enough to get a bit more sleep. So I reorganized myself to prepare for my plan: I got my sleeping bag and pad out of my suitcase and into my backpack, where they could be pulled out quickly.

All set up to sleep in the bus terminal, ear plugs installed to reduce my exposure to CNN, which was on all night.

Before I headed outside, I noticed that the ticket window was already closed. A man that by all appearances was homeless (I’d seen him checking inside a cup in the trash earlier, hoping in vain that there was something worth drinking) had stretched out in his sleeping bag across the metal wire mesh chairs. It suddenly dawned on me that the hours I saw on the Greyhound website might have been for ticket sales, not the waiting area! A security guard had appeared, so a quick inquiry informed me that the terminal was indeed available for ticketed customers to stay in overnight, and she was even happy to have me stretch out my pad and sleeping bag in a corner. Evidently the man in the sleeping bag must have had a ticket, after all. So my first experience of being homeless on a city street would wait.

A long delay leads to some new friends

In the morning the security guard told me at 5:30am that I needed to pack up because she was going to unlock the doors to begin the day. I was about to anyway, as I only had 40 minutes until my bus left, or so I thought.  10 minutes after our scheduled departure time, we were informed that our bus driver failed to report to work that morning and they were not yet sure when a replacement would be found. That status did not change until 8:30am, when we were informed that a replacement bus and driver had been found and would arrive at 11am. Everyone that had hoped to catch connecting buses in Tallahassee, the final destination of that route, was called up to the ticket window so they could go over our options for rescheduling or rerouting. I was informed that I could board a bus later that afternoon going to Fort Lauderdale and go from there (on the route I was already working to avoid), or wait until 6:10am the next day and try again on the route through Tallahassee. I said I’d wait until tomorrow.

I sat back down in the waiting area, to collect my thoughts and do some more research on my phone. I found that the local mindfulness practice group in the Plum Village tradition had their weekly practice that night, so I put that onto my calendar and continued to look for other things to do. It was a beautiful day, so I could always do some meditation practice outdoors.

I struck up a conversation with a woman I’d seen earlier, who I’d gathered was also waiting for the same delayed bus. Her name is Nina, and she wore a filter mask, which she sometimes pulled up over her nose and at other times was pulled down around her neck. I thought she might be protecting us from the flu or some other contagious disease she carried, but it turned out she is sensitive to chemical smells such as the fragrances often added to laundry detergent or fabric softener. I asked her if she was also missing a connecting bus, but it turned out that she was going to her home near Tallahassee and just needed to wait until the delayed bus left at 11am. Our conversations were interesting enough that we decided to go find something to eat together while she waited. By the time we got back to the bus terminal, she had invited me to come stay with her and her partner at their house whenever I’d like. It did not occur to me that she was actually inviting me to come that night, so I could spend the night at their place instead of in the bus terminal again. The third time she invited me again it became clear, just minutes before the bus was to depart. I was delighted to take her up on the offer. I enjoyed her company, and I would also avoid another night of hearing snippets of CNN sneaking through my earplugs!

Nina had already told me enough about her house mate’s mutual interest in theosophy that I was looking forward to meeting him too. He and I did indeed have some interesting conversations about beliefs and spiritual practices. He even challenged my use of the word “faith,” as he preferred the term “model,” because faith for him indicated a belief that people tended to hold for life. We agreed to disagree on that one! They were both very hospitable. Nina even gave me my first healing touch treatment, using her own fingers to do “off the body” muscle testing, aka kinesiology, to determine what I needed. By the time it was time to take me back to the bus station the next day, I’d promised to give her a series of distance reiki treatments over the next few days. I had given them a copy of my book, but that was a small thing compared to all they had done for me in that 24 hour period together.

I arrived in Albany, GA right on time at 3:15pm. I made my new hitchhiking sign, had a snack and started walking down the road towards the nearest major intersection along the best route to Koionia. I realized a few blocks later that I’d walked in the wrong direction, so I turned around and walked back. When I got back to the bus terminal, I man pulled over and picked me up. It turned out he had seen me earlier, but in a location where he could not get out of traffic to stop, so he had come back to find me. He was going to a town on the other side of Americus, so I knew he would at least get me close to make it easy for someone at the farm to come take me the rest of the way. That was not needed however, because he went 10-15 minutes out of his way to take me right to the farm!

As I finish this post I’ve already been at Koinonia Farm for almost a week, but I’ll leave that part of my story to the next installation. The big news I will mention now, is that my application to the monastic guest program that I mentioned in a previous post has been denied. I was not given any specific reason. They just said that from what I shared with them (my motivations and history) they could tell that program was not for me. I trust they are correct, which leaves me again open to anything and uncertain of almost everything!

Group Practice in Decatur, Hitchhiking to Florida

Saturday January 20, 2018

I guess to increase the chance that I actually post once a week during this trip, I’m going to allow myself to write a little bit at a time, in the style of journaling, and then edit the post only lightly before I publish.

As I write this, I’m all set to head to two meditation practice groups: The Breathing Heart Sangha Mindfulness Practice Center (MPC) for their once-a-week practice session and The Zen Center of Georgia, both in Decatur (near Atlanta). The later is planning a one night mini-retreat, complete with 3 hours of practice tonight and a 4:30am restart of practice in the morning. A perfect way for me to end my stay in this area!

Tomorrow (Sunday) I’m getting picked up by a new couchsurfing.org friend named Jim who just happens to be traveling north to south on return to his home in Warner Robins, GA. I’ll stay one night at his place, and then continue down to Sanibel Island, Florida to visit my sister Becky and her husband John at their vacation rental there.

On my last two days in Decatur, I finally got to spend some time with the children that my daughter Anna cares for in her nanny job.

I was planning on going to Koinonia Farm next, but they have had a crisis with their drinking water system and are also welcoming their new interns, so they asked me to reschedule. I may visit there later in the winter, we shall see. As I’ve been saying for this trip, I’m uncertain of everything, so anything is possible!

Sitting with the small MPC group last Sunday was sweet. As usual, this group practicing in the Plum Village tradition was friendly and welcoming. The following Saturday, I returned to practice with them again and the facilitator asked us for suggestions of what to talk about during our dharma sharing time. I suggested happiness and was encouraged to say what I thought about that subject, so I gave a mini version of the basic view of happiness coming from within and so on, as I also write about in my book. I don’t think I actually mentioned my book to this group except when we were sitting snacking Sunday. I think I’ve got a bit of a tendency to shy away from it, perhaps because of a (mostly unconscious) concern about being seen as self serving through book sales. I’d like to release that tendency and the underlying fear!

The main patron and host of the MPC group shared many interesting stories from his life as a former Christian minister who was very involved with the civil rights movement. He married a woman of color, so knew first hand the challenges of racism in the south. I am lucky to have met him and have already spoken to him on the phone to get his help discerning the direction my life might take next! After hearing a bit of my story, he recommended I look into the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, in Conyers, GA.

This Monastery is Catholic Trappist and from the photos on their website, amazingly beautiful! The church was built of concrete starting in 1944, but the photos make it look more like an ancient cathedral than a modern day church. I look forward to visiting there and have applied for a one month minimum stay through their Monastic Guest program. This would allow me to be of some service, as participants work along side of the monks 5 hours a day, and help me discern if re-engaging with Christian one or more communities feels right for my future. I’ve received a reply that the monk in charge of these applications has the flu, so there will be a delay processing my request. That will give me time to get the required letters of recommendation lined up.

Every time I’ve visited a Christian church for Sunday service, I’ve felt the spirit strongly enough to require breathing through the ecstatic reaction that wells up in me. This ego reaction to my blissful state, which used to be triggered by particularly beautiful scenes in nature, has mostly been released, so having it rise again feels like a signpost worth noting!

Evening of Sunday, January 21

My new friend Jim has taken me right from Anna’s apartment to his home, and we just got back from a light dinner at a local brew tap that features lots of craft brews. We met his friend Beth, who had lots of interesting stories of her own to tell.

As soon as I got to Warner Robins, it was so warm I had to take a walk with bare, “happy feet!”

One Night Zen Retreat

Last night’s mini Zen retreat was similar in some ways to my experience with the Upper Valley Zen Center. Both centers are in Rinzai lineages, but not the same branch, evidently. I know little of these historical details! We sat, walked in step with each other, and sat some more in a quite rigorous schedule that was mostly on the cushion with about 5 minute walking “breaks,” as I started to think of them. Not that I dislike fast walking, it was just a fairly sit-intensive rhythm. In the morning we did some chanting. One of the chants seemed to be the same as from our book at the UVZC. The rest didn’t “ring a bell” in my memory at all. But the “flavor” was basically the same: ancient Japanese syllables the meaning of which is unimportant because it is meant as a vocal meditation practice more than an affirmation of any Buddhist beliefs.

For me the highlight of the retreat was the calligraphy practice, as this was new to me. We each took our turn using a very large brush, to copy a three part Chinese symbol, one part at a time, on sheets of newspaper. We all rotated around the work area and the person immediately on the left of the one doing their art was in charge of snatching the top sheet up as fast as it was used, to clear the way for the next set of strokes to be made on the clean sheet below.

I was told that I should move the brush from my core, not just my arm. The stroke order was not indicated on the sample we were copying, so I did my best to memorize it from the people that had their turns ahead of me. We didn’t all use the same stroke order, but evidently the process was partly interpretive and partly prescribed and at least for this practice, the resulting artistic product was unimportant: it was immediately discarded.

I left this short experience of calligraphy as a meditation practice both intrigued and hoping to have an opportunity to do more. I suppose I could practice on my own with a bit of equipment, but the group aspect of the practice was certainly an important part of the magic for me. Perhaps I’ll suggest that we try it at one of our future Center for Transformational Practice retreats.

Hitchhiking to Florida
Tuesday, January 23

My first day of hitchhiking was quite a success. Jim drove me to Interstate 75 so my first wait, which was over 2 hours, was at the south entrance ramp. At some point while I waited, I realized the nice opportunity I had to send a silent blessing to the each of the folks that passed by, that they have a great day. This changed the tone of waiting from a basic current moment meditation, to a nice connection with each person as they rounded the corner onto the entrance ramp! I intended to make eye contact with them, and often got a friendly wave and a smile in the process. I think I was only doing the well wishes “Metta practice” for 20-30 minutes before I got that first ride from Scott. He took me about 70 miles, to a rendezvous with his brother at the diner where he works, where we had lunch together. Before we said our “farewells,” we friended each other on Facebook.

Heading towards Sanibel Island to visit my sister Becky.

I continued the “Metta practice” while waiting for the second ride, and after about 30 minutes I was picked up by Gary. It was a short ride, but the new interchange had much more traffic so I was grateful for for his generosity for picking me up. Once I hopped in, I recognized him from when he drove by me earlier. When I asked about that, it turned out he had actually turned around at the next exit off the highway to go back to give me a ride!

I set myself up at the new busier on-ramp, and after about 15 minutes I heard a voice behind me, calling me over to a fence that separated the ramp area from a coffee shop parking lot. The young woman said, “I know it isn’t safe to pick people up…” as she looked at me somewhat apprehensively through the fence. As her voice trailed off I said, “I’m safe!” and I patted my “Faith to Practice” sweatshirt. “See, I’m all about faith to practice spiritual practices, like meditation, so you are safe with me.” She seemed fairly well convinced and agreed it would be best for me to come around the fence to meet her in the parking lot.

We had a very nice conversation on our 40 mile ride. She asked me about my beliefs, providing an opportunity to describe some of the basic ideas in my book. It turned out she is unsure of her beliefs, though she was raised in a Christian church. She is only 18 and just starting college to study natural resource management. As we parted, I gifted her a signed copy of my book and she thanked me, saying that she was very glad to have met me. That’s good, because when I shared that the previous man had turned around to pick me up, she told me that she had done so as well! This one interaction was worth the whole day of standing by the side of the road, all by itself, but the day wasn’t over yet.

Next to the next entrance ramp, a work crew was building a new bridge over the highway. I was waiting there, continuing my “Metta practice” for over an hour before I got my final ride of the day. During that hour, I noticed one of the workers glancing my way from time to time. During one of his short breaks to get a drink of water off the back of a truck, he came across the street to greet me. We exchanged our names and a few pleasantries, before he asked if I had money. I said I have some, but am saving it by not buying bus tickets. He handed me $10, saying “Here, I can use all the blessings I can get, so take this.” I said, “You already have all the blessings in the world and are showing it by giving me this money!”

Shortly after this nice interaction, something very strange happened. I big black van came up the off-ramp from the highway, crossed the road to the on-ramp at which I stood, and pulled over to pick me up! Later I wondered if he could have even seen me standing with my sign wayback at the end of the long off-ramp, as he rambled along at his usual 80 MPH? The driver didn’t speak much English, so I had to mainly communicate through his wife, who said she had no idea what he was doing when he left the highway. She said, “Maybe God sent us to you!” Of that I’m (of course) sure, but I still wonder what was going through her husband’s mind as he turned off the highway!

This last ride, which came only an hour or so before dark, took me all the way to a Flying J truck stop, just south of Fort Pierce, FL, where we stayed the night. They in their van, and me in a pasture a mile away down a dark dirt road where I was pretty sure I’d get away with pitching my tent just for the night. I did get away with with it, but the residents came to check me out in the morning. They luckily didn’t seem to mind, or they might have come at me with those pretty deadly looking horns!

Luckily the residents of the pasture in which I pitched my tent didn’t seem to mind that I was there, as I broke down my one night camp.

In the morning I found my new friends at the truck stop and they took me the rest of the way to a highway that would take me in the direction of Sanibel Island, if I could just get a ride. I waited in what seemed like a pretty ideal location, where a car could easily pull over to pick me up and there was lots of traffic, to no avail. After two and a half hours, I decided to go to the bus fall back plan. My sister Becky and brother-in-law John were willing to pick me up in Fort Myers, so paying $30 for the bus looked pretty good, given the risk that I could end up in a city environment at dark, with no couchsurfing.org friend lined up to stay with. It would have been pretty hard to find a place to pitch a tent in Fort Lauderdale, and even if I could get myself to a commercial campsite, it would have cost me as much as the bus fare.

This sign didn’t work for me. After 2.5 hours attempting to get my first ride out of Fort Lauderdale, I headed for the bus station.

As I finish up this post, my stay at Koinonia Farm has been confirmed to start next week. They have grape vines that need pruning, which sounds like a great opportunity for mindfulness practice to me! I’m looking forward to morning chapel and the other worship routines at the farm, and reconnect with friends I made when I interned there in 2015.

Spiritual Walkabout, Sleep Witnessing

At the bus station, heading to Logan airport in Boston.

I’m starting this post on the plane to Atlanta, heading south for the winter.

This morning I realized that the best word to describe the trip I’m heading into is “Walkabout.” At least a modern version, where I have no longer term plan and relatively few resources, at least by the modern standards of a developed country. I will have no vehicle, a low budget sufficient for groceries and a suitcase on wheels that contains some clothing, a tent, sleeping bag and pad, a wood burning cook stove, a small pot, a bowl, one set of utensils, a small Swiss Army knife and a few copies of my book, “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness.” I also have the usual modern bits, like a cell phone and an iPad with an external keyboard, so I won’t have to go to the library to make these posts, or to connect with the couchsurfing.org community that I plan to engage with quite regularly.

Most everything laid out to pack. Not shown: my custom designed / built folding meditation bench.

The trip was originally envisioned as a “book tour” or trip to teach about the subject of finding beliefs that support wholesome life practices, with an emphasis on meditation and other spiritual practices. Then at the end of September a wonderful thing happened to derail my will to put energy into all the logistics and human interactions that would be required to make that happen: I realized the ability to do what I call “sleep witnessing meditation.” The depth of this new practice, the pureness of awareness that I had uncovered, was quite unprecedented for me.  I spent 4-6 weeks doing it for 1-4 hours / night and sometimes during the day as well. The improved quality of awareness during this deepest practice started to be realized during some of my other meditations, while sitting and walking. Once, doing my usual “I am the witness” practice my motorcycle (of all times) I had a glimpse of a profound sense of “knowingness” which surpassed any level of personal understanding, which I’d only read about before. All in all it has been the most “exciting” (which is kind of a strange word for a seeker who is releasing all fears and desires 🙂 thing to happen in my practice since the ecstasy period I’ve mentioned in the about the author chapter of my book and on this site.  

Custom bench, folded.

At some point I vowed make it a goal to do this new practice as much of each night as possible from then on. It seemed to me I might be getting all the stress relief benefits of deep sleep and bodily rest I needed, regardless of the amount of unconscious sleep.  Very soon thereafter, my ability to do it shrunk to 1-2 hours a day, after I’d gotten my full nights sleep. Such is the way with these awakenings, at least in my experience. They tend to be realized in “previews,” then become occluded partially or completely for a time.

Like when I realized the radiant beauty of all creation, it initially lasted about 3 months, then was mostly occluded.  I had to do 1-2 days of continuous meditation practice to see it again. Fortunately I did not take it as a problem, just a wonderful new reason to motivate practice! Later it returned “to stay” (so far!)  Similarly, when I first realized unconditional Love of All, including everyone around me, it lasted about 2 months, before the ego covered it back up. It was an even more powerful motivation for practice than ever!

These previous awakenings have been described elsewhere so enough said. The point is that the same pattern may well again happen with the sleep witnessing ability, we shall see. Certainly it is yet another wonderful motivation for practice, so I’m very, very grateful.

I’ve never experienced full Unity of all creation, or full Awareness of all creation as “Myself.” The sleep witnessing does feel like a doorway through which I’d like to go, which seems to be positioned between my smaller self and my intended destination. I’m still spending at least an hour every day in that threshold, because it is such a nice place to stand. A place I’m devoted to go until I sense a better practice, or see that doorway open more fully, so I can see if stepping through will reveal my true Self.

This trip is an exploration and a test. I’m open to anything and planing almost nothing. I’m holding the intention of a better understanding how to interact with the world, now that I’ve “fallen in Love” with it. How can I best serve? All my life I’ve preferred to make decisions based on what I love (or at least like, when I was younger) to do. But I was more discriminating then! How do I decide what to do, when I experience Love when doing so many things? It is easier to find a few things I still don’t really care to do, like working on my car, than it is to find one thing that I love the best.

As I write this, I’m realizing that I could see this trip as a prayer of devotion. “God, I’ll listen to my heart to feel which direction to go next, to make it easier for you to show me the best way(s) to serve your plan of unconditional Love.” I know that there are people suffering everywhere, so I really don’t have to go far to find them, but I still don’t know where and how I can best serve. In the end, the trip still just “felt right” to my heart, even when I had not managed to plan any stops to engage formally with people to promote the book or otherwise teach / help them. I trust the trip will be perfect, none-the-less.

I’m finishing this post after being in Atlanta a week. At this point, my main concern is of cultural distractions. Will I manage to keep my practice focused, even with an increased exposure to media and the uncertainties of my travel plans? That is the biggest test. Increased exposure to mainstream culture tempts me to return to old habits of behavior, which could engender old habits of thought and occluded awareness. So far all is going blissfully well, but we shall see!