Saying "Enough"

Hi all, it's another Mimi update from her Boswell. Some of you have been inquiring by email about Mimi's status - many apologies for the delay in responding and in updating this blog. It's been a busy week around here with family visiting from Florida and a friend visiting from New York. Next week will bring more family from New Jersey. How wonderful that loved ones are making the pilgrimage from near and far!

Many of our Seattle friends, along with thousands of Kadampas from around the world, are making another kind of pilgrimage: they're on a spiritual holiday at Manjushri Centre in England, attending the International Summer Festival that occurs every year at about this time. Local friends who aren't at Summer Festival this year are putting in extra hours to help out with cleaning and other chores, or just to be present while Mimi rests so that Richard can take a break. A friend who has experience with caring for a loved one on hospice calls these "respite visits." It's been so helpful for Richard to have this assistance - thank you, amazing friends! Your gift of cherishing is so precious.

As of the last report about ten days ago, Mimi's energy was good and she had been receiving up to five visitors a day. More recently, her energy levels have waned a bit and, outside of the respite visits, we've reduced her schedule to about two visitors per day. The remainder of the time she's been spending in bed to rest up and charge her batteries for the next visit. She's been spending more time sleeping and her appetite has decreased. Then Kadam Heather came up yesterday from Portland to spend the night here, and it was such an energizing visit for Mimi! Today Heather presided over Offering to Spiritual Guide right by Mimi's bedside so that Mimi could rest when she needed to during the two-hour puja. We coordinated with some friends at Manjushri Centre and timed the puja so that we were all making prayers at the same time. It was magical! Email me at rebecca-dot-lafond-at-gmail.com if you'd like to see pictures.

Mimi's physical state is going through ups and downs, but her mind, as usual, stays peaceful and positive. As you might remember from her previous blogs, Mimi considers her experience with cancer as an opportunity to receive daily teachings on samsara's true nature. She views suffering and difficulty as gifts that help us to become deeply familiar with our real situation. Mimi has written that her approach to adversity is "not just to welcome it, but to thank it for being there, showing honestly the face of samsara, rather than the mask, which fools me into thinking there's some real pleasure here. I don't want to hang out in this impure world. I don't want temporary pleasures to hook me into believing they're what's going to make my life happy." If you want to read more of her thoughts about how deceptive samsara can be, and about renunciation, samsara's antidote, see this blog post (especially the last paragraph). It will blow your mind.

Send emails, post comments - it's wonderful to hear from you!

The end of ...

At the Rocky Mt Retreat, Kadam Lucy read us this well known quotation about impermanence by Gungtang Rinpoche:

The end of collection is dispersion.

The end of rising is falling.

The end of meeting is parting.

The end of birth is death.

 

After that session, when we were headed to lunch, some of us came up with a few variations:

 

The end of drinking is peeing.

The end of eating is defecating.
 

Sorry if that's too crude for you, but it is true. It might help cut through an attachment to food and/or drink, or help in developing renunciation.

Today, I found myself thinking:

The end of cleaning is ...
 

Well, it seems there is no end of cleaning : )
Or you could say the end of cleaning is "more cleaning."

A Good Look at Samsara

When I had a recent health scare (story to come), I realized another way I want to deal with adversity: not just to welcome it, but to thank it for being there, showing honestly the face of samsara, rather than the mask, which fools me into thinking there's some real pleasure here. I don't want to hang out in this impure world. I don't want temporary pleasures to hook me into believing they're what's going to make my life happy.
It's fine to enjoy a tasty meal or a fabulous song, but the danger to is that we naturally get addicted to them, thinking more is even better, and pursue them to the exclusion of meditation, which does take a bit more effort, like walking uphill, rather than following the easy downward trail. 
Buddha taught the middle way, not the ascetic way. We learn ways of transforming what would otherwise be indulgences into something  meaningful.
For example, yesterday after I got the good report about my medical condition, R and I were enjoying some delicious spinach mo-mos (Tibetan dumplings), sitting at our dining table in the sun, and we had to remind each other not to be deceived.
Of course, we know we can offer that enjoyment to Guru Buddha at our heart, and that's become a regular practice, because it's so enjoyable. Isn't it great that joy is considered a power? It helps us sustain our spiritual life. I love hearing about ways to make it fun, like pretending you're just an actor, and the whole world is a set.
Send me your favorite way to make your practice fun, and I'll post the collection here.

Sufferings of Aging

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been reading the book A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents - and Ourselves by the New York Times writer Jane Gross. It's her story about taking care of her elderly mother as she declines over the last four years of her life. Her descriptions of those sufferings really made an impression on me and strengthened my renunciation and compassion.

Here's one example about getting to an MRI appointment, from early on:
Since her arthritis was worst in the morning, she had to rise at dawn and wait to dress until her joints had loosened. I’d go to her apartment and help her downstairs to the car, fold the walker and put it in the trunk, and then settle her into the front seat and fasten her seat belt, since she could no longer swivel from the shoulder and waist or manipulate the buckle. These were among my early lessons in how hard it is to be old — how long everything takes, how much some of it hurts, and how a caregiver must stop moving at warp speed and adapt to the pace of someone who is disabled, trying to make it all look natural and effortless.
I learned this much: Never shame your mother into rushing to keep up with you. First of all, it’s not nice. Second, both of you will have to cope with her broken hip if rushing leads to a fall.

A few years later her mother loses her ability to speak and then the ability to swallow, among many other losses. Gross's mother, Estelle, wasn't someone who wanted to be kept alive with things like feeding tubes; in fact, she had a risky surgery on her spine because she was hoping the operation would kill her, her family learned after the fact.

More excerpts:
p.268
My mother and I knew that, most likely, she'd missed the moment for a quick and easy passing. ... The reward for living this long, she often said, and studies support it, is that you get to "rot to death" rather than die. ... It was, she thought, the perfect trope for what happened to anyone who had the misfortune to need a nursing home or to have to pay someone to live with them at home, babysitter style, because they were too compromised to be alone. .... For someone of her nature, the long, slow, humiliating decline - mentally or physically - was unacceptable. ...

p.291
A doctor writes about his mother's fear of becoming "little more than a blank stare."

p.231
Helping our parents transition from total independence to partial or total dependence is a delicate balancing act that is impossible to do perfectly. Empathy, I would argue, is our best guide. While it may be impossible to escape the complicated feelings engendered by being thrust into a quasi-parental role toward one's parent, you can try to leaven those thoughts by considering how they feel about the same role reversal. The work, and ultimately grief, is ours, but the accretion of losses is theirs. They are giving up their independence, their physical or mental capacities, their pride, the role as head of the family, their spouses, and their friends. Their reward for longevity is often a wheelchair and diapers and being ordered around by their children. On the days when I wished I could run away from my responsibilities, I'd practice this mind game: If I can't bear one more day as my mother's mother, imagine how she feels. ...

Saying "No"

A companion post to Saying "Yes" ...
I say "yes" to Buddhism, but as a Buddhist I say "no" to samsara, the ongoing cycle of suffering in life after life after life, which is renunciation.

My friend of the "yes" said the ultimate "no"- she killed herself, in her early 30s, after surviving the most horrific childhood I have ever heard of. Kerry was a close friend, and we often talked about her wish to kill herself. This was B.D. (before Dharma). I wish I had some Dharma wisdom then - maybe I could have helped her. How do you convince someone it's worth sticking around when their life is so painful? She rarely slept because she feared the traumatic dreams that left her soaked in sweat. I knew that she had a lot of trouble imagining hope for herself, so I tried to get her to rely on my hope for her.
She was a Religion major, and her favorite religion was Mahayana Buddhism, because she loved the idea that you weren't just trying to get into Heaven for yourself and then, as she said, pulling up the ladder behind you. Unfortunately, her intellectual knowledge didn't lead to believing.
She was an amazing person, working with the homeless when she could have been a professor, as many of her own professors encouraged her to be. Bloomington, Indiana gave her a key to the city for her work. When I visited her there, she couldn't walk down the street without being greeted by people she had helped: an alcoholic who almost froze to death in his car who was working for the parks department, a schizophrenic who had gotten Section 8 housing thanks to her, a father who'd regained custody of his kids.
One of her intellectual interests was the idea of ''action at a distance,'' which I thought of at the time as history but now see as karma (even though you could say history is a subset of karma). I think she lost hope when she found out that geographic distance from her family wasn't enough.

Later I met a psychiatrist friend who's had this suicide conversation with too many of his patients. He's deeply influenced by Buddhist thought and believes the best answer is impermanence. He thinks that depressives have a strong sense that nothing will ever change.

When I find myself tempted by worldly pleasures, I sometimes think of Kerry. There is nothing that is going to make up for that loss - there is no lemon tart, no sunshine on the beach, not even a true heart-to-heart conversation with a good friend is going to come even close to balancing that out. Not just her dying - the fact that any of us has to die. That there's war, and addiction and famine and disease and depression and ... I could go on and on, and it could get really depressing listing all the sorrows we have to experience.
Do you ever feel like our situation is unacceptable?
Samsara is a losing proposition. It's a con game. They say you can only be conned if you want to be. I don't necessarily believe that, but to the extent it's true, it applies to samsara. Switching analogies: I don't want to play anymore. You cannot win. To  keep betting is to put yourself deeper and deeper in the hole. The house will let you win just a little to keep you in the game (those small, temporary pleasures we think of as happiness), but the odds are not in your favor. The only sure thing is that you will lose, and the longer you play, the more you will lose.
Samsara is like being constantly lured into an ambush, with shiny gee-gaws as bait, which turn out not to be the precious jewels we imagine but worthless plastic trinkets.
We are fools. I am a fool for thinking any of these things can really make me happy.

Renunciation as Compassion

Many of us don't like the word 'renunciation' because we associate it with rejecting things we hold dear, such as our families and enjoyments. Of course, that's not what it means in Buddhism, where it's defined as a wish to abandon suffering, particularly the suffering of future lives. It's a joyful mind.

We're taught that before we can generate compassion for others, we need renunciation for ourself. For our compassion to be grounded, we have to understand the true nature of the world we live in, which is suffering. I was one of those who wanted to jump ahead to compassion for others without generating renunciation for my own suffering.

I've been pondering whether we can bring it back around, so that we think of renunciation as compassion for ourself. That isn't technically correct, but I wonder if it's sometimes helpful to see it that way. (Maybe I've lost track of which mountain I am, This or That, Me or You : ) Heh, heh - I don't think so.)
You could certainly say we want to develop renunciation out of kindness for ourself.

A few years ago when Jindak was leaving her job, transitioning to become a nun, she taught a lunch-time meditation class, I think it was, where she compared renunciation to the last days of work after you've given notice. (This was back in the days when people often left a job for a better one.) If you're conscientious, you're still doing all the tasks you used to, but you're not bothered anymore by the petty criticisms, office politics, and gossip - because you're out of there. That's the feeling of renunciation. It's liberating!

Last Sat we had the Empowerment of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. He is one of my favorites - probably the first Buddha I connected to, even more than Buddha Shakyamuni, who was like a kind father; Avalokiteshvara was like a friend.
Richard and I did some traveling in Asia - Japan, China, Hong Kong (when it was a British colony), Thailand - and looking back I think seeing Buddha statues all over helped draw me to Buddhism. In a lot of those places, the Buddha of Compassion is female, so sometimes I used to forget and think of Avalokiteshvara as female.