The Rules for Being Human

Re-blogged from Teacher as Transformer.

What wonderful, simple rules. They speak for themselves. Enjoy!

 

A faulty basic belief

A faulty basic belief.

This is reblogged from “Mindfulbalance Blog.” It really said something I needed to hear today. Enjoy!

 

The Papa Gathas

So the first thing I should probably explain for my non-Zen audience is what a gatha is. A gatha is essentially a short verse that can be recited during daily activities to help maintain mindfulness. A perfect example is the following gatha, written by Thich Nhat Hahn, and included in his book, Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. This gatha is to be used just before driving the car:

Driving a Car

Before starting the car,
I know where I am going.
The car and I are one.
If the car goes fast, I go fast;
If the car goes slowly, I go slowly.

Another good example is this one, also from Thich Nhat Hahn (all the ones I use are from him), which is to be used while washing dishes:

Washing the Dishes

Washing the dishes
is like bathing a baby Buddha.
The profane is the sacred.
Everyday mind is Buddha’s mind.

You get the idea. We recite these verses to help keep our minds on where we ar–in the present moment–rather than letting our minds drift off to what we have to do at work tomorrow, or what we have to get at the grocery store. The idea is, while washing the dishes we should just wash the dishes.

So, I decided to compose a couple of my own to use while I am performing my daily duties as a father. There didn’t seem to be any parent-specific ones in Present Moment, Wonderful Moment (and why would there be? Nhat Hahn is not married and has no children), so I adapted a couple of the ones in the book for my more specific needs. Here are a couple I have come up with so far:

Cleaning Applesauce

There is applesauce in her hair

And in the carpet.

How wonderful it is to scrub and clean.

 

Coming Downstairs

Small legs need more time

To take big steps.

With each step, a gentle wind blows;

With each step, a flower blooms.

 

Changing Diapers

In the poop I smell a rose,

In a rose I know there is poop.

Everything is in transformation.

Even permanence is impermanent.

 

During an Argument

May my words create mutual understanding and love.

May they be as beautiful as gems,

Even though my daughter does not listen,

And must sit in time out.

 

Once I have written all the gathas one will ever need as a parent, I will collect them into a volume called, The Papagathas. (Look for it at your local bookstore.) Some of you will recognize this as a reference to Tathagata—which has nothing whatsoever to do with gathas, but which works as a nice play on words for me. And I will spare you the explanation of what Tathagata is. If you already know, great. If you don’t, that’s okay; you don’t need to. And if you want to, you will look it up.

As always, thank you for reading this far. Be at peace. 🙂

 

This is wonderful. What a great illustration of why we should suspend judgment (and assume innocence!). We never have all the facts. I’m going to try to start looking at things as if there is a duck–even when I don’t know if there is one or not. 🙂

Facebook Zen

Have you ever been scrolling through Facebook and found yourself wondering, “Why on earth am I doing this?”

Have you ever wondered what you would do if you had back all the hours you lost on Facebook?

Now, let me say right up front that this post is not intended to criticize or vilify Facebook or its users in any way. Chances are, if you are reading this post, you got here via Facebook. Facebook is a fine medium for interaction between people who may or may not interact otherwise, or who want to share their lives with their friends and family. But it is also something that can be a drain on the mind and the soul—a hole down which we can sink many hours that could be spent doing something more worthwhile.

It can also be an opportunity to practice compassion.

When I first created my Facebook account about a year ago (yes, I’m a late bloomer), I went through a “honeymoon phase.” Did anyone else have one of those? Where you obsessively check Facebook a couple dozen times a day? (And looking back now, for the life of me I can’t imagine why I did that! But at the time, I just had to!)

It doesn’t take long for that to wear off, though (unless you get hooked on the games—which I thankfully avoided) and then there’s a big crash and you enter the Uggh-I-hate-Facebook phase. You spend less and less time on it until one day you realize that you haven’t even looked at it for three or four days.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but one of the reasons I became disillusioned by Facebook was that I started to notice how much negativity there was on there. Maybe I had overlooked all of that during the honeymoon phase (that is, after all, the definition of a honeymoon phase), but eventually it caught up to me and became overwhelming. There were all these posts complaining about the weather, complaining about work, complaining that it wasn’t the weekend yet, complaining about health issues, life sucks, pity me, boo-hoo-hoo. It started to make me feel tired and worn down and it became very annoying.

But we’ve all been through the cycle before—the extremes of the “obsession-with-a-new-toy” to the backlash of loathing and avoidance—and we all know that eventually we achieve equilibrium. This happened for me when I started to notice again that there was also a lot of positive out there on Facebook: people sharing pictures of their kids, pictures of their vacations, birthday greetings to friends and family, comments on their favorite TV shows, movies, bands, etc. That was when I realized (or remembered, anyway) that you find what you’re looking for. If you look for positive, you’ll find positive; but if you look for negativity, that is what you will surely find.

This was fairly early on in my Zen practice, but I was starting to see some fruit from it already! What a revelation! So, I started ignoring all the negative posts and I made a vow to only post positive things myself and to acknowledge positive posts with “Likes” and comments. Once I started this blog, I amended that to only posting about things—especially negative things, like capital punishment—in a positive manner. That’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

Then I learned about Metta and Tonglen from a Zen priest.

For those of you who are not familiar with Buddhist practice, Metta is the practice of “loving kindness.” It’s very simple. Basically, one wishes well for others. You think of a person and say, “May so-and-so be happy; may they be at peace.” Formally, it involves repeating this phrase as you work through a list, starting with the household pet and moving through other family members, someone about whom you have no strong feelings—either positive or negative, a difficult person, everyone in the city where you live, everyone in the United States, everyone in the world, and finally, all sentient beings in the universe.

I really enjoy this practice. It’s simple and, like any true “practice,” it helps to build the habit of compassion for others—which has not always come so easily to me.

Tonglen is a related but very different practice. It is a Tibetan Buddhist practice which is also designed to develop and enhance compassion. In Tonglen, you literally breathe in and imagine taking in all the pain and suffering you encounter—then breathe back out peace and happiness. I’ll often say the same thing as I do in metta when I do this: “May so-and-so be at ease; may they be at peace.”

So I started using these practices in my daily life and one day I had a revelation: what if I brought my Metta and Tonglen practice to Facebook? Now, each time I check in on Facebook and I see a post about something bad that has happened to someone, or about how their job or their life just generally sucks, I breathe it in, then breathe happiness and peace back out toward them and recite, “May so-and-so be happy; may they be at peace.” It feels a hell of a lot better than what I used to think and feel when I saw negative stuff on Facebook.

Now, Zen practice is not magic. There are no spells and I am not a sorcerer. I don’t think or pretend that so-and-so is actually going to be happy or at peace because I recite my little phrase. And I don’t think a powerful being somewhere is going to make so-and-so peaceful and happy because I ask nicely. No, the change is in me. As I repeat this practice again and again, over (hopefully) many years and decades, it will gradually make me more compassionate—no matter how stubbornly I may resist.

I can actually feel the change already—even after such a short time. I’m not as easily annoyed as I used to be (which is not the same thing as saying I don’t get annoyed) and I am starting to recognize that some of the things that annoy me are just manifestations of suffering and that the best thing I can do to help create positive energy in the universe, is to show some compassion. The idea is if all of use create as much positive energy as possible and as little negative energy as possible, every one of us will benefit and the world will be a better place. (Yes, I know I’ve got a little bit of a hippy thing going on.)

So the next time you check Facebook and you read a post about how miserable it is to exist, try smiling, breathing in all that misery, and breathing back out a little happiness.

And if you have read this far, may you be happy; may you be at peace. 🙂