The Way of It

I want to tell you about a retreat I am putting together together with my dear friends at BKI in the San Francisco Bay area on December 12-14th. It is called The Work and Silence and it combines periods of sitting meditation with doing The Work with a partner. Silence will be observed between sessions throughout the entire retreat. It will be a weekend of silence, stillness, deep listening and open ended inquiry.

The retreat will take place at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, 40 minutes north of the San Francisco Airport, in a valley that opens out onto the Pacific Ocean. It is a beautiful venue with hiking trails that lead to the shores of Muir Beach in only a few minutes. Green Gulch hosts a community of Buddhist practitioners that year round devote themselves to the study and practice of Zen as they care for an organic farm and garden, a guest house and a conference center.

We held this retreat for the first time at Green Gulch in March 2008 and it was a beautiful, intimate experience. I learned a lot and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible there. If this interests you, I strongly invite you to consider attending. Scholarships will be available.

The highest level is to be level with everyone.

To not leave anyone behind.

The trust that has been placed on me by my teachers

I shall not defraud

To be kind to you

is my greatest joy

A few Sundays ago as I was taking a shower I had the courage to admit to myself the unadmittable: that I still loved my drama. I have been reading over the last few months in several of Adyashanti’s writings about the fact that the reason that we humans still identify with the notion of a separate Me is that we think it is fun to be a Me. If we didn’t think there were any benefits, why would we do it? And if we did not identify, how could we suffer? So to the extent that I still feel entangled in my life I can open my eyes and, well, begin to take inventory of all the benefits I think being a Me brings.

And the insights I got from this kind of honesty to myself are too numerous to count and even to describe, although I will try my best.

• I found a freedom that was at the same time deep and very ordinary, that simply comes from the realization that it is okay that I love my drama, when I do, because that’s what is.
• Loving what is, no matter what it is, does not take me to the land of the metaphysical fairies, it brings me to now, now, now. Where else would anyone think it was going to take me? It’s all reentry, all the time. And this is the best news.
• I notice an ease to deal with the “curveballs” in life that I fall in love with more and more with with each day that passes by.
• I am more loving and accepting to myself than before. I don’t have to wait to be “enlightened” to really love and admire the way I live. I can be more loving and accepting of it now instead. And whatever parts I don’t love yet, I can love and accept that I’m not there yet. It REALLY is okay.
• My favorite way of saying it, for now: I still have problems. It’s just not a problem that I still have problems. I don’t need to be problem free to be happy or at least to be at ease with the conditions in my life, or at least to have the integrity to be present with my suffering, when it comes. And sometimes it does.
• Further, I see the advantages of still “having problems.” Judging from all I’ve learned from my old problems, and knowing the value of those lessons, wow, I can’t imagine what good could come from what is left of my problems. So I look forward to them. They are welcome here. Not because I’m masochistic, but because, well, they may come anyways. I am open to the wonders they bring. In the end it becomes difficult to call them problems anymore, and I notice that I still do, sometimes. I’m working on it.
• The real end is that I don’t care much anymore about whether there is an end or not, because either way, I know how to deal with what comes. And even if I forget how to deal with it, I’m never too far from Home. Not far at all.
• And that, as far as I can see, is the real freedom, the one that is independent from conditions. It’s what’s meant in Buddhism by the expression “Samsara is Nirvana,” as far as I can see.

But, please, don’t take it from me: I may just be full of hot air. That could be as true, or truer :).

I am currently driving West, on my move to San Luis Obispo County in California. Along the way I have had the joy to see spectacular sights side by side with, well, the wonderful content of my mind.

At some point early in the trip I decided to do The Work on the thought “I need people to admire me.” I came to see for myself that, despite me believing it at varying degrees of strength throughout my life, it isn’t really true, and what wonderful news this is!

Further, I tried on “I need me to admire me” as a turnaround and to my amazement I discovered that whenever I do something that makes me proud of myself I soon want somebody to praise it but I spend barely any time giving the kind of honest and loving praise to myself that I seem to want from others. And so I decided to catch up with myself: as I drove through the desert I began making a list of all the aspects of me that I really do admire, and I took it in, really spending time reflecting on them, bathing on them, fully.

It is one of the most beautiful things I have done for myself. I would think, for example, how proud I am of how I have handled my divorce this last year, of how dedicated I have become to establishing a genuine connection with my students, of how loving of a father to my children I have become through the years, and the list would not stop. It would go on and on, searching through the distant past, finding the ways in which my life has had meaning and enriched this wonderful, mysterious planet. I did this slowly, really taking in the internal approval for who and what I am, for what I am becoming, for what breathes and thinks me.

I would think about each of these reasons for humble pride, and they would fill my heart, and I would cry, and cry, and cry, in joy. In fact, my heart swells up just to think of those wonderful hours of driving through the Southwest, crying, becoming real with myself about my own worth. At last.

What a wonderful thing, to be aware of one’s greatness, because it is through my greatness, and only through it, that I can be of genuine service.

You may know I have a son. His name is Tad, and he is about to be 14 years old. He is a handsome, emotionally put together young man. A couple of months ago I told him:

You are coming of age. It is time for you and I to take a trip together, through which we will bond, and we will both expore how is it that one may come to live a meaningful life.

The old forgotten rite of passage. Machelle and I had talked about that this time would come. It was time. Tad tells me that at the moment he thought I was going to take him out to the wilderness for a week, or take him to the middle of a lake and throw him there and see him swim back to the shore. I said, instead:

You and I are going to Byron Katie’s three-day Relationship Workshop in Chicago.

He was strangely relieved. I asked him how he felt about that, and he said he would do it.

What you will read in the upcoming posts is his own account of how the weekend went for him. He wrote the text you will read as part of an assignment he had for school, about community service. His take on it was that being a facilitator of The Work is a form of community service. Enjoy.

Tad’s experiences at the Relationship Workshop (Part One)

Tad’s experiences at the Relationship Workshop (Part Two)

Tad’s experiences at the Relationships Workshop (Part Three)

Tad Baumann
Byron Katie Workshop: Day One
May 4, 2007

At the Byron Katie workshop, we got a folder that had many sheets of paper. As we went along through the workshop Katie would invite us to get a certain sheet of paper and write the answers to questions she would ask us. The most unique sheet of paper was the yellow card. The yellow card had the following words on it:

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

• Turn the thought around…………..

These four questions changed my whole life to a different view and that of many others who were there at the workshop. We used these four questions for every problem we worked with. I will show how each step works using the following sentence:

I am angry at Brandon because he is mean to everyone.

This is a stressful thought that I had. To work with it I first shortened it to:

Brandon is mean to everyone.

Number one: “Brandon is mean to everyone, is that true?” You shut your eyes and think. If the answer is YES, you go to question number two. If the answer is NO you skip to number 3. In this case my answer was YES.

Number two: “Brandon is mean to everyone. Can you absolutely know that this is true?” Shut your eyes again. “Is he mean in your thoughts?” “Does he act mean to people in your point of view?” “Does he act kind to some people?” Those questions that I just typed are the things you should be searching for in your mind. My answer to this question is NO. He is not mean to everyone.

Number three: “Brandon is mean to everyone. How do you react when you believe that thought?” “I feel sad that he treats people with disrespect. I feel like it is my fault that I can teach him not to be so mean if I hang out with him but I don’t want to because he is mean.” That was an example of a common answer. The answers tell how you feel and how you treat yourself and others when you believe that thought.

Number four: “Brandon is mean to everyone. Who would you be with out the thought that Brandon is mean to everyone?” “I would feel safer. I wouldn’t have to worry about him in his long run. I would hang out with him more. He would be a better friend to me.”

The Turnaround
Turn the thought “Brandon is mean to everyone” around. A turnaround could be: “I’m mean to everyone.” Now find three statements in which that could be true. “I have been mean to my sister. I have been mean to my friends. I have been mean to my parents.” Now find another turnaround. “Brandon is not mean to everyone.” Now find another three statements in which that could be true. “He is kind to his nephew. He is kind to his sister. He is kind to most of his friends.” The turnaround is a way to learn about myself and the world from the judgments I have about others.

Now we have done The Work. From this I found out that Brandon is similar to me because we are both mean in some ways. I learned that he is not mean to everyone. I want to say he is so that I can be right but that does not prove anything. After doing this work on Brandon I felt better. I felt like I could understand him more.

By accident, I ended up at Steve Pavlina’s blog today. I had been there before. Intriguing, strong willed character, Steve is. Browsing through his posts, I found this one called “How to discover your life’s purpose in 20 minutes.” Too tempting to pass. On his post he recommends the following exercise:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type .

2. Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”

3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.

4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

So I decided to give it a try. I opened up my word processor, wrote at the top “What is my true purpose in life?, and began to write.

I immediately wrote:

To be happy, to serve

and began to cry.

So much for it taking 20 minutes. Maybe all the inner work I’ve done through the years hasn’t been in vain.