Retreat opportunity in 2022

Dear Friends,

Just as things seem to be contracting again during the newest wave of this pandemic, I wanted to offer a bright spot on the horizon and something to look forward to for the coming year. Each in-breath is filled by an out-breath in the endless cycle of change in our lives.

As many of you know, Donna Martin and I have led retreats in Hawaii since 1999. After twenty years of teaching at Hui Ho’olana we decided to discontinue organizing and managing these retreats. However, we still feel like we have something to offer and we have generous and committed students who have offered to assist in organizing another retreat. We have also heard from many of you who have asked for another opportunity to be with us, especially after the particularly barren time we have all lived through over the past 18 months. We will be returning to the Hui in May of 2022 assuming the pandemic has shifted sufficiently by that point.

The retreat is titled Hakomi as Spiritual Practice and will be a body-centered week of relational practices founded in mindfulness. We will have periods of meditation, mindful movement, interpersonal exploration, and deep internal work, all focused on living with more freedom and choice. We expect there to be Hakomi practitioners interested in continuing their training experience with me and Donna, Zen students looking for a deepening of their spiritual practice, and people from many other disciplines who have studied and practiced with us in the past and who long to return to the Hui. Whatever the motivation, all are welcomed, and I trust that the group will become a gathering of those who are called to this particular time and space to be nourished and renewed.

Donna and I are not in charge of registrations, but for more information about details or to register, please follow the link here: https://www.hakomicascadia.com/retreat-hakomi-as-spiritual-practice

With our warmest aloha,

Flint

IMG_1142.jpeg

What is the point?

Q:  A friend recently asked me an important question and wondered if you could shed some light. She asked, what is the point of living? … (she) wondered if all is perfect then why create or manifest humanity? Are we trying to work through something? which of course suggests imperfection. Perhaps you have a suggested reading?

This is such an important question today as we face unimaginable change, losses seemingly on every front, the swirl of fear and uncertainty, a profound erosion of care, and yet we also see immense creativity, a deep commitment to shared generosity and basic goodness,…and much more.

“What is the point.” we sometimes ask, as we veer between nihilism or despair on one hand and fantasies of protection and the many forms of grasping hope on the other. Is there a way to understand our everyday, grounded practice as it relates to this huge question — what is the point — and how does it bear on our lives now?

Remember, spiritual practice, and Buddhist practice in particular, is not about creating new ways to solve problems. Our practices help us open to a more wise and compassionate space from which we can respond creatively to our inevitable and unending problems. Zen practice won’t give you a new solution. It will, however, shape and inform how you come to every solution and reminds you that every solution is provisional. 

Here is what I wrote…

A: As to your friend’s question, “What is the point of living?” The point is to live. We are given this amazingly miraculous thing called “a life,” so we have a responsibility to take care of it and to care for each other—to care for all things that have been given a life. I don’t have the capacity nor inclination to tackle the larger philosophical or theological issues surrounding your question. People have been speculating about these big questions for as long as people have been given lives, and I sense that a good deal of the philosophizing is done out of a vulnerable and fearful attempt to face the existential question of existence in a way that will give them some ground to stand on or some assurance that they are doing the right thing or going in the right direction. In our spiritual search, we want answers that will console us, or at least ones that offer us something, rather than nothing.

The Buddha refused to answer most of these kinds of questions, not because they were not important, but they were not the essential questions that would help inform and guide a life. The question you pose in your note, along with the additional query from your friend, “if it is all perfect, then why create or manifest humanity?” includes some pretty important assumptions. Things are “perfect,” meaning they are a perfect manifestation of all the causes and conditions that went into manifesting each thing and each moment. Things are not perfect in some ordinary way of matching human preference from a self-referenced perspective. Obviously, many terrible things happen, seemingly daily, and these are also perfect manifestations of the causes and conditions that went into manifesting them. Human beings are part of that perfection—part of that manifestation—not some separate aberration set aside from “nature” which can be romanticized as “perfect.” Each of us are also a perfect result of everything that went in to making us. This is the foundation of the natural world and it is also what we chant in our confession and repentance [All my ancient twisted karma…]. 

Our lives on this earth are temporary and precariously balanced along with everything else, and we are also likely to become perfectly extinct as a species if we allow our self-centered minds and egoic desires to rule. We humans are supremely creative and also ruthlessly destructive, but those are just human creations — linguistic descriptors of perfect actions (i.e. naturally interdependent, arising as mutual causation), but offered from a single person’s individual viewpoint. Remember — awakening is stepping beyond a personal viewpoint.

The universe is an equal opportunity employer—everyone gets a chance—but everyone and everything has to play by the rules, which means that no matter what we think or wish, everything always effects everything else, intimately and without end. So, it is probably a good idea to be awake to what we do and to the consequences of how we are doing it — how we live our lives. And herein lies a response to your friend’s question. The point is to live a life in the service of life. Our purpose is to support and cherish this miraculous existence so that the ongoing perfection of impermanence and mutual causality, the contingent flow of dependent origination, this vast web of one-thing arising, might be wholesome and generative to all. We are all part of the game and how we play it matters. There is only one thing happening, and it looks like this!

Of course, I am making my own assumptions in my reply—that there is no master manipulator calling the shots. There may or may not be some divine direction, but that is not what we are discussing here and it open up an additional discussion that is not required now. The lawful interdependence of everything is what is in charge. The dharma might be called the guiding energy of “god" or “great spirit” or “universal mind.” But, these are, again, additional human descriptions of what is always and already happening anyway. There is no perfect existence which exists out there which is then spoiled by humans. Humans do spoil things but that is part of the immense fullness of existence, including clumsy and brilliant humans, and we are not more or less important than anything else in nature. However, because we have been given these big brains which can imagine and create almost anything, we do have an enormous impact on each other and everything else on the planet. So we have an immense responsibility to wake up. The point is to pay attention, to care, to love, and to be humble in the face of it all. Ultimately, we don’t really know.

With a respectful bow,

Flint

P.S. You can also see and hear my offering of this at online Inquiry: September 8, 2020

The Shock of Vulnerability

Throughout my life I have been blessed with relatively good health and vitality. I have decent genes and come from good stock, for which I am exceedingly grateful. As a college student, my father was a record-setting athlete in track and field, and has remained physically active into his 70s. As a young girl, my mother was an energetic ranch-hand working cattle right alongside my grandfather. She has always been hearty and healthy, from a long line of women who typically live into their 90s. As a result, I have lived most of my life with an uncritical assumption that I, too, would remain healthy and active without any extraordinary effort on my part, and that I would naturally look and feel more youthful than my chronological age. Of course, this set of assumptions is really a kind of self-centered entitlement, completely in accord with our society’s preference for youthful bodies and infinite good health, a form of clinging that has set me up for a certain kind of painful fall as things have begun to crumble. As they say, “aging is not for sissies.”

When this kind of grandiosity or entitlement is confronted by undeniable experience, therapists call it a “narcissistic injury.” It is a terrible shock to confront one’s messy humanity and to realize that this very special self you have cultivated and protected for so long is not so special after all. It is embarrassing and painful to be ordinary and vulnerable. It can also be a big relief.

The first time I went to San Francisco Zen Center as a guest student I was thrilled and nervous at the opportunity to practice in such a well-known and historical center. I had planned the trip for over a year, had carefully designed a way to take the time off from my therapy practice, had negotiated with my partner to be gone for a week, and had read everything I could about the Zen Center and its history. I had made it a big deal. The second day I was there I was given a soji assignment (a temple cleaning job) following morning service. My job was to vacuum the residents’ lounge. I found the vacuum cleaner and began doing the job in the way I thought an enthusiastic Zen student should. At one point as I reached over to pick up and move a rather large chair in order to clean the area it covered, I was thinking about how cool it was to finally be at Zen Center after so much fantasizing about the trip, and how much I was going to learn by being in this wonderful place with these wonderful teachers. As I lifted the chair, something unpleasant happened in my back. I felt something like an electrical shock in my lower back, immediately followed by muscle spasms. I was unable to straighten up without intense pain. I somehow managed to slowly become upright enough to drag myself, along with the vacuum cleaner, back to the closet. I was then able to sneak down to the men’s dorm in the basement without attracting too much attention. to myself. I lay down on my bed and pondered my situation.

Here I was, just beginning my special week and I was flat on my back. I knew this wouldn’t just go away and I was slightly panicked. I also knew I couldn’t even pack my things and go home. I wasn’t able to sit on a plane in this condition. I was trapped and embarrassed. My body had betrayed me and I couldn’t escape this temporary disability nor could I leave and hide my embarrassment. I had to face THIS! My roommate came by and I solicited his help in going to the store and getting ibuprofen for the inflammation. He also took a note to both the Ino and the Work Leader to tell them the situation and then I just lay there – miserable and in disbelief.

My journal and pen were right by the bed and I found a small piece of paper I had been using for a bookmark. I wrote the following three phrases on the paper:

  • SLOW DOWN

  • PAY ATTENTION

  • DON’T GIVE UP

After a while I rolled over onto the floor, got up on my hands and knees, and pulled myself to my feet using the desk as a crutch. I could walk if I remained very upright, but I couldn’t bow. I even found I could move around slowly and I could sit carefully in a chair, a big embarrassment for this enthusiastic beginner who was trying to sit on a zafu in full lotus. However, I could only do these basic things if I followed the three suggestions I had written on the paper. If I took my time, with very mindful attention, and didn’t get caught in my story or trapped by fear, I could keep going. Of course, I also had to rest and allow healing rather than trying to be the best beginning Zen student ever.

Throughout the rest of that week I had the opportunity to meet myself, and the challenges of this new practice, in ways that I had never anticipated. I couldn’t depend on my body as I could ordinarily. I couldn’t move about in habitual or unconscious ways. I had to be very focused and present in my body or I had a painful reminder that I just become distracted. I had never had such exquisite and precise help with practice before. This was not the teacher I had expected to meet at the San Francisco Zen Center, and yet I was intimately connected with what all the teachers would have suggested: enter practice through your body; be present with “things as it is”; let go of your preferences; study the self- centered dream and drop the clinging to that self. This list of practice recommendations could go on and, in fact, continues to this day.

Ten months later I returned to Zen Center to participate in my first seven- day sesshin. I carried that small piece of paper with me and put it on the altar in the room where I stayed. Each day of that difficult and wonderful week I was reminded to slow down, pay attention, and to not give up. These phrases helped me make my way through the sesshin and became important guides that have stayed with me. I began to have a visceral understanding of Pema Chodron’s phrase — “the wisdom of no escape.” I found myself backed into a corner with nowhere to turn except to follow the schedule of practice, The events which offered me this painful and useful opportunity were literally physical blows to my self-centered image of myself. I was shocked at how vulnerable I could feel and I began to wake up to the truth that simply by being alive we are always vulnerable, no matter what grandiose stories we have about ourselves. Actually, each day is a gift and a blessing, best met with gratitude. Our temporary bodies are miracles, the source of the most amazing pleasures and often very difficult pains. This is where we live – in this body. This is where we practice – with this body and mind. And this is what the young Gautama saw on his secret trips outside the palace; that everything wasn’t always beautiful and pleasant; that sickness, old age, and death are real and inevitable for everyone; and that the shock of this human vulnerability has the power to awaken us from the self- centered dream and liberate us from suffering if we slow down, pay attention, and don’t give up.