Thoughts Happen

How is Meditation Like Marketing?

Meditation — Marketing. It doesn’t seem that there should be any connection between the two. Think of a meditator and you probably picture a person sitting serenely cross-legged on a cushion with his or her eyes closed, hands resting gently or holding a pose with thumb and middle finger lightly touching to make a circle. Perhaps the setting is a quiet meditation hall or under a spreading tree in a magazine-worthy nature shot.  

Think of a marketer and the picture might not be so serene. Perhaps an underpaid desk jockey in India with a headset microphone, or a slick, aggressive Mad Men-type shyster trying to get people to buy things they don’t need. 

But in reality we are all meditators and marketers, whether we realize it or not.  

I ran across a discussion in a LinkedIn writers group recently that touched on this exact topic. One of the posters posited that even if we protest that we don't like marketing and don't want to have anything to do with it, all our public statements, including those on message boards and in person, are in fact part of our marketing and branding.

Writers who are too lazy to do the digging around to figure out what type of articles a market typically publishes, and simply email editors asking them to look at their website to ask what type of work they could get, are also marketing — in a negative way — to their intended audience. In essence, we can't escape marketing, so we might as well approach it consciously and productively. 

Hmm ... you mean I’m always marketing myself, consciously or unconsciously? Yikes. Better watch what I put out there!  

But what about meditating? Surely I am not meditating all the time.  

Well, it depends on how you see the word “meditation.” Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the spiritual leader of Shambhala Buddhism, in his video clip, "Learning to Meditate," (also shown below) says the word in Tibet has roots in the word “familiarity,” and so it really means getting used to something. 

“I always think that in a sense we are always meditating, meaning we are always getting familiar. Our mind is getting used to something. We may be getting used to the thought of anxiety, worrying, anger. Our mind is getting used to something. So in a sense we are meditating.”

It makes sense: whatever you place your mind on during the course of the day, you are getting familiar with. We can meditate on thoughts of being wronged, feeling impoverished or on our own fantasies and desires by constantly coming back to them during the day. Or, we can familiarize ourselves with kindness, curiosity and humor, and meditate on those.

Which kind of meditation and marketing would you choose?

 

 

Changing the Channel, or: How to Draw a Horse, with Artist Rick Stitch

Rick Stitch, of Santa Barbara, is a real, live working artist. He's also approachable, creative and practical, as I recently discovered when my daughter and I dropped in at the Lux Art Institute where he is the current resident artist.

We were taking in his water-inspired paintings on exhibit and enjoying the mini pier that he created right in the gallery (complete with water), when in he walked and said hello. 

He asked my daughter if she liked art, and when she said yes, he imparted some of the most practical advice for creatives I've heard. 

"I found this piece of advice in a book I read," he said, "and I tell it to all my students." 

"First of all, I'm always reading things about drawing and painting. Anytime I see something I pick it up, because you never know where you'll find something good."

He then proceeded to tell us that he'd picked up a book for a buck at a garage sale called something like, "How to Draw a Horse," (I don't know if Stitch is a Buddhist or not, but being open to advice from a book called, "How to Draw a Horse," sounds very Beginner Mind to me), and in it was this piece of advice:

"When you're starting out on making something, it's very important to listen to your inner dialogue as you're making it," he said. "And if your inner dialogue is telling you, 'This isn't coming out right, this is so frustrating, I'm never going to be able to draw this horse,' the thing you've got to do is to change the channel.

Change the channel on your inner dialogue to something that says, 'I'm really excited about drawing this horse,' because the only thing you can have any control over is what you put into it. You don't really have any control over the outcome, but you can control the input."

This reminded me of Anne Lamott's chapter on Radio Station KFKD in her classic book on writing, "Bird by Bird." She says, "KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and say a small prayer — please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written."

Even though I know I have other channels to listen to, station KFKD is sometimes the strongest, so I was glad to hear Stitch's advice, because it bears repeating.

So tune into that other channel, no matter how faint, set a pushbutton, and go create. The outcome will have to work itself out from there.   

View more photos and a video of Stitch at  www.voiceofsandiego.org

My So-Not-A-Sitcom Life

"This room is a disaster." As soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them, and understood in a way I never had before the meaning of hyperbole.

War in Libya. Nuclear meltdown in Japan. Messy office.

"One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong ..."

I guess I am compelled to exaggerate the mundane details of my life so it will feel more important. So I'll feel more important. Like in a sitcom world where everything is hyper-real and shiny and nobody ever has to do the dishes or clean the kitty litter. And if they do, something hiLARious will happen right in the middle. 

Nothing hilarious ever happens when I'm cleaning the kitty litter. (Well technically, that is because my husband cleans the kitty litter, but I've never noticed anything hilarious happen when he does it either.) 

My Buddhist training emphasizes seeing things as they are, without adding anything extra from our own projections. I've noticed this is very hard to do. Because in a way, our projections are a survival technique: we see one saber-toothed tiger and we figure that all of the rest of them are likely to be the same, so we project our fear of being eaten alive onto each saber-tooth that we come across. 

But it gets in the way of experiencing each moment as fresh, unlike any other moment that has ever come before. 

If I walked into my office and said, "This room is kind of messy, but it is messy in a completely new way than it ever has been," it doesn't have the same effect, but is closer to the truth.

And maybe instead of berating myself for not keeping it completely neat and organized, I would see the scattered papers from projects I've been working on, business cards from interesting people I've met and magazines with tons of good reading material in them as opportunities to be grateful for the rich life that I have. 

Complete with dirty dishes and kitty litter.

Photo of old TV courtesy Gonzalo Díaz via Creative Commons

Cats Happen

I set my Zabuton meditation mat on the floor and plop my rectangular Gomden cushion and support pillow on top, settle into a cross-legged position and rest my palms gently on my thighs. I relax and bring my attention to my breath. And invariably, a cat walks by. 

As anyone who lives with cats knows, they have an uncanny knack for finding the most inconvenient place to be at any given time. There’s something about a body in meditation, or yoga for that matter, that attracts them from the other room as surely as a tuna fish sandwich.  

In our household, one cat in particular seems to gravitate to me when I’m meditating. Walking invitingly in front of me and curling his tail over his back as I’m trying to concentrate on, well ... not concentrating on anything, he chooses this particular moment to decide that he must have my attention right now.  

He meows up at me piteously, begging and pleading for attention, not possibly imaging why I am sitting on the floor if not to reach over and scritch his soft brown back.  

I try ignoring him, and it works to a certain extent, except for the guilty feeling I get for not attending to those piteous cries. He’s got that, “I’m just a poor little cat looking for some affection,” shtick down pat. It gets me every time. But I hold my ground. 

When this doesn’t get him anywhere, he proceeds to explore the highest point in the room, which is the top of the bookshelf.

He gets there via the top of my husband’s dresser, which he leaps onto as easily as I would step out of the shower. Then he crouches into a striped, furry mass, and out of the corner of my eye I see him propel himself as if shot from a rubber band to the top of the bookshelf, a mere foot from the ceiling.  

By this time my meditation is pretty much shot. Even though I’m not looking at him, I know he’s up there, and instead of letting my attention rest lightly on my out-breath, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, when he will execute a controlled fall back to the dresser with a considerable Thump, the tag on his collar jingling as he goes.  

It’s just like thoughts, really. Every time I sit down to clear my mind, there they are. I try ignoring them, but they beg and plead. “You’ve been running around all day and now you sit down so I think you are going to pay attention to me. But you’re not?  How could you? I’ve got some really good ideas! And besides I want to know what’s for lunch.” 

I wish I could say that I’ve managed to ignore both the cats and the thoughts during meditation, but it’s just not the case. I’m working towards a mild yet benevolent curiosity, and maybe that’s as it should be. Thoughts, like cats, come and go through my life, and even though they can pop up at the most inopportune moments, I wouldn’t want to live without them. 

Photos of cats who "help" write Thoughts Happen courtesy of the author.

 

Of Orzo and Impermanence

My neighborhood Vons had no orzo.  

It’s the foundation of several of my go-to recipes when I’m sick to death of pasta and rice. Existing in a Twilight Zone between the two, it fools my brain into thinking I’m eating something new and exotic.  

And Vons was out.  

As I scanned the shelves for the second and third time I noticed that they not only were out, but they seemed not to be stocking any of the signature blue boxes of the one pasta brand that used to have it. What is my world coming to?

I don’t know why this is irritating me so. I try to convince myself that I’m not really upset, I mean, who gets upset over orzo? But for some reason when I reach the checkout counter I am compelled to blurt out, in a rather snippish and superior way, “You don’t appear to have any orzo.”  

“What?”  

I could tell that my checker, a twenty-something young man with dark wavy hair, had no idea what I was talking about.  

“Orzo — it’s a pasta.”  

“Oh — well I can have someone go check for you.”  

I don’t want someone to go check. I really just want to complain.  

“No, I already checked. There’s about fifteen different varieties of spaghetti, but no orzo.”  

Now I hear myself talking, and I am almost laughing at myself inside. Am I really about to make a fuss over this? Is a lack of species diversification in the pasta aisle really worth getting up in arms? 

He turns to the woman at the next counter while continuing to ring up my groceries.  

“Natasha, do we carry orzo?”  

Natasha resembles Maria Sharapova if she were about twenty-five years older and had lived her life as an overworked grocery clerk; she’s clearly got some seniority at the store. She looks up at me apologetically. 

“Zhou know, there are so many brands that zome of them get dropped.” 

I nod, wishing now that I had never brought it up in the first place. 

In my exploration of Buddhism that I’ve embarked upon in my quest to make some sense of my inner and outer universe, I keep coming back to the notion of attachment being the root of our suffering in this life. Living the truth of the impermanence of all things sounds somewhat doable when I’m sitting alone in my room reading or meditating, but out in the messy world of real life my fledgling spirituality seems challenged by the most mundane of worldly encounters.  

I’m feeling a bit sheepish about the orzo incident. I mean, I don’t even need it right away! I start to wonder what it was about this encounter that has brought out my righteous indignation — a sure sign of attachment if there ever was one.   

I think about the orzo. I don’t think I’m really all that attached to orzo. But it’s the concept of the thing. What if there was never any orzo to be found ever again? If there was a great orzo blight and all trace of this tiny, rice-shaped pasta was wiped off the face of the earth, what would my reaction be? Would I suffer and feel cheated and resentful? Would I celebrate the fact that there once was orzo? If I never saw orzo again could I recognize it as something that came and went, recognize it as impermanence and therefore part of the truth of existence?  

Or to make it even simpler, what about the plain fact that my neighborhood store no longer carries it? I imagine a Zen master as Italian grocer: “Yesterday, orzo. Today, no orzo.” Is it as simple as that?  

Perhaps this is what Pema Chodron refers to as recognizing impermanence and suffering at the kitchen sink level. Can I notice my reaction to the impermanence of orzo with mindful awareness? Can I recognize that not getting what I want is a form of suffering, and notice my reaction to that with curiosity and awareness? 

I think about these things the next day when I buy orzo at Ralphs.

 

The Buddha at Work - "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" | Interdependence Project

I’m starting something called Saturday Morning Surf here at Thoughts Happen as a way to highlight pieces on other sites that I find intriguing and worth sharing. Each Saturday I’ll post a link to something I found during the previous week that I think you will find interesting and, I hope, thought-provoking. Please leave your comments here at Thoughts Happen or the Thoughts Happen Facebook page to let me know what you think of them. 

This week I’m sending you to The Interdependence Project’s “The Buddha At Work” columnist Jon Rubinstein, who excerpts a Mary Oliver poem called “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?”

As a disclaimer, I am not usually a poetry person. I’m usually too left-brained for poetry, and a lot of it bores me, frankly. But I heard a lot of Mary Oliver poems quoted during my Shambhala Meditation training and found them penetrating and breathtaking.The first line Rubinstein quotes gets right to the point: 

 

“Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you?”  

Whoa. 

Oliver’s honesty in getting to the core of what it means to be human breaks through barriers between individuals and I find myself nodding in recognition whenever I read her work. 

 

I won’t quote any more of the poem here, but instead send you to The Buddha at Work - "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" | Interdependence Project, which in turn points to the entire poem if you find yourself compelled, as I was, to read the rest. 

Hope you enjoyed the first Saturday Morning Surf session. See you next week!

 

The Art of Being Human

 A little over three years ago, I downloaded an audiobook to my iPod shuffle, pushed Play, and heard the author’s reassuring voice saying, “This very moment is the perfect teacher.” It felt like she was speaking directly to me. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have this experience upon hearing the opening words of Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times,” but the book seemed to be a custom-made prescription for my own difficult times, and it was on steady rotation on my iPod for months. I also eventually picked up the hardcopy too in order to refer to specific passages.

Chodron is an American-born Buddhist nun in the Shambhala tradition who teaches about the very human aspects of the spiritual journey, and emphasizes developing lovingkindness towards oneself and a “fiercely compassionate attitude” towards the pain and the joys we all experience. She also talks a lot about bravery and the courage of the spiritual warrior.

I didn’t feel like a spiritual warrior when I started listening to Chodron. I felt like someone who was trying to make it through the next day without falling into a pit. But I was intrigued by her approach to meditation, which didn’t emphasize benefits such as lowering your blood pressure, but rather that meditation can be a method of consciously training the mind in developing a nonjudgemental attitude of unconditional compassion towards ourselves. This is a very powerful thing, because in order to have compassion for others, we must first genuinely experience it from ourselves.

 So I tried it, and began meditating on my own at home. But eventually I felt the need to reach beyond my own living room, so I turned to the almighty Google and found the San Diego Shambhala Meditation Center. I took the plunge (developing my bravery!), showed up for a Sunday morning sitting meditation and was given initial instruction from a senior member there. To my relief and delight, the people I met at the Center were welcoming and friendly without being (as I had feared) hippieish or just plain weird. In fact, they were refreshingly normal, and I felt right at home.

A few months later I attended my first Shambhala Training weekend, titled “The Art of Being Human,” and the rest, as they say, is history. The Shambhala path has been incredibly enriching to both me and my husband, without claiming any kind of exclusive rights to the one best way. Plus, nobody has ever expected me to wear a shapeless robe, become a vegetarian or give up my Christian affiliation.

For readers in the San Diego area (or those willing to travel to our fair city), the San Diego Shambhala Meditation Center is again offering The Art of Being Human as a weekend training on March 5-7, 2010. From the brochure:

The program is a secular meditation training that develops fearlessness, confidence and openness toward ourselves and others. By looking directly at our own experience, we discover a continuity of awareness underlying the changing conditions that make up our lives. Connecting with this wholesome, wakeful presence enables us to experience life fully and directly. In Shambhala this is referred to as “basic goodness” and is seen as our birthright.

Making this opportunity known is one small offering I can give to the Center in gratitude for the thoughtful engagement, gentle encouragement and genuine camaraderie I have found there. Click here for more details

For those outside the San Diego area, the Shambhala.org web site lists directories of centers around the world.