Wednesday, November 06, 2024

Tricycle Magazine Post

 

Pictured tree on a windy day. It is leaning sideways.

The Worldly Winds

Cultivating equanimity allows us to face uncertain and changing events with respect, yet without being governed by them. 

By Christina Feldman

 Jan 15, 2023 Photo by Khamkéo

Each of our lives will be touched by what are called the winds of the world. Moments of praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, gain and loss are woven into every human life. In the light of approval and praise, we glow; in the light of disapproval and blame, we find ourselves ashamed and withering. 

Understandably we long for acceptance and appreciation—the near enemy of this very human longing is the pursuit of approval and praise. Too easily we place ourselves at the whims of another’s words of affirmation. Understandably blame, judgment, and criticism are hard to bear. The near enemy of this pain is to seek an elusive perfection or to deafen ourselves to feedback from others. Too easily we internalize the anger and aversion of others as being an accurate measure of who we are. We are prone to personalize both praise and blame, describing ourselves by them and subjecting ourselves to elation and despair. Equanimity disappears in the contractedness of identification. 

The wonderful meditation we finally achieved, the love we were sure would last forever, our health and youth—all are delighted in, yet all will change, and we are asked to meet the bleak landscape of disappointment and feelings of failure. Life continues to teach us the hard lessons of letting go. Culturally we are told that our worth as human beings is defined by our successes and that failure is unacceptable, an indictment upon our worthiness. During the recent recession, rates of mental illness and suicide skyrocketed. We strive to become the kind of person who is immune to failure and to fearfully defend our successes. Culturally we are taught that success opens the door to love, acceptance, and reward, whereas failure sentences us to the shadows of life. We can become frantic in our search to secure our well-being through success and possession and come to fear the loss of that certainty, believing it will sentence us to a life of invisibility and meaninglessness. We can even believe that equanimity will be the outcome of securing success rather than found through the willingness to be equally near the highs and the lows of life. 

Our hearts are touched and gladdened by the moments of pleasure and delight the world offers to us. The simple joys of the sunlight touching our face, the great joys of a newborn child, the wonderful art, music, and poetry available to us gladden our hearts and enrich our lives. We love health, lovely emotions, and pleasant thoughts. We do not open so easily to the moments of pain—the unexpected illnesses, the difficult emotions, the repetitive thoughts, the vexing sights and sounds. The sounds of the birds outside the window are drowned out by the roar of the garbage truck. A delightful fantasy or plan is replaced by a nightmarish obsession. Our health falters and at times we become weary and bored with what we previously delighted in. 

Equanimity is a teaching not only of poise but of grace, a deep knowing that life will not stand still for any of us and that to rely upon stability is a recipe for agitation and anxiety. 

We develop the habit of leaning toward and pursuing the pleasant, flinching from the unpleasant, and doing all we can to arrange the conditions of our lives in ways that protect us from pain. We rarely appreciate that our very pursuit of pleasure makes us increasingly intolerant of pain and binds us to a life of agitation and anxiety. Equanimity holds within it a quality of resilience that is not an armoring against the winds of the world, but born of inner strength and poise. We are affected deeply by the unexpected changes and events of both the lovely and the unlovely. We will bend before the force of those winds but learn to return to uprightness. Cultivating our capacity for balance, we learn to meet the many small moments of discomfort that are part of our daily experience without flinching or turning away, discovering it is possible to surround discomfort with a calm stillness. We discover the capacity to meet the many small lovely moments of our day with a quality of appreciation that is not distorted by our desire to possess and maintain the pleasure of the lovely. 

Experiences of gaining and losing are woven into the rhythm of our lives. We gain stability and security, money and stature. Many of the achievements of our lives are born of skillful effort and dedication and are to be honored. We also lose a great deal. We are separated from people we love; our livelihoods disappear; we face the loneliness of friendships that change or disappear. We lose our youth and vitality; we gain a newfound peace in the midst of aging. A mother told the story of the heartache of being informed that her son had died in the Asian tsunami. The following week she received a postcard from him saying, “I am in heaven, this is the best time of my life.” There are unexpected moments of stillness, unpredicted moments of depression. Equanimity is a teaching not only of poise but of grace, a deep knowing that life will not stand still for any of us and that to rely upon stability is a recipe for agitation and anxiety. 

In the midst of all of this, we still breathe, our hearts beat, we go from morning to night, and remain present and alive. We ask ourselves how our hearts can continue to absorb the ongoing, changing stream of events without being shattered. We see the ways in a single day that our minds swing between highs and lows, elation and despair, fear and confidence. Equanimity pivotally teaches us to meet this river of uncertain and changing events equally with respect, yet without being governed by them. The Buddha said, “Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, success and failure are the eight worldy winds. They ceaselessly change. As a mountain is unshaken by the wind, so the heart of a wise person is steady amidst all the changes on this earth.” 

A Practice

In the midst of a life with its “ten thousand joys and sorrows,” we can simply attend to how we are present just now. Allow the body to come to stillness and the mind to settle, attending to the life of this moment, however it is. In the midst of the lovely, in the midst of the difficult, we make our home in our capacity to embrace, include, and care for the well-being of our hearts.

May I embrace change with stillness and calm.

May I deeply accept this moment as it is.

May my home be a home of balance and spaciousness.

Each time we return to an intentional way of being with both the lovely and the unlovely, we are untangling the patterns of aversion and craving that lead us to abandon the moment. Moments of dissociating and abandoning the moment we are in are all moments that undermine our confidence in the freedom of our own hearts. Through flights of aversion, we build fences that make our world a little smaller, telling ourselves we cannot bear this life as it is. Through following patterns of craving, we convince ourselves over and over of the insufficiency of our own hearts. Equanimity teaches us to live as if we were a mountain, touched by the winds of the world but unshaken. We learn to be steadfast, receptive, and committed to freedom. A Zen master was once asked, “What is the secret of your happiness?” He answered, “Complete, unrestricted cooperation with the unavoidable.” The unavoidable is our life.

From Boundless Heart: The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity by Christina Feldman © 2017. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

Christina Feldman is the author of a number of books, including Compassion and The Buddhist Path to Simplicity. She is a co-founder of Gaia House and a senior teacher in the Insight Meditation community. She lives in Devon, England and teaches several online courses with Tricycle.



Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Nancy Ross Gooch — 1811 – 1901

Thursday, September 12, 2024

Interview with Stanley Nelson, Director, "Attica," (2021) on its 50th An...

Sunday, September 08, 2024

Booksigning Today


 

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

Wanda's Nia 2023 Birthday Party

 Wanda’s Program:

1. Welcome and Libations (with Dar lighting the Kinara)

2. Introductions & Testimony, Talking about Wanda

3. More food, talking, dancing 


Habari Gani?

Nia: Purpose

Why are we here?

What is our legacy?

How is our being, value added?

We don't want to over-consume, leave a deficit

Ase to the yet-to-be-born who've been here before

Ase to those seated with us

The unseen and the seen


Ase to potential

Ase to earthseed, water, air, the oceans, and the trees

Fire

Can't forget the refiner

Master Shaper

Ase to human genius and sentient beings' wisdom

May we make strong bonds between us


We say Ase to those above

To those below

To those inside

To the place where light brightens our days

We say Ase to the place where the light retreats


We say Ase to the North

We say Ase to the South

We say Ase to the East

We say Ase to the West


We say Ase to all the Points on a compass grounding flesh to earth

We are one

No greater than the particles covering the beach

We call the tiny rocks sand

We say Ase to those great people, women and men whom we honor

Peace makers

Conjurers

Warriors

People who believed in freedom

People who could not rest

We come by our restlessness honestly

It's in we genes

If we world incorrect, we straighten it out

We who cannot rest do this

It a DNA thing

We, some of we, be born into it

It a thing we do

Change the world with our hands

Speak right words

Walk good

It's in the choreography

Like some of us born with rhythm

You know

We call the names of our mamas and her mama and our great grandmamas, great-great grandmamas and our great great great great grandmamas and she sisters . . . and we keep calling even when we don't have a name. We know they're there cause we're here.

It's in the blood, but it's bigger than blood memories

We in this together people

We share one earth

One world

Pachamama

So call your motherline . . .

We honor a mother father creator who doesn't make mistakes. We are here on purpose-- Nia. It's that Nia thing. Tomorrow's principle is kuumba or creativity. The 7th day is imani or faith.

Yesterday was Ujaamaa or cooperative economics. Umoja or unity was day 1, Dec. 26. Day 2 was Kujichagulia or self-determination and Day 3 was Ujima or collective responsibility

And again Ujamaa was yesterday and today is what? People

Nia or purpose

We say Habari Gani?

What's the news?

Nia

Purpose

We call the names of our heroes but you know the song, everyone is searching for a hero.

Does anyone remember the song. . .


Mariah Carey's Hero, Lyrics

There's a hero

If you look inside your heart

You don't have to be afraid

Of what you are

There's an answer

If you reach into your soul

And the sorrow that you know

Will melt away

And then a hero comes along

With the strength to carry on

And you cast your fears aside

And you know you can survive

So when you feel like hope is gone

Look inside you and be strong

And you'll finally see the truth

That a hero lies in you

It's a long road

When you face the world alone

No one reaches out a hand

For you to hold

You can find love

If you search within yourself

And that emptiness you felt

Will disappear

And then a hero comes along

With the strength to carry on

And you cast your fears aside

And you know you can survive

So when you feel like hope is gone

Look inside you and be strong

And you'll finally see the truth

That a hero lies in you,

oh, oh

Lord knows

Dreams are hard to follow

But don't let anyone

Tear them away, hey yeah

Hold on

There will be tomorrow

In time you'll find the way

And then a hero comes along

With the strength to carry on

And you cast your fears aside

And you know you can survive

So when you feel like hope is gone

Look inside you and be strong

And you'll finally see the truth

That a hero lies in you

That a hero lies in you (2X)

Mmm, that a hero lies in you


Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Mariah Carey / Walter Afanasieff
Hero lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music

Photos: TaSin, Ava, Juanita, Dar and others

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Robert Henry Johnson, Presente!

 Just learned that Robert Henry Johnson, artist extraordinaire is with the ancestors. We wanted to acknowledge his wonderful presence with an interview from Wanda's Picks Radio, October 7, 2011 on the topic: Maafa Commemoration. 

Tuesday, March 14, 2023

"A Particular Memory" by Wanda Sabir