By chance, world leaders and I are in Geneva today, on peace missions of different sorts. Events of the past two weeks spur reflection on the ways in which their big mission and my little one intersect.

I arrived in Switzerland feeling quite concerned about potential US military strikes against Syria and their uncertain consequences, but it was inner peacemaking that brought me here this time: an irresistible invitation to jump in and help a group of dear Swiss friends put on a three-day program with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master of the Bön tradition. I’ve long and much appreciated Rinpoche through his writings and webcasts, but hadn’t had the chance to see him in person until now.

One of the perks of hosting such an event (in addition to the karma cookies) is the opportunity to spend a little time in the company of an inspiring human — an educator who lives what he teaches, who embodies peace and kindness while he works to spread them.

Naturally, Rinpoche, too, was concerned about Syria, as we quickly learned. A Swiss TV team had picked him up from the airport in order to have a bit of time with him before filming an interview at the place where we awaited him, the home of two of my friends who were part of the team organizing the event. Not long after he walked in the door and greeted us with hugs, we got to talking. Rinpoche, who now lives in the US when not traveling internationally to teach, asked if I thought the US would strike.

It was looking likely. President Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace merely for a campaign promise to abandon the mad cowboy aggression of the Dubya years, was poised to nab a second award for contortionism, adopting the unilateral warrior’s stance while attempting to project a compassionate face. Just last Tuesday, responding to increasing public opposition, Obama said, “when with modest effort we can stop children from being gassed to death… I believe we should act.”

A Deeper Look at the Libya Crisis

No one of sound mind wants children to die — of any cause, let alone such a truly horrible one as chemical weapons. So, clearly, action of some kind is called for. But a rational person must ask what kind of action seems most likely to achieve the desired result. Is it military intervention, intensified diplomatic pressure, or other nonviolent solutions?

More to the point: What historical precedent provides any confidence that a “modest effort” with bombs might be a dependable way to restore peace in the Middle East? If anything, don’t all of the Asian military campaigns of the past half century suggest the opposite? And if a “modest” bombing were to depose Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, who would fill the vacuum, and how would they behave toward those Syrians with whom they don’t feel aligned?

Another (most deserving) Nobel Peace laureate, Archibishop Desmond Tutu, put it plainly in an interview published in yesterday’s Financial Times: “You’re going to smash him [Assad] to smithereens, and what do you put in his place? Because that’s not going to solve the crisis in Syria, because you have all kinds of factions there, it’s better to try the long route…”

Tutu, as perhaps the world’s most authoritative living voice on national-scale conflict resolution, should be given our most attentive ear when he speaks on this complex and unpredictable issue. But let’s face it: At this point in human evolution, the “long route” is not our strong suit. As a species, we are capable of fantastic feats of creativity and perseverance under optimal conditions, but we tend to be less likely to rely on those gifts under stress.

In crisis mode, we tend to lose our patience, our finesse, and often our common sense. Why? These three days with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche would shed some light on this.

Over a polyglot lunch (languages spoken at the table included French, Italian, German, Spanish, Tibetan, Hindi, and English), gazing across a serene lake in Fribourg Canton, Rinpoche mentioned that recently he had watched a documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis, a case study in the escalation of fear that very nearly led to a nuclear confrontation between the USA and the USSR. We observed parallels: increasingly strident political rhetoric, fearmongering in the media, and a conspicuous absence of serious multilateral diplomacy. Once the psychological machinery of war is set in motion, it is difficult to park.

A Deeper Look at Human Nature

After a siesta, we took Rinpoche to the venue, an art gallery in Bulle run by friends, where he was to deliver a public talk to kick off the first night of the program. But just as we rolled into the parking lot, Rinpoche announced he wanted take a quick walk, and asked if I’d like to join him. This was the sort of tête-à-tête I had quietly held hope for without any expectation, so I was delighted. As we hit the sidewalk, he joked, “I’m supposed to give a talk on the awakening mind, and what would help my mind awaken is a cup of coffee.”

The only place in Bulle I knew for a proper cuppa, a bistro called “le 43,” was just a block away, so off we went, briskly. “Une tasse de café, s’il vous plaît,” and the bartender set to pouring. I wanted to get the check but Rinpoche beat me to it, offering to treat me to a cup as well. But he had only euros, and I had only dollars, so we both drew our plastic, only to see the bartender shake his head apologetically.

Witnessing this, one of the patrons at the bar, suit-clad, fresh off work, turned to us and said with a hearty mountain smile, in richly textured, Swiss French-accented English, “Let me buy your coffee. Welcome to Bulle.” Rinpoche’s reply drew a laugh: “Now I feel like ordering dinner!” He and I were touched by this kind generosity toward strangers, and we spent the next ten minutes happily sipping espresso while he offered me tactful and helpful reflections on staying balanced and healthy while living a busy life (with the option of the occasional caffeine boost).

Returning to the gallery, Rinpoche paused briefly just before the threshold and switched gears with one breath. The jovial and soft-spoken friend we had spent the day with instantly transformed into a powerful orator, concisely delivering a stream of penetrating insight into the nature of consciousness and our human capacity to find connection and fulfillment within, and thereby interact with the world more effectively and more gracefully. In the course of this, he presented an overview of what his tradition refers to as the “nine winds,” a taxonomy representing states of individual and collective consciousness, ordered from the most sublime to the most agitated. The ninth and last of these translates as “era-destroying wind,” which Rinpoche defines as the escalation of fear within a society (or group or relationship) to the point of self-destruction. [For more on the nine winds, see Rinpoche’s book, Awakening the Sacred Body.]

The truth of this is clear when we look honestly at our lives and our world. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience research confirm what contemplatives of many traditions have known for centuries: tension (physical/mental/emotional) is the enemy of clear thinking, good choices, and effective action. As tension increases, the human mind becomes a progressively blunter instrument. Conversely, the more we connect with stillness (of body, mind, and spirit), the more the mind becomes supple and thinking becomes clearer and increasingly nuanced and creative.

In this light, we see the problem of escalation holistically. The threat of violence overheats us. Fearmongering in the public discourse polarizes us by making nuanced thinking more difficult — not only emotionally, but also on a physical, biological level. It squeezes all subtlety out of the room and leaves only crude options on the table. A limitless world of possibilities is reduced to primitive binaries: to hit or not to hit.

When pushed to the furthest extremes of fear, humans are ready to kill with no rational thought of the possible consequences. And when this happens on a societal scale, that is the “era-destroying wind” described by the sages — the very worst potential of our nature.

So, How to Get Back to the Best in Us?

There is a physical, biologically driven necessity for us to cool off, to connect with the stillness that is always within us, as an aspect of our nature, so that we regain access to the serenity, sensitivity, and creativity that support to our best thinking, catalyze our most inspired solutions, and engender enough trust between people to give peaceful proposals a chance to succeed. We must first connect with the best in ourselves, and then open ourselves to connect with the best in one another.

“Peace begins within” might sound hackneyed or hippie, but this isn’t about some indulgent personal bliss. It’s a pragmatic prescription for safety, stability, and prosperity. And, when push comes well beyond shove, it is the key to our survival, as individuals and potentially as a species.

Try as we might (and must), we can’t pacify the entire world, of course, but we can pacify our own responses to tense situations. And if enough of us do that, then that changes the world.

For more on Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, including a free video archive of recorded talks, see ligmincha.org.

Smiles all around at the close of our second annual silent meditation retreat with SanghaSeva at the Dharmalaya Institute in the Indian Himalayas.

It’s always fascinating to spend a week with people without hearing their voices, and then finally get to ‘meet’ them, while having a sense of already knowing them in a way.

Now we’re preparing to welcome new arrivals for an eleven-day service-learning retreat in sustainable building. Good times!

This story was written in response to a request from my friend Rodger Kamenetz to post to his popular Jew in the Lotus page.

An Unlikely Path

How did an artist and activist fresh out of college wind up opening a vegetarian restaurant and community center just up the street from H.H. the Dalai Lama, and how did that funky little café in the Himalayan foothills spawn a charitable organization working for sustainable living and cross-cultural collaboration across the globe?

In 1994, I set out with a couple of friends on what was meant to be a year-long, round-the-world journey. We wanted to see who lives on planet earth, learn about what it means to be human, and try to make a difference along the way. Something happened halfway around the globe, however, that stopped us in our tracks: a ten-day discourse from the Dalai Lama on the Path of the Bodhisattva — the life of the engaged contemplative who dedicates herself to the altruistic intention to realize her full potential in order support others to do the same.

It was a life-changer. Everything we were looking for was here, we reasoned, so why go any further? We tore up our onward tickets and set ourselves on the cushion, and also started asking around about volunteer work. If we were going to be here for a while, how could we make ourselves useful?

No adequate caption for this experience…

One thing leads to another (even more fortuitously than average in Dharamshala) and, in the summer of 1995, I had the great blessing of my first private meeting with His Holiness, in which he very generously advised me on the vision that would become the Earthville Network and a full-time adventure for the next seventeen years (and counting) of my life, laying the groundwork for a global network of local initiatives for a more compassionate and sustainable world.

There was some context for this: In 1992, as a senior in college, I had spent a semester in Nepal, living with a materially poor (but joy-rich) family in their one-room mud house just below the Tibetan border. I was profoundly inspired by the extraordinary wisdom, resourcefulness, and kindness of the peoples of the Himalayas, yet also alarmed by the destructive impact of unplanned and unsustainable “development” in the region. Recognizing that change is inevitable but can be shaped to some degree for the better, and aspiring to help build bridges of understanding, appreciation, and altruistic collaboration across cultures, I began organizing a global community of kindred spirits committed to developing and promoting holistic and replicable solutions for compassionate living and sustainable development, starting locally and networking internationally.

A Café in the Clouds & a Vortex of Virtue

In 1997, my friends (Scarth Locke and Dara Ackerman) and I, in partnership with local collaborators, opened the doors of the first Earthville project, the Dharamshala Earthville Institute (DEVI) and KhanaNirvana Community Café, in McLeodGanj, the exile home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile. Providing jobs, training, and language education for recently arrived Tibetan refugees, we cooked up tasty, all-natural vegetarian cuisine from around the world and served it to a colorful international crowd of seekers. We channeled the modest proceeds into efforts (our own and others’) to develop educational and community building programs in Dharamshala, such as computer training for Tibetan refugees and vaccinations for local street dogs.

Documentary Night at KhanaNirvana/DEVI

At KhanaNirvana/DEVI, we held weekly talks from former Tibetan prisoners of consciences (many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured brutally for “crimes” such as saying the name of the Dalai Lama or having his photograph). We showed documentary films on Tibet, Buddhism, India, and other topics of regional or spiritual interest. And we had lively open mic nights with music and poetry of every description. And, in the midst of this, the best part happened: connections. KN/DEVI became a fertile nexus for fruitful meetings, recruiting new volunteers for local NGOs, matchmaking our diverse visitors’ gifts with the local students or agencies who could benefit from them, collecting blankets and medicines for our friends with leprosy, and endless streams of other good things.

DEVI was intended as a first step – a staging ground for launching other activities that would gradually flesh out the larger Earthville vision. This expansion happened quite naturally, as many altruistically oriented people from around the world who passed through Dharamshala made connections at DEVI, which naturally led to friendships that evolved into partnerships and projects.

One of the first such friends was Azriel Cohen (who recently passed away, in October 2012, and is pictured in the center of the photo at the top of this page, immediately to the right of the Dalai Lama). Azriel came from an orthodox Jewish background and had traveled far, both geographically and psychologically, to discover for himself why so many Jews had been drawn to India. At the trailhead of his journey, he read The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz’s fascinating and penetrating account of the first historic meetings between a delegation of Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama (and, through that lens, the human search for deeper connection). Following that trail led Azriel to DEVI and to us, and we began organizing Jewish, Buddhist, Jewish-Buddhist, and Interfaith programs that eventually came full circle by bringing Rodger back to Dharamshala as a guest educator and facilitator in our passover program. This truly unique seder and month-long interfaith program was attended by several hundred people from every imaginable background, all coming together first in curiosity, then in compassion, and gradually in burgeoning love.

The Next Level: Dharmalaya

The newly-sprouting Dharmalaya campus

Fast-forward a decade. Having handed DEVI and KhanaNirvana over to our very capable Tibetan refugee staff, I moved two hours to the east to the village of Bir, a small and yet-unspoiled settlement of a few hundred Indian families and one of the earliest Tibetan refugee colonies in India. There, we receive a warm local welcome to establish the next step in the Earthville vision: a rural eco-campus for sustainable and compassionate living. With the generous support of Didi Contractor, one of the most preeminent vernacular architects in northern India, and an enthusiastic crew of local labourers keen to learn the dying arts of the traditional eco-building styles of the region, we set about creating the Dharmalaya Institute for Compassionate Living.

Before the first building of the Dharmalaya campus was even half-finished, we held our first “integration retreat,” a ten-day program organized in collaboration with our friends from SanghaSeva, which combined meditation in the mornings and evenings with mindful and joyful volunteer work in the afternoons. Participants made mud bricks with the locals, and then learned to build adobe walls. Organic gardening and permaculture landscaping were among the other “work meditations” on offer. The goal of these programs is threefold:

• To provide a vehicle to help us take the warmth from the meditation cushion or the yoga mat and apply it in our work and social lives;
• To create a model of immersive, contemplative ecotourism that allows visitors to break through the tourist bubble and have authentic and meaningful contact with the good peoples of the Himalayas; and
• To establish a local green economy that creates fairly-compensated employment for low-income villagers and especially to create empowering opportunities for women of so-called “low caste.”

At the end of a happy work retreat

Since then, we’ve done two more similar retreat programs and the experiences of both the locals and the international participants in these programs have been life-changing in many cases. Considering that we haven’t even officially opened yet, we imagine this bodes well for the future.

Once the building is complete and the Dharmalaya Institute opens to the public, we will host a variety of service-learning programs in various aspects of sustainable and compassionate living, including classes, workshops, and retreats. We’re already running a weekly meditation group (seasonally). We hope to carry forward the magic of the interfaith programs that began in Dharamshala, and take them even deeper in a beautiful natural setting where our guests and volunteers can stay a while and find their own ways to plug into this dynamic mix of social and ecological learning and service in a contemplative environment.

Help Us Launch this Innovative Campus

Raising the Roof

In the last four years, we’ve launched a innovative NGO, raised around $80,000, created green jobs for dozens of Himalayan villagers, hosted over a hundred volunteers from India and over 25 other countries, completed about 90% of the beautiful new adobe-and-bamboo building that will serve as the HQ of our eco-campus, and changed a few lives along the way.

Once the doors of the Institute open to guests, the project will have a steady steam of income to sustain itself, but we need public support to make the last step to reach that point.

Please visit our crowdfunding campaign page at Indiegogo and make whatever contribution you can, no matter the size. You can also forward the link to your friends: http://www.indiegogo.com/compassion-campus

You can learn more about Dharmalaya at http://dharmalaya.in, and about the Earthville Network at http://www.earthville.org/ .

We welcome all of you to visit, and we look forward to connecting with you in person or online. We’re on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dharmalaya and www.facebook.com/earthvillenetwork .

After a marathon rush of construction activity through the winter, Dharmalaya held its first programmes in the new (and still-unfinished) main building of the Dharmalaya Institute. Over thirty participants from ten countries made the journey to Bir for the occasion.

Organised in collaboration with SanghaSeva, the inaugural programmes included a one-week silent meditation retreat led by Ajay Pal Singh, who also gave commentaries on the songs of the great Indian poet Kabir, followed by a twelve-day service-learning retreat on the topic of sustainable living in the Himalayas.

Read the whole story on the Dharmalaya News page ›

Merhaba from Konya!

The Mevlana's Mausoleum

Arriving in this ancient Anatolian city, once a fertile garden of cross-pollination among the great mystics and scholars, philosophers and poets from all over Eurasia, my warm-hearted tram driver, Mehmet, asked my views about Islam and Linux… I grinned. I had spent the whole night on a bus to reach this place of pilgrimage, the shrine of the great Sufi poet and teacher Jelaluddin Rumi, and my groggy mind had to do some quick yogalates to engage Mehmet the tram driver’s eager questions about cross-platform network administration. But i did so with relish. After all, what was Rumi’s legacy if not Open Source…?

And that’s par for the course lately: a lotta profound, a lotta mundane, and not a lot to distinguish one from the other (since, on close examination, each is full of the other).

Like this service ashram eco-campus thing, for example, and the new land…  But wait, i get ahead of myself. Rewind…

Bodhgaya Boot Camp & a New Home in Bir

Sitting under the Bodhi Tree

This winter (which never actually happened as winter, as such: it was the warmest on record in India), we had the very good fortune to return to the Bodhi tree (in the Indian town of Bodhgaya, birthplace of Buddhism and world capital of burning plastic bags) for a two-month program of Buddhist philosophy and meditation given by the Karmapa (leader of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism) and Mingyur Rinpoche (one of the most gifted and scientifically-minded meditation teachers of Marg Trek: The Next Generation).

By dint of this intensive mindfulness boot camp, i have fresh awareness that the previous paragraph was in fact a single run-on sentence peppered with four parenthetical clauses… and i simply rest in that awareness, as it is… 🙂

The new front yard

Back home in Bir (and it’s a new home, BTW — i’ve been restoring an old house at the top of the village to serve as our new base, for now at least), i’ve continued the practice of doing at least two hours of meditation daily, and it makes a world of difference.

So, yes, i’m still charting my own Middle Way du jour, in search of my optimal hybrid of the life of the servant, the monk, and the artist that feels most appropriate for this chapter. And, as has been the case for the last three years, i’ve been leaning generally more monkwardly, still as devoted as ever to humble service, but wanting to continue tilting the balance toward the relaxed and contemplative…

And…

While the deepening of meditation practice keeps me smiling more than ever before, i’ve also been a busy little bee, collecting pollen for our blossoming Dharmalaya project. After a few months of wading through Indian legalese (and drafting 20+ pages of it), i’m happy to report that at last we have been signed, attested, notarized, certified, triple-stamped, submitted in duplicate, registered, and numbered Charitable Society #4305.

And i suppose the “big news” is that, at long last, we have land on which to build the ecovillage-ashram-school-thingy i’ve been dreaming of since i sat on my rock in Nepal in 1992.

Now, to say “we have land” is both to overstate and to understate things.

The overstatement: Though we have a signed agreement and we’ve put down a deposit, we still need about $5000 to complete the purchase, and there’s Byzantine paperwork ahead. So we “have land” in the sense that we’ve signed on the dotted line and we’ve started the first stage of pre-construction work: we’ve hired local laborers to start laying a motorable track (taking care not to disturb the trees) from the existing village road up to the bottom of the building site.

The understatement: The word “land” in “we have land” doesn’t really capture the gift that has presented itself in this glorious piece of Mama Earth. It’s a quiet, green, terraced hillside with a mesmerizing 300-degree view of the Kangra Valley, with snow peaks behind us. It’s pristine, with rich soil and full sun, and it’s breathtakingly beautiful. It’s ideal for the project in pretty much every way. Better than i’d ever hoped for, really, so i’m beyond delight.

So, what will we do on that beautiful piece of land? I’m thinking maybe a casino. What do you think? 😉

I’m excited to share juicy details, like the great good fun we’re having with our friend and co-conspirator Didi Contractor, a virtuosic and sagacious 79-year-old eco-architect who is volunteering her time and immense knowledge, skill, and heart not only to help us design and build our first green buildings, but also to guide us in developing a training program that will give local laborers a chance to learn the arts and sciences of neotraditional green building (i.e. indigenous earthen architecture plus earthquake retrofitting and other enhancements for safety and aesthetics) using the construction of our facilities as their OJT.

That plus other sustainability workshops (like high-yield organic farming and eco-friendly cottage industries) equals a humble, village-scale community college for green job skills — the direction we’re heading. There’s more on the Dharmalaya website…

The Near Future

Day trip to Tatooine

I have a few more days to explore Turkey, which i’m loving. (I started this email in Konya and i’m finishing it in a “cave hotel” in Ürgüp, an ancient oasis in otherworldly Cappadocia.) Next, i’ll hook up with family in Berlin and Denmark, then onward to Switzerland for time with dear friends and teachings from the Dalai Lama, followed by a few days of down time in Andalucía, then a couple of months in the US — mostly in Colorado, where Dara and i will continue our slow-grow cultivation of an album of her lovely songs, and finally a California visit in late October or early November before returning to India to start planting seeds (figuratively and literally) on the new land…

Or something like that.  🙂

Sending you all a warm glow from the cave…

Buongiorno from Venice, which i thought i’d better see before it sinks much further. Lately, it’s flooding more frequently and more severely, and it’s chilling to drift around this jewel of history and imagine that, within as few as 20 years (if some scientists’ predictions come true) the first floor or two of every building in Venezia could become aquaria. I’m imagining schools of tourists snorkeling around the ghost town like a shipwreck, gawking at the pesci dining in the bistros where once they were dined upon, while the tenaciously adaptable Venetians (the few who can still afford to live in ever-gentrifying Venice) get out their tools and move the old front doors up two flights of steps. 2028: the 3rd floor is the new 1st floor.

Saved by music & poetry

Yesterday in Vienna, after a tasty breakfast of organic beet salad and “veganer schnitzel,” i did part of my morning meditation in the Secession Museum, in the company of Gustav Klimt’s epic frieze in honor of Beethoven and the revolution of virtue Klimt saw in his chart-topping 9th symphony. Motivated by both compassion and the desire for personal gain, the most virtuous of humans wage ethical combat against the forces of darkness and decay, but in the end even the mightiest of men cannot stop it… not even the gods can defeat it… yet, in the final battle, a woman with a lyre plays the trump card of music and poetry, opening the door to the Ideal Kingdom. (Sister, could you play a little louder, please? We could use your help.)

Carnage, in its many forms

The exhibit upstairs was case in point: first, hundreds of the most gruesome photos of slain humans, murdered brutally; and then, further in, the same photos, but this time it’s seals, clubbed and hacked to death for their fur and meat. A few dozen mannequins march in protest, joined across time and space by a parade of Tibetans marching in photographic solidarity, while an elderly Balkan woman in a wheelchair holds a placard asking for change… in the person of Barack Obama. Surely no single person could be Klimt’s harpist for all humanity, but give me Obama and the lyre or, better yet, give me the Dalai Lama and ample time to cultivate the active love he exemplifies, and reflections like this every morning, to remind me why i’m here and keep that extra wind in my sails.

Back in the Himalayas

My bro Todd and i were set to join our pa-la for a trip to Tibet and Mongolia, from which we would’ve just now returned, had we not had to postpone the trip on account of the fact that the Chinese government (currently preoccupied with massacres of Tibetans), wouldn’t let us in — they closed the entire region of Tibet to foreign visitors. In the meantime, we’ve been facilitating discussion  about the crackdowns at KN/DEVI, hosting nightly events packed with concerned global citizens, which, if nothing else, gives us all a chance to gather in a human response, and gives our Tibetan staff some small comfort. It’s hard to know if all the caring people in the world could change the course of the Beijing juggernaut, and honestly i’m skeptical, but… we do what we can, right?

Todd and the KN crew

While we were there, Todd inspired us to do some ambitious renovation. Fixing, sanding, painting, cleaning, and lots of good fun. We updated the menu with a few new dishes, too, and now KN is shining more brightly than she has in years (Thanks, Todd!). It’s a joy to see the place in full swing, and to see so many people enjoying it so much.

Having finished a several-month-long heroic push at KN, Dara has just begun another kind of adventure: a traditional three-month monsoon retreat at an international Buddhist women’s center just outside of Dharamshala. She’s all smiles to have some time to focus on the inner work. As am i! 🙂

An Auspicious Setback

And for those of you who have been asking for an update on our efforts to establish our new eco-campus for sustainable village development and service retreats, well, there’s much to tell. First, as you may know, we were offered land in the West Bengal hills (near Kalimpong, in the Darjeeling district). Well, what some generous humans giveth, some selfish humans taketh away: Starting late last fall, the whole region went up in political flames (not only figuratively) as a tiny minority of disgruntled and/or opportunistic Gurkhalis (ethnic Nepalis uprooted by generations of military service) revived a sometimes-violent (and always inconvenient) movement for an independent state. The stated rationale for Gurkhaland is sensible enough (Gurkhalis comprise the majority in the area, and the Bengal state government utterly neglects them, so let them rule themselves), but the methods of the movement tend to be both despotic and ineffectual (an unfortunate combination) and, because they’re as relentless as they are inept, the pain never ends. They keep the whole region locked down for weeks on end with forced shop closures, road closures, and heart closures. Very sad. And not particularly conducive to building a retreat center, by the way, especially when they expel all the “foreigners” now and again.

So, between the political chaos and the fact that we learned of a government plan to build a road right through the middle of the land we were offered, we put the Bengal project on hold indefinitely, packed our bags and headed back hOMe to Himachal Pradesh. And, as life goes, this is turning out to be much for the better, as it has given us the opportunity to stumble upon an even more appealing prospect in the tiny, quiet Himalayan town of Bir, just 2-3 hours east-southeast of Dharamshala by road. You’ve seen Bir if you’ve watched Khyentse Norbu’s excellent film, The Cup, which insightfully conveys some of the quirky idyll of Bir. And Khyentse Rinpoche’s Deer Park Institute is a mighty magnet for world-class teachers of Indian wisdom traditions.

In short, we’re still on the road to build the Dharmalaya Institute, but now 1000 or so miles to the west and a fruitful year or two later. A delightful little team of angels has converged around the cause, and we’ve been looking at several pieces of land. We’ll keep looking a bit more in the fall, and around that time we imagine we’ll nab a piece and start slowly building this mud-brick-and-bamboo paradise. What will actually happen is of course anyone’s guess, but we’re pointing our prow in that direction. For inquiring minds, there’s more about the vision on the Dharmalaya website.

Meanwhile, i’m off to Geneva tomorrow to reconnect with our dear Swiss friends to explore the creation of an Earthville chapter in the land of yodels and strudels so we can build long, high bridges between the Alps and the Himalayas.

Sending love to all points on the compass…

Sawadee khap from the warm waves of Thailand!

Happy to be hOMe again. Conveniently, i feel that way almost anywhere i go… and yet there’s this familiar flavor of effortless contentment on some of my favorite patches of Asian soil. The static subsides…

Mozzies & the Matrix

Mahabodhi Stupa at Bodhgaya

Last month in Bodhgaya (where the Buddha formerly known as Prince Siddhartha, having spurned his 9-to-5, sat beneath the Bodhi tree posing for tourist paintings, many of which are still available today), i was fortunate enough to attend the 25th annual Nonviolent Mosquito Eviction Festival*, where i nearly mastered the gentle kung-fu technique; after a slow start, through diligent practice, i eventually succeeded in liberating well over 400 skeeters from the confines of my room without harm, and by the end i had accomplished the level of “Two Mosquitos in One Glass and Third in Hollow Fist,” which i’m told is pretty good for a rookie.

Mingyur Rinpoche, a rising star of the exile-born lamas (and now my main meditation teacher), offered very helpful elaborations on the practice, and also gave the transmission of the ancient, ear-whispered commentaries on the Matrix (“When Neo sees the electricity and stops the bullets, that’s a very good description of arriving at the first Bhumi“). And as if that weren’t auspicious enough, there were also 10,000+ monks, nuns, and laypeople making prayers for world peace and offering free medical treatments to thousands of impoverished Indian villagers, so the mozzies and i weren’t the only beneficiaries… 😉

[*CLARIFICATION — Since a few of you expressed confusion about how to discern the border between truth and humor in the story above, allow me to shed some light: There’s no such thing as a “mosquito eviction festival” — the Kagyu Monlam is a somber and inspiring traditional Buddhist gathering for world peace, which merely happens to take place in a land that is blessed with multitudes of mozzies on a mission to teach us compassion and forbearance — but the part about nonviolently removing over 400 of them from my hotel room is completely true. “It’s all in the wrist.” And, yes, Mingyur Rinpoche did refer to that scene from the Matrix in his explanation of what it’s like to begin to see reality as it is but, no, he didn’t actually comment on the mosquito kung-fu practice — nor would he have, since it’s double top secret!  😉 ]

On Noses, Ears, & Hearts

Here in Thailand, we have a brand new prime minister who is peeved at Thailand’s deaf population because of they name by which they refer to him in sign language. They make a fist over their faces, recreating his generous nose, which some have likened to a rose apple. Apparently, he doesn’t feel that this is a respectful way to address a prime minister, but the deaf community has responded that they’ve been calling him “Big Nose” since the ’90s, when he helmed the brutal crackdown against peaceful democracy and human rights activists, and it would be too confusing to Thailand’s deaf to change their language now.

I can sympathize, in a way, having lost all hearing in my right ear quite suddenly just over a year ago. After spending five years building what had grown to become a deeply rewarding career of music production, losing half my hearing (and thus the ability to mix in stereo) was a stunner for my little mind on several levels: physically, because the brain uses stereophonic hearing to place the body in space, to place the sounds we hear (e.g. car horns, sirens, shouting people) to evaluate whether we’re in danger or need to take quick action; emotionally, because so much of my life inspiration had been invested in musical gardening, some of the fruits of which were almost ripe to be shared; and practically, because the SF Bay Area is one of the most expensive places in the world to live and suddenly i found myself without income and without a key body function that had become (half) the foundation of my income. Naturally, i visited many holistic healing heroes (from whom i learned a lot) and even stooped to allopathy (trans-tympanic corticosteriod injection and other joys), but all the king’s horses couldn’t repair the nerve that no longer carries signals from right eardrum to brain.

My old friends at Tao Garden (holistic healing center here in Thailand) didn’t have any new input on the ear, but they did manage to get my platelets flowing freely. The clumpiness of my blood (which i wrote about a couple of years ago — “too much sticky”) may have been part of issue with the tissue. (Blood too thick + capillaries too thin = traffic jam; that’s one theory.) They took about 300ml of blood out, infused it with ozone (which made it maraschino red!), and let it drip back in. Now the dark field microscope shows all my blood cells have lots of elbow room. Not likely to bring the hearing back in my right ear, but perhaps it’ll help me keep it in the left (i.e. if there’s any truth to my neurotologists’ theory that my hearing loss may have been due, at least in part, to a vascular issue, such as poor circulation due to thick blood not circulating properly through narrow capillaries).

Otherwise, the only thing that’s happened so far that has brought any noticeable change in my hearing is, interestingly enough, trekking up and down the paddies in the Himalayas, on and around the spot of land near Kaimpong that we were offered for our retreat center. On the first day we visited the land, i was surprised that, on maybe five occasions, i distinctly heard my own voice in my right ear as i was talking, for just a fraction of a second. The same happened once or twice since then. So far, it happens only during physical exertion, so i intend to exert all the more.

Meanwhile, though — and perhaps until the nanobots can go in there and bionicize my nerve, i’m profoundly enjoying the many blessings of sudden single-sided sensorineural deafness (with the bonus of tinnitus and other strange stuff in my right ear). The gift of deeper compassion for others who suffer invisible-yet-challenging impairments. The creative challenges of learning to mix in mono. The wonders of watching the brain and body-mind grow new pathways, finding new ways to take care of bizniss. The quiet joy of simply noticing the resilience and tenacity of my quiet joy. My happy camper cup overfloweth now more than ever before. This effortless happiness in a time of challenging change could be read as an unsolicited endorsement of Buddha in ’08 [campaign slogan: “Regime change begins at OM”], but maybe it’s just a statistical fluke, a dimpled chad on both cheeks…

Speaking of OM, tomorrow we fly to Delhi and make our way up to Dharamshala, for a reunion with KhanaNirvana, Maynerd Doggie, and the Ocean of Wisdom. For 10 days, HH the Dalai Lama will share with us his incomparable insight into living a life of loving kindness and skillful action to benefit others. I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to listen to his teachings again and then have a little time to retreat and reflect on them. Feeling humble and inspired as i prepare to spin a new cocoon…

Just now starting to get my energy back after a surreal week. Feels good to be able to walk right again (no more significant dizziness), and i drove for the first time since the hearing loss.

Despite rhythmic waves of worry (what might happen to my career as a music producer, and what might be happening in my skull?), i’m mostly chill, doing a fairly good job staying cheerful and taking care. Juicing lots of carrots (which, i recently learned, are as good for the hearing as they are for the eyes, and also have enzymes that help nerve regeneration).

I’m feeling grateful for meditation and some degree of perspective: at least i know it’s just an ear, and i still have love and joy and everything else (just mixed in mono).

This week is for tests (MRI and 2 more docs tomorrow) and spending most of the rest of my time resting and doing my best to stay really relaxed and not think too much.

I can breathe again….

🙂

When i arrived at Tao Garden, my breathing was shallow. I didn’t realize how shallow it had become, because, well… i guess i forgot to breathe for the last year or so. But after just a few days of chi kung, yoga, meditation, and simply breathing mindfully, my chest is open again.

Chi Kung Pavilion at Tao Garden

And i can move, too! Twisting and stretching in unfamiliar yet totally natural ways. “Long, hollow bones,” said the chi kung instructor, and i saw myself as Plastic Man until it occurred to me that i’d be healthier if i were made from eco-friendlier material. Now i’m an ocean plant, undulating in the waves, with my roots stretching down through the core of the earth and my fronds reaching up into the next galaxy, blowing gently in the solar wind… Or so i’m told, and i’m starting to believe it. 🙂

Take Five Diagnostic Methodologies & Call Me in the Morning

This week has turned out to be largely about balancing. I’ve had too much this and not enough that for too long, and i was starting to feel it almost everywhere that has feelers. A cross-disciplinary team of doctors from Eastern and Western medical traditions did my intake. The standard vitals were all perfect, and if this had been a conventional modern medical checkup i would’ve walked with a clean bill of health… but i knew i had issues, because i live in my body, so i wasn’t surprised that the interdisciplinary testing turned up stuff that the standard medical exam wouldn’t. Then the fancy computers and gizmos substantiate the diagnoses, from different angles. The result is, at worst, a lot of thought-provoking possibilities and, at best, a balanced and detailed picture of one’s health. If all the different doctors and machines arrive at the same conclusions, it builds a certain degree of confidence in the diagnosis and increases the motivation for treatment.

The battery of tests they did for my intake was fascinating. Amazing to see photos and charts and graphs and numbers confirming what my intuition — and that of my excellent acupuncturist, Maureen Raytis, and several other healer friends — had said about my body and its systems: basically, (a) i have more energy activity in my heart than the miraculous little muscle can handle (that’s right folks, i love and feel too much… for my relative lack of grounding, anyway), and it’s been sucking all the chi out of my kidneys, contributing to my lower back trouble, and (b) the emotional stuff has wound its way into anxiety, which has kept my nervous system on high-alert, robbing energy from my digestion, disturbing my sleep, and generally crampin’ my style. Another consensus: Mr. Computer Man spends far too much of his life in a chair, so my blood circulation and oxygenation is baaaaaad (“blood is too much sticky”), but we knew that already.

What Doesn’t Kill You…

Now treatment time: They put me on a crazy machine to circulate my blood — it’s like a stairmaster with no stairs, just a ferocious jiggler under the feet to shake the whole body. I felt like a can of paint in the shaker machine that mixes in the tints. It got my blood going, alright — so much that it blew a bunch of capillaries in my nose, and for the next two days i looked like Rudolph with a faux crackle finish. I’ll (un)stick with the trampoline from now on, thanks.

So, the exercise part is easy, but what to do with all the surplus energy in that easily overexcited SNAG heart o’ mine? Start by watching… closely… more closely than before, because whatever i’ve done before has baked me into a half pretzel…

OK, i see that, until now, my “mindfulness” practice has been focused too narrowly — too much attention fixed on the small chunk of my mind that sits in my skull and (often to a lesser extent) its downstairs neighbors in the heart and the gut. I’m pretty vigilant in monitoring my thoughts and some of the energy in my body, but i’m still sleeping through a lot of the action, with the result that my mind (or at least the aspects of it that i’m watching) is almost always tranquil, and yet my body (especially my nervous system and subtler emotional field) is quite often a mess. There’s a lot of powerful machinery in there that is doing who-knows-what, and i need to master it because, for practical purposes, it’s me.

Enter the Dragon Breathing

Meditation Hall

It had been over a decade since i’d studied chi kung (a time-tested Chinese movement-meditation-martial-art tradition offering many practices to keep the body’s vital energies flowing and balanced, for good health, longevity, and happiness), and both my practice and my understanding had atrophied (and with them, my energy systems). The kind teachers here helped me identify dozens of practices (stretches or movements combined with breathing patterns and meditations) that i can do specifically to move the energy from the parts of my body where there’s too much (e.g. heart and sacrum) to the other parts that have been starving (e.g. kidneys and digestive system).

The most helpful one for my overflowing heart is the simplest: feeling the energy in my heart and, when it gets intense, dumping it like a bucket into my belly. It’s the suddenness of the dumping that moves the energy much more effectively than the gentler and more gradual practices i’ve normally used. This grounds and relaxes my heart instantly. I’m doing it hundreds of times a day, and it’s changing my world. And after dumping the energy into my belly, at the advice of one of the therapists, i roll some back to the kidneys so they’re nice and wet and smiling, and pour a little more into my digestive tract.

[If it seems like i’m earning my New Age credentials here, consider that this stuff is actually really Old Age, as in millennia. Asia has accumulated a massive body of knowledge about the body and mind that is, in many cases, highly complementary to the data that modern science has collected in its relatively short life. Like acupuncture and other branches of traditional Chinese medicine, chi kung works, and it goes a long way toward keeping hundreds of millions of people healthy, fit, flexible, and shining even into advanced age.]

So, yes, i’m feeling big improvement in a short time… but one week isn’t gonna do it. If i go back to my old habits, i’ll be just as tweaked this time next year, but a year older and that much less resilient. I need new habits, now. My mindfulness practice must expand throughout my body and the field around it. If i can watch the whole picture  as well as i’ve trained myself to watch a part of it, i’ll live to be infinity like all the cool Taoist dudes are doing. 😉  I’ll have much more to give, and i’ll enjoy it…

Will y’all please remind me when i’m back home and busy again?

Ho Chi Minh Trailhead

Speaking of gettin’ busy, tomorrow morning, after my mug of hot water and my small plate of dragon fruit with a squeeze of lime (i was never wild about dragon fruit until i discovered its lime alchemy — wow!), i’ll be pulling out of paradise to make my way to Vietnam, where the outer work of this journey begins.

But first, a sticky stopover day in Bangkok, my favorite environmentally devastated Asian supercity. Think i’ll get my teeth cleaned while i’m there: something just isn’t right when the end of the digestive tract feels cleaner than the beginning!  😉

Sawasdee khap from the Universal Tao Garden, home of the Inner Smile and observatory of the Microcosmic Orbit, where you can avail of free Wi-Fi access sipping garcinia tea in the dining pagoda while waiting to get your chi circulated, your blood ozonated, your arteries chelated, and your colon irrigated — all before lunch, and all for less than a ticket to a Britney Spears concert.

I heard the call and spontaneously left Chiang Mai this afternoon to transplant my retreat an hour northeast, to this most exquisitely green, beautiful, and eco-friendly healing center founded by world-renowned Taoist teacher Mantak Chia, and i’m already glad i did. I had some organic green papaya salad and downed a glass of mighty amalaki juice (visualize intense pucker), then slipped into the free nightly Tao yin yoga class and hit the mat just in time to hear the sweet and gentle Italian-accented instructor begin the class saying, “Close your eyes… now put your hands on your jade pillow…” An hour and a half later, i’m drenched in sweat, quivering from actual use of muscles other than those required for typing, and almost immortal… (OK, scratch that last one.)

Those of you who are aware of my history of kidney trouble will no doubt be pleased to know that my once-dour renal twins are now glowing with a warm sapphire light, like the sun just below the surface of the clear ocean off Koh Tao… and, yes, as advertised, they’re smiling at me. In fact, it’s a full-on lovefest in my grinning gut, with all my internal organs beaming at each other like one of those sweet gooey connecty moments in the foyer or the kitchen for which our beloved Earthville House in Oakland has earned a well-deserved reputation. Tomorrow morning, after chi kung in the mango grove, i’ll get my dark-field blood scan, my nutri-energetics analysis, and my bio-electrographic evaluation so we can find out what my organs are so happy about. Then, as a bonus, i get my brain synchronized! It’s about time, is all i can say.

Dropping Out, Dropping In

With each passing day, i feel another exponent more like the “me” i remember from more balanced days in the late ’90s — a person i more enjoy being. This is really the first time i’ve felt the spaciousness to make a real dent in unpacking the last four years of life, since returning to the States after living for seven life-changing years in India. There’s lots to notice in myself: what has changed since returning to the US, what’s the same, and what’s wanting to shift. Part of the intention for immersing myself in retreat on Asian soil is to bring myself full circle to reclaim some of the gems i found here years ago and gradually misplaced in the confusion of trying to situate myself as a person in my new home — both as an irreversibly global citizen trying to navigate the peculiar landscape of “American” cultural expectations (quite a few of which, believe it or not, i’d entirely forgotten, including some i must admit i wasn’t entirely pleased to remember) and, deeper down, as an inherently unlocatable spirit wanting to cooperate with the flow of a place and time without losing the universal signal in the local noise…

In my morning sit yesterday, i unearthed a time capsule i had buried for myself back in ’96, shortly before we opened KhanaNirvana — a text i had compiled from my own translations of the Tibetan texts i’d been studying. I had shared with one of my teachers there (Geshe Sonam Rinchen) that i had found it difficult to connect authentically with some parts of the texts and, after some questioning, it seemed to be a matter of translation, so i was inspired to retranslate my daily practice texts in a way more resonant for me. He affirmed that my own translation would be potentially more powerful as a tool for me, provided the translation was accurate enough not to introduce distortions of meaning into the text i would be using as a guidebook. So, i took care to go over all the points in question with him and other teachers to check my understanding of the material, and then began composing this personalized practice guide. I never “finished” it: once we launched KhanaNirvana, i scarcely set eyes on any text that wasn’t a menu, a project write-up, a syllabus, or a spreadsheet for the next five years or so.

Well, that old file is here on my laptop, and during my meditation i was inspired to open it up. [Bad in-joke for my vajra siblings: “short terma.” 😉 ]  I spent the next few hours in waves of different flavors of tears, sad to have forgotten so much, but profoundly grateful for the reminders.

Note to self: Always journal the epiphanies. You think in the moment that it’s so clear that you could never possibly forget, but then… Er, sorry, what was i saying?

In Thailand, Even Cities Are Getting Facelifts

To follow up on my last post about changes in Chiang Mai, a friendly local i talked with at one of the wats shed some light. He started by telling me that the much-loved King Bhumibol made his way up north in 2003, which right away gave me a sense of how the town might have been scrubbed clean. Anyone who stayed in Dharamshala long enough to see the Dalai Lama’s motorcade make an exit from the temple compound that serves as his exile home know the scene: the faithful (and the politically liable) go aggro for several days leading up to the moment his car pulls out of the gate and onto the public road, picking up weeks or months worth of litter and throwing up a fresh lick of paint here and there. Likewise, when one of the V.V.I.P. Indian ministers is about to pay a rare visit, well, suddenly someone in the Public Works Department “remembers” that they had been given a budget for road repair several years back but it somehow got spent on chai and laddoos, so they pool their paan (betel) money, run out and fire up the tar car to pave the road, and suddenly the state of transportation leaps forward from the 17th century to, well, the 1950s.

In a similar spirit, it seems, Chiang Mai cleaned itself up in anticipation of the King’s visit, but the King also made his own contributions. He and the Queen are both busy philanthropists, and apparently he put some love and largesse into spiffing up the town and boosting its local economy. Gotta love a ruler with at least some part of a heart. (Where can we get the US one o’ them?)

My Thai friend also identified one of the statues i’d been curious about — a sassy sentinel standing on one corner of the temple roof: “What in your country you call Cupid!” On a Theravada wat. Who knew?

Fortune smiling on Chiang Mai as it may be in general, the economy has been sagging again since the Tsunami, due in large part to a precipitous 60% drop in tourism, and i did find a few folks panhandling once i finally made a foray to the spendier part of town. Some of them were clearly pros, raking in far more in a typical day than your average wage earner. On the advice of local social workers, i usually give the pros only smiles. But i found one gentle, clear-eyed young man with no legs sitting on his own, propped up against a wall and, since i figured he probably can’t hold a job and the social stigma adds insult to injury, i reached into my pocket for him. We had a short, sweet moment of connection, but since i speak very little Thai (poot Thai mai dai!), i didn’t get to learn his story (which i normally try to do when there’s no language barrier). Food money and a loving smile… it feels so painful to want to do more, and to know the scale of the challenge is so daunting… but we can’t let that stop us from doing something.

I spend most of my time working for change in the form of projects that take a long time to materialize, so it feels important for me to find opportunities to give something with immediate benefit as well — both so my legless friend can eat and so i can keep at least one little finger in touch with the way the other ninety-something percent lives. Both needs are valid and valuable, but mine is a luxurious abstraction and his is a churning gut, and… can i even imagine what his life is like? In any case, it’s clear that, whether he really needs my support or not, i need my heart to stay open to feel and active to serve.

~~~

More news at 11, when my brain is synchronized (assuming i can still type…)