The chi kung practice lawn at Tao Garden

Sawadee khap from Doi Saket, where i’m planted once again in the Tao Garden, polishing my inner smile. 🙂

Yesterday was the first slow, leisurely day i’ve had since i left India two months ago… and now, after a whistle-stop tour of my world in Oakland (mostly my desk, truth be told), i’m finally catching up on missed breaths, and feeling grateful to be exactly where i am.

(In a heartbeat, it’s suddenly raining buckets here.)

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A week ago, in a jetlagged layover dream, i sat on the shore in Kowloon (notably more graffitti’d under Chinese administration), watching the clouds blow by in the mirrored windows of the feelgood Hong Kong skyscrapers, then took the subway into veggie paradise. Dinner in Bangkok a few hours later… why can’t i do this every day? 🙂

Like life, but somehow denser, Bangkok is always a mixed bag, but the mix keeps getting sweeter as i navigate more knowingly. This time was extra-special though, since the whole city threw a double birthday party for the Buddha and me. I wondered how we should celebrate, and he suggested we hit the streets early and find some folks who could use a little love. The first person i invited to our heart party was a 50-something leper propped up against the Skytrain stairwell. I bought him a few meals, but i got the impression that the smiles were even more nourishing to him, by the way he lit up. Likewise for all the other partygoers i recruited across the city. May those candles stay alight…

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Spent most of the last week within a few blocks of my beloved Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi. Yes, the sequel! We’ve returned for another round of recording and filming, and oh am i glad we did!

The reunion with our Vietnamese musical-kung fu family was very sweet — and somehow even warmer than before. No committees, no toasts, just love and music. Felt like coming home to family. We recorded in a well-appointed home studio run by a new friend, Ho Hoai Anh, who is a very popular musician in his own right but, like his elder Khanh, is very down-to-earth and can’t be bothered with protocol. Hoai Anh was a godsend as a second engineer, helping to keep us all in sync with graceful technical and cultural translation. The result is a solid hour of good performances, cleanly captured, and i can’t wait to get home and mix them.

My only regret is that everything went so deliciously smoothly that i have no fodder for drama to keep y’all cliffhung this time, so i guess your entertainment will have to come from the two CDs we’ll be releasing in September. 🙂

On the inner plane, the big news in Hanoi was my reunion with Hoan Kiem Lake. Saw familiar faces there — others who, like me, seem drawn to her, sit facing her, in silence. The old folks, doing what matters most. Young lovers, in pairs and alone, longing. The tai-chi ladies with their fans and swords. The kung-fu dudes whacking their wrists and forearms against the poles to toughen themselves up, and eyeballing the growth of each other’s muscles. A woman in her 60s, with a condition that renders her helpless as an infant, being held by her husband or brother, who every day brings her to the lake, lovingly feeds her on the bench, then takes her walking Butoh-slowly around the water.

I don’t know how to explain, except to say that, somehow, the spirit of that lake is one of my best friends in this world. Doing my morning chi kung with her, strolling around her, or just sitting by her banks, i feel more like me. Kinda wish i could take her home in a bottle, but she definitely lives in my heart.

We are already wondering what the next mission to bring us back might be…

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Meanwhile, here at Tao Garden, there’s nowhere to go but in and nothing to do but bloom. Returning after several intense months, i’m awestruck by the dramatic non-impact of peace… My arrival here was a meteor hitting the ocean with no splash… just a gentle rippling, a rustle in the leaves, and i’m here, floating…

I notice that when i’m so deeply peaceful i don’t need to eat much. The food here is divine, but i feel so nourished by everything else around me that my (famously enormous) appetite for gourmet Asian vegan grub is quickly satisfied, despite the fact that i’m quite physically active. This is in sharp contrast with my life in the city, where i’m often moving only my eyes and fingers (and the hard drive in my head) yet feeling ravenous, insatiable.

Looking deeper into these contrasts, while my perspective is fresh, i am humbled in recognition of the undeniable power of place. I could be doing the same thing with the same attitude and intention in a dozen different places and have a dozen utterly different experiences. Just being in a city makes me hungry, even when by all appearances i’m not doing much… but in the light of contrast here i see the truth is i am doing a lot when i’m in the city, just being there: my system is being bombarded with myriad stimuli, and of course it’s going to react, and those reactions burn energy. But, as Marshall McLuhan aptly put it, “whoever it was discovered water, you can be sure it wasn’t a fish.” We become desensitized to what is all around us, to the point where even some of the biggest influences on us can become invisible.

It seems i’m getting a tiny bit better at it. Though i certainly didn’t arrive at Tao Garden this time in the same great shape i was in when i left it last October, i clearly did arrive here in much better shape than when i arrived last time. That’s something.

But, inevitably, i have to ask: why leave? I’m feeling more motivated than ever to build community in nature. It just works.

Yo ho ho, a village life for me.

Everyone please go outside. 🙂

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Speaking of the village life, a week from now i will transplant my retreat from the manicured majesty of Tao Garden to the fertile terraced slopes of Sikkim. I’ll be in India till mid-July, doing a combination of creative and meditative retreating and project-related advancing, starting with the former and ramping up to the latter. At some point (dates still in the air), i’ll be heading back to the land in the West Bengal Hills to meet with Ani Sonam La, her family, and our South African friends to take the next steps on our project there.

For the last week of May and most of June, i’ll be very, very far from the Internet (yes, there are still a few places it doesn’t reach), so if you don’t hear from me again till July (which is likely), well, no news is very, very good news for this flower who blooms in stillness.

Juicy love from the mango forest…

After the intensity of our inner and outer experiences of recent weeks, my friend Artyom and i were ready for a holiday. We hired a jeep to Sikkim, had good talks and good momos, and then he caught a jeep eastward to Rumtek Monastery (the exile HQ of the previous Karmapa, though the Indian government still won’t allow the current incarnation to take his seat there, or even visit, for fear that China would be none too pleased) and i caught a series of local share jeeps northwest to Ravangla, one of several towns in a breathtaking cluster of centuries-old mountaintop settlements worthy of the mythic moniker of “Shangri-la.”

After a magical, nearly dead-silent day of rest and reflection in a cabin on a hill above Ravangla, near Kewzing, i hitched a ride onward to Gyelzing with some grad students from Gangtok who were conducting a state-sponsored survey of all of Sikkim’s schools to assess their material needs so the state government can fulfill them. Just like that. This many pens, that many books, here ya go. (Wow. I thought India was supposed to be a “poor” country and the US was supposed to be a “rich” one, so why do so many of my teacher friends in Oakland have to buy their own chalk out of pocket?) The inquisitive students asked me, “What is the greatest problem facing America right now?” I answered right away, “George Bush,” which earned me a high five from Manu, the Poli Sci major in the passenger seat. (No offense intended to anyone who might feel aligned with him; i’m not a partisan, but i do place a higher value the lives of others and healthy international relations than this president has demonstrated, and i do view his actions as a grave threat to the peace and prosperity of the US and the world.) After giving it moment’s thought, though, i nominated another candidate: “selfishness.”

Speaking of Dubya, he just arrived in India for his first-ever visit to the subcontinent, in search of a face-saving way for the figureheads of both countries to gain domestic and international political capital by coming to an “agreement” about the nookyaler plans that India will pursue whether “the Decider” likes it or not. There were tens of thousands of Indians on hand in Delhi to protest the arrival of the man some referred to as “the world’s greatest terrorist,” and our beloved Arundhati Roy is all over the TV (even BBC World felt it necessary to cut her off repeatedly and change the subject when she made her case compellingly). Today, around 150,000 protested in Delhi, and i’ve been overhearing people criticizing Mr. Bush high and low in West Bengal and Sikkim as well. A dose of comic relief came today , however, when i read in the Kolkata paper that officials from the US Library of Congress attempted to buy some of the protesters’ signs and T-shirts for documentary purposes…

The talk of Dubya and selfishness led to a conversation about the role of educational institutions in preserving, creating, and shaping culture. I thought of the inspiring two-hour talk i heard the Dalai Lama give in Sarnath just a couple of weeks ago, addressing Tibetan and Indian academics, in which he called for a radical revision of the traditional monastic curriculum. It’s not enough to study the traditional Tibetan Buddhist canon, said the envelope-pushing reformer: monastic students must familiarize themselves with the entire body of Buddhist literature, from the Pali and Sanskrit texts to the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and other iterations… and, due to the irreversibly globalizing nature of the world of today, monks and nuns must also study at least the basics of the various spiritual traditions of the world as well as western philosophy, the natural sciences, computers, environmental issues, and social activism… and the monasteries, nunneries, and other Tibetan educational institutions must reinvent themselves to serve these updated objectives. If only the rest of the world’s spiritual leaders felt the same way… (Disclaimer: My Tibetan is rather shoddy, so i hope i’m conveying his message accurately enough. I did ask around to double-check, so i’m fairly confident in what i’ve written here, but in case of any errors, i apologize.)

~~~

Interconnectedness vignette: I spent Losar (Tibetan New Year) afternoon at Pemayangtse Gompa (trans: Sublime Lotus Monastery), an 18th-century marvel of otherworldly art and architecture near the remote village of Pelling in West Sikkim. Most of the monks were knackered from two solid days of tantric cham dancing in heavy, hot, god-monster costumes, but when i leapt to help one still-effervescent lama move a butter-lamp table, i discovered he teaches about Buddhism in my alma mater’s Nepal program, which (unbeknownst to me until this moment) had transplanted itself from Nepal proper to Kalimpong a few years back when the so-called “Maoist” violence in Nepal escalated to a civil war. But the world wasn’t quite small enough yet. Standing behind me when i asked this lama how to find Zangdok Pelri, Guru Rinpoche‘s Copper-Colored Paradise, was a friendly South African computer programmer (the first Western face i’d seen in a couple of days) who, it turns out, used to take classes at the DrumCafé in Cape Town, which was founded by relatives of brother Guy Lieberman, who was the person through whom i originally met Leigh, who introduced us to Ani Sonam La… and he knew Guy’s uncle Steve Barnett, who had joined us for one of our programs in Dharamshala. Yep, that’s our global village. 🙂

~~~

And so ends this visit to India. Whatever may come of the possibilities that have emerged, i’m immensely grateful for my time here. So many reminders of simple wisdom too easily forgotten when life speeds up… and some new learning that i can already feel doing its thing in me… opening, softening, humbling, strengthening, forging, inspiring…

Thanks for being with me on the journey.

PS – New Bollywood fad: guys wearing long black fishnet kurta shirts over vests and trousers… wow…

Being in India again is enough of a gift, but the unexpected bonus prize is a reunion with Nepal as well — not geographically this time, but culturally. This whole chunk of the Himalayas from Sikkim to the northern West Bengal hills (from the Bhutanese border in the east to the Nepali border in the west and the Tibetan border in the north) is predominantly Nepali, culturally and linguistically, with generous helpings of Tibetan, Indian, Bhutanese, and indigenous spices in the masala. A tasty mix, to my palate.

As we climbed higher into the foothills on the way to Kalimpong, we heard less Hindi and more Nepali, and i got to play in my favorite linguistic playground for the first time in seven or eight years. As some of you know, i find great joy in being the me that i become when i speak and think in Nepali (which i learned back in college during a life-changing semester in Nepal). It somehow feels like a more native tongue to me — a linguistic framework more readily conforming to the ways in which i experience the world and myself within it (whereas i often feel i’m “translating” when trying to express myself in English). So, all the more delightful it is that Ani Sonam La, our new old friend with whom Artyom and i spent three precious days last week, comes from a long line of Nepalis with broad minds and deep commitments to natural living and selfless service to their communities.

Ani Sonam La traveled several hours from her nunnery to meet us in Kalimpong. Physically tiny but energetically giant, and with a slightly weathered forty-something-ish face that could just as easily be Tibetan or Native American, she sailed down the hill to our lodge as if her nun’s robes were concealing the fact that she was gliding just above the ground rather than walking, and she lit up when i called her name. Instant friends — just add eye contact. We spent the four-hour jeep journey north toward her village yakking away about our dreams about H.H. the Dalai Lama, our visions for sustainable community, and our family legacies of service to society. Ani Sonam La was excited, she said, because it was clearly our good karma that brought us together to create this project to benefit the village and those who will come to meditate on this sacred land.

We reached the end of the “road” (using the term with maximum generosity here) after dark and walked the last hour through the forests and rice paddies to the home of her cousin, one Mr. S.N. Rai, who serves as the headmaster of their village primary school. A very thoughtful, gentle, and cheerful man, Mr. Rai, like many of his fellow villagers, is a devotee of Sai Baba (the world-famous afro-wallah guru whose motto is “love all, serve all”) and, as such, is exceptionally open-minded and more socially and environmentally conscious than your typical Indian or Nepali villager.

As we (Mr. Rai, Ani Sonam La, Artyom, and i) talked service, spirituality, politics, and sustainable development over dinner by lamplight, i was moved to tears as i listened to them and it struck me how similar we are — in some ways, more similar to each other than we are to the mainstreams of the societies from which we’ve emerged. It felt like the universe was doing some stellar matchmaking.

We slept in the guest room of Ani Sonam La’s parents’ home (a traditional two-story wood-and-adobe affair) and emerged in the morning to see the beauty of the village that we had only felt the previous night. We met her delightfully friendly parents and younger brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, and then joined Mr. Rai after breakfast to trek down to the school and then continue along the trail to meet the plot of land we’ve been offered.

The schoolhouse was built by the villagers in the early ’70s, with their own funds (the government promised school funding long ago, but… well, someone in a Kolkata office needed chai instead) and entropy has had its way with it since. One of our first projects will be to find a modest amount of financial support to enable to the villagers to do some basic renovation on the school for safety, and to build a fence around the courtyard to keep the kids from falling off the cliff when they play!

From the school, we wandered down a maze of trails, through rice paddies, forest, and cardamom plantations, to Pichung Lakha, the old name (which means something like “the seasonal encampment or resting place of Pichung,” though no one today knows what person or people were named Pichung) given to the hillside that hosts our date with destiny. Pichung Lakha is perfect.

The land (about half of which is visible in the photo, though it’s a bit larger than it looks here) stretches from the forest at the top (just beyond the right edge of the picture) down to the river below, which you might barely make out in the horizontal center photo, and includes a strip on the other side of the river. The land being offered to us includes terraces for growing food, caves and grottos which could easily be built into spots for long-term retreats, and several other flat spots suited to a dining pavilion/kitchen, dorm huts, a yoga pagoda, and a meditation hall/classroom.

Water is plentiful, for both cooking and farming, and there is no shortage of cash-poor locals who would benefit greatly from some paid work to construct the place (with their traditional, eco-friendly methods) and work with our international friends to create and maintain the gardens according to local, permaculture, and biointensive principles. In short, it’s everything we need for the humble first incarnation of the vision of a service-learning ashram and eco-retreat center.

Ani Sonam La wants to start by replanting the orange orchards that were there in her childhood and later clear cut to make space for rice paddies and terraces. Double-yum.

There are still many questions to be answered before we can be sure if this can happen here, but we’re off to a good start. We had left Sarnath with the Karmapa‘s blessings for the project, and we concluded our tour of Pichung Lakha with a puja (prayer and offering ceremony) at the Shiva cave down by the river for the removal of all obstacles and the success of the project… and the rest is just details. 😉

Seems i’ll be returning this summer to continue the conversation. For now, there’s plenty of visioning and homework to be done, and that too is a rewarding process.

For those of you who missed the message i wrote in the clouds (poor timing: as soon as i enscribed it, the Mothership flew by and messed it all up… sigh…), here’s a plain-text version of update:

After a sweet and transformative two-week meditation retreat here in Sarnath, i’m now officially the same as i was before, which is to say nonexistent yet somehow still fond of fresh fruit. Truly miraculous!

The retreat was a collaboration between Christopher Titmuss (a gifted Buddhist teacher and former monk who spent enough time meditating in the forests of Thailand to learn to tell sticks from snakes) and my lovely new friends at Open Dharma, a noble project offering retreats that provide an “atmosphere of creative stillness where each participant can open and deepen in her or his own way.” (Incidentally, Open Dharma has just taken a cushion under the Earthville parasol, and we’re happy to have them aboard.)

Before arriving, i was inspired to participate in the retreat for three reasons: for the opportunity to meet these good folks i’d been hearing about; because i was overdue for a contemplative pit stop; and because the structure of this particular retreat is an unusual one that’s similar to a model i’ve been envisioning for some time (thinking, “why doesn’t somebody offer a retreat like this…?”) and i was intrigued to see how the Open Dharma approach to this model works.

Well, work it does, and it’s designed to work quite differently for everyone, which is one of the things i really like about it. It is an open retreat (everyone is welcome, costs are covered purely by donation, and all are free to come and go at will) and this one follows at the end of a more traditional structured retreat led by Christopher every Winter in Bodhgaya. On the heels of that intense silent Vipassana retreat, this dharma gathering in Sarnath provides a chance for people to integrate their sitting practices with the rest of life, and to explore that integration process with each other as it happens.

A typical day alternates between silent group meditations, multiple discussion groups on a range of topics (e.g. practice-related questions, service as yoga, living free from fear, death and dying, love and spirituality, inquiries into the experiences of the participants, and so on), meals (with the group or otherwise), and a more formal dharma talk every evening.

As much as i liked the whole program, i found the small group discussions to be particularly nourishing — not unlike the conversations we tend to share over meals back home at the Earthville House, but with dozens of insightful people from across the globe and skilled facilitation from the teachers. I felt closer to being in my element than i have since KhanaNirvana days.

The whole experience stirred my long-waxing aspiration to create a campus for the exploration of meditation in action, applied compassion, and service-learning as a contemplative practice, and i got the feeling it might be time to take that dream off the back burner.

And, well, as it turns out…

I write you now from Kalimpong, where Artyom and i are pausing for the night en route to a small village near the Sikkim border. What’s there, calling us, you might ask? So might we… and, happy as we are to visit beautiful new places for no reason at all, our curiosity is piqued all the more in this case because of this tingling feeling that something fruitful is afoot and the universe, true to its coy sense of humor, has hooked us up for a blind date with destiny, so i’m mentally preening…

See, there’s an exceptionally devoted Tibetan nun (whom we still haven’t met), from a Nepali family, who has been wanting to use a few acres of sacred land she inherited to create a sustainable, non-sectarian retreat center and school. Her idea, as we’ve heard it, sound like a bare-bones version of that vision i’ve been dreaming since ’92. Feeling it wasn’t for her to develop such a project on her own, this nun entrusted the land to Leigh and Justin, two friends i first met years ago at KhanaNirvana. But, as it happens, they’re not in a position to make it happen alone either, so they were as delighted as we were when we bumped into each other in Sarnath and Artyom happened to mention that the other half of our reason for coming to India was to explore possibilities for creating just such a center. After a short and sweet conversation, they passed the torch to us.

So, suddenly, we find ourselves with the gift of a plot of sacred land that so far we’ve seen only in pictures and, we hear, an eager village full of enthusiastic Nepali-speaking collaborators of various syncretic spiritual leanings, ready to build traditional adobe buildings and grow organic veggies for the center. The Himalayan Connection Vortex churns on, it seems…

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be off to meet this nun and her family, see the land, and get a clearer sense of what might happen there. The village is totally unplugged, so the next update will come when we return from the blessed boonies.

🙂

As the sagacious space swami Bonzai Baba taught (in the Garland of Pop-Culture Pith Sutra, IIRC), “Wherever you go, there you are.” Well, one thing about India is, somehow, wherever you go, there’s even more of you. More than any other place i’ve been, India has the mysterious power of reflecting whatever one brings to it, holding it right up in one’s face, and sometimes none too gently. Nice to be reminded i can always count on her for that. 🙂

After living here for seven years and then spending the last five years in a semi-accidental stateside hiatus, it is both so very normal and so very strange to be back. The smells and sights and sounds are fresh as yesterday (though some of the smells one would guess to be considerably older…). But my whole world has changed several times since 2001 and it’s in some ways very much a new m that is here this time (though i’ve spotted a few old-m habits that i’d be happy to leave by the roadside). Feels a bit like making a pilgrimage back to my elementary school to visit my favorite teachers after years out in the world…

We used to refer to the aromatic nation’s capital as “Smelly Delhi,” and the airport air reinforced the illusion that some things never change. Driving into town in my natural gas-powered taxi, however, i was amazed to discover i could actually breathe once we left the outskirts and entered the city proper, where the clean air ordinances passed in 2001 have made a dramatic impact on the respiration situation. (Wish the US had the sense to follow suit: Must world’s worst and richest polluter lag so far behind one of the most cash-poor and least industrialized countries?) Walking to find a bite in Connaught Place the next morning, i did a double take on a fancy sign saying “Metro”… could it be? I rode the glass-doored elevator down to discover a (relatively) swish new city-wide subway system, freshly flowing in full effect, replete with shopping bag-toting teens and mobile-gaming commuters, all basking in that inimitable Indian glow of swadeshi spirit (a beaming home-team pride) that clued me in that the subway is the place to be seen. You go, Delhi!

A restful overnight train ride later, i said good morning to the Gangaji (a.k.a. Ganges) on my way to Sarnath. A dustpan of a town just north of Varanasi, Sarnath’s claim to fame is the fact that it was the site of the first teachings given the Buddha Shakyamuni after he got the Ultimate Download under the Bodhi tree in nearby Bodhgaya. As such, it’s a place of pilgrimage for countless waves of Buddhists and other folks from every corner of the globe, come to soak up the magic vibes and take pix of what remains of a 2200 year-old stupa (a cylindrical structure sharing common ancestry with the pyramids; this particular one looks like a 34-meter tall kiln) built in his honor. It was, in fact, pilgrimage that first brought me here back in 1994, with Scarth and Amy, when we shepherded an international group of 30 pilgrims through the ruins of the centuries-old monastery and tried to figure out how to play along while our monk friends performed the customary Sarnath puja (prayer and offering ceremony) at the stupa, as a part of a month-long Buddhist pilgrimage we organized – a gig that somehow went rather splendidly despite our total and utter lack of experience or qualification – a great adventure at the time… Oh, if i had only known where it would lead me (it was on that pilgrimage that we got the inspiration to make our next stop Dharamshala, to catch H.H. the Dalai Lama‘s teachings and stay “maybe a few weeks” checking out the Tibetan scene…)

Well, fast-forward twelve years, and here i am again, wandering aimlessly through the rice paddies of the surrounding villages, reconnecting with the village vibe (a push-cart apple vendor cocked his head at me curiously and flipped his hands at the wrist, meaning “What’s the deal, gringo, what brings you to my village?” I told him, “Ghoomraha hu,” meaning “just wandering,” which satisfied him plenty – he clearly approved of aimlessness, but i thought to myself, “i really wish i could tell you…”). And here i am walking mindfully through town (mindful not only of the walking itself, but of what one might step in), feeling the feeling of being here… and feeling my feelingness of it… noticing what i’d missed (e.g. the light in so many people’s smiling eyes, the way i look at and see myself when everyone is staring at me, and the ubiquitous and never-ending, universally-embracing CELEBRATION of all things supramundane that one only finds in such dense abundance in India – and in greatest concentration at India’s places of pilgrimage) and what i could continue to do without (e.g. exhaust, horns, never-ending concrete construction and commercialization of all things accoutering and accessorizing spirituality, overcooked vegetables, and, well, the things one might step in [the province of Uttar Pradesh has to be the roadside deposit capital of the world…]).

More than anything else, though, i was feeling how much i miss being near HH. After living a half a block down the street from him in Dharamshala for nearly seven years, and then seeing him only through the narrow-band prism of the media for the last five, i felt a quietly aching longing for the unique support that i found in the rhythm periodic connections with him that i was blessed to have there — the viscerally brilliant reminders of what is possible for a human to become… inspiring me inward and outward and onward…

So imagine my delight (really, i dare you!) when Artyom and i set off to find the Karmapa (one of the four top lamas in the Tibetan tradition, who happens to be in town for a spell) and we got wind that someone else thought it would be a good day to come to Sarnath and say “wassup” to the Karmapa: HH’s caravan was en route to the Tibetan University down the road, so off we went in the rickshaw…

Only got to see him for a few seconds, but…….. ah….. sigh………….

My batteries are recharged! 🙂

~~~

Speaking of old friends in crimson robes, i also bumped into our activist buddy Bagdro, a spirited monk who used to speak regularly at our “Sunday@Sunset” series at KhanaNirvana/DEVI (our center in Dharamshala, where we had former Tibetan political prisoners as guest speakers almost every week – and still do, much of the time). We met him not long after he first arrived in Dharamshala, after spending interminable aeons in Chinese prisons for speaking out for Tibetan freedom. He was tortured unimaginably brutally in prison and was scarred in every sense of the word.

Today, however, i got to have lunch with him and i saw a brighter Bagdro than i’d ever seen before. He continues to travel the world speaking about his experiences in prison and his activism since then, and he took advantage of a trip to Germany to spend 20 days in a hospital finally getting some good care for his internal wounds… so for the first time in over a decade, he isn’t living with physical pain compounding his suffering. In his animated way, he gleefully reported that he has finished collecting 400,000 signatures from people of 60 countries for his petition to the UN to reconsider its decision not to allow HH the DL to speak at the UN on the subject of world peace, as he was first invited to do and then barred from doing a few years back. “China is very angry,” boasted the smiling monk. He will hand-deliver the petition to the UN when he is next in New York, and if the UN doesn’t meet his deadline, he plans to hunger strike in front of the UN until they respond. The energetic monastic also has a CD coming out – chanting Dalai Lama bass notes with a German hip-hop band (it was just a matter of time, right?). I remember him rockin’ the overtones with us at our open-mic jams at KhanaNirvana…

~~~

Starting tomorrow morning, i’ll be joining friends old and new for a two-week meditation/integration retreat – one of the two main purposes of my visit. I’m feeling ever so ripe for it. I’ll write again when i emerge… unless i get the Ultimate Download, in which case maybe i’ll send you all a pretty picture post card in the clouds. Just to show off, ya know… 😉

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…)

Something magic happens when everything familiar is removed from the outside, and all that’s left is (imaginary) me… same old me, new world (or, as one of my old songs goes, “Same Planet, Different Universe”). Kinda like a ginormous sensory deprivation tank but with lots of other auspiciously random people in it, it reflects me back to me from unexpected angles.

(Remind me to give myself the gift of a solo retreat more often. One would think i oughta know by now: it’s amazing how amazed i still am that the present is such a high-yield investment in the future.)

Transition & Transformation

I managed to keep myself awake until 10 last night, to help my body adjust to Thai time, but still awoke around 3:30am to a dark guest house bedroom and a yakety-yaketing mind. For our protagonist, Mr. Intentional (who long ago somehow got the idea that the objective was to control the mind, to keep it focused on the magic, the meaningful, and the moving), it’s a peculiar humbling to sneak up and catch himself meandering in the mundane. Truth be told, this discovery is, sadly, all too common, but what made today different was that, instead of racing through the motions of a morning practice, saying “close enough for rock ‘n’ roll” and leaping from the bed directly to the desk, i chose to park the runaway truck and spend the next couple of hours sinking in a little deeper…

Almost immediately when i generated that clear resolve, i felt that familiar deep shift — like unplugging from the matrix and jacking back into the training program, putting the reins of my mind back in the most trusted hands (the practice itself). Simply  letting the awareness rest lightly instead of controlling it tightly is not unlike the difference between skiing fresh powder and scraping down steep sheets of ice.

As that familiar effortless experience returned and grew clearer and steadier, i remembered how it felt when i used to do a proper, extended sit every day… and some days that’s all i would do.

I suppose one could say i needed to learn to walk with one eye open. I had spent enough of my life in more extreme states — either “in the zone” or out of commission — that it was valuable for me to learn simply to function (not well but adequately) when i’m not at my best. But even if there’s value in learning to be OK with “just barely good enough” when circumstances don’t permit any better, recently i’ve become too good at it. I’m glad to have made friends with mindstream mediocrity, but i’m clear that i wouldn’t want to live my entire life there if i had a choice. And, like most meditators, i’m motivated by the conviction that we do have a choice: we can gradually improve our relationships with our own hearts and mind so that, whatever thoughts, feelings and experiences may arise and pass, we are more deeply at ease with them and, with time, more able to respond to the flow of life with greater grace.

It’s integration time again. The exalted and elusive Middle Way of socially-engaged contemplative practice is only truly the “middle” if it is both truly engaged and truly contemplative… and the former (as challenging as it can be) comes much more easily than the latter, so discipline is my friend. I choose this path in part because it feels superlatively inspiring to walk it when i am both disciplined and relaxed enough to walk it in earnest, but even more because i have so much more to share with the world when i take care of my energy, health, and practice in this way. I love my job.

Change in Chiang Mai

This is a wonderful time of year to be in Chiang Mai. The northern monsoon has just spritzed its last bits, so there’s lots of lush green and the air’s pretty clean (unless one is right behind a propane-burning tuk-tuk), and yet it’s early in the season so not many farangs (foreigners) have rolled into town (which makes it easier to find an available computer in one of the bazillion internet cafés that have appeared since i was last here a few years ago).

I made a point of getting completely lost right away so i could reacquaint myself with the laid-back northern capital of Thailand, which has long been a favorite chillville for me (and so i could keep my jetlagged body awake until the sun went down). One of the first things i noticed, walking through labyrinths of back alleys, was that there are now recycling bins all over, and some of the cooking classes have gone organic. Barely any trash on the street anymore. The moat around the old city center (Chiang Mai was historically a fortified town) is still chocolate brown, but it no longer reeks, which i noticed when an overzealous fountain in the middle of the moat sprayed a few drops of urban chocolate on my face and i didn’t melt into a puddle of toxic goo from the stench as i might’ve in years past.

The children look happy and well fed. Where are the beggars? And the infamously raucous employees of the red-light district? Are these high-season-only fixtures of Chiang Mai? I don’t see them this time. We did notice seasonal migrations living in India: every year we would watch the beggars multiply exponentially before the peak tourist season and then move on to greener pastures when the tide of money ebbed. Is that what’s happening here, or have the marginalized been pressed further toward the margins, or are things actually looking up for the downtrodden in Chiang Mai? I’ll ask around.

It’s interesting revisiting the wats (Buddhist temple-monasteries) too. I remember my awe and wonder, in my first visits to Thai wats back in 1992, was focused on the art and the architecture — the incomparably crafted pagodas, statues, paintings, frescoes, carvings, and textiles. Now what really strikes me is the graceful groundedness and unassuming presence of the white-haired, white-robed nun looking after the place. Weightlessly anchored, she is a hOMing beacon for my travel-weary, Americancerous mind. We acknowledge each other with a slight bow and a flash of very gently connecting eye contact, and we spend the next half hour sitting in the temple alone together, feeling our breathing and listening to the birds. I’m in my element (and vice versa).

The Road Ahead

In a week, i’ll be exiting the cozy, familiar, farang-friendly womb of Chiang Mai to explore the new (to me) world of Vietnam. Retreat will give way to advance, the anything-goes-as-long-as-you-don’t-insult-the-King-or-Thai-culture openness of Thailand will give way to the nothing-happens-without-someone-watching-and-reporting-on-it constriction of the so-called “Communist” police state in northern Vietnam, and Pad Thai and green papaya salad will give way to Buddha-only-knows-what-they’ll-feed-me in Duong Coc village (where my recording project will be focused). And, in the middle of all this, the hearts of people will be the same, but how will we find each other?

In the Vietnamese language (the official Hanoi dialect, which i’ve just begun studying), there are 18 different ways to pronounce the letter “a”  and each of them make the difference between one word (the one you meant) and a completely different word. You say toMAYto, i say toMAHto, bit we’re each talking about two entirely different things — and one is a tasty fruit while the other might be an unforgivable insult to my new friend’s ancestors… but no pressure or anything. 😉  I’m glad i enjoy learning.

Speaking of which, the roosters are ringing the school bell — a little study to keep the embers warm, and then a breakfast adventure. There’s an organic produce market here now (several, apparently), and my belly says it’s time to discover a new fruit.

Free the Mangosteens! (That’s a joke for my Mama…)