I think the inclination to write usually comes when suffering is at its peak but intuition and clarity are on the cusp of rising to meet it at the same level.

2022 was another unexpectedly hard year for me - it continues to be hard. 

There is fear. There is depression. There is loneliness. (Ooft, the tears have arrived.)

A lot of it has to do with immobility, isolation from leaving school again, being in an emotionally challenging LDR.

I feel like my heart has been squeezed of all its energy - its effort, patience, endurance, love. I feel it just wants a place to rest. To just surrender. To fully exhale without a care in the world. To let go.

A lot of the difficulty this past year has been to do with love - for myself and others, and both in terms of giving and receiving.

I've learned a lot more about myself, and it has definitely taught me to be stronger. I have a quote on my phone - "what is soft is strong". I feel I've really learned the meaning of that for real this season. I've learned to be softer - mainly with myself. And in that way, it has made me stronger.

I've learned that I have a lot of love to give to others. But I sometimes do this without boundaries - I pour out of my cup to the point where it's overflowing for those I'm giving to, but they sometimes don't pour back. So I'm left feeling very empty and lonely and hurt. 

So this year a big thing is learning to love myself. I think I've always thought of self-love as 'metta' for oneself, and really never knew what that meant. It was just a concept. (Like 'self-care' - I was very mechanical about it, very superficial. Just doing things like going on walks and taking bubble baths. It helps but that's not it.)

I often feel it's unfair that I commit to being a good friend to others but they might not show up for me in the same way. I always feel I'm giving more than I receive. I get very hurt by that. But I'm learning that not everyone can show love in the same way that you would/ that you would want - but it doesn't mean they don't love you. I'm still learning to accept this and not take things personally when people don't match my expectations of what love should look like. It's honestly really hard.

I'm learning that I can be that good friend to myself. I can be that person that I've always wanted for myself. I can love myself in the way that I've always wanted to be loved. I know how to be a good friend - but for some reason I've never able to be that for myself. 

It's a very new concept to me. I've had to do things like talk to myself, like a friend would; acknowledge all my feelings and tell myself it's okay, like a friend would; comfort myself when I'm lonely or sad, like a friend would; take myself out and do things to lift my spirits, like a friend would; pat myself on the shoulder or head, like a friend would. It's a new relationship with myself that I've never had. I've always emotionally relied on others - my therapist pointed out that there tends to always be at least one person in my life that I rely on as 'my person'. But that's not a very secure thing to do, because people change, and relationships change. So relying on someone else to fulfill my needs puts me in a vulnerable position.

I've been contemplating loneliness and relationships. 

Everyone is fundamentally alone. Even when we have friends or partners or family. We are all alone. No one can feel these feelings for us. No one can carry this suffering for us, no one can take it away. We are the only ones who are with ourselves 24 hours a day. Even if we have the perfect partner, the perfect parents, perfect bestfriend - there are times where they just can't be with us. 

It's a very sad realisation because I think we're accustomed to having a sense of security through the presence of others. It's very overwhelming and depressing to realise that that is false.

Sorry if this is all really depressing.

My ankle injury is now a diagnosed long-term health condition. It's osteoarthritis - which is cartilage loss, in the ankle joint. I've been advised to never do high impact activity again, such as running, jumping, all the sports you would imagine. I've also been advised to walk as little as possible from now on.

It's essentially a disability.

It's been so devastating, so incredibly isolating. I don't think the people around me can really understand how it's been, making it all the more lonely. Most of my friends are in their 20s, thriving physically, financially and in relationships. Maybe some have had hard life shit happen at some point - cancer, injury, delaying uni for a year or two, losing a parent. But they get back on their feet and are now thriving.

On the other hand, I feel like my life has been continuously hard since I was 18 - losing mum, getting over a break up with someone I loved for years, joining and leaving a cult that destroyed me mentally, emotionally and socially, being out of school unexpectedly because of the pandemic and being isolated from my social circle. I've made it through all that but now have to come to terms with the reality of an ankle-injury-turned-disability, being out of school for yet another year, and being in a hard relationship.

It feels like nothing is going right, and nothing ever will. It's so exhausting to endure, to pick myself up over and over again. It feels like there's no light at the end, no hope. It feels like there's no meaning in all this. I know the Dhamma - this is just reality, life is suffering, and there is a way out. But I just feel like I don't have the strength anymore to come out of suffering. It feels endless and difficult.

I know suffering is not personal. It's a universal phenomenon. But it's so hard not to look around and take it personally. 

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle this. It feels like any effort to get back on my feet is eventually squashed.

I guess, even though it's hard, there is now a feeling of gentleness behind it all. There's a feeling that - this is not ok, but it's ok. Things can only be the way that they are. なるようになるしかない。

Life keeps being hard, but I can keep being there for myself. I can keep being that friend to myself, the one that has my back no matter what's happening. The one that listens and receives and comforts and empathises. The one that is there. I can be that friend. That's the only thing I have, the only thing I can rely on.

I went on a family holiday Langkawi last week. It was the first time done a beach holiday in years. We stayed at The Datai, and it was really nice. Lots of nature, clean beach and sea. I think I was able to relax there and have some insights. For the past 6 months I've been doing the thing of trying to work things out with thinking. As we know, that doesn't work. Stillness leads to insight - something I had forgotten or resisted for a long time. I came back to the realisation which I've had before that there is nothing to do, nowhere to go. Things will happen as the way they need to, when they need to. How I can respond to that is by being in tune with that, not resisting, not grasping. Receiving. Letting. Allowing. Moving gently according to those waves of intuition and clarity, within my boundaries, instead of an ideal or how I want things to be.

My friend Yuki recently said 心配しなくてもいいよ - "You don't have to worry".

There's a deeper meaning to that - more like, whether you worry or not, it will just turn out how it needs to turn out. Things happen on their own whether you're worrying or not. So you really don't have to worry. It's an added burden.

There's a comfort in that. I think we worry because we think we have control and we try to exercise that control. I think worry can be replaced with trust. Trust that things happen their own way. Trust in yourself, that you can respond appropriately, with everything you have in you. You can only do your best. That's really all that you can do.

After everything that's happen, even though it was all incredibly challenging, I know in my heart that I did everything I could. I did my best - my best being what I could do at the time, given the conditions at the time. That's all we can really do. That is enough.

I feel very afraid, a lot of trepidation about how to go through life with these new conditions - never being able to move freely and engage in activities as I would like, ever again. Will I ever be able to walk on my own two feet again? Will I ever be able to explore and experience life the way I've always wanted to? Will I ever be able to be loved the way that I've always wanted? Maybe this is all too much to ask of life.

I don't think I have anything hopeful or wise to leave with you, I don't know how to wrap this up in a nice little bow or a 'everything is going to be okay'. I think this is just one of the ways I'm being a friend to myself - to receive and acknowledge how very hard and scary it has all been.

PS I've been listening to a lot of Kina Grannis lately to help with receiving the pain. I've been following Kina since I was a teenager but don't think I was ever properly listening to or contemplating the lyrics in her music. All I knew was that I liked her voice and her vibe. As an adult, I started actually tuning to Kina's words. She sings gentleness and Dhamma.

Here's a playlist full of her and Jesse's (her partner) music that I listen to often during this season: 

Hello! I've missed blogging!

This blog post is going to be a big metaphor. Who doesn't love a good metaphor?

I've been undergoing different types of treatment for the ankle - physio, acupuncture, etc. It's been a long and frustrating journey but I'm finally on the right path to recovery as I'm seeing results from treatments I've undergone recently.

What has most been effective is this treatment by a guy I will henceforth refer to as 'Kungfu Man'. Friends who are regularly in touch with me will know of this iconic figure. The ways of Kungfu Man are, in some sense, mysterious, other-worldly. Magical, even.

I got to know about Kungfu Man through an uncle - as you do (uncles and aunties form an extensive network and diverse source of info, worthy rivals of the Internet).

Kungfu Man's treatment is interesting. It is hard to give it a name (he doesn't really have a name for it himself) because it isn't mainstream, what he does is probably not validated by empirical evidence like most accepted forms of medical treatment are in the West. Kungfu Man claims to be a tissue specialist, and apparently his treatments aim to restore the function of damaged or inhibited tissue. He does this by 'tearing them up' and 'restoring bloodflow' through the tissues, which encourages healing.

Essentially, Kungfu Man is like a deep tissue masseur but because his treatment aims specifically at tearing your tissues up, it feels far from relaxing / therapeutic, and it all hurts like fk. His instruments of torture include his elbow (and it's various points and edges), his fingers and nails (yes you read that correctly), his palm. It's almost like his treatment won't work unless you're in pain (not exaggerrating - KF Man says if your muscles are 'rigid' some place and it doesn't hurt when he applies lots of pressure there, it means the area is 'numb' and your blood isn't flowing properly - meaning to say, rigid muscles hurt when pressed. And KF man is all about tearing up your rigid muscles haha). That's just the nature of the treatment. It's a literal case of 'no pain, no gain'.

So you have to be able to deal with the pain - 1 to 1.5 hours of it. You shouldn't tighten up your muscles in an effort to avoid the pain - the muscles have to be at rest in order for him to really work at them in a structurally productive way. You shouldn't turn your limbs away from him so that it hurts less - they have to be in the right position so he can get at the right area. If you tell him you can't withstand the pain, he'll have to apply less pressure, which makes progress slower than if he could apply more pressure given your higher pain tolerance.

What's crazy is that, if you let him do his thing, it really does work. Yes, it fkn hurts. Immediately post-treatment, I'm often covered in bruises, the area that he's worked on is often swollen, I might be limping, but after a few days, when the muscles recover, my ankle seems to have more mobility, it really does feel better. And it's been getting better and better since we started (about 16 weeks ago?). That's because his treatment aims at returning damaged tissues to their normal state and function, compared to relatively gentle approaches like conventional physiotherapy where therapists don't really get into the area so invasively. According to KF man, with these more mainstream treatments, although the pain may go away over time (since you're probably icing it all the time, not running on it as much, etc), the full range of mobility or function of the limb may never be restored because no one has gone and done deep tissue work to actually fix the damaged internal structures - which is exactly what KF man does, and believes is super necessary for proper recovery and restoration.

(Note: I don't claim to know anatomy and biology and physiology like medical experts but this is what I've learned over time from KF man, and from some of my physios as well. And intuitively it just seems to make sense to me.)

Interestingly, although this may all sound a bit dodge (as things do when they deviate from mainstream science and information and empirically-validated data, since society gives so much emphasis and significance to all that), KF man has been the only guy to be able to straighten my arm significantly, and in a fairly short amount of time.

Rewind -

So the broken arm was fixed via surgery, but what happened was, there was tissue build-up at the elbow joint and hardening of surrounding muscles (probably due to the lack of use and mobility when my arm was in a sling?), which caused the arm to bend - it could not fully straighten. It felt like there was a hardened lump at my elbow joint blocking the arm off from straightening.

By the time I went to KF man to have a go at it, I'd seen multiple physios and gone through physical therapy, shockwave therapy, acupuncture, blading, etc. The arm would sometimes be straight immediately after treatment, but the effects were usually not significantly lasting. The tissues would feel like they hardened / stiffened up again.

Let me just give you a pictoral journey.

ORIF in left humerus - 6 weeks or 3 months post surg? Can't rmbr. But this was my arm relaxed I think. Notice the reduced angle - probably 150 degrees at worst??

So yeah - no pain, no gain.
That's definitely how it was with the arm, and that's how it's going with the ankle as well.

I've had to endure pretty much guaranteed (unless KF man is having an off-day where he just doesn't have enough strength) intense physical pain twice a week for about 16 weeks (or more?) now. What's been really interesting about this whole process is the mental aspect of things.

It's quite cool when you look into it, because if you practise meditation and have done long enough sits where you experience bodily pain, then you would have had to learn how to deal with that in your mind - because a lot of the problem really is in the mind. Bodily pain is just a sensation - it's the mind that 'doesn't like' it, amplifies it with aversion. It's like the anticipation of pain is worse than the actual experience of it, which is temporary.

Ankle treatments with KF man are essentially a session of meditation on pain. I mostly have to close my eyes and get into my body (wherever he's working on specifically) and just be hyperaware of what he's doing and where it hurts. 

I think for me, bare awareness is the first weapon. If I can just feel the pain, and let it be painful without getting involved and 'owning it' and making it MY PAIN, then there's not a lot of problem around it. I've noticed that's usually only effective for low-level pain though. When the pain starts to get sharp and unpleasant, I have to actively soften the area where my body instinctively tenses up when the pain gets a bit much. 

Something interesting I've noticed though, is that there are moments of relief between the moments of pain - it's not like he's going at the most painful spot in the ankle for 5 minutes straight (that kind of strength and pressure is probably quite hard to sustain as well for him haha). There are seconds / moments that are pain-free, but I think because the habit of the mind is to either cling to the previous moment of pain, or to cling to the next moment of pain that is yet to come in tense anticipation, the process feels 'unbearable' because the mind conceptualises it all as just too painful - but actually that's not how it really is if you allow yourself to take a good look. I've tried to actively relax and let go when those (albeit brief) pain-free moments come about, and just feel the relief, and only deal with the pain when it comes. I think letting go periodically helps make the whole process more bearable.

Another important, powerful weapon in the arsenal is the breath - breathing through the painful area and around it, through the whole body. The breath is soooo powerful srslyyyyyy. It's cleansing and brings relief. 

I don't know if I ever mentioned this on here before but I told some friends that when I broke my arm, I had to lie on my stomach in this awkward position, with my arm in two pieces, for like 40 mins waiting for the ambulance. The pain was no joke man, and small movements would induce sharp pain. I think my friends who were with me at the time were trying to distract me by talking to me about other stuff, but the more they did that, the more drained I felt because the pain from the arm would be nagging in the background. It felt like my attention was all over the place and causing the mind to lose energy. So I had to go inward and look at the pain and breathe through and around the pain mannnn. The breath honestly saved me!! I think at the time I felt, if I hadn't cultivated a meditation practice before, how difficult would it be to deal with the pain.. That experience showed me that I had a refuge immediately accessible to me - the breath. 

The same is true for KF man's painful treatments. When things are too painful to handle with bare awareness and softening, the breath is a reliable tool. It creates space around the pain, and in fact brings a level of comfort and relief to the experience. There's not much more to say here - maybe you can try it out for yourself!

(Maybe a bit TMI but I've also used breath meditation to deal with period pains [and I think sitting just helps with blood circulation in general?], and it really does bring a lot of relief [although temporarily]. I might start the sit with cramps but when I start bringing the breath energy down a pathway down and through into the abdominal area where there is pain, there's a lot of relief. At the end of the sit, there's basically no pain. 

I don't know what to tell you - I have no scientific explanation for this. It just works. The breath seems to scatter the tension within the body? Anyway. I often tell Dara I don't know how girls deal with period pains without meditation).

The last weapon, when all else fails, is just plain patience and endurance. The kind where you might grit your teeth. The voice in your head screams 'I can't take this anymore', telling you to tell KF man to stop, or telling you to punch him (sometimes that desire really does come up man!!!). But you don't because this is the exact spot that needs to be worked on in order for things to be released further - where it hurts most. And if this spot is left untouched, I will never go beyond the progress that I've seen up till then. It's really hard sometimes. I do struggle with this when the pain is too sharp and too intense - I struggle to keep the area relaxed, which KF man can probably sense, and as a result he probably turns down his intensity, which is not ideal for making progress. Struggle's real.

As I'm writing this I realised that these approaches are similar to the approaches Ajahn Munindo recommends for dealing with defilements: cutting, seeing, burning.

I was speaking to Ajahn H about this whole 'no pain, no gain' thing last week and we agreed that this is kind of how Dhamma practice works as well. In order for it to work, it has to hurt first - sometimes, a lot. 

Unpacking that further - I don't think it's necessarily because the practice is painful in and of itself. I think it brings to your attention the pain in areas where there are problems. This is how it is with the ankle too - for particular structures / areas, KF man says that if the muscles hurt here, then that's because there's something wrong with it; it wouldn't ordinarily hurt if there was no problem. 

That's how it is with some things in life, I think. This has been my experience on an emotional level as well, this year.

Ajahn said in a talk recently that this year has been good for the Dhamma, if not much else. I agree - the pandemic has forced me to address (or at least take a good look at) problems in my mind that have been unaddressed for the longest time. I won't get into specifics on here but I can tell you that when I was in Australia, away from these particular conditions, it seemed like all was well and good. You think you're fine, you know. And then I came home and all the issues I hadn't fully brought into consciousness to heal from them just resurfaced, because all the conditions for them to arise were suddenly there again, and now there was no where to run - no going outward (literally couldn't leave the house) to distract myself endlessly. They were all in my face, and it was all on fire, and I was on fire.

It's like if there's scar tissue in an area that you've injured - unless you press hard into the area, you think there's no probem. But actually the scarred, misshapen tissue is a problem, and when you press into it, you realise there's a lot of pain. You realise it's not okay. I find that interesting because when you really look at the mind, you realise, shit, it is NOT OKAY IN HERE. Things don't just 'go away' over time. Time doesn't heal all things - time may make you forget for a while while you do other things, but it doesn't inherently heal. Effort heals. Wisdom heals. This might be a very scary truth to face, but I think unless you've actively put effort into trying to let go and heal from something traumatic, it probably hasn't gone away - it's probably just that the conditions aren't there for the pain of that trauma to get triggered. So you think you're fine. You think it's all fine - but it's an illusion. It's unawareness, ignorance.

So coming home during the pandemic was a bit like that. It was time to face up to the unreceived pain compounded over years that I never had to face so directly and relentlessly before. I had no choice but to endure. Calm down, soften up, receive, then apply discernment because the only thing that really works at uprooting these things is wisdom and a correct perception of things. I think that's the general approach that has worked for me. 

When the defilements are on fire, I can't meet them head-on just yet. Sometimes I need to bask in the sadness for a bit, lay around, be depressed. Just let myself be on fire, burn a little. Sometimes it hurts so much, my immediate reaction is to distract myself with pleasure, put on some Netflix, scroll on Instagram. Hopefully not indulge and spiral, but just numb myself temporarily (yo man this probs not in the Buddha's teachings but this is my process hahaha). Although in certain situations the anxiety and suffering is so hardcore that I can't even distract myself, I straight up have to cry / let myself freak out.

And then when I've had enough of that, I try to calm things down, turn down the heat first. Try to prime the mind with good concentration, calmness, gentleness. When I get like this what I need to do is lots of walking (or something else, like baking). Walk, get the body moving. That energy in the body needs to go somewhere. Sitting may not help at all because the mind doesn't have enough calmness to meet the flames - it will just hurt more because every thing is magnified when you sit, it's easier to fall into the stories of the mind. This process helps to receive it. You receive the, as Luang Por Munindo calls it, 'unreceived life'. I feel like this stage is where I give myself lots of space.

And then when the mind is receptive and calmer, when the mind is willing to embrace something that could help it deal with the pain, I begin speaking to Dhamma friends, reflecting, listening to talks tailored to my particular struggles. This, for me, is the discernment stage. You're looking for the Dhamma to correct your deluded perception of the matter, which is fundamentally what is causing you this suffering. You are not seeing things in line with the way things are, and your clinging to your own deluded reality or ideal that has remained unquestioned for ages, is what has caused the pain and suffering to fester and remain unresolved. Reflecting with a calm mind, consulting with wise friends and listening to wise teachers is a massive help in flipping around the wrong views that we hold. From my experience, nothing compares to the power of wisdom when it comes to cutting through suffering. When there is understanding, it's like there's an automatic letting go. This can be a gradual thing, or sometimes it can be really instant.

What's interesting though, is that often that hardest part about the whole process is learning to receive the pain. Of course it's unpleasant. And it's counter-intuitive because it requires you to look directly at it, no filter, no sugar-coating, no pain-killers. Delusion and unawareness is like a pain-killer, but it doesn't mean the problems have been resolved. You're just not allowing yourself to be conscious of them, and so they never get addressed.

I love the way LP Munindo talks about suffering. It's such a different approach to the whole practice (at least for me). He says that suffering is 'pain to be received'. I find that so interesting, because it encourages one to meet the pain, instead of avoid it or shy away from it like we instinctively do. It makes it sound like an act of self-compassion - which it definitely very much is - if you are hurting, you first need to acknowledge that pain. It's like a hug - when you go to your friend crying, they receive you and your pain and give you a hug. They embrace you - in both the physical and emotional senses of the word. They hear you. They feel you. Often, our reaction to pain is to 'push it into unawareness (delusion)' because it is too painful / unpleasant to be dealt with. Now, when pain emerges, either because it is old pain that has been brought about by past conditions already in place, or new pain brought about by new conditions, it is our chance to receive it. When we begin to receive it (N.B. the Buddha says suffering is to be known!!), then we can begin to address it. So often we skip this very important first step, we want to 'get rid' of the suffering out of aversion - but actually it first has to be known.

Back to ankle pain - it's funny because KF man thinks that I somehow use my meditation practice to 'shut the pain out', like I'm making myself numb to it, and that that's how I'm able to endure it. It's actually the complete opposite because the more unaware I am of the pain, the more I try to distract myself from it (e.g. using my phone), the more unbearable it is when it's intense and sharp enough. To really deal with it, I have to be completely, fully aware of the pain - which is often less 'unbearable' than it seems if you were just distracting yourself from it, since the immediate reaction to unpleasantness seems to be resistance. When I know it fully, then I can find ways to deal with it. There have been so many times when I feel like, oh hey the treatment is not so painful at this moment, so I start playing around on my phone, and then he decides to get in there with the sharpest part of his elbow or something and it's like NOPE and I have to put my phone away and close my eyes and focus.

Man, I just love that. The lesson with physical pain can be translated into emotional and mental pain. It's different in that physical pain is grosser and harder to run away from immediately I think, but I think the same principles apply. Distracting yourself from the pain might 'anaesthesise' it temporarily, but it does not help you when the pain becomes intense. And it certainly does not help to address the underlying root causes of the pain. To uproot those causes, one must meet the pain right where it hurts most. And that's up to us to find what works - how do I meet the pain? Metta? Patience? Breath? 

But most importantly before thinking how we go about doing this, our views must be corrected so that we realise that we first have to meet it, receive it, acknowledge it, welcome it, even - and everything else we build around that pain. The stories of 'I can't take this anymore' and 'I don't like this' - they all have to be received as well before we can really look at what is hurting.

So yeah, this year has in many ways been like being held down and bruised forcefully, with nowhere to run. But it's been good, because it's forced me to stare my pain in the face when I otherwise might have just turned away from it, been distracted by life, with the illusion that 'everything is A-okay'. I'm still in this process, and it's still pretty painful, but if nothing else, it is healing.

Much love! x

P.S. We've been listening to so much LP Munindo because he is awesome. I told Ajahn his list of talks are like a personal playlist tailored to my defilements HAHAHA. So for anyone who has a similar temperament to me, struggles with the 'go-fight-win' mentality, is super hard on themselves, thinks your practice should 'look a certain way', etc., I would recommend LP Munindo's talks. He's great at encouraging wise reflection.

Here are some I've listened to and recommend:

Hello from Malaysia,

I'm back because of the coronavirus pandemic. I'm in self-quarantine and trying to study Japanese again. I was looking through old poems that I used to discuss in class with my Japanese teacher Mizuki-sensei and came across this one.

It summarises where I'm at mentally and where I want to be in a relationship.

The Japanese is much more beautiful and lyrical than the English especially because I translated it and thus will never be able to do it justice haha.

Enjoy 🌸

これから日本語。

やほー

今マレーシアにいるよ。コロナのパンデミックなんだから。

いま自己検疫をしてるけど、日本語のお勉強を続けてみろうと思った。日本語先生のみずき先生と昔話し合った詩を読んでいたけど、この素敵な詩を見つけた。

私今の恋愛についての気持ちとかがまとめられることができると思うからとても好きだ。

確かに作家さんの日本語の方は私の下手な英語の方より美しいし叙情的だと思うけど、作家さんに謝るね　(笑)

じゃ、読んでくださいね！

ふたりで生きるということは

ひとりとひとりが

ひとりで生きているということ

ひとりでいても幸せなら

ふたりでいれば幸せは

二倍になる

ひとりで考え

ひとりで行動できて

ひとりでも生きていける

そんな力を持ったふたりなら

素敵なひとつの幸せを築ける

そんなことを考えている

ひとりで

-小手鞠るい

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Go to the limits of your longing by Rainer Maria Rilke. 
In Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. 
Translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

***

The past few weeks have been a hard time for me. 

Went in and out of a "relationship", discovered that my ankle is more damaged than doctors initially realised and that I might have to get surgery down the line, underwent yet more visa madness, and what have you.

I don't think I've felt that low in a long time. Aside from doubt, helplessness, loneliness, etc., it was just general depression. 

The kind where all you can do is lie down on your carpet and feel the pain while listening to The Smiths. Or where you just sit in the middle of the living room floor and start sobbing.

I know it sounds dramatic and a bit "real" and like maybe people are thinking why are you airing your dirty laundry out on the Internet.

But that's an interesting thought because it seems like nobody ever wants to talk about suffering. Nobody wants to talk about it, and nobody wants to hear about it. Let's be real, who wants unpleasantness? All we want to know is that things are going well - good news, good news, good news. Perpetually. Don't you tell me that life is in fact quite sad, I just want to go shopping. 

~ Good vibes only ~

This Sunday past, we were talking to Ajahn Hāsapañño about the practice of confessing when you break precepts or deviate from the path in some way. He said the intention behind doing that is important - not to get into a kind of martyr complex, but just to be true and honest with your spiritual friends. He said that that's better than pretending that everything in life is perfect, like lots of people do on social media.

And it's like, yeah, who are any of us kidding. Life is a shitshow for the most part, and then some. Maybe we should be more honest about it so we can start addressing the shittiness rather than hide behind pleasure, which is mostly delusion.

***

When things get painful enough, I tend to need to retreat inwards. I don't feel inclined to reach out to friends or teachers, until I have processed the problem enough on my own. I feel like I have to let a big part of the suffering pass through before I can talk about it in a productive way. Sometimes you just gotta mope about for a bit, sit with it for a bit.

The way I addressed the visa stuff and the break-up, and the way my spiritual friends supported me around that stuff, was very gentle. Going with the mentality that I shouldn't be so hard on myself, and I should let myself be what I needed to be, feel what I needed to feel. Be as sad as I had to be. (Probably to the point of indulgence really....)

And then when the ankle problem surfaced and I told Dara about it, she very skilfully called me out on it. She and Shaun (her partner) were like, okay girl, you're just going to have to get over it. Don't misunderstand, that doesn't come from a dismissive, mean place, like "just suppress the suffering and get on with it" - no, not at all. It comes from a place of letting go.

They were telling me, look, yes, this is shit, but you have to let go of the past and power out of suffering with right effort. Focus on what you can do now to fix the problem, direct all your energy there. Let go of the rest, it doesn't do you any good.

They weren't telling me that I shouldn't be angry or sad about it, but that I needed to set my intention towards what I can do for recovery right now.

That was real skilful of them because at that point, that would have been like my 4th consecutive week of low-key moping. Ain't nobody got time. Struggle's real. Just got to power through like a Dhamma warrior.

Reflecting on sadness for a quick second-

It's one of those emotions that is so easy to indulge in. Like when your mind is low, it's so easy to just stay there, even though you know you're in a pit. In a way, we actually enjoy sadness. It's like an excuse. "I'm sad, so let me eat all the things I wanna eat, and watch all the Netflix I wanna watch". It's not easy to uplift the mind, it takes effort.

Dara and I have been in conversation about skilful means to handle the mind - knowing when to be gentle and when to be tough. Sometimes you need to take the soft and gentle approach - that's what's considered right effort, when you take a soft approach to conditions that demand softness, or as Dara calls it, "Dhamma cuddles". But sometimes you just need to take a hardline approach and snap out of it and get tough with the mind just so you can power through. 

I think, in different ways, both approaches involve letting go. It's about responding to what you need at that time, given surrounding conditions.

I was chatting to Dara about the flaws of the healthcare system, and she goes, "it's cool, we let go and rework the road ahead". I mean, that's the way to go, clearly. I guess the instinctive reaction is to get angry and dig through the past and start pointing out what went wrong where and stay bitter and vengeful about all of that. But again it boils down to intention and what you wanna get out of it.

I went through a similar situation some months ago, where I relied on an external agent, who let me down. I was gonna storm into their office and give it to them and really make them see they'd screwed me over. But Xeyiing told me, look, you have to set your intention right. In vague terms - if your intention is to achieve the goal that you wanted to achieve through them, then you'll just take the actions that you need to take to get there.

Her advice was so simple, but made things so clear. The storming in and giving them hell was unnecessary, it was out of ill-will. What do you get from telling them off? Sure, you may teach them a lesson, but how often do they take that to heart, even if you're really giving them constructive critism? It's really more about you and how uncomfortable you feel with what they've done to you than going with a higher purpose of "correcting their mistake". The anger seems completely justified because you think you're going with that noble purpose, but really, anger is anger is anger.

If I really wanted to get things done, what I really had to do at that point was let go of the past and just power through with right effort. 

Same thing in this situation. The intention is to recover, not take revenge on the doctors haha.

It took me a few days to snap out of it - once I started putting in the right effort to remedy the situation, I felt pretty good. The mind felt uplifted.

In getting to that place mentally, I had to amp myself up with talks by Ajahn Thanissaro. He is the man when it comes to toughening up the mind.

I found this gem: Toughen & Tenderize the Mind. An excerpt.

"There's a paradox in the way the Buddha talks about a trained mind. On the one hand, the trained mind is sensitive - as he says: malleable, tender. And on the other hand, it's unshakeable, strong, tough. So how do those two qualities go together? 

They're both desirable. On the one hand, you want the mind to be sensitive to what's going on. One of our major problems is that we cause pain and suffering to ourselves and others, and yet we tend to deny it. That becomes ignorance. A big wall in the mind which blocks off a lot of things, so that we can't really see what's going on - what we're doing or the results of what we're doing. So you want to train the mind to be sensitive so that it can come to see problems inside itself that it didn't see before and make corrections. If you don't see them, you can't correct them. So you want to be sensitive.

On the other hand, if you're sensitive but weak, you get blown away by the problems of the mind and lose whatever confidence you had that it could be something you can handle, something you can solve.

So both qualities are desirable, and it's learning how to develop them together in the right way. That's what brings balance into the training of the mind.

We develop sensitivity by thinking in terms of saṃvega - it's a Pali term that literally means 'terror'. But in practice it means a sense of dismay when you look at the way the world is. Because as the mind gets more and more still, you see that the world is filled with a lot of meaningless turmoil and it seems to want to keep on doing it - there's not much that you can do to stop it. And then you look inside and you realise there's a lot of that turmoil in you as well. And a lot of your internal turmoil is going to implicate you in the external turmoil. As long as you want things that the world has to offer, you get pulled in. The Buddha's image is a fish in a puddle of water, and the puddle is drying up, and they're fighting one another over that last gulp of water. Of course, they're all going to die when the water runs out. But there's a group of them that decide, okay, we want that last gulp and push the others out of the way.

Years back I saw this - I was in a stream up in British Columbia. The salmon were coming in and there were a lot of dead salmon in the stream and there were the salmon that were hopping over them to get further up the stream. And there were bears waiting to get the ones that were still alive. Seeing the fish fight over that last gulp of water really impressed the Buddha's image on my mind.

So one of the things you'll notice as the mind begins to settle down and you get more sensitive - you see all the pain and suffering out there and you see the pain and suffering in your own mind. And you'll also see your own defilements. Where your greed, aversion, delusion come in. The important thing is not to get discouraged, not to get depressed. This is where the other emotion that the Buddha recommends comes in - which is pasāda, which is confidence. Confidence that there's a way out, that there's a solution to the problem. And having this confidence that there is a way out and you can figure it out - that allows you to put up with a lot of things that otherwise you would just get blown away by. Because an important part of this toughness of the mind is patience and endurance. You want to develop an attitude of the mind that can watch just about anything and not get blown away. This doesn't mean that you accept everything and embrace everything. You accept things that are there but then you accept also that there are times when you have to make changes. But even if you can't succeed in making changes outside, you want to work on making changes inside. But before you can make changes and things you have to be willing to see what's there. 

This is what this quality of toughness is. And the more you have confidence and conviction that there is a way out, and there's a solution, the more you'll be able to see. The more you'll be willing to open up to see. Because if a part of the mind feels there's no way out then you just don't want to think about it and you start closing things off. So it's in this way that the toughness of the mind actually allows the tenderness to grow in a healthy direction..."

***

Two weekends ago, the weekend after Valentine's Day, Ajahn Hāsapañño gave a powerful Dhamma talk that went straight to my heart. Maybe it was powerful because it was what I needed at that time.

He spoke about how Valentine's Day actually started because St Valentine was marrying unmarried men to save them from going to war / joining the army (I think the law in Rome back then was that married men shouldn't go to war). It was in the name of compassion, not "romantic love" per se. Ajahn said nowadays the way modern society and culture and movies approach love makes it so unrealistic, holding it to a standard or value that it can never truly give us. So it's almost like we keep searching for value in something that just inherently doesn't have that value.

Then Ajahn said, everything in this world will let you down.

He said that in his classic Ajahn Hāsapañño matter-of-fact way.

For people in partnerships, there are only three outcomes:

1. You break up.

2. One of you dies first.

3. You both die at the same time.

But the Dhamma will never break up with you, fail you, die on you, etc.

The Dhamma protects those who practise it. It is something you can rely on.

Just reflecting on that again in line with the recent reflections on pasāda -- when things are going shit in the world, yeah that's how it is. As Ajahn Thanissaro says - gain, loss, praise, blame, pleasure, pain, status, disgrace - that's what the world has to offer. All you can do is go with Dhamma, with Right Effort, like a gentle warrior. You have faith in the actions that you do that are in line with the teaching, that you will be okay because the teachings are the path out of suffering. No need for moping or lamenting. Just gentle and energetic effort. When you go with Dhamma, you transcend the world, because Deathless reality is not conditioned the way the world is.

So yeah man. A lot has been happening. But again and again: no mud, no lotus. It's almost like you can't have wisdom without the prerequisite suffering first haha.

Last weekend we helped polish all the bronze things at Vimo. I don't know if you're ever polished bronze, but it involves applying polishing solution to a cloth and rubbing the bronze with it. Black stuff comes off the metal when you do, and it seems absolutely neverending, it's like omg where is all this black stuff coming from. But as you keep going, the bronze actually gets shinier and shinier and shinier, whether or not you realise it. But before you can get it looking completely pure and spotless, you gotta go through that tedious process of cleaning it, getting the dirt off it, being patient with it all. 

It's actually quite an enjoyable process. And when you turn back and look at it, you find it's become shiny.

There's actually a Dhammapada verse on this, 239

One by one, little by little, moment by moment, a wise man should remove his own impurities, as a smith removes his dross from silver.

I reckon they were polishing metal statues back then too hahahaha.

***

Here are some recent pictures from my life, just because.

Dhamma sisters!!

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Just Melbourne doing its thing... I love this city.