Challenges

Life is challenge and change. It is easy to ignore life's challenges in an industrialized society with its conveniences. I can turn my back on a challenge and just watch TV or get in my car and drive to a store for distraction. Challenges are circumstances which demand a behavioral or internal personal change.

Practice requires facing challenges with purpose and consistency. If I am living in mindfulness with compassion, the path to facing and resolving any challenge becomes clear readily. If I am living on the tides of my emotions and selfish needs, I perceive challenges as threats which can often immobilize me or distract me from my path to wellness and harmony in my life.

The key to walking an even path through life is mastery of emotions and needs in favor of mindfulness and compassion. Patience and an acceptance of the inevitability of change come with this form of practice. Challenges become the exercises which tone and strengthen the heart and mind.

Responsibility

Taking personal responsibility with right action in one's relationships with the world and oneself is a constant challenge of practice.

I was recently approached by a neighbor with a problem he had created by shoddy work in his own house. It became obvious to me very quickly that he felt he could manipulate me into fixing the problem, even though it had nothing to do with me. The question this posed to my consciousness was this: Is it more responsible to ease my way out of this situation or is it more responsible to confront his disrespect and dishonesty in our relationship?

Since I have set a goal of patient discretion in my practice, I did neither in the moment. I gave him a referral to a tradesman who could solve the problem and left the situation for him to work out. Subsequently, I checked with the tradesman discreetly to make sure he had been contracted to fix the problem which was potentially very dangerous.

Many of us choose inaction in stressful or frightening situations. This is not practice. Inaction in the presence of conscious choices of right vs. wrong actions is irresponsible to oneself and one's world.

Learning to deliberate patiently despite anger, fear or frustration is a keystone of practice. This only comes, paradoxically, with practice itself. It takes practice to prime the pump of practice. Today is the best day to start this practice.

Perspective

My key to compassionate behavior is always realizing my own perspective is uniquely mine.

My upbringing, my genetics, my body chemistry, my body architecture, my neural wiring...these are what make me who I am and how I perceive reality. Even if I had an identical twin, my twin would have different perspective from me, because my twin would be seeing through his own eyes and hearing with his own ears and feeling with his own touch. His experiences would be different from mine. That would shape a different perspective, no matter how much we would share in common.

In stressful situations, I have to fall back on my practice to take a deep breath and find this key to compassion. And, as I age, life becomes more stressful on a basic biological level. Practice offsets much of the biological stress. Yet, in my interactions with those who are not committed to practice of any kind, I must rely on compassion to avoid conflict and promote peaceful coexistence.

Trying to leave my own perspective for even an instant is very hard at times. Doing this regularly by consciously trying to learn the perspective of others is another building block of my practice. This does not necessitate accepting the values of others. It simply entails listening and trying to understand.

The most compassionate behavior toward some people I encounter, after I listen and observe them to understand their perspective, is to walk away from them without any interaction whatsoever. Occasionally, I realize that the most compassionate behavior is to simply continue to listen, to offer a smile, a comment or some form of concrete assistance. Sometimes, the compassionate choice is to accept the concern and help of another.

When I center my own perspective on compassion, while trying always to be mindful of the realities of the moment, I find that peace and harmony, both internal and external, are quite achievable with work and persistence.

Bullies

The world is run by bullies. Aggressive men and women make it to the top of private and public pyramids with many causalities along the way. This is probably one of the major reasons why poverty and violence are virtually untouched by political and monetary powers around the entire world.

The majority of men and women are conditioned to accede to bullies early in their lives. They are beaten or humiliated into submission as children. Those lessons go deep into the developing psyche. Perhaps this is one reason for the ineffectiveness of educators at stopping this from being perpetuated in the schools they now run. They too have been conditioned to accept bullies as unbeatable, or are the administrators in education are bullies themselves?

Dick Cheney is perhaps one of the most outstanding bullies of our age, equaled by the thugs who run Myanmar (Burma) or the thugs who run parts of Somalia. Any man or woman who shamelessly defends torture is a bully, no matter what his or her rationalization may be. And Cheney still wields power. His Blackwater-Halliburton buddies are gearing up to make another fortune in Afghanistan. It seems obvious to me that there will be a succession of these conflicts as long as they are in business with the Pentagon, and as long as there are Cheneys to get them their way.

How does practice relate to dealing with bullies? Bullies draw their power from the fear of their victims. The mindful person can see a bully readily. The mindful person can then refuse to acknowledge the bully's power. Ignore bullies. If confronted by a bully, refuse to engage in any intercourse with that person. If pushed by the bully, walk away. If pursued by the bully, call the police. The police are the people's bullies ideally. They are hired by bullies to bully the bullies.

Bullies fear the truth. They also fear those who do not need or want anything from them. Refusing to acknowledge the bully is a great weapon to defend against him. This can be honed with daily practice of peace, compassion and focus on that which is positive and good.

Fading

Graceful and natural aging in Western industrial culture has been corrupted by commerce and the pharma-medical industry. Hedonism has ruled the day. From Joan Rivers to Nip-Tuck, neurosis about aging has evolved into mindless and vacuous self-mutilation in the wealthier classes. This is occurring in a society which begrudges basic medical care for everyone. In fact, the same tax-evading seniors who are spending fortunes on growth hormone and plastic surgery resent supporting government programs to end porverty and provide a basic social net for all people in the society. This is narcissism of the worst kind, plain and simple.

I have come to see my own experience of aging as a gentle and appreciable fading of many of the urges and impulses which made my former life so complicated and frought with struggle. By accepting age and letting go of these habitually perceived necessities, my life has become simpler, calmer and less stressful.

The key to this method of aging is embracing the changes, physical and emotional (also physical in the sense of hormonal), which are inevitable, despite any measures taken to fend them off. For me, this does not entail letting myself go to pot, by any means. In fact, I exercise more regularly than ever, but more gently. I set goals and projects for myself daily, but I do so realistically with my most basic needs at the top of the list.

The Middle Path entails balancing these seemingly contradictory concepts and actions. The Western mind thinks in dichotomy. It is best to reject this mode of thinking , if you wish to age well. One must learn to think inclusively with an acceptance that many things, some contradictory, can be happening at the same time to achieve balance and wisdom.

Letting go, fading gracefully, is the key to dignified aging in my opinion. This is a keystone of my practice.

Heat

The sudden onset of hot days in the high 80s and low 90s is an opportunity to feel and understand the automatic systems that really keep our bodies alive. We do not 'think' our bodies alive, as much as we like to take credit for our state of being. Turn off your mind by lying down in comfortable and quiet place. You can then tune into what is really happening within the complex cellular machine you usually take for granted.

Learning to find the balance of working within and with the body's machinery is what wellness is all about. It is not easy, if you have been raised in an urban, industrial society. It is worth the effort.

Gardening

A garden can be created in a 12-inch pot.

The point of gardening is gardening. It is practice. Design a space for the garden. Plant seeds or seedlings. Tend them. Meditate upon them. Watch them flourish. Watch them mature. Watch them die back in Winter.

The garden is a simple and accessible lesson about life on Earth. The good gardener holds the precious understanding of happy labor, beauty, ecology and the transitory nature of all life.

Possession

Possession is always a two-way process. There is no possession of goods without a reciprocal possession by goods. This is the essence of Buddhist admonitions about materialism. It is a core precept lost entirely by Christianity. It has little historic correlation in Judaism. Islam preaches a socialism, pertaining to possessions, which is never concretely followed in Islamic cultures. The economic divide between rich and poor in all cultures permeated with these religions is a glaring indictment of the messages of those religions, as they pertain to greed and possessions.

Buddhism (the core sutra philosophy, not the cultural religious forms) advises a realistic approach to possession. Detachment entails the constant mindful understanding that all things and beings are transitory, illusory. Liberated consciousness, that mental energy that supersedes its origins in personality through practice and meditation, enables its source to be detached from all possessions and ties to the material world.

Detachment is an acquired skill, in other words. As someone who recently bought new appliances, I can attest to the seduction of shiny new things. However, I have been struggling with remaining detached from these machines, despite their efficiency and time-saving benefits. Remaining detached from people is much more difficult, of course. To love unselfishly, to be compassionate and to be detached simultaneously are the skills of a Buddha. Perhaps this is beyond the capacity of most, if not all, human beings.

Practice is the daily conscious attempt, moment by moment, to strive for this Buddha state, a state without possessiveness, even of oneself.

Resurrection

Throughout history, human beings have tried to formulate a visual model for life's big concepts. Usually, these models come to us as myths or stories, contrived from many different parallel and historic events.

The Christian resurrection myth (Easter) is one of these stories. The phoenix myth, which appears in several cultures, is another. The human mind is still trying to cope with an understanding of death's finality, as science narrows the probability of conscious, personality-based life after death.

As a person who accepts the finality of death, the eventual and inevitable end of my personal being, I tend to seek resurrection as a hopeful process in my ongoing life. I try new things. I attempt to make new friends. I tackle learning curves. I turn from the old to the new. I let go and reach out. These activities and choices inspire resurrection of my energy and spirit, so easily dulled by age and experience.

Time spent worrying about an afterlife seems wasted to me. There is so much to learn now. There are so many new lives to be had within this present life. Each moment is an opportunity to let the negative in us die. Each moment is an opportunity to live a new, more positive life. Perhaps this is a key element of all practice for personal evolution.

Taxes

This year, paying taxes will seem more painful to many people. It is obvious that government has let people down all over the planet. Here in the US, government has mismanaged the nation's financial regulatory system with disasterous results for the majority of American citizens and taxpayers.

Complacency among the electorate is just as much to fault as the greedy manipulations of financial mathematicians, who played a shell game with themselves and brought down the capitalist system. From the Madoffs to the Greenspans, the lack of foresight and oversight will have implications for years to come.

Paying taxes without being involved with government as an active observer and critic is simply stupid. It is like handing money to a drunk or a compulsive gambler without conditions.

I consider it part of my life practice to stay informed, to correspond with representatives and to voice criticisms and kudos equally. As a person who believes that life is simply what it is, bettering my life and those of other human beings is a matter of each daily decision and action. Right action, for me, entails being a responsible citizen and taxpayer.