required reading

Waking Up To What

You Do cause and effect

you are what you do

 

 

 

Dogen Zeniji – Monday

to study the self

is to forget the self and

become one with all

Abstaining

Ben Lee has a great song entitled, We Are All in This Together.

Woke up this morning
I suddenly realized
We’re all in this together
I started smiling
Cos you were smiling
And were all in this together
I’m made of atoms
You’re made of atoms
And were all in this together
And long division
Just doesn’t matter
Cos were all in this together

Which reminds me that when I feel, lonely, separate, unimportant, I do not have to go looking for something to fill me.  I do not have to seek praise or attention.  Well maybe I do.  Maybe that is why I am writing this post now.  I have decided to take a break from posting while I am at Upaya.  Just two nights, Friday and Saturday.  I want to process my experience without sharing it the minute I have it.  This craving I have to be seen, to be recognized, to be sought after is in the words of my friend, Cyndi Lee, a magnetizing effect on me.  If I set aside the possibility of seeking approval through my writing for just two days I can sit with myself, in myself and perhaps see to the depths of this compulsion.  No shame, no guilt, simply curious about my motives.  Svadyaya.

Sitting here at Starbucks enjoying an afternoon latte, waiting to take a taxi to Upaya.  Until Sunday night.  Adieu.

Wow, I am already going through withdrawal.  I have come to depend on those of you who read my blog.  It will be so interesting to abstain from my addiction, writing. I will be writing at the retreat.  Natalie Goldberg is one of the teachers and part of the workshop focuses on timed writings or at least I think it does.  I am a little nervous about this retreat.  Oh well again adieu.

Writing About Alcohol

Why do I write, day after day about alcohol, about my alcoholic mother, and about my relationship to alcohol?  Anne Sexton, when asked why she wrote such painful, dark poems, replied that pain engraves a deeper memory.  Virginia Woolf said strong emotion must leave a trace.  Dani Shapiro goes on to say,”These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories.  Joan Didion called this a shimmer around the edges.  Emerson called it a gleam.  ” A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” he wrote. “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it was his.” Dani Shapiro writes, “If you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it.  Like falling in love.  Moments that announce themselves as your subjects are rare, and there’s a magic to them.  Ignore them at your own peril.”

I cannot ignore the shimmer of alcohol, the stories it holds, the pain I and others in my family have experienced.  Am I an alcoholic?  The jury is still deliberating.  Those of you who rush to judgement, walk down this path with me.  See where it leads.  I am going to follow the shimmer, the gleam, the light.  I am writing into the light.

Last night we had a dinner party, actually a small neighborhood potluck.  Ten of us gathered at our house.  We drank, we talked, we laughed, we ate and we shared stories.

Since I began writing every day, I find myself asking people to tell me their stories because it is our stories that connect us.  In the course of the evening, I learned that one of my neighbors worked his way through college as a door to door book sales rep.  He made enough money to pay his tuition and travel to 65 countries in four years.   He was one of the first Americans to visit Vietnam after the war.  Among other things, he told us how he met his wife, who at that time dismissed his advances, but later traveled all the way to Thailand to see him.  He proposed there.

When we wrapped up the evening at 10:30, there were 9 empty bottles of wine and that did not include the one still half full in the refrigerator which went home with our neighbor two doors down.  Did I drink too much?  I did not feel light-headed or intoxicated during the evening.  I remember every conversation.  I have a vivid memory of the food we ate, Rendevous ribs,  coleslaw, a dreaming rice salad, asparagus cooked to perfection and cover with blue cheese.  And for dessert, pecan bars with raspberry sauce and ice cream. I recall with detail the clothes people wore.  One neighbor, who is absolutely gaga about holidays, had on a black cardigan covered with sparkling ornaments.  It was fabulous.  She had really decked the halls.  One man sported a crew neck sweater, while another wore a V-neck, cashmere one.  My husband wore my favorite blue shirt, the one that makes his eyes pop.

Back to the alcohol.  Back to my shimmer.  What did I notice?  The laughter.  The stories.  The camaraderie.  At the end of the evening, as we were washing dishes, I turned to my husband and asked, “Well, what do you think?”  He said, “It was great fun.”  Could  we have had as much fun had we not been drinking?  Maybe.  We are having another gathering here on Sunday night.  Neither of us will be drinking at that event.  In fact, I really don’t have any desire to drink again for quite some time.

Writing about this, following my shimmer, I feel very differently about alcohol.  It’s okay on occasion, but I never want to go back to a daily consumption.  In small doses it can be fun, but on a daily basis it is depleting, mind numbing, and ultimately boring.  Anything that becomes a habit, whether life enhancing or destructive, involves unconscious, automatic behavior.  I favor choice.  I do not want to be a human robot.

What about the after effects of a night of revelry?  My stomach is a little queasy.  I have a slight headache. Definitely not the way I want to feel on a regular basis.  The experiment continues.

One more thing.  As my shimmer around  alcohol pertains to my family of origin, I know more now than I did even yesterday.   I am not my mother.  I am very clear about that.  She never had dinner parties. Parties involve work, cooking, cleaning, setting up and breaking down.  Too messy.   And she had very few people in her life whom she could have invited.  She pretty much drank alone or with my step-father.  Living with my father was never a party.  If my stepmother did invite people over, my father always managed to start an argument with one of the guests, a sure way to break up a party.

I will not drink today.

The Thing About Drinking

I had a glass of wine last night.  Pretty uneventful.  It tasted okay.  Not great.  It was not a super good bottle of wine, just average.  Jimmy joined me.  I thought about it long and hard before I decided to drink.  The one thing I noticed was that I got light-headed.  I did not particularly care for that feeling.  I do not want to be spacey and ungrounded.  After the glass was empty, I felt extremely tired.  We had not yet eaten dinner.  I feel like a scientist.  I am the guinea pig and the observer.  I did not want more and I did not want to feel so fatigued.

We ate dinner in front of a blazing fire, played a rousing game of scrabble and went to bed early.  I got up this morning at 4:30 to prepare for the day.  I wrote my morning pages, drank my coffee and dressed for spin class. I love my spin class. Here I am 3 hours later, at the computer, writing about my life.  It is a good life.  I am grateful.

After abstaining from alcohol for 14 days and exploring the questions that this time has born, I realize three very important things. I want to be fully present to myself, others and to the needs of the planet.  I want to feel as good as I possibly can every single day of my life.  I want to mentally clear, alert, and steady.  I do not want to be blinded by the fog that arises from the myopia alcohol creates.

The following is from the blog at: http://www.spring.org.uk/2010/03/psychology-of-alcohol-attentional-myopia.php

“The alcohol myopia model says that drink makes our attentional system short-sighted and the more we drink, the more short-sighted it becomes. With more alcohol our brains become less and less able to process peripheral cues and more focused on what is right in front of us. It’s this balance between what is right in front of us and what we don’t notice around the edges that determines how alcohol affects us in different situations.

 

Here are a few effects which imbibers will recognise immediately:

 

An ego boost: when people drink, they often feel better about themselves. This may be because the attentional short-sightedness induced by alcohol makes all our shortcomings float away and so we feel closer to our ideal selves. This is probably one of the reasons it is so potentially addictive, it is self-actualisation in bottle form.
Real worries can get worse: if we’ve had a bad day and we sit quietly with a drink, alcohol can make it worse because all the peripheral cues which are potential detractors are cut out and all we see are our problems.
Pleasure in the moment: the flip-side of this attentional focus is that if, while drinking, we are doing something enjoyable, we find it easier to ignore any nagging doubts or stray worries wandering through our minds. We can be totally in the moment listening to music, watching sports or talking with a good friend.
In the zone: it’s even possible that for some types of task it may increase performance as we let go of our insecurities. Perhaps that’s why so many writers wrote with a glass of whiskey at their side.”

 

“So the effects of alcohol come down to how our minds interact with the situation when our attentional systems have started operating with a kind of tunnel vision.”

 

I offer my life today to the highest good of all. I pray for guidance from the Divine Mother.  May all my actions serve Her.

Divine Mother prayer

by Swami Rhada

 

         O Divine Mother

         May all my speech and idle talk be mantra

         All actions of my hands be mudra        

         May all eating and drinking be the offering of oblations unto thee

         All lying down be prostrations before thee

         May all pleasures be as dedicating my entire self unto thee

         May everything I do this day be taken as thy worship

 

 

Alcohol: The MIddle Path – Keep Questioning

F_ _ k this not drinking.  Even though I am not drinking, I still woke up at 3:30 am and could not go back to sleep.  I still have a headache every morning.  Maybe that is a result of the bit of sugar I had last night.  I could quit sugar too.  Why not give up eating and drinking all together?  When is enough, enough?

I do not feel closer to others.  I actually feel as if I have created a self-imposed prison.  I did not have dinner with a friend last night because I knew I would want to drink if I did.  Well f_ _ K that.  I wanted to drink anyway, and I missed spending time with someone I love very much.  Why am I doing t his?  Do I really believe I am an alcoholic?  People in AA would say, yes, you are an alcoholic because you think about drinking.  You question your drinking.  I dare say there are others out there who sometimes drink to excess, who think about what cocktail they will have in the evening, and  who plan a party with the idea of what special alcoholic concoction they will serve.  Are all of them alcoholics?

Saying that every person who ever thinks about alcohol or makes plans around alcohol is like saying that only Christians who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.  When my daughter was in Catholic high school, she dared to question this doctrine.  She was in a required religion class.  The nun was explaining that all those who did not believe in Jesus Christ were condemned to eternal damnation.  I do not know exactly how she worded her disagreement, but she made it clear she could not believe in a God who would turn his back on the majority of the world’s population because they did not take Christ into their hearts.

In the same vein, I do not believe that all people who questions their alcohol consumption are alcoholics.  One of the basic precepts of yoga is svadyaya, self-study.  It requires going so far into yourself that you do not come out until you find peace with that which is deep within.  In the book, 365 TAO, on page 344,Deng-Ming-Dao says,

“Don’t be inhibited.  If you hold back from achieving your hearts desires, you will become bitter and frustrated.  If you hold back from expressing yourself, your creativity will stagnate.  If your hold back from taking action, you will become impotent with timidity.  Don’t stop anything. Let your uniqueness flow freely.

In the beginning, one must adhere to structure — artificial though it may be )) until one attains the proper understanding to behave with uninhibited spontaneity.  Thus one must spend a certain amount of time studying structure until there is no need for structure.   By that time, one will have thoroughly absorbed the secret of moderation and one will be able to act with correctness and spontaneity.

How ironic is it that the above was today’s reading?  There really are no coincidences in this world.  Everything we need is here in this moment.  I have spent the last 30 years of my life, in self-study.  I am always learning more and more about myself, about this thing we call being human and about the world I live in.  Krishnamurti, the great teacher and philosopher cautioned, (this is paraphrased) “Beware of breaking out of one prison only to create another.”  He also said,

“Don’t be afraid to be discontent, but give it nourishment until the spark becomes a flame and your are everlastingly discontented with everything so that you really begin to think, to discover.  You see, without this flame of discontent your will never have the initiative which is the beginning of creativeness.  To find out what is true you must be in revolt against the established order.  So one must have this total discontent –but with joy.”

I must say I am not experiencing much joy these days.  I have the “discontent ” part down.  Where is the joy?

My self-study continues to come back, again and again, to my mother.  The bitch is dead, but she haunts me.  I see her drinking, daily, sometimes throughout the entire day.  Then I see myself as her.  I am not her.  I have not spent an entire day drinking since my college days and even then, I never woke up and drank a beer first thing in the morning.  My mother used to make those weird hangover concoctions with beer and tabasco and a raw egg.  Ugh!  Even when I am with friends who have cocktails at lunch, I rarely drink because I know it will affect the rest of my day.  I will feel sluggish and groggy, and I probably end up in bed.  I do not want to spend my precious time recovering from a glass of champagne.

The practice of not drinking is bringing up so many questions.  I am grateful for this time.  As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I believe freedom, moksha, real freedom, is the product of a self-understanding.  I am not you and you are not me.  “This is not your life, it is life itself and we are all in it together”…  I continue to offer my struggles to the highest good of all.  I do not believe for a minute that I am the only one who asks myself the question,” How much is too much?  How often is too often?  What is enough?  Do I have a problem with alcohol, food, television, shopping, reading, and so on?

My dear friend Cyndi Lee just spent  7 days in a silent retreat at Upaya, a zen  center in Sante Fe.  When I spoke with her last night, she talked about how challenging it was to be still and to have rigidly defined structure.  She said, “There was nothing to look forward to.  Every day was the same.  We sat in meditation, we ate, we cleaned our rooms, we rested, we sat again, we ate, we meditated, and we slept. ”  She said there were times when she dropped in to  the routine and was comforted by it.  I admire her courage.

But I also know that we are “householders.”  We live in the world.  I practice yoga and meditation on a daily basis so that I can be a part of the world in which I live.  I am grateful for teachers like Cyndi and Rod Stryker and others, including myself, who spend time in reflection, apart from outside stimuli, but I know for myself, and I would hazard to say for Cyndi too, that we do it so that we can be a part of the greater good, so that we can serve others,not permanently separate from them.

My favorite grandmother, Momo, told me on her death-bed, “Petty, always have something to look forward to.  Just a little something.  And remember, everything in moderation.”

What would life be like without our friends and families, without the daily events we plan, the things we do that engage us?  My grand baby, Amelia, comes to our house every Monday.  I love our time together.  I anticipate the day with wonder and excitement.  She brings so much joy into our lives.  I enjoy having friends over for dinner, or at least I did, until I quite drinking.  We are hosting a neighborhood party this Friday.  We planned it over a month ago, before I decided to give up alcohol.  I love all the people who plan to attend, but now I am dreading the event.  I will be separate, just as I was at the luncheon on Sunday.  I will have fun, I always do because I know how to pretend,  In fact, I pretend so well that I am now not sure when i am really enjoying myself.  When is it an act and when is it real?

My whole life, I have felt separate, different from others.  Yoga teaches that this kind of thinking is an illusion.  There is no separation.  We are all one.  In AA, they say that this feeling of being separate is what drives alcoholics to drink.  I do not believe that is entirely true.  Acknowledging separateness is accepting the human condition.

For a long time I worked with the sankalpa, ” I am happy to be sober because I feel so much closer to my friends and family.”  Oh but if that were the case!

Looking back, I remember clearly that to stay sober for the 10 years that I did, I gave my entire life over to AA.  I gave up all my old friends, I spend hours in meetings and with other recovering alcoholics.  Yes, I did not drink.  Yes, I was sober, but my life was incredibly small, limited.   Depression set in.  The doctor put me on prozac.   Was it because I was unhappily married?  Was I disatissfied with myself and my life?  Will I ever be satisfied?

Tantra teaches that life is ever expanding, that there are no limitations.  Paul Tillich taught that the answer to every question reveals  a deeper, more profound question.  We start with small inquiries and keep moving higher and higher into the realm of the vast unknown, but we continue because we know there is more.  This is because, according to Tillich, a lifelong pursuit of philosophy reveals that the central question of every philosophical inquiry always comes back to the question of being, or what it means to be, to exist, to be a finite human being.

I do not want to give up all my friends to live a sober life.  I must find my own way.  I do believe there is a middle path.  When I went to treatment for bulimia, the counselors there told me I would always have an eating disorder.  I do not.  When I quit smoking years ago, people told me I would never be able to touch another cigarette.  “If you do, you will start smoking again.”  I did, now and then, take a drag off of a cigarette, but I never returned to daily smoking.

I will find the middle path for alcohol.  I will.

The journey continues.  Day 10.  Still sober.

P.S.  I wrote my therapist last night.  This is  the man who saved my life two years ago..  Here is what I said, “Do you have any openings this week for an appointment?  Feeling strangely psychotic.  Not suicidal.  Watching myself thoughts go from one extreme to the other.  Have not ingested any alcohol for 9 days.  Been going to AA meetings which I hate, blogging about the whole thing.  I really need to get clear about my relationship to alcohol.”  I am seeing him at 1:00 pm on Wednesday.