12/06 2012 Posted In Busyness of Life, Contentment/Happiness, Mindful, Non-attachment/Letting go, Perceptions & Thoughts, Simple Living, Thoughts From Annie

Lazy or Buddha?


Dear Friends,

A young relative of mine graduated from college last May with an MA and a part-time internship.  She has been out of school for six months now, and since graduation she has continued her internship one afternoon per week.  If we round up, that means that since graduation she has worked a total of 50-75 hours.  That’s about the same number of hours that I worked each week during my most productive years at a full-time job.  Calculated per week, she is working fewer hours than I worked when I was 14.

My initial reaction (like yours perhaps) was that she needs to get out there and get a full time job and learn how to work hard.  All of my individual and social conditioning says that she needs to experience a full-time demanding job.  In my growing up household, the worst insult from our parents was to be called lazy (or worse yet lazy slob.)

But then again, I have spent the last 20 years learning how to stop running, stop over scheduling, and to enjoy every moment.  I teach workshops on how to relax the body and quiet the mind, which is something my young relative does easily all the time.  She doesn’t fill every waking moment with something “productive,” when she is sitting down to eat, she sits down to eat.  When she is hanging out with her friends, she doesn’t have a agenda and isn’t worrying about work.   Master Linji, one of the founders of  Zen Buddhism says:

“It would be better to listen to my words, take a rest and practice having nothing to do. According to my insight, there is nothing you need to do.  You just need to live as ordinary people.  Wear your robe, eat your food.  As day follows day, be a person who has nothing to do.” — Master Linji

When I ask my relative how she spends her days, she says that she gets up early, cleans up, maybe goes to an appointment, does a crossword puzzle, if it’s Monday, she prepares for her internship, and then gets ready for the evening activity.  Evenings could include hanging out with friends, preparing a surprise party, or watching a movie.  She recognizes that she has more than enough time for her life, and that she could add a few more hours of working, but she doesn’t feel bored or restless.  She has the time she needs to prepare for the next event, unlike many of us who race around from activity to activity without time to digest what we take in.  She is physically healthier than she has been in years.

So why does it seem like she should get a full-time job?  For one thing, she does need to learn how to financially support herself.   Her parents are picking up the tab for her rent, food, and living expenses.  Her relationship to money is much like a Buddhist monk or nun who has all of his or her expenses paid by the community, and never handles money.  Which would be fine, but she isn’t actually in a monastic community, and by the way doesn’t live with only three robes, one bowl and one spoon like most monastics.   At some point she will need to learn how to live her life with little or no capital contributions from her parents.  And surprisingly, that may be possible even with less than a full-time job.  I have several friends who have found ways to enjoy a simple slow-paced lifestyle with very little work and income, simply by adjusting their costs and style of living.

I also know how much satisfaction she gets from her internship and helping people, and doing more of that would probably be even more satisfying.  But how do we know when we are working enough and how do we know when our working becomes too much?  Aren’t most of us operating on overdrive even at this moment?  Wouldn’t we all rather be doing less work and enjoying life more?

Maybe one of the real reasons that her situation makes many of us uncomfortable is because we want her to become someone who does something.   Like “Annie who runs a yoga studio” or “Bob who teaches high school.”  To have a definition, a direction, some ambition.  The Buddha taught that the only way to live without suffering is to stop resisting what is.  To stop craving what we don’t have and pushing away what we do have.   The Buddha’s prescription to help reduce our suffering is very different from what we are conditioned to think and do.

We may wonder, “If a person has no direction, isn’t yearning to realize an ideal, doesn’t have an aim in life, then who will help living beings be liberated, who will rescue those who are drowning in the ocean of suffering?” A Buddha is a person who has no more business to do and isn’t looking for anything. In doing nothing, in simply stopping, we can live freely and true to ourselves and our liberation will contribute to the liberation of all beings.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, “Nothing to Do, Nowhere to Go”

In my own life, I  have experienced how letting go of ambition has created much more space in my life and led me to be more content and happy.  And that is what we want for our young people as well.  Having no ambition doesn’t have to be the same thing as having no work or no goals.  Living with no ambition may mean setting goals and intentions but not living only to reach their fulfillment.  Working fewer hours, or at least putting away our work on evenings and weekends may be helpful.  Or simply pausing in the middle of our work day to breath and come back to ourselves and remember why we are there.

We may never have the luxury of working only 3 hours a week, but if we practice slowing down and releasing some of our driving ambition, we may find that we are no longer creating as much suffering for ourselves and those around us.  And that just might be the goal that drove us to our vocation in the first place.

with love, annie
09/05 2012 Posted In Busyness of Life, Environment, Mindful, Self-care, Simple Living, Thoughts From Annie

Collapsing under the Weight of it All

Dear Friends,

I think you would have laughed if you saw me this evening, lying on the family room floor with a tree trunk across my body.   Ok, it was actually a coffee table made out of a tree trunk.  But this wasn’t a help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up accident.   I consciously laid down and lowered the tree trunk table onto my own trunk.  And I found it oddly comforting.

If you are still reading, then you are curious enough to wonder why I was doing this, and I will explain.  Lately, I have been feeling ungrounded.  The time I spend looking at screens and typing quick responses is ever increasing, and no matter how many calls and emails I return, there are always even more in my inbox.  I am guessing you may have felt this way at times.

I travel by plane several times a month, my work day moves about between home, office, and other meeting places, and I rarely spend more than an hour or two at a time in one location.  There is very little routine to my daily life, and minimal hands-on activities like cooking, gardening, or creating art.  When I go at this pace for too long, I start to feel adrift.

In yoga class, we often put a 5 pound sandbag on our bellies to help ground us during savasana relaxation.  This helps us settle more fully into our bodies, the earth, and the present moment.  In this case I needed a 50+ pound tree trunk to help ground me and pin me to the earth!   Yes, it was difficult to breathe with the table resting on my chest and belly, but it allowed me to really let go.  That much weight could counter balance the enormous pull of email, text, phone, and never ending stream of work.   Although I knew that I could get up if I wanted to, my body felt like it was secured to the earth in a way that I couldn’t easily resist.  Ahh.

You may not need as much grounding as I did today.  But simple grounding techniques can help us balance ourselves when we get swept away by the rapid pace of our lives.  Thich Nhat Hanh recommends walking meditation as an effective way to come back to our bodies and feel the full weight of ourselves walking on earth.

The earth is sacred and we touch her with each step. We should be very respectful, because we are walking on our mother. If we walk like that, then every step will be grounding, every step will be nourishing.  - Thich Nhat Hanh

A sandbag or even a pillow on our bellies or feet can be grounding and relaxing before bedtime.  Lying down outside under a tree, gardening, or curling up with an animal (preferably a tame one) are also good ways to ground and reconnect.   Doing work with our hands and slowing down the pace of our walking and driving can help,  as can simply closing our computer, turning off our phones, and sitting still.

And for the really hectic days, you can always grab the nearest piece of furniture.

 

 

with love, annie
07/04 2012 Posted In Busyness of Life, Contentment/Happiness, Family, Friends & Community, Mindful, Simple Living

Stop Working so Hard and Sit on Your…. Porch

Slow down, you move too fast.  You got to make the morning last.  Just kicking down the cobble stones.  Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy.  –Simon & Garfunkel

 

Dear Friends,

 

In 1972, when I was ten years old, and growing up outside of Detroit, I heard a derogatory term used for people who sat out on their porch hanging out with friends and talking.  The term porch monkey was used in a way that implied that there was something seriously wrong with people who liked to hang out with friends on their porch.

 

At the time my family didn’t have a front porch, but I knew I enjoyed playing and lounging with my siblings and friends both inside and outside, so I didn’t understand why this would be an insult.  I also knew that I enjoyed sitting with cousins on my grandmother’s porch, rocking in the davenport and simply watching the river go by. I decided that this expression was one of those things that I was too young to understand but would make more sense when I was older.

 

Well, I am older now.  Much older.  And over the decades, I have thought a lot about this expression.   And yet I have never had the aha! moment of understanding why sitting leisurely on one’s own porch would be something to condemn.  Over the years, I have actually found that sitting on my porch, or inside, or under a tree, relaxing alone or chatting with friends or family is one of the most satisfying activities in life.

 

I moved away from Michigan years ago, coming to Washington DC where I find the pressure to be productive even more intense.  We are conditioned to believe that we must be productive every moment of every day.   I now have a front porch, but it would be embarrassing to tell anyone that I sat on the porch with my dog reading a book while the rest of the city was working.  And as we all get busier, there are ever fewer opportunities to sit on the porch with others and just chat about whatever comes to mind.  One of the reasons that I love to visit France is the culture of taking long leisurely meals at outdoor cafes (the French equivalent of a front porch) talking with friends and watching the world go by.

 

Why are we working so hard?  As Bertrand Russell says in his 1932 essay, In Praise of Idleness, there are two kinds of work: moving matter about on the earth, and directing others to do so.   Some work is quite beneficial to other beings and the world, of course.  Many of us work in jobs in which we are trying to help others be healthy enough, or peaceful enough, or well off enough to enjoy their lives.  And yet we work too hard to enjoy our own.  And though our work may be important, when we never have stillness and down time, we begin to believe that our work is indispensable and more urgent than it really is.  This then leads to less opportunity for sitting on the porch.

 

Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever. –Bertrand Russell

 

So many things in our world seem to conspire to push us to work more and enjoy life less.  It is truly radical to decide to sit on our porch with no agenda, even when our friends, family, and our own minds tell us we should be working.  If we take the time to pause, to breathe, do some yoga or qi gong, we can see clearly that this moment is the only moment that we have to enjoy.  And why not enjoy it sitting on our porch or at our dining room table with whomever we like, while we are still able to do so?

 

 

 

 

 

with love, annie
04/03 2012 Posted In Busyness of Life, Mindful, Self-care, Simple Living

Dropping Plates and Doing Nothing

When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you.  Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love
          -David Whyte, from the poem Sweet Darkness

Dear Friends,
I started this month on a high note, writing a lot on my blog, traveling, going out, getting lots of work done, and balancing the many, many plates that we all juggle.  At the end of the first week of March, I was on top of my game when one of the plates dropped.  A difficulty that I thought had been resolved came back again as an open issue needing my attention.  And I faltered.  If you have ever watched a plate juggler in real life or on TV (or perhaps tried it yourself!), you know that when one plate falls, pretty soon all the plates are down, and you have quite a mess.   Since I was spinning plates at maximum capacity, lots of plates crashed to the floor, and me along with it. 

I’m guessing that many of you are like me, living and working somewhere between mania and impossible, and that it doesn’t take much to bring the whole structure to collapse.  A week before I dropped my plates, a co-worker asked me if she could talk to me about something.  I rattled off the next 8 hours of activities that I had scheduled, including a 2:45-3:00 call with my daughter.  She expressed surprise at the fact that I had to squeeze my daughter into a 15-minute time slot in the middle of so many other things.  If I were a ER doctor or a surgeon, or even someone with set hours controlled by the company, then I could better justify such a schedule.  But, heck. I am a yoga and meditation teacher who has full control over her own schedule. There’s some irony here, don’t you think?

For me, and maybe for you, some of what is on my schedule is there because I have to do it, but a lot of what’s there are things I want to do.  I want to have tea with another yoga studio owner, I want to plan a weekend away with my husband, and I want to meet with studio staff and students.  Spending time is a bit like spending money. It’s so easy and fun to spend it that before we know it, we are broke!  When I got my first job, I remember a boss telling me that I needed to always pay myself first.  I never did learn that lesson.

After my plates fell this month, I spent a few days desperately trying to get them back up, working the weekend straight through trying to get caught up on email and work.  I soon realized that I wasn’t getting back on top, just slipping further down.  And feeling pretty bad about myself as a result.  So I decided that what I needed was C&C time.  Most people think they need R&R, Rest and Relaxation, but what I really needed was C&C, Cloister and Convalesce.So I have been Cloistered — seeing other people as little as possible, even with people who are so kind as to want to help me talk through things or even take on some of the work.  I tell them about my C&C, and tell them that I will be in touch when I’m back out in the world.  And I have Convalesced — treating myself as if I had just been ill — sleeping and resting, eating as well as I can, and trying to get gentle exercise.During my C&C, I was able to restore my energy, re-prioritize my life, and recharge my enthusiasm for living.  Limiting our connection with others may sound counterproductive, but we interact with dozens or even hundreds of people each day, and more if you count the internet, Facebook, Linkedin and the like.  I am convinced that most of us aren’t wired for so much contact and so many different activities, and it simply overwhelms our nervous systems.

Now, at the end of the month and after about 10 days of C&C, I have many of my plates back up in the air, but with more awareness about each plate and why I am spinning it.  Practicing C&C is a way to pay ourselves first rather than burning up all of our valuable time on outside activities.  It also allows us to weed out any unnecessary plates that we are spinning out of habit.  If we set aside a little C&C time every day or week, we may not be able to spin quite as many plates, but we also won’t risk making such a big mess of them and suffering as a result.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says:

Doing nothing brings about quality of being, which is very important. So doing nothing is actually something. Please write that down and display it in your home: Doing nothing is something.

Let’s give it a try.

with love, annie
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