12/14 2012 Posted In Contentment/Happiness, Friends & Community, Mindful, Mindful Eating, Simple Living, Thoughts From Annie

Vessel of Appropriate Measure

Dear Friends,

I recently learned the sanskrit word for bowl, patra.  During the Buddha’s time, monks and nuns took their patra on alms rounds.  On their rounds, townspeople would  scoop food into the monastic’s patra for their one meal of the day.    Patra is similar to the English word for cup, because it can mean both the vessel itself and also a measure of quantity.  Monastics also translate patra as Vessel of Appropriate Measure.

The Vessel of Appropriate Measure helps monastics know how much food to accept.  When on alms rounds, even today, monks and nuns accept food up to the rim of their bowl, but not beyond.  If their bowl is brimming beyond the top they give the excess food away.  The patra is the measure which tells them they have enough.  I was secretly relieved to hear that even monks and nuns struggle with knowing how much food to eat.

And I started thinking about how helpful it would be to have a Vessel of Appropriate Measure for my own eating and for other parts of my life.  Wouldn’t it be great if I had a Shopping Bag of Appropriate Measure when I went into Bloomingdales?  Or a Grocery Bag of Appropriate Measure when I went to buy food?  Sometimes it seems as though I don’t know when my bowl is full, and patras might help me learn when to stop accumulating and start enjoying life.

“It is better to rise from life as from a banquet — neither thirsty nor drunken.” - Aristotle

Taking only a patra amount of something isn’t about punishing or limiting our happiness.  The idea of the patra is to help monastics learn to know when they had gathered the right amount of food that would maximize long term happiness, or contentment.  If we take too little, we will be distracted by our gnawing hunger.  If we take too much, we will be too full and sluggish.  This is true with everything, not just with food.  Research has shown the law of diminishing returns with regard to material wealth.  As we first gather the basics of what we need — enough food, shelter, clothing, and love — our happiness increases.  But after we have reached a certain point –when our patra is full– happiness doesn’t increase much more even if we have ten bowls of food (or pairs of shoes), and happiness actually begins to decrease as we approach levels of excess.

So a patra is a simple reminder of how much we need in order to be happy and content.  It’s what the Buddha called the middle way — gathering what we need without getting caught in the suffering brought about by craving what we don’t really need.   Accumulating any more than one bowl, or patra, of anything may diminish our ability to enjoy it.

with love, annie
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
12/01 2012 Posted In Contentment/Happiness, Mindful, Non-attachment/Letting go, Perceptions & Thoughts, Simple Living, Thoughts From Annie

Toenail Fungus and Happiness

“Only the present moment contains life.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Dear Friends,

Some weeks ago, I was getting a pedicure with one of my daughters, and when the polish was off my left big toe, I noticed a dark area that I had never seen there before.  I was surprised and I asked the pedicurist what it was.  ”Oh, it’s just toenail fungus.”  So she slapped some nice pink polish on there and it completely disappeared.

A few days later, I googled toenail fungus (if you ever do this, don’t click images) and found out that this is a pretty common concern, but that it clears up much faster if left unpolished.  So I took the polish off my toes hoping that it would be gone, but there it was, bigger than ever, a dark black square in the middle of my big toenail.  Ugh.

Because I am barefoot at least half of the time, even in the winter, I have been looking at my black toe on a daily basis for a few weeks now.  And it isn’t getting any prettier.  Every time I look at that toe I think, who is this person that has a toenail fungus?  Surely not me, a healthy and active yogi.  I tell myself that people won’t like me if I have imperfect feet, and that fungus toes are simply not cool.  How can I be happy with this toe?

Then yesterday I was thinking about how I would like a new fleece jacket for Christmas.   And that thought led to a short fantasy about the perfect fleece coat, in which I would look really great.   Which led to the thought that brown fleece might be best because it was the color of Buddhist monks robes and therefore would make me look more monk-like and down to earth.  Can you see the irony in that?  I am embarrassed to admit that I craved a new coat to demonstrate how simple and humble I was.

When I became aware of my thoughts, I had to laugh.  Because I could clearly see how I was hooked.   The Buddha taught about three forms of craving or tanha which are the root of all of our suffering: craving for sense pleasures (sights, sounds, tastes, etc), craving for being or becoming, and craving for non-being.  With both my toe and my jacket, I was dealing with the second type of craving, bhava tanha or trying to become someone.  Instead of just being a healthy, humble, cool person in that moment, which would have meant compassionately accepting my toenail fungus and the red fleece jacket already hanging in my closet, I spent that moment fantasizing about becoming a healthy, humble, cool person.  Craving is the distance between where we are and where we think we want to be.  And that is how the Buddha defined suffering.

As Phillip Moffitt says, we “take birth” in each moment in which we try to create a separate self.  When we do this, it isn’t that we are bad, it’s just that we create more unhappiness for ourselves and others.  We can only ever be in this moment.  When we crave being another way in a future moment, we lose our ability to actually be the person we want to be in this very moment.  If we take care of this moment, the future will take care of itself.  The only way to become something later is to be something now.  Craving makes us believe that we won’t be happy unless we get the object of our craving.  In this case, when I have no more toe fungus and am wearing a brown fleece jacket.

“But throughout any ordinary day there are so many small ways where, if you pay attention, you can see how you’re suffering unnecessarily. Awareness sees it and in the seeing of it, there’s letting go and you’ve liberated yourself. So liberation isn’t just a goal. It’s actually a practice. You are liberating yourself in this moment—and that’s all we’ll ever have, these moments. If you have even a little glimpse of clear mind, or that in us which is untouched by any kind of cultural conditioning, it’s hard to settle for anything less. “–Larry Rosenberg, The Art of Doing Nothing.

It’s easy to see now how my thoughts did not reflect reality.  But when cravings strike the mind, we are often hooked before we have a chance to see their true nature.  This is where the practice of mindfulness can really help us.  Learning to pause, to get some distance from our thoughts, if only for a moment, allows us the time we need to let go of craving and see our delusions for what they are — a new brown jacket will not make me more humble and a fungus-free toe will not make me cooler or more loved.  But what does create more happiness for all of us is when we live fully in this very moment.  The only moment in which we can live.

with love, annie
11/06 2012 Posted In Contentment/Happiness, Family, Friends & Community, Love & Compassion, Meditation, Mindful, Presence/Showing up, Simple Living, Thoughts From Annie

Like a Tree.

linden tree at plum village

Dear Friends,

Since my dog Gus died this past August, I have become more aware of our two fluffy cats.  One of them, Addie, is quite the princess (her kindest nickname) and doesn’t seem to care if we are nearby, or even whether we exist.

The early morning used to be the one time that she engaged me, loudly, because she knew that I was going to be serving her canned food.  But a few weeks ago I switched to canned vegan cat food (a macrobiotic mix of veggies and whole grains) and so now she generally ignores me 24/7.

One chilly morning this week, I went into my meditation room to practice and I closed the door behind me to keep in the heat.  A few minutes into my sitting, I heard someone pawing the door.  When she got no answer (I was trying to meditate) she upped the banging.  Pretty soon she was meowing, screeching, and finally resorted to swiping her paw back and forth under the door to get my attention.

addie with attitude

Since this was so out of character for her, I got up and let her into the room.  I assumed that she wanted me to get up and get her breakfast or fill the sink with water for her to drink.  I worried that she might disturb my practice by continuing to harass me once I let her in.  But she didn’t.  Instead she curled up quietly behind me, indulged in some badly needed fur cleaning, and just chilled with me.   I was surprised and delighted to have her sitting in the room with me.

That episode reminded me of something that Thich Nhat Hanh said when I was in Plum Village this past June.  He said that sometimes we can be there for someone without doing a thing.  Like when we sit near a tree and we feel that the tree is there for even though it doesn’t say or do anything at all.

When we sit down under a tree, we aren’t expecting the tree to do anything, but yet we still feel comforted just being there in its shade.  It’s the same with all of us.  It can be truly comforting and joyful to be with another being, in silence, with no agenda.

It’s a teaching that I try to remind myself when someone shares their difficulties with me.  I often feel like I have to say something or do something or even be something in order to help them.  But then I remember how comforting a tree can be, and I let myself off the hook.  Very often, being present for the other person (or cat) is enough.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.  – Ram Dass

Some of you may have lost trees in this last storm.  And even though the tree didn’t make you dinner, didn’t help you move, or give you any good advice, you probably felt a loss.  That tree just stood by, and by just standing by, it provided some comfort.  Heck, the Buddha became enlightened while sitting under a tree is silence.

And when Addie curled up in the room with me, I realized that she was looking for that same kind of tree love and offering it to me as well.  She didn’t want water or petting and she definitely didn’t want her vegan breakfast, she just wanted to sit under my tree.  I know how she feels.   I love to sit near my friends and loved ones (even cats), and quietly relax.  Especially in the darker, wintery months, it sure is nice to curl up together with nothing to do and just be there for each other.  And in some ways, our quiet presence is the most precious gift we can give each other.

with love, annie
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