A smorgasbord of musings

Bodies, identities, coffee, listening, plus more Zen talks

A stick of incense burning down. Smoke changing shape and dissolving back into the larger whole.

Bodies, What we are, Endurance and Humility:

A dear friend of mine who was a strong young man when we met and later a cross-country trucker, is now using a walker. He tells me that people on the street don’t even seem to see him anymore. Perhaps if they do, what they see is what they imagine to be a frail old man. But what kind of strength and endurance does it take to walk when you’re in pain and walking is no longer easy, and how much humility and surrender does it require to let go of your self-image as an independent, strong, self-sufficient, useful person?

As I grow older, I’m struck more and more by the heroic effort ordinary people are making every day: the people here at the retirement community where I live who are walking with walkers, recovering from strokes or falls or dealing with Parkinson’s or MS… the couples where one has dementia and the other does not, still walking and dining and working out together, the one gently guiding the other… the friends here and elsewhere who are currently dealing with severe depression… the close friend in her late 80s who is in pain and learning to walk again for the second time after the second fall this year… the person from my past who survived a head-on collision that left her severely disabled and in chronic pain, but still practicing medicine and ordaining as a Zen priest… the middle-aged man I see walking across the grocery store parking lot who has (I can tell by the way he walks) two artificial legs… and oh yes, I suppose I should include myself, the aging one-handed woman with the ostomy and the slowly crumbling spine also crossing the grocery store parking lot… all of us carrying on, day after day.

Many of us noticing the time it takes now to do things once done quickly and the enormous effort to do things that once seemed easy and some of us requiring help with our most intimate tasks. So much we once took for granted is gone. And the gift hidden in this, as I’ve said before, is that we are brought home to right here, right now, just this, just as it is—finding the beauty, the joy, the freedom in the midst of limitation.

And of course, “an aging one-handed woman with an ostomy and a slowly crumbling spine” is not my own present moment subjective sense of here-now-being. Not even close! From the inside, there is simply vast open unbound presence and the kaleidoscopic magic show of present experiencing. “Aging one-handed woman” is simply one possible description (from the outside) of this body, this person called “Joan,” one possible story about who or what this person is. This “same” person has also been described as a Zen teacher, a spiritual teacher, an author, a writer, an English professor, an office worker, a janitor, a cancer survivor, a gender non-conforming non-binary bi-sexual lesbian, someone with a great sense of humor who should be a stand-up comedian, a pain in the ass, an oppositional control freak, a compulsive fingerbiter, a one on the Enneagram, an astrological Cancer with Scorpio rising, a septuagenarian, a photographer, a nature lover, and many other labels all describing different ways that this ever-changing wave-like pattern of movement called “Joan” momentarily appears to be. These descriptions can all be relatively true, but they are all conceptual abstractions of an ever-changing living being whose life is inseparable from the whole universe. To a child, Joan appears unimaginably old. To the ninety-year olds here in the retirement community, Joan is a young one. So which is it? The labels solidify in the imagination what is actually momentary, unresolvable, ungraspable, unpindownable flux.

And so, it’s equally undeniable and true that there is no body, no mind, no self, no division — only this centerless, boundless, seamless here-now-aliveness, this unbound awaring presence, this vast emptiness, this listening silence, this unnamable wholeness, this flowing experiencing that shows up in infinitely diverse ways while never departing from right here, right now.

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Small (rather blurry blow up) of a section from a larger self-portrait taken many years ago when I was in my 30s, training in karate and seriously into photography and darkroom work—standing in my kitchen, coffee cup in hand.

On Coffee (and other things we consume):

When I briefly mentioned going off coffee in my last post, I got so many replies from coffee drinkers that I feel moved to say something about coffee and my experience with it. And, of course, I’m not just talking about coffee. I’m talking about anything we love, or to which we have a somewhat addictive relationship, or about which we have conflicting thoughts and desires pulling us in different directions. Maybe it will be of interest to some of you, and if not, feel free to skip it.

I have gone on and off coffee myriad times over the years, usually more than once a year. I love coffee. I love the taste, the aroma, the feel of the hot coffee cup in hand, the ambience of it (which is very different from the ambience of green tea) and the way it seems to clarify, brighten and energize. It is truly magnificent.

Unfortunately, I’m not one of those lucky folks who can have an occasional cup, because for me, once I have even a single cup, if I don’t keep drinking it the next day, I get a headache. If I’ve been drinking it for more than a few days and I stop cold turkey, I get migraine level headaches lasting for about 4 days in which I am in unrelenting excruciating pain and cannot function at all. I’ve learned to taper off slowly, and that helps the withdrawal. I don’t get migraine level headaches that way, and I can function, but there is still a week or two of feeling very tired and having occasional mild to moderate headaches.

When I do go off it, once I’m through withdrawal, what I notice every time is that I feel calmer, more grounded, more settled, less in my head and more in my body. There is significantly less mental activity, less busy mind, less restlessness, and my fingerbiting compulsion mostly disappears. When fingerbiting does happen, it rarely breaks the skin or results in bleeding wounds that require bandages, as it does far more frequently with coffee. I also seem to go to deeper places of stillness and presence. For all these reasons, I decide, again and again, that I’m better off not drinking it.

I notice the difference between the felt-experience that is being described above, and the ways it gets conceptualized after the fact and then translated into a prescription for what I “should” do. I also notice two conflicting voices in my head, and how each becomes a kind of identity: “Joan the coffee drinker” and “Joan the drinker of mild green tea.” These are two very different personalities or identities, and the difference between them involves far more than just a beverage. It’s very much like the two different parts of me I discovered years ago in Gestalt therapy when I was trying to stop smoking, and my therapist had me alternately speak as the voice telling Joan to smoke and then as the voice telling her to quit. (To read more about that exercise and the whole subject of conflicting desires, see my website article on addiction and compulsion.)

Anyway, the two voices typically begin a kind of tug-of-war inside me, pulling me in two different directions: should I stay off coffee or go back to drinking it again? One voice (urging me to stay off) is the healthy, mature, sober, spiritually wise adult. The other voice (urging me to go with what I love) is the wild, untamed, impulsive, joyous, childlike rebel who just wants to let Joan do what Joan wants to do, as the poet Mary Oliver so beautifully expressed in these lines from her poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

— Mary Oliver

Yes! But what do I really love or most deeply want? These two conflicting voices or identities (the spiritual adult and the wild child) both have something important to say in this regard, and they argue back and forth. Each of you reading this now might notice whether you find yourself identifying with or rooting for one or the other of these voices, perhaps depending in this situation on whether or not you are a coffee drinker.

I know from long experience, as I first discovered back in that Gestalt therapy exercise about smoking, that it isn’t really about one side of us triumphing over and defeating the other. It’s not that one is entirely right and the other entirely wrong. Each of these conflicting voices speaks for a vital aspect of our whole person, and it would be profoundly unhealthy to crush or dismiss either one of them. They both have part of the truth, and they both include an aspect of potential delusion. Can you see how that is so?

Eventually, every time I quit, the desire for coffee returns and grows stronger and stronger, and sooner or later I will often find myself online reading about all the beneficial effects of coffee: good for the liver and the colon, good for preventing dementia, on and on. What’s not to like? I should be drinking it! The wild child is gleefully gaining ground over the healthy adult by using the very concerns of the healthy adult to do it! Very clever!

And eventually, I find myself drinking coffee again. Ahhhh! How wonderful it feels! Until I once again begin to notice the chewed fingers, the somewhat more restless and busy mind, the somewhat more agitated and less settled body. And again the thought arises, “Maybe I should stop drinking coffee.” And again, I go through the pain of withdrawal. And then I appreciate, at least for a short while, how good it feels to be off coffee. And round and round the circle goes, year after year, decade after decade.

But this time, there has been an added twist, namely the sciatica I’ve been experiencing in recent months and the way my neuropathy flared up at the same time. I have some chronic fractures and serious spinal degeneration that is largely a result of all the radiation I had to the pelvis seven years ago (which thankfully saved my life). So this time, I also looked into how coffee affects nerve-related problems. I already knew it isn’t good for bones. And what I found online about neurological issues was that, while it can sometimes have analgesic effects, coffee isn’t generally considered good for nerve problems. Most doctors I’ve asked (probably all of them coffee guzzlers) say a cup a day is probably no big deal in the case of either nerves or bones. But for me, with my sensitivity to it, maybe it is a bigger deal. And keeping my spine and my bones intact is a high priority for quality of life. This time, when I got through withdrawal, the sciatica was almost completely gone and the neuropathy in my feet had calmed back down to its usual mild buzzing.

So, for a month, I was just watching all of this—being aware of how often I was fantasizing about coffee, longing for it, thinking about it. Noticing how it felt not to be drinking coffee. Liking the way I felt more grounded, more settled, more in my body, and the way the fingerbiting compulsion disappeared. And not liking the way I seemed more tired and perhaps more mentally foggy. Noticing how some coffee drinkers encouraged me to drink it again, much the way I remembered how fellow alcohol drinkers and alcoholics had often encouraged me to drink alcohol again after I sobered up years ago.

I was simply being aware of this whole happening, being curious about it, and also knowing that whether I do or don’t drink coffee probably doesn’t matter all that much in the bigger picture, because whether I benefit my liver or damage my spine, either way, as the old song goes, “I’ll never get outta this world alive,” and whichever behavior prevails in each moment is the only possible in that moment.

I stayed off coffee for a month. Usually I stay off longer than that, but the urge to drink it was quite strong this time, and predictably, I eventually started drinking it again. I was greatly influenced by Mary Oliver’s wonderful lines cited above, and I think Nisargadatta said something similar once about his smoking habit. (He kept right on smoking while dying of throat cancer).

My goal now, in hopes of keeping some of the benefits of being off it, is to reduce the usual heaping tablespoon of Peet’s coffee down to a less than level tablespoon, brewed in a smaller cup, so I’m not getting quite so much caffeine, and I’m skipping the half-and-half and drinking it black. It has stirred up the sciatica a bit, but only mildly, and I’m hoping that will mellow out. The fingerbiting came back a bit at first, but has gone away again. It’s a kind of experiment. Can I have my cake and eat it too? Can the wild child and the mature adult find a happy compromise?

The interesting thing is that the sciatica first appeared on the first day that I was going off coffee sometime in early May. That first night off coffee was when I had really horrible level ten pain. I decided the next day that I wasn’t going to go through both the pain of sciatica and the pain of withdrawal at the same time, so I immediately went back on coffee. The sciatica gradually settled down, and then eventually I decided to go off coffee again in late May. The first day off coffee, that night, I again had a huge flare-up of sciatica, just like that first night before. Level ten pain again, the whole deal. Was this just a strange coincidence, or could the sciatica be connected to going off coffee? I googled that question, and indeed, this seems to be something that can happen.

Since I went back on coffee, the sciatica has been a little bit flared up from where it had been when I was off, but no level ten pain. Meanwhile, I’ve been getting physical therapy and exercising a lot, so that could also be a factor.

I’ve gone on and off coffee millions of times over the years without sciatica, so it probably has more to do with the gradually worsening condition of my spine impacting nerves and maybe very little to do with having or not having a small cup of coffee once a day. But we’ll see.

Everyone is different. I’m not by any means suggesting that coffee drinking is the same for everyone (or anyone) else, or that anyone else should do as I do. But with anything we are consuming—food, beverages, intoxicants, medicines, media, entertainment, news, socializing, etc—it’s helpful to notice how it affects us. And no two of us are exactly alike. So what’s good for one person may be toxic for another. And we are always changing. So what’s good for us one month or one year may not be good for us a month or a year later. Instead of going by what experts say we “should” do, or sticking with our own conclusions from past experience, it’s important to pay attention to our own direct, fresh, immediate experience now.

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More about the art of listening, and about Substack AI:

As I mentioned in another recent post, listening is a great art, and in this age of information overload and multi-tasking, it is becoming a lost art. Listening, as I see it, is at the very heart of spirituality. And by listening, I don’t mean just with the ears. I mean with the whole bodymind and the whole heart.

I know that many people these days like to listen to nondual or spiritual talks while walking, driving or doing household chores. And of course, everyone is free to do as they wish, but I want to encourage a different possibility—listening whole-heartedly with full, undivided attention. Be still. Just listen. (And watch, if it’s a video). Listen with the whole bodymind.

And if you’re out walking, try listening to the birds and the wind and the street traffic and fully enjoying the visual feast all around you. Unless you can’t do otherwise, take your earbuds out, put your phone away, and try giving full open attention to where you actually are. Listen and look. Feel the body. Be present to right here, right now.

Along the same lines, unless you have a visual disability or can’t comfortably do otherwise, I urge you to read my Substacks and not listen to the flattening AI voice reading them in a way that misses the heart and spirit of the text. The AI repeats the words, but it has no soul, no sense of presence, no sense of how to read it. As a writer, it’s painful to hear that AI rendering mangling the text, which is also why I’ve chosen not to have my books read by AI on Amazon audible.

That was a tough choice, because I do want to make things accessible to people with visual disabilities, but I also hate hearing what has been written read in such a soulless and often confusing way. I do understand, because I experience this myself, that listening to something can go in way more deeply than reading it, if it is read by the author or by a skilled human reader who fully groks what they’re reading. But AI is not that.

Some have wondered if I could perhaps read and record my books or my Substacks myself, but frankly, I just don’t have the energy or the time for such a huge project. I may however eventually try recording something on Substack—we’ll see. I know many of you would appreciate it.

And I know many of you will feel differently about AI readings and about listening while driving, and of course, as always, please feel free to dismiss any of my suggestions. Always follow your own heart.

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Two More Great Zen Talks

This is Kokyo Henkel giving a talk centered around Zen Master Dongshan’s Jewel Mirror and Dongshan’s awakening moment when he realized, “Everywhere I meet it. I am not it; It is me.” Dongshan is known for the teaching of suchness and “just this is it.”

And here’s another one from my new favorite, Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, abbot of Green Gulch Zen farm, on being with what is and being free from needing it to be different. A beautiful talk with some real jewels:

I’m not going to keep sharing these SFZC talks, but there are many more on the SFZC YouTube channel.

Another rather different but equally wonderful resource on YouTube is Jayasara’s channel. Jayasara is an Australian Buddhist nun in the Theravāda forest tradition who does beautiful very slow meditative renderings of the words of many great sages, mystics and poets (including Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Krishnamurti, Longchenpa, Christian mystics, Sufis, Zen Masters, as well as many of her own talks and guided meditations), often with music or a drone in the background. I love her channel and very highly recommend it as well as the SFZC channel.

I find many great things on YouTube—spiritual talks, political commentary, movies, music. I pay to get YouTube without ads, which makes for a way better listening experience, especially with spiritual talks and music. In the evening, if I’m not writing, watching something on Apple TV, reading, or just sitting quietly, I often explore things on YouTube.

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Love to all…