Letting Go, Part 2

We had a great book club discussion.  Different people enjoyed different aspects of the book and ideology.  The concepts of nonattachment and "letting go" made the largest impression.  I spoke about how we are so used to trying to control outcomes.  It's part of the American Dream - you are responsible for your own future. You succeed or fail by your own hand.  By the same token, if you suffer, it means that you should have prevented it by taking a different course of action.  This has caused me a lot of stress personally, trying to analyze all of the things I could have done differently after a tragedy.  We want so much to think that we control everything, but we don't, and the concept of detaching and acknowledging what happens in life without fighting it can help with that (theoretically).  In the book, Lama Surya Das mentions a sign he once saw that said, "Let Go, or Be Dragged."  That image stuck with me.

If you could detach in a healthy way, who/what would you detach from?

Letting Go, Part 1

Happy Sunday, friends.  I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but you know how it goes :)

Last month my book club finished Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be: Lessons on Change, Loss and Spiritual Transformation by Lama Surya Das.  We met a couple of weeks ago to discuss the book.  It was a small turnout - only four of us total - but we had a great discussion about the book and an overall great time.

This was my first experience reading Lama Surya Das and I just loved it.  The Dalai Lama calls him "The Western Lama," and I found that be one of his greatest strengths as a writer - to be able to make Eastern thought clear and relevant for a Western audience. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

The philosophy of nonattachment is based in the understanding that holding on too tightly to those things, which in any case are always going to be slipping through our fingers, hurts and gives us rope burn. This is the secret of letting go. 

Inner detachment, remember, is not synonymous with indifference. We do still care about others ... but we are far less invested in desirable outcomes.... We can flow better and roll more gracefully with the rollicking punches and weaving bumpy roadways of life.

Many of us have been conditioned to believe that another person is going to "save me." Be honest now, don't we all want to believe the following myth? "All I have to do is find the Prince (or Princess) Charming of my dreams, who will complete and satisfy me in every way, then my life will be perfect." Recognizing the emptiness of this illusion and living in solitude opens up space for the inner face of divinity to emerge within one's own heart-mind. Then one begins to find God and the beloved everywhere in everything, always. Life becomes your lover.

My book club hasn't met yet to discuss the book we've read but just reading it has kickstarted me into a Buddhist phase.  Aside from that book, I've purchased How to Be Happy by Lama Zopa Rinpoche and The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard.  I visited the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, where I took a tour and a meditation class for beginners.  I also bought a mala for practicing meditation - it's only a wrist mala for starting.  I used to have one when I took Hindu meditation classes years ago, and it was the long standard 108-bead mala.  I don't know where it ended up when we moved, but I miss it.

So what's my angle?  I was raised born again Christian, departed from the faith in my early adult life, and remain interested in spirituality but from a safe distance.

I have always been drawn to images of the Buddha because he looks so peaceful.  I tried reading the Buddhist texts years ago but was put off by the idea of detachment.  Buddha taught that we suffer because we are attached to things - people, possessions, etc. - and if we detached from them, we would find peace.  I can understand a healthy detachment from your possessions, but from your family or friends?  That always threw me off and prevented me from taking Buddhism seriously.

Even now, when I meditate, I am not "praying."  Buddhists don't really have a deity they pray to.  The meditation class teacher explained to us that the different bodhisattvas (Tara, etc.) represent different aspects of the mind.  Seems like a religion an intellectual humanist can get into.  

I like the stress management aspect of Buddhism and meditation.  I am so amped up on stress every day of the week.  This is partly my personality and partly my living in one of the most stressful cities in the world :)  Either way, it needs to stop.  These books and practices have been helping me to slow down and calm down.  Breathe a little.  Pay more attention.  I'm not very good at it yet but it takes practice.

Be Present

I have so much to catch you up on. In the last month, I went from no interest in spirituality to joining a book club, practicing meditation and visiting a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. How did I get here?

My troubles have always led me to faith in the past. This is not surprising. I've had a lot of troubles in the past year, so I began reading books on self-improvement and meditation.

One day, I got an email about a new book club in my neighborhood focusing specifically on books about personal improvement and spirituality. Those were exactly the types of books I was reading at the time, so I joined.

We had our inaugural meeting a month ago and I joined the most interesting group of ragtag misfits - a Tarot reader and consultant, an Orthodox Christian high school English teacher, an elderly retired philosophy teacher, a young Christian woman close to my age, and a young man highly interested in "energy" as it is depicted in The Celestine Prophecy. We each brought a book near and dear to our hearts to share who we are with the group. My book? The life-changing A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, of course.

At the end of the meeting, the Schoolteacher, who organized the group in the first place, chose our first book: Letting Go of the Person You Used to Be by Lama Surya Das. I read and really enjoyed it. More on that later.

Namaste

Yesterday I visited Namaste Bookshop. But maybe I should back up here. Why would I, someone who has not seriously considered religion in 3 years, willingly visit a store filled with Buddha statues, healing crystals, and books on meditation and yoga instruction?

Over the past year, I've been reading a lot of self-help books. I know self-help books get a bad rap, like the people who read them are miserable, pathetic souls who can't handle their own problems. I disagree with that. Self-help books are amazingly helpful, written by doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists with years of experience and research under their belts. I am also a big fan of therapy for everyone, not just "crazy people." (We are all crazy.) But that's neither here nor there.

I also began rereading the manga series by Osamu Tezuka on the life of the Buddha. I first read it in 2008 and loved it. As I was rereading it, some of the precepts of Buddhism called out to me and made sense.

Serendipitously, at this time I received an email about a new book club beginning that would focus on self-help type books that are spiritual in nature. Naturally, I joined. I'm currently reading our first book by Lama Surya Das and really enjoying it. More about that later.

So all of these things came together to spark my interest in going to Namaste bookshop. I had never been there before but always vaguely considered it to be a new offshoot of East West Books, which used to live around the corner from Namaste and sadly closed down.

The Comeback

It’s funny how life changes. People change. Everything changes.

Seven years ago I started this blog to wrestle with the questions about faith and spirituality that had plagued me for a long time, and were especially potent at that particular time.

I kept on with it for years, even as I drifted away from its original purpose. I lost interest in spirituality. I got tired of it. I stopped reading books about it, attending religious services, talking to friends about it. I moved on to other things - love, travel, career, intellectual pursuits. At a certain point, the blog’s name didn’t even make sense anymore. I started out on a sojourn (journey, adventure, trip, voyage), but was I even on one anymore? If so... towards what?

Then it died off. Why? For a number of reasons. I had shared it with friends, so there was only so much intimately personal info I could put here. I had not shared it with other friends, so very few people knew it was still here or being updated. I ran out of interesting things to ponder under a pseudonym that was not so pseudo.

But life is funny and I’ve learned that it comes in stages and phases and can wrap around like a boomerang. Just as I’ve been vegetarian, then meat-eating, then vegetarian, then vegan, then somewhere in between again, I keep coming back to places in my life where I have been before.

All of a sudden, I’m reading spiritual books. I’m talking to spiritual people. I thinking about this stuff. A lot.

With that, I bring back Sojourner’s Truths for its original purpose. Some of you will have no interest in this, and that’s okay. Some of you will. There may be people out there who never read before who are interested now. By reviving the old, I am making this new and freeing myself up to share even more.

Welcome. Or welcome back. I hope you’ll stay a while.

Where does the time go?

Can't sleep. Suffering from Day 4 of the mega-cold from hell and have a lot on my mind.

So many intense things going on in my life right now that I feel I can't share on the blog. Sometimes I wonder if I should scrap this one and start anew, truly anonymous, without telling any of my friends. Though I doubt many of my friends still read here - I mean, I post once every other month!

Do you ever get nostalgic? Like big time? I do it a lot - I mean, I think more than most people. I live in the past or the future, generally... never the present.

Tonight I'm thinking about 2005 me, sitting in the front room of my parents' house, typing away at this blog. Six years younger - wow! Both parents still alive, my biggest concerns were getting a boyfriend and getting an A in my college courses.

Time flies.

Things That Make Me Happy: Spotify

NaNoWriMo Time

I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I've only done this once before, which I apparently didn't blog about if Blogspot's search feature is to be trusted. (All I can find is a post about visiting a new writing group in Austin and hearing a funny NaNoWriMo anecdote.)

NaNoWriMo is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November. People around the globe come together and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. It's an amazing challenge and quite a feat that many people actually do complete! I love what it represents - community, creativity, people who don't even know each other deciding to do "the impossible" outside of their day-to-day "real jobs."

I tried it a few years back but did not make the claim that I would write a brand new novel. I also didn't strive for 50k words. I had a novel in progress with very little progress and decided I would use the month to do the best I could to develop it. I wound up with close to 11k new words that month, which is good to have, but I did learn that setting a challenging goal would have pushed me farther. At 11k words I was kind of like, "Well, this is a lot more than I had, I can be lazy and stop now." You know, when it gets hard.

My novel in progress (for years now - ugh!) stands at about 24k words and I have decided, once again, to NaNoWriMo my way through it, only this time I AM aiming for 50k brand new words. I may hit the target and I may not, but I'm sure as hell going to try and so happy for the opportunity to bring writing back into my life.

I've been living in NYC, married, working at a great-albeit-demanding job now for over a year. A lot of things have happened in this year, both good and bad. One of the bad things is that I stopped writing. Completely. Not a thing. In one year.

When I lived in Texas I wrote and published articles out the wazoo. I blogged and wrote poetry and read my work publicly at events and networked with other writers. In NY - nothing. Nada. Zip.

The reason? There are a few. First is the pace and stress and pressure of the city, the pace and stress and pressure of my job. The second is that I kind of lost my motivation and got writer's block. Even when I did set aside time to write, nothing would come. It's like working out every day for a long time and then stopping for a year. When you do go back to the gym, don't expect to just resume like the year of absence didn't take place. It did.

So when a Facebook friend (a member of my Austin writer's group) announced she would be NaNo'ing, it was just the kick in the pants I needed. I completely stopped self-identifying as a writer this past year, when that was practically all I identified myself as previously. How sad! How wrong! Not going to let it happen.

Wish me luck...

Sojourness's Beliefs... circa 2006

I was going through my blog drafts and see there are a bunch of things I drafted but never published. I thought this was worth sharing - from January 9, 2006.

Sojourness's Beliefs

I believe that we are not to blame for being imperfect, because we did not ask to be born this way, or to be born at all, for that matter.

I do not feel that we should perpetuate systems of belief that foster self-loathing and a low sense of self-worth.

(I feel that Christianity sends mixed messages: we are sinful and evil, yet greatly valued by God, so precious that He would die for us, yet so abhorrent that only the shedding of his blood would allow us to escape his intense wrath.)

I believe that we become "guilty" when we allow our imperfections to harm others without making a concerted effort to avoid doing so.

Just as members of oppressed groups unite in solidarity, I believe that woman- and man-kind should be united because we are all in this together. We all face the terrors of life and death, and none of us know for what purpose. Any that claim to are either being dishonest, or cling to doctrines out of fear. I do not fault them for the latter.

I believe that there is great love in the world, and it is one of the few, if not the only, reason for waking up in the morning. But it is rare, and hard to find.

I am not sure that happiness is attainable as a state of being. (I don't mean in the utopian sense; I just mean one being able to honestly say that she/he is happy in life.) I believe that one can find many examples and instances of it, but nothing more.

Things That Make Me Happy: Tea

I've resurrected the blog and haven't even written anything. That's so me. Husband nagged me about blogging again and I thought it was a good idea. Truth be told, ever since I moved back to New York (1 year ago!) I have not been writing. I used to be so prolific. Even if it wasn't all quality stuff, I was writing. I was a writer. Then I got to New York and became a married woman, a career woman, a family woman, a New Yorker... and became entirely too busy and stressed for my one passion. I thought bringing Sojourner's Truths back would give me the opportunity to at least write something, even if it's not for official publication or a book proposal. Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott and every other writing expert says you just have to show up for work like you do with anything else. You have to write consistently, like athletes and musicians and dancers have to practice. You should be writing every day if you're a writer - not letting a year go by with nothing to show for it.

Sad, I know, but I'm ready to make a change.