Buddha Balboa Archives - Page 5 of 9

TBIF – Thank Buddha It’s Friday

TBIF – It’s summer and a Friday…who wants to be working?

I offer you this to ponder today and over the weekend:

Darren Rowse, blogger, thinker, speaker (creator of Problogger.net) said he asks himself this question at the end of every day – “What gave me energy today?”

Great question….really great question.

I love the way he phrased it – that instead of asking what he’s passionate about or what his passions are, that he looks for what gives him energy – what he refers to often as “the spark.” Think about it for a second. What gives YOU energy? What excites you with that energy to move forward, to investigate, to learn….to keep reading, to figure out…that thing that gets you up early each morning or keeps you up all night?

It’s different for all of us. What excites one person may bore another. But we all have that energy producing interest that lights our brains on fire. Darren suggests we fan the flame and watch it grow.

Make a list – without thinking – just put down things that get you goin’….and see if there is a connection or a path they take you. And then follow it.

Cool, right? Gives me energy just thinking about it! – BB

The Great Escape

We spend our lives running. Running away.

As a card-carrying member of the Western culture, I realize that we are a group of dodgers. Generally speaking, we do whatever it takes to avoid pain, discomfort, fear and unhappiness. YET, fear is the invisible wall that we continue to crash into over and over again.

We are uncomfortable with sadness. We loathe pain. We outrun emptiness by any means. Because we haven’t been taught how to handle it. OR that it’s a normal part of human existence. I repeat, it’s a normal part of human existence that we all experience.

I’m not glorifying or glamorizing human suffering…not by any stretch. I myself try to work around my unhappy moments, try to minimize pain (both physical and emotional.) Let’s face it – pain and sadness are not welcome friends. BUT, they are a part of what it means to be human…so in that, we can either fight it or come to understand it and, for lack of a better word, embrace it.

When my mind wanders and recalls a sad or painful time in my past, and I start replaying it in my head, I catch myself shaking my head quickly, as if I were saying no, attempting to shake off the memory like a pitcher does to a catcher in baseball. (No, not that pitch. I don’t want to throw the slider.) Painful memories and thoughts are uncomfortable – they make us squirm in the seat of our souls. So it makes sense that we “don’t want to go there.” Why would we?

However, from a Buddhist perspective, we can stop running. We can transform our fears and our feelings of emptiness instead of trying to eliminate them. As Mark Epstein, M.D., so beautifully explains in his book ‘Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart’, our Western therapy has spent much of its time trying to eradicate our feelings of insufficiency, emptiness, and fear and finding the source of our problems, instead of taking a more Buddhist type of approach by learning to face these feelings and tolerate their existence in our lives. Now I know that sounds so “heady”, but doesn’t it also have the gentle peal of the truth bell?

It just amazes me how we (and I include myself in this communal grouping) are constantly running after happiness and away from unhappiness making for a lot of exhausted people. We waste precious energy in all those unnecessary psychological calisthenics. Mark Epstein (he’s also a psychiatrist) uses meditation personally and professionally as a way to help manage this frenetic storm.

I sometimes want to scream out in the streets (but don’t for fear of being locked up) that we should all stop chasing our happiness tails….because we will never catch them. We do not land on Happy Island and set up our tents and live happily ever after drinking coconut flavored beverages with sippy straws. It just doesn’t work that way. Storms blow through, tents get destroyed and our tropical beverages go sour. Even on an island in the middle of nowhere, life has a way of finding us.

We don’t always get to see the troubles of others – we are most often bombarded by headlines of success of those more fortunate than ourselves – those members of societies elite. Their lives appear to glisten like gold in the noonday sun – all polished and untarnished. But it’s not real. It’s a facade, a mirage. Even the most powerful of us must sleep each night. Even the richest of us goes to the bathroom. Even the most famous experience death.

So this is my thought – there is no escaping. But that isn’t a bad thing – it’s reality. It’s honest and gritty and truthful…and, if you’ll allow me here…quite beautiful. It takes the pressure off – knowing perfection and unending joy and bliss are myths – pots of gold that are forever unreachable. Letting go is a part of the Buddhist philosophy. And in letting go we gain so much more than we lose. Letting go of impossible ideals is the only way to relax into the life we have and make it our own.

Now where’s my coconut drink? – BB

Rah-Rah Go You!

You know how random things pop in your head out of nowhere? Like when a long forgotten memory leaks its way back into your consciousness? I had that this morning.

I suddenly found myself remembering my youthful years in pursuit of being a cheerleader. (Feel free to groan and make the gag-me sign of sticking your finger in your throat. Trust me, I feel the same way.) Come on now, cheerleading? Really??!!

I’m not even a big fan of cheerleading. (No offense to anyone.) I have such a roll-my-eyes feel about the whole business – I’m sure partially due to my experiences – but also because the genre itself is culturally easy to make fun of. You know what I mean.

As a young girl, I was a tot of a cheerleader for a Pop Warner football team. It’s a youth-based organization of football and cheerleading. My brother was on the team, my sister was on the squad with me.

We practiced. And practiced. I don’t know how many cartwheels I did in preparation – or how many times I fell to the ground attempting – but I’m sure I had the scrapes and bruises to show for it. Kids have that way about them – not much phases them in the pursuit of fun.

And I did like it. We had our cute little skirts and vests. And the requisite pigtails. And most importantly, our own set of paper pom-pom’s. Oh man, I loved those shakers. There’s something about jumping up and down and throwing your arms in the air with pom-pom’s that makes a person feel good. (I’m not even going to go there.) But something about it made it special and cool and desirable.

So as the years rolled past and I moved into Jr. High School, being selected to the school cheerleading squad became a bit more competitive. Grabbing a coveted spot took more gymnastic skill and social ladder climbing. Neither which I was pretty adept at. Certainly the splits and back flips and cow-jumps were NOT my forte. I don’t know how many times I was probably borderline muscle tearing as I forced gravity to heave me downward in a split that clearly my legs weren’t made for. Oh, I practiced. And grimaced. I was a dancer but I wasn’t a gymnast. Back handsprings were reserved for others.

I envied those girls….whose flexibility rivaled Gumby’s. I wanted that. But it wasn’t happening. Perhaps I was just better closer to the ground than heels over head. I know that I had the spirit though – the deep voice, that could shout for hours. And I liked to smile. So I always hoped that would count for something.

My Jr. High didn’t have a football team – just a basketball one. And I did make the squad. One year or maybe two. It’s a blur. And not on my resume under special skills so it doesn’t much matter. But I pushed my way in….somehow.

And then came High School. The nirvana of your cheerleading years (if you’re of that ilk.) It was cutthroat. Seriously. If you didn’t have the typical gymnastic abilities…or you weren’t of the popular ‘in’ crowd, there wasn’t a chance in hell you were getting in. Damn. They had cool megaphones and thick white sweaters to keep the football weather at bay. Pleated short skirts and saddle shoes with red and gold laces. And jackets – with the squad’s name embroidered on the back – and your first name on the front.

I didn’t get in. No matter what I did, I just didn’t make the cut.

So I created my own squad. My own group to belong to. Take that cheerleader girls!!

Since I was a dancer (I had been dancing since the 3rd grade), I created, along with friends of mine, a dancer-cheerleader hybrid I had seen in other schools. We were Highsteppers. We would perform routines to music during halftime, on the field, in front of the crowd. We were part of the mid-game entertainment (the requisite break from the sporting action.) And we had our own set of pom-pom’s. Yes!

My friend Trudi and I were co-captain’s to a bit of a motley crew. We had tryout’s and weekly practice. We worked hard to choreograph dance routines that included kicklines of Rockette fame. None of our routines consisted of flips or jumps. After all, I wasn’t much of an aerialist.

We weren’t entirely ‘accepted’ at first – I’m sure the cheerleaders weren’t too happy about us horning in on their territory. But we weren’t out to take any of their glory (well, maybe a little), we were out to create a slice of our own. After all, even in Western’s, there was always space for a sheriff AND a deputy.

We made it happen. We bought our uniforms (even cuter than the cheerleaders, in my biased opinion) and we wore our saddle shoe’s on Pep Rally days in school. Oh, and we got jackets too – with our names.

I’m sure the squad has evolved over the years – growing into whatever its newest members need and want. But it’s nice to know I helped plant the seed.

Blazing your own path is essential to creating the life you want – the experience you wish to have. If you don’t fit in to the standard mold (or don’t wish to), make your own. Why not? You are your own greatest inner cheerleader – and what better way to win then doing it your way. No cartwheels required. – BB

Getting to it

Isn’t irony funny?

I was telling someone that I really needed to get down to the task of writing more often (a lot more often) because I had SO much I wanted to write. And the fact that I had so much that I wanted to write about was the thing that was keeping me from doing the writing. The overwhelmed factor – that feeling that you have so much to do that you don’t know where to begin. It’s a self-inflicted paralysis of sorts.

So much to write about but I can’t get started because I feel overwhelmed by all that I have to write about….irony at its most absurd.

Steven Pressfield, the author, writes in his wonderful book, “The War of Art”, that we all encounter this block – he calls it Resistance. This invisible force that keeps us from our work, our task at hand. It’s internal, yet we externalize it through excuses and justifications. We allow this Resistance to take from us what we want the most – to get down to it…to take a step forward and get moving along our desired path.

I suspect it’s because we want everything to fall into place….to be struck by inspiration which magically allows everything to flow smoothly and easily. We don’t like being “forced” to do this or that…to get down to the hard work of focusing and plowing through. I like to have a clear, complete picture in my head when I’m writing a piece, but yet I forget that the beauty of writing is that it takes on its own shape despite where I try to lead it. Writing is not about producing the perfect piece; writing is about being open enough to allow the “muse” to come through…to let it be what it will. Just the act of sitting down to put words on paper swings open the gates of energy and forward momentum. It can’t be any other way.

I guess what I’m saying to you, and to myself, is to get on with it. Whatever you have to do – be it write the next great American novel or clean the bathtub, go at it. You will feel so much better once the task has begun. – BB