catherine lipscombe
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Sue Ellen, I hope this reply goes to you as I intend. Thank you for the detailed involvement and application of the Karmas. Reading how you applied them is quite helpful. I too have to work on my patience, not so much with my kids as with my eighty-year-old mother who gets quite panicked also– not just with technology but any information coming at her at a normal pace– is too fast and needs to slow down. This inspires me to explore patience with her from the four karmas practice. Thank you!
Hello, fellow friends on the path;)
There is no way for me to play catch up so I have completely surrendered, and will start here writing to you. I write letters in my mind to answer the homework essay prompts regularly but don’t write anything down. I have felt resistance to coming to the forum, not sure why, because I don’t know where to begin or end probably but I have been consistently practicing the sitting practice and the prompts and readings and somehow truly benefitted from being connected to you, feeling supported, thank you.
So I’m last minute, but last minute to what really? It takes me time to process. Hopefully, I will now engage with the forum from this point onward. Forgive me; it’s going to be messy. This week I wrote about the cumulative effect in a pile of random notes in my notebook which made the task more surmountable and intimate to corall them here.
So here goes a little sharing and possibly some over-sharing. Warning, this may be non-sensical, but hopefully somewhat entertaining and not too self-centred. I am aware I have not yet participated in reading and responding either but hope to do this tomorrow afternoon before class and look very much forward to it.
The Heart Sutra: Is it possible to learn something and remember you have learned it many times because you forgot as many times as you practiced it because the experience is similar to not being able to see the bottom of the ocean? The Heart Sutra is like that for me, if that made any sense. Always starting at square one. It is ungettable. Somehow unfathomable. Yet everything shifts. And it is unforgettable on some level I don’t even understand how it operates, escaping me all the time over the years. The droning is a little weird but I give in and it gets me.
Two weeks ago, Susan’s casual statement: as we approach practice the supposition is we are worthy and whole, floats through me as I approach everything since, haunted by it like a wise ghost. Like a loving ancestor reminding: you are loved, there’s nowhere to go, just stay here. Haunted because it echoed out to a part of me that knows and forgets my own wholeness.
This, coupled with the question Susan posed: How do I connect with the space between me and what I seek? and how these were twin guidelines for me book ending for my experience of blowing open spaciousness around limiting views I hold without realizing; perceiving myself as an open-minded person, that too, relatively humbling.
To move with the transcendent paramita of patience, including generosity and discipline so that I explore both container and spaciousness and how they are the same? Not fixing anything, not trying, trusting in the breeze of change. Relaxing my will and ambition. What if I could want nothing? Eek. to ally myself to an underlying willfulness in nature, in a tree.So much more is operating and interconnected than I can see, and the Heart Sutra has had the effect on me of making space and fixing (as in both reparation and stultifying)break open. I have also been feeling like I am falling and quite shaky. I notice when I am anxious what my anxiety does to the space. I sort of claw it in like a cat falling off the slipping tablecloth. Trying not to hit the ground. I remembered this week what the controversial and wise Trogyam Trumpa was quoted once saying, about there being no problem with falling because there is fundamentally no ground!
I should start at the beginning again so I don’t lose you, dear reader, and risk you thinking I am completely insane. I don’t know where the beginning or end is so I am writing passing through and hope that’s ok. I’d like to give you the sun and some shade to go with it but I’ll have to just unfold first.
Ok a simple observation, I love cookies. Connecting again to the space idea between myself and what I seek; I notice the space between the cookie and what in me wants to be satisfied by the cookie. If form is emptiness and emptiness is form then the craving and the cookie are both empty and have real pull. The cookie in question, by the way, is a perfect biscotti. The texture, not too sweet, doesn’t dissolve when you dip it; has chocolate and a good bite; hard and receptive which helps me understand my dog and his bone–and the itch the bone and the biscotti eclipse momentarily. But the itch goes on. Spaciousness helps me feel into my absurd pursuits.But the weird magic, and so here’s a little woo-woo, was last week when I taught Qigong (an energetic practice similar to Tai Chi). Everything shifted in the room in our group: One student said she felt no separation between the space inside her body and outside her body.
Another, a dancer, mentioned the reference points of her sternum bone, hip bones, sacrum etc were not there as reference points as per usual but rather energy was moving her body from the inside like a creature. Another practitioner said that momentarily–and she specified she wasn’t sure if it qualified as a good or bad experience–she disappeared into space. But When she felt her form defined again she felt freer in it. We did not practice the Heart Sutra together. But it felt like the energy of the Heart Sutra came in by contagion or influence from my practicing on the cushion during the week every day. I know it’s easy to assume oh oh spacey and so perhaps the oddest thing of all that might sound like such a contradiction is how earth-bound and grounded everyone was as though their legs were pillars when they walked out of class. Not spacy but having touched space and very present.
It was oddly ordinary and extraordinary and so this seems like the place where it might be ok to share this as I haven’t shared it anywhere else and leave off. And nothing yet about the five families because I am still digesting reviewing them. As an aside, I always thought of Susan as Vajra. Sharp and precise and clear but warm.Thank you so much!
Hello there,
I’m Cat, an anglo-franco Montreal, Quebecer and
I offer Qigong classes, Shiatsu Massage Therapy, and Somatic and Mindfulness Coaching. Also last fall, I graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Naropa University and I am finishing a novel (I have been repeating this same sentence for quite some time, finishing the finishing I think now finally haha) and recently completed a poetry chapbook. I’m a mom of two kids and a big fluffy dog friend.Looking forward to a container for sharing the form and formlessness of all things sane and good here together; feeling the need for community and guidance to go deeper or rather, stay deeper and not jump out. Already, I feel encouraged and bolder.
I was first exposed to Buddhism on two back-to-back silent retreats in Thailand in Theravadan Buddhism a whole bunch of years back, and then discovered and fell in love with and took refuge in the Shambhala Tibetan lineage during a Dahtun at the Drala Mountain Center at the Stupa. This was a few months before I became pregnant with my now, sixteen-year-old daughter. Consistency in my practice has been a bumpy ride. I completed the OHP teacher’s training a few years ago and recently, as the magic would have it, I bumped into Susan live at the Drala Mountain Center this last summer. I took it as a sign to get my ass back to the cushion with her teaching the teachings! Community is essential, so thank you for this. And thank you for the scholarship from OHP!
Warmth to all,
and may we have a fantastic, real, mind-heart-opening, and auspicious journey.C
