precepts

hi friends!

as i've mentioned before, i'm taking jukai at Dharma Mountain Zen Center in the near future. what i haven't mentioned yet, because the details are still getting ironed out, is that i will also be taking a retreat at Rinzai-ji in Los Angeles in mid October. sweet!

so, i've been thinking about this stuff a lot, and have also been thinking particularly about the precepts. the precepts are generally a set of training guidelines on how to develop sila, or morality, or ethical training, or however else you'd like to consider acting in a way that causes the least harm in the world.

there are several different precepts and kinds of precepts. in jukai, i'll be taking 14 Bodhisattva precepts. in my current practice i take five lay precepts every morning.

i chant this each morning:

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma sambuddhassa

*bow*

Buddham saranam gacchami
Dhammam saranam gacchami
Sangham saranam gacchami

Dutiyampi buddham saranam gacchami
Dutiyampi dhammam saranam gacchami
Dutiyampi sangham saranam gacchami
Tatiyampi buddham saranam gacchami
Tatiyampi dhammam saranam gacchami
Tatiyampi sangham saranam gacchami

*bow*

Panatipata veramani sikkapadam samadiyami
Addinnadana veramani sikkapadam samadiyami
Kamesu micchacara veramini sikkapadam samadiyami
Musavada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
Surra-meraya-majja pamadatthana veramani sikkapadam samadiyami

*bow*

the first part, the namo tassa part, is an homage to buddha as one who is awakened. more importantly, as one who is self-awakened and a teacher. basically in the buddhism i practice there isn't any elevation of buddha to the status of a deity as is often misunderstood. instead, he's a teacher. he's the guy who figured out what to do and told everybody how to do it and basically this first part is just, "this guy is awesome! thanks, awesome guy, for sharing with us how to also be awesome."

the second part, the Buddham saranam... part, is what's called "taking refuge." basically it's a recognition that if i'm feeling shitty or things are really hard, the buddha, the buddha's teachings (the dhamma or dharma, depending on whether you're looking at pali or sanskrit), and the community of fellow practitioners are all places where i can find a degree of solace and help. i've personally also found this to be true and a very helpful recollection for me.

now the rest of this is where it gets interesting. the vows are basically translated to mean the following:

i will train in not killing.
i will train in not stealing.
i will train in not committing sexual misconduct.
i will train in not using speech harmfully.
i will train to abstain from intoxicants.

at the center of each of these vows is the concept of ahimsa, or "non-harming". i want to talk a lot more about all of this, but i need to be somewhere in a minute. i'll come back and hit up these sila trainings in more detail in the near future.

thanks!

daydreaming about mendicancy

hi friends! what's mendicancy? begging and relying on charitable donations to survive.

to summarize, i spend a fair amount of time daydreaming about what it might be like to be a honest-to-goodness homeless wandering monk. i am sure it would be terrible but it also has some appeal that i can't fight off.

i think about it a lot. quitting my job, wandering off into the desert or the mountains to live, doing tons of meditation, etc. i know it's unlikely and i know that it would be foolish, and yet here i am.

i'd stay in the Bookcliffs all summer, trying to stay cool and studying during the day and find water and meditate in the evenings. i'd adhere to one of the approved aesthetic practices, which would be only eating food once a day and only eating that food from a single bowl. it would be a tough life, likely ultimately unsustainable, and yet.

anyway, silly daydreams on my part aside, the actual tudong monks who wandered Thailand's forests in the first half of the 20th century are fascinating and well worth reading about.

study watch experience

I'm considering doing a self-study course of the Digha Nikaya. That book is like 1000 pages long, but as you can see is only a small part of the whole Tipitaka (oldest Buddhist teachings that have survived to the present) and doesn't include any of the latter sutras like the Lotus, Heart, Platform, or Diamond sutras. Whew! I'm working to strike a balance between practicing every day and also studying, and there's obviously a whole lot to study.

When I took a course on vipassana meditation by S.N. Goenka, he described three types of knowledge in a metaphor involving a restaurant. He said there's the first type of knowledge that comes from reading the menu and deciding what sounds good. There's the second type of knowledge that comes from sitting in the restaurant watching everyone eat their food and seeing how good it looks, imagining how good it must taste, etc. Finally, there's the third type of knowledge that comes from receiving your food and eating a good meal yourself. These knowledges are study, hanging out with good/strong practitioners and teachers, and the practice of meditation. A good practice ought to ideally have some components of all three types of knowledge, all in balance.

I know myself, and I have a strong tendency to over-emphasize the intellectual "study" side of an activity rather than the praxis of something. (note to self: write a future post about this in relation to activism, theory v praxis debates, education, etc).

I'm wondering if it might be in my best interest to commit to study no more than I meditate! At the moment I'm averaging about an hour a day... I think that would be a reasonable study limit. I'm sure once I start classes in October any non-vital reading will take a backseat.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

microblog

This is Vella, she's my daily commuter bike. Isn't she lovely?

body positivity struggle bus

Hi friends. Warning: I'm feeling shitty about myself and my body tonight, so this blog is more negative than I'd prefer. Fair warning.

So, I struggle with body positivity. My body, for all the cool things that it can do, is way outside the "normal" range of bodies and therefore I often feel kind of shitty about it.

First of all, it's very heavy, which makes it hard to trust new or small looking chairs. In high school I went to an end-of-the-year bonfire at a friend's house. We were all sitting in lawnchairs, but before the night was over mine began to buckle and, in an attempt to subvert an embarrassing moment with humor, I rode the damn thing to the ground. I still remember that night, 14 or more years later. The heaviness, also, is hard on my feet and my back and my furniture and my bike and etc etc etc.

My body's extra wide, so I'm always worried that I won't fit in a space - booths in a restaurant are both a crapshoot and a hell. They are often too tight (but once you've sat in them it would be anathema to request to move so you spend the whole meal in pain, sometimes to the point of bruising, not be able to enjoy your food or even laugh or take a deep breath). I hate sitting on public transit and I basically won't fly because I don't need that awfulness in my life. This limits my travel options and thus the sphere of life I can directly experience.

My body requires a lot of energy to move. I do love hiking and riding my bike and going for walks, but sometimes the thought of doing that is just... too much. I tire more quickly than most of my friends. When hiking I am *always* the slowest. I tried to climb a mountain early this summer and it was humiliating; for some reason I really thought I could do it. I hiked up steep slopes for a long time, huffing and puffing and feeling out of place but excited. Unfortunately, there was a false summit. I got to the top of the false summit with a lot of encouragement from my significant other, but when I saw the real summit still some distance away I collapsed, sobbing. I failed at something I was really, really excited about. I failed because of my body.

Sometimes because of how my body is, it hurts. Or things happen to it that don't happen to smaller bodies. Or sometimes I'm afraid to try new things with my body because I don't trust it.

Because of how society views bodies like mine, people immediately think they know things about me. About my work ethic, or my motivation, or my intelligence, or my desirability, or other things. Their judgements are usually negative, because society has trained all of us, myself included, to view bodies like mine as bad. As moral failures. As failures of character, or will, or self-control, or upbringing, or culture, or whatever.

I have internalized many of these beliefs. A lot of my core self-talk revolves around feelings of shame and laziness and unworthiness. Some of my fundamental beliefs about myself are so cruel I could never speak them to another person. Yet I carry that weight around too, and maybe my body is a physical manifestation of those beliefs.

But I am trying to unlearn those patterns of thoughts and behavior. Some time ago I began intentionally seeking out the social media profiles of other fat men. I found Chubstr, which discusses style for large men. I found 300 Pounds and Running, which is just what it sounds like. I found Unlikely Hikers and a few other groups or profiles. I'm currently enrolled in a Men's Body Trust group with a registered dietician (though we thankfully don't discuss diet, or at least haven't yet).

So anyway. I'm working on it now, but I still absolutely hate myself sometimes. It's a trip, y'all.

vegan-ish

hi friends!

at the beginning of 2018, i went on a strict vegan diet so that i could more directly commit to both following the First Precept (don't kill!) and to helping the earth (a vegan diet is the best diet for the planet, possibly). what i learned was that a vegan diet is effing tough for someone like me, who has limited cooking skill and desire. i kept it up strongly for three months, kept it up half-assedly for another three months, and then recently gave up in order to reset and begin the struggle again.

during that second set of months, i was diagnosed with diabetes. conventional wisdom is that the best diabetic diet is one in which a person consumes few carbohydrates. my vegan diet in the first round was largely made up of heavily processed foods, and my diet in the second round was very carbohydrate-heavy. so, as you can see, my personal ability to maintain a vegan diet while eating in a way that helped keep my diabetes manageable was somewhat limited.

i'm in the process of considering going strictly vegan again, and focusing on whole foods. not like Whole 30-style intense, though i would love to, but focusing on these vegan foods reproduced from the Meatfree Athlete. i mean, this seems like it gives a lot of options, and i know i like all of those foods except lentils (sorry man, lentils are gross) and black beans (too much like little cockroaches, sorry again). i think these are doable: the difficulty i encounter is that a lot of vegan foods beyond these staples are quite expensive and a pain in the butt to deal with. these staples are versatile and cheap! which is what i'm looking for.

this vegan grocery list, courtesy of vegainstrength, is another healthful and reasonably cheap list. there are delicious foods that can be made from all of that! the difficulty, again, is that cooking is not something i'm particularly good at or interested in. i did briefly entertain the idea of food prepping, but that didn't last long. i struggled to keep up.

i do have some ideas, though. breakfast is maybe the most important meal, and one that is simple to prepare for. what i was most successful with was very simple peanut butter toast. it takes almost no time, it's got protein and healthy carbs, and it kept me from getting too hungry before lunch so that i could make good lunch choices. another successful breakfast food i enjoyed were what i called purple protein smoothies. they consisted of ice, blueberry, red berries, bananas, peanut butter, pea protein powder, almond milk, and water. they were purple and delicious! i might have to try those again.

i've found moderate success with keeping basic lunch foods at work, like spinach wraps and stuff. right now i am using a lot of meat and cheese, but could transition to cooked rice, sauce, and tofu, with vegetables. that would be fairly easy. also easy are spinach salads, which for me are spinach, a cut up apple, and mixed nuts.

dinner is more difficult, especially if the goal is to avoid extra carbohydrates. i suppose i could do vegan chilli and chips (i friggin' love chips), spaghetti with tofu meatballs, stir fries, etc. i'm not sure about good dinners.

anyway, in writing this post i'm starting to feel like i can in fact do it again, and now i want to. i'll talk it over with my lovely partner and we'll see if it's something she thinks is wise to do or not. i think healthy vegan is more important than low carb, but i'm not a doctor or a dietitian so it's hard to say.

in conclusion, i think being vegan is the best choice for me, but it's hard and i'm not always successful. i may very well try try again!

jhana practice

hi friends!

i figured i'd write briefly about a topic i'm still learning about, the buddhist idea of the jhanas. the jhanas are something i'm still working on, still learning about, still practicing, so please be aware that this is in no way an authoritative gloss of this subject, it's more the thoughts of a wayward practitioner! so, you've been forewarned.

jhana is a Pali word that basically means "meditation". in Sanskrit, the term is "dhyana" and is also used in Hindusim and Jainism. however, the word has, over time, accumulated more nuance and specific meaning, and now means a particular thing, or more accurately a particular series of things.

in common modern Buddhist jargon, the jhanas are particular mental states that can be cultivated through intense focused concentration. there are four "material" jhanas and four "immaterial" jhanas, all of which are accessed sequentially through meditative techniques. it's possible, though difficult to confirm, that jhana practice is one of the earliest buddhist meditative techniques.

jhana practice is a form of concentration practice; there's a whole long thing i could get into about concentration practice vs insight practice, but that might be a bit much for today. suffice it to say that jhana is my current primary practice unlike vipassana, which is a very popular modern technique but is an insight practice. someday we'll talk about all of that in more detail!

depending on who you ask, jhana is difficult or impossible for modern people to achieve outside of intensive retreat environments. i understand why folks say that, but i am practicing as though that's not the case. the reason that belief is fairly common is that in our modern lives our minds are quite active all the time; there's much more information flowing through our lives than there were through the lives of folks even a hundred years ago. and as jhana practice requires an extremely focused mind, free of distraction, i will be the first to admit that it is difficult to practice but i find it to be very beneficial.

please take the following information with the caveat that i'm also not a meditation teacher. please listen to the instructions of a teacher before attempting any intense practice!

that said, here's what i do. i use the breath as an object, and i begin my sessions by taking a few deep breaths through my nose, paying close attention to where i most clearly feel the incoming and outgoing breath sensation.

i then focus my attention on the sensation of the breath coming in and going out of my nose. usually my attention falls on the upper lip, where i can feel the incoming and outgoing breath moving across the little hairs there somewhat clearly. other times, depending on factors beyond my understanding, i can feel the clearest breath on the outside rim of my nostrils, or inside the nostril somewhat. wherever i find it, once i've got an idea about it i try to lock my attention on that spot. the suttas describe an analogy of a saw: the saw itself is long but only contacts the branch at a single place. that area of contact is the focus of the meditation.

from here, the practice is straightforward to explain but difficult to maintain. you just... keep the attention on that single spot. your awareness may expand (mine occasionally encompasses my stomach and my nostrils, or my entire chest, and once or twice so far my entire body), but keep it concentrated. eventually stranger things start to happen, which other sources describe more effectively. those strange occurrences tend to be the jhana factors. i don't want to get too far into it because i'm not an expert and i'm still working, but if i can do it so can you!

overall, i find the jhanas a fascinating topic. the meditation model that i learned early on postulates that the jhanas are one path to enlightenment, and that insight/vipassana is another path. the jhana path may be the same path the Buddha taught in his life, though it's really hard to tell.

the other interesting thing is that my main meditation group (or sangha) is in the Rinzai Zen tradition, which has a very different set of normal meditation techniques as far as i can tell. my teacher, however, indicates that it is okay for me to continue my jhana practice and so i do; i just think it's a bit different than what most zazen actually looks like in practice, which we will also talk about later!

here's some more authoritative information on the jhanas. the first is by Theravada teacher Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. the second is also informational from Access to Insight. finally, here are instructions by Leigh Brasington, who is a jhana teacher.

enjoy, and best of luck if you decide to give this practice a shot.

daily meditation practice

hi friends!

one of the things i'm really engaged in right now is my meditation practice and study of Buddhism. i've been, nominally, a Buddhist for some time, about ten years or so, but my practice has always been pretty sketchy. in April of this year, in the midst of some Big Feelings, i decided to get serious about it. to that end i did a bunch of research and decided i needed a teacher and a sangha, or group of practitioners. i did a bunch of research and was extremely pleased to find that Grand Junction, despite not being a Buddhist hotbed by any means, had a regular Zen group called Dharma Mountain. i've been going regularly ever since and have found it to be a welcoming environment that is a tremendous asset to my practice.

and what is my practice, you might ask? i do a couple of things. most regularly i do concentration practice, which is often referred to by the Pali word jhana. basically it's a practice that focuses intently on one subject, in this case the breath, and trains the mind to focus on it unwaveringly for whatever time amount one decides upon beforehand. for me, it's about 25 minutes at a time, twice a day. this is my core practice, and from what modern scholarship can tell about the time period of Early Buddhism, this is likely something similar to what the historical Buddha practiced and taught himself.

i find this video to be a good description of zazen, or the basic Zen meditation. i don't always do this technique; i'm usually doing the one described above, but i do sit in this way (half lotus all the way!) and find this description helpful.

i use Insight Timer to track my meditation and share when i've finished on my twitter. feel free to friend me on either platform!

i'm sure i'll have a lot more to say about all of this, but for now, this is a quick and dirty overview of where i practice and what i practice.

what i'm doing right now: a potentially incomplete list

i try to stay pretty busy, and here's an incomplete list of what i'm doing:

studying Zen at Dharma Mountain with my teacher Seido
preparing for jukai and, thusly, learning how to sew a rakusu
preparing to start a BS in Information Technology at CSU-Global
working full-time at the library*
hiking and photographing nature and adventures at slowcurious
trying to be a good partner to my lovely significant other
trying to be a good son to my lovely mother
trying to be as solarpunk as possible, in part by:

• driving a hybrid car (mine's named Samus)
• bike commuting regularly (my bike's named Vella)
• considering green energy alternatives to my normal apartment life
• trying to generate less waste

working on Green/ecosocialist politics locally and at the state level
contemplating a run for City Council
deepening my study of social and political issues and theory
getting my civic pariticipation on via the Commission on Arts & Culture
participating in an online Men's Body Trust group to work on body positivity

*i think it should go without saying, but just in case: nothing said here or anywhere online by me necessarily reflects the views of my employer.

First Post Best Post?

Hi friends! My name is Andy Hamilton and I'm a bunch of stuff. Amongst them: fat, bearded, activist, environmentalist, tech enthusiast, Buddhist, student of Zen, wanderer, photographer, etc. This is going to be my basic home away from home, if you will. I'll talk about my Buddhist practice, environmentalist activities, activism, and more!

Note: the term errant is in the archaic literary sense of "on a search for adventure!"