Opportunity From Disaster – Learning Opportunity Six: Experiment With Cooperation

Experiment with creating with others in times of shared disaster. This may be a major life-threatening event for thousands of people, such as a hurricane, earthquake, forest fire, or volcanic eruption or it might be a serious event for relatively few, such as an auto, work, or play accident. Cooperating with others may be a stretch because it requires truly listening to others and having others truly listen to you. Cooperation is not merely volunteering and taking orders from those who are organizing a structured response to suffering. Whether it is regional, city-wide, or in your neighborhood, cooperation requires live, real-time, co-creative conversations between you and a friend or several friends about what might be done. This is an experiment to see if, in co-creation (which requires equality), you can arrive at some possible ways to assist that you might not have thought about or taken seriously if you had considered them by yourself.

You don’t have to wait for a natural disaster to practice. You can begin by looking for ways to interact with others that would potentially yield more benefit to all than any of you could provide individually. Perhaps sharing lawn mower ownership with a neighbor(s), car-pooling, or rotating shifts by a hospitalized friend’s bedside or cooking meals for her children. There are countless ways to cooperate. As you begin to experiment look for benefits that you will find in all of them – satisfaction, gratification, and fulfillment. Is the potential of creating these in your life worth some experimentation to you?

© Gary Zukav

Opportunity From Disaster –Learning Opportunity Five: How Do I See Myself?

Allow your suffering as well as your experiences of seeing other people suffer to show you what you think of yourself.

Do you think of yourself as someone who can make a difference in the world? Or do you think of yourself as someone who has no power in the world? Do you think of yourself as someone to whom others listen? Or as someone whom others do not see? In other words, use your emotional reactions to the experiences of people suffering, as well as to your own suffering, to show you how you look at yourself because how you look at yourself did not come into being when you first encountered the suffering. You saw yourself this way long before the divorce, separation, death, illness, or painful experience that now occupies your attention. You have looked at yourself this way all your life. Use your experiences of the painful experience that is in your life now, or that has been in your life, or that you fear being in your life, to let you see how you are looking at yourself and if you feel that your view of yourself is not a healthy one, you can change it. You can also consider the possibility that what you do in the world and what you say have impact whether or not you are willing to accept that.

You can also realize that the great souls we admire, such as Mahatma Gandhi, such as Martin Luther King, such as those who are doing so much in their own ways to help others, are souls like you. The difference is that they do not allow themselves to be incapacitated by a self-perception of powerlessness. They assume that their efforts will benefit others and they make efforts to benefit others, each in their own way. You are in a position to observe whether you are a person who feels that you can contribute to the world regardless of what you are experiencing in the moment, or feels that you cannot. In fact, you can. It is only your perception that prevents you.

"The Law of Detachment," by Deepak Chopra

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty . . . in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe. I will put the Law of Detachment into effect by making a commitment to take the following steps:

Today I will commit myself to detachment. I will allow myself and those around me the freedom to be as they are. I will not rigidly impose my idea of how things should be. I will not force solutions on problems, thereby creating new problems. I will participate in everything with detached involvement.

Today I will factor in uncertainty as an essential ingredient of my experience. In my willingness to accept uncertainty, solutions will spontaneously emerge out of the problem, out of the confusion, order and chaos. The more uncertain things seem to be, the more secure I will feel, because uncertainty is my path to freedom. Through the wisdom of uncertainty, I will find my security.

I will step into the field of all possibilities and anticipate the excitement that can occur when I remain open to an infinity of choices. When I step into the field of all possibilities, I will experience all the fun, adventure, magic and mystery of life.

Daily Inspiration

"Everyone has a purpose in life ... a unique gift or special talent to give to others. And when we blend this unique talent with service to others, we experience the ecstasy and exultation of our own spirit, which is the ultimate goal of all goals." -- Deepak Chopra

CARLA BEACH: Matching Inner & Outer Desires: Feng Shui Visioning Board Retreat

Sangha member Carla Beach is offering a seminar. Please see below for details.

~COF Administration

This retreat is designed to empower women to identify what they desire to create in their lives and how to bring that to manifestation. Retreat leaders are Carla Beach, Denise Brooks, and Jane Marzoni.

CLICK HERE for details.

Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009

10am to 4pm

Fee: $85

Vision Board supplies provided.

CLICK HERE to register online

Bliss Wood and Dick Sutphen to Co-Host Seminar in Sedona

Dick Sutphen and Sangha member Bliss Wood will be conducting a seminar together in Sedona, September 18-20. The details can be found here.

Bliss will be teaching a portion of this workshop with her latest CD, ChantDance.

Join Dick and Bliss for this workshop in beautiful, mystical Sedona! You can learn more about ChantDance here!

Meditation for Difficult Times, by Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön on four ways that meditation helps us deal with difficulty

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is a simple, direct relationship with our being. We call this maitri, loving-kindness toward ourselves and others. There are four qualities of maitri that are cultivated when we meditate:

Steadfastness. When we practice meditation we are strengthening our ability to be steadfast with ourselves, in body as well as mind.

Clear seeing. This is another way of saying that we have less self-deception. Through the process of practicing the technique day in and day out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves.

Experiencing our emotional distress. We practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. We stay with the emotion, experience it, and leave it as it is, without proliferating. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotions.

Attention to the present moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward others, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love. These four factors not only apply to sitting meditation, but are essential to all the bodhichitta (awakened heart) practices and for relating with difficult situations in our daily lives. By cultivating them we discover for ourselves that it is bodhichitta, not confusion, that is basic.

From the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun

Why Oscar Winning Actress Ellen Burstyn Slept On A NYC Street: Stepping Out Of Your Comfort Zone

We all dread stepping out of what is familiar and known: your comfort zone. But when we do, we can discover enormous reserves of strength within ourselves, as actress Ellen Burstyn told us she did when she was homeless.

Most of us have a deep fear that the unthinkable could possibly happen to us, such as becoming homeless. In today's economy, many people are finding themselves on the street through no fault of their own. Yet how many of us acknowledge street people as fellow human beings with needs no different from ours, simply without the means to fulfill them? Instead, how often do we avert our eyes when we pass them by and pretend they do not exist?

In an attempt to find out what it would take to see homeless people as being no different from ourselves, Rev. James Morton, the dean of St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York, began an experiment. As Zen teacher Grover Gauntt told us:

"He designed what he called the plunge: an act of diving into unknown waters and getting completely whacked and disorientated so you can orientate yourself in a new way. And he applied this to the street by sending his ministers out without any money, no place to live, no identification, just like the people they were serving. The first thing they did, quite naturally, was to go to the churches and ask for help, but, of course, very few would help them."
From here developed the idea of street retreats: living on the street for a few days as a spiritual practice, intended to bring people into the very midst of society's neediest, and by doing so to seek a place of inclusivity. Bernie Glassman, founding teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, talked to us for our book, BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You and the World.

He told us: "The homelessness that exists in our society is due to treating people as throwaways, and it will only end when we stop seeing them as garbage. Street retreats are where we live and practice meditation on the streets, begging and sleeping rough just as any homeless person would. We meet for meditation periods together and then disperse to do what we have to in order to survive, such as finding food to eat and boxes to sleep on."

Bernie continued: "I included meditation as I wanted to show that meditation is not just sitting on a cushion but reaches out to every aspect of life. It is a way of bringing us into a state of inclusivity and of not-knowing, and when that happens, the experience of oneness arises. But at the same time we have the experience of not existing. When you are homeless and begging, people walk past you, you are completely ignored, you simply do not exist. When you have been so ignored, it is impossible to do that to another person. You can no longer look away from anybody or anything."

Ellen Burstyn had this experience of being ignored when she did a street retreat and lived on the street with the homeless. In our book she told us:

"I did the street retreat because I was so afraid of it. I could physically feel how much fear I had about being away from my comfort zone, my bed, and especially not having any identity. The whole idea of begging was terrifying. The first time I did it, I had to a cross a street to a restaurant with tables outside. Two women were eating there and I decided to approach them. As I walked toward them, I felt like I was crossing over some line that I had consciously never known was there. I was purposefully stepping through my ego to experience what was on the other side. I approached the women and simply asked, 'Excuse me, but I need a dollar for the subway. Could either of you spare a dollar?' The woman closest to me reached into her pocket and handed me a dollar without taking her eyes off her companion's face. I said 'Thank you' and walked away. I felt a strange pride that I had really accomplished something, but then enormous sadness as I realized that neither of the women had looked at me. I had got what I needed, but I had been disregarded, I had not been seen."

This invisibility is one of the biggest difficulties for the homeless. As Grover Gauntt, who is a street retreat leader, says:

"Just a day can seem like forever as it is so intense. Suddenly, you do not have the money to get home, buy a cup of tea, make a phone call, or do anything. Fear rises as you are without any identity, any way of saying you are who you are. How do you relate to this world now? You have to find a place to sleep; you have to beg for food. And you watch people move their eyes to avoid seeing you. When we don't have the experience of something, then we tend to negate or categorize it. Homeless people get categorized as being alcoholics, drug addicts, there to rip you off, or just plain crazy. But every homeless person has a story and a history, just like we do. Before I first took the plunge, I was fearful of confrontation, but I learned that confrontation is just disguised fear. I rarely pass a homeless person now without saying a few words and acknowledging him as a human being. Taking the plunge into the unknown is an expansion into a different way of seeing, an acceptance of all states of being beyond one's own limitations."

Doing anything outside of our experience is a plunge, especially stepping into places that we resist or are fearful of. The added ingredient of meditation to the street retreats was to deepen the experience of inclusivity, that we are all a part of each other, whether we are homeless or not. Such retreats, now held in many cities across the country, confront our fear and in so doing embrace our shared humanity.

By: Ed and Deb Shapiro

Opportunity From Disaster – Learning Opportunity Four: Where Does My Attention Go?

Allow the experiences of those who are suffering to help you discern where your attention goes. Much of what is presented to you on television has been pre-digested and comes through the filters of those who are presenting it, yet there are many viewpoints – those who are suffering, those who are alleviating the suffering, those who are blaming others for pro-longing the suffering, and those who are defending themselves. In all of this, where does your attention go most eagerly? What do you look for without realizing that you are looking for it? Do you look for conflict? Do you look for someone to blame? Do you find yourself sympathetic with those who have found someone to blame and want to ally yourself in that activity? Do you look for those who are spreading good will, even in a time of great pain? Does your sympathy go with them or simply your curiosity? Do you look for violence, for stories of looting, of raping, of violation? Or do you look for stories of support, stories of heart-felt connection between people who do not know each other but recognize each other with a humanity that is deep and real?

What is it that you are drawn to? Begin to think in terms of what am I “drawn to naturally” (without thinking about it) and at the same time realize that what you are drawn to look at without thinking is what you are drawn to unconsciously so that you can make that magnet in your psyche conscious, so that you can become aware of it and identify that which draws your attention when you are not aware. Then, if you decide that your attention is not going where it is most healthy for you to go, you can choose other things to look for.