So far the weekend is going well. I’d thought it was going to be one of those lost weekends where I spend the whole thing napping, but it began last night with a burst of accomplishment—plowing through my stack of unread periodicals—that ended in time to go to sleep by about 1 a.m., which meant there was ample time for Saturday to get off to a roaring start. I read two issues of Harper’s, one New Yorker, one Poets & Writers, and People (which I call The Journal of Popular Studies—I wouldn’t have any idea what anyone was talking about if I didn’t read it; actually, I mostly just look at the pictures). All I had left to read today in the way of periodicals was Tricycle.
Even after getting a full night’s sleep, I can easily sleep until 5 p.m. the next day, but today I got up at about 10 a.m. and did something or other. I can’t remember exactly what, but I do have the sense of having really been on top of things. I keep meaning to edit a longish piece about P., break it into shorter parts and put it here, but can’t quite get around to that. Oh, I know what I did this morning: I called My Best Friend, the pet store in the Castro, to see about getting 150 pounds of cat litter, but they are going out of business, which is a shame. I envisioned spending the rest of the weekend on the phone trying to find another source, only to find that the cat litter people had also gone out of business, but my very next call, to a pet store on 24th St., yielded the promise of the desired item, and then I felt great.
I also cut three old t-shirts into rags and figured out exactly how many stamps of various denominations I have to buy to make things come out more or less even now that the rates have changed; besides lots of 37-cent stamps, I also have some 34-cent stamps that belonged to my beloved, departed grandmother.
I talked to my mother briefly (my father was about ready to serve dinner) and did take a teensy nap and also talked to my friend Lisa. After my nap, I went to Freewheel to get the Marin and brought a bar of Venezuelan each for Dan and Eric. In a few minutes here, I’m going to go up to Tom’s and we’re going to watch The End of Suburbia.
Another thing I did earlier was meditate for an hour. For about three years, I meditated for an hour every single day, but recently I gave that up, as it was starting to feel like a chore. I decided instead to just meditate at least five minutes a day and leave it at that. (Before I started meditating for an hour a day, I asked my meditation teacher, Howie Cohn, what he would think of someone who meditated just five minutes a day for the rest of her life, as it seemed at the time that that’s all I was going to be able to do. His answer was wonderful: “I would think that person was very devoted to her spiritual practice.”)
I began sitting five minutes a day, and in no time, it grew to an hour a day. It turns out that it was a much bigger step to go from no regular practice to five minutes a day than it was to go from five minutes a day to an hour a day.
Today was the first time I’ve sat for an hour since formally swearing off. It was good. What I do lately is a bit of metta (lovingkindness) for myself, picturing myself sleeping at my friend Carol Joy’s, which I did recently, and it was very dark and quiet (unlike where I usually sleep) and Carol Joy was in the next room and there was a little lamp over the bed thoughtfully placed by Carol Joy or her husband, and right outside a nearby window was a beautiful orange tree. I picture myself there and say a set or two or three of metta phrases: May I be happy. May I be strong and healthy. May I be safe and protected. (May I be safe and protected on my bicycle.) May I live with ease.
It turns out that doing metta for myself is a really good way to generate friendly feelings toward others.
Then I do a bit of concentration practice, attending to the sensation of breath at my nostrils, and then I spend the rest of the time on mindfulness of my body: throat, chest, belly; or a full-body scan; or whatever calls my attention most.
I went to a concentration retreat last year and it was wonderful. For one thing, it generated more pleasant feelings than had my entire 14 years of vipassana practice put together. But I found subsequently that it's not a good idea to only do concentration practice, as for me it created a laserlike intensity that could easily get used to ill effect: when I was angry, I was really angry. And one of the teachers at the retreat, Steve Armstrong, who I thought was fantastic, observed that the point of doing concentration practice is not for it to be an end in itself, but to take the resulting steadiness of mind and use it for one's vipassana, or insight, practice, which is what actually ends suffering, specifically insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness. That's why I spend most time on mindfulness for the purpose of insight rather than mindfulness for the purpose of concentration.
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