Happiness vs Non-Attachment

Recently, I spent 3 days at a Buddhist monastery.

No, I didn’t disguise myself as a Buddhist monk and sneak in. I was actually welcome there by the residential monks to an Introductory Retreat – the first retreat if you’ve never visited before, at the beautiful Shasta Abbey near Mt. Shasta, California.

The mostly silent retreat – mostly because we were encouraged to ask questions during “Dharma Discussions” and communicate as necessary during instruction and invited to sign up for a counseling session with a residential monk – all required the use of our voices.

I have been home for three days. There are two major things coming forward for me to share with you all:

First:

I love spending time in silence. It’s a relief for me in my overly articulated, super-verbal life. (Some might even call me bossy at times!) But I really like silence! Here’s what I wrote about it during the retreat:

“I really like the silent times where I don't talk. The thoughts that will never reach my lips somehow have a clearer, crisper -  pure bell-like quality to them. I didn't realize how the prospect of speaking thoughts (or potentially writing them) adjust them - taint them somehow. As if the intensity with which I think things that might get spoken or written created an unknown tension in my brain. It's a relief."

The fabulous monk, Reverend Mugo, to whom I talked wrote about my thoughts on silence in a kind and eloquent way on her blog with my OK and preserving my privacy. Here’s a link to her blog (url below). I highly recommend you subscribe as I find her blog to be of great spiritual insight and value, not to mention pragmatic, especially for those of us not living full time at a monastery!

http://www.jademountains.net/thoughts-unspoken/

Second:

Non-attachment is the bomb!

            (Am I attached to non-attachment?!?)

But happiness is confusing. Our constitution contains the word, stating every citizen of the United States (save slaves, indentured servants, and indigenous people at the time!) has the right to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but what exactly is happiness? Surely someone high on morphine, while at the best part of the high, feels happy, right? Some might argue that’s not really happiness, but pursuing and feeling happy can be as goal-oriented, evasive and have a chasing-the-dragon quality, I think. For example, most people would probably categorize me as a happy person; I think I’m someone who cultivates happiness on a regular basis – for me my cultivation activities include meditation, exercise, eating healthy, being myself and spending time with people who embrace me for who I am; in other words, not feeling (or believing) that I need to be other than who I am.

I’ve been having internal dialogues and researching happiness for a while now, but from my experience at the Abbey, I’m realizing that a more non-attached way of being actually leads to what most people call happiness. It may not be as manic (though true happiness really isn’t manic) or exciting, and is likely less obvious. But life’s little annoyances don’t carry much weight when practicing non-attachment. Two examples: Yesterday while in the kitchen, I accidentally spilled some water. In the past I would’ve gotten annoyed that I did this and I know the physiological symptoms of this annoyed state were heighted blood pressure and acid throughout my body (typical physiological stress responses). Yesterday, I basically shrugged, mopped up the water, and moved on. Today, I didn’t have enough toilet paper in the bathroom and realized it too late. Our extra supply is in our overflow storage (bathroom is small), which is outside and about 20 feet away from the bathroom and no one was around to fetch some for me. Being really into personal and excrement-related hygiene would be part of my excuse why I would’ve gotten annoyed in the past. Today, upon realizing I had about one-wipe worth of TP left, said “crap” aloud to no one, and once again shrugged, decided to deal with it calmly (and not beat myself up for forgetting to replenish earlier) and just did what was necessary to remedy the situation.

Non-attachment! What a revelation. And it can be so hard to do this when absorbed in the annoying moment. It’s worth noting that I’ve called myself a “recovering perfectionist,” and I think that was a factor in my annoyance about things that I judge could have been better or perfected.

Now I’m still quite attached to certain things: family, loved ones, friends, healthy food, shelter, fun, relaxation, even meditation! But, this way of being also helps me to acknowledge that losing any of the aforementioned human needs and attachments, like family, shelter and food wouldn’t be as emotionally devastating as they would be were I not practicing non-attachment.

Meditation helps. A lot. Helps me to be in a non-attached way of being. Some call it “seeing things as they are” or “seeing the truth.”

But I’m also not trying to be attached to meditation and am mindfully aware of that as well. For now, I feel it is one of the best tools for overall health and wellness… and for seeing things as they are. Truly.

And that’s the trouble with language. Often the same word means vastly different things depending on person and context.

So, how is it for you? How do you define happiness? Non-attachment? Are you cultivating anything in your life? Does it add to your daily calm contentedness? Who are you? Are you able to be you regularly?

One final thought: Shasta Abbey is one of a handful of monasteries where male and female monks live and train together at their monastery but still practice celibacy. All the monks have shaved heads and wear similar brown robes. As you can imagine, that makes it difficult to reference a monk if one doesn’t know their name. I would smile and laugh often during my 3 days at Shasta Abbey… But during meditation I was trying to stay still and silent, so I'd let the laugh just circulate instead of letting it be audible or sharing it with someone. A common reoccurring thought was that I wanted to call the female monks monkettes or monkess, or the male monks monkers. All those words struck me as funny. I haven’t asked permission yet whether any of these terms are appropriate, so to describe a monk whose name I couldn’t recall, I simply said, the gentle-lady monk or gentleman monk.

A Day of Silence

Of late, I've been eating mostly organic, mostly raw or in the event I eat non-raw, I eat organic vegan. The diet is devised primarily by Aajonus Vonderplanitz, but Marcus has made a few variations based on his own experience, taste buds, and work with clients.

Those who know me say I look better than ever. I've been working out pretty lustfully too - usually 30-40 minutes of hard cardio (the 600 calorie per hour variety of cardio), and body-builder/fitness-model inspired weight-lifting every day or as my muscles recover (sometimes a 2-3 day cycle of weight-lifting). 

So, the combination of super-healthy eating and working out like Arnold's younger sister has put me on a path toward feeling and potentially looking better than ever.

But four days ago, I ate some non-organic, who-the-fuck-knows-how-it-was prepared food. Now it wasn't prepared via a cart downtown, and it was technically vegetarian, and at a decent restaurant, but it did not do me well. In the past I'd do this once or twice a week, but of late I'll sometimes go a month without ingesting non-organic food.

The next day I felt a little off, by two days passed, I felt as if my body were detoxifying and my inflammation (immune responses) had kicked in almost fully. Achy, swollen/sore throat, and generally feeling yucky.

If I'm living so healthy, why would I feel this awful after only one semi-bad meal?

Part of me thinks this is complete bullocks - I have formatted my daily life around healthy living! My body should be able to handle one bad meal!

But as I check in about it with my higher wisdom, I know that my body is just taking care of me.

No longer am I a practical, economy car. I'm an indy-car, and bad-fuel in an indy car is much more noticeable than low-grade fuel in a Honda accord.

It leads me to another thought, however. If this had happened in the past, my body was probably more occupied with other, more toxic exposures than one little meal. Alcohol, negative thoughts, an over-all less healthy and high-cylinder life-style.

Are we all just functioning at a lower-level than we're meant to? Have we all just grown accustomed to a low-grade level of feeling shitty all the time?!?

I read a book years ago called "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." In the book, author Thom Hartmann talks about how our predecessors, the nomadic, living-in-harmony-with-the-earth peoples as having more leisure time - up to 80% - because they lived in harmony with the earth, had few possessions, and worked together for what food and shelter they did require. He contrasted that with modern humans, who work up to 80% of our waking hours - all the while attempting to gain more leisure time.

The diet I currently eat is actually most similar to the way people lived and dined when we were nomadic. I eat foods closest to their natural state - organic, raw, or gently cooked and never highly-processed. Natives didn't eat this way based on some philosophy; humans evolved eating this way, it was natural and not given a second thought. And of course, organic used to be just food. Pesticides back in the day were natural peppermint or other clever tribal movement or crop rotations - also not based on philosophy, just based upon tried and true methods of sustainability.

So why the sore throat and aches? Truly I don't know for certain, but in honor of my body telling me I should be gentle with myself, I'm taking a day of silence today - not using and saving my voice for another day when I feel well again. No phone calls, no speaking with my love Marcus, no chatting with the check-out girl at the market. I'm not working today, so it'll be easier, though I must admit, using my voice is such an automatic, default way of communicating, the days not even half through and I've slipped 4 words already. I recommit myself, and trust my body to heal.

Maybe that's why the immune response to the bad food - to remind me of my body's ability to heal; my body's inherent intelligence with releasing unfamiliar and toxic substances...because when you think about it, all of our processed foods are toxic. Our bodies haven't yet evolved to eating hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, or genetically modified foods. How could they? These things have only been around 20-80 years. The human body takes 12,000 years to evolve. Minimum! If scientists don't know for sure how long it takes, I won't pretend to know, but most agree it takes a minimum of 12,000, most likely 50,000 or more.

So today, I'm silent. Don't try to call me. You can text or email, but talking I will be refraining from. I suppose I could also go sit on some moss and smoke some Ayahuasca too if I were really going native.