What do you call a wolf who meditates?
AWAREWOLF!
cec
The Cultivation of Interdependence
No surprise that interdependence can feel like sweet balm in an otherwise-imbalanced world. But what we seem to forget is that interdependence isn’t something we have to try for, orchestrate or strive for. It’s something we simply can’t fall out of.
In other words, you do not have to try to be interdependent. You simply can’t not be.
May I Be In My Practice a Full Half-Hour Before My Ego Knows I’m Awake.
So I’ve started to bring more curiosity and openness to how I wake up. What thoughts am I first aware of? Do they come with or cause any emotional affect in the body? Or am I driven to thoughts to distract myself from some emotional discomfort already present in the body? And whatever I notice, can I meet it with equanimity, just allow it without any resistance, agenda, or need for it to go away or be other than it is?
Being Wilderness
In the Buddhist tradition, the elements — fire, water, earth, air, space — are a way of knowing the living texture of reality itself, how it moves and changes and dances on its own. The elements are not on any self-improvement mission. Fire is just warm. Earth just heaps. Water coheres, air moves, and space accommodates. Nature is not FOR anything. It just IS. Us too.
But easier said than felt. We tend to reign over the wilderness of the bodymind like land-developers, trimming the unruly underbrush, damming up the emotional rivers, paving over the spooky swamps where the wild things are. Even stillness and meditation, tools of self-discovery, can get co-opted into this project of self-control and self-curation. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. And as a total and continuous experience of being, it is exhausting.
Holding on to Let Go
In Attachment Theory, the original sense of safety is provided by our primary caregiver. They either meet our needs consistently in a way that helps us trust that our needs will be met, or they don’t, which leads to a fundamental mistrust that others, and the world in general, will be able to meet our needs.
When we take this perspective, that a sense of safety helps us relax and trust, then we can begin to see that these principles aren’t actually in contrast to much of what’s taught in Buddhism.
Buddhism has these principles embedded all through it. If you were to become a traditional Buddhist, you’d do something that’s called Taking Refuge. You take refuge in The Three Jewels, which are The Buddha (the teacher or enlightened ideal), The Dharma (the teachings or truth of the path), and the Sangha (the community).
While the Buddha preached non-attachment, The Three Jewels definitely look like forms of attachment to me. My theory is that while The Buddha taught an ideal, it was also realized that there’s a very real process to ultimately achieving that ideal.