A Life's Work.

 Join us at www.lifes.work

Exploring who we are and our place in the world.

Siddhearta becomes A Life's Work

Exciting news! 

Starting next week I am going to be rolling over my Siddhearta blog to the new website A Life's Work. The past few months I have been building this new website and creating a vision of what I would like to share. I am really excited about how it has come together and I am looking forward to you joining me on the next leg of this journey. 

For those of you who have been subscribers to the Siddhearta blog, thank you! You have encouraged me and inspired me in my practice for many years. I have loved the interactions that have taken place in email exchanges and in workshops. I am looking forward to having more of those conversations and plan to offer more courses and workshops in the near future. 

If you have been a subscriber, starting next week Monday you are going to be getting email updates from A Life's Work instead of Siddhearta. Your experience will largely be the same as it has been (but will be more beautiful and mobile friendly;). You will still receive weekly blog posts on a variety of topics related to your practice and integrating your practice with your daily life, and you are still invited to share your own feedback and insight. 

Current subscribers to Siddhearta will be free subscribers on A Life's Work. The free subscription includes:

• Mondays: Weekly blog post.
• General content: Access to most content 

Paid subscribers to A Life's Work ($10/mo or $100/yr) will include:

• Tuesdays: Inner Circle Zoom meeting
• Wednesdays: Deep dive on evolving topics
• Fridays: Seeds to contemplate for the weekend ahead. 
• Full access: To all content, practice resources and guided meditation instruction

Thank you for all of your support and if you have any questions please let me know! 

See you next week!

A Life's Work.

I've spent the past few months working on a new project, something I am calling A Life's Work. It is still a work in progress, but I thought I would give those of you who have supported me for the past few years a sneak peak. 

Take a look, let me know what you think. I welcome your feedback and hope you'll join me on this journey. 

https://www.lifes.work/

Why A Life's Work?

Have you ever ended up down a path you didn't want to be on? Somehow you have found yourself in the darkness, lost in the wilderness, not really knowing where you are or how you got here.

You might feel that you are not living up to your potential, or that you are living at odds with your values or aspirations. You might feel stuck, afraid, tired, unable to appreciate your significance or purpose in this life. You might be sick, in pain, battling your body or your mind with an imminent fear of death or loss.

A Life's Work is about rediscovering who we are, our place in the world, and the gifts we have to share. It is foremost about living a life dedicated to practice. My aim is to give you a light, a lantern, a torch to take with you on your journey, so that you can find your way through the darkness and wilderness.

Along the way, you'll learn to tend that light so it doesn't go out, as well as learn useful wayfinding tools and techniques. Some of these skills you will find useful and beneficial, others you will leave behind. Once you are ready and equipped for the path, you'll learn how to orient yourself in unfamiliar territory, and how to use landmarks and recognize signposts along the way. As you progress, you'll learn to value and appreciate guides and fellow travelers on the path, so that you can save time and gain insight about the path ahead.

By the end, I hope you'll have gained confidence in being a wayfinder, and discovered that the destination is not nearly as important as enjoying the journey that is this life. If you are one of the fortunate ones, you might even discover the great joy that is sharing your light with others, giving them the gift of exploring the wilderness of their own life with confidence and determination.

Living with pain, not in pain.

Chronic pain is a very common and often debilitating condition that affects young and old alike. Western medicine struggles with pain management, we encourage modalities like physical therapy, massage, accupuncture, exercise, but often end up turning to opioids and other medications to manage chronic pain. Meditation has made its way into the treatment of pain, but even that has mixed results. 

Meditation seems to be touted as a cure-all these days, recommended for everything from treating hypertension, to mental illness, chronic pain, and improving overall well-being. There is a lot of good data supporting the practice of meditation for these purposes, but I think it is important to recognize that meditation is not a cure-all, but rather manages to make everything workable. 

This is a rather minor but significant shift. Meditation won't solve all your problems, but it will help make all your problems workable. Problems of all kinds are solved when we see them as workable. When we know that we can experiment, play around with things, try something new in a maybe slightly different way, we can solve problems. Maybe the problem goes away, maybe it just becomes less of a threat. 

Most of the power that problems have, and this is especially true of chronic pain, is that they seem inescapable. The pain doesn't go away, and it doesn't seem likely that it is going to go away tomorrow. This persistent experience in our lives is exhausting and drains a lot of our attention and energy. When we fight our pain, it always wins, because it gains power when we resist it. Try to escape its presence by using drugs and alcohol, and we just find it again on the other side of our stupor. Escape seems hopeless, we seem powerless, and it is very easy for depression to set it. 

The solution that meditation provides is to find some space with the pain. In meditation, we find that we can experience pain, but not be overwhelmed by the pain. The pain is there, dancing, doing its thing, but it is also a little distant from 'us'. We find that we don't need to identify with the pain, that we can live with the pain, rather than in pain. Pain in this sense becomes like a companion with us on the journey of life. Sure, it is often a nagging companion that we don't really want to hang out with, but alas, here we are. If they are going to join you on this journey, you might as well figure out how this relationship is going to work. 

If you are feeling stuck with a chronic problem like pain, start by trying to find a space where you can be present amidst the pain. Set out to discover a sense of peace and calm, a solid ground to stand (or sit), amidst the experience of pain. This ground is the basis of exploring and understanding your relationship with pain. When you start to realize that you can experience pain but not be dominated by its presence, then you have made the problem workable. Gradually, your presence overpowers the presence of pain. Sit with that, your presence overwhelms the presence of pain, rather than the other way around (the old way of our relationship with pain).

Then, like the Buddha said, our pain becomes like a teaspoon for salt in a large body of water, rather than a small cup. The salts still there, but not as distasteful.  

My last thought on the use of meditation for working with pain. Often, we are asked by the doctor how much pain we are in, 0-10. If the pain is held as a constant level of experience, what if we change our relationship to that pain. How can we move from a 7 to a 5? Or even a two? That's what meditation can do, I'm confident of that. 

Natural stability.

Recently, some Dharma friends and I were discussing the natural stability that we find when resting in the natural state and we came upon a useful metaphor that is worth sharing: that natural stability in our meditation is like the buoyancy of the body in saltwater. 

Our bodies naturally float when they are put in the correct position. When our head and lungs are properly positioned, we can find a lot of natural stability and ease in the water quite effortlessly. It often takes really simple corrections to get the body into the correct position, and then we find that we can relax into the natural stability of that state. 

It is much the same in meditation, by relying on the correct technique (such as the three immovables),  we put our awareness in the correct position to discover natural stability. When relying on this technique, oftentimes small corrections can have profound effects. We don't need to manufacture stability, or put in a lot of effort to make it happen. Rather, we are allowing the natural stability of awareness to come to the fore. 

What we are discovering in this type of meditation is our natural condition, the nature of our own mind. Stability, clarity, peaceful, satisfied, these are all qualities that are naturally present when we are resting in the natural state. By learning to rest naturally, we are not so overwhelmed by our day to day interactions. Like a buoy out at sea, we become an island of safety and a source of refuge for those who are lost at sea.