All of the management team here says that Samadhi Cushions has been busy for the last two years, almost non-stop. I joke that it helps to have someone answering e-mails and phone calls on a regular basis (one of my primary job responsibilities). I am happy to know that even during economic hardships, that this small but lively not-for-profit is continuing to grow– with the staff nearly doubling in size in the last year alone.

I have been training my own replacement in the last week and half, this has added to the chaos in these last couple weeks. But honestly, I love it. I love coming to work and not knowing what the day will hold. Don’t get me wrong,this job has numerous routine responsibilities that are tied to it, but everyday generally throws a curve-ball of some kind.  Days like today, where the multiple phone lines seem to ring almost non-stop. Or days where we get four to five wholesale orders in a single day, when we haven’t had any for weeks.

I suppose I should explain why I am leaving such a delightful job and moving roughly 7 hours south and several states away to the relative unknowns of New Jersey. This past summer while working full time I was attending school full time to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at Lyndon State College. This was a revamped plan since my last post. Previously I had been working on an Accounting degree, and was anticipating remaining in Vermont and at Samadhi Cushions for at least another year. Thanks to Rod Jacobson, the chair of the Business Department, I changed to Business Administration thus allowing me to graduate a year earlier than originally planned. I had planned on moving after getting my bachelors degree, I just didn’t know it was going to be to New Jersey. New Jersey was not an option for me before I met Tony (link to his artwork).

Tony is the reason why I am moving to New Jersey. We met online. To some people, that seems totally weird. But consider the following: I have been using online “dating” for a number of years, for two main reasons: first, there is an extremely limited quantity of available, attractive, educated men my age in this particular section of Vermont, second, people I go to school with are usually 5-7 years younger then me and people I work with are generally twice my age (most married or have a significant other). So to “chat” let alone date anyone my own age I need to seek out others in an online forum. I have had MANY unsuccessful dating attempts, both in this and the Burlington area. Honestly, I would do it all again as long as Tony was waiting for me at the end.

While it is sad to leave this chapter of my life behind, I am taking fond memories with me into the future. Along with two Gomdens, and two low Cloud Benches for our own personal use.

Goodbye to the greatest boss I’ve ever had: Jeanine

Goodbye to my “marketing” director: Michael G.

Goodbye to my “store manager”: Sumner

Goodbye to my “shipping manager”: Randy

Goodbye to my “production manager”: Judy a.k.a. “I’ll lock in the attic so you can’t leave!”

Goodbye to my “technological wiz”: Michael T.

Goodbye to the “hardest working man I know”: Lee

Goodbye to my dear friend Cassandra

Goodbye to my “Monday” Bonnie

Goodbye to all the lovely ladies who sew: Barb, Bonnie, Marie, Jeannie (my mom) and Wilma

Goodbye and Hello to my replacement: Kelsey

I have been with Samadhi Cushions for almost 6 months now.

It all started with an e-mail, as many things do these days. Career Services at Lyndon State College circulated an e-mail stating that Samadhi Cushions was looking for a telephone and office support person. I sent Jeanine my resume and cover letter, and shortly had an interview. I had never been to Samadhi Store before, and didn’t really have any idea what I was getting myself into. I was warned by Jeanine and Michael that there were some major projects that I would be taking on.

I was not fazed. I think they expected me to run screaming from the building here (which is where the cushions are actually made), but I didn’t. I left the interview with a starting schedule of Monday, June 14th from 9am to 4:30pm. I have been here ever since.

A few interesting facts:

I am not a Buddhist, and I do not meditate, but I can answer most questions about meditation cushions you might have (just by osmosis I guess). I am allergic to incense used in meditation, but I can recommend several kinds to you that you might like.

I have completely redone the filing systems in both the office and the store, so if you are looking for something around here you can actually find it. I have some weird ability: when I come to work at Samadhi Cushions, people call or e-mail with new and novel questions that nobody else on the staff seems to get at any other time.

I am not the newest member on staff any more (Barbara was hired to help with sewing the meditation cushions), and it feels like I have been much longer than a mere 6 months. Maybe that is because I do not shy away from asking questions and picked up the daily routine easily.

I walked in here six months ago not knowing how to pronounce Samadhi (Sa-Ma-Dee), Zafu (Za-Foo) as in the round meditation pillow–which I had never seen before, Zabuton (Za-B’you-Tawn) as in the mat, Gomden (Gom-Den)–looks like a block or Seiza (Say-Za) as in the Kneeling Bench. Now I know what these cushions look like and can say the funny words that are their names. I can also help others learn how to pronounce them.

In the Samadhi Store, I can still run across things with names that I myself cannot pronounce, and Sumner (the Store Manager) usually gets a kick out of my attempts and phonetic spellings. But he understands what I am trying to say most of the time.

Like everything, it is a daily learning process working here (if you keep your eyes and ears open), and I am very happy to be a part of it.

What goes around...

Scientists in Germany reported Thursday that the often-described sense of lost-hiker déjà vu, of having inadvertently backtracked while wandering in the woods — is real. “People really do walk in circles,” said Jan L. Souman of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen.  – The New York Times, August 2009

The path of meditation shines a light on habitual patterns that keep us lost, both to ourselves and the world we inhabit. For meditation to move forward, however, orientation is essential. As the article from the Times on lost hikers aptly demonstrates, orientation isn’t optional. We always have one. The question is: where is it taking us? Summarized notes and quotes from the Times’ article in italics:

As long as the sun or moon was out, volunteers were able to walk (more or less) in a straight line. But on cloudy days or dark nights, they would loop back on themselves, often several times.

Find a meditation teacher. Read a book that speaks to you. Find friends who are interested in meditation. Teachers and companions on the path are the sun and moon that meditators use to orient themselves.  They can help you find and adjust your direction. Like any discipline, meditation practice needs view or vision. Teachers and companions on the path of meditation can provide essential guidance.

Information sources in the brain are relative  — “they don’t tell you when you are moving in the same direction as an hour ago.” When it comes to being lost — “you cannot trust your own senses at all.” What sets experienced hikers apart? They are “more aware” of what has happened.

The desire to be somewhere else makes it very hard to see where you are and where you’ve been. Looking back on difficult periods in our life, we find that in many ways, our sense of being lost was partly self-imposed and self-perpetuating.

Of course, inasmuch as none of us really know where we are going, being lost is part of the creative process of living. Meditation supports an honest assessment of our situation as human beings. It is practicing acceptance — a first step toward understanding where we are now. Understanding where we are — and have been — is key to changing direction.

“One way to walk straight is to set your sights on a nearby tree, walk to it, find another tree in the same direction, and move to that”. In other words, proceed in steps or stages.

Don’t look for great and immediate staggering results from sitting on your meditation cushion. Set reasonable and thoughtful goals for yourself – and meet them. Authentic meditative traditions have a culture that embody this skillful means. As per Tibet’s greatest yogi/saint Milarepa — “Hasten slowly, and you will soon arrive.”

Without orientation, “little errors will compound themselves” and “when the errors start to build in one direction, the hiker often ends up going around in circles.”

We get frustrated or hurt by life, and then we get upset about being upset. Compounding habits seem to address our pain, but they only perpetuate it. At some point we have to relax and give ourselves a break. Be firm with yourself when you have to be, but there is never a good reason to be harsh or dogmatic. Be your own friend.

There is one sure way to avoid going around in circles:

“Your job as the lost person is to sit down.”

There are unexpected twists and turns to life, and long paths that seem to stretch out in front of us forever. Even so, it is a beautiful journey. When we meet it fully, we discover what it means to be human. Losing our way is an expression of losing a connection with our own heart. Often, even if it doesn’t feel right, we find reasons why we have to keep moving.

Sitting down, paying attention to the sensation of breathing, we can appreciate ourselves, relaxing the habitual patterns that cover our heart and obscure our vision.  Looking back on our restlessness, we realize there was a level of frustration, fear or even anger, behind our agitation. When you don’t really know why you’re moving or where you’re heading, find a meditation seat (and space for meditation) where you can be comfortable and sit down!

Editor’s Note: In Tibetan, the word for life as we know it is korwa – which means wheel. A traditional analogy for a live lived without understanding: a bee buzzing around in a jar. At the same time, movement is natural and necessary. And after all, it is possible to hide in stillness as well as activity. In either case, as Michael points out, the question is where are we trying go? For students of meditation, studying a meditation primer for even a few minutes a day can be enormously helpful on the journey.

The eye altering, alters all. -- William Blake

Last Saturday morning was busy with a long list of errands. First stop was the Farmer’s Market to visit a booth selling compost supplies. We needed a new filter for the compost bucket that sits on the kitchen counter.

As I drove to St. Johnsbury along the empty interstate, I remembered something my friend Mary Anne had mentioned to me recently.  “It seems like the farmer’s market has really grown,” she was saying, “there are more booths, new sights and smells, fresh coffee, food cooking…”

The simplicity of Mary Anne’s comment must have stayed with me. Pulling into the parking lot, I had to reflect that with my list of “to do’s” and the focus on my errand, there was a good chance that once I made it to the market, I wouldn’t notice any of the new booths or smell the coffee brewing.

To be honest, a visit to the farmer’s market makes me anxious. Samadhi Cushions is in a neighborhood of small towns. The likelihood of seeing someone you know at the market is high. In these situations, unless it is a good friend, I’m generally at a loss for words. How will I gracefully initiate, develop and wind-up one of these encounters, I always wonder? On top of that, my errand lists never includes unscheduled conversation with acquaintances, adding time pressure to the anxiety of chance encounters.

The Point of Practice
“Isn’t this is what your meditation practice is supposed to help you with – smelling the coffee at the farmer’s market?” Had my (on again off again, it must be said) sitting meditation practice somehow disconnected itself from the day to day? Having embarked on the journey of meditation, had I concluded that meditation was somehow more meaningful than the mundane details of life? It’s ironic of course. The point of mindfulness meditation is to be mindful of what’s happening. As a general rule, the senses (smell and the other four) are what’s happening, along with our mental commentary and subconscious gossip, of course. Getting out of the car, I resolved to smell the coffee Mary Anne had talked about.

If from time to time, your meditation practice encourages a retreat from the world of the senses, then you may, like me, find yourself rushing through the slices of life that occur between meditation sessions. The pretext — maybe these details are insignificant to the grand scheme of things. Of course, half of life is only the sum total of many sensory details. Ignoring them is a likely indication that we are alienated from our own ordinary experience. Since the philosophy of meditation teaches us about the primacy of mind, we find ourselves wary of the senses and their messages for us.

Culture Sense
In traditional Buddhist literature, sense experience is referred to as a “realm.” In effect, fully explored, each sense (seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing, touching, feeling) is understood as its own world. In today’s speed driven culture, we seem to have lost much of our connection with the depth and magic of our basic sense experience.

Traditionally, it was the role of culture to teach how to engage and appreciate sense experience. In France, my wife’s country of origin, teenagers are encouraged to have opinions about the quality of wine and character of cheese. In a simple stroll through our nearby forests, old-time Vermonters can tell you so much about its history, flora and fauna. These are refinements to the senses taught to us by our parents and grandparents.  The sense experience is refined by paying attention to the details of what we experience.

A Matter of Relationship
To pay attention, you need to hear from someone that sense experience is trust-worthy, meaningful and merits appreciation. This doesn’t seem to be a big spiritual question; it is simply a matter of connecting with one’s experience of life. Wisdom comes later. It is insight or penetration into the depth of that experience. Without the experience, however, the question of wisdom is moot.

I appreciated Mary Anne’s remark because it reminded me that there is merit in meeting one’s experience directly. Our basic experience is good –smells can be appreciated, we can marvel at sights and sounds. When you really experience senses directly, it is always new and surprising. This is a subtle point. The experience of the senses can’t be explained mechanistically. How we relate (with appreciation or distrust, for example) changes our experience of the senses. Also, there is no viable argument that puts sense objects as somehow there for us. The smell of coffee may be enjoyed, that of compost less so.  It seems more accurate to say that our sense experiences and us are there for each other. It is a matter of relationship. Also, how we “see” things, experience them, seems to be largely a matter of habit.

The Ground of Meditation
As for meditation practice, it is paying attention to the details of experience, before judgment. For another thing, you have to do it. Talking alone doesn’t help. Since we are in the habit of overlooking the details, consistent meditation is needed to develop the strength of habit to pay attention.

Beyond that, when you sit down on your Zafu (or Meditation Bench) and Zabuton Mat, the first step is just to relax.  Feel the weight of your body on the meditation cushion. Acknowledge your meditation room by noticing it. Is it cluttered? Clean? What are the colors and textures? Hear the sounds, both near and distant. Feel the sensation of the body as it breaths. The ground of taming the mind in meditation is a willingness, courage really, to be with our experience as it is  — now. This experience includes the five senses. Initially, it is by making friends with the basic constituents of experience that the practice of meditation begins to develop and deepen.

Market Shifts
In slowing down, the meditator begins to appreciate that everything — senses, thoughts, feelings, are continually shifting. They are all fluid and fleeting. In a way, there really is no such thing as a “farmer’s market” – just a wave of smells, sounds, sensations, at a time and place. All of which we label with the thought “market” – which is associated with other thoughts, like the memories of chance encounters. Captured by these thoughts, we find ourselves anticipating life – instead of living it. Unable to relax with ourselves, we are unclear about the details, unsure about life and its messages.

At the same time, from the perspective of meditation, it is because things don’t really hold together that they can appear to our senses in infinite detail, color and variety. Meditation does bring some distance from the “idea” of a farmer’s market, but this distance is based on appreciation of the details of the market, rather than anxious or happy preoccupations that result from our momentary capture by thoughts.

Not Sure
Once I got there, as Mary Anne predicted, the market was buzzing. The morning sun was out after many days of rain. There was warm breeze. There did seem to be a few more stalls than before. I ran in to a couple of acquaintances. It wasn’t so hard really. Some smiles, handshakes and shared appreciation for the day. We all seemed perfectly happy to see each other.

Driving home (without a filter for the compost bucket – “try online”), I felt grateful to Mary Anne and her simple observation.  Then I remembered. Had I smelled coffee? I wasn’t sure.

Editor’s Note:  Mr. Greenleaf has mentioned a Zafu and Zabuton as well as a bench for meditation. Our most popular meditation bench is the kneeling bench. Of course, you can also practice meditation in a chair (see the article on meditation posture). Burning incense and sounding gongs bring basic sense experience into the practice of meditation, leaving us ready to wake up and smell the coffee.

Theree were other programs I might have done that weekend. In fact I was quite torn since Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche was teaching at his center in Vershire just 45 minutes away. But I ended up doing the program here at Karme Choling, over Labor Day weekend (and into the Tuesday): His Eminence Namkha Drimed Rinpoche gave the empowerment and taught and led us in the practice of a Yeshe Tsogyal sadhana.

A tiny amount of background for those unfamiliar: His Eminence is the father of Khandro Tseyang, the wife of our teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, and while in Tibet prior to 1959, was close to the founder of Shambhala, Chogyam Trunpga Rinpoche, from whom he received important empowerments, including the Rinchen Terdzo. So there are strong family and dharma ties among the teachers.

Among us students, however, we seem to be used to quite different practice styles. Chogyam Trunpga Rinpoche had a brilliant command of the English language (to the point of giving his American students elocution lessons), taught nearly exclusively in English, and liturgies used by his students are beautifully translated and printed by the Nalanda Translation Committee, and recited in English. So we always know what we’re saying (whether we understand the full meaning is of course another question). Now, given a Tibetan original which is often in verse and so has particular rhythms and melodies to it, and an English translation which is quite elegant but generally has an emphasis on meaning rather than on meter, the chanting style developed in the Shambhala community is a one-note unison, a monotone. Which can have quite an energy and drive and rousing quality to it in a group situation.

Pretty much any time you see a documentary on Tibet or on Tibetan Buddhism, or come across one of those old Nonesuch recordings of Tibetan monks, you hear melodious chanting, you hear cymbals and drums and various blaring wind instruments. If you come to a Shambhala Center, you hear some monotone chanting, sometimes with a drum. So it can be hard not to wonder sometimes, what are we missing?

Well, here I was part of that full treatment. Most of the practice was chanted melodically in Tibetan, with the occasional bursts of cacophony on drum, cymbal and conch-shells. Salient sections were repeated in English, and for the most part there was interlinear translation in the text so with a little back-and-forth glancing we could know what we were saying (at the risk of losing one’s place in the text). And, doing four sessions a day, it wasn’t long before there was a general familiarity with what was going on anyhow. Certainly a good deal of the immediacy of the meaning was lost, but a whole other dimension was added, an added emotional quality, a further sense of immersion, clarity, and heartfeltness to the practice. Often when we switched back to the English text there would be a sense of, “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been saying,” but it would also suddenly sound very flat.

At the end of the day, Rinpoche’s daughter, Semo Sonam Palzom, would sing the Yeshe Tsogyal mantra with a haunting, spine-tingling melody.

With the before-breakfast sessions starting at 6:30, and the after-breakfast and after-lunch sessions running usually around three hours with no break, after four days of this I was pretty wiped out but also amazingly energized.

And then I had to go back to work. The next day I was talking on the phone to someone who asked, “Are you sick? You sound different.” And I said, “Oh, no, I’m fine, I’ve just been chanting in Tibetan for four days.”

Yonten
Samadhi Cushions Store