This one's been percolating for a while. I think it's accurate to write that both of my sisters are exploring Buddhism and Hinduism--in various manifestations and to various depths--and have been doing so for a while as the summer and autumn months have deepened into winter. Joanna's "winter" is a warmer one than we're accustomed to--she's in Lisbon, Portugal, and will be there for several months of dissertation study and work. Katie is in Denver, Colorado, near the Rockies and near some American centers of Buddhist study and practice.
I'm inspired by their study and practice, and have been so for a few months now. I myself have been curious about Buddhism for years; as it turns out, I purchased my first book on Buddhism (outside of a college class context, that is) just about a decade ago, and I've read and dabbled and glanced at the topic (ugh--a terrible word for so big a philosophy/spirituality/religion) time-and-time again over the years.
I'm settling into a more organized and disciplined investigation into Buddhism now that I've begun to face the reality that my oldest kid isn't little anymore. This is yet another example of a way in which being a parent drives me towards productive and fruitful behaviors that I probably wouldn't currently have the discipline to pursue on my own. Maia's begun to ask questions on spiritual matters. She knows the word "God," and that's raised some interesting topics of conversation in our family unit's atheist/agnostic framework of habit and thought. She's been to Methodist Sunday School, and she's begun glancing towards mindfulness via yoga, breath awareness, and meditation techniques (largely thanks to Auntie JoJo).
I can say without reservation that Buddhist patterns of mindfulness and awareness have a hugely positive influence on my personal anxieties and habits. I've been meditating daily for about 10 minutes in the evening hours, after the sun has set and the kids are in bed. I've begun thinking how mindfulness (particularly with regards to its approach to stress and pain) can influence and shape my doula and childbirth work. I know for sure, unequivocally, that some of the themes of mindfulness and meditation--noticing and identifying "thought" as separate from "self," breathing strategies, mantras, etc.--have had a really positive influence on Maia's emotional awareness and intelligence through this winter. She has a phrase (a mantra, almost) she uses for anger now: "My brain feels like it wants to kick and hit and push" ... and yet she doesn't do any of these things! She's aware of the emotion and the thought, can identify it, and thus can distance herself from feeling overpowered by and helpless against the emotion.
I've come to believe that it'd be a pretty significant oversight on my part, in my role as a parent, to ignore spirituality and excise it from our family's normal conversation patterns just because I'm myself an agnostic/atheist (I think it's fair to say that Brian leans more "atheist" than "agnostic" than I do). Maia's on the verge of entering public school and these topics are just around the corner with her classmates, as they were with me in early elementary school. What is my parental voice of influence going to be? What are the frames of mind that I'd like to offer to her as alternatives, as options, as possibilities?
1 comment:
Isn't it weird how things change over the years? I started studying Buddhism a long time ago, too - don't quite remember when, but it was during high school (when I went and got my old Taoist tattoos) - and while it appealed to me superficially in terms of my own adolescent identity-formation, there were things about my understanding of Buddhism that turned me off. Specifically, I thought that Buddhism was all about suffering, and I couldn't relate to suffering; I wanted to think of the world as a beautiful and wonderful place, I wanted to really be in the world, and I thought Buddhism pointed toward transcendence of the suffering world, of the suffering body. So I kinda left Buddhism behind for a while. For years.
Now I'm older, and I've been through some sh!t, and I know that (a) the world often isn't a beautiful and wonderful place, at all, and (b) Buddhism's teachings on suffering are far more complex than just a simplistic quest for nirvana, anyway. Fundamentally, the world - or rather, our experience of it - is contradictory and paradoxical and always changing, and Buddhism attempts to be honest about this. And (c), Buddhism isn't about transcending the world, anyway: it's precisely about being in the world, with all of the contradictions and paradoxes of human experience.
Another thing I've learned about Buddhism which allows me to access its teachings more authentically is that it isn't a religion: the original buddha isn't, and never really was, a deity. A lot of the stuff that seems like theism in Buddhism is actually a later (like, 18th- and 19th-century) projection of Western religious structures onto this complex Eastern philosophical system; it's a modern Western interpretation of what we see when we look at a Buddhist "temple" or "altar" or ritual. Just because there is ritual doesn't mean there's a "god": ritual can simply (richly) be about discipline, muscle memory, honoring a continuity of tradition, even stilling the mind. (This is where yoga comes in, too, and the Hindu context from which Buddhism comes.)
I'm not sure why I am going on like this, in a comment on your blog. Maybe it's because I sometimes wonder, these days, whether my next natural step in life (after the PhD) might be to become a nun. Have I talked to you about this? I can't remember... Renunciation certainly becomes more and more appealing to me as each month, each year, passes.
But of course, I know that that may just be klesha mara taunting me. :-)
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