I’ve got a lot to write about for this post, which will be the last one that is entirely about my working visit at Koinonia Farm. On March 1 I’ll be heading back down to Florida to stay with my sister Becky and her husband John again. My dad and sister Susan will be there this time, so it’s turned into a semi-family reunion. My third sister Jennifer is on her way too, although we probably won’t overlap. My daughter Rose and 3 friends are also scheduled to arrive later in March, so Becky is keeping a very busy vacation home this month!
The main things I’m sharing about this time are:
- The presentation I did here on my book, “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness.”
- Facilitating a spiritual dance session.
- A new directed lucid dream yoga which may enable 24/7 practice.
A Christian take on “Faith to Practice: Foundations of Happiness”
After planning and waiting for a time that would work for everyone, the day finally came for me to present some of the ideas in my book, “Faith to Practice, Foundations of Happiness.” I prepared a slide presentation for visual learners, complete with speakers notes.
I was all set, or so I thought, to cast the presentation from my iPad to the TV in the library where we were scheduled to meet, but when the time came I had technical difficulties and had to borrow a laptop and cord instead. By the time it was all sorted out, we started 12 minutes late, in a location that was not as ideal as we originally planned, and I was feeling kind of scattered. The 5 minutes of silent meditation I’d planned for the start of the presentation helped, but I still was not at my best as I launched into the presentation proper.
I was pleased to run into Tracy Newton when she visited for a day. She was living at the farm when I was an intern.
As you can see if you check out the slides, about half of the presentation was reviewing the ideas in the book, chapter by chapter, and the other half was applying the ideas to beliefs that could be adopted to support the practice of radical acceptance, aka non-judgment. This was my first time giving a formal presentation on both, so I’m grateful for the patience of the folks at Koinonia who came. It could have been clearer and smoother, even after the technical difficulties were overcome.
I wanted to use personal stories and poetry imbued with metaphor, to attempt to better appeal to those for whom a strictly intellectual approach does not resonate. I did so to some degree, and would have remembered to do more if I could have seen my presenter’s notes; the fall back technology I was using didn’t allow me to do so. However, when we got to the mini-bible study part of the presentation, we were all on familiar ground and I thought it went fairly well.
My goal was to inspire (some of) them to start a practice of non-judgment or what I call “radical acceptance.” I asked for interpretations to this teaching from the gospel, making notes on a flip pad as we went:
Matthew 7: 1-2, 5 “1 Judge not, that you not be judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.”
5 “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
Then I presented the interpretations that I prefer, which would indicate that Jesus meant an unqualified “no judging, period” stance (from the presentation, slides 25-29):
- I like to see this teaching as being immediately true, at many levels.
- The judgments we pass against another are caused by misunderstandings, represented by “the log in your own eye,” blocking you from seeing clearly.
- When we judge another we are also judging ourselves (Insight of Unity)
- When we judge another, we “defile ourselves,” (see below) even if we tell the other how we feel. Even a speck in our eye hurts, let alone a log!
- Mark 7:20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Talking through how this works is tricky, and I think the experience at Koinonia will help me do a better job next time. For example, how can I accept everything in this moment and still take actions to help reduce suffering in the world? Won’t I lose motivation to take actions at all? No, and the key is that accepting what is happening now is just practical, because it’s a “done deal” or “water over the dam” as my dad used to say. It does not preclude us seeing what can be done to improve on the situation in the future, even if that future is only a few moments from now. The actions come out of “love for,” rather than negative “judgments against.” I think I explain it pretty well through story and example in the book.
As I explained to the folks at Koinonia, the book really wasn’t written for people who already have a strong connection and faith from a spiritual tradition. It is more for those many people who either were never exposed to religion or spirituality, or have since become disillusioned or had other reasons to leave whatever faith tradition they had. To those that are engaged with church or some other spiritual community, I say please keep revisiting the teachings from time to time and see if you have gained new insights and interpretations that are helpful to support your wholesome life practices. This is such an important spiritual practice that I also recently posted a more secular approach to different levels of beliefs to support acceptance.
I’ve spent a lot of time doing walking meditation on the farm road.
Weekly day of solo practice?
The past two Saturday’s I did lots of extra meditations and/or sleep witnessing practice. The first I made my own schedule, including lots of walking meditations on the farm road and the second I did a “30/60 retreat” in support of and from the folks at The Center for Transformational Practice who were hosting same that day. I love getting extra silent meditation from time-to-time and could easily see making this a regular schedule every week! Perhaps my lifestyle will allow for that at some future junction.
Spiritual dancing with the birthday boy and guests from Quaker Volunteer Services
We cleared the furniture out of the new library, which has the best wood floor on the farm for dancing.
Saturday night I got a chance to re-use a playlist created by my friend Sophie, to facilitate dance practice here at the farm. She originally curated the list for the Soul Sunday dance community in Quechee, VT, where I normally dance every week when I’m home. The only person from the Koinonia community that wanted to come (partly given the late hour) was Nathaniel, one of the new interns who is an experienced dancer and was celebrating his birthday that day! We would have just gone ahead and practiced just the two of us, but for a group of 9 young people from the Quaker Volunteer Services (QVS), that happened to be visiting, many of which wanted to give it a try. Then another brave soul with previous ballet experience as a girl came down from the guest house too, rounding out our troupe quite nicely!
It went wonderfully. The only challenge was when general energy levels fell during a long stretch of staccato style rhythm, I decided to skip the end of a couple of the songs to keep things moving. At the end we reclined on the floor to relax and let it all sink in, as we always do in Quechee and I led them in some toning, which sounded really good! As we let the silence return, the last noise offered was a kind of a funny gurgle, and then out of the silence came a laugh from one of the young women. I took that as a wonderful suggestion and answered back with a laugh, which got us all laughing for another wonderful group practice. It was a hearty icing on a rich and many layered cake!
The evening after they left it seemed very quiet in the Fuller house , because the QVS group was staying there with me. They were all of that twenty-something age that I feel could really benefit from my book, so I gave them a copy. They all live in a single intentional household, so I trust they will be able to share and read it when (and if) they are inspired. I feel lucky to have spent a lot of time with this wonderful group of energetic, positive people and said so tonight at our weekly Sunday gathering where we share prayers of gratitude.
“Continuous spiritual practice” takes on new meaning with the addition of dream yoga
At some point after I realized the ability to stay aware during sleep last fall, (as described in a previous post), I found a web discussion group thread on the subject. The people posting were having similar experiences to mine. Last week I revisited that page and saw a reference to a book that looked very interesting, which I somehow didn’t pick up on before. I immediately purchased the Kindle edition of “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep” by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and started an awesome new chapter of my practice.
A little more than a week later, I’m 87% of the way through the book and I’ve added a practice of lucid, directed dreaming to my nightly routine. Since the night of the 23rd, I’ve been using modified versions of the practices described in the book, to initiate one to three sessions of 1 to 2 hours each per night. Being able to direct my lucid dreams feels pretty darn revolutionary, for many reasons: the number of dreams I typically have remembered in any detail has been around 1-2 per month; lucid dreams were rare; and I’ve never been able to direct my dreams before. So my dream life has gone from virtually nil to a major facet of my practice!
Wangyal writes of the importance of a seeker’s quality of awareness, steming from their day time practice, to the success of lucid dreaming. So I credit my rapid success in using the teachings from his book to the continuous waking practice that I’ve been doing since I interned here at Koinonia in 2015.
What I’ve been calling “sleep witnessing meditation” is almost the same as what he describes as “sleep yoga.” Perhaps I’d already had short tastes of the state he describes, where all bodily sensations have ceased to register and the mind remains free of thoughts, leaving only the light of pure awareness shining on itself, uncluttered by even a notion of the relative world of manifestation. In a way the lucid dreaming that I’ve now started to practice is a regression from that pure state, but in other ways it is a wonderful tool in it’s own right.
Wangyal describes how our waking life is really very much like dreaming. The Buddha actually used a term that translates to “awakening” for what is now often called “Enlightenment” or “Self realization.” So as the seeker comes to understand how dreams are created during sleep, they can also gain insights into the nature of manifest reality. More importantly, he writes that sleep and dream yoga are effective practices for spiritual awakening itself.
Taize is my favorite form of Christian worship and we had it twice here at Koinonia this month!
My birthday is coming up next week and I feel like I’ve already been given the best present ever. The time I now have available to me for practice each day has increased by more than 25%! Back in October, I set a goal for myself to practice sleep witnessing meditation all night long. I thought that it was restful enough to meet all my daily restoration needs. I now see that the unconscious sleep periods that I kept falling into were needed because I wasn’t getting any dream time during my witnessing practice. Dreaming is understood by scientists as critical for stress relief and normal waking brain function. Evidently I still need that benefit even in my blissful state. Now that I can remain aware during both dreaming and the deeper phases of sleep, my I goal of practicing all night has become practical. I’ve already come pretty close.
Monday night I fell asleep on the couch reading and ended up getting an hour and a half nap before I went to bed. That gave me just enough conventional rest to enable a successful first session of dream yoga. Most of the handful of nights I’ve been practicing the new techniques started with 2-4 hours of unconscious sleep before the first of a series of successful dream yoga sessions. It feels like the quality of my waking awareness is already benefiting from the new night time practices, so I suspect I’ll need less and less unconscious sleep over the next few weeks.
Besides all these wonderful benefits to spiritual practice, directed lucid dreaming is also really fun! As described by Wangyal in his book, the dreams you can have are only limited by your imagination. Over these first few nights of practice, I’ve gone swimming; down hill skiing; sailing; windsurfing; walking on the beach; visiting with Nisargadatta in his shrine room; paddling with Jon, (my canoemate for my week with the River of Life, Connecticut River Pilgrimage last summer); and done lots of flying, unaided by any device, like superman. Shifting between scenes feels like teleporting; it can happen as instantaneously as the whimsical mind shifts to a new desire! I’ve also become a few different animals including a chipmunk, squirrel, seagull, dolphin, trout, and red tailed hawk. This really takes a good imagination! The clarity of vision and sensations of all these amazing experiences isn’t that vivid yet, though it is slowly improving. But the feelings that come with each experience are wonderful nonetheless. Gazing over Boston Lot Lake, watching the water sparkle in the sunlight as a gentle breeze raises ripples on the surface, brings the same feelings of peace and gratitude as really being there, even if the blue water is framed by trees that are a hazy black and white!
I’ve been making voice recordings after some of the sessions, so I can journal and share about experiences that may not stay in my weak memory long enough to write about later. In the recording I share here, I make reference to not being attached to planet earth, which deserves some explanation. I love our planet and everyone on it. The main motivation for me to devote my life to spiritual practice is to work to reduce suffering, as I describe in my book in the section on spiritual activism. In order to release fears that stem from the destructive trends that currently threaten the health of our planet, I’ve needed to release my attachment to it remaining the beautiful place I’ve known. In the dream, because it was a dream, I took that a bit further out of playfulness!