In a very interesting discussion with my brother-in-law Jon Bower, which was mainly about the cool things he is doing to create tools and teach techniques to use in education, I realized that what I’m trying to do with my book and face-to-face opportunities is really not so much like teaching as it is like fishing. I’m encouraging people to cast out into the waters of beliefs to catch those that resonate, which will better inspire them to do regular spiritual practices. The idea is to use our rational minds to find beliefs which reinforce and support the reasons to do practices that actually weaken our addiction to, and identification with, the random stream of thoughts that plague the average person throughout their waking life. It’s kind of like the rational mind waking up to the irrational nature of our thoughts themselves, even though the intellectual reasoning being used, when energized by fears and desires, is a major player in many of these unhelpful thoughts.
After a wonderful month at Koinonia Farm, I spent the first third of March in Clearwater, Florida, at the house that my sister Becky and her husband John are renting there. They moved up from their rental in Sanibel Island just before I joined them. The highlights in this post are:
Koinonia Farm to Clearwater, Florida
To get back down to Florida from Koinonia I decided to take the bus again. Hitchhiking in Florida just hasn’t worked out that well and the ticket was only $61 from Albany, GA to Tampa, FL, the closest major city to Clearwater. So the first trick was getting to Albany from Koinonia, a 35 minute drive. Bren (the director of Koinonia) kindly scheduled one of their interns to take me down early on March 1, but then my friend Jo Knox, who lives in Albany, contacted me. I had been trying to reach her to schedule a visit, and it turned out she was coming up to do a little work at Koinonia the day before. Jo is about 10 minutes from the bus terminal, so I asked her if I could go stay at her house one night and hitch a ride to the bus with her the next day.
Jo with her chickens and geese.
Jo and I had been wanting to spend some time together anyway, going back to the end of my internship in 2015, so it all worked out beautifully. It was also great to meet Jo’s husband and see their home and beautiful yard with it’s 4 beehives, custom made deluxe chicken coop, chickens, geese, dog, parrot and more.
Traveling companion?
Jo & I discovered that we both want to go to Sedona, AZ. She has a friend there she would like to visit and I’ve heard wonderful things about the area with it’s many spiritual retreat centers and positive energy vortex. Jo and I may drive out there together at some point soon, which would enable the trip for her (she is 80 and couldn’t drive long distance by herself) and save a lot of hitchhiking for me! Stay tuned to see how this works out.
More biking, with my rollerblading family
My sister Susan and her husband Jon were visiting Becky at the same time as I was and she rented me a bicycle for my birthday, which enabled me to go along with them on their almost daily rollerblading trip down the Clearwater – Tampa causeway. We didn’t have a way to put the bike on the car, so I rode to the causeway from the house too. If I got a 10-15 minute head start, we would arrive at the near end of the causeway at the same. Their routine is to take a rest break for lunch at the Tampa end of the causeway at a nice restaurant right on the beach.
Short video of rollerblading:
Families play in the water on a cool windy day at Sand Key Park Beach.
The bike also enabled me to ride to Clearwater Beach on two occasions. In some ways it reminded me of Waikiki in Hawaii, with high rise hotels just across the street from the beach. The beach is wide, with fine white sand and volleyball nets to attract the masses. In addition to the main beach, I went to Sand Key Park where the beach is adjacent to a nice buffer of green space. It was a bit cool and windy, so people were mostly staying on the beach. The hearty people in the water were mainly motivated by their children, who were too excited about the water to be deterred. When I went for a dip, I would have stayed in the water longer if the waves had been big enough for body surfing, because once I was in I realized that by staying down in the warm water it was actually pretty comfortable.
I had a great 61st birthday. It started with successful dream yoga in the wee hours. Then my email brought a heart warming video of my friends at the Center for Transformational Practice, singing me a happy birthday song! We went for our usual rollerblading/biking trip down the causeway to have lunch out. My family took me out again for dinner, at a nice restaurant near the house. Then my brother-in-law John let me borrow their car so I could go see “Black Panther.” It was good to have a little taste of the mainstream movie culture and see what lots of people are raving about!
Clearwater Zen Center
With a little Internet research I found a couple of meditation sanghas in Clearwater. The closest one was the Clearwater Zen Center, so on Sunday morning I joined them for their regular weekly practice. That week it included sitting, walking and chanting. It was my first time at a Zendo where you sit facing a wall to meditate, so I followed their practice and kept my eyes open, as I learned to do atthe Upper Valley Zen Center (UVZC). Some of the chants were in English and the rest were in ancient Japanese, like the ones I am familiar with from practicing at the UVZC. I really liked verbally affirming my faith through the profound teachings in the English chants, with each syllable falling on the beat of the drum, as steady as the beat of my heart at rest. The Zendo was quite full that morning and it was wonderful to practice with such a large, welcoming group.
Dream yoga practice starts to flower
I continue to use modified versions of the techniques from the book, “The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep” by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche every night. At this point I need 3-5 hours of unconscious sleep to start the night, to bring my awareness to a clear enough state to practice lucid dreaming. Through experience, I’m getting better at sensing when my awareness is pure enough to begin the practice; when it’s not, I just lay back down for another session of unconscious sleep. That way I can do the preparatory “9 breaths” practice and guru devotion ritual that the book recommends, just prior to the first successful dream yoga session; I’d been doing them at the beginning of the night and I wasn’t sure they were that helpful to the practice after I’d been in unconscious sleep for a few hours. Given the time spent unconscious, I either practice only 1-2 of the 4 recommended session techniques, or each of the 4 sessions is shorter than the recommended 2 hours.
The visual quality of the lucid dreams is improving over time, with more and more color sprinkled into the experience, which has been mostly black and white up to now. Some scenes are even full color, but sounds are still rare, with occasional short conversations with other players. As I’ve shared here before, the feelings of peace and gratitude are still almost constant regardless of my nascent abilities to create a dream world complete with stimulation of all the senses.
Traveling to a new location every week or so has been challenging for this practice. The first few days I was in Clearwater I wasn’t having much success, with unconscious sleep more of the night than I had been at Koinonia. It is mysterious to me exactly what all the factors are at this point, but I love that Wangyal stresses that the quality of your day time practice is key to your success at night. It means I have another wonderful motivation to steady my mindfulness during the day and do extra sitting and walking meditations, etc., when I have a chance.
As I finish up this post, I’m in Quincy, Florida visiting my friend Nina who I met in the Greyhound bus terminal in January. When I contacted her that I was heading north via bus right through her area, it turned out she was going to be in the Tampa area and then heading home right when my time in Clearwater was coming to an end! She and her boyfriend Andy have been very hospitable. I’ll write more about that adventure filled leg of travel and my visit here in my next post.
