In which I experiment with a social media cleanse, fail miserably at it, then find the teaching within it. ​

It is the middle of January in the year 2021. There is a spring thaw, although of course it's an illusion and not yet spring. We're still in the middle of a deep Maine winter. It was simply a rain storm that swept in and caused the brook to flow with a spring-like energy. In a few days, that water will freeze over again.

And I don't know about you all, but I had to pull myself out of bed this morning. I sat drinking my morning tea and my mind felt rocky and rough and muddy. And mildly annoyed. I felt pushed into a corner. A bit like my elderly cat who jumped into a deep and empty bathtub early this morning and couldn't jump out again.

​This morning, I sit and write and attempt to let the emotions of the past three days find alignment. So I can release them to the wind.How does one reconcile the terrorist attacks in Paris? How does one react to a world filled with this sort of pain? 

I want to recount my movements this past week. How daily life and dharma met. 

It began last week, when I was deep in preparation for a meditation retreat. As a volunteer in my local Buddhist center - our Maine branch, I was helping to lead a full-day retreat on Saturday November 14 called Tranquil Abiding - Buddha's astonishingly clear teachings on how to still the mind, to bring it to complete focus.

​The meditation we would be focusing on was called 'Equalizing Self and Other'.

​I was following my teacher, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's exquisite teachings in his books Joyful Path of Good Fortune and Eight Steps to Happiness. In this meditation, we use logic and reasoning to evoke a mind of love. ​I had been allowing this logic to touch my mind deeply in the lead-up to the retreat. Here it is quickly, in a nutshell: