Author Archives: liam

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  By liam | December 22, 2015 - 2:50 pm | Healing
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There’s never enough time. There is no time to lose. I know this, and have known this, but never truly grocked this until the last two years. Petty resentments , hurts, and demons know nothing of how fast time is. The last two years have shown me if you have something to say. Say it! don’t wait. If you have a hurt expose it, and try to heal it with the other person. Time slips by so fast and we always think we have time until it’s too late.
I miss my mother deeply today. This mixture of regret and introspection clings to me like thick molasses. I would give anything to say just two more words to her. All I can say is slay your demons before it’s too late, because there yours not theirs, and no one else can do it for you.

You grow where you are planted

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 12:41 pm | Healing
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You grow where you are planted. Depending on the environment and and what you are fed greatly influences what you fruit. Being attached and enmeshed, it is hard to see that one is growing in the wrong soil. Not having what you need and unable to ask for it brings, about the wrong fruit (vipāka if you will.) Having grown up in this environment I would like to believe that I can identify when I am in this situation. Time and time again I am proven wrong. Each time though it gets quicker I am able to identify in a much more timely manner that I am in the wrong soil.

I have come to realize that the main question I should be asking in my relationships is “will it feed you?” Is the environment fulfilling, sustaining? The constant interplay of feeding and being feed the give and take is it there, or I am sacrificing who and what I am, like a man on a sinking ship bailing water to keep a float?

Over the past year this thought would come upon me like a cold wave of nausea. Am I being fed? Am I able to feed? The answer was always different, colored, checkered in an array of inter playable justification, self loathing, and, desire for more. This led to yet another road of self discovery. What was it I truly needed? Separating the wants from the desires, The idealization from the truth. Being able to identify emotional needs and separate them from emotional wants is a long hard journey. Environmental factors always played a lot in decisions. Societal ideas always crashing in on the thought process (I blame Disney.) Poor communication skills when expressing emotional needs was also a difficult wall to climb.

What I found to be true is no matter how well you are explaining it. No matter how clear your communication of your needs are, if the person you are talking to does not have the ability to meet them they will not be met. Seems like a simple enough concept to understand, it took me a while to catch on. In the end I learned that we have no control over anything but ourselves. No amount of talking will change this. All you can do is make your case state your needs clearly. If they are met fantastic. If they are not, the responsibility lies with you. What are you going to do to make sure you are getting what you need?

In the right environment people grow. in the wrong environment people can grow even more. At the end of it all however you will not be your best in the wrong soil. You will not produce good fruit unless you are fed what you need to bloom.

Am I being fed? Am I Feeding?

In the end

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 11:42 am | Poetry
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And at the end .
I am relieved , fascinated , and destroyed.
out of my chest a giant bird flees .
uncontaminated by the validation
Off to distant lands , and new horizons
Fly away , fly away, my black friend.
Take with you all the malice , worry, and spite .
Leaving me sacred to be filled with light .

She

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 11:21 am | Healing
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I Know now. I never saw it before, but I see it now. The fact is I am very much like her,( we react the same way to stress.) I have a peculiar insight into her mind. It only makes sense that our relationship for many years was one of adversity. I never gave her a chance really ,never tried to see things from her perspective. The pain and hurt from her actions were too close too new, even though it had been 20 years. Pain demands to be felt and seems to compound until it is. When not given the space and time for expression it festers, like a septic infection of the soul.

I spent years rehashing and “working” on this with different therapist and counselor. This did give me an intellectual understanding of what I had experienced, and survived but never allowed for the space and the time to feel the hurt that was locked up inside with this scared child. I did not even know it existed.

Years later I have been confronted with her death and it all changed. Although there was and still is a lot of pain from my past, it was not until she passed that I realized (and could drop my defenses) there was a lot of love and caring as well. She (my mother) was a hard woman, who did not really know how to express love. I being young took this poor example and integrated it into my psyche. With this poor idea of love, I existed under the incorrect perception that she just did not love. Instead of the truth she did not know how to show it well. There was little to no forgiveness in my heart for this woman who had spent seventeen years of her life taking care of, and loving me the only way she knew how.

Now She has passed and I am left with a cacophony of emotion. Love, hate, forgiveness, justification, and understanding all vortex through my core. I see now how this mistaken perception of love has tainted everything in my life. I see now the healing that needed to take place. This pain that has demanded to be felt for the last 30 years, is now so close to the surface of my life that it can no longer be ignored. I am here and now, I have to face it, walk with it, feel it, and learn to love it. I know that it will not lessen until I do.

Death clears all scoreboards

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 10:47 am | Recovery
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Death clears all scoreboards. In the light of never seeing someone again, or feeling them, most things we keep score about seem very small and insignificant. It’s hard to see when you are in it, and they are alive. The hurts and expectations of change are all there, and strong brimming and bubbling right at the surface of our awareness. If they would just do this, or say that. Why can’t they just….

Truth is most people don’t change. Not the way we feel they should. It’s the expectation of change that causes pain and lack of healing. I refused to deal with and accept my own pain around the situation until they did, what I felt they should. My dear old friend hindsight pays me a visit once more. For when I look back I can see now that it really is all small shit. The hurts and pains that I have carried with me where just that; carried by me. I lacked acceptance and in that I lacked forgiveness.

There is no time to lose, in this world time is a cruel and fickle mistress and she will not stop. Lessons learned over and over are painful and pointent of my refusal to heal old wounds. There is no one who can do it but me. Time to walk once again.

Angst

  By liam | July 7, 2015 - 9:33 am | Poetry, Uncategorized
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Crawling out of my skin. So let the circus begin.
Always and forever, when does it end?
Thoughts cross change and interweave, misperceive, Its all disbelief.
Emotions like beasts, driving, Writhing, striving in misconstrued support.
I see and I know but, always taken along by the show.
Standing in indignation of self.

Flightless bird

  By liam | March 21, 2014 - 2:08 pm | Poetry
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Plumes of hyper mediocrity bloom as if spring where upon us.
The weaving of time in looms gone by; I see, I want, I need.
To taste, to feel, to hear, to feed, Oh to be heard.
Lying there like some large flightless bird I flail and grasp for you.
As I sit and wait in bogs of light temperate chewing on sweet gale
Like some old wives tale I think of you.

The Bardo Thodol Comic form

  By liam | December 13, 2013 - 9:06 am | Dharma
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I did not make this I have no idea who did but it is getting harder to find each time I look for it, so i decided to put it here for the future. This is a great comic rendition of the Death Bardos. Taken from the Bardo Thodol.

The problem with shiny

  By liam | November 24, 2013 - 2:43 pm | Dharma
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The problem with shiny is that it’s usually sharp. When I was a young boy around Christmas I became enamored with one of the glass ornaments on the tree. It was one of those thin glass red foiled ones.  I ran up and grabbed it off the tree and in my excitement, and, zeal of the moment I grasped it very tightly. The sound was really what I remember most like thin ice cracking on a lake with that high pitch “Tink” sound. The next thing I noticed  was the blood, pain, and, the shattered ornament in my hand. I have the scar to this day. It cut me deep in the fleshy part of my hand.  The significance of the lesson was lost on me at that young age.

As I got older there was many more shiny distraction, Beautiful people, and things in my life I destroyed by grasping too hard at them. The lessons where all lost on me then, as well. It took me many years to realize the truth of attachment,  grasping, and, the suffering that it causes in our lives. It took me many years to even see, that I needed to work on balance in my life.

Finally twenty seven years into life I had broken, crushed , and destroyed just about all the shiny in my life there was no shiny left for me to grasp.  I was very fortunate to have had such a great opportunity to change my relationship to life and to walk a spiritual path.  I am grateful to have had such great teachers that have taught me that the root of all suffering is attachment.

One of the greatest and worst things about this samsara is that all things are impermanent and depending on my relationship to this fact, it can either be a freeing truth or a bone crushing juggernaut of suffering, It is all my choice . I have the choice to train my mind, I have the choice to live the eightfold path today. I rarely grasp tight enough to break things now ( and for this I am extremely grateful ) but grasping and attachment will always be something I have to work on, I think that may be the point who knows. What I do know is that when I am practicing equanimity, I can serve the greater good in any situation without much work on my part. The work was already put in through daily practice before the causes and conditions came together.  It is through a daily meditation practice That I am able to compassionately and skillfully react to situations in my life.

Non attachment is a hard practice and I am not so sure I am any good at it but I try and each time I get a little better.

Lean Into Your Rough Edges

  By liam | November 18, 2013 - 2:15 pm | Anger, Motivation, Recovery
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Lean into your rough edges. That has stuck with me lately, it’s kind of been a ‘theme’ if you will. In the time I have been walking my path I have had plenty of opportunities to lean into my edges; many “Buddhas in disguise” moments and many opportunities for practice. However, there have been a few rather large moments in my practice that have really encouraged me to continue on, moments where it has seemed almost effortless. Moments in my life that point to the truth that the Dharma is working and I am ripening, just as the sutas say.

One of these moments was about three years into my practice. I had gotten a call from my mother and she explained that my cousin David’s wife Debbie had passed from a brain hemorrhage (she was only in her mid 40’s), and that David was quite understandably destroyed.

Now to truly understand the story you will have to know the history behind David and I. David was one of my abusers when I was growing up, and I had a deep and undying hatred for this man for many years. This hatred extended towards Debbie as well, as she had also been one of my abusers. Lucky for me, through the process of the twelve steps and my daily Dharma practice I was able to forgive them. Although I had forgiven them, the well spring of love and well wishing was not there for them in my heart – and understandably so.

So my mother telling me this news about Debbie, and David’s obvious suffering over it had a very unexpected effect on me. My reaction surprised me as much as I think it surprised my mother, because she knew the feelings I had towards the two of them. The first words out of my mouth were “Is he ok? Is there anything I can do for him?”. The feeling of empathetic sadness for this man washed over me and I felt nothing but love and compassion for him in that moment. I truly meant what had just come out of my mouth. This healing of the heart was effortless, I had only to meditate and try to follow the dharma as best I could and naturally it was this that came about.

Another one of these times happened ten years into my practice. I had just recently moved back to the Coachella Valley (where I had grown up) to take a job that was more in line with my spiritual goals. I went to one of the Insight Community of the Desert‘s weekly meetings and dharma talk. Larry Yang was speaking and it was a good meditation session. During the dharma talk, I thought “hey, i might know someone here“, scanned the crowd, and there I saw a man who I could just barely recognize as my ex father-in-law Jim.

Getting married very young and having a child at the age of seventeen was not one of the best life choices I have ever made, and I am sure this choice did not make my wife at the time’s parents happy either. Jim was always polite to me in a cold and curt manner but he did try and help me and Anne out when we were kids.

Jim is a Buddhist, and one of the ones that made a bit of a difference in my life although not through his actions but his examples. He held a weekly sangha meeting at his house and I remember a few times hearing them chant. Something in the sounds of the chanting deeply resonated in me. I was drawn to dharma in all its forms all my life. I remember asking Jim about Buddhism and he responded by handing me a Tao Te Ching. I have that book to this day. However, it explained nothing about Buddhism. Looking back and knowing Jim the way I did, it makes perfect sense why he handed me this book when I asked about Buddhism. I don’t think I would have wasted the time explaining it to me back then either, knowing that my mind state was nowhere close to where it needed to be in order to understand the concepts of the Dharma. Giving me a book to read that was very eastern philosophical and kind of esoteric (for a seventeen year old kid who was raised in the desert and sheltered from any sort of culture such as this) was a good way to put me on a path of some sort without actually having to put the time and energy into something he felt was a lost cause.

After the ugly separation of me and my wife and some very (what I felt at the time) unskillful and hurtful actions on Jim and Sandy’s (Anne’s mother) part, I was embittered with the family. Nine years later Anne and I were in court for custody and visitation of my daughter, and Jim wrote very scathing letters to the courts as to why my character was of poor quality and why I should not be allowed to see my daughter or be in her life. This left me feeling very angry and somewhat hurt.
Knowing that resentment like this can eat away my core and even kill me. I spent a full year doing metta and forgiveness practices with Jim and Sandy as the focus. After the year passed I had fully put down the resentment and gone on with my life.

So after seven years there sits Jim and his husband Jim across from me at this dharma function in Palm Springs and all I could feel for this man when I searched my feelings was love, compassion, and, gratitude for what he had done for me when I was younger. All this with no effort on my part and no reasoning, just pure responsive metta and mudita from my heart space. The feeling was amazing and encouraging, and it is times like these that I know that all I have to do is keep walking, and I know that if I put in the work, anger, greed, and delusion will naturally fall away.