Tag Archives: Right Action

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?

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.

What Can We Do?

  By liam | June 2, 2013 - 2:44 pm | Dharma, Motivation
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So what are we going to do? I see people all the time on Facebook and other social networks, posting about this political thing, or that political thing. It seems like everyone is putting out a call to arms for one thing or another. But what are we really doing?

We need to get off our asses (my ass included). We need to get off the computer if we are ever going to enact any real change in the here and now. Sitting around and posting pictures of kittens, or angry political rants  scrawled over a picture of a flag, a country, or a horrid picture of dead soldiers in a poignant angry looking font is not enacting change in any way. Most people (myself included) just scroll past that shit nowadays anyway. As a society, we are assaulted daily with so much visual and audio stimulus. It’s almost impossible to wade through the sea of useless crap that we are consuming in the form of media to actually get a point through.

So what are we going to do? I often wonder if there is anything we can do. Maybe if we start at a small local level, because the system we have in place is much too large to take head on. We need to start with ourselves. You know, like Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see.” Maybe we need to pull our heads out of our narcissistic asses and “do” something – actually go out and do something in the real world. Like volunteer at a hospice, take Dharma into the prisons, or a meeting, or work with at-risk youth so they have a decent example in their life.

Growing up the way I did left a lack of good examples in my life. If it had not been for the handful of people that tried to help, I would not be here today. The funny thing about that is at the time, I did not respond in any positive fashion to their attempts to help me, or to their lead and example. I remained that shit-ass-know-it-all kid with no hope of a decent life.  What they did do was plant a seed; a seed that, when the causes and conditions where right, grew to be the firmly rooted tree I held on to as my soul weathered the storm of my own creation.

As a direct result of these people who tried to show me a better way, when the time came I was able to use the tools they had given me so many years before. The soil of my heart was finally tilled enough for these seeds to take root. Now it has become my lifelong practice to continue to nurture and fertilize this soil. The seeds will only grow if I continue to give them what they need – good and bad seeds alike. So it is also my practice to only nurture the good seeds, and not the bad.

It is a process that cannot be rushed. It’s a lifelong daily practice. Day in and day out, I have to continue to do what is needed to nurture my heart, to train the mind in the great way. Even when I do not see the results I “think” I should be seeing, I must still work, and I must still practice. I do not have control over how fast the seeds will grow, nor do I have control over what fruit they will bear. I only have control over what I do to help that seed bear fruit.

From this example, I can see how I might change things slowly. I can do whatever I can to help all sentient beings; it is through this action that I myself may plant some seeds that will bear the fruit of change.

Right Action

  By liam | March 4, 2013 - 12:07 pm | Dharma
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Right Action in the Eightfold Path is the second ethical principle. It pertains to the body as a means of expression, as it really involves the body’s actions. The idea of practicing the Five Precepts in our daily life comes back to Right View. If we have Right View, and can see the correctness of the Four Noble Truths in samsara; the Five Precepts will then come naturally. We will want to follow them, knowing that they will lessen suffering for ourselves and others we come in contact with.

The First Precept is to abstain from harming sentient beings, particularly abstaining from taking life. Suicide falls into this category, as we are no less important a sentient being as any other around us. This brings up often the question of eating meat. The Buddha and his disciples where not vegetarians – they ate what was offered to them when they went on alms rounds. If meat was put in their bowl, they ate it. The exception to this is if the animal had been killed specifically for them; they would not eat it, as the animal would have lived if it had not been sacrificed to feed them.

The Second Precept is don’t take what is not freely given. So, do not steal – but more so than that, do not manipulate others to get what you want. Do not take it if it is not yours, whether you do it by force or by guile. Manipulating others to give you something means what you received was not freely given to you. Guilt, emotional blackmail, harassment, threats – they all fall into this category. It is not just the action of physically taking something which is not yours; it is also all the actions and mindstates that lead to you getting what is not offered.

The Third Precept is to abstain from sexual misconduct. Do not hurt yourself or others with your sexual actions. Lying or leading others to believe you feel a certain way in order to bed them, cheating on a significant other, and having sexual activities with a person who is in a committed relationship are all examples of sexual misconduct. The harm done by this one act can be immeasurable; not only do we cause suffering to the significant other, but to the children and other family members as well. The ripples and impact from this action can have lasting harmful effects, all due to one selfish act. The harm we can do ourselves with sexual misconduct can be grave as well. The guilt, shame, and general self-hatred that can be kicked off by heedlessness is only the beginning of our problems. If we act with reckless abandon with our sexual energies, it can very well mean death to others and ourselves.

The Fourth Precept is to refrain from false speech.  Do not lie. This idea of honesty pervades all the precepts. It goes further than just not lying; sometimes it can mean having the wisdom to know whether to speak at all. I often like to run what I am going to say through two criteria: Is it true? and Is it useful? If what I am thinking meets both of those, then I will open my mouth. Harsh speech is to be refrained from as well. As speech is our primary form of interpersonal communication, it has the capacity to be extremely harmful when we are not mindful of what and how we say things.

The Fifth Precept is to abstain from intoxicating drinks and drugs causing heedlessness. I found this one to be very important on my path. For me, when this precept was broken, I would soon break all the others due to my heedlessness. It’s impossible for me to be mindful of myself and others when I am intoxicated. Heedlessness, i.e. being unmindful, makes the practice of Right Action impossible.

Right Action is the practice of reacting compassionately and kindly to others, to be honest and respect others belongings, to keep our sexual relationships harmless to other and ourselves.