This is the 7th day of writing/meditation retreat. Things are beginning to get interesting.

Last night, I drove the 10 miles to Shambhala Mountain Center to hear Sakyong Mipham give a talk and in-depth meditation instruction. It was wonderful to see him, beyond wonderful, indescribable. Anyone who has had the great fortune to find a spiritual teacher, the teacher for them, knows what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, it’s very hard to say what it feels like. Although there were several hundred people at last night’s talk, I felt that he was speaking to me personally; his teaching reverberated with some aspect of my practice, my mind, my concerns. It has nothing to do with making you feel happy. It’s more like a kind of profound intimacy, like someone talking with you from within your own mind and moving with or away from all the subtle shifts, turns, and gradations that arise. It is so private.

I also saw many, many friends from the noble Shambhala sangha, which was lovely but also kind of heartbreaking. I long to be with them, to practice intensely and experience the joy of enlightened society that is created under such circumstances. I can drop in for various things, but it isn’t the same and so I felt very lonely.

Speaking of lonely. Today, like the majority of the past week, I have been completely alone. I’m in a beautiful house, beyond the beyond of lovely. Spectacular.

The house has every conceivable comfort. The phrase “well appointed” comes to mind. It is a house of devoted practitioners and I can feel their dignity and genuineness in every corner. The house is designed to relate to the mountain range it looks out on. In all the main areas of the house—bedroom, living room, kitchen, dining room, you look out onto extraordinary spaciousness. If you could see what I’m looking at right now… well, actually you can. See photo of right now:

Wherever I settle myself, I’m able to see how the mountains morph throughout the day, responding to sunshine and clouds, darkness and light. Yet they remain implacable. Would that we could all be this equanimous, this inscrutable; responsive yet utterly planted.

The first few days, I took pictures of everything. Every room, every vista, every time of day. I realize now that I was trying to have a conversation, trying to bring someone in, show someone (Duncan, my parents, my girlfriends) where I was so I wouldn’t be so alone. When I’m home, I crave solitude. But the first thing I did was try to establish conversation. I see that I’m scared to be completely alone. I don’t understand much outside of city living and so it intimidates me to walk too far from the house. This makes me sad. I’m scared of the dark and I really don’t know why. As the sun sets, like it is doing now, I feel my loneliness and fear rise. What am I afraid of? Again, I do not know.

There is no phone here. I miss talking to Duncan so much. I miss how he makes me feel safe. Without him, I’m not sure how to do it for myself.

I spend all day doing one of three things: practicing meditation and studying texts that relate to my practice; working on my book, “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart,” which is due in October; or fussing. I’ve been spending a lot of time fussing. I sit down to read and then think I should write. I start to write but have nothing to say. I fix myself something to eat but then I’m not hungry. I check e-mail and then feel a longing to be working on the book. I return to the manuscript and find that it says nothing, absolutely nothing. Then, finally, at some point, hopefully at least once in a day, all that drops away and I find my voice, I find that I do have something to say.

Practicing meditation has been very deep. I spent the week before coming here teaching a retreat so I had already been acculturating to a retreat pace, sitting for short periods throughout those seven days. I came home for 36 hours before leaving for NYC for one night where I participated in a “talk back” after a theatrical performance of a play called “The Perfect Couple.” If you’ve never heard of a talk back (I hadn’t), it’s when people with something to say about the play are on stage afterward to dialog with each other and with the audience. I was one of three authors and our conversation was moderated by the two completely awesome authors of “The Nanny Diaries” and did I ever love them. Plus it was really fun to talk to the audience about relationships. For that night, I stayed at the apartment of one of the producers who was also a producer on some John Waters’ shows based on his movies, like “Cry Baby” and “Hairspray,” I believe. Her assistant let me into this lovely apartment on Union Square right near where I used to live at 10th and University. The producer and I never even met. She came in late and I had a 5:30 AM car to the airport to fly to Denver. So that was a completely urban blip between these two retreats. I felt totally comfortable walking all over downtown Manhattan and staying in a stranger’s apartment on Broadway but I feel kind of stiff and shut down in the house of friends, in the middle of the mountains. Once when I told a friend of my fears of being alone in the country, he said, “you’ve got it reversed. You should be afraid in NYC and feel safe here.” Well it doesn’t work that way for me.

Anyway, between the solitude, the beauty, receiving teachings from Sakyong Mipham, trying to grasp the nature of heartbreak, and a lot of meditation practice, I feel so raw. My responses are unpredictable. Sudden things arise in my mind that make me cry or laugh, but mostly cry. I could try to give some examples, but they would be meaningless to anyone but me, to whom they are quite meaningful, yet also completely ephemeral. The instruction under such circumstances is just this: relax. But relaxing doesn’t mean spacing out or distracting yourself with Project Runway reruns, or even the new season, which started last night but who’s counting. It means allowing what arises to arise, and to continue allowing and allowing, without knowing what it means, where it’s going, or how it will end. All by yourself. It is scary and noble at the same time.

But wait. I’m not alone. I have a kitty cat for company. Here he is, assisting me in the writing process.

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Somehow I’ve ended up house sitting in Shangri-la, up in the clouds, surrounded by quiet. This house is a gift, a blessing, a treasure. It is absolutely beautiful on the inside, but the killer beauty is just outside. The house is situated all alone looking directly out onto the front range of the Rockies which appear soft and distant and cool. The house is owned by dharma practitioners and they have an amazing library. Certainly every dharma book I’ve ever read is here, plus hundreds I wish I’d read. I’ve been writing, practicing meditation, reading, cooking, and sleeping.

So it’s heaven, yes? Yes. And also not. While it’s mostly a paradise of solitude, I do have one constant companion who is bugging the crap out of me. I simply cannot escape my own company. Without husband, friends, traffic, and Project Runway reruns to cushion the blow of my own personal neurosis, I have to take the brunt of it. I have so much self-doubt. I am afraid of the dark. I hesitate to give my all to anything: to my writing, my practice, my trust in myself. I see how I’m always holding back, which is easy to do now that I’m in a place where there is absolutely no reason to hold back–no others to attend to, no interruptions, nothing dictating my time, no reason not to pour myself body and soul into what I love most: study, practice, contemplating, and then attempting to be creative with these three things by writing. It makes me very sad that I don’t love myself more than this, but apparently I do not. Why? I don’t know.

I’ve been here 5 days. I wonder what it will feel like on day 10 or 19 or, at the end, on day 30.

Highly recommended!

From May 08 issue of the Shambhala Sun

“The crazy wisdom approach to fear is not regarding it as a hangup alone, but realizing it is intelligent. It has a message of its own. Fear is worth respecting. If we dismiss fear as an obstacle and ignore it, then we might end up with accidents. In other words, fear is a very wise message….The point is, you can’t con fear or frighten fear. You have to respect fear. You might try to tell yourself that it’s not real, that it’s just false, but that kind of approach is very questionable. It is better to develop some kind of respect, realizing that neurosis also is a message, rather than garbage that you should just throw away. That’s the whole starting point — the idea of samsara and nirvana, confusion and enlightenment, being one. Samsara is not regarded as a nuisance alone, but it has its own potent message that is worthy of respect.”

Chogyam Trungpa, From “Fearlessness” in CRAZY WISDOM, pages 124 to 125.

On July 8 I’m departing for a one month semi-solitary retreat in Colorado. I’m house sitting in a beautiful but remote house in the foothills of the Rockies. There is no regular phone service. I say “semi-solitary” because for 3 or 4 days during this time, some others will also stay at the house. And I might drive to Shambhala Mountain Center to hear talks from my teacher, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.

During the month, I will be super focused on writing, on seriously finishing the first draft manuscript for my new book, “The Wisdom of a Broken Heart.” I have such huge plans for this retreat: to write, first and foremost, but also to seriously, seriously devote myself to Buddhist practice. And I can’t resist the urge to also try to quit eating all bad foods, begin a strenuous exercise program, and blog every day. (I’ll be able to get online.) I just want to make every single day count. I’m so afraid I’ll eat cookies and play Solitaire on my computer all day instead.

A friend and spiritual advisor suggested setting a schedule for myself. Okay. I shall. Here it is:

7-8 Meditation
8-9 Breakfast
9-12 Writing
12-2 Lunch and Break
2-4 Writing
4-530 Meditation
530-7 Dinner and Break
7-9 Revisions, reading of dharma books

I figure if I say this on my blog, I’ll be too embarrassed not to do it. Taking shame as my motivation may not be the most spiritual thing of all time, but it will do in a pinch. The important thing will be to write. And practice. And commit to self-care as my hidden emotional life steps out of shadow and offers to box with me.

In the beginning, I took the teacher as teacher,
In the middle, I took the scriptures as teacher,
In the end, I took my own mind as teacher.

–From Journey to Enlightenment, pictorial biography of Dilgo Khyenste Rinpoche

Relationships are lonely. Even good ones. My relationship with my husband is lonely. My relationship with my guru is lonely. They’re the same kind of lonely—I have no idea what either of them is really talking about. And these are the good relationships. I really love them both, but in both cases the relationship is planted somewhere just outside my capacity for understanding. The only thing I know is that I’m no longer in a relationship with a person (husband or teacher). I’m in a relationship with a relationship. Which doesn’t really care what I have to say, particularly. So I just wait for it to tell me what to do.

The other day, we had a fight. (My husband and me, not my teacher and me) It was a bad one. Super bad. Bad like leaving-the-house-at-1AM-to-go-sleep-on-the-couch-in-my-office bad. It’s so cliché to say I can’t even remember what it was about, but I sort of can’t. Well maybe I can, but just don’t want to believe that something so unbelievably stupid (someone not telling someone else that they bought a new camera, for example; I mean it only cost $200 and I needed it for work) could cause two normally sane people to absolutely lose their minds and jump all up and down yelling at each other. I mean for goodness sake.

I was so depressed by this argument. I drug myself home at 6AM, dreading seeing him, but also hoping I would so he could see that I was still ignoring him. As I let myself in and walked up the stairs to our bedroom, he was exiting the shower, towel around his waist. His hair was wet and smelled like drugstore pineapple. His bare chest looked kind of dewy and sweet, not at all like the chest of someone you’d hate. Although I was still angry, I could see that he no longer was. (When he blows up in anger his emotions metabolize and become digestible—he feels better after a “good” fight. For me, a fight is like getting socked in the head, the kind of punch that at first you can’t even feel how much it hurts and then throbs for days…) He came toward me and held his palms up in an unreadable gesture. My palms spontaneously rose to mirror his, whether to stop him from coming closer or to hold him to me, I also couldn’t tell. Back off. Come here. It didn’t matter which one I did, because in that moment, I realized I was trapped. I couldn’t push him away, nor could I hold him close enough. I couldn’t keep him at bay because our lives are no longer two separate-but-parallel tracks as they were when we began living together. No. We’re living one life together. I don’t know at what moment this happened, but something invisible pushed us into a single life. We must have held each other one too many times. Inhaled each other’s breath while falling asleep one too many times. Had the same fight, kissed the same kiss, exchanged the same glance, eaten off the same plate one too many times. Our bodies and hearts have re-formed into cutouts that can only hold the other. From this realization and from the sight of his bare chest and the scent of his pineapple hair, I wanted to open to him, to hold him close just because for whatever mysterious reason, the mere sight of him touches me so much.

But no embrace will ever really satisfy. I could never hold him close enough for him to actually know me; he would never know what it felt like for me to do this, why I was doing it, or to recognize the sequence of thoughts and feelings that led to this opening. I saw the depth of our connection and the simultaneous inability to know each other. He must feel the same exact way, I thought as I pulled him close. Very lonely. And, I realized, the closer we got, the more shocking and painful it would be to still not really know each other.

***

In my spiritual practice as a Buddhist, I’ve been encouraged to open myself to spiritual wisdom, to the kind of knowing that goes beyond the conventional mind. I’ve made a commitment to this effort and have taken many vows, taken on demanding meditation practices, and even found a guru, something I had always scoffed at as an excuse made by the lily-livered to forego adult responsibility. But when you find your teacher, it isn’t all that different than finding your husband. On one hand, you are bowled over by the extraordinary fact of their very existence and how profoundly and unquestioningly you love them, but on the other, during the first-blush phase, you look at them and go, “that’s it?” Still, as both relationships progress, your beloved becomes both more familiar and more mysterious as time goes on. You question the vows you made. Some days they seem outrageous, impossible (I said I’d always love you?) and on others their true meaning deepens beyond what you had originally imagined.

If the marriage vow is to love, the vow to the guru is to open your self to his instruction and influence. It’s very scary. But here’s the funny part. It’s way more complicated than doing 100 Hail Marys or 100,000 prostrations just because he told you to. At some point, the guru enters your mind. It’s impossible to describe this. It begins with simply recalling his verbal instructions when you sit down to do your meditation practice (“make awareness itself the object of your meditation”), then graduates to unbidden reminders as you go through the day (you’re about to give the finger to the guy who just cut you off in traffic, but suddenly remember your teacher saying, “regard all beings as your mother,” which is a guru-way of saying, please don’t flip people off). But at some point, you stop hearing the teacher speak to you in his voice and you start hearing him speak in yours. I think. It’s very hard to know. But what seems to happen is, because he is your guru, you have somehow always known him. It’s sort of like, as a grownup, still hearing your mother’s voice when you’re about to take the last piece of pie (“haven’t you already had two pieces?”) only he says things like, “regard all dharmas as dreams,” and “the mind is empty and luminous.” The more you relax your mind, the more you practice, the more kinds of wisdom energies begin to manifest themselves in your existence. These energies are variously described as self-existing wisdom, Buddhas of wisdom, bodhisattvas of compassion, and, of course, as Susan Piver, if you happen to be Susan Piver.

But are the Buddhas and bodhisattvas really there? Do they know me? How will I ever know them? Am I inviting them or rejecting them? I have no idea. Sometimes I think I’m in a relationship with them, sometimes I don’t. I can feel that the longer I practice, the more something happens, but I’m not really sure what that something is. I used to simply go to dharma talks and then try to practice what I’d been taught. I still try to do this. But just as often, these days I get my practice instructions from Aerosmith songs or an overheard conversation on the train. There’s nothing mysterious about it—I’m just listening to my iTunes or going to work and suddenly something clicks, like, “it’s really true—I don’t exist.” I don’t know where it comes from. Everything starts to sound like the teacher’s voice and all I know is that my efforts to connect more deeply with him have become much more dreamlike and difficult to differentiate from my own mind. It’s very personal. Intimate. Lonely. Just like my husband stepping out of the shower with pineapple dewdrops in his hair, my teacher steps out of my own mindstream, palms held up in an equally inscrutable gesture. Communications are taking place in a way I no longer understand. These two individuals have taken root within my mind and speak to me in their own curious language, using my mind as their voice. Some days I can make out what they’re saying and on others it sounds like complete gibberish. The last thing I can share with either of them is what it’s like to be with them. It’s just too intimate to describe. Both relationships are teaching me something, but I can no longer understand the instructions. Still, learning occurs.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to friend of mine, also a practitioner, but from a different lineage. He was telling me that nowadays, his meditation practice consists of getting up in the morning, going to his cushion, and just sitting there. He basically tries not to do anything at all. To relate to the teachings, there are no longer any rules to follow such as “place attention on the breath” or “visualize an open sky.” Just like me, he doesn’t really know what to do anymore. He can’t go back to following a set of practice instructions, nor is there a new set to jump forward into. There is only space and the feeling of groundlessness. In his tradition, he says, this stage of spiritual development is called “stupefaction.” This is where no one can tell you what to do anymore, no one but your guru, who somehow can never be found, yet is everywhere. All I can do is listen, without knowing what listening looks like. Some kind of dialogue is taking place beyond my radar. No one will ever know what this is like for me. Not even me.

This book describes a wonderful way of dealing with fear. The only way, in fact. By making friends with it. Offering it a cup of tea, perhaps.

Tsultrim Allione brings an eleventh-century Tibetan woman’s practice to the West for the first time with FEEDING YOUR DEMONS, an accessible and effective approach for dealing with negative emotions, fears, illness, and self-defeating patterns. Allione-one of only a few female Buddhist leaders in this country and comparable in American religious life to Pema Chodron-bridges this ancient Eastern practice with today’s Western psyche. She explains that if we fight our demons, they only grow stronger. But if we feed them, nurture them, we can free ourselves from the battle. Through the clearly articulated practice outlined in FEEDING YOUR DEMONS, we can learn to overcome any obstacle and achieve freedom and inner peace.

Betrayal. Love lost. Murder. Sweet sorrow. Haunted voices speaking from beyond the grave… This song (recorded by the great, great Johnson Mountain Boys) has it all.

No, brother, I'll never grow better
'Tis useless to tell me so now
My broken heart is only awaiting
For a resting place under the snow
I was thinking last night, dear brother
How happy our home was with joy
When a serpent crept into our Eden
In the form of fair Christine LeRoy

I was thinking last night of our wedding
One year ago only tonight
When we stood 'neath the gaslights so happy
In jewels and garments of white
When she came with the face of an angel
To wish us a lifetime of joy
My heart sank within at the malice
In the face of fair Christine LeRoy

Diamonds gleamed high in her tresses
Falling back from her ivory brow
And glistened like stars in the heavens
On her fingers as white as the snow
When she gave her white hand to my husband
I knew he thought me a toy
By the side of that radiant beauty
That beautiful Christine LeRoy

Time passed away and my husband
Grew thoughtless and careworn each day
I knew 'twas the wiles of the demon
Who so artfully lured him away
When at last one bright evening I found them
'Twas a sight all my life to destroy
Hand in hand with her head on his shoulder
Sat my husband and Christine LeRoy

Now brother, be kind to your darling
For my heart has grown sick now and faint
For the thoughts of the wiles of the demon
In the beautiful form of a saint
When I sleep 'neath the snowdrifts of winter
Where no sorrow or pain can destroy
Just tell them they've murdered me, brother
God forgive him and Christine LeRoy