AWAKENING ON A TWO-WAY STREET

"Holy crap!" I exclaimed to the void when thunder, practically in my bedroom, roused me out of my early morning dream. I'd been resting well, having cleared all work-related duties from my conscience and having the weekend to pack before leaving Monday morning on my Korean Air flight to Beijing via Seoul.

An odd office moment on Thursday enhanced my anticipation. Our health insurance carrier (AKA, health care provider) had scheduled a health education presentation. I usually attend these sessions about nutrition or exercise or proper self-treatment --things all promoted in the interest of "containing" health care costs, something I understand because 25 years ago I used to work for this particular carrier. The idea is that the more the health care provider/insurance company does to "educate" the policy holder, the lower costs will be. I am not sure this is a proven concept.

I was a little leery this time because the session wasn't by the usual charming, fit, and handsome young man (who usually tells us things we already know but in an engaging guilt-inducing manner). But the topic was intriguing: "Meditation: A Modern Approach to Ancient Wisdom." Modern, of course, means western and scientific, but still, it seemed like a good excuse to get away from my desk for an hour. Meditation was being promoted, with the sanction of the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (an arm of the National Institutes of Health) as a stress-relieving (and thus heart-healthy) technique. Not too many of the staff took the time for the brown bag -- desk slaves slammed by deadlines. "I would have liked to come, but...". If I was the CEO I would have made it mandatory that the entire staff participate. But the CEO didn't attend either. (But his administrative assistant did.)

It was a nice overview of something my China trips have been about, although the insurance company educator, who seemed to have some background in neuroscience, was quick to point out that this was not being presented as any spiritual exercise. (That was part of the "ancient" concept.) No slouch, the charming, fit, and energetic older man reviewed some classic techniques (breath counting, visualization, affirmations, mindfulness), citing The Relaxation Response from 1975 and the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. (No neidan or Wang Liping here.)

The health educator led the desperate little group (mostly from the accounting department) in some basic breath counting ("1 to 10 is good, if you can do 11 to 20 you have reached the meditative state," he claimed); some affirmations (I am confident, beautiful, etc., appealing to the HR staff), and some mindfulness ("Unwrap the Hershey's miniature--unless you are allergic to nuts or chocolate--and slowly savor it."). Actually, I'd never noticed how well-polished and shiny a Mr. Goodbar could be. And you can make it last a lot longer when you're not simultaneously slaving at your desk.

I had already become one of the interactive talkative persons in the group, being the same age as the presenter and the only one familiar with some of his antiquated allusions (W.C. Fields, patent medicine, Proust) when I made an observation based on something my Chinese neidan teacher had asked me last year.

"Are you meditating always?" Or maybe lao shi said "always meditating." Whatever. Though I suspect he might have meant "regularly," I have been thinking always since then of the notion of "always" meditating.

"You know," I said to the health instructor,"if you practice deep meditation it makes the mindfulness stuff come more easily. And mindfulness makes the deep meditation easier. It's like you're meditating always, these techniques become a two-way street."

"Ah," he said, "that's enlightenment! Everybody, talk to her." I don't think this decreases any of the deductibles on my health care plan, but later, the person who is revising business cards to reflect the new office address asked me to verify my title.

"Just put 'Enlightened One'," I joked. She had also attended the session.

"Like a certification," she said. "Certified Enlightened One. CEO!"

In the meantime, wandering about this two-way street, my attention was called to something I said just previously in "Miswiring," that I'd come to rely on my car radio when I was "tired of thinking my own thoughts." (Ah, the two-way street of blog comments, something not everyone likes, but I appreciate the dialogue, the observations. I suppose I might enjoy chat rooms and IMs, but that seems too fleeting and noisy, too much like the office.)

My blog commenter quite rightly pointed out that I might myself be a little "miswired" at the moment, and this made me more convinced that it is time to make this trip back to Wudang for a little adjustment. Hardly a CEO (that's just a title, a position of control and arrogance all too often), I'm just trying to meditate always, trying NOT to be thinking my own thoughts all the time.

But I do have a couple of trivial puzzling thoughts about enlightenment on this early stormy morning, awakened before dawn by thunder and, yes, lightning:

1. How do I get my health insurer to subsidize my trip in the interest of health maintenance and stress relief?
2. How do I clean under the keys of the keyboard of this MacBook Pro, across which I splashed a glass of red wine, and now the "q,w,e,a,s,d,z,x,c" section of the qwerty chiclets is dimmed. I can touch-type well enough, but the lit keyboard enhances writing in the dark. (They say red wine is good for your heart health, right?)

Time to brew the coffee, smell it (slowly, slowly), get a haircut, shop for travel necessities, prior to tomorrow's packing exercise, to be followed by the opportunity for 13 hours of meditation at 30,000 feet.

PENDING EQUINOX
Awoke this morning with my personal barometer/sinus headache caused by low pressure and rain, which will probably prevent viewing the spectacle of the full moon at the equinox tonight, not a common conjunction. Night-skygazing can be a spiritual activity, but is easily hampered by clouds, as a muddy murky mind clouds meditation.

This reminds me of my only "regret" from my last China trip, a failure to observe a particular starry night in the mountains, listening to insects and frogs, away from city lights and traffic noise. We had been out in the courtyard at the kung fu academy, watching the moon set, also noticing a passing satellite. I had washed out some underwear, hanging it on the line in the dark, then did a little qigong, a little standing meditation. I reminded myself that it would be great to come out and do some sky viewing after I had been asleep for a few hours, eyes adjusted to really appreciate the stars after the moon had gone. When I awoke at 3:30 a.m., it was just too cold and damp to leave my finally warm (if hard) bed. I told myself...tomorrow night.

But the next night it was rainy and cloudy, a condition that continued until we left the mountain. It's always better, I think, to regret things you haven't done (as opposed to what you have). You can't change what you've done, but you can always try something again, the way I finally, after several visits to Beijing, managed to spend some time at the Temple of Heaven. It had been on my to-do list for years. (Is that the "bucket list" people talk about? What is that? And the Temple of Heaven itself wasn't all that great after Wudang, though the wandering around in the park on my last day was pleasant.)

Temple of Heaven (for solar festivals)

In any case, I have already seen the Taoist mountain stars in great glory, Big Dipper and all, on a painful dark descent from the main summit of Wudangshan in 2007. I just thought it would be nice to see them when I wasn't suffering from leg pain and exhaustion. That was the real regret. But I got over it.

******
The falling barometer may also have caused some bizarre dreams for me (or it could have been a lot of really bad, if yummy, food I overate yesterday. (A chai latte from Starbuck's, a pumpkin cream cheese muffin, a Beard Papa cream puff...a Korean chili-cheese dog with jalapenos. What was I thinking? I'm fasting today, more or less, and Longjin tea has calmed my stomach.)

The dreams were only in my muddy murky cloudy mind, but they seemed meaningful. In the first, a version of the "exam in class you haven't ever attended" dream, I was among a group of peorsons to be presenting scientific abstracts for proposals. When my turn came to present, I realized that instead of a proper paper, all I had was a couple of pencil doodles on a scrap of bond paper.

"I propose," I said,"to posit an imaginary universe." I went on to discuss something about imagination, imaginary things, all fluid and fluent, it was really good, like a successful Toastmasters speech. When I was done everyone applauded. The next speaker up, said "You're a hard act to follow."

"Why don't we just take a little break, " I asked the moderator. And we did, and I woke up.

Only long enough to remember the dream and fall back to sleep again, when next I was on some sort of job interview, trying to talk to people who didn't really understand me. I was having a wardrobe malfunction, no nudity, just all tangled up, so I threw the uncontrollable bits of my costume (which may have included a sword) over my shoulder like a sari. Then as I was leaving, I met my boss on the way in. This actually happened to me once. She got the job, I got hers.

Practically everyone I know is in some state of distress over relationships, job pressure or lack of such, health puzzles...seasonal existential despair. Perhaps once past the equinox and its unusual associated full moon, things will begin to change. Partly because in past years, this is when I ordinarily would have been returning from China and I have a nagging longing to be returning (one way or the other), and partly because I am having my own share of existential despair, I hope the dreams actually mean something. In any case, "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours."

May we all have sweet dreams tonight.

THE OX ARRIVES

Was awakened this morning, in the first hour of the new year, by a mosquito. I was irritated, and later consulted my feng shui calendar, which indicated that today was mostly auspicous or neutral, but that the hour from 1 to 3 a.m. was very bad. Indeed! I tossed and turned and sprayed DEET and tried breathing exercises. I may have slept, but can't be sure. I was partly disturbed because I started reading that damned "Eat, Pray, Love" book again. At the ashram, she is having all kinds of issues, which might have been more interesting if she'd used the third person in her narrative. More relevant to the present moment though, one evening she meditates to ignore the mosquitoes that are sipping her troubled blood. My mosquito was quite harmless I'm sure, but would you trust mosquitoes in India? Do they have malaria in India? Why am I reading this book? She says all the bites faded quickly. She was lucky: a couple weeks ago when our night visitors were out in large force, my complexion acquired a frightening adolescent appearance for a few days. While she has many interesting observations about meditation and spiritual quest (that's why I'm still reading it!), there are way too many problems of her own. I think I would have avoided her if she were on one of my own recent retreats --speaking of which, while trying to ignore my pathetic buzzing Year of the Ox harbinger by thinking about what to do in the coming year, I made a decision to go back to Wudang in September. Now the year begins to map itself out. I have a vision, a plan, a framework for the next cycle.

What's your plan?