A Practice that Works

If we don't have a practice that works, that we can call upon in the midst of our desire, anger and frustration, ignorance, pride, and jealousy then we will act on them. We won't be able to see the suffering of the other person.

Rinpoche sometimes talks about a wonderful man he knew who was always very fair in his dealings with everyone. But also, he wasn't a pushover and he never let anyone cheat him.

Sometimes when we see the suffering of another clearly, a side effect is that we see how, in their pain, they try to manipulate you to ease their pain.

I think the seed of wisdom is seeing all this and understanding how to help them best.

My Mother-In-Law is here for Thanksgiving so I'm getting a lot of chances to put my practice into action!

I'm failing miserably, but I am doing much better than I used to. I'm also starting to see some of her good qualities.

When I started my practice this am, my negative emotions got washed away.

Better late than never :-)

I'll try to do better today.

I am a Buddhist Practitioner

I used to be an IT geek in Silicon Valley, the pinnacle of geekdom. I considered myself cooler and smarter than the normal humans. But that was OK because we were doing stuff to make work easier and move society towards a better future where everyone can be themselves and do what they want because they would be liberated and empowered by technology. The job was "the very definition of my being" as Lev Yilmaz says in this deadpan funny video.

Then I got a job with my Buddhist group. It didn't pay much, but that was OK because I figured out that Buddhism was really the way to move society towards a better future where everyone can be themselves and do what they want because they would be liberated and empowered by the Buddhist teachings. The job became the very definition of my being.

Now I'm learning how to become a day trader which, in a lot of ways, is even More Elite and Even Cooler than being a Silicon Valley geek. Learning how to day trade is much more time consuming, demanding, and costly than I thought and it's becoming the very definition of my being.

There's something interesting about day trading though. The more you grasp onto it and let your emotions, such as greed and desire, anger, ignorance, pride, and jealousy, rule you, the more money you lose. If you let hope and fear rule you, you will lose money, and lots of it. This is great, because I realized a few jobs ago that I didn't want my job to be the very definition of my being, but I couldn't stop myself from doing that because it seems that I need something to identify with to justify my existence.

Here's my new identity: I am a Buddhist Practitioner.

If I can't renounce grasping onto some kind of ego, I figure a healthy replacement behavior is a good interim solution.

What does being a Buddhist Practitioner mean?

It means that I practice the Buddhist teachings in order to crack my heart open to let it's love and wisdom pour forth. It's a lot of work, but I realized that in order to more society forward towards a better future, we have to change ourselves and no one can change ourselves for us.

Becoming a Good Christian

I want to be like those good Christians. You know the ones. They are so gentle, kind, and humble. They are incapable of hurting a fly. They are good through and through.

I've been wrestling with my ego by myself, and my ego's been winning. In desperation, I prayed to the lama, buddhas, and bodhisattvas and they helped me. Then I realized that I don't have to go it alone (big DUH!). In fact, it's impossible to conquer your own ego by yourself. While doing my Refuge practice, I realized that those good Christians are that way through the grace of God, and that I, too, can become like them through the blessings of the lama, the buddha, the dharma, and the noble sangha.

Those good Christians practice being in the grace of God throughout the day, throughout their lives. Maybe if I continue to practice Refuge in this way after I'm done with my accumulations, I can eventually become like them.

Right now, however, I'm like Scarlett O'Hara who really wants to be a great lady like her mother was, but she hasn't got time to be one. Right now she has to run the lumber mills and carry a gun. HAHA!!!

The Cult of Fausto

The gifts I mentioned a couple postings ago are literally paying off now. I joined the Cult of Fausto (my nickname) and signed up for the program at cybertradinguniversity.com. Yes it costs a lot and my mom would have a heart attack if she knew how much I paid. I told Austin and he almost had a heart attack! :-) But with day trading, as with any skill, you need to learn from a master of the craft.

I made $842.32 today, my first day of live trading with my new cult. Biotechs were on a tear. I traded AGEN (that was a loss) SVA, CPRX, and SQNM. I would have traded HGSI during the last 10 minutes of the trading day but I maxed out my account and didn't have the wherewithal to switch to one of my other two accounts. duh.

My mom was so excited she hugged me. Lack of results thus far was beginning to get her worried and I was starting to worry that she was going to pressure me into getting a regular day job. Getting a day job would kill the whole point of my new life. I might as well roll over and die rather than do that.

Also today, I got my mom logged into the site where you can check up on your kid's grades. Alex has gotten all 100%'s so far, plus some extra credit. We were very happy and relieved about that. I told Alex he was awesome and he was pleased despite himself. He tried not to show it but he couldn't help it :-)

Better still, my mom decided not to have any more big parties, yay!

The whole house is breathing a sigh of relief with all the good news.

Population Control

Everyone should be required to raise someone else's kids but not their own.

Then, without those most powerful of all evolutionary blinders on, people would see the whole concept more clearly and realize how utterly stupid and insane it is to have kids. They would also realize where they're going wrong with raising the kid, and they would realize where the kid needs help to improve in order to hold down a job, make an honest living, and stay out of jail.

Unfortunately, with many parents, the urge to have kids stops with the kid being born and does not continue with the job of actual parenting. I know most of you can't even imagine being uninterested in raising your child, but unfortunately, I have seen this phenomena at all socioeconomic levels and it's disastrous results. Human life is precious. Bringing a child into the world should not be taken so lightly. My mom says that raising Alex is a full time job for 2 people, namely, my mom and me! HAHA!!!

Some people should be sterilized.

Population control in all countries would go a long way towards solving the global problems we face today.

Having a hard time practicing

Well, the gifts just keep on coming.

Everything seems to be looking up.

So I'm having a hard time practicing.

My practice is where I go to work out my troubles, or at least make peace with them.

So what happens when I don't have any troubles? No practice! I'm very ungrateful. Well, Lama, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, things are really cool for me now so I no longer need you in my life. Ta ta, I'm off to amuse myself. See ya when life sucks again. That might be any moment now, anyway.

I didn't manage to start my practice this am.

I'm just starting now, but I'm interrupting myself to write this.

I went back to coffee because I was staying up late reading the Harry Potter books. Now that I'm done reading them, I think I need to cut back on the coffee :-) Maybe that will help.

Yesterday's Gifts

Confession: I didn't practice yesterday. However, I got several seemingly miraculous gifts from the buddhas and bodhisattvas, totally out of the blue, to help me with my book. I didn't manage to finish my practice in the am and then all the gift getting took up my whole day. Note to self: FINISH PRACTICE BY 8:30 AM EVERY DAY!!!!

But anyway, it was kind of amazing, I was just sitting at home as usual minding my own business when stuff dropped into my lap and people came over to the house.

I've been stuck on a piece of the plot and I stumbled on something really fun on the internet to move it forward.

Two other gifts are for helping my day trading. My day trading will hopefully fund my ability to live at home and write the book without taking up ALL MY TIME, which is what's happening now. My book is purely a labor of love. I'm not intending to make money off of it and I want to keep the making money part separate from the book writing part.

As an added bonus, the slipcover for the couch came from overstock.com and it matches and fits perfectly! HAHA!!!

First Day of School

Hurray! Today is Alex's first day of high school.

The three of us, my mom, Alex, and I, are happy summer vacation is over. Alex is delighted to get out of the house and be with other kids and have less chores to do each day.

I'm relieved that he is doing something constructive without my having to oversee it. I just have to get him off to school and then I have several completely peaceful hours :-)

Master of the Universe

I've been getting discouraged at how I just can't keep my mind focused on doing what I want to do.

To keep myself doing all the things I am supposed to be doing, my usual method is to whip myself into a frenzy of "shoulds" and "musts" which I have to fulfill in order to be a human being worthy of taking up my share of space on the planet. These then build into a huge ball of anxiety which then drives me to complete my task list in order to relieve my self-induced stress.

However, now that I've renounced stress, I'm realizing how precious little control I have over my mind, and thus, my behavior. I can't stay focused while I'm doing my meditation practice. After practice, I can't keep focused on my task list. I slip up on my lay person's vows. I waste time.

Then I remembered that "To tame this mind of ours, that is the teaching of all the buddhas." That is the essential meaning of all the buddhist teachings distilled into one line. So with great relief, I realized I was just being human. I'll be working on this until I realize the heart of enlightenment. Which in my case, is going to be a very long time.

Now I'm even more motivated to keep developing the stress-free method of making myself do what I want to do through my meditation practice.

To be master of your own mind is to be master of your universe.

Healing

Compared with the emotions, the body heals in a jiffy.

This is both reassuring and disturbing at the same time :-) You mean life won't be magically rosy if I'm healthy? But on the bright side, that means no matter how sick I may be, I can still be happy.

Actually, I don't think you can heal emotions. It seems to be more effective to think of it as getting rid of the negative ones, leaving only the virtuous ones. Or maybe it's more like accepting them all, and not giving any particular ones center stage. Then letting them all just go back where they came from :-)

Taking back my life through taking vows

My life has always run away with me. Ever since I can remember, it ran me around until I was completely exhausted and sleep deprived. I've been in a constant battle trying to take control of it.

I've been listening to Sogyal Rinpoche's many hours of teachings on the practice of refuge. In one of the teachings, he talks about the meaning of taking vows. So today, I decided it might be a good idea to take some basic lay person's vows until I complete my Ngondro. There are five basic vows: not killing, not stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying, and no intoxicants.

At least the way Rigpa does it, you can sort of set the parameters of the vows you want to take. Basically, at first, you set the bar low enough so that you are fairly confident you can jump over it. So for example, for the vow not to kill, you can vow not to kill humans. My friend said she "hoped?" that it would be easy enough for me to keep that one :-)

Once Rinpoche said, you might be celibate anyway by accident, so you might as well take a vow and get some merit for it! Check ;-) Another easy one!

So I thought about the parameters of all the vows and decided, "I'm going to do it."

Then something magical happened. I felt like I was in control of my life.

!!!!!

I feel as if I am now aware of what what I am doing, and making my own choices. I feel as if I am thinking, saying, and doing things on purpose, instead of forever being carried round and round in circles really fast on a runaway racehorse.

I think that's what taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is all about.

I'm happiest when I leave my mind alone

I'm happiest when I leave my mind alone.

Now I just have to figure out how to leave my mind alone when I'm, uh, using it.

Recession Over in China

Still more breaking news and some China facts:

• China has emerged from recession. It's GDP grew by 7.9% in the second quarter. On the other hand, China has to grow at 8% just to keep unemployment at bay. However, must be nice to be keeping unemployment at bay...
  
• Industrial production increased 10.7% in June Y/Y.
  
• It's stock market has now surpassed Japan's in terms of market cap, making it #2 in the world (the U.S. is #1).
  
• Imports of copper and copper products increased 13% in June.
  
• It is the third largest world economy at $3.2 trillion
• This dude projects that the reminbi could replace the dollar as the global reserve currency by 2050.

Geopolitics is going to be interesting. Will China bend the rest of the world to it's ways because the rest of us will be bankrupt? Will China need to modify it's ways in order to do business with us? Something in between? None of the above? The world is interesting now and I like that.

There's been some debate whether China can lead the world out of recession, but now it seems that China is doing just that. As we are all painfully aware, China is the #1 buyer of U.S. debt and if it didn't buy it, we'd immediately be toast. Sales to China helped drive Intel's ginormous earnings upside surprise which took the entire market up 3% yesterday, and is increasing the topline of AMSC and other companies.

I want to start inner city factories in Cleveland and employ disadvantaged people so we can be China's China :-)

OK it's 8:26 pm, gotta go watch Squawk Box Asia. CNBC.com streams it live and free and puts up a "commercial break" frame during the commercials. Don't get left behind kiddies, it's not too late.

Bad Poetry

More breaking news--The sunrise and the morning air are unbelievably gorgeous. I can see why people are moved to write bad poetry. In the past, people have tried to get me to enjoy things like the sunrise and flowers, but I thought that was way too trite and hippie-ish. I was much too impatient and worried about all the stuff that I wasn't getting done. I couldn't enjoy those other things if I tried. And I did try. It just didn't work.

I've been sickish for over 2 weeks and I've enjoyed every minute. I didn't do anything other than study day trading and watch Glambert videos. No practice, no volunteer work, no phone calls, no social obligations. It's really wonderful to be a recluse.

My mom's been giving me gentle chores to get me in the fresh air. Yesterday she told me to go pick the blueberries off the bush.

I love my mom :-)

Who knew life could be really enjoyable?

I mean, I did appreciate life version 1.0 and especially in Idaho and then in the SF Bay Area.

But, well, money and possessions don't buy you happiness. In fact, all that excess is an extreme pain in the ass.

Maybe I should start a stress junkie rehab camp where people can learn that their self-worth is not based on how much they accomplish or what they do or what they have. They can learn that they are worthy simply because they are a living, breathing being. They'll all come here and just do nothing.

Life 2.0

Breaking News--When you get regular sleep and plenty of it, you have no trouble staying awake during the day and you don't even need coffee. Who knew? You totally need to try this sleeping thing out. It's so necessary for your well-being. Promise me you'll try it. Try it for a month. You'll be amazed!

I used to feel terrified of death, especially during the time when my husband, Karl, was dying of cancer.

Then when I was working for Rigpa, I reached a point of, what I thought was a bit of renunciation. I was happy that I was helping people find and follow the Buddhist teachings and I didn't care if I lived or died. I could die knowing that my life was well-spent and hopefully I would meet the teachings again in my next lifetime or at least eventually.

Now, however, I am enjoying my new slacker life so much, I would really, really prefer to live!

So on the one hand, you could say I was so miserable that I didn't care if I lived or died and I was so tired I was numb to all pain and discomfort. On the other hand, I feel as if I've ended one life and am now in heaven and probably I'm using up the good karma I created in my life version 1.0. Either way it's all good. Liz calls working for your buddhist group "Staff Ngondro" and now I do believe it's true. Ngondro is a practice of purification. It's sort of like polishing the tarnish off to reveal the gold underneath. My life version 2.0 would not be this amazing if version 1.0 hadn't come first.

The Secret to Being Liz

I have this friend who is an accupuncturist. She's always going to India, does triathlons, spends every weekend at her boyfriend's house in the country, which is a remodeled barn with solar panels, is doing a Buddhist chaplaincy program, and does lots of volunteer work. She has the freedom and flexibility to follow her dreams. It seems like she's always having fun and knows everyone and she has a big heart. I've always said, "I want to be Liz in my next life."

I was trapped in my high stress, endless work lifestyle and death was the only way out.

There are millions of impoverished people around the world who are, indeed, trapped in poverty and misery. They work all day and still it's not enough so they need to have children and send them to work too so collectively they can earn enough money to house and feed themselves.

Generally, though, as Americans, we're not one of those millions. We have choices.

We choose a lifestyle of overconsumption which traps us in the golden cage of our jobs.

We choose to occupy ourselves with projects in the hope that it will improve our situation but just robs us of time and money.

We choose complexity over simplicity to keep ourselves busy so that we don't have to look at our inner selves and follow our secret dreams.

Now, I'm Liz too. I just had to choose to be Liz. It was as simple as that. Everything I needed to be Liz was there all my life.

The Buddha said, "He who loves himself would never harm another."

So forget about your goals and follow your dreams, be the real you, and be happy.

Don't be afraid to dream big, as in helping half a billion people out of poverty in one fell swoop and making a profit while doing it. Here's an inspiring (long) video of Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems and now a venture capitalist, talking about microfinance.

Renouncing Stress

I used to be a stress junkie. I used to work in corporate IT. I helped to deploy and maintain mission critical business systems. If the computer system went down, business ground to a halt and all kinds of very bad things happened and lots of blame and anger ensued. I loved being so important.

Now I have completely renounced stress and coffee and I have embraced slacking and sleeping.

Our lives are rife with hope and fear. EVERY little thing in our lives is a source of stress. Can you name anything that is not a source of stress? Even fun things, like these Charles David sandals on bluefly.com, are a source of stress. Can I afford them? While wearing them, I'll have to be constantly careful so I don't scuff them up.

We say and do all sorts of things in frustration, blame, and anger because we are stressed. But you can have the right answers and still be wrong. Right answers and wrong answers are really just ideas on the relative level. So aren't they really part of this grand delusion that is samsara? What's really important are your fellow human beings. Those people standing right in front of you. Besides, getting upset is, well, so stressful :-)

We can sometimes have so many grandiose ideas about our work, our goals, our mission in life. My last job was working for the Buddhist group to which I belong. I completely missed the irony of my having so much hope and fear about contributing to the work of my Buddhist teacher, whose life's work is to free our minds of hope and fear.

The end doesn't justify the means. In Buddhism, I think the means are the end.

Zen of Day Trading

I'm finally starting to crack the day trading code. Mom's going to lose her job in September so it would be good to start making some money eventually. Toni Turner, author of "A Beginner's Guide to Day Trading Online," talks about the need for "detachment." She seems to be a Deepak Chopra fan. Everyone is a Deepak Chopra fan and everyone is gay. Is Deepak Chopra a Buddhist?

Actually, day trading, along with everything else, is buddhist. You can take a buddhist approach to everything. You can use all circumstances to practice buddhism. Moreover, being successful at something requires that you take a buddhist approach.

To excel at something, you have to let go of hope and fear and your attachment to outcomes, be open to what evolves, be able to recognize what is instead of what you think it is, be open-minded and flexible and be able to change on a dime, be humble enough to listen to people and learn, have respect, and be centered, grounded, focused and true to yourself.

Still sickish

Still not well, ugh. Overextended myself by making a birthday cake and dinner for my mother in law for 4th of July. My mother in law's existence is so wretched, hollow, and pointless it's painful to watch her suffer. She enjoyed the weekend at our house so that was good. She has every material comfort and need met and hasn't worked in 47 years, but as she herself says, "Money doesn't buy happiness."

However, if you already are happy, money is definitely an asset!

Sick

I think I got swine flu, ok just kidding. I went to a Rigpa training weekend and got super sick. I'm back home now recuperating.

The Secret of Time

• Don't let people waste your time. It reinforces bad habits for you and for them
• Learn to say no
• Do what's important and commit to it
  
• Have gratitude every day and appreciate all the amazing gifts you've been given. Even if your life is a living hell, everything is impermanent, even hell is impermanent. So appreciate these moments you are having right now. As in, right now :-)
  

Practice and Insights

There's a one to one correlation between my practice and having insights:

Wed - no practice, no insights to report
Th - no practice, no insights to report
Fri - a little practice, small insights, nothing to write home about
Sat - no practice, no insights to report
Sun - a little practice, small insights nothing to write home about

Garlic Scapes

Today I enjoyed the fruits of my mom's (sometimes questionable) labor. She's planted like 1000 bulbs of garlic and shallots. Insane. But that's my mom and now you know where I get my tendencies.

As a result, we have bags full of garlic scapes, which are the flowering part of the garlic plant. It's the curly thing in the picture. You have to cut them off so the garlic bulb in the ground grows bigger and so the garlic seeds don't sprout and grow. The garlic that grows from seeds ends up being way to small to use. You have to plant the cloves instead.

Koreans eat garlic scapes like vegetables and yes, they are seriously garlicy tasting. During this total slacker day, I found http://foodgawker.com and made garlic scape pesto, garlic scape white bean dip, and roasted garlic scapes, all with fresh thyme, which is now flowering.

I also made Andrea Ngyuen's Lemongrass Pork and sliced it and we had it in Bun Salad Bowls with mint, orange mint, and perilla leaves for the herbs, also from the garden. Everyone was very happy, including Anorexic Alex.

It was a complete waste of a day. How could something so wrong feel so right? :=)

The good news is, I have not listened to, googled for, or watched any Adam Lambert videos today! So I guess this is better than how I spent last Saturday.

Recipe for Misery

My mom is raising my cousin's son, Alex. Alex played some of my old CD's while I was doing my am practice, which was distracting.

I wanted to tell him, "Don't do it!"

It took me back to when I was a kid in this very same house. As adolescents, we struggle to assume an identity. We sample everything and decide "I like this," "I don't like that," or "I don't care." We present this collection of opinions and feelings to the world and say, "This is who I am."

Isn't it?

Alex is relentlessly in the "I don't care" camp about everything. It's very strenuous for him to constantly embody "I don't care."

I wish I could tell him, "Don't do it, you'll just have to undo all this later in order to find peace."

Buddhist Exercising

My mom thinks I'm doing prostrations to lose weight and doesn't know I'm actually doing my meditation practice, so she heartily endorses them. Otherwise, she would say, "Stop wasting time, do something productive!"

Here's a teaching from what must be the most entertaining Rinpoche ever. It's not how we are taught to do them, but the general idea is the same.

One reason we take refuge in the Buddha is because he is free from the 4 obscurations: karmic, emotional, conceptual, and habitual.

I realized that those four things are, indeed, obscurations. They lie in front of everything we see, think, and do, blocking our view of what actually is.

We can't think our problems away or solve other peoples' problems for them. Everything we do has to come from the heart. Not the emotion-laden heart filled with hope and fear. The heart of compassion.

Curing Glambertitis

I dived into watching a backlog of dharma teachings that I needed to watch. It's the one thing I love more than watching Glambert.

“Everything is perfect as it is, in it’s intrinsic nature. Having nothing to do with good or bad, or acceptance and rejection. One might simply burst out laughing.” --Longchenpa

"Meditation is the process of getting to know your mind." -- Sogyal Rinpoche

In the Tibetan teachings, the mind is the same as the heart.

Weekends Suck

Weekends are bad when you are mistress of your own time. It's taking me forever to finish my meditation practice. Instead, I am taking breaks to hunt for and devour new Glambert tidbits on the web. There is something good to be said about having many demanding people in your face time all the time.

"Through being impelled to by others, we discover Dharma
And find the essential meaning. Thank you, all who drive us on!"
- Longchenpa, from "The Words of My Perfect Teacher" p181

Glambert Time

Help!

I am addicted to Adam Lambert! It's ruining my life.

I hate Rolling Stone. However, I bought my first one today.

Even worse, I discovered I was a Cougar. For more mortification, check out this Cougar TV show. Women must be allowed to embarass themselves in all the same ways as men.

Unfortunately, NPR cannot save us from this fate.

Slacking is Good

Being a 46 year old living at home with mom is cool.

Here's my new schedule. So far it's awesome, but I'm only on Day 1! HAHA!!!

5:00 am - 9:00 am

• Meditation practice

9:00 am - 4:00 pm

• Day trading

12:30 pm - 3:00 pm

• Meetings & appointments
• Phone calls
• Personal paperwork
• Help mom with stuff
• Take Alex to tutor and play soccer mom
  

5:00 pm - 10:00 pm

• Volunteer work for Rigpa Fellowship