Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso
Picasso painted because he couldn’t sing.
Maria Callas sang because she couldn’t write.
Hemingway wrote because he couldn’t paint.
Focus on the talent that you have and develop it to the fullest. Waste no time wishing for other talents.
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Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. — Pablo Picasso
While others are making lists of New Year’s resolutions, I have only one: simplicity. I used to make lists of resolutions. It seemed comforting and the thing to do. But lists of resolutions have become nothing more than yet another to-do list in a world of too many things to do. What’s needed isn’t another list, but a principle that takes away the need to have a list. That principle is simplicity.
Simplicity means reducing the number of things you do in a day. It means focusing on the task at hand. Because we divide up our days in 24 hours and we need sleep, simplicity means limiting the number of tasks we do in any given day. How much time have we spent tweeting, sending text messages, updating our profile on the various online social networks we have joined? Was all that necessary?
I will be the first to admit that I have spent countless wasted hours reading blog posts, commenting on them, posting on Twitter, reading and retweeting tweets, updating my Facebook page, and then wondering why I don’t have time for anything else and why I feel so unsettled. I don’t want to spend 2010 in this way. To start the year, I have cut in half the number of blogs I subscribe to and am limiting my time on Twitter.
As for my offline life, I have been doing my daily meditation, spending time with friends, cooking, reading books that have been screaming for attention on my bookshelf, and writing. I feel peaceful and grounded.
I promised to elaborate further on my ten worthwhile summer projects, the no. 1 project being “Meditate”. How do you get started? What is it? And for the more curious, how do you find out more about Buddhism?
I have listed several online resources for meditation instructions and Buddhist teachings. However, there’s no substitute for showing up in person at a meditation center to really learn the proper posture and to ask questions about your practice. It is my hope that once you get started, you will continue to meditate throughout your life, and develop wisdom and lovingkindness.
RESOURCES
Tricycle Magazine: a great resource for those who are new to meditation and Buddhism, and for those who are already practicing the Dharma. Sign up for their Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/tricyclemag)
San Francisco Zen Center: the Zen Center is located in San Francisco at 300 Page Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 in Hayes Valley. They have regular meditation sessions for beginners and more experienced meditators. They also run the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley.
Dharmaseed.org: online repository of dharma talks by teachers of Vipassana or Insight practices of Theravada Buddhism. Until now, the teachings had been available only on CD or tapes. You can find them now in MP3 format on this website. They continue to add new recordings of teachings given at various retreats.
My personal favorites are the Satipatthana Sutta teachings given by Joseph Goldstein, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts (where I hope one day to go for a two-week or longer retreat). Listen to his other teachings, too, which are very clear and inspiring.
RETREATS
Tassajara Hot Springs: affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center, this wonderful retreat is located at the end of a dirt road in the Carmel Valley. It is about 4 hours from San Francisco. There is no electricity, except in the dining hall, kitchens, Japanese bath house and the zendo (the hall where monks and visitors meditate). It is closed in the fall and winter for the Zen practice period. I went to the Tassajara Hot Springs for a 5-day meditation and yoga retreat which turned out to be a deeply spiritual experience. I joined the monks in their 5:40 a.m. and 8:40 p.m. meditation sessions, hiked in the mountains, did yoga twice a day (2 hours per session), ate delicious vegetarian food from their famous kitchen (the Tassajara cookbooks are sold everywhere) and sat in the Japanese style hot springs. I went to bed as soon after the evening meditation. I appreciated how peaceful I became without the demands of email, mobile phones, Twitter and all the other ways we distract ourselves in our daily lives. There is no cellular signal so one is truly cut off from the world. What a luxury!
BOOKS
Since economists are predicting a severe recession and people think there’s going to be one, we will probably have one. That means a lot of people will lose their jobs, businesses will close down, consultants have no gigs. But you don’t need to get depressed or panic. There are other ways to deal with the recession: get away. What’s the point of sitting at home being depressed? If you have an apartment or a house, try to rent it out, and go to a place where the living costs are lower. Here are a few suggestions that are good for the body and the soul.
(1) Travel to cheap exotic places and have a real adventure: hike the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu, go trekking in Nepal, backpack around India, Sri Lanka and Burma. For the Inca Trail, check out Peru Andean Experience.
(2) Go on a meditation retreat for several months. In the US, the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts has a three-month retreat (http://www.dharma.org/ims/retreats.php), as does Tassajara (Zen Buddhist retreat center) in California. In India, you can immerse yourself in a vipassana retreat in Bodh Gaya or Sarnath: http://www.bodhgayaretreats.org/.
(3) Go on a yoga holiday in Goa, India: http://www.ashiyana-yoga-goa.com/yoga-holidays.shtml.
(4) Volunteer for charity work in developing countries or for Greenpeace aboard one of their ships.
(5) Get away — deep into your mind by taking a course that develops your creativity. Take a class in creative writing, painting, photography, sculpture, cooking, DJing.
Research on the benefits of meditation show that “longtime meditators don’t lose gray matter in their brains with age the way most people do, suggesting that meditation may have a neuro-protective effect. A rash of other studies in recent years meanwhile have found, for example, that practitioners of insight meditation have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for attention and control), and that experienced Tibetan monks practicing compassion meditation generate unusually strong and coherent gamma waves in their brains.”
