ZoomBuddhism: My favorite 4 FREE buddhist links, Nov 2020

 With the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a giant explosion of online resources for Buddhism. Most retreats have moved online. I've nicknamed this ZoomBuddhism, or the Zoom Buddhist Explosion. I am very happy about it.

Here are the resources that I find to be the best, along with some details:

• AudioDharma - https://audiodharma.org/  (FREE)
   This is my "home base" for where I started Buddhism. There are about 1000+ recordings and quite a few videos (since 2020, especially). Gil Fronsdal connects very well with me, but I have gained from many of the teachers. I also appreciate being able to search odd topics, like itching or sex or lying or boundaries or ???. There is also a basic app.
• Insight Meditation Center - https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/ (FREE)
  This is the physical center for AudioDharma, located in Redwood City, CA. With COVID-19, there are no in person gatherings, and the teachers are now doing live Zoom sessions, with YouTube Live streaming too usually. The best place to get started is to find a session on the calendar: https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/calendar/. If you are timid, look at the archives which are mostly un-edited, raw sessions. Often, they offer "guided meditation", which are words that guiding you in how to breath or visualize things. These are often a very good entry point for new people. (UPDATE 2022: They have a voluminous youtube channel)
• DhammaTalks.org - https://www.dhammatalks.org/mp3_index_current.html (FREE)
  My main teacher these days is Ajahn Geoff, formerly known as Thanissaro Bhikkhu. This website has books, articles and audio recordings.  He has grown to be quite famous in the Buddhist and Vipassana world because of his frequent and voluminous work as a translator of early Pali texts.  The link is to audio, his evening talks. These are more traditional dharma talks, touching on a subject or idea. They aren't really about guided meditations.  Thanissaro Bhikkhu is on the stricter side of things. I appreciate that he isn't always "just feel good and be gentle". (UPDATE 2022, they have a youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DhammatalksOrg)
• Update 2022:  10 percent happier APP and website: https://www.tenpercent.com/ 
  I like Dan Harris and his relatable approach. He breaks it down very simply.   The caution here is that these techniques there are highly focused only on mental noting and decreasing reactivity. These are excellent things, but there are some elements of meditation that aren't simply noting or reducing reactivity. Notably, it de-emphasizes fabricating anything except relaxation, and the insight is perhaps limited to "letting go". 
• For alcoholics or people with other addictions: I recommend the Recovery Dharma, East Tennessee.  https://www.recoverydharmatn.org/meetings.html
  They do not mind if you are not from the local area. I stumbled on it when I went eclipse chasing in Aug 2017. It was a very sweet environment. Not large. Very earnest.
  Note the time zone is East Coast. Noah Levine has been censured for sexual misconduct, but he's no longer the head of the national organization. Plus, I feel that what he has done is helpful and earnest. His book is useful. Don't judge the book by the author's actions, especially the biggest lapses.

Outside of these free resources, I've found a lot of help from the following.

• Pema Chodron's Getting Unstuck audiobook on Audible. Really good about feeling stuck.
• Jack Kornfield's Buddhism for Beginners audiobook on Audible. About 9 hours, but very colloquial and with a lot of humor. I've re-listened about 10-20 times.
• Tricycle magazine is a great resource. It really spans a lot of Buddhism and it's intersection with more pop culture. If your view of Buddhism is too narrow, Tricycle will surely broaden it. (a few free articles online per month.)
• Try finding some of these on Overdrive or Libby in your local library. (where it might be free).

A few that I look forward to delving into:

• https://dhamma-dipa.com/
  I met Dhammadipa at a Thai Forest monastery for bhikkunnis in Northern California at Aloka Vihara. We had a really good dharma talk about pain. She answered my question about whether to open or close the eyes during meditation (it depends on the goal, a noting meditation or an inward focusing meditation).  I felt a strong depth in her practice while having a dhamma discussion.

On Contradictions and Getting the Most out of It.

A word of warning:  you will find a lot of contradictions in what you hear about Buddhism. Don't let this dissuade you. I like the phrase UUDR: Use what's useful, discard the rest. And, it's a good reminder to think about the lessons to Rahula (alternate sutta link). If you notice something helping you have less anger, greed, or delusion (which I also call wishful thinking or if-only thinking), keep going to that resource/teaching for help. Beware... there are things that are comfortable but not actually helpful. Getting what we want is comfortable, but actually breeds greed, anger, and delusion.  

Almost everything I've heard attributed to Buddhism is helpful at the right time.

Here's a specific example: Acceptance can be helpful or harmful.  If you are struggling with trying to control the world, acceptance can be very powerful. Just realizing and just noticing the present moment, whatever comes up, is very helpful. This is often early on the path (and sometimes later, too). But, Buddhism's overall richness isn't just about acceptance. If you accept your bad habits and impulsivity, you don't go very far to calming the mind. For me, it's a lot about thoughts of sex and relationship partners.... I fantasize a lot about finding love, companionship, and sex. So for me, a big part of my current practice is not accepting lustful thoughts and desires when they pop up.

The notes to Rahula of noticing and developing your watcher is very key. Because I also made the mistake of pushing away my lust and trying to squash it too hard, and that just made that impulse stronger. I actually needed to make friends with it, like befriending a problematic uncle who keeps coming back. And, then, once I really studied why the lust/uncle did what he did, I was able to figure out the Karma/causes of it. I was able to "garden" my mind so I didn't feed the lust impulses so much. The lust impulse still comes up, but I'm not hijacked so much anymore. I find I need to be accepting of the impulse, but not accepting of letting it run havok in my mind. And, that was a very, very, very hard lesson for me.

With all that said, probably the first 3 years, I didn't understand much of this and I just played talks before bed and while cooking. And, over time, a lot of this seeped in. Kinda like the famous saying attributed to Dogen: 

“Associating with a good person is like walking through mist and dew; though you will not become drenched, gradually your robes will become damp.”

With this post, I hope you find lots of fog!

PS. Funnily enough, I was trying to figure out how to kickstart Zoom-based communities in January of 2020 (https://buddhistfriend.blogspot.com/), but I couldn't figure out how to get people to seek it out. Well, COVID-19 changed all that! So now I can focus on figuring out apps and games.

SHORTY: May you have ease...

 I found this more helpful. "May you have ease with difficulty."

Instead of: "May you have ease." --- which is pretty good,but has a danger of creating a desire to avoid dis-ease.

Better: "May you have ease with difficulty." --- this is realistic and not wishful thinking. My goal isn't to have ease all the time by avoiding difficulty (in the outside world). My goal is to find ease even amongst the worst difficulties, aging, illness, death, loss, fear, anger.

See also The Sublime Attitudes, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, for more discussion on the Theravada view of how to use metta for the goal of calming the mind and heart.

Excerpt: an alternate and safe pleasure

 You find that a sense of ease and wellbeing with the breath can do a lot more for you than any amount of status, material gain, praise, outside pleasures—any of the ways of the world. A sense of ease and well-being that come from within: This is really all you need because it fully nourishes the mind right now.

Excerpt from https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/less-more/ by Thanissaro Bhikkhu AKA Ajahn Geoff

Childhood causes and consequences

One of my strong interests during my retirement is childhood trauma and adult life outcomes.  Many of us know about PTSD, which stands for post traumatic stress syndrome. Well, kids living in poverty and trauma are often (but not always) exposed to continuous traumatic stress. Consequences can include learned helplessness, impulsivity, and decreased attention and concentration.

The way kids are setup from birth to age 5 can set them up for success or difficulties that are far reaching.

Several books and studies have informed my understanding. The ACE, adverse childhood experiences survey is a big one. I first learned about it in the book The Body Keeps Score. A general overview of stress for lay people is Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Both those books deal with stress overall, but have chapters that link to early childhood.

The surprising thing is that the consequences of this early stress to lifetime outcomes is something like 10X worse than cancer or drunk driving or cigarette smoking, some of the larger debilitators of our day. But it is a third rail, of sorts. People don't want to be told how to raise their kids.

On Kanopy (web video service via my library), I happened on the 5 part web series: www.raisingofamerica.com. Several fascinating things.

1. The US military has affordable sliding scale child care for all service member families. It's low cost and high quality.

2. The "pro-family" lobby is ideological, starting in the Nixon Era. Ostensibly aimed at keeping government out of the family, it often harms family. It often does so with an air of fiscal conservatism and anti-welfare arguments. Nevermind that these things reduce late-life poverty and other social ills (i.e. positive return on investment)

3. Child care often costs $10,000 a year to $16,000 a year per child. This is a burden or way out of reach for most middle class families.

4. The hardest are those families with nonstandard work schedules. Nurses who work split shifts or drivers who sometimes have mandatory overtime.

Alot of the policies aim for a national or state-funded program, funded via tax dollars. This could be beneficial, but is a big political fight. I'm curious what social policy labs could be done to introduce incremental change.

Putting on my policy brain, the startup costs of child care are very high. The business has to set up with various background checks, licensure, and training requirements. These can easily be on the order of 5k to 20k. While this isn't a big deal for larger centers, it is for a place that might want to only run a summer program.

I'm curious about whether Buddhist centers can venture into child care. Many catholic centers or schools do this. I did find a few centers that run in the Los Angeles or Denver areas. I don't know if these are run just for congregants/members of the religion, of if they serve a broader community.

In general, it may not be legal to informally babysit for more than 1 family and accept pay. Like, it may be technically illegal if I watch the kids of 3 families for a day at my house, unless I certify several things.

I think good programs like Boys and Girls Club or Big Brothers/Big Sisters understand a lot about the screening requirements.  Certainly, keeping kids safe is vital. But are there other ways than pretty onerous screening? It seems to be the case that, just to volunteer for a day, you technically are supposed to be screened. This then means organizations have to look for volunteers that are worth the cost of screening, so they demand up front commitments that are pretty large.

Cameras may be a big solution to the problem. If the kids are recorded and there are rules (like two adults in the area at all times), this can avoid sexual misconduct or neglect.

Crisistextline does an interesting thing. They provide crisis counseling via text. Everything is via text, so they are monitored in real time (the text-based analog to cameras) and logged.

I worry about barriers to entry for helping.

Lastly, who really wins from childhood trauma? Who is against wiping it out? Nobody is really against it. But some people feel like the nuclear family should solve it individually and without interference (even help is interference). And others feel like it's a waste of money.

There's not a ton of common ground, unfortunately. I don't see a grand bargain. And as long as states keep the costs of screening on businesses (and states CAN choose to pay for the background checks!) innovation will be stifled.

Keep getting back up

As I do my own practice, I'm constantly falling off the path. I have an intention, and I have a desire to not chase after greed, to not chase after aversion, to not chase after wishful thinking. But the old habits are strong, and I inevitably fold back into those old habits.

This is not a catastrophic failure. In fact the law of karma emphasizes that our actions and the results of our actions follow pretty clean laws. Getting stuck and realizing it is part of the path. So many people don't honestly realize it. So, give yourself credit for the awareness.

One of those laws of karma is that habits can be broken but they are very hard to break.  It takes time to create a new habit that takes the place of the old habit.

So with this, it really emphasizes the paramita of persistence. Of meeting setbacks with renewed sense of purpose. We want to be careful not to grit our teeth and force something, because we can create a new habit of forcing without having much impact on the old habit of our wandering mind. It's nice to just notice when I have fallen off the horse. Sometimes I'll just say oops. Or say "look, I fell off the horse." Or say the classic,  "I see you Mara I see you Mara."

Keep getting back up on the horse. There's no other way to learn to ride.

With that said, there's an important sense for me to remember the middle way. The middle way here is to be between forcing things and making too many excuses. There is one friend of mine who has great earnestness for this journey of Buddhism and calming the mind. But they also have a lot of habits. And I see them making a lot of excuses for why they can't take a moment to follow the breath or making other excuses of why they don't practice consistently. I've advised them not to push too far, but to set very very simple goals for consistency. Maybe just a phrase to be repeated once a day. Maybe just reading the same passage before bed. 

And they don't have to do it consistently. What I mean by that is it's okay to mess up and skip a day. But the thing to be very careful about is to make excuses about skipping a day and then skipping another day and then another day. Because that reinforces the old habit that the spiritual path and the path of calming the mind is not that important. It reinforces the old habit that dealing with the world is the most important thing, so important that you can't take 2 minutes a day to work on your mind.

I feel like it's one of those friendships. The friend keeps complaining about something, maybe drinking too much. And they asked for help. But then they just never follow through with even the smallest steps.* There is some attribution of their failure to their lack of will. But I also understand that willpower is a finite resource, and the poll of our addictions is very very strong. But the second or third or 15th time they say I'm going to do better next time... At some point The helpful thing to do is to point out the pattern period and it's important to do so not from a I'm telling you so kind of mentality. But to do it with a really genuine open desire to help the other person. To do it with care and right timing so that it can actually be heard.

Sometimes people just like to wish for things and not put in effort. And that's fine but those are not people I like to be around, because they create problems for themselves and other people. I want to help people wish for things that they can achieve, to put in the effort to achieve them, and to achieve them. 

And in Buddhism, amazingly, calming the mind completely is possible to achieve.

*I don't live near them, and they aren't very good at communicating. So I don't know if they are being consistent or not. But when I ask them to tell me about their practice, it doesn't sound consistent. I hope I am wrong. Ultimately, their practice benefits or hampers only themselves, not me.