No more Bucket Lists…this one is a Fuck It List.

It is the time of year that wish lists of goals are being made up. I’m not about to make a wish list. Wish lists are too quickly abandoned and I won’t be abandoning this list. So I will keep the primary list short.

In no particular order:

1    1. Get my BMI-Waist measurement - Weight down to a healthy range.

2.      2. Stay alcohol free.

3.      3. Become physically beautiful. The goal is complete muscle definition with accompanying loss of my belly.

4.      4. Get my arse into Lycra without inflicting trauma on everybody.

5.      5. Climb walls with a rating of 20.

6.      6. Move well beyond the Sun Salutation in Yoga and become a serious student of Pilates and Yoga.

7.      7. Exercise for an hour every day.

8.      8. Become fluent in Indonesian. Will be writing a multilingual edition of the Dhammapada.

9.      9. Cycle from home via the Dingley-Dandenong Bypass-Eastlink and Mullum Creek Trails into the city.

And here is what could be considered a wish list.

v  Climb well above 20.

v  Run more than 5 km without feeling like I want to die.

v  Have Bliss in my meditation.

Fitness, Death and Motivation

I recently wrote on FUCK IT!!!’s. What I didn’t explore in that essay is the meditation that I am using to drive the FUCK IT!!!

I use a meditation on death to drive my personal change. Once you consider it, the choice of a meditation on death is natural when it comes to motivating change. Below is the meditation that I use.

My body is incredibly and undeniably fragile. Death is normal and natural. My own Death is certain. There is no possible way for me to escape, bribe or out run my Death. My lifetime has an absolute limit. Every breath brings me closer to the ending of my life. I will die on a perfectly ordinary day, a day just like today. I will die and the world will not notice. 

The first line states a fact. Whilst we like to think of ourselves as being rather robust and tough, the truth is that as organisms we live within very clear boundaries: deny us oxygen for 10 minutes, we die, cause us to lose 10 litres of blood….., deny us water for 4 days…., place us in an environment much above 50 degrees Celsius or below 0 degrees Celsius without cooling or heating….., cause injury to the brain, the liver, the heart, our bowels, bladder and we tend to…. If death wasn’t normal and natural, we would literally be crowded out. Given that we all know someone who has died, our own death is guaranteed. Most of us make it to about 80 years old. And when you stop and think about it, the number of breaths you will ever take is finite. As surely as you took your first breath on the day you were born, you will take your last breath on the day you die. And no matter how monumental your ego is….the world really doesn’t care about you.

I can be alive one moment planning my days and the next moment I can be dead. The world is utterly unpredictable and random. Accidents can and do happen all the time.  People can and do simply drop dead. I am not excluded from these facts and that this can happen to me.

Car accidents and heart attacks. The people who have them are just like you in that they all have plans for a future. Given that we are all made from the same material and endure common illnesses etc., it is a safe bet that there is a chance you will die in a car accident or drop dead.

It is the simple, ordinary and everyday things that can and do kill. Food, i-Pods’ and cars kill us. Food can kill us through eating the wrong foods, foods we have allergies to, by eating too much food. I-Pods can kill by distracting us from our environment. Our cars by driving them improperly or through the inattention of other drivers.

The obesity epidemic is being driven by the rising amounts of sugar in our diets. Eat a diet made exclusively of refined fats, sugars and carbohydrates and you will end up obese and likely dead within ten years. People are regularly killed by their media devices. They plug in and tune out and as a result get hit by the train, car or bus they would have seen or heard had they been more in touch with their environment. As for cars, see the road toll in your local paper.

It is only the practice of Dhamma that will help me deal with and accept my Death. The clutter of possessions, relationships, careers will not help me when I am dying. Often these things make it harder to die with many things left undone and unsaid. I must have my lifetime in such a place that should I die today, that nothing truly meaningful to me will be left unsaid or undone, especially acts and words of love. I must be ready to leave this lifetime immediately.

In understanding the frailty of our bodies we can see the necessity of having our lives in order. We need to be in the head space where everything really important to us is done.

I must live with great gentleness and kindness, for how I live will determine in a very large degree the state of my mind when I die. I can choose now to live and die without great mental suffering in both myself and those I love. My friends and relatives cannot do my dying for me. I can however lessen their pain at my Death by living and dying well.

People die in character. Rarely does death change people. If you’ve spent your entire life being a toxic piece of shit, then the chances are you will fear death. Conversely there is abundant evidence that if you’ve been a nice person and done everything that was important to you, that death isn’t going to be such a big deal. A life well lived and a death well done are things to be celebrated. Do you want to go to your death loved or loathed? 

 As surely as I came into this lifetime naked and bereft of possessions, I will have to leave it the same way. This body if not treated with proper care will often be the cause of death, so why should I turn to it for help at the time of Death? It was never mine in the first place.

You can’t make a wealth transfer to your next life…assuming there is one. I’ve seen my children being born and I’ve seen people die and we arrive and leave only with whatever attitudes and karma we have made.

When I use this meditation, there is the need to be in the space I want to be in should I die today. There is the acceptance that I have no time to get things right. Whatever time I might have is running out and the end of that time is unknown. So if I want to be utterly toned, gorgeous and to mitigate health risk factors, there is no time like now in which to become it. I may not have a tomorrow and I know I will die seriously ticked off at myself if I’m not at my most physically beautiful should I die today. And this is how I connect fitness, death and motivation.

Love and Silence

I was asked a question recently by someone I shall call Katniss and the question was: How do you love someone and not act it out?

Love, Katniss, like silence and stillness has many textures. I can love this person and feel a deep emotion and attachment for them and not act it out because there is no need to. In meditation there can be silence and stillness. Just as there is love between this person and myself, there is also a silence. 

With an understanding that love and silence have textures, let us look further into them.

Katniss, at the moment the love you have with your person is like music from Beethoven. There isn’t much silence at all. It is noisy and busy, dramatic, energetic and restless. It is only in the moments in which Beethoven manages to draw breath that there is much silence and Beethoven isn’t much into drawing breath.

Selina and I are an old couple. We’ve been together for almost ten years. We have silence. Our silence is the silence that happens between thoughts. Whilst we are busy and loud and passionate, there is still an observable silence between Selina and myself. If you think there isn’t a silence and stillness between us it is because you haven’t looked closely enough. Our silence and stillness is that of a love that knows that we can trust each other completely. Our love and silence is completely still, which is why you’ve most likely missed it. Our love and silence have no compulsive need to do anything. They simply either stand to one side, or if there is a job that needs doing, they get it done and then return to stillness.

In meditation the mind can become very still. There is the simile of a deer in a forest. The mind becomes very silent and very skittish. Our minds are afraid of their own silence. We aren’t used to silence and often don’t know what to do with it.

The same is true of love.

When meditation deepens the mind realises that it quite likes this silence. When you love someone and the love is returned, after a while you realise that you like loving and being loved. I believe Katniss that you are learning this at the moment.

Katniss with this other person the love is different. Our silence and stillness is that of something that is not yet born. We’ve tried a different love in the past and it hasn’t been terribly successful. The texture of our love and silence is one of expectation. In some ways our love is like a building storm. We both know it is there. We have both feel the rising humidity, but lightning has yet to strike and shatter the silence and whatever thunder is being heard, it is distant and likely unrelated to our storm. We both know that our storm may never be more than gathering clouds and rising humidity with distant thunder.

Yet, our love, like true silence, is not unrequited. Katniss, often it is the love and silences that are unmolested by words that are the greatest. I’m lucky, I have two of both.