Get Moving You Lazy Ass!

Here are some lines from an old Pema Chodron article from the blog Awakening the Buddha in Us:

Traditionally, laziness is taught as one of the obstacles to awakening. There are different kinds of laziness. First, there’s the laziness of comfort orientation, we just try to stay comfortable and cozy. Then there’s the laziness of loss of heart, a kind of deep discouragement, a feeling of giving up on ourselves, of hopelessness. There’s also the laziness of couldn’t care less. That’s when we harden into resignation and bitterness and just close down.

You know, I have to say the hard part for me about confronting my own laziness is that I often have the idea that it means I must work harder, get my ass more in gear so to speak. However, Pema suggests in the next paragraph of her article that this attitude might actually be just another form of laziness. Instead of sitting with the muck and confusion coming up, and making whatever decisions and doing whatever work is being called for now, there's just rushing around, doing things for the sake of doing things.

It has only been over the past year or so, as I have forced myself to slow down at my job, in my volunteer efforts, and in life in general, that I have been able to see how all that running around and doing, doing, doing was both laziness and a way to avoid feelings of not being good enough.

It's tough in a speed-addicted, overworking orientated culture to slow down. Even harder to do so with balance, and not just become a sloth.

Built into the human predicament seems to be the assumption that we should eliminate our failings; as adequate and worthy people, we should be able simply to leap over our weaknesses. So perhaps the grown-up thing to do would be to blow up laziness with a bomb, or drop it into the Atlantic Ocean with a huge weight so it would never reappear, or send it off into space so that it would float out into infinity and we’d never have to relate to it again.

I have put myself into work situations that require a lot of energy, attention, and well, work. Other than a short stint as a low level postal worker, and a year or so as a museum security guard, I have had jobs that have been all about serving others. So, manifesting laziness in the workplace in any of the forms Pema mentions has often had a quick turn around - in other words, it's caught by someone pretty quickly, put back in my face, leaving me to address or avoid it.

Beyond work, I have volunteered my time over the years in positions demanding a similar kind of attention and energy, and with their own rapid laziness feedback loops.

And even as a kid, I was plugged in sometimes as a faux parent for my sister, master housekeeper, and generally laden with responsibilities earlier than most children.

So, that feedback loop has often been with me, along with the social admonishments against laziness that seem to drive people to overwork and then crash again and again. The feedback loop is probably a benefit, you know, because I have had enough opportunities to face these forms of laziness that now I can actually see them some of the time. I can even hang with them more than in the past.

However, there's still that narrative right behind my ears, saying "I'm tired. I don't want to work any harder. Enough already." And maybe there's some truth to that story, but I think it's also true that it is a story coming from believing that all effort feels the same, has the same impact on the body/mind.

Yet, when you face your laziness, or anything else coming up really, there's actually a shifting that goes on with your effort. It might be difficult for awhile, but eventually that difficulty burns away.

We join our loss of heart with honesty and kindness. Instead of pulling back from the pain of laziness, we move closer. We lean into the wave. We swim into the wave.

Somewhere in the process of staying with the moment, it might occur to us that there are a lot of unhappy brothers and sisters out there, suffering as we are suffering. In becoming intimate with our own pain, with our own laziness, we are touching in with all of them, understanding them, knowing our kinship with all of them.

In my own experience, it really has been the moments of awareness that each of us going through variations of the same things. That it isn't just my laziness, but the laziness that appears within all of us from time to time. I still am challenged at times by thinking that I'm not doing enough in life, and that I have to work harder to be a "better person." It's easy to know this is a false narrative intellectually, but not so easy to let go of when you have believed and acted out of it for a long time, and a lot of people around you also believe it and are acting out of it.

We reinforce each other, for better or worse. It's foolish to say otherwise. So, breaking free of these kinds of stories, which are pretty common in our society, means standing out and perhaps being viewed in a negative light. This is where I think having a deep sense of one's balance points, coupled with the courage to do what's necessary to maintain that balance, is so utterly important. Because it's so much harder to face laziness, or anything else, when you're out of balance.

Power and Balance

I've been reflecting on power recently. Obviously, my previous post on institutional oversight has to do with macro level power. However, I'm also interested in how power manifests in day to day, moment to moment life. The way words are said, a shoulder is shrugged, and/or an eye is shifted, and how that can impact others in certain ways.

We had a meeting this morning at zen center about a topic which I might be blogging about more in the future. However, the topic isn't what I'm interested in right now. During the meeting, several versions of a story about the potential unfolding of the idea came up, and we deliberately talked about how those stories needed to be aired so that any personal disagreements could be examined in the open. As we went around, it was clear that the kind of thing that happens in the game Telephone - pieces of information getting passed around and, in the process, becoming blurred or bent out of shape - had occurred. And it was from the ground of that blurred or bent out of shape information that a lot of us in the group were working from and reacting to, which obviously can lead to trouble.

So, what does this have to do with power? I've been listening to a set of Buddhist teacher Ken Mcleod's retreat podcasts called the "Warrior's Solution." You can find them and other retreat podcasts here. In one of the podcasts, he speaks a lot about balance and imbalance, and when comes to power, I'm convinced that this is critical. Most of us in this group meeting this morning were a little off balance in our understanding of where things were, and thus, it was really helpful to go around, speak to that imbalance, and go forward from a more balanced place. The macro level abuse issues I was speaking about in the post on Friday have to do with, among other things, how groups fall out of balance and how they might best re-align themselves.

In some ways, focusing on balance and imbalance is a way to step out of the "good/bad" and "us/them" dichotomies that frequently come up within groups experiencing minor difficulties, like our group had this morning, or major difficulties, like the various sex and power abuse scandals that have rocked several U.S. Zen centers over the past 30-40 years. Viewing organizations as in balance or out of balance could be a way to deal with the tricky ethical issues arising without assigning blame to any one person - because no matter what, it's never just one person. And on a personal level, each of us can assess where our own balance points are so that we might better function within the various relationships we have in our lives.

I'll have more to say about all this after I finish sitting with the rest of the retreat podcasts, but I thought I'd write this short reflection because my experiences this morning and the post of a few days ago seemed linked enough to say something now.