Post-viral fatigue: living inside a brown paper bag and not having the strength to punch your way out. New story, old plot: the latest novel in the cycle of a prolific writer. The return of the great big dog with the soft mouth, who shakes you and shakes you until you’ve had far more than enough ... or until you’ve got it – at least it’ll do for now. Eventually, when you’ve abandoned all hope, the switch trips and you’re catapulted back into the regular universe, where you don’t need to have a sit-down and a cup of coffee in order to hang the washing up.

The nub of what I’m required to learn, a little bit differently with each revolution on the merry-go-round, is surrender; giving up the illusion of control; letting go of structures, rules, systems; improvising; living on the tide of life, not always trying to push it. And this requires a sensitivity to arising, a willingness to still myself and listen ... even when everything in me cries out to go numb and start running.

We had heavy snow in London this month, and my internal experience over the winter has felt thick and fast like a blizzard. Still, I’ve been reluctant to write about it. I don’t know how to deal with the fixative nature of words: the way they make things this and not that, when really things are both and neither. I’ve wondered if art disappears in proportion to awareness emerging, but I see from a review in Shambhala Sun that Chögyam Trungpa didn’t think so:

From a Western perspective, art is often about shoring up the self – or at the very least is held to emanate from a self, whereas in the Buddhist view there is no self. Chögyam Trungpa says that when we are creating from a more awakened place: ‘We no longer regard a work of art as a gimmick or as confirmation, it is simply expression – not even self-expression, just expression.’

Dance, when I am completely present, is for me essentially like mushrooms or hailstones – it’s simply the truest possible expression of myself existing. Writing is a lot more tricky. And yet it seems to be important in some way for me to write. Not indispensible, like dancing, but important.


Some people have commented on the degree of self-exposure in this blog. The reality is that I don’t feel I actually expose myself much at all. What I write here is a specific kind of distillation of my experience. A lot of the time – like now – I’m writing about writing (or not writing) about my experience. I don’t reveal the tender places.

When the last snow finally melted from my garden, the primroses had come into bloom underneath. That's how I feel about writing here. I leave the snow alone, and if in the end some flowers show themselves, that's OK with me.

I wrote my dancing story as part of an application process.

My dancing story
In one form or another, I’ve been dancing all my life. Age four: I dress up in old curtains and 1950s winklepickers to dance to Top of the Pops (‘Those were the days my friend / I thought they’d never end / Singing dance forever and a day’). Age nine: my grandfather teaches me to waltz (one-two-three, two-two-three). Age 13: I wait until everyone’s out and do Isadora Duncan to the Readers Digest Chopin collection.

Dancing was an invisible activity in my parents’ house. If it was seen at all, it was seen as something embarrassing, unfit for public view, like masturbation. I internalised this view of things. Other girls at school went to ballet classes, but it never occurred to me even to want to learn ballet. I took it for granted that I was a lesser class of being than the kind of girl who got to wear a leotard.

My dancing energy got dislocated and I became a writer. Although writing never offered me the doorway into the ecstatic that dancing did, I wrote for many years and got quite good at it – won prizes, got a first class degree and a doctorate, published a book and poetry, and here I am writing still. It doesn’t surprise me, though, that I’ve ended up with a highly ambivalent relationship to writing.

While in my head I’d defined myself as a writer, my body was subversive. It just kept dancing, no matter what I couldn’t see about who I was really meant to be. For many years I did professional ballet class every day. I remember fidgetting through my PhD viva and rushing off hell for leather to make it just in time for the 4pm ballet class at Covent Garden. Although I couldn’t acknowledge it, in reality dancing was always my number one priority.

I went into ballet wanting to gain control over my body. However, you can’t put your body into movement, even in a highly regulated way, and not have all of you shift. Ballet was a big paradox for me in this way: both an anorexic endeavour, a way of restraining and constraining myself; and at the same time a means of finding myself, liberating myself, creating moments of bliss. I wasn't interested in performing (although in later years I've adored being witnessed), and I found this hard to reconcile with my dedication to the regimen of daily class. It was at odds with the whole rationale. In retrospect, I can see that what spoke to me was the discipline of dance, and the pathway that dancing offers into the deep self, the self that cannot be known by the mind.

After many years, to cut a long story short, I got into astanga vinyasa (yoga that moves!) and then began teaching it. Around the same time that I discovered astanga, I started dancing Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, which has been my dance practice for the past seven or eight years.

The spiral rounds another bend and I find myself wanting to bring dance into my work. I want to be legitimate. I want to face the world full on and own that I’m here in it to dance. I’m aware that I’m tracing the pathway of my spine, which has an S-type scoliosis. Like my spine, I’ve deviated and I’m bringing myself back into alignment, though the kinks will always be there. This is exciting and terrifying, and is without a doubt the most radical movement into my own centre that I can make.

Getting on my mat at 4.30am is a statement of intention to stand up and face the day rather than collapse under its force. Intention is important; it’s the root that keeps me bedded in the soil. But a rigid form gets blown over; there also has to be plastiticy. There has to be the ability not to resist the wind but to to bow and weave with it.

I often don’t keep standing up. I often feel that I don’t have the sinews. There’s something about hypermobility here: the sense of being too pliable and then hardening to compensate, which manifests in all sorts of stops and jolts and stutters. Physically it creates knots in the muscles, emotionally a sort of sporadic armouring that really only works against the integrity of the whole structure.


There’s such poignancy in bringing up a child. Every day a little more of the adult enters, and every day a child creeps slowly off the stage. Celebration and arrival are all tied up with grieving and loss, and at the back of it all stands the ultimate reality of death and impermanence: we are all always crossing the stage like this. No matter how I resist being a mother, how I want to leap ahead and inhabit that fictitious promised land in which I am responsible for no one, I have a feeling that when I look back I will realise that the promised land was actually always in the process of love and struggle, that life has never again been as fraught with tenderness. And partly memory will be sweetened by the sugar of perspective, but also I will be tasting something real, which is more elusive to consciousness when I am in the here and now with it.

If writing is a practice, it means that I just put myself in the present and flow with whatever arises. The temptation is to try to record experiences, but this never works. It moves me out of the now. Writing shouldn’t be a preservative. It should be its own moment.

For me, the ngondro is a kind of cummulative destabilising force. It creates a particular set of internal conditions that gather and gather until you’re juddering down the hillside on a river of scree and your backside. In other words, it’s a landslide in here. I want to pin down each rock and tussock with words, but they go by too fast. The only thing is to let go and slide.

It’s a spider’s world out here. I could easily be lunch for one of these fat, ambitious old men on their sticky wires. September wends on, but the nasturtiums are still here, and lavender, butterflies, bees, some yellow and purple weeds ... The sun crosses the garden at an oblique angle: arrives later, leaves sooner. Ten-thirty finds me and two cats squeezed into two square feet of sunshine under the apple tree. It’s the still point between seasons, the last moment when denial is still possible, before you have to admit that the year is really on its way out.

I think this blog is mainly about practising, rather than what I experience when I practise. I suppose that’s the seed in the dark, the ineffable, the real esoteric side – real because it cannot – not may not – be articulated.

A sense of being at a watershed, of waters joining, like the two limbs of the Esk at the naga-house. It’s a landmark rather than an arrival, because a river is always a process, a passage – until it debouches into the sea. The Esk is an enthusiastic river; it rushes and jumps and circles. It’s like a puppy; it can’t contain itself. I could also become a bit like this, in the face of so much joining and opening and possibility. As well as having an eye to where I’m going, I need to keep returning to where I am now. If I get carried away too fast on the water, everything will dissipate before I reach the sea.

When I look at how I have been teaching, or rather setting up the structure to teach – devising, scheduling, selling – I see that I have been like someone trying to build Stonehenge. Single-handedly. And I wonder if it’s really necessary to drag enormous slabs of stone for miles and erect them with only brute strength and ropes made of grass. Latterly, I’m more inclined to wriggle down into a form that already exists and needs only to be excavated a little bit, something much simpler and more organic. It may be less visible on the horizon, but it’s more authentic, a better fit all round, and therefore more effective, in a ‘less is more’ kind of way.

Wiped the rain off the garden chairs. It’s not exactly outdoor weather, but too much interiority becomes claustrophobic. The openness of outside, of nature, is good. Wet September garden: spider’s webs spangled with raindrops, nasturtiums, marrow vines encroaching over the fence, everything late and leggy ... and the damp organic smell of humus: everything ending and beginning at the same time.

Sometimes it’s easier to write when I’m struggling than when the path appears clear and unobstructed. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I got kind of restrung at Samye Ling ... rewired. My synapses have been reconnected in different ways. I think I said that last year, but this is deeper somehow. I came into a closer relationship with the lineage and the monastery and the teachers and the practices. A lot that had seemed intellectual to me distilled itself into something deep and personal and direct. I suppose this is only what the ngöndro promises, but, still, it comes as a sort of surprise to me to find that it delivers.

I have been focused on finishing the ngöndro so that I can get on with something else; now, though, I’m feeling that this kind of practice is something I want to be engaged with permanently. Perhaps what I have most resisted is the way in which the ngondro permeates my life – because the accumulations are so large that if you’re not in a three-year retreat, you have to be doing them all the time to make any significant pile. But actually this is the way in which, to me anyway, the ngondro turns out to be most profound: because it sacralises everything: it makes the whole of life a sacrament. In words this sounds to me kind of trite, but the depth of experiencing it, moment by moment, absolutely isn’t.

This connects for me with resistance, because when everything is a sacrament, there’s nothing to resist. And when resistance dissolves, what comes in its place is a certain buoyancy, a lightness, a sort of fundamental laughter at the nature of things and the way we keep getting taken in: nothing being taken in by nothing.

As ever when some body of knowledge or practice seeps down, when it is assimilated on a deeper level, many pathways have opened. So many that it’s a bit overwhelming. I see that they connect, because I am holding all the ends, like so many balls of string. They connect because I am the connecting point, and somehow I know they all join up again at the other end. Some of them may turn out to be blind, but most of them need to be walked in order to tie this knot, and that is exciting, challenging and a little bit breathtaking.

Tsultrim Allione has written about how much of spiritual life must remain unspoken. This is not because certain practices, or aspects of practices, are traditionally labelled esoteric (although some of mine are) but because some spiritual processes need silence to mature, as a seed needs the darkness of the earth. I’ve often been frustrated and dismayed at the way the meaning of redolent experiences dissolves when I attempt to put them into words. It seems to me now that this insubmissibility to language is really just the inherent way in which the process protects itself. It is necessary. While this blog might appear to be an exposure, really it tells only a fraction of a part of one story, and it can’t be any other way.

I feel scratched up like chicken dirt. It’s the disparity between the way I’m living and the way I want to live. I’m living halfway the way I want to live; the other half is predicated on choices I’ve made and the responsibilities they entail. Well, there’s only one choice really: to have a child – which means to take hold of one end of a ball of string and keep holding on as it unravels and unravels, as one thing after another ensues. I’ve never regretted that choice. Nevertheless, it’s becoming harder and harder to remain present and invested in mothering in the face of the desire to practise, just practise. And I don’t feel I’m doing well by Rowan, not well at all. He’s so much a person who thrives on company and fun, whereas I live best in silence and reflection. Sometimes I feel as if I’m wearing him down, just by dint of who I am, and who he is. I don’t know what I can do about this. Neither of us is going to change our nature.

I understand why the ngondro is traditionally done in three-year retreat. These practices want to absorb you. It’s how they work. They get into your veins. I’m doing them in a very different situation, and I feel torn up and flying in the wind, like little pieces of scrap paper.

In transition again. I would like to be the Esk, just up-river of the naga house, always twirling and jumping and running, formless except where solid objects give it form. Actually, we’re always in transition, from one moment to the next; I can either offer myself to the flow or try to dam myself up against it. But the dam is in its own slow flow, year by year offering its body to the water. It's not really separate and discrete; it only looks that way to the observer who doesn't stay long.

For me, the heart of Samye Ling is not the temple, but the Esk, and the naga house on its grey stone island. This is where I find myself most deeply, in the body of living water.

Travelling. I’m a difficult plant to uproot. The clod clings. Getting out of the house and onto the road (train, actually) is hard. I resist. I vow never to go anywhere again that requires a suitcase. Then, finally, I’m up and away, a cup of coffee, a litter of crumbs of soil shed, and flying like a bird. I want never to touch down.

Time gives me vertigo. I try to attach myself to the moment as it spins away, but it’s gone before I can touch it. I experience my life-in-time like cloud formations massing and dissolving. I mean, I’m always wanting to anchor myself in this pattern or that – this past week to life at home without Rowan – but you cannot fix the form; I just create resistance, always behind myself, hanging on to the last thing, and then the last. Yesterday, alone once more, I got to wishing Rowan was with me, but he had already gone again, before I’d even managed to find myself in being with him.

Travelling fast I feel as if I could soar up above all these phases in time banking and dispersing. But I know that soaring is really just another phase.

August in England: sixty-something degrees, grey and constantly threatening rain. It’s like simmering (barely) in an old tin saucepan with the lid on. But I’m in the garden anyway.

The second set of ngöndro teachings begins at Samye Ling on Friday. I’ve booked the thing and then cancelled it and then booked it again. Now I’m glad to be continuing with the damn practices, even if Scotland is driech, five degrees colder than tepid London, and beautiful only in a dower, monotonous way, with endless pine forests, pheasants, and wild raspberries along the road.

I watched a caterpillar manoeuvring its way across the aubretia, tasting into the air and dropping down from leaf to leaf. This is the way to journey, knowing the destination only in a blind interior way. The mind doesn’t understand this slow, spirallic progression.

For two-and-some weeks, Rowan was away. I loved those weeks. Everything slowed down. Space bloomed around me. Silence dropped like dusk. I lived a life of practices, contemplation and few but redolent connections with people. Then, this week, Rowan came home, and I am struggling with the transition from single, childless person to the parent of a nine-year-old boy. Yes, I am an unlikely mother, full of resistance and longing for the quiet, contemplative life that I feel is really mine. But the caterpillar in me is making this loop, so I have to trust that I need to veer off the road ... or not even that: I have to recognise simply that I am veering off the road ... or that I don’t even know what a road looks like if it can be an emerging trail across the aubretia.

When Rowan was a baby, I wrote that I felt like a biscuit being mashed into the carpet. I hated being that biscuit. I still do. But something had to be – has to be – eroded. And just practices won’t do it. There aren’t enough pebbles, or hard enough, for me in that bag. So I was given this child, like me but so unlike: so social, so talkative ... as if for Rowan speaking itself is proof of existence. Whereas for me, even at nine, reality was silent and internal. And of course I feel guilty: that in the deepest sense I will always be (so it seems to me) unreachable to Rowan. I will be always moving off into the distance, absorbed in my own story. But I don’t know what he will make of all this. That’s his story. And it’s undercut by that fierce, inalienable umbilical love, which changes the shape of things perhaps, and keeps me here, no matter that part of me would like to be like Machig Labdron, who left her children for the dharma.

I scratched two entries to this blog, because, I think, the process of writing them didn’t tell me anything. This is important: that the process of writing should be the experience itself, not just the record of some other experience, however significant that experience was in its moment. If the writing is not its own moment, it dies.

The ngöndro is a noisy practice – so many words, so many repetitions. I wake up in the middle of the night with Vajrasattva still rattling around my head like wooden wheels on a stony road. In Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg tells this story:


My head, too, is often going to India, while all the rest is staying in Taos Pueblo. The songline that I’m really dreaming is half submerged and mysterious. What I’m saying is not what I’m actually doing, and I’ve learnt that what I’m doing is a more reliable guide than my loquacity. While I complain about the ngöndro, while I tell myself that I long to concede to the gravitational pull of moving practices, I’m still doing the ngöndro. And my head can't work out whether this is one great loop of a pointless diversion, whether it’s another way in which, for all sorts of reasons, I can’t quite give myself permission to just move; or whether the ngöndro is really something I need to complete in order to deliver myself totally into my body moving. But I am doing the ngöndro, and even if it goes against all sense and prior experience, I trust this underlying process of emergence.

Too much need for ‘perfection’, when the real perfection is underlying it all – all that I consider not up to scratch. Or not even that ... it’s more that it’s meshed within it – within the blowsy roses and the half-wild garden and the green plastic chairs with the scratches and the dull-grey summer day. It’s pressing through to the surface of everything that doesn’t try and doesn’t care a bit. It has nothing to do with my ‘standards’. It has nothing to do with what I think I have to do to prove that I am who I think I want to impersonate. None of that really has anything to do with perfection. Yes, I put a lot of energy into impersonating a yoga teacher, and then everyone adds their projections and the illusion is complete, but it’s only ever that: an illusion. And none of it has anything to do with perfection – nothing at all.

As soon as I made the link with Samye Dzong – offered the lunchtime meditation sessions and they accepted – I realised how much I want not to be a part of the one institution – any one institution – or even to be a student of the one teacher. What I want is to be the yogi up in the mountains, growing my dreadlocks and living in a cave. Actually, ‘want’ doesn’t come into it; it’s just a predisposition. I can try to counter it, but I’m going against my own grain. I seek practices that cut me loose and expose me to my own wildness, that lead me up the creek without a paddle and abandon me there. Of course, ultimately, all practices lead you up that creek, even when it looks as if there’s a big institutional safety net or a teacher holding your hand. And, yes, at the same time there’s a need for surrender of the will, and on a dualistic level that appears to be at odds with self-determination and the mandate – the absolute mandate – to follow your own path, your own, but only on a dualistic level.

I’m into my summer teaching schedule, which means that tomorrow I have all day to roll around in – aside from getting Rowan to school and home again.

The desire to eliminate extrinsics from my life – things, stimulation ... all the unnecessary distractions. But this isn’t it really. All those external things are just a cypher for the real necessity, which is to simplify myself – to empty myself – because the real nature of myself is emptiness. So I suppose the desire is actually just to become consonant with the reality of what I am. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Thomas Merton. This sounds like something he might have written.

Too much ‘me’. I’m so centred around what I want and what I feel, and (whether I get what I want or not) it’s oppressive. This has nothing to do with a kind of nursery virtuousness, like ‘share your toys’, or the quid pro quo ‘do unto others ...’, which are just other attitudes of the ego. This is a more radical internal shift. In this culture, me-ness is so normative that my own has been almost transparent, but it’s starting to thicken and darken and become visible to me: the ego curdling. There’s a kind of pursuit that appears ‘spiritual’, and maybe it’s appropriate when you’re young, but if it doesn’t exhaust itself, you never wind down into stillness, equanimity. Everything is contained in the grain of this moment. More and more, I experience this directly.

I’m reading Thomas Merton’s journals. He gets good as he reaches middle years. Before that, he’s a bit histrionic and florid – which is really only what I would expect. I expect it because it’s just what I see in myself. To find it in someone else’s journey, at a point where I’m starting to let go of some of the internal melodrama, is clarifying. His struggle around the desire (is it?) or vocation (is it?) for hermitage resonates with me. I understand the need to whittle everything down to the absolute minimum, and then also the doubt whether this isn’t just a new form of self-indulgence – literally, the indulging of the self rather than its whittling down, which is what I really ought to be about.

Actually, this clarified something else for me. There’s talk around me at the moment about ways of living in community, and I’ve wondered why I don’t feel the attraction. Now I see that it’s because I’m moving in the opposite direction. People come into community usually in order to simplify, but what generally happens is that a new layer of complication gets added. And then I can’t help experiencing community as institution, which always turns my blood cold. I began adulthood in a kind of aloneness that was actually alienation. It was a product of fear and incapacity. I was so lonely I didn’t even know to call it that. The intervening years have been like living in a bag of pebbles. All kinds of sharp edges got knocked off and rough surfaces were rubbed smooth. I learnt to relate to people in deeper and deeper ways. Now, if I think of solitude, it feels like a place not just of peace and silence but also of deep connection. Hermitage? I don’t know. But definitely as I move out of the child-rearing phase I’m looking to make more space for practising, contemplating, being. Already I’m eliminating as much activity and stimulation as I can bear to be without. Sometimes I feel like that artist who stitched his eyelids together, because he said that by the age of 30 he’d already seen more than he could process in the entire rest of his life.

Because I didn’t have Rowan until I was 36, I feel, in a way, a bit out of synch with myself. I’m of an age where I might otherwise be moving into the third asrama, whereas actually Rowan is only nine, and it will be a while before I can head for the forest. Really, though, it’s impossible to be out of synch with yourself. Everything is unfolding in the only possible way. To say it’s the ‘best’ way or the ‘perfect’ way would be to miss the point. It’s just the way it’s unfolding.

Found myself on the Circle Line today. Suddenly, just an undertone, the old smell of the Underground, jolting me back 20 years, to the city I lived in then, which is a completely different city from the one I live in now. That one was ... How to nail it? It was so urban, and I was so out on all my surfaces, without a centre. Now there’s a lot more grass, and so much that seemed to matter then – because it was holding me together like a battery of steel pins – really doesn’t matter at all.

There’s a lot of doingness in the ngöndro. I have to do 100,000 prostrations and 100,000 mantras and etc, etc ... a lot of things. In a way, it’s a young person’s practice, and I wish I’d got myself enough together to do it a long time ago. In mid-life, the desire for doing is falling away and I’m increasingly subsiding into being, so I feel a bit out of kilter with all these accumulations of actions. I certainly don’t need to prove to myself that I have the self-discipline to accumulate them. Yes, I’m squeezing the last little blob of toothpaste out of the tube with the ngondro. Which is to say, there won’t be any more big heroic practices for me.

Getting on the mat
Another fuck-up. But there are no fuck-ups really, only the cat purring, stretched out on my belly, and a child breathing the breath of sleep at my side. There could even be something of grace in this, if I could let go and accept it. Self-discipline can be neurotic, as anyone who has been anorexic knows. Perhaps that’s what’s crumbling in me. The thing is, I know now that practices are just a way of passing the time. They have only a tangential relationship to awakening. But in the world of action, we want to do something, and practices give us the illusion that doing can be somehow harnessed to awakening.

According to the Yoga Alliance, ‘a dedicated, committed teacher practises regularly – at least four times a week.’ I also used to believe that to teach with integrity a teacher must practise regularly, but now I would rather choose a teacher who doesn’t practise at all. Because practising is an intermediate stage. You don’t practise if you have arrived at the end of the journey ... or abandoned all hope of arrival, because abandoning everything is really it. I mean, Ramana Maharshi didn’t practise. He didn’t need to. He worked in the kitchen.

I’m reading Paradise, by A.L. Kennedy, which is written in the voice of an alcoholic. At first I hated that voice, with its mealy-mouthed dishonesty and its wriggling out. Then I saw that I hated it because it’s mine. Because although I don’t black out and wake up two days later in an unfamiliar room, my life is full of little escapes, moments when I absent myself, in chocolate, caffeine, novels, sleep ... I would like to be able not to do this, but constant presence is enlightenment, so perhaps that would be a stretch.

‘How are you?’ I suppose this blog is in part a public statement in response to that question, which always stymies me, having so many potential answers, most of them socially unacceptable.

I’m reading a book by Patrick Gale – Notes from an Exhibition – in which the central character is a bipolar artist. I came across this idea again ... Where did I encounter it so clearly stated first? Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi says: ‘Manna was one of those people who would experience ecstasy but not happiness.’ I remember being stunned by recognition then. I know all about ecstasy and also about the mist that falls like a pall so you touch things but cannot feel them, as if you are experiencing the world – even your own internal world – through a scrim. But happiness? Not a clue. I can’t find a place for that in the geography of my body.

‘[The darkness] had no real cause and it came upon her with devastating speed, like a storm across bright water.' More Patrick Gale. A nice snippet of prose. He makes me want again to live in Cornwall – the natural place for an extremist, I suppose: the very toe of the country, the furthest edge, facing out into the sea. Where on earth else would I want to be?

My Little Book of Self-sabotage: that’s the other way I’ve been getting myself onto the mat ... my book of refuse, where every night I deposit the psychic junk that embarrasses me too much to make it onto these pages. My Pillow Book of Intention: it’s that too: a place for writing a clear pathway.

Tomorrow is June. My favourite time of the year, when everything is rising to a crescendo. My body feels good in summer ... I feel good in summer. I crave heat, sun.

I read some other people’s practice blogs. Either I am self-dramatising or extremely intense – or both. I feel a bit embarrassed really. As a result, I scratched what was going to be my previous entry, and which felt rawer and more self-exposing than what went before. I write first of all for myself, not for anyone else who might possibly be listening, and yet, clearly, I am editing just in case.

If I am self-dramatising, it isn’t that I don’t realise the ultimate emptiness of all my stories. It isn’t that I don’t see how they go round and round like a ball of string. It’s just that somehow they can’t be let go of until they have been hauled up from the bottom of the sea and rinsed in clean water. Maybe this is the meaningful function of art.

I am getting out of bed and onto my mat every morning, and it has been delightful. I stopped trying to dismantle the old patterns, and turned my energy to creating new ones. It’s tremendously powerful when the practice becomes the basis for each day: the round-bottomed bowl on which the day rocks and rolls but never quite slops its liquid. I see it like this anyway.

Why am I finding it so difficult to get on my mat these days?

Because in order to find my way onto the mat, I have to get out of bed, and in order to get out of bed I have to grope my way through a cloud of free-floating anxiety, and I would rather stay in bed and kid myself for a couple more hours that I don’t have to face the day.

When the alarm clock goes off, there’s a critical mass that has to be reached if I’m actually going to get up. On the one side of the balance is the said desire to hide under the duvet and hope that the day doesn’t find me. Then there’s the need (genuine) to get enough sleep, which I rarely do when I’m on the mat regularly at 5am. On the other side is the knowledge that practising forms the foundation for my day, that if I don’t do it, the whole structure will be rickety and in constant danger of collapse. Which begs the question, I suppose, how much I create the day and how much it’s already out there pre-formed and waiting for me.


In the garden suntrap. Carol Shields describes driving to Toronto in the snow: everything ‘the colour of cement’. Massachussetts was like that, when I was there that winter. The monotony of it. So un-nutritious when colour feeds you. Down by the Thames, with the tide swirling in: a bollard kind of thing, bright-blue paint eaten away, and lichen growing over. Salt water does this, brings up the intensity of colours, and the texture – even of ordinary synthetic things: bottle tops, old bits of plastic.

Here’s a resolution. I’ve made it before, but as of now it sticks. Promise. Tomorrow is the day I get back on my mat, first thing in the morning, and from then on every day (except Wednesdays: day off). Without any agenda except to be with my body for two hours in whatever way feels appropriate. I will muster the courage to get up and embrace the day, because, let’s face it, if I don’t it will break the door down. I will acknowledge the the fear and the resistance and I will get on the damn mat anyway, knowing that, from the larger perspective, it’s the sanest way.

And that too passed ... By which I mean that on some level all of it continues to be so, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter too much any more.

The right side of my body is in serial collapse: joints going down like dominoes. As much as I can, I avoid asking myself what this means. I have a certain internal cartography. I know – or think I do – where certain experiences, certain traits of personality, certain clusters of emotion are located in my body, and this is valid on a certain level. But knowing it all too surely blocks out space for the unknown. And then there’s the awareness that all of this geography exists only on the relative plane. In moments of intense presence, in movement, it’s all dissolved. It just doesn’t exist. So it seems better not to feed it too much energy.

I feel dark inside. Through the dance, a certain process is unwinding itself in me. It is plotless and unmapped, and it isn’t finished. In the meantime this is where it leaves me, in this place – this dark place. It’s not so much that it’s hard to put this into words (although it is), but more that it’s hard to know whether putting it into words is any use – or whether words just fossilise it into some sort of spurious permanence with all the meaning leached out. When I was a child, one of my aunts had a place-mat made out of dead butterflies. They were laminated into a gruesome kind of sandwich, their fat furry bodies bulging the transparent plastic. Even at the age of eight, maybe, I saw how the essential point had been missed. I saw how when you take something bright and vibrant and on the wing and seal it into plastic limbo, you are not understanding that the wonder and beauty of life is in its evanescence, that you have destroyed whatever there was of vitality there and left yourself with some sort of grim sarcophagus.

Sometimes when I write I feel that I am committing the evanescent into the limbo of ink. When I was a child, a process occurred by which I was dislocated from my body into words. My instinctive impulse to move was displaced into the acquired discipline of writing. I was like a gypsy baby switched at birth, and once I had grown up and found my way back, I couldn’t quite trust the gadjes any more. So when I engage in the process of writing, my heart and my throat constrict a bit; my stomach speeds up. I want to struggle. I want to batter my wings against the camphor jar. That’s what it did to me in the end, dislocating myself into writing: it suffocated me and sealed me in plastic: silent, immobile. Yes, I had words – I published them – but they were half-dead: zombie words. Their lifeforce had flown away.

If I’m writing this now, it’s because occasionally, if I can keep shedding garments and digging down deeper, the passage of words across paper ceases to be the record of something experienced in some other time, on some other occasion, and the words become the unique moment of themselves. They take wing. And even thinking this makes me smell camphor, and I want to select all and press the delete key.

I’ve never been closer to giving up not just the ngöndro but the whole Buddhist project.

First there’s my experience of sitting, which is one of compression, claustrophobia – not 100 per cent of the time, but quite a bit of it. My impression of my childhood is of too much sitting still and being quiet: I suppressed a large part of what was most real and most valuable in myself. I supressed my passion and my responsivity. I suppressed my life and my warmth and my humanity. I often experience sitting meditation as a recapitulation of that suppression, and I want to explode, I want to howl, I want to weep, I want to laugh, I want to dance. I want to protest to the world that movement, not stillness, is my natural expression. Movement is where I find delight and fullness, is where I find pathways to something that is already here and at the same time beyond what is here – or through and between what is here, like the picture you can only see if you slide the black paper slots over the image in the right way.

And that leads me on to the cultural thing: the emotional ‘flatness’ that appears to my, Western, sensibility to characterise Buddhist cultures. I cannot make myself this way – and I sometimes feel that I’m being tacitly asked to – when my gateway is bliss, and the road to this gateway is all the emotions: sorrow, rage, grief, abundant joy ... It seems to me that there is room for these on the Hindu path and the Sufi path – more than room: they are themselves an aspect of the path – in a way that I feel they aren’t quite in Buddhism.

Sitting under the walkway on the banks of the Thames the other week, I received something like a personal mantra: ‘The world doesn’t need you to be a hero; it just needs you to dance’. I think that finishing the ngondro and making myself sit still are heroic. And it’s paradox, yes, because when I received the mantra I was sitting. And here’s where sitting works for me: when it happens in nature, when it’s spontaneous, when it’s the pause in the rhythm of the dance, the halt in the beat. When there’s no compulsion. Then it feels organic.

As I read this a few days later, I can see how I am at war with myself, how there’s no compulsion to do anything or be any particular way except the compulsion that I'm imposing upon myself. This changes the perspective but it doesn’t make me feel the conflict any the less. And maybe this is just my own particular way of creating an explosion.

I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know whether I feel angry or anxious or lonely or sad. Really what I mean is I don't know which feeling is at the root of all the other feelings. They’re like the little coloured pieces in the kaleidoscope, tumbling and tumbling over one another, making new configurations always out of the same thing. But I do know that I need to be inside that beginningless, endless howl. The one that unloops from the darkest and most loveless recesses of my body. The one that lives in places beyond places and encompasses the universe.

It feels bottomless, that howl. And maybe it is: the universal howl that keeps regenerating itself out of the universal pain. And at the same time it isn’t bottomless or universal, but personal and just very deep, so that dipping into it is like taking a thimble to the ocean. I imagine that if I keep dancing, keep howling ... if, finally, I drain the ocean ... if I drain the wound ... I will arrive at the bedrock ... arrive at the original injury that I suppose to be underneath all the pus and the festering and the roiling weight of water. But that’s a story. And probably it’s a little bit trite. The main thing is just the howl.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

Because I don’t really want to. Because when I achieve a certain degree of orderliness in my life, I just have to kick over the wastepaper basket. The same goes for eating properly. It’s OK for a bit, but then I start to feel trapped. The situation is too claustrophobic. I have to erupt out of the structure, sending busted plywood and fat splinters flying. I have to let chaos in. There’s something so fundamental for me in this dynamic. It’s like a creative spring, an engine. But at the same time it’s also a stalemate. I’m a hung parliament, 50 per cent of the electorate gunning for consistent self-discipline, 50 per cent seeding anarchy. The result is that I'm like a two-year-old who keeps building the tower and then knocking it down again.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It seems that ngöndro first thing in the morning is one straw too many for this poor old camel. So I’ve dropped it from my early-morning practice. It’s now relegated it to the cracks between the paving stones – the interstices in my day – where actually it’s flourishing pretty well, because its new situation better reflects my real priorities: moving practices first. It also does away with that little lurch that I experience in the instant transition from a Tibetan Buddhist practice to an Indian yogic one, though I suppose the lurch is still there implicitly. The fundamental disjunction, if it is a disjunction – Buddhism / vedanta – still exists. But that’s another trajectory and I won’t take off on it now.

Pat, just like that: a solution. Not really. Human nature is more complex. I don’t for one moment think I’ve cracked it, that next week – tomorrow even – the bucket will still hold water. Nevertheless, it has some value in its moment.

Why can I not get on my mat these days?

It isn’t just inertia. It isn’t just the season and the urge to hibernate. It’s something deeper and less graspable in my consciousness. It’s something about where my practice came from, way back, long before it was a practice ... about the need to flee my mother’s house and how I have been running, running all these years, and how lately I have gradually slowed down and risked looking over my shoulder. But my practice grows out of many roots. Only some of them are fed by fear and flight.

I thought I would burn our old love letters. Not in a grand funereal pyre, or each individually with its own match. This isn’t grief or the dramatic gesture. I was thinking more pragmatically, of kindling for the fire. Liberated ... all those nails we drove into the floor, all those words, all those little black platoons marching purposefully across the page like ants. Of course, we couldn’t nail down anything. You never can. Or maybe I’ll use our letters to line the compost bin. It pleases me to think of all those big emotions mulching down, re-arranging themselves into the anatomy of worms.

For me, there’s nothing personal about the dance. It isn’t emotion put into movement; that’s back-to-front. The dance looks like me when it comes through my body, because it assumes my lines and forms, but it isn’t me – not when it’s good anyway. It’s something larger and more organic, something more like compost, building up and breaking down. It’s something more like burning old letters, unravelling the stories, returning meaning to source. And when I try to nail this too in words, of course it slips through my fingers and I’m left with just another story. Words close on nothing; there’s just the one hand clapping.

It’s harder to dance when I turn up thinking I have energy than when I turn up thinking I don’t. When I think I don’t, I have small expectations and therefore I’m closer to surrender. The low-energy idea is humble; it looks only for a crust, and so the dance grows itself organically. The high-energy idea is freighted with expectation and desire ... for ecstasy, for catharsis ... which translates into striving and leads me away from the dance that cannot be created but can only reveal itself.

I somehow wobbled back onto the ngöndro path. Partly, as soon as I gave myself permission not to do it, I wanted to do it; partly, my energy returned (I wrote the last entry after flu) and it seemed possible to keep all the plates spinning once again. At the same time I retain a sense of the validity of all my objections. The reality is it’s neither one thing entirely, nor the other, and so I’m racketing along veering sometimes one way, sometimes in the other direction. Still, more or less I’m remaining on the road.

There’s a chapter in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism called ‘The Hard Way’. In it Chögyam Trungpa talks about the ‘false heroism’ that we think is the hard way – or the way we should be doing it – but is really another way of feeding the ego with spiritual-ness. It’s the way that we romanticise our practices and ourselves as practitioners, the way we accumulate them, as if by doing so we garner some kind of spiritual merit. My practices have been founded on false heroism in the past, and there’s still a lot of it tangled up with the useful stuff. There’s definitely a lot of false heroism involved in my motivation for doing the ngondro, and that’s part of why it doesn’t feel right.

We can carry this sort of false heroism to great extremes, getting ourselves into completely austere situations. If the teaching with which we are engaged recommends standing on our heads for 24 hours a day, we do it. We purify ourselves, perform austerities, and we feel extremely cleansed, reformed, virtuous. Perhaps there seems to be nothing wrong with it at the time.

Accumulating merit plays on my tendencies to obsession and compulsion. I’ve danced a long slow waltz with these, but I’m heading for the ballroom door now. The ngondro pulls me back into the dance. I’m not finding this helpful.

It’s the practices of the body that truly resonate with me, that have the greatest power to shift me. For years I’ve felt as if I need to ‘graduate’ to practices that are more cerebral, as if some evolution is required. But in 45 years I haven’t evolved away from my body, only more deeply into it, and I’m starting to give faith to my sense that for me there is no evolution in that direction, that the practices of the body offer me everything I need.