It was whispered to me that if I uttered something true, my sins would be forgiven.

My silence was a lie.

Having never been so close to redemption before, I now longed for a state of grace. The desire itself was truth. Too little, too late.

With angers haste I thought to seek vengence from the source of the tantalizing whisper, calmer moments prevailed. The gentle wind was not the harbinger of my own shortcomings.

Allow me this folly as I seek to fill the void by falling into it.

I spoke up the other day during a dharma talk at my local zen center. In the midst of an all-day sit. I spoke of 'my agenda' during sitting. Or at least on my way to the mat, if not actually on it.

I know having an agenda is completely neurotic. & i'm completely ok with that.

I could sense the reaction in the room, 'oh no this guy has an agenda! how not zen, how not the party line!'

i think agendas & masturbation are pretty similar, they're only unhealthy if you pretend you don't do it/don't have them. I feel a cloud lift when i speak about agendas, quite similar to the point one passes through in life when all of a sudden your comfortable with the fact that you, & everybody else, masturbates.

it's not about leaving this world y'all, it's about being in it, warts & all.

& if it's an easy day, then writing should be easy today..right? Oh well. So I've acquired a portable hearmath unit & have been using in the car during my various travels for work. The first week i had it i was using the emwave 2hr+ a day, worked 70hrs that week & felt pretty damn good for it all. Used a it a little less last week, about an hour a day, but i find using the heartmath/emwave instrumental in attaining the levels of productivity/performance i'm striving for. I've been in a discussion spinning around the compassion VS emptiness. One side is pointing out that if there is absolutely nothing, then what is being compassionate for what? that compassion is an extraneous lens. I'm still fighting to keep compassion in the mix.

Need to keep momentum, i don't write because i feel awkward communicating in this medium. But i need to stick with it, practice, to gain the fluidity i desire. (when all else fails, just blurt out from a honest/vulnerable space)

So my routine had been sitting in the morning, heartmath at night. Things were going well, entered a really amazing (& nuanced, & painful, & inspiring) period of realization/growth a couple weeks ago. neato, great. next. I picked up software for generating my own BWE (brainwave entrainment, read:holosync) session. Begun using that over the weekend. Well, i kinda crashed. But's that's ok. no biggie. What I'm curious about is if it's a form of restructuring, (ie;overwhelm) that the centrepointe/holosync folks talk about when using BWE type technologies. The np2 software using different, more effective entrainment modalities than just binaural. The other variable was that i took my weekend break from caffiene/mate, that got extended into monday against my will when i realized at way to early an hour that i'd allowed myself to run out of tea. So, the variables are BWE & caffeine. & i entered into a funk, not a huge one, but it would come on for a portion of the day. But the ups & downs are besides the fundamental point. Just recording here, keeping a log. Hopefully this documenting will find some coherence one day.

I enjoy sifting through large data sets, finding the patterns, here's to creating my own data set.

also, discovered last night the Heart Tuner Pro, it's the big-kid version of heartmath, definitely on the shopping list.

oh man, hooked on the crackberry i just got as well (8830 vzw) hooked, but man, having everything i need to do & the means to do it on my hip all times to be seen at a glance is equally empowering & overwhelming.

I've gotten back to regular practice. Sitting in the morning, using Hearmath at night. I recently acquired Transparent Corporations Neuro-Programmer 2 software for producing my own brainwave entrainment tracks (read: holosync). Oh yeah, & a blender, fortune had left me without a blender for quite some time. Glad to have remedied that one.

So..Heartmath. I gained access to online databases of scinetific journals & have doing a ton of research recently (PUBMED is my friend!).  Aside from what you can find on the Heartmath site, the research that has been done into HRV (heart rate variability) & related topics is amazing. I was fan of heartmath before, but now that i realize (in scientifically validated terms, thank you very much) what that little pinging device can enable, I'm a true believer.

So if you're interested in any of the above mentioned tools, i'd love to hear from you. signing of for now.

....It's been a while. I'm typing at this point soley in hopes of intertia building. I'm back from my 3rd seshsin at Zen Mountain Monastery. Fantastic. Came home to a new toy (Heartmath) which i've been havin lot's of fun with, it's an incredible tool. Trying to rope some friends into this zaadz thing & explore connect with others out there.

So afer finding a couple blogs on here actually tackling the subject of awakening, i feel compelled to chime in here & do a little more than being my typical sarcastic trickster self. maybe ;)

  The first thing that comes to mind is f*** seeking enlightenment.  The second thing that comes to mind is that awakening is the most worthwhile venture one can engage in.

 Hmm, Now to find something something useful to say...

I think being in your body is really important.  There's the whole "chop wood & carry water" saying attributed to the buddha at times, here's the concise statement i found elsewhere.

"Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."
--Wu Li

Now, see how much more chopping wood & carrying water there is than enlightenment?

Most people i think would flag before even finishing chopping wood.  At 8.33lbs/gallon, carrying water is no easy task at times either.  

It seems that there are people trying to tackle awakening who'd balk at any sustained physical effort such as chopping wood.

(sidebar, through all this i'm trying to bring more awareness to the shadow aspect of myself that is quite the physical moralist)

I wonder about the correlation between physical health & how dis-integrating the experience of awakening plays out for an individual. 

So, I've had the goal to do 100 continuous pullups, & starting from the bottom hasn't gotten very far.  Then...it occurred to me, have you ever heard of the Hour of Power drinking game (it's probably better if you haven't). Well i thought to tackle from more of an involutionary rather than evolutionary approach. Last night i did 1 pullup a minute for an hour, for 60 pullups. It was fairly easy. I might do that one more time, then go for 1pullup every 30sec for an hour, for 120, then maybe do that every couple of days between a regime of doing continuous pullups & see what the gains are...

Pinkie came to bring me a message, he was photographed here delivering the ultimate truth to me. Only it had to do with cheesecake. I think of Pinkie in my darkest moments for Pinkie is my shepard & i shall not want.

This was on a coffee maker  i recently acquired. I'm going to use this coffee maker everywhere i go now, so i can be free from worry. I'll use it in the shower, so i don't have to worry about slipping & falling. I'll use it while i'm crossing the street so i don't have to worry about getting run over by a car. I'm safe now, thank you coffepot.