donutszenmom.com

Tan Dtoon on YouTube. I discovered this via the Dharma Overground, a community for meditation practitioners.

A delightful look at the busy nature of the mind:

free video player & video platform - interactive video, online video solution: video player, video editor - kaltura
wordpress video - wordpress plugin for integrated video on video blogs, and video tools

And an interesting (and familiar!) description of some “physical” effects of meditation:

free video player & video platform - interactive video, online video solution: video player, video editor - kaltura
wordpress video - wordpress plugin for integrated video on video blogs, and video tools

God, I grin like an idiot the whole time I watch these! You can find more of Tan Dtoon on the dhammatube playlist on YouTube.

The playlist is described as “…the sometimes raw inside of the world of meditation practice. Many clips are autobiographical experiences with meditation, meditation techniques or meditation teachers, some take stands on controversial points. While some of the people interviewed are well-known teachers, many are unknown publicly.”

***

I walked into the livingroom this morning, took one look at this and spun around to get my camera. The first picture was to make sure I captured the moment. The second was a close-up of Waylon and his underbite.

***

Practice was super good today. Starting later in the morning, the warm hot weather here in the desert, and a pre-practice walk with Waylon, ’cause he was full of puppy zoomies, all contributed to a very relaxed and warmed up body. Is it nicer to do backbends when I’m warm? Um, yeah. I’m still struggling to open hip flexors and shoulders, but there’s progress and I can’t complain. Sitting meditation afterwards is all about energy prickles moving around in surges. So basically, practice is about making energy sensations and then sitting down to note them.

The Cop and I have been on a Leonard Cohen jag, kicked off by The Cop hearing this interview on NPR. We watched the documentary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, and I’ve been listening to his music this morning.

We feel an extra connection, too, because Cohen practices with Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who is the head teacher at the zendo we attend.

And nerdily enough, both The Cop and I are great fans of how Cohen uses language. Not just in his poetry or song lyrics, but even just in the way he speaks extemporaneously.

Quiet day today — a usual Sunday. Cleaning while listening to music and podcasts, general household maintenance projects. And this evening we’ll go to my favorite Mexican place. The Cop disowned the place during the holidays, when we went only to find that they were closed for a corporate event. Employees were outside, distributing tickets for free margaritas and guacamole, so we’ll go and use those, and perhaps The Cop will forgive them for not calling us to let us know they’d be closed for a private function.

Oh, I have the NPR interview playing in the background as I write, and I just heard Terry Gross talking a bit about Leonard Cohen’s work, how it so frequently is about lust and love and appetites, and then she asks: “Did you become a Buddhist because your desires were so dominant?”

Haha! That’s always such a funny question. I think people often assume similar things about yogis — that mind, spirit and body are somehow incompatible, or always destined to be at odds. People always worry about desire and Buddhists — like we’re these huge ascetics. I always want to answer the question in a robotic voice: I am a Budd-hist there-fore I de-ny all feel-ings.”

Cohen rocks because there is desire in his work, and spirituality, and humanness. Well worth checking out the documentary, too, because he is delightfully straightforward and humorous and disarming. Not at all the tortured Buddhist one might expect