Desperation

With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,

The other day I was in Walgreen's looking for Band-Aids. There are Band-Aids for every conceivable injury. No one size fits all mentality here. Many sizes, shapes, colors, patterns, and even Sponge Bob Square Pants, are available. Across the aisle were various headache remedies, cold remedies, allergy remedies. To be in Walgreen's is to be in the middle of America's love affair with symptom relief.

As a therapist, I saw the tide turning years ago when therapeutic models focused on symptom rather than cause. Brevity was tauted as insurance companies and willing therapists praised brief, solution-focused models. Yet, in schools we were teaching systems approaches, exploring the interdependent causal (dare I say, karmic) linkages between this and that.

Ecclectic approaches were popular as we thought of therapeutic tools in tool-bags. Never mind the internal inconsistency of the models, we were pragmatists!

As America shopped for symptom relief, it shopped for religious fit, as well. This church "felt" right, that one didn't. And so the religious horizon was increasing populated by new and different churches, synagogues, mosques, and a few and increasingly variant Buddhist centers. Orthodoxy was on the defensive: innovation was the knight in shining armor.

Here's the thing: its all quick fix, based in our own stupid unwillingness to do the work we need to do in order to be human beings in a civilized world. Every one's feelings matter, few people actually think things through. And we grab at the bottle of Orajel to get us through the night.
Zen is a disciplined practice. It isn't a feel good practice. It is not a quick fix, not a pill or a drink, or a hit of bliss. It is work, the real work, of examining the actual nature of the universe with no real aid from anything outside of your actual experience of it. No wonder many people visit a Zen Center and quietly, but very quickly leave. Looking deeply into oneself while staring at a wall is very uncomfortable.

We all want serenity, peace of mind, symptom relief, but we want it without the fundamentals. We don't want to examine our own lives with a cool eye. We want wiggle room. We want to point fingers to other causes of our suffering. Anything but turning the eye inward.

Our fundamentals are the paramitas: generosity, morality, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom. Practice these earnestly and need fewer and fewer quick fixes. Practice these and the annoyances of the self become less relevant as we open our eyes and ears to the suffering of the world.

Like anything else, the solution is the steadfast determination to put one foot in front of the other.

Be well.