Putting Myself out There

I'm always freaking out about putting myself out there. I'll post something on Facebook and then an hour later, as I'm walking down the street, I'll think, "shit! I shouldn't have posted that thing on Facebook!" Then, a second later I'll get over it and move on with my life. When I was younger I was often paralyzed by the fear of putting myself out there, and I didn't even have to deal with social networking. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily get easier with age. A lot of people get better at avoiding potential embarrassment and pain by staying inside their nice warm cocoons. Maybe that's why adults suck at learning new languages. We always want to be right, sound smart and never suffer failure.

But my meditation teachers keep instructing me to put myself out there, and meditation has given me a lot of confidence to experiment and to fail. Putting yourself out there means making mistakes and often falling flat on your face, then getting up and saying, ok, that failed miserably, so I'll try it another way next time. It means being fearless in the face of failure, and resting in the knowledge that I'm not always going to get things right.

What it doesn't mean is acting like an asshole, giving constant unsolicited advice to all my friends or saying whatever I feel like to everybody. After all, the Buddha taught upaya, or "skillful means."

Putting yourself out there is a bit like learning a new language. You practice your set phrases and then you get to Mexico. You think you are picking up the language, but then you want to say something about an embarrassing moment, so you say, "estoy embarasado." Instead of saying what you meant, you tell everyone you are pregnant. You fall flat on your face, but you laugh it off with your new friends, assuming you've had some success practicing gentleness. Next time, you'll definitely get that word right, but if you didn't put yourself out there and try to communicate, you'd never learn Spanish.

Sometimes I still cringe a little when I'm putting myself out there. For example, this blog is an experiment in moving out of my comfort zone. I know and accept the fact that some people are going to read this and say, "whoa, he kind of went off the deep end with this meditation blog." I understand that not everyone is going to get it. By practicing gentleness towards myself, it is easier to imagine that others will cut me some slack as well.

So where does this fear of putting oneself out there come from? For starters, I'm thinking it comes from attachment to a self, an identity. I've experienced the loss of self in brief moments of awareness, but to live constantly in the knowledge that the self is illusory, is not something I have achieved or that I really fully understand. Since I grew up in the self affirming punk scene, Noah Levine's words really resonated with me when he said, "you have a personality, it comes through, it's conditioned, it's completely part of you. It's not your true identity." Being part of the punk scene was empowering. It was by developing this hard-core, counter cultural identity that I put on my armor and found a way to get around in society. I felt like I had a place in the world and that there was something special about me and my friends. There was a time when I was terrified to let that identity go. It gave me all my power, but later I realized that I could get a lot more done by relaxing my grip on that identity a little bit.

To start putting yourself out there you have to get a taste of fearlessness, which is not so different from equanimity. But to learn fearlessness, you have to start with gentleness. And to learn gentleness, you have to learn to be gentle to yourself first. Gentleness is one of the first things you learn about when you study meditation. It's an ongoing process, not something that you ever graduate from. I expect that the same goes for putting yourself out there. It is a practice and a process, not something we graduate from.

Contemplating Impermanence from my Hotel Room in Phnom Penh

I’m sitting on the back patio of my hotel room in Phnom Penh, contemplating impermanence. My time sitting on this cushion will soon come to an end. My time in this beautiful hotel room (with a private dipping pool - what?!?!?) will come to an end; I will move to a new hotel room (will it be as good?). My time in Cambodia will come to an end and maybe I'll return home safely. My time with my beloved fiancé will come to an end. She’ll become my wife, but my time with my wife will some day come to an end (and it will definitely end in heartbreak), and my time on earth will surely come to an end.

This is a heavy contemplation before 7am, suffering jet lag and adjusting to the sweltering heat of Cambodia, but contemplating impermanence has been a rewarding practice. Through the contemplation of impermanence, I aspire to rest in the truth that all compounded[i] things are impermanent. By resting in this knowledge, I cultivate fearlessness in the face of change.

By facing some of the most difficult truths in life, you start to relax into the realization that everything is impermanent. At the end of this contemplation I stop and realize that my chest has tightened. My heart is beating a little faster (cool, I can feel my heart beat!). I recognize the fear of these truths and the discomfort it causes. I acknowledge this fear, drop the words, and hold onto this feeling. I let it sit and I experience the physical sensations. Then I drop the practice and return to my life.

I was listening to a podcast by Noah Levine of Dharma Punx the other day and he was talking about how he met this person who said, "I've been studying Buddhism lately, but man, what a bummer!" (My dad says the same thing once in a while). A student of the Dharma might argue that contemplating the truth of reality is important and that this philosophy attempts to cut right through the fear and bullshit, resting in all of the hard truths, even if it leaves us squirming sometimes. What was it that Nietzche said? "That which does not kill us only makes us stronger," or some Conan the Barbarian tidbit like that... But that would only be half of the story. The thing that people often fail to realize when hearing about the teachings on impermanence is that great joy and peace can come out of a contemplation like this. Once I realize that my time walking the earth is impermanent, and once this knowledge sinks deep into my bones, I will slowly learn to appreciate every moment, every movement, every shadow, every word and every rumble from the motor bikes outside my hotel window. I won’t be taking my fiancé or my mom or my dad or my friends for granted, at least not as often as I otherwise would. I won’t be taking myself and my health or the job I love for granted, because I know these things will end. My aspiration is to learn to appreciate every fleeting moment that passes. Those moments of awareness are like a bird swooping in overhead to see what is going on, before mysteriously disappearing back into the sky.

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[i] Pretty much everything we deal with on the day to day level is a compounded thing, as the Buddha taught. Things come about as an aggregate of many factors. For example, this cup of tea I am drinking is the product of sunlight and fertile soil and water for growing the tea leaves. The cup contains water that had to be heated by a person for it to brew. Some stranger picked these tea leaves in India, and then a truck took it to an airport before someone flew it here. That required gasoline, someone to build the truck, roads, etc., etc. etc. There is a teaching on interdependence embedded in there too.