Vøid Contemplations for November 2024
The liberation of hopelessness and the practice of non-self improvement + Basking in Gravity updates
Over the next couple of weeks I’m doing three yoga projects that I am – or at least I was – very excited about. Now as the consequences of this week’s disastrous US election continue to unfold, it’s been more difficult than usual to find the energy to do self-promotion for my “psychedelic death yoga art project.” But once I let the self-centered voices of doubt echo away into silence, I remember that sometimes speaking sentences that help me in dark days aloud in a room with other people can be useful, or at least it’s better than sitting alone, staring at the same aphorisms on the computer.
These are the concepts I’ve repeated in my head, typed out in these newsletters, broadcast on the radio, and articulated in private conversations and public yoga and meditation sessions over and over, regardless of the darkness of the present moment. They are ideas about how to continue to take action in a state of hopelessness, strategies for seeking equanimity in armagideon, and a restatement of the core values of my practice: everything is connected, nothing lasts, you are not alone. This is non-self improvement.
The first event is our monthly Second Sunday Basking in Gravity session at Healer Indianapolis. It’s the debut of an especially heavy soundtrack and the low-key premiere of an aggressively psychedelic video projection. A continuation of the White River, Slow Flow series, this new work is a 90m set of visuals composed from heavily manipulated macro photography and slow-motion video documenting a 2019 algal bloom at one of the street runoff drainage channels feeding into Muncie’s primary riparian corridor.
Then I’m super stoked for a return to The Alembic in Berkeley on Friday, November 15, where this “collaborative exercise in fully appreciating our connectivity through suffering and the catharsis therein” will be on offer to my West Coast friends in one of the most exciting and weird meditation centers in North America. Truly a pleasure and a privilege. If you come through, please say hello and also perhaps remind me of you IG handle if I don’t recognize you IRL?
Toward the end of November I’ll be hosting my first meditation and yin yoga workshop here in Muncie in collaboration with Little Red Door Cancer Agency. LRD is a nonprofit that “works to reduce the physical, emotional and financial burdens of cancer for medically underserved Hoosiers by providing free client services, survivor programming and education.” This is going to be more straightforward: We’ll be doing 100% mellow music, chair-based yin, and a more traditional form of silent sitting meditation. If that sounds relevant to you, or someone you know, drop me a line for more information. It’s extremely free.
Getting ready for all of these projects has been hectic enough without the overwhelming stew of “radioactive dread” that was spreading through my head after Tuesday’s election results. As A.J. Daulerio writes in the first post-election edition of The Small Bow, “I'm trying to avoid another post-mortem commentary about Tuesday's events, but everything I write feels imbued with either radioactive dread or tone-deaf positivity. I'm trying to skew positive here, but maybe I should also respect everyone's right to spiral however they choose.”
I’m neither sober, nor in recovery, but thanks in part to the recovery narratives from The Small Bow, I’ve at least had less to drink this week than I might’ve otherwise. It’s a persistently helpful read for anyone seeking to maintain whatever form their recovery or sobriety takes during such dark days. It’s also helpful in mitigating the damage when you’ve fallen off.
The Small Bow also published some writing about the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, specifically her talks on the usefulness of hopelessness, in their November 5 “check-in” newsletter. It makes for a good companion to similar ideas – presented in harsher light – that I return to often from Zen teacher Joko Beck.
From Chödrön’s “heart advice for difficult times”:
“When we talk about hopelessness and death, we’re talking about facing the facts. No escapism. We may still have addictions of all kinds, but we cease to believe in them as a gateway to happiness. So many times, we’ve indulged in the short-term pleasure of addiction. We’ve done it so many times that we know that grasping at this hope is a source of misery that makes a short-term pleasure a long-term hell.
Giving up hope is the encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, not to run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what’s going on.”
There are a few important things to say whenever I talk about letting go of hope, and specifically when I get into the Joko Beck version down below. The first is that if you need to hold on to hope, hold on tightly. I'm an artist with a yoga teacher certification and I lived in a ramshackle Zen Center for a couple years. I’m not a guru, therapist, priest, or dharma teacher. These are ideas that have helped me, and I'm talking about them here in case they work for anyone else. And if they don’t, let these thoughts drain.
The second is that this isn't a contrarian argument, and doesn't come from a nihilistic or cynical place. If anything, it's a naive concept that usually leads me back to the importance of love and kindness. I should also clarify that “kindness” is different from “niceness.” As my friend Nick Terry, a former student of Beck’s, once wrote to me, “Joko yielded the sword of compassion wisely. She was tough.” This isn’t about being agreeable. Being nice to oppressors is not kindness. There’s a reason Oprah went with Pema instead.
"To do this practice, we have to give up hope," Beck writes in Everyday Zen.
“I mean that we have to give up this idea in our heads that somehow, if we could only figure it out, there's some way to have this perfect life that is just right for us. Life is the way it is. And only when we begin to give up those maneuvers does life begin to be more satisfactory.
When I say give up hope, I don't mean to give up effort. As Zen students we have to work unbelievably hard. But when I say hard, I don't mean straining and effort; it isn't that. What is hard is this choice that we repeatedly have to make…
We have to sit with pain and we hate it. I don't like it either. But as we patiently just sit our way through that, something builds within us . . . we are slowly transformed in this practice. It's not by anything we think, not by something we figure out in our heads. We're transformed by what we do. And what is it that we do? We constantly make that choice. We give up our ego-centered dreams for this reality that we really are.”
As I’ve written about many times, this idea of giving up hope while persisting with effort always brings me back to the couple years I spent working as a medic with Marfa EMS, a 911 ambulance service in Far West Texas. Most of the training I received in order to become a medic (NREMT-B) amounted to “this is how you stop leaks” and “this is how you move a patient without making the situation worse.” Getting a certification meant sitting through a lot of straightforward instruction of how to not fuck up a fucked up situation more than it’s already fucked. EMTs aren’t doctors or nurses, we were often more like trauma janitors. And as with all janitors, the work is usually fucked up: essential and gross and undervalued and underpaid.
So while there was plenty of instruction on how to clean up physical messes – e.g. “if it’s wet, it’s infectious” – there wasn’t a whole lot of training on how to keep your head from becoming fucked in the process. There wasn’t much advice on how to help the other people involved – your partner, the patient, the people who care about the patient – with how fucked up their heads were gonna get. But the instructors did offer one profound piece of guidance for interacting with people on the worst day of their life: Be straightforward and clear with people about the terrible thing that is happening to them. Giving people false hope isn’t helpful, it just prolongs the pain with a prologue of confusion.
You don’t say “it’s going to be okay.” The reason you go to work is because something extremely not okay has happened. You say “I’m here” and proceed with efforts to help, or at least to not make the situation worse.
This is relevant to my yoga and meditation practices – in general, not just when accompanied by heavy music and trippy videos – because for me these practices are rooted in the idea of non-attainment, non-striving, non self-improvement. Zazen is not therapy, it’s not head meds, and it’s not a productivity hack. As my teacher at the Indianapolis Zen Center likes to say, the goal of meditation is being in the room. It’s an opportunity to take a break from trying to fix things, or hoping things will be different, catching my breath even when the air has turned toxic, being in the room while also acknowledging that the room is on fire.
Yoga works along similar lines. Yin yoga in particular is about holding potentially uncomfortable physical configurations and being OK with the discomfort, rather than trying to alleviate it. If zazen is about being in the room, yoga is about being in my body. And in a time when autocratic governments are encouraging their fascist partisans to celebrate the violation of body autonomy, and when those same governments are poised to make some bodies illegal, it is about accepting our bodies as they are. I hate my body a lot of the time, but yoga is about being kind to my body and occupying as it is right now. Not hoping to change that body into something better and easier to love.
As I wrote in “Smiles of Blood,” an essay about the crossover between righteous black metal, heavy ambient music, and yoga, “This is a practice for those of us who may feel alienated on our mats when the teacher tells us that we’re beautiful beings full of strength and light. Are we holding the pose wrong if we’re still feeling like a frail and nasty creature, full of tar? It all depends on whether today’s practice is about escaping from your head, or making peace with the void pulsating in your chest.”
Void Contemplation Tactics guided meditation video featuring Joko Beck and sounds from Inner Travels, the “peaceful electronic music” project of Wisconsin-based artist Steve Targo
These experiences are training for future hardship, choosing to remain in stillness over time in an awkward pose, while acknowledging the discomfort of that pose – and in some cases the complicated feelings that the heavy music that accompanies the pose might provoke. All so that I might be better equipped to experience a sense of equanimity when the world has forced pain on me for an unknown duration, regardless of my consent.
If that sounds at all helpful or enjoyable to you, I’d love to see you in Indianapolis, Berkeley, or Muncie. Please be in touch with any questions. Thanks for being here.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
P.S. You can hear a preview of the Basking in Gravity soundtrack on our weekly Inter-Dimensional Music broadcast. ID Music premieres on Saturdays at 12p (ET) on 99.1FM WQRT Indianapolis, with an encore presentation the following Friday at noon. You can also tune to Marfa Public Radio in Far West Texas and Northern Chihuahua Sunday night at 11p (CT).
If you miss the live transmission, there are 200+ classic shows to stream in the Cosmic Chambo archive on Mixcloud, with current episodes appearing on the ID Music FM page. You can also find plenty of listening material in back issues of this newsletter. Such as this wonderful series of programs based on writing by Thich Nhat Hanh:
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