Category: My Writing

Posted on

Meditation on the Different Bodies

This is a meditation I wrote that was inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Living, where he discusses eight different bodies we all posses. I abridged that for us, in order to fit in the allotted time. May we all practice connecting with our different bodies.

  1. Breath
    1. Breathing in, I am aware that I am breathing in
    2. Breathing out, I am aware that I am breathing out
  2. Expand awareness to our whole body
    • Breathing in, I become aware of my whole body.
    • Bring the mind home to the body
    • Realize that you are alive, still alive, and this is a wonder.
    • To be alive is the greatest of all miracles.
    • In, Aware of Body
    • Out, Smiling to Body
  3. Spiritual Practice Body, dharma body
    • Breathing in, I become aware of my dharma body, my spiritual practice body
    • This is the part of us with the capacity to be awake and fully present, to be understanding, compassionate, and loving.
    • Every time you take one peaceful step or one mindful breath, every time you embrace a strong emotion with mindfulness and restore your clarity and calm, your spiritual practice grows.
    • People can steal your phone, computer, or money, but they can never steal your spiritual practice. It is always there to protect and nourish you.
    • In, Aware of my dharma body
    • Out, resolved in my spiritual practice
  4. Sangha body
    • Breathing in, I become aware of my sangha body
    • I am a cell in the body of a sangha, of many sanghas, offering my gifts and nourishment, contributing to the well being of the sangha, and being nourished in turn
    • I am aware that we friends are all practicing together, right now.
    • I am aware that right now, many other members of Plum Village and the greater Buddhist sangha practice around the world.
    • I am aware that this sangha has been practicing for many generations, going back all the way to the buddha and the monks and nuns who practiced with him, and even beyond into the sangha of practitioners that proceeded the Buddha.
    • In, aware of my sangha body
    • Out, rejoicing for sangha
  5. Continuation Body
    • Throughout our life we produce energy. Every thought, every word, every act, every product we create continues to influence the world, and that is our continuation body.
    • We are like stars whose light energy continues to radiate across the cosmos millions of years after they become extinct.
    • Thay says that the true art of living is to see our continuation body while we’re still alive and to cultivate it to ensure a beautiful continuation.
    • In, aware of my continuation body
    • Out, ending out love to all my dear ones

Continuing to Walking Meditation

As we walk, I invite you to continue this practice by focusing on connecting to a greater body – whether that is the small ecosystem of our home, the land we live on, the entirety of the earth.

Posted on

Clipping my Nails Gatha

Gathas are short practice poems that we can use to bring mindfulness into daily activity. I wrote this for clipping my nails, but really, this could be used for any form of body care. Including trimming my nose hairs and ear hairs, two new activities I find myself having to undertake in middle age.

Clipping my nails,
I am aware that this body
is always changing
Impermanence is the way of the world

Posted on

My Waking Up Gatha

For many years, I recited several poems immediately upon waking:

  1. Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Waking Up” gatha
  2. The Dalai Lama’s “Today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life…”
  3. Haim Ginott’s “It’s my personal approach that creates the climate, it’s my daily mood that makes the weather…”

I tried to combine the essence of these three into a single practice poem.

Gatha

Waking up this morning,
I smile.
I am alive,
I have a precious human life,
and I am not going to waste it.

I will use my energies
to heal myself,
deepen my connection with others,
and build a beautiful continuation.

I will offer peace to others.
I will not lash out or attack others.
I will benefit other life as much as I can.

Posted on

Flossing my Teeth Gatha

Flossing is a difficult habit for me. My parents didn’t model good tooth care (my father died with no teeth), and it’s always been a slog for me. Which is why I have developed several different practice poems!

Flossing My Teeth I

This is the first one I came up with and taught to my young children.

Flossing my teeth 
and strengthening my gums
I improve my overall health
I know that even the smallest detail matters

Flossing My Teeth II

Between each tooth,
space for patience.
By caring for this body,
I care for the Earth.

I deeply want to care for the Earth, and my body is not separate from the Earth, and so it deserves my patient care too.

Posted on

Gatha Practice

Gathas are short practice poems. They can help us bring mindfulness, concentration, and insight to daily activities.

Practicing with Gathas

The basic form of practice is to: pause before you undertake some action, come back to your breathing, recite the gatha in your mind or out loud, and then initiate the action with mindfulness. Another method is to keep the gatha flowing through your mind while you perform the action, tying one line to an in breath and the next to an out breath.

I find that gathas, especially when practiced regularly, can wake you up to things you take for granted, expose habit energy, and steadily retrain your inner voice. I also find that my days are more beautiful when filled with poetic reminders of the practice and the wonders of life.

My Gathas

Writing your own gathas is a longstanding Zen tradition. I take great inspiration from my teacher in this, using gatha-crafting as a way to personalize and deepen my practice. Writing gathas makes the practices meaningful to me, and it helps me to reclaim areas of my life that I am less present to (for me, flossing is a great example of a rich area of practice.)

Here are some of mine:

References

Articles about gatha practice:

Sources of gathas from Thich Nhat Hanh:

  • Present Moment, Wonderful Moment
    • A gatha-focused book, containing 49 gathas and Thay’s commentary
  • The Energy of Prayer – How to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice: See Appendix 2, “Buddhist Prayers and Gathas,” pp.145-155.
  • Stepping into Freedom – An Introduction to Buddhist Monastic Training: This book is not just for monastics but is for everyone. It begins in Part One with 68 gathas.

Other sources of gathas:

Posted on

Phillip’s Notes on The One Ring 2e

I’ve been cleaning up and publishing some of my notes from running The One Ring (2nd edition). This page serves as a place to collect and organize the various posts.

Table of Contents:

  1. For Players
  2. For Loremasters
    1. Regional – Eriador

For Players

For Loremasters

Regional – Eriador

Posted on

Acknowledging My Father’s Efforts

I’ve been in a space of reflection and atonement and forgiveness since Yom Kippur. And over the weekend I had a chance to engage in conversations and reflection related to the wounding and lack of skills that so many men walk around with.

I was so tough on my father during his life. I wanted more connection, more presence, more vulnerability, more ownership. He couldn’t offer me what I wanted so desperately. Hell, the only strong memory I have of him asking how I was feeling, I was 30! 

But now, as I am working on my healing and trying to do better for my kids, as I am looking around at others doing the same, I see just how much effort he put in and did not get the credit for. Or, at least, not from me.

My father never even knew his own father. That man walked out on his family. His mother worked several jobs to keep him afloat. He had to take care of himself from a young age. He did not have a parent to make him dinner every night. When his friends had to go home for dinner, he had to go to a lonely apartment and fend for himself. He did not have a role model of how to be a parent. He did not have enough love. He did not have people to connect with in his pain – his friends thought it was cool that he had so much freedom, and even they didn’t recognize until recent years what that freedom really meant. These are not things that he shared with me, but that I learned or rediscovered after his death.

My father has many faults. But he really tried to do something different for his kids, to give them what he did not have. He did it imperfectly. He created a lot of pain. But he also gave us love and great memories and so many valuable skills and a comfortable life.

Thank you, dad. I would like to acknowledge now all the effort you put in to make things better for your children. I would like to acknowledge that you were criticized for your shortcomings and incapacities by me and by many others. I see now that you were doing your absolute best, and nobody acknowledged that for you.

I wish my father was still alive so that I could offer him that. Alas, I can only offer it to the part of my father that lives on in me.

Posted on

Treating Handwriting as a Form of Practice

For most of my life, I have carried an identity of “having bad handwriting.” This is somewhat ironic, as I write by hand on a daily basis and fill multiple notebooks in a month. Having stayed in practice with so much writing, one would think that I would maintain a modicum of legibility. Yet even I struggle to read my own writing.

I was reflecting on why I stick to this identity. Why, exactly, do I need to write so small, so cramped, so quickly? What, exactly, is the value of saving space by cramming in my writing? Why does it have to be done in such a hurry?

Ultimately, I realized that at the root of “I have bad handwriting” is simply yet another form of “rushing.” My handwriting is poor because I “have to” write quickly, to get it all down before it’s too late.

But this is not necessary. It is not founded on any real concern of “losing something” if I slow down. It is simply conditioning.

Writing by hand can be another form of meditation. One can flow, engage fully in the physical act of writing, sit with and marinate in the words being written. My writing could be made beautiful and efficient. Ultimately, all of that would be much better than the cramped rush I have been committed to all these years.

There is no rush. I can just enjoy the act of writing. I can treat it, too, as another way to express art, to be fully present.

I shed this identity of having bad handwriting, and my need to be in such a rush while writing.